> It's hard to take that objection seriously, though. His pen name and his real name are already strongly linked in search engine space. The only thing that will change as a result of the NYT article is that there will be additional scrutiny of his ideas.

"strongly linked" is doing a lot of work. They're linked in that if you're a tech professional, you can figure out his last name with five minutes of dedicated digging. A casual searcher would not make the connection without knowing it beforehand.

> I also agree that protecting his patients and his business is something he should have seen to, but it is a problem he should have addressed six years ago, not after building a minor media ecosystem around himself, including books, published articles, and con appearances.

Kind of victim-blaming, but yeah, he should have used better opsec six years ago. That boat has sailed. But what's the public benefit of the NYT outing his real name? The public costs are clear: primarily hurting a provider of healthcare services and secondarily making it more dangerous to entertain even slightly heterodox ideas in public.

It's wider fame that threatens Scott's current life track. This is true for all people whether that fame is positive or negative, whether the person in question is Scott Alexander, Rebecca Black, or Monica Lewinsky.

By those lights, the only thing he's a victim of is his own success. I suspect we'd be getting the same reaction from SA regardless of any so-called "doxing," the trail of breadcrumbs leafing back to his identity would still have been present. And at least the article was planned to be positive

As far a the goofle-fu needed to find that specific information, well, I think you're overestimating the difficulty of that particular feat.

As Scott himself has explained, the bigger deal isn't whether or not it's easy to find out his last name if you know the blog. It is finding the blog from his last name. In other words, if his patients, who don't know the blog exists, find it simply by googling the name of their doctor.

Seems like that would happen eventually whether or not NYT did anything, if SSC got famous enough. Though, I wouldn't dare to tell him how important the timeline of that is. It is his life, after all.

One thing that I'd be curious to test: if Scott were given a choice between a very critical article that maintained his weak pseudonymity and a very positive one that didn't, which would he go for? My expectation is that he'd go for the former, and I'd be disappointed if he went for the latter.

I think that's fair.

You're thinking with the wrong threat model. The concern is not about people who really want to know what his real name is, it's people putting his real name into Google and getting references to Slatestarcodex on the first page of the results.

>His pen name and his real name are already strongly linked in search engine space.

It's not.

I've been following the development of the drama for a while. And even though I know a thing or two about OSINT, I still don't know Scott Alexander's real full name.

It was autocompleting in a major search engine at least as recently as several days ago.

Having his real name linked to the gathering place and intellectual support he provided for eugenicists is beneficial to his patients, since it lets them see just who it is they’re really going to for treatment.

I'm aware it's fashionable among certain parts of the left to refer to any discussion at all of population genetics as "supporting eugenicists" but it's honestly not an effective way to make any sort of point.

How's that even remotely relevant? Your doctor is not your wife and treatment does not involve enthusiastic agreement on every controversial topic of the day.

I don't care about my doctor's opinions as long as they behave professionally and do their job well.

If this is a reference to discussions around IQ, I'd suggest that equating "person X scores lower on IQ tests than person Y" and "person X is subhuman compared to person Y" is a frankly horrifying position and if that isn't the equivalence you're trying to draw then you might do better being less combative and more descriptive around your actual objections.