What is your take on what Alexander asked for?

That Alexander started the substack under his real name only after leaving his job is a pretty big hint that it wasn’t about “demand[ing] that journalists pretend that his identity is secret”.

I don't want to guess at how this connects to the question I asked, so can you be more specific about what you think it was Alexander was asking of the New York Times? I think he was asking them not to disclose his identity. Do you think he was asking for something else?

You're moving the goal posts here, pretty significantly. He didn't want them to disclose his identity, because he didn't want his patients to see his name blasted out in major media as that could potentially impact their care. This seems entirely reasonable, and well within the range of requests that NYT grants to many subjects of their articles. You can think it's unreasonable, because if you are trying to connect SSC to an IRL name you could find it, and that's fine. I don't, because I think Alexander should've been given the exact same deference NYT offers others.

I think we're going around in circles. Because Alexander's identity was not in fact private, I don't care why Alexander wanted the NYT to keep it out of the story, nor do I think there is any real-world norm obligating them to do so.

Sure, you're free to ignore that one (of several) motivations was protecting his patients (which there absolutely is a real-world norm around). "My Doctor is the guy who writes SSC?" isn't a question he wanted asked. You're also free to ignore that NYT journalists do, quite often and as a norm, protect the identities of their sources and subjects of stories, and in this specific instance choose not to do so.

The whole idea that the NYT is somehow obliged to protect Alexander's patients is deeply weird. If protecting Alexander's patients was so important, Alexander shouldn't have been running this hugely popular blog using an identity so trivially connectable to those patients. Either way: it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Times.

Why do you prefer to live in a world where professionals are afraid to blog? Scott himself shared [1] an example of a police officer facing disciplinary action and being forced to shut down his blog under similar circumstances (worse, his identity was uncovered through hacking by the reporter) [2]. I think the entire society loses, except for the newspaper that gets a few clicks. Good for them I guess.

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Horton_(blogger)

The other case is completely different. The police officer hid his identity more carefully and the journalist broke the law.

I prefer to live in a world where professionals act responsibly. He could have stopped writing as Scott Alexander and started writing with a new pseudonym. He just didn't want to rebuild his audience.

I didn't claim they were obligated like it's a law to do this, but I do think it's a little strange you wouldn't expect a powerful media org like NYT to care about the second order effects of their reporting at all. To reduce this to it's simplest form: I am claiming that the NYT shouldn't have been an asshole about it. What is so puzzling to me is that you are a) intentionally not getting this, or saying "meh don't care" and b) are giving enormous deference to a very powerful organization that can negatively (or positively!) impact someone's livelihood.

>...using an identity so trivially connectable to those patients.

As others have pointed out, the connection was mapped as A to B and not B to A.

>...it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Times.

And the Times is what would've changed how his identities were mapped. How The Times' operates in this new tech-enabled media environment is absolutely relevant.

The connection was trivial to find both ways. People in the rationalist community used his real name when talking about his pseudonymous writing.

Sure, and there's an argument to be made that Alexander was taking some professional risk in that it was always possible one of his patients would wide up in the SSC subreddit and see his real surname.

Just searching the web for his real name would find those discussions. Someone can argue the NYT shouldn't make the connection more prominent. But it was mapped both ways already.