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Comment by PatrolX | Hacker News Reader

This is a very dumb move on his part.

He just went from "big interesting blog" to "very suspicious behavior".

Think about it from a reporter's perspective, they were about to write about an interesting blog, and suddenly the blog gets deleted because his real name will be revealed. Well, that's a pretty big reaction, so big we can't ignore it. The reporter's first question now will be "Wow, what's he trying to cover up?"

One thing is certain, reporters are now trying to dig up the thing that they're imagining he's trying to cover up.

And maybe he does have something to hide given his irrational behavior, who knows?

This won't end now until reporters find something, and they're gonna go to great lengths to find something.

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It's not a dumb move. The current reality is that you can get #cancelled for telling students you won't give them higher marks just because of their race. Scott wasn't exactly politically correct, him getting fired for something he wrote was a very real risk.

Fuck that reporter.

On the contrary, it's a smart and deeply reasonable move. Scott is being quite transparent about the reasons for his choice, and the NYT reporters' and editors' behavior will look far more suspicious than anything he's doing.

Except a journalist isn't going to sit back and take his "reasons for his choice" as true and go away, they're going to dig even more and he's smart enough to know that.

He just made things worse for himself by deleting that blog and drawing attention to himself.

Now it's not just the original reporter looking into this story, a whole bunch of journalists have dived in, and are now looking for an even bigger story.

They're going to "dig" in obscure web archives to try and make him look bad? Anyone could do that, but good luck trying to sell that as reasonable after you've doxxed the guy. It would be so obvious that this is what they're doing, they probably wouldn't even bother.

And Scott has no reason to care about "drawing attention to himself" at this point - you can't beat a NYT article (even a sympathetic one!) as far as "attention" goes, and that was already in the cards.

I think his given explanation is plausible. Having that much opinion and personal information tied publicly to his real identity _would_ make it hard to do his job as a psychiatrist well. Presumably that is very important to him, possibly even more important than the blog, especially when you take into account the personal safety issues of doxxing.

I agree, it's plausible.

But journalists don't stop at "plausible" and then write, they keep digging until they have "the facts" (or their biased version of the facts) right?

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