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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Not that the NYT has any business printing somebody's name who doesn't want it to be printed, but I kind of feel like he had been looking for an excuse to shut down the blog for a while - it had been a long time since any of his posts really felt inspired like they were even a year ago. This gives him an excuse to make a clean break.

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I’m genuinely surprised that getting doxxed wasn’t part of his playbook. It’s not like he went to the greatest of lengths to hide his identity, Bay Area psychiatrists named Scott is a pretty small pool of people.

This is pure speculation but my hunch is that the Scott Alexander of a few years ago wouldn’t care about being doxxed. I agree with your take on this. Become a well known writer on the internet and doom yourself to being forced to live by the principles you articulate. It gets claustrophobic and cognitively dissonant after a few years. I think he didn’t want to be married to the content he’d created forever, was looking for an excuse to shut down the blog, and when this NYT thing happened it was a blessing in disguise because it allowed him to shut it down without losing face.

I think Scott Alexander would be very sympathetic to this line of reasoning too.

"It’s not like he went to the greatest of lengths to hide his identity, Bay Area psychiatrists named Scott is a pretty small pool of people."

This is a misunderstanding. He was not trying to prevent "Scott Alexander" -> real name inferences. He was only trying to limit the rate of incidental inferences in the other direction; the primary effect of greatly increasing that rate is to harm his professional life.

That seems at best a very narrow sense of "doxxing." If his name is for all practical purposes already public, and he just does not want readers of a specific newspaper to see his name mentioned, does that really count as "doxxing?"

It shouldn't. It's so weird that the outrage just ... glosses over that.

At that point, it sounds like this is essentially about maintaining SEO for his name rather than what I would consider "doxxing".

It's not for all practical purposes public. I'm very tech literate and google-literate, and I have tried multiple times to find his name, and was unable to.

Um, I know his name but by accident. Why are you trying to track this guy down?

Pure curiosity. I tried it a few years ago, I think because he posted something about keeping his identity secret and I was curious how hard it was to find. Then again with these recent articles I did some basic searching.

Scott, answering to a different question: "I’m not sure what kind of evidence you want me to give. But if you want, you can confirm with Cade that I begged him, at great length, many times, over the course of days, not to use my real name in the article. I gave him a warning that I would delete the blog if he used my real name, in order to pressure him to reconsider, and I only deleted the blog after he refused."

https://www.coindesk.com/i-failed-terribly-at-keeping-my-ide...

Additionally, this is a much less clean break than "blah blah blah thank you all blah blah blah new projects blah blah blah goodbye" would be. Also, the NYT could have backed down on the spot and he would be expected to put the blog back up.

I detected the same shift in blog content, but figured (or, assumed) it was due to caution given the current political and social climate, more than lack of inspiration.

Yes, the blog author did say as much. The idea that he would want to take his whole blog down because he wasn't feeling "inspired" seems preposterous.

The current climate should be plenty inspiring for those with the capacity to form heterodox ideas.

The kolmogorov complicity post was arguably an announcement that he felt it necessary to do so.

I kind of doubt that level of Machiavellianism from him. If he didn't want to do it anymore he would just say so.

That theory directly contradicts his claim that he was considering continuing his blog under a different name.

Maybe he already is and the internet hasn't found it yet.

No, it supports it. Why not use the excuse to shut it down, killing “SSC” forever. He’s no longer tied to those posts or opinions. And then he can create a new blog not linked to it at all, and start fresh.

You don't have to live by principles you raise espouse anonymously 24/7.

> Not that the NYT has any business printing somebody's name who doesn't want it to be printed,

I'm not sure it's as simple as that. Surely newspapers should be able to name Brock Turner or Donald Trump no matter how much they'd dislike that?

At the very least, we'd have to be able to articulate some line that Scott Alexander was on the other side of.

There is no public interest rationale for exposing Scott Alexander's identity.

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