Comment by dondawest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dondawest | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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