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The point was the dangling sword over his head, being the imminent publishing of the article.

They told him they wouldn't hide his name, but they didn't tell him they wouldn't publish the article.

Also, most of the credibility loss has been because a lot of those anonymous sources flat-out lied to them, but that's another story and I have yet to see them write about it.

Thank you for engaging.

So if someone just .... wrote an article after doing a few google searches, what would the consensus be in that scenario?

I can see a few options, two of which require having made steps to avoid this outcome intentionally -

1) always separate your personal from digital profiles and

2) have ways to modify your search rankings ?

(He could reach out to The news paper and sue them After the fact I suppose, But Im not sure it would stand up in court if it’s public info)

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Side note : I’m assuming people agree, that the creation of large platforms is a natural outcome of the way the world is set up.

(Limited brain storage/attention, competition in media, network effects of leaks, Etc.- these conspire to give a few channels greater reach than others)

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Well he may want to look again, because his real name is pretty strongly tied to SSC now, via a tweet and some other articles that pop up. Google even autocompletes it.

Forgive me because I posted something very similar a month ago when Alexander deleted SSC, but I'm a mental health professional in full-time research and clinical practice and this bears repeating: the "damage to the therapeutic relationship with patients" argument for Alexander's anonymity is weak at best, since

(a) psychiatrists in particular have little to no "therapeutic alliance" with their patients as traditionally understood, and (b) professional mores in mental health more generally (including clinical psychology, social work, counseling, and psychiatric nursing) have changed in favor of a great deal more "self-disclosure" being permitted in the therapeutic relationship (or "alliance") than 75 years ago.

In my view, it would damage Mr. Alexander's relationship with his patients very little to know that he has a popular blog about rationalism etc. As another commenter points out above, most adults (and most users of psychiatric / mental health services, believe it or not) are perfectly capable of separating whatever they know about their clinicians' personal lives from their ability to do their jobs.

I'll quote myself from the earlier thread:

"I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk, and everyone in modern mental health knows it. I've worked as a clinician in the types of settings Mr. Alexander works in (locked inpatient psychiatric units), and others in mental health as well, and while there's certainly a longstanding debate within psychotherapy (talk therapy) about so-called "self-disclosure", the days when clinicians were expected to be "impenetrable to the patient" and "reflect nothing but what is shown to him" are long over.

Researchers and practitioners from nearly every therapeutic modality that rose up to challenge (and in many cases mostly displace) these leftovers from Freud have challenged the notion of "psychiatrist-as-cipher" from within their own perspectives. And there's even a very good case to be made that hiding oneself as aggressively as Freud wanted clinicians to do (and as aggressively as S. Alexander seems to want to maintain) only augments an already severely lopsided "power dynamic" in the therapeutic relationship. In plain English: it's attitudes like these that allow "the therapeutic class" of which I am a part to lord it over the populations we are ostensibly treating, people who in many cases aren't treated as people and who have valuable expertise and experience in matters relevant to them but who we, historically, have been eager to ignore.

But it's funny because these debates have occurred within the universe of "talk therapy", a universe that psychiatry as such abandoned about fifty years ago. Dr. Alexander is a psychiatrist in 2020 - not a psychologist, not a social worker, not even a nurse. His profession left all pretense of actually talking to patients behind when they fully embraced medications as the first-line treatments for nearly all mental disorders; psychiatrists today do "medication management".

None of this is to slander the guy, by the way; he's really good at what he does (the blogging, I mean), and I've enjoyed a lot of his output over the years. But this specific reason for remaining anonymous got under my skin a bit, because it's wobbly for the reasons I listed. It's _also_ wobbly, I'll add, because the rest of us in mental health could have no such luxury of privacy these days even if we wanted it - and 99.9999% of us do not maintain ultra-popular and highly public-facing blogs. I value my privacy greatly, perhaps more than Alexander, but citing ancient and highly contested professional mores to maintain it is pulling a fast one on the public he very much needs right now."

I don't speak for all mental health professionals or researchers, of course, but I feel I owe it to HN (where most are not in the field, I'm guessing) to offer another point of view on this, especially in light of SSC's popularity with the HN crowd.

If you're writing a blog under a consistent identity pretty much by definition you are a public figure because you're creating public discourse and attaching your name/pseudonym to it.

You can't really have it both ways. If you want to speak publicly but truly don't want to be identified you can do that by just posting anonymously, or you can just not engage in public discourse.

But if you do write even with some invented persona clearly you want others to recognise that.

Sharing content is a different matter because you didn't originate the content and you didn't set the public policy on it.

Honestly, it's hard to tell without the article being published and seeing what comes of it?

It's not like particularly rare for an article to be published where the journalist includes the name and two or three aliases of the subject of the article, and suddenly a lot of people realize that the person they thought they were dealing with in an isolated way is actually engaged in a much larger pattern of behavior -- the person who skipped out on a couple of grand in rent with a sob story under one name did the same thing ten more times under three different names, the guy with a family in one state has a couple more in two different states that didn't know about each other, the "reference" that spoke so well about a former employee is actually said employee, etc etc etc.

But generally when writing a piece on anybody it's normal to gather all kinds of details about one's life. Profession/job, educational history, some basic family background and name is usually one of them too.

Now again if the journalist has a good relationship with the person and they say they really want to go by XYZ instead of their full name, this is a perfectly valid request to me. But the notion that one is committing a grave crime if they don't comply (or ask) is another story.

Say back in the day I wrote a little piece on something that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Some journalist got interested in it and called me to discuss it. Spent most of the time discussing my own background. Hardly talked about my story at all. Wasn't enthused about this but I understand that's something people generally want to know.

[0] I mean correct me if I'm wrong but this person publishe[s/ed] under their regular first and second name. Mentions his actual life and experiences in his publicly available writings. Is generally easy to track down. Has a big cult following. But wants their last name redacted. Again, not saying that the journalist shouldn't honor the request. But nonetheless the whole situation is a bit bizarre. And sooner or later his full name will be out there (probably already is). So he's essentially asking for his full name not to rank too well in search results?

It has value but it's a mechanism that isn't necessarily needed in all cases.

One could do a thought experiment imagining a group of newspaper readers evaluating an edition where names of subjects were not given and one where they were. Which edition would be more interesting?

The quality of thought seems to be incredibly low.

You can say this about pretty much any group of people.

Everyone is now partly responsible for what the other adults they associate with do when they're not around?

This is not the world you want to live in even if you think you want it.

I find his response confusing. Full marks on managing to get of lot of publicity off the back of the NYT not writing are article though. He is really getting is very-slightly-obfuscated name out there.

I tried googling around and I don't see much information on what happened. Why was he deanonymised?

Could you give me a quick rundown of the situation?

Some may find the Greek term "kenosis" interesting, meaning "emptying". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis

I agree that SSC being separate from his psychiatry is pretty important. I like SSC, and at the same time I would find it difficult to go to therapy knowing Scott is behind SSC. It would cause me to fixate on obsessional traits in myself, knowing that he is predisposed to the same thing.

That's not a very solid foundation. Pretty much everything from Freud has since been reconsidered.

My experience with therapists is that I want a certain connection, and I've been rather unsatisfied with most I've seen (though my sample size is only 4). It's not optimal to have to keep rolling the dice to try and find someone I'm comfortable opening up to, and of course both the situation where I'd need to find a new therapist and the US healthcare system (& attitude to mental health) do not make it any easier.

For most professionals, however, it is quite hard to work this out, at least without asking them in person. (For a minority, who are involved in research/etc, one can look at their publications.)

So I'd actually encourage more mental health professionals to blog (or otherwise engage with the public) with their opinions on their field of professional expertise.

(SSC mostly isn't doing that, since Scott mostly comments on general topics, and only posts something on his profession every now and again. I often find what Scott has to say on general topics interesting, but I doubt I'd find what J. Random Psychiatrist or J. Random Psychologist has to say on general topics anywhere near as interesting.)

But Scott doesn't exactly try to be a blank slate to patients, given that he mentions details like his time in Japan and his "struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder" in his public profile as a psychiatrist, which seems to be aimed at patients (there's a big button for booking an appointment).

Of course, there is a difference between making a few superficial details like this available to your patients or millions of words of your essays.

Now, regardless of all that, it still seems like it would be a nice thing to do for news media to respect his wishes. But it also seems like a bit much to say that publishing his name would be all that significant of a change to his level of anonymity.