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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

His name wasn't private to begin with. There are huge threads on HN about this from the time it happened and numerous ways to have easily stumbled across his real name, including the fact that he wrote some of his better known pieces first under his real name. Repeating over and over again that Scott Alexander's name was private using different words each time won't change that fact.

What was happening in this story was that Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable. That's a reasonable request to make in a community of peers (it's why I'll keep using "Alexander" on HN, for instance). It is not remotely a reasonable demand to make of strangers, let alone journalists.

This is another instance of message board thought seeping into the real world, and it's always alarming to me to see that, because while message board thought is fun, it's also deeply weird and dysfunctional.

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If you read any of those "huge threads on HN" you would easily know the crux of why Scott wanted to remain pseudonymous.

"Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable."

Absolutely false. Scott admits many times that it's trivial for his real identity to be known if you search around for Scott Alexander.

Scott Alexander -> Scott Sisnick (trivial)

What Scott was concerned about what his searching his real name being resoundingly brought to Scott Alexander, a major issue for his psychiatrist-patient relationships, as he demonstrates that psychiatrists need to maintain a blank slate for their patients to project onto, so that the patients don't hide or alter the behavior knowing something about their psychiatrist. That's very mainstream psychiatry. And there were concerns about current psychiatric patients he was seeing possibly being affected by this.

Before: Scott Sisnick -> "psychiatrist, bay area, studied at X, etc."

After: Scott Sisnick -> "Scott Alexander, rationalist, providing a platform for white nationalists, racism, etc."

FYI tptacek has gone dozens of comments deep on this topic every time it has come up. I don't know why he picked this hill (although I believe he has said he dislikes Scott) but I do know he ain't budging.

People keep explaining to me why Alexander wants his identity not to appear in a newspaper. I understand that. I just don't understand why his preferences bind on anyone else.

By way of example, a friend just told me on Twitter that it's super important that patients not be able to look up their therapists on the Internet and learn more about their personal lives. But that's definitely not a norm! I checked with several therapists I know personally.

I feel like people are scrambling to invent Internet rules that allow Alexander to coerce journalists, and I don't find that effort especially persuasive.

> . I just don't understand why his preferences bind on anyone else.

I mean, they don't bind like a physical law or something. Ignoring people's requests for anonymity and getting them harassed or fired is certainly physically possible, it just makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about the effect on speech and discourse.

It's sort of similar to not wearing a mask out, it's certainly not illegal or impossible to go out without a mask and cough on people who would prefer you didn't, but it still makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about you putting others' lives at risk.

It's not a reporter's job to protect people from their own conflicting interests. They can choose to withhold parts of a story after processing the ethical considerations, but "associating my name with the thousands of pages of opinion I've published on controversial subjects would damage my reputation" isn't a clear cut issue. It's a judgement call, he could have done it either way, but that Metz went ahead and attributed the works to their actual author doesn't make him an asshole.

It's especially egregious here in a hit piece that deliberately makes the things he said horrible.

But even if it was an accurate representation, the media has to ask "is it our job as a powerful outlet to literally punish this much less powerful person because they have opinions we disagree with".

If it wasn't "opinions we disagree with" but like "has killed 3 people" sure appoint yourself judge, jury, and executioner. But in other cases yes it makes you an asshole to think that you should enforce your will by punishing someone who disagrees with you.

It sounds like the big issue for you and others is that this was a hit piece. Okay -- but it's not in general wrong to report the name of someone who has written a large body of influential work, especially when it wasn't unknown in the first place. You're exaggerating grossly.

Scott Alexander on the one hand is a practicing clinician, and on the other writes prolifically about culture war topics. This is majorly out of balance, and it's on Scott to fit these areas of his life and income together. Why would the responsibility be on the NYT to help him?

It's not on the NYT to help him, he's already managing fine on his own, it's on the NYT to not try to punish him by breaking the anonymity that's allowed him to both continue his job and practice his free speech without affecting that.

Why should anyone care about how their actions impact anyone else? Is "don't be a dick" not good enough for you?

I guess it's just a matter of decency. You certainly don't need to abide by that but don't be surprised when others don't agree with or want to be around you.

> I just don't understand why his preferences bind on anyone else.

His preferences bind on the NYT in that as Scott can take actions which are adverse to the NYT in order to maintain his preferences. Such as deleting the blog and having his fans sign a petition and cancel their subscriptions. None of those actions are unreasonable: he is free to delete his blog for any reason or no reason, and anyone can make in a petition. What is the problem here?

People in the rationalist community used his real name when discussing his pseudonymous writing. Searching for his real name identified him as Scott Alexander before too.

Yeah, his name wasn't private. That is partly because of a decision to publish under his real name when he was much younger, and partly because people have been working to keep his name public despite his attempts to scrub his name.

But, as Scott has said numerous times, he simply wanted to make it hard for his patients to google his name and find his blog, so that he could continue practicing psychiatry. That's a perfectly reasonable request to ask of anyone, including journalists.

Much younger? He published a blog post of his under his real name in 2017[1].

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technological_Singu...

Alexander can certainly want his identity to be obscure, and has legitimate reasons to want that. That preference doesn't bind on strangers. He can't force the world to un-know things it already knows, and so no, that is not a reasonable request, especially not to a journalist.

These arguments about why we're all obligated to cooperate with Alexander's attempt to walk his identity back always seem to be inventing new norms, like the norm of "if a doctor slips up and writes political essays under their real name, then, for the sake of the doctor's career, every other person in the world should pretend that real name was never disclosed". It's a reasonable thing to want, but not to expect.

> These arguments about why we're all obligated to cooperate with Alexander's attempt to walk his identity back always seem to be inventing new norms

Not really. The NYT was perfectly willing to protect the anonymity of a different psychiatrist blogger. Yes, this person did a better job of keeping their identity a secret, but the justification was largely the same.

And let's not pretend that journalism is only about sharing information. There's a great deal that journalists don't share (or even try to actively suppress) for many different reasons. Partly because there are a lot of ethical considerations when publicizing information.

Worth noting that part of the issue is that, with psychiatry and counseling in particular, it really doesn't matter what he was writing about or what his politics are. Any such publicity compromises the blank slate that counselors are supposed to present to their clients. While this does mean that mental health professionals have an obligation to take care with their public image, it's not unreasonable to ask others (including journalists) to respect the particular cost they face with any kind of exposure.

I've lost track of the rationale you're trying to give me for why the NYT is obligated to pretend Alexander's identity wasn't public, or why the NYT is somehow a party to Alexander's professional practice.

It's not _obligated_ to, no one says it's illegal. NYT can decide to be an asshole and reveal it despite the request not to. Which it has.

Is there a real argument for why the NYT _should_ publish Scott's name? Other than "it doesn't care whether that hurts the subject, and it expects to get more clicks this way".

Journalists routinely protect people's identities when they think outing them could threaten their safety in some way. They do this regardless of whether a dedicated investigator might be able to piece together someone's identity from existing public information.

It's not a requirement to offer this protection, but declining when it's asked for by the subject of a story is certainly a weighty ethical decision that respectable journalists don't take lightly.

Outing someone in a vulnerable position simply because the journalist disagrees with their ideas and wants to harm them (vs. deciding it's in the public interest) would be a very clear breach of ethics.

If the NYT went digging and found a friend of Alexander's who revealed his name, this would have maybe some weight (but probably not: journalists write stories about people who would prefer, for economic reasons, not to be identified all of the time; that is often the point), but in this case, all they did was Google. I'm sorry, I still can't see the real-world rule that requires the New York Times to pretend that you can't just Google a pseudonym to unmask it.

They don't have to pretend that. But they also don't have to include someone's name when it's not pertinent to the story and could conceivably cause the person harm.

It doesn't matter if someone could just Google it. The NYT shouldn't make it easier unless there's journalistic value in doing so. Spite doesn't count.

Would you feel the same if this was a story about a sexual assault victim instead of a blogger?

Scott Alexander is not a victim of sexual assault; he's the author of a blog that he would rather not have connected to his name. The norms about sexual assault victims in journalism are specific (and they're contentious! Google CJR for examples) and you can't generalize from them.

In other words: no, you wouldn't feel the same.

He's a blogger, not an assault victim, but his concerns are similar. Avoiding harassment and physical violence against himself and his family. Avoiding negative consequences on his career.

Why are his concerns less valid than anyone else's? "Because I disagree with him" or "because he talks about ideas I don't think should have a platform" aren't good answers. There's no allegation he hurt anyone, did anything illegal, abused his influence, or acted in bad faith. So what's the journalistic purpose of exposing him?

Since we're making absurd comparisons, what about violentacrez, who moderated a subreddit devoted to creepshots of underage girls?

Should his identity have been withheld because it would hurt his career, or he might be harassed?

Are you really incapable of seeing the distinction between being able to find a real name from the pseudonym, and being able to find the pseudonym from the real name?

Both were possible already. People in the rationalist community discussed his pseudonymous writing using his real name.

Possible, yes. But not equally easy.

It's not like he was trying to hide from the NSA or anything. The goal was "I don't want my patients to see my blog on the first page of Google results when they search for my real name". The NYT completely obliterated that.

Additionally, the fact that the NYT chose to smear him means that now many potential patients may google his name, see the hit piece and nothing else, and decide "yikes, better not go there".

The first page of Google results had pages that linked to his blog. And I think patients would be more likely to click on pages containing his name than an obscurely named blog.

The article wasn't flattering. It wasn't a smear or a hit piece.

You're ignoring the main issue here: Metz has no legitimate reason for publishing Scott's name. It's a purely spiteful move that provides no benefit to his readers.

Based on his behaviour in this and other[1] situations, I have no doubt that if Metz thought he could get away with something more unsavoury, he would have tried to.

[1] https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-c...

You're ignoring the main issue here: Metz has no legitimate reason for publishing Scott's name.

This would be reminiscent of the South Park planet Marklar where all people, places and things are named Marklar. It's fun for a bit but likely impractical. It's also not clear how using someone's name is 'spiteful' given the vast majority of readers would have never heard of Scott Alexander, pseudonymous or otherwise.

Do you realize that when covering chapo trap house the NYT referred to Virgil Texas by his pseudonym rather than revealing his real name, which he prefers to keep private? It's just as easy to find his name online and it's often mentioned on message boards. Why provide anonymity to one but not the other?

I guess I just don't care how they chose to refer to Virgil Texas. If it was me, I'd probably have used his real name.

It matters because either the NYT is inconsistent, or worse they are consistently biased, in how they respect the anonymity of their subject. But ultimately any justification they provide for publishing his real name rings hollow and comes across as a petty act of power.

I guess I just don't care how consistent the NYT is in offering people control of their portrayal in stories, because I don't believe the NYT has any obligation to offer anyone that control.

It's not about offering subjects control, it's about weighing the impact to the individual against the public interest of the reporting.

You seem to be under the impression that journalists are under no obligation with regard to how their reporting impacts their subjects, even when that subject is not a public figure per se. I'm pretty sure that's something that even most journalists (at least those working at relatively prestigious institutions) would disagree with.

Again, you are justifying Gawker-style journalism, which is pretty atrocious and doesn't serve to create a better informed public.

The subject here is a very public figure, as the article amply demonstrates.

"Very" is hardly the word I would use. Not to the same level as a politician, for example. And certainly wasn't a public figure under his real name.

You don't think journalists should follow some sort of publicly stated code of conduct or held to a higher standard than an anonymous poster on 4chan when it comes to revealing an individual's personal info?

I think the norms of message boards and the norms of journalism have literally nothing to do with each other, and you can't learn anything about one by analyzing the other.

Privacy-by-obscurity is still privacy. It seems absurd to argue that's equivalent to his name being front and center in the NYT of all things.

Taking things from obscurity to publicity is literally part of the premise of journalism. Alexander cannot demand that journalists pretend that his identity is secret when it's not, not remotely, not even plausibly.

> Taking things from obscurity to publicity is literally part of the premise of journalism

What a facile justification. By that metric there was nothing wrong with Gawker's antics. The question is always whether the things a journalist is publicizing in the public interest, and the fact that publications (especially prestigious ones) have an obligation to consider the impact of what they expose of citizens who often don't have an equal platform from which to defend themselves.

The very fact that you can find his real name from his pseudonym means that the NYT wasn't actually "exposing" anything of value. At the same time, they've made it considerably harder (if not impossible) for him to practice normal psychiatric medicine.

Also, does this article even cover what it was originally supposed to be about - i.e. a bunch of people online who saw COVID coming long before the authorities? I haven't gone all the way through, but my understanding is no. Instead there's no so subtle implication that the guy who wrote the "Anti Neoreactionary FAQ" may in fact a secret nazi or something.

Respectfully, I doubt a lot that any of us know what this article was "supposed to be about".

Well, that was the justification Cade Maetz provided when he was asking around about Scott initially. Are you saying we shouldn't take the author at his word?

That's plainly false.

Those who tried to find Scott Alexander's real name could find it.

But those who tried to find information about their doctor or colleague Scott Siskind most likely wouldn't find out that he writes a popular blog.

He published under his real name early on.

Which he regretted, so he removed his original blog and started blogging under a pen name.

Yes, you could only obtain Scott Alexander's real name if you were a little bit interested in knowing what it was.

The energy spent trying to miss the point here is kind of breathtaking.

There existed a trivial mapping of A -> B. There did not exist a trivial mapping of B -> A. Scott was trying to prevent his patients, who had information B, from being bombarded with the link to A. It is not a hard concept to grasp.

Yes, we have all heard this before, many, many times. The connection not being made here is why it is that a newspaper is obliged to care about this.

I cannot understand the point of you switching back and forth between "he was already doxxed" and "well ok but actually the NYT should doxx him" in 25 separate threads on the topic.

I don't know what this word "doxxing" even means in this context. Does it mean calling unwanted attention to public information?

And you have yet to explain why there was a public interest in giving his real name that level of exposure.

But if you did a google search for his real name, his blog was not on the first page of results. Which was the main objective.

Links to his blog were. People in the rationalist community used his real name when talking about his pseudonymous writing.

That seems like it's more between Alexander and Google than between Alexander and the New York Times.

Scott is perfectly justified being upset when the NYT tries to parade his name around in a hit piece knowing (probably even hoping) their cancel-happy readers will run with it.

> Alexander cannot demand that journalists pretend that his identity is secret when it's not, not remotely, not even plausibly.

This isn’t what he asked for. As you note there’s pages of comments and Alexander’s own account on Substack now. Maybe you’re claiming he isn’t being honest about his requests from NYT.

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.

Private is not the same concept as secret.

My name is not secret. It is, however, private.

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