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Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

Newspapers are in the business of publishing information. Part of that are the names of people involved in stories, who don’t get veto power unless they are clearly just passive “victims”.

Specifically, (potential) patients of Alexander might have a legitimate interest in knowing about his writing. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with being treated by him. But therapy is among the most sensitive subject, and I could easily see people having a legitimate interest in being given the opportunity to decide for themselves.

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Actually the norm in psychiatry is that patients are absolutely not supposed to know this kind of detail about their psychiatrist: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/why-psy...

Searching the web for his real name would reveal his pseudonym even before all this. He chose to keep using the same pseudonym because he didn't want to lose his audience.

Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility.

After all, if it's important to an individual's therapy, it's even more important for government policy (foreign or domestic) affecting the lives and futures of millions of people.

Is this sarcasm, right?

Why?

> Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility.

Boy, is that a false equivalency. You do realize that anonymizing a source is part of a bargain for the journalist to get access to information they wouldn't otherwise have had access to, often information the source isn't authorized to disclose (and thus could face punishment for disclosing it)?

It's also worth nothing that, in the real world, revealing someone's real name isn't the high crime of "doxxing," rather it's normal and expected. Journalists aren't typically creatures of pseudonymous web forums, and it's a category error to expect them to abide by the peculiar norms of them.

> It's also worth nothing that, in the real world, revealing someone's real name isn't the high crime of "doxxing," rather it's normal and expected. Journalists aren't typically creatures of pseudonymous web forums, and it's a category error to expect them to abide by the peculiar norms of them.

When i go to a foreign land, or even someone else's home, i try to abide by the rules and norms of the locals there, regardless of whether they are norms in my land or not. Its a basic part of being a guest.

I don't care if journalists typically use pseudonyms or not, its just basic human decency to respect the norms of a space you're a guest in. I don't see much reason why journalists should get a free pass on doxxing in a forum where pseudonomity/anonymity has been the norm for decades.

Even more so, the journo explicitly asked for consent to publish his name, didn't get it, and published it anyways. Like just doing whatever you like without the subjects consent is understandable only in a few rare cases of serious crime, definitely not for the modern "crime" of wrongthink on the internet.

Ironically, Scott himself used an anonymous source as the lynchpin of his response to the article in question.

"I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them." https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

How will this help them make a choice if they don’t also have access to the writings of other therapists they might consider?

> How will this help them make a choice if they don’t also have access to the writings of other therapists they might consider?

Isn't it obvious? To put it in mathy terms: if I have to choose from ten things, and I dislike 2. my chance of picking something I dislike is 0.2, if I can disqualify one of the disliked things up front, my chance of picking the remaining disliked thing is 0.11 (i.e. a big improvement).

> if I have to choose from ten things, and I dislike 2

What’s obvious is that 10, and 2 are not something you know in advance.

More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.

> What’s obvious is that 10, and 2 are not something you know in advance.

They don't have to be. The principle holds generally, as long as there's some choice out there you'd like.

Ok.

More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.

> More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.

I don't but you're moving the goalposts and asking a different question. I was talking about personal preferences (e.g. like/dislike), and you're talking about "efficacy as a therapist."

I'm also getting a vibe of a kind weird inversion from you, where it's the therapist's right to see a particular patient unless that patient can prove with a "model" that the therapist won't work for them.

> I don't but you're moving the goalposts and asking a different question. I was talking about personal preferences (e.g. like/dislike), and you're talking about "efficacy as a therapist."

No. You are advancing the position that the interests of people selecting therapists are served by newspapers publishing articles about their writings.

I think that if you ask people whether they would prefer a more effective therapist over a less effective one, most people would say they would prefer the more effective one.

Effectiveness as a therapist is part of how people form preference of therapists. Excluding it is arbitrary.

Nowhere do I suggest anything about therapists having any right to see any particular client. That idea is competely made up by you.

And who draws the line of what is "legitimate" interest?

Because the Gawker type "journalist" will tell you that there's no such line, and clearly leaked dickpics are a "legitimate interest" of their readership.

The position of Scott Alexander seems to be very, very different - entirely opposite from "patients of Alexander might have a legitimate interest in knowing about his writing." the general practice seems to be that it's imperative that patients do not know about his writing, as that affects the therapy in a negative manner. If a potential patient reads Scott Alexander's personal blog and knows who he is, then Scott would be ethically prohibited from taking them on, they are not a potential patient any more; if a current patient does the same, they may have to terminate the relationship and transfer to a different therapist solely because of that. It was also clearly stated that patients reading his public blog and knowing who he is is incompatible with the employment at his previous clinic - if he'd be outed, he'd be fired and all the patients would suddenly have to find a different therapist, which isn't good for the stability of their treatment.

A therapist is supposed to be a blank slate to project what is needed for therapy. The patient is not supposed to know whether the therapist is married or not or divorced, because that may affect (not in a good way) how the patient handles revealing their relationship trauma - the therapist should either appear neutral (to freely allow the patient to project whatever they want to project) or be free to create whatever impression about himself works best for the therapy. It would be near-taboo for a therapist to have a family picture in the room visible to the patient, and in the exact same manner the patient reading about therapist's personal life can only hurt therapy.

The patient should not know the therapists political opinions or moral opinions about various ethical dilemmas, as that may hurt the therapy as it involves the patients' current personal stresses. One patient might need the therapist to show agreement to their viewpoint in order to open up more, another patient might need the therapist to confront and dispute the same viewpoint. The therapist must not be taking sides based on their personal beliefs, they should project whatever viewpoint is needed for the particular patient at this moment. For this reason, various symbols of political or advocacy affiliation are near-taboo, all the therapist profiles are explicitly neutral, and (again) a patient reading their therapists personal blog is bad for the effectiveness of their therapy. A patient isn't supposed to choose a therapist based on their political opinions anyway, if the therapist lets out their politics in therapy, then they have failed at their job and the patient should get a better therapist no matter if they liked those politics or not.

Patients have a legitimate interest in knowing the professional qualifications and professional reputation of the therapist, but all the personal life and personal opinions of the therapist are out of bounds as it disturbs the relationship with the therapist - the patient has a right to read that, but it would force an ethical doctor to "fire" that patient. As far as I understand, currently Scott Alexander has to filter potential patients based on whether they read his blog as it's not anonymous anymore, but that's manageable as he now has a separate practice. But if indeed all his patients would have a "legitimate interest" in reading that and would actually do so, then he would have to stop blogging about pretty much everything meaningful because that would be incompatible with treating patients properly.

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