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Comment by sbilstein | Hacker News Reader

Anyone could literally find out scott alexander siskind worked at the walnut creek PCPA by a google search or two years before the NYTimes outed him. As an occasional SSC reader I thought it was disingenuous of him to claim an 'outing' when he self-admittedly didn't try very hard (at all? just not usually using his last name?) to cover his tracks.

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All of this is true, but I do think this "outing" still means something.

My hackernews account here is "anonymous", but not carefully so. I'm sure any dedicated reporter could figure out who I am (I have no pretensions that I would ever merit attention like this). Still, if one decided to out me after I asked them not to AND it didn't even really advance the story, I would indeed feel violated. And I'm not a therapist with patients to consider, I'm an IC FAANG grunt.

I think his spiel has been that while blog readers could trivially find out his real name, but his patients could not (searching 'scott siskind' wouldn't bring up his blog in the first n page of results), until this association was made in the NYT. If you search that now the first two results are the wiki for SSC and the NYT stories, and if you look in the wiki for SSC you'll see that his real name was kept off of it (despite weekly-ish edits attempting to re-add his name) up until the NYT story.

i get that point but still it is a little tough to buy. When I lived in the Bay Area (until 2019), the only psychiatry office that accepts medical insurance upfront is the PCPA. As a software engineer living in Oakland wanting to use my company health insurance I saw Scott on the list at Walnut Creek. I remember immediately thinking "bay area psych, Scott Alexander, oh my god what if i got an appointment with this dude?"

I never made the appointment because it would have been really difficult to separate the writing from the person. However, that is on him! Plenty of mental health professionals blog and see patients.

Searching for Scott Siskind would find people discussing his pseudonymous writing.

Again: The point was not to break the Alexander -> Siskind link, but to break the Siskind -> Alexander link. Barring death threats, Alexander didn't care whether readers found out where he lived, but whether patients found his blog on the first page of Google.

He not only didn’t make much effort to hide his name but had even published some of his SSC writing under his full name. The way his supporters focus on this particular attack rather than the substance makes me inclined to believe they’ve selected it as the line of argument most likely to garner support from a general audience since it’s not exactly outside of long-running journalistic practice.

Yes! Old rational wiki posts had his full name too

There is a difference between searching for "sbilstein" and the results returning your actual name and searching for your actual real name and your hacker news posts being returned.

In the past if you searched for "Scott Alexander" you could find the real person but if you (or a patient) searched for his real name they wouldn't have found the blog posts.

Searching for Scott Siskind would find people discussing his pseudonymous writing.

Did a search for “Scott Alexander Siskind” lead to SSC?

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