I'm hyperfixated on the idea that they're angry at Metz for "outing" Scott Alexander, who published some of his best-known posts under his own name.
And he has already lost the job he was trying to protect back then. Now AFAIK his main source of income are subscriptions on Substack, and obviously those are not threatened in any way by having his name mentioned one more time.
Please let's respect each other's intelligence by not playing the game of pretending that posting Scott's full name before 2021 is the same as posting Scott's full name after 2021.
So, do you have examples of "some of his best-known posts published under his own name" before 2021?
Is this information surprising for you?
Title of the post is "Hail Scott Siskind" from Robin Hanson's blog Overcoming Bias. This blog was a central point of the early rationalist movement.
Notably, posts like this were scrubbed some time near the New York Times debacle. There was an active effort to scrub mentions of "Siskind" from rationalist adjacent blogs around that time.
It was amazingly effective at rewriting the history. You won't find any mention of the activities to scrub "Siskind" from the rationalist blogs, though.
More people should read the article, if anything because it provides interesting insight into Sam Altman's shady behavior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
Is this anything other than a naked assertion of force, that might makes right? He couldn't stop it, therefore it's fine that it happened to him? (Also, it's extremely... something... to describe "he asked a journalist to not print his name on the front page of the NYT" as "asking the world to forget his name", as if his real name was already the primary referrent by which he wielded his influence, and he wanted to shield that power from scrutiny. This was obviously not the case, and is _still_ not the case despite the article, which is why nobody has actually made a compelling argument for why including his name in the article was _good_ rather than _something Cade Metz had the power to do_. I in fact don't particularly think that Cade Metz did it to deliberately hurt Scott, I just think he's a blankface who didn't care that his usual modus operandi would sometimes hurt people for no good reason and was unable to step out of his frame enough to actually check whether what he was doing made any sense, in that instance.)
> I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.
That you describe it as "patients must not be able to Google your blog" makes me not particularly trust the reports of those therapists. I, too, talked to some therapists, who thought that Scott's concerns were reasonable. Not that there was an overriding professional duty, sure, but that wasn't the claim, either. I dunno, man. The attitude you have towards this really seems like, "well, getting slapped isn't that bad, and you're not strong enough to stop him... maybe stop complaining?" What good thing happened when Cade Metz put his name in print? If you want to adopt a principled stance against pseudonymous writing online, do that. But don't pretend that Scott's failure to keep a pristine separation between his real name and his entire history of online writing somehow makes it so that the NYT printing his name is merely the maintaining the status quo ("ask the world to forget his name"), rather than dramatically expanding the circle of people for whom his identity was deanonymized.