Ironically, Scott himself has an old (2013) post on "the virtue of silence" that talks specifically about the NYT: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/

Scott's argument is basically, he is a psychiatrist and his patients will put his real name into google to find out info about him, check he's correctly licenced etc. But this shouldn't lead to them finding out too much as him as a person as that would get in the way of the therapeutic relationship. One thing he does to help with this is not run his public online identity under his full name.

The problem is not people searching for "scott alexander real name", even if they find it. The problem is reverse searches for "scott $surname" by his patients, leading to an article on the politics of his online community, his views on polyamory and transhumanism and gender etc.

If some random blogger made a post using his real name, and it didn't end up ranking highly in the google results for his real name, it probably wouldn't hurt too much - especially as most people don't look at more than the top 5 search results or so. The information being out there by itself is not the big problem.

But if a NYT article gets enough of an impact that it's the number 1 search result for his real name, then we have a problem. And the NYT has a pretty big platform, as Scott pointed out in the linked article, so it's a real hazard.

Further, this behavior is quite common. Pretty much every mental health professional I know who engages in social media does so under a (light) pseudonym. Its their solution for maintaining a professional relationship with people who may not understand or respect that boundary. A great many teachers do too, for basically the same reason.

How is this different than a security through obscurity argument which is so roundly discounted by virtually everyone who reads HN?

Doesn’t he admit as much in the article?

He doesn’t claim the NYT is the first to discover his identity, only that that are big enough to for that revelation to be pernicious.

Obscurity as a primary security method is criticized when it exist as an alternative to being, you know, actually secure.

Like, I could have RCE's in my software and hide the source to hopefully slow you from finding them. ... or I could fix the bugs!

But for many things, being "actually secure" isn't cheap or even possible at all... and perhaps obscurity and other less strong tools are the best anyone can do.

Security by obscurity is roundly discounted when there's an obvious way to do it right. For example, you store your passwords BASE64 encoded in the database, when you could be using scrypt.

When there's not an obvious way to do it, you have to fall back on the chouices that you have. The choices for a psychiatrist seem to be not have a blog or online profile at all, or run one under a pseudonym.

Security by obscurity is a problem because a site can get destroyed if one person discovers the flaw. He cares mainly if a not insignificant number of his patient discover him.

Thanks, that blog post was quite the intellectual indulgence to read and enjoy.

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)

————-

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)

——-

It is possible to disagree politically with your psychiatrist and still think he is good at his job. My head shrinker is a hippy kooky leftist and I am a govt-paranoid cabin-in-woods type right-libertarian. I still pay him $200 an hour because he does good work. Politics is only one part of a person. It is a part that is highly visible on the internet and mostly hidden in real life.

> But this shouldn't lead to them finding out too much as him as a person

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.

Google autocompletes a lot of names, and Scott's isn't exactly unique. Checking just now, SSC is not on the front page of a Google search in a private window for his professional name.

Note that if you're already using the blog name as part of your search, then you're not in the protected audience Scott wants to avoid spoiling.

"But this shouldn't lead to them finding out too much as him as a person as that would get in the way of the therapeutic relationship."

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.

Your comment does not make too much sense to me as a layperson. As far as I know, therapy by talking is still being done and research is still being done that investigates how it works. Scott and others have implied psychiatrists (individuals not the field as a whole) still try to avoid self-disclosing.

To me his choice to remain under pseudonym is communicated as his choice, not policy. If therapy by talking is still considered useful and he thinks self-disclosure has an impact on that, it is sufficient for his choice to be sane.

I appreciate that you highlight self-disclosing is contested, but calling this "pulling a fast one" seems excessive to me given your reasons

Your point of view is much appreciated, especially as you say because you are a professional in the field yourself.