
Pseudonymity as a Trivial Concession to Genius - MindGods
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4870
======
tptacek
_In my view, for SSC to be permanently deleted would be an intellectual loss
on the scale of, let’s say, John Stuart Mill or Mark Twain burning their
collected works. That might sound like hyperbole, but_

You can stop right there.

I don't want to get into a prolonged litigation of the Slate Star Codex
oeuvre. You can like it or loathe it. But at some point people on these
threads need to speak up and say that this blogger is not in fact the second
coming of John Stuart Mill --- or at least, that's not the _universally held
opinion_ of people in tech. I know, he goes on to hedge his claim the same
way. But let's retain candor. You can employ hyperbole if you feel it helps a
valid argument, but it remains hyperbole.

~~~
Barrin92
I know this will go down like a lead balloon on HN but I've never seen
anything as cringeworthy and pseudo-intellectual as this entire rationalist
subculture, where weird obsessions with Bayesianism or other highly technical
lingo is applied to all sorts of topics in ways that just make anyone else
roll their eyes.

I think this also ties into this latest drama because apparently Scott seems
himself like some medieval scholar being persecuted by the authorities if his
name ever comes up, which is dramatic given that his pseudonym is his actual
first and middle name which together with "psychiatrist ann arbor" gives you
his actual name on a google search and a picture. Any of his patients who has
ever googled his name knows who he is.

~~~
norswap
Also, it should go down. If you're going to call something vile, you should at
least provide some argument to that effect.

Second, and not that it matters, but searching Scott's real name does not link
him as the author of SSC, which is what Scott cares about.

Rationalists have written a lot about: \- making better arguments, and
discursive standards \- holding truer beliefs no matter if it goes against
your current beliefs or makes you appear "cringeworthy"or "pseudo-
intellectual"

Maybe you really ought to check them out?

~~~
Barrin92
>but searching Scott's real name does not link him as the author of SSC, which
is what Scott cares about.

tried it in an anonymous browsing session. Googling just his real name returns
a link to the SSC twitter as the very first result, a rational wiki entry to
scott alexander, and plenty of pictures at SSC meetups, so I have to assume
any of his patients who ever Googled his name (which I guess is most people)
probably know who he is

~~~
norswap
Good point, but only if you include the middle name (Alexander), and except
for one of these links that is a bona fide doxing, most are matches for "Scott
Alexander".

------
luord
There are enough comments in this thread discussing whether this guy has any
real privacy (read: is pseudonymous) or not that I decided to see for myself.

After half an hour, I couldn't ferret out his last name no matter the search I
tried, regardless of incognito mode, open session, etc. In fact, google kept
trying to point me to some screenwriter, at least whenever I searched while
logged in.

Admittedly, I don't remember ever reading his blog nor anything about him...
But then again, that is probably true of most of his patients too, so my
search results might be more representative of the results he cares about.

Now, something tells me that an NYT article would definitely bring his two
personas closer together in anyone's search results. So, even assuming that my
google-fu is weaker than I thought it was and it turns out that literally
everyone (but me) can immediately know who he is, his fear still seems
warranted to me.

~~~
tptacek
I don't know what to tell you, since I had his real name on the simplest
imaginable search, and other people have had his name autocomplete.

~~~
luord
That doesn't surprise me, to be honest. From what I've seen in this thread,
you seem to care more about this guy than I do, and google adapts results
according to one's history and all the other data google collects.

As for our incognito results, mine aren't even in English, so that also
factors in why they might be so different. Though I doubt this Scott Alexander
person cares about someone who won't ever be his patient.

~~~
tptacek
I think I care less than you do, since I spent less than 4 minutes, and you
spent a whole half hour. I do care about bad arguments, though; very little
Google skill is required to rebut them, though.

~~~
luord
> I think I care less than you do, since I spent less than 4 minutes

You've been on this thread for hours and have been replying to almost everyone
in it...

Anyhow, what was my bad argument? Wait, scratch that, what was my argument,
period? I only mentioned what my results were and some stuff about google
results that everyone already knows anyway. I certainly wasn't trying to share
any particular view, idea or theory.

Wait, I also speculated on whether an article in one of the biggest news sites
in the USA might impact the kind of results google shows about him, was that
an incorrect assumption on my part?

------
mellosouls
_Even though the article was going to be positive_

No. That's what the NYT _said_ it was going to be.

Despite Professor Aaronson's assurances of the writer's good character and
pure intentions in this case, Scott Alexander - apart from his duty of care to
his clients - is wise to not take that for granted considering his open-minded
approach to various subjects which is liable by certain elements of the Ctrl-
Left to warrant a cancel-attack.

~~~
pvg
_That 's what the NYT said it was going to be._

That's what Scott Alexander said the NYT writer said. Everything we know about
this story is entirely his portrayal and version of it. You can give it as
much credence as you like but it is, so far, one party's representation.

~~~
mellosouls
This doesn't make sense - the writer is hardly going to say its gonna be a
hatchet job, and if he said it was going to be anything other than positive
then Scott Alexander would have mentioned that as it would have made his
caution all the more understandable.

There is no reason to disbelieve that the writer said it was going to be
positive and that Professor Aaronson believed him from experience.

~~~
pvg
There is no reason to disbelieve the subjects of this potential story got the
impression the story is going to be positive. This happens a lot and sometimes
turns out to be inaccurate, it's at the center of lots of post-publication
journalism kerfuffles. But we haven't seen the story. We haven't heard the
journalist's description of any of these interactions. All we have are the
impressions and recollections of one side.

~~~
philwelch
It would be truly strange for the NYT to dox a pseudonymous blogger against
their directly expressed wishes in a puff piece about that pseudonymous
blogger. I believe that Scott Alexander believes that’s what’s was going to
happen, but the motives just don’t line up.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Maybe, the "Don't ever talk to the police" rule is also good for journalists.
"Don't ever talk to journalists." Just like in real life, if you need to talk
to the police, you hire a lawyer whose professional job it is to talk to them
on your behalf, so if you need to talk to a journalist, you hire a publicist
whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf.

This has to do with incentives. Police, no how nicely they talk to you,
ultimately want to close the case. If they can do that by having you take the
fall, they will do that. Journalists, no matter now nicely they talk to you,
just want to create an article that will optimize for engagement from their
readers. If they can do that by a misleading portrayal or something that
otherwise harms your reputation or safety, they will do that. It is just
business to them.

~~~
205guy
Yes, I think this is a good idea. If your blog/hobby/project is just a side-
gig to your main employment, I’m not sure national media scrutiny is
desirable. If you wanted to go full-time as a writer or pundit/speaker,
perhaps like MMM or James Kunstler, and if you are media-savvy, then maybe it
is worth playing the game.

------
krallja
VERY highly voted and discussed topic earlier today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416)

~~~
etrabroline
I wonder why it isn't anywhere to be found on the home page then.

~~~
JoshuaDavid
Flamewar detector I think. IIRC HN posts are automatically down-ranked if the
ratio of comments to upvotes gets above a certain threshold, because a large
number of comments relative to upvotes frequently indicates that there's a
flamewar going on in the comments section.

~~~
nkurz
> Flamewar detector I think.

I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments than
upvotes, which isn't true for this article. Judging by the drops
([http://hnrankings.info/23610416/](http://hnrankings.info/23610416/)) I
wonder if the site might be penalized in some way, so that it decays faster
than one would expect. Or perhaps an editorial penalty added specifically for
this story, to kick it out of the top spot to make room for a more technical
article.

~~~
mundo
> I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments
> than upvotes

I guess that might explain why someone who really dislikes SSC might add a lot
of short, repetitive comments in this thread :|

------
mirimir
I'm struck by this in TFA:

> In effect, Scott was trying to erect a firewall between his Internet persona
> and his personal and professional identities, and was relying on the entire
> world’s goodwill not to breach that firewall.

And it obviously _did_ matter to him, because he took his blog down over the
coming NYT article.

So what I wonder is why he didn't erect a far more effective firewall, one
that didn't rely on goodwill. If he was writing pseudonymously, I don't get
how his blog's credibility would rely on his true identity. But perhaps it
did, in a subtle way.

~~~
tptacek
I don't believe it's reasonable to claim that any "firewall" existed. There
are very basic things you can do to protect your identity, especially if you
blogged at length and with a fair amount of notoriety under your real name,
that Scott Alexander didn't do. I'm genuinely confused as to how he could in
good faith claim his identity to have been a secret.

You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how
it works.

~~~
odessacubbage
>You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how
it works.

would you say the same of kendric lamar or mf doom? both fail the google test
and yet the nytimes respected their pseudonyms.

~~~
errantspark
Uhh, kinda off topic but you've got a great username and you mentioned two of
my favorite artists to make a point. Feel free to email me if you wanna be
friends. :3

------
maybel_syrup
"In his takedown notice, Scott writes that it’s considered vitally important
in psychiatry for patients to know almost nothing about their doctors, beyond
their names and their areas of expertise."

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.

~~~
zozbot234
> I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist",
> because this reason is bunk

It's bunk to call Scott's concerns bunk. You may think that he ought to self-
disclose, but that's simply not his call: he has a job as a psychiatrist and
has to stick to what his employers require of him if he wants to keep working
in the field, and support his patients.

~~~
maybel_syrup
I didn't say he ought to; I said that if he were to self-disclose, there'd be
little damage that could occur to his effectiveness as a clinician, contrary
to what he claimed.

Further, to cite that as his _first_ reason for wanting to remain pseudonymous
is odd, because it's flimsy for the reasons I cited. His second reason (that
he's gotten death threats) is much more compelling, and to me is all he needs
to make a good argument here. Why sully it with things like this?

------
Y_Y
Maybe this is what MacArthur should give to geniuses instead of cash.

------
voidhorse
I'm sorry, but if I may be frank, I feel ascriptions like "genius" to be
massively overblown in this context, masturbatory, and nothing more than the
signal of how inflated egos may become once they gain modest degrees of
influence.

Is it possible epoch defining ideas are lying around on a blog somewhere,
sure, but it's highly unlikely. In order to become an intellectual legend, you
need to have ideas with _reach_ stoking the ire of a few thousand redditors
and having even a few million views on posts in 2020 is not a significant
amount of reach to shape zeitgeists. Yes, sad but true, those who are going
through the traditional channels and publishing institutions still have the
most impact on the world (it's easy to feel like your contributions and small
internet following is a more significant player in shaping the future than it
really is). While it's quite possible/likely the ideas on this blog _will_ be
immensely important and thoroughly studied _in a field of specialization_ , I
will wager they will have no effect on the overall social field. I'd argue
pseudonymity is actually harmful in a community of specialists, since it
blocks the proper exchange and verification of results and creates opportunity
for plagarization.

There is a distinction between internet/niche community "cancellation" and
"cancellation" in the real world. In my personal estimation, everyone's fear
of "cancel culture" is grossly exaggerated when it comes to the way it
operates in the real world. Typically, most of the notable "cancel" incidents
are not the result of some "leftists" ruining someone's career over indelicate
statements, they stem rather from direct allegations of criminal behavior;
sexual assault, abuse of power for personal gain, clear-cut hate crimes, etc.
Sure, there may be small communities more susceptible to flimsy, purely
speech-based "cancellations" but that is a failure of the community in
question to uphold ideals of open discussion (assuming the speech isn't in
fact harmful); if you think "cancel culture" is an unstoppable global
phenomenon that can ruin anyone's life in a moment's notice you only need look
at the current US president to assure yourself otherwise.

Finally, I'd like to say that the vast majority of people that continue to
cling to some antiquated enlightenment ideal of reason, in which reason is
some pure, untrammeled, untainted instrument that will unite us all and lead
us to the promised land, only prove themselves ignorant of all of post-WWII
philosophy. WWII blew gaping holes in the entire enlightenment enterprise and
philosophers from all sides (even legendary logicians such as Quine, Russell,
and Wittgenstein) all make some fundamental appeal to relativity in their
work, and clearly state there are problems that logical reasoning (by
extension strictly economic/utilitarian reasoning, by extension purely
technological reasoning) cannot solve (or in the case of Wittgenstein, cannot
even express).

Many people have switched to using so-called "reason" as a defense mechanism
for promulgating ideas they know would bring them flak were it not for the
guise of "objectivity" or the shield of (usually suspect) statistics (another
thing philsopshers have throughly dismantled, by the way, as early as the
1800s with Neitzsche and more recently in the philosophy of science).

~~~
anonymoushn
The tiny number of people who read The End of History seems unimportant
compared to the founding of neoconservativism causing the US to invade Iraq
and Afghanistan. Though the impact of neoreaction is probably smaller (that
is, it hasn't literally killed 500,000 people), I don't think you could get a
good estimate of that impact by finding out how many people read the blog that
founded the ideology.

Maybe the tech workers you read who are afraid of being cancelled are afraid
of being cancelled because tech companies have shown they are totally willing
to end people's careers over fairly mundane speech.

------
KirinDave
What's confusing about all this is that Scott Alexander [redacted, see 0]
doesn't seem to be in _any_ way "pseudonymous." A non-profiled Google search
autocompletes this, and then links to numerous fan-driven Reddit threads
including talk about podcasts and authors.[1]

Given that his name was already out there to the point where it's trivially
discoverable, did he even _have_ pseudonymous status to begin with? I still
have to work to recover Dril's name, and I confess I never heard Infosec
Taylor Swift's name. But I actually had this name in the back of my head for
years now. If an NYT reported had asked me to name him, I probably could have
in a heartbeat.

A lot is being said about the transgression of the press here, but if you've
got a fan-run reddit where they're using your full name publicly, maybe it's
somewhat futile to delete your blog and blame the NYT no matter how much your
purported genius entitles you.

I am definitely one of those spooky antifa types that folks here label with
derision as the "ctrl-left". If anyone wanted to somehow threaten his safety,
they're a google search away. That places him closer to discoverability for
most folks than any NYT article which will squat behind a paywall.

Far more likely is that few have bothered Scott or substantially transgressed
his safety because he's actually a very small niche blogger with a loyal but
admittedly small fan community.

I admit I'm a famously uncharitable audience for bloggers, but I'm much more
inclined to think that this entire series of events is either a fit of pique
that blew up in Scott's face, or a deliberate attempt to create a controversy
to gain publicity.

[0]: I've been informed that as there is a central controversy over if this
man is in fact anonymous, the mods are going to err on the side of caution,
and so I've re-presented this post with the item redacted even though it turns
out all it took to find the name was to let google autocomplete the name,
populated from content 7 years old.

[1]: I've screenshotted what _I_ see when I use an incog to search for him on
this tweet: [redacted], it turns out even THIS is too much of a concession to
reality. My twitter account has the screenshot if you'd like to see it. But it
consists of typing "scott alexander"

~~~
scarmig
Yeah, it's too cute by half to pretend you're working to respect his
pseudonymity and then link a tweet you sent out with his real name attached.

That's also clearly not a clean incognito search, as it has your previous
search with his name included.

~~~
KirinDave
Uh, I regret to inform you that I found the name from the autocomplete and
then hit tab. It was not on the tip of my tongue and you can easily reproduce
the experiment if you don't believe me.

~~~
scarmig
My reproduced experiment:

[https://imgur.com/a/Ppj57cP](https://imgur.com/a/Ppj57cP)

Note that there's no reference to his real name.

The only reference to his real name in your screenshot is the first entry,
which is purple and removable because it is coming from your browser's session
identity history. If this was in fact in an incognito tab, it's likely you had
one or more incognito windows simultaneously open somewhere else where you had
searched for him, which carried over into your new tab.

~~~
danharaj
[https://imgur.com/a/NwwBiIo](https://imgur.com/a/NwwBiIo)

I did this on a computer I don't usually use in an incognito tab.

~~~
scarmig
Interesting. I suspect that the different results Google gives different
people (even in incognito mode) are driving a lot of the divergence and even
rancor between the two points of view.

~~~
KirinDave
I have no privileged information except one: my father dropped by and I could
reproduce the last name appearing on his non-incognito account.

He is not "the target audience" for this sort of thing.

------
throwaway4666
>In a year of historic ironies, here’s another one: that it was the decent,
reasonable, and well-meaning Cade Metz, rather than any of the SneerClubbers

Okay so what's with the obsession with a niche subreddit whose sole purpose is
to dunk on rationalists/SSCers who talk too often about the IQ of black
people. I mean it's not like Aaronson is himself an HBD blogger. I kind of
like Aaronson but his online anxiety is really getting the better of his
judgement.

~~~
waterhouse
To treat this in good faith, I point to here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-
culture-war-thread/)

"A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War
thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers."
That is SneerClub.

"Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people
made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an
opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew
my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.

Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being
friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody
posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.

One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and
tried to get me fired.

... I had a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t even that bad a nervous breakdown. I
was able to keep working through it. I just sort of broke off all human
contact for a couple of weeks and stayed in my room freaking out instead.

... The first few [subreddit mods] I approached were positive; some had
similar experiences to mine; one admitted that even though he personally was
not involved with the CW thread and only dealt with other parts of the
subreddit, he taught at a college and felt like his job would not be safe so
long as the subreddit and CW thread were affiliated. Apparently the problem
was bigger than just me, and other people had been dealing with it in
silence."

~~~
tptacek
It is odd seeing someone who blogged under their real name, who released one
of their best-known pieces of public writing under their real name, talk as if
their real name was somehow discovered through sleuthing. I want to be careful
how I respond to this but, let's just say, the amount of Google elaboration
required to penetrate the veil of protective secrecy this person has created
for themselves is not... uh... significant.

~~~
mundo
You're looking at the wrong side of the veil. Yes, it's trivial to find his
real name if you know of his blog, but it's not easy to find his blog by
searching his real name.

~~~
tptacek
No, it's straightforwardly evident from a search of his real name. And, again:
one of his best-known standalone pieces was originally published under that
name.

~~~
neonate
What piece was that? Just curious as I have no idea.

~~~
jefftk
I'm not sure which one tptacek was thinking of, but
[https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/efficient-
charity...](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/efficient-charity-do-
unto-others/) (a cross-post, which now says "Scott Alexander") comes to mind
for me.

~~~
tptacek
Not that one. I'm uncomfortable sharing, though honestly I would have a hard
time articulating why, since my whole point is: this guy's identity is not a
secret.

