I've always been very skeptical of Scott "Alexander" after he and his supporters tricked half of reddit into harassing some journalists for "doxxing" him when his identity was public knowledge seemingly because he just really didn't like the takes presented by the journalists. The way he refers to them like it was a hit piece targeting him reeked of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking.
The details are important here. His identity was "public knowledge" in the sense that regular readers of his blog could sometimes find links to his previous blog, and somewhere on that previous blog he mentioned his name. So many of his long-term readers knew.
But in the opposite direction -- if all you knew was Scott's full name, and you did a Google search -- there was no connection to the blog. You could find his professional web pages, and that was it.
What the NYT journalists threatened was to make a #1 search result for his full name that would expose his private life and his pseudonymous blog to all potential patients trying to find out some information about their doctor. Which would practically cost him his job.
And, ultimately, Scott did lose his job. The fact that writing on Substack turned out to be more profitable than his former job was a lucky coincidence.
If the stakes were so high he shouldn't have been so careless with using his real name. As a professional psychiatrist it is 100% on him to make sure these situations aren't a possibility and if that isn't possible- it's really not that big of a deal to simply not blog about your deeply unrestrained and potentially offensive opinions about [insert culture war here].
This is not the fault of the nytimes and given the success of his blog, it absolutely would have happened eventually. It is frankly irresponsible on his part. He chose that profession and with it comes certain sacrifices made for the wellbeing of his patients.
Further he went on crazy rants about how the article was a hit piece which is deeply dramatic and maybe even a little egotistical. He's not nearly as important as he thinks - and the nytimes piece covered him in a fairly neutral way from my perspective.
You should read it if you haven't. It's an enlightening piece about the burgeoning semi-conservative movement masquerading as pseudo liberalism amongst so called thought leaders in silicon valley and tech more generally.
Curious to read these. Got a source?
I've always been very skeptical of Scott "Alexander" after he and his supporters tricked half of reddit into harassing some journalists for "doxxing" him when his identity was public knowledge seemingly because he just really didn't like the takes presented by the journalists. The way he refers to them like it was a hit piece targeting him reeked of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking.
edit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...