Last I checked, SSC was the first hit on google when searching for his real name. That would seem to make it rather pointless to believe in the ability of keeping that content hidden from his patients.
I’m also not entirely certain it isn’t in the public’s interest to allow patients to read their therapist’s writing. Yes, they shouldn’t be privy to the details of their love life and favorite spot to go skinny dipping. But Scott never disclosed much personal information anyway.
I think rather fondly of his writing. But it should be uncontroversial that some of it is, well, controversial. Even if I don’t agree with his critics, I wouldn’t consider it entirely unreasonable to disagree with him on some points. And because so much of it touches on hot-button issues, some of them might very well decide not to share their most private thoughts with him, and could feel betrayed when learning about it only after the fact.
It’s also somewhat strange to see a community (his, and here as well in previous posts) complain about unnamed sources any time the news media is discussed, but getting outraged when one publication actually makes it policy to use real names more often.
There is a case for anonymity on the internet, and even for others to respect that wish. But at some point, when you start having the sort of cultural influence that Scott has, and your efforts of hiding your name were rather half-hearted to begin with, it’s nobody’s job to play pretend on your behalf.
It is definitely in patients’ and Scott’s interest to maintain anonymity.
There is a tradition in therapy going back to Freud that the therapist should be a blank slate to the patient(there’s a technical term for this which I can’t recall..)
I agree that SSC being separate from his psychiatry is pretty important. I like SSC, and at the same time I would find it difficult to go to therapy knowing Scott is behind SSC. It would cause me to fixate on obsessional traits in myself, knowing that he is predisposed to the same thing.
That's not a very solid foundation. Pretty much everything from Freud has since been reconsidered.
My experience with therapists is that I want a certain connection, and I've been rather unsatisfied with most I've seen (though my sample size is only 4). It's not optimal to have to keep rolling the dice to try and find someone I'm comfortable opening up to, and of course both the situation where I'd need to find a new therapist and the US healthcare system (& attitude to mental health) do not make it any easier.
Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on the debates around the validity and usefulness of the DSM? Do they think overdiagnosis and/or underdiagnosis are problems? (It is possible to believe both are a problem simultaneously – I have heard some professionals express the opinion that ASD is overdiagnosed in males yet simultaneously underdiagnosed in females.) Are antidepressants overprescribed? Do antipsychotics cause brain atrophy?
For most professionals, however, it is quite hard to work this out, at least without asking them in person. (For a minority, who are involved in research/etc, one can look at their publications.)
So I'd actually encourage more mental health professionals to blog (or otherwise engage with the public) with their opinions on their field of professional expertise.
(SSC mostly isn't doing that, since Scott mostly comments on general topics, and only posts something on his profession every now and again. I often find what Scott has to say on general topics interesting, but I doubt I'd find what J. Random Psychiatrist or J. Random Psychologist has to say on general topics anywhere near as interesting.)
> Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on the debates around the validity and usefulness of the DSM?
That's... risky. There are accreditation boards and professional orgs for a reason, and if they're pushing questionable science or standards they still control what the requirements are.
Debating it behind closed doors with your peers is one thing, but it's another to air dirty laundry to the public. A professional puts out their doubts about [X] to the general public and then it gets picked up by cranks, "official doctor says [X] is bullshit, and that alternative [Y] might hold promise." And then people start buying healing crystals or Jordan Peterson or something.
Has that actually happened to anyone? I can think of a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who have made contributions to the public debates relevant to their profession, and I've never heard of anyone being formally disciplined for expressing doubt about the science behind the DSM-5, or expressing concern about underdiagnosis/overdiagnosis, underprescribing/overprescribing, etc. (See for example CEP-UK [1] and the Critical Psychiatry Network [2] – many of the opinions of their members are rather unpopular with their peers, yet their members are still allowed to practice.)
If some crank misuses a professional's comments to justify their crank views, that's not the professional's fault, and I've never heard of a professional being disciplined for that.
I am 100% for respecting Scott's wish for anonymity and in general there seems to be a strong norm of not giving to much personal information to patients in the psychiatrist and therapist communities.
But Scott doesn't exactly try to be a blank slate to patients, given that he mentions details like his time in Japan and his "struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder" in his public profile as a psychiatrist, which seems to be aimed at patients (there's a big button for booking an appointment).
Of course, there is a difference between making a few superficial details like this available to your patients or millions of words of your essays.
On the other hand, perhaps his patients should be aware about the fact that their psychiatrist is divulging what they probably thought of as their private information to the entire internet.
I disagree. I feel like that's up for the patient to decide. If I am going to tell my deepest secrets to someone I'd rather there not even be the faintest idea that details would be written about, even in very general ways.
I specifically had to sign a consent form before starting therapy, with exactly how my data would be handled and what could or could not be done with it. I think that is SOP in the field.
In the US, afaik, there is no such requirement, and publishing anonymized stories in pyschiatric journals is common practice, without any sort of consent.
Surely there is a difference between a professional journal with standards and peer review, and a public blog with a comments section that frequently features Steven Pinker and discussions about racial effects on IQ.
Sorry, I got my online Steves confused and meant Steve Sailer, not Pinker. For one, there aren't any professional journals for which Steve Sailer's ideas about race, IQ or the Holocaust would meet their standards. Second, doctors often get consent for case studies on their patients, and only give pertinent details like sex, age, or complicating medical conditions if absolutely necessary. Case studies are meant for professionals to peruse in an effort to better advance the field they practice in.
A personal blog where a psychiatrist divulges his patients' sexualities and relationship issues to pontificate about polyamorism with his laymen blog readers, including Steve Sailer, is not the same thing as a case study in a professional journal.
I agree that they are not the same. But I don't really understand why it is different in a way that changes its moral character. Steve Sailer can read psychiatry journals if he wants to. As long as the stories are well anonymized, I don't really see much difference.
It costs the NYC nothing to respect his efforts at pseudo-anonymity, as halfhearted as they were. The cause of journalism is not advanced in the slightest by publishing the real name.
The problem with "unnamed sources" is there's no fixed point to compare against -- the unnamed source loses nothing by lying or making things up. Scott has a huge amount of reputation to lose if he lies, even if it doesn't directly tie back to his real-life persona. It would be a REALLY long con to blog for a decade to build a reputation, just to be a disreputable unnamed source in an article.
Google results are very different for different people. SSC is not returned at all when I search for his real name; a result many others have reported in the ongoing discussion about SSC on Hacker News.
I'm not sure what that means for your conclusion, but I think you may be overestimating how closely connected SSC and his real name are on average.
Do you already know his real name in order to search it on Google?
If you search for "Scott Alexander" then, yes, Slate Star Codex comes up. But that's not the dots he's trying to avoid being connected. He doesn't share his last name on SSC, and his patients probably don't know his middle name.
Depending on your search engine of choice, given just his first and last name, you will discover either his middle name or his blog on the first or second page of results. If a patient wanted to look him up online, it wouldn't take much, and if a person familiar with his blog wanted to find his real name, it also wouldn't take much. I did it just now in a few minutes of Googling.
Now, regardless of all that, it still seems like it would be a nice thing to do for news media to respect his wishes. But it also seems like a bit much to say that publishing his name would be all that significant of a change to his level of anonymity.
It's still a difference though if a patient searching for his real name to check if he's properly licenced etc. gets SSC as their first search result or not.
Anyone selling stuff online knows that if it takes "a few minutes of googling" to find you, you might as well not exist; whether you're #1 or #2 on the search results can already have a huge impact on your bottom line and the how many people even advance to the second page of results?
Google also has "related searches" at the bottom of the results page. It works both ways. Searching First Middle, the related searches return First Middle Last. Searching First Last still for the most part accomplishes what he wants, not bringing up a lot about his online life, however the related searches hint at it, by showing First Last Middle, and First Last 'Blog'.
I have no particular interest in SSC or this controversy around it, so I have no search history around him. I just tried this and the search suggestion drop-down totally had his full name listed. That sucks.
The cats been out of the bag for a long, long time.
I mean, look, if he had already had anonymity, I would absolutely be considerably more understanding of the outrage behind this, but let’s be honest, his name has been connected to ssc (simple google search levels of easy) for a long time.
That fact has really made me question the motives behind why he chose this particular hill to die on.
The issue was debated to death when the initial story flared up, but the strongest counter-point I saw was this:
Publication of his name in a NYT feature would have made a huge difference to the awareness level of his identity, vs just being able to be sniffed out by determined online sleuths, and would have dramatically altered his identifiability with respect to his clients.
I can see it both ways and don't care to argue the topic any further, but this position deserves to be put.
I think it’s a bit dishonest for us to imply it would have taken a determined online sleuth — unless we now consider anyone who would have simply googled a name to be a determined sleuth.
I agree though, it’s kind of a silly thing to put much concern into. I’m done worrying about it as well lol.
In the original discussions, people were reporting different degrees of ease of finding his name via Google. Some said it came up in autocomplete on Google when you started typing his name, whereas others didn't get this, including myself. Perhaps it was influenced by region, as I'm outside the U.S.
Of course it became a whole lot easier to identify him soon after he took down his blog, as it suddenly became a much bigger discussion topic online.
But being written about in the NYT still takes it to a whole new level. Without that, it's just something that nerds like us talk about on obscure discussion forums like this. When it's in a feature article in the NYT, it becomes something ordinary people talk about at dinners and cocktail parties.
I think these things have become truer since the NYT debacle, due to people spamming his real name in lots of public places. Among many other examples, somebody set up a linkedin profile under his real name, listing his occupation as "author of slatestarcodex blog".
There was a campaign on Twitter recently, people encouraging each other to post Scott Alexander's full name, because "if all the hundreds of people who know his real last name just started saying it we could put an end to this ridiculous farce".
Translation: if enough people join this doxing campaign, it will be difficul to report our accounts for violating Twitter terms of service.
The usual suspects have joined, including David Gerard from RationalWiki. (Not linking the tweet here, because it contains the dox.)
I think you are mistaking his pseudonym "Scott Alexander" for his real name. These are his first and middle names. His desire is to keep his full legal name from being associated with the blog. His last name has occasionally been published, but I don't think it's visible here in the comments.
I’m also not entirely certain it isn’t in the public’s interest to allow patients to read their therapist’s writing. Yes, they shouldn’t be privy to the details of their love life and favorite spot to go skinny dipping. But Scott never disclosed much personal information anyway.
I think rather fondly of his writing. But it should be uncontroversial that some of it is, well, controversial. Even if I don’t agree with his critics, I wouldn’t consider it entirely unreasonable to disagree with him on some points. And because so much of it touches on hot-button issues, some of them might very well decide not to share their most private thoughts with him, and could feel betrayed when learning about it only after the fact.
It’s also somewhat strange to see a community (his, and here as well in previous posts) complain about unnamed sources any time the news media is discussed, but getting outraged when one publication actually makes it policy to use real names more often.
There is a case for anonymity on the internet, and even for others to respect that wish. But at some point, when you start having the sort of cultural influence that Scott has, and your efforts of hiding your name were rather half-hearted to begin with, it’s nobody’s job to play pretend on your behalf.