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Comment by throwaway4666 | Hacker News Reader

Okay so you're saying the NYT is silencing Scott by threatening to publish a hit piece about his early warning about covid? And if he didn't post that, his relationship with his patients wouldn't have been jeopardized by having his real name associated to his personal blog and he'd have kept it up? I'm not trying to strawman here, I'm genuinely attempting to connect the dots.

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What I got from it is that any sort of publicity at this scale is potentially harmful to his position as a psychiatrist and person. Not necessarily that the things he said were particularly right, wrong, or controversial. And even though early warnings about COVID may not seem particularly controversial, the internet attracts and fosters all sorts of conspiracy theorists and fantastic ideas. Scott also mentions himself that he's had death threats, which adds to the risk of having his name associated with the blog.

Maybe I'm missing some nuance to this line of questioning since I'm skimming too quickly for my own good...

But my read is that Scott is simply opposing the NYT's absolute policy of posting his real name in their article. His decision to delete the blog is because there were other non-coronavirus posts which he feared could lead to all kinds of IRL reprisals if his real name were to be known publicly.

Hence the repetition of "No doxing random bloggers for clicks". He seemed to be willing to bring everything back if that policy changes, and went so far as to ask people to mail the editor and be polite and specific about it.

Anyhow, apologies if I'm just restating the obvious here.

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