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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The firewall wasn't burner phones and foreign VPNs, it was Scott emailing people who use his real name to respond to his blogging, and asking them not to do that. And it has worked pretty well up til now - when I search his real name I see nothing about SSC in the first 50 google results.

It's on the first page of Google search results for me. I won't relate the query --- that seems out of bounds --- but, uh, it's a pretty obvious one.

If it was 50 pages back, I'd agree with you. I'm saying what I'm saying because that is simply not the case. And, again: he was a public, vocal part of the rationalist blogosphere (I think I'm using those words right?) under his real name, for some time.

The point is, if one of his patients casually googles him, they find stuff about his job and not his blog. That you can find his blog is neither here nor there (and the first ten comments to that effect probably covered it).

No, that's not true either. Go search his real name: you'll probably see links back to his writing on the first page, the way I do.

I did, obviously. You're either including his middle name (not common when googling your doctor), or counting a Robin Hanson essay that links to Scott's old deleted blog as "his writings", which is not reasonable since it would require considerable further delving to get from there to SSC. Or google is serving us different results for some reason.

I do not. Google search results, I find, are extremely inconsistent.

Extremely tailored to each person, not inconsistent, I think

It really depends on your Google history and demographics the algos slot you into.

For example, whenever I do a search in kanji, Taiwanese sites show up, so I migrated to DuckDuckGo instead which shows up both Chinese (and Taiwanese) and Japanese sites, the latter of which is I want.

That's what I meant, yeah.

My experience is Google tailors results aggressively, and does so using a wide number of fingerprinting techniques. I've demonstrated to my own satisfaction that using an incognito window will not give you "clean" or "average" results.

>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.

I don't even understand the question. Both Kendrick Lamar and MF Doom have their real names in the first sentences of their Wikipedia pages. The NYT has reported things in at least Duckworth's name; I didn't bother looking hard for Dumile's. Is your question "would I be upset if the NYT reported MF Doom's real name, Daniel Dumile"? No, I would not be.

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

There’s a pretty big gradient between “in a national news article with his name” and “only posts on his blog using tor, from a coffee shop, on a burner device, under a pseudonym, with no personal details revealed” (or whatever constitutes a “firewall”).

At this point, casual observers do not know Scott’s identity. With a few hours of time most people on HN could probably figure it out, but in that same amount of time they’d also probably calm down if they were interested in sending death threats.

No. You've comically overestimated the amount of effort required. I understand why: the way he wrote his announcement, you'd think it'd be tricky. I'd say more, but I'll respect the norm --- you may have to take my word for it --- and just say: people I've talked to have been shocked to discover how easy it was to find out. No firewall existed here at all.

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