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.
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.
A few minutes? Google literally suggests it as an autocomplete for me.
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.
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 agree though, it’s kind of a silly thing to put much concern into. I’m done worrying about it as well lol.
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.
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.)
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?