It's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.
That part of things is what really made this entire argument all apart of me.
There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number.
Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.
Take a moment and apply some common sense to your math. Do you really think there are 5 psychiatrists in the country named Scott? That's off by multiple orders of magnitude.
It's his first and middle name. At least that's what he said in the post about shutting down the blog.
It's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.
Yes, but a patient who googled his real name would not find his blog. That was the point.
That part of things is what really made this entire argument all apart of me.
There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number.
Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.
> Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott.
Seems to be more like one in 425 per SSA.
Take a moment and apply some common sense to your math. Do you really think there are 5 psychiatrists in the country named Scott? That's off by multiple orders of magnitude.
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It is his real name, and he also used his real surname in early blog posts.
It is not his real name. Once he upended his life, he revealed his real name here[1]. It is not Scott Alexander.
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive
Scott Alexander are his first and middle names, and Siskind his last name, or that's what I've understood.
His pre-SSC blogging was, and he’d link those posts directly from time to time.