It's a pretty interesting article if you know how to read around the NYTimes's rhetoric.
"""The issue, it was clear to me, was that I told him I could not guarantee him the anonymity he’d been writing with. In fact, his real name was easy to find because people had shared it online for years and he had used it on a piece he’d written for a scientific journal. I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind."""
Reading the response, I don't think this is condeming Metz to live in infamy.
(I think this is a bit of a distraction from the main thread, but the main issue there was always de-anonymization in the other direction: that patients might Google "Scott Siskind" and find his blog, which might render it difficult to maintain the correct kind of relationship with him as their psychiatrist. He's careful to not accept any readers of his blog as patients.)
Well, he signed up for exactly that outcome with full knowledge it could happen.
Outing a psychiatrist's internet ramblings to his patients is not high on my list of journalistic crimes.
The same can be said for any other instance of deanonymization, and yet we do not thereby (by default) absolve everyone who deanonymizes someone else against their will. Was Scott perfectly careful? No. Was this something that harmed him in straightforward and predictable ways, and done against his wishes? Yes. Was there a trade-off that made it worth it? Not a question that Cade Metz has seen fit to answer publicly.
I guess Metz would have a lot of sympathy for someone drawing the heat of the entire internet, and even powerful VCs, by doing something that many people think is destructive "on principle".
