Sigh. I think this article is holding Scott, and a core constituency of posters and meet up people, guilty by association with every rando on the internet, and also about half of the celebrities in the Bay area.
"War against the media" strikes me as ridiculous hyperbole in this context. I have met some of these people in real life, and none of them expressed that attitude to me, nor any kind of utopian superiority. It seemed like they were just trying to live morally considered lives and improve themselves a little at a time if they could -- and maybe do a little networking.
I think if Scott knew that his blog would get so big it would screw up his career and living arrangements, he probably wouldn't have published it in the first place. That might have been a lapse of judgment, but begging the NYT not to make him mainstream famous is hardly war on the media.
>I think this article is holding Scott, and a core constituency of posters and meet up people, guilty by association with every rando on the internet, and also about half of the celebrities in the Bay area.
Tying Scott and Silicon Valley together is another case where I simply do not understand the way reporters/journos draw cultural ties, boundaries, allegiances, and opposition.
It's like looking at twitter to form an opinion about the market for a product instead of doing market research. Voiced opinions from the type of people to voice their opinions on twitter are insanely different than the purchase habits of the population. But every day some journo is acting like Twitter is a useful cultural barometer.
My (not too confident) assessment is that Scott and whatever amalgamation of "tech" / "the internet" they're lumping in with him are just people that look like the pre-iPhone internet era: online often, and willing to venture into open communication for the sake of the ideas and discussion. That happens to weigh toward computery jobs, where reading (and sometimes writing) online resources are large part of the job and competitors openly collaborate online.
The "War against the media" is outlined towards the end of the article. When Bay area "thought-leaders" are calling for the blacklisting of reporters and replacing traditional media as a whole, "war" doesn't sound like hyperbole to me.
AIUI, they're calling for individual non-cooperation with unethical reporters. There may be a broader "war" between SV and elite media, but it's not clear that the SSC affair has much to do with it beyond possibly being a case of elite media behaving unethically, and (quite uniquely, all things considered) being held accountable for that.
No, there's a pretty clear call for SSC readers to just not work with anyone from the NYT in future. It's not about individual journalists - at any rate Cade Metz doesn't have a bad reputation and appears to believe his actions are constrained by corporate policy, rather than being his own choice.
I myself have been the (cooperative) subject of a bio piece that landed on the front page of the international edition of the NYT in the past, and notified them that if they go ahead and wreck SSC then I won't work with them again on stories. By myself this is unlikely to have much impact: yes, I've been more than a reader for them but also a story, on the other hand, that only happened once. I'm not appearing in the NYT every week.
The NYT can fix this very easily; promise Alexander their story won't include details about his real life. Then he'll bring back his blog, the NYT will get their story, and everyone is fine.
Obviously the New Yorker managed this feat of journalistic integrity, so none of the NYT's excuses for why they "can't" do it add up. I feel they've led directly to the destruction of a highly valuable resource for no reason at all, it's not a hard decision to say "no" if and when their journalists come calling again.
True. It's peculiar how a nuanced presentation of Scott's blog and the values of rationalist culture are not sufficient, and a crude description of Scott's purity test results is offered to readers, likely so Lewis-Kraus can avoid worry about being cancelled.
Do readers of the New Yorker really need such blatant reassurance that Scott is not a Trump supporter, and that he was actually a vocal opponent of Trump and strategic supporter of HRC?
The New Yorker can't insulate itself from the many illiberal negatives of cancel culture when it stoops to this level.
Perhaps, but can we honestly believe that if Lewis-Kraus had omitted the extra verbose reassurances that Scott isn't a Trump supporter and within hours of the article's publication there were calls for the New Yorker to fire him, that the New Yorker's editors would defend the more nuanced treatment?
Seemingly, Lewis-Kraus does not believe this. I wonder if the extra verbiage was his own decision or the result of editorial feedback.
I guess you can believe whatever you want, but it's equally possible that the author is trying to (accurately) emphasize to his readership that Scott Alexander isn't a member of the alt-right/scientific racism segment of the self-proclaimed Rationalist community.
Yes, and I hope that is the correct explanation. But I think we should be wary of the tremendous pressure that publications face to lean away from nuance and anything that requires careful reading and to rely on broad and pat generalizations.
In my view, the New Yorker is an incredible publication that typically features writing that is superb and also well edited (if edited at all). So that's why this one stood out.
Maybe the issue is that so many people are quick to label anything that sounds like rationalism as alt-right.
I read the thing James Damore wrote and the problem was not the content he claimed was factual, it was the tone. He could have made the same point without sounding like he was on a "side" in an ongoing battle.
The elderly Richard Dawkins gets into political sides taking, as does Sam Harris. Both do little to hide their islamophobia. This appeals to those who were looking for scientific justifications of their beliefs, but also alienates anyone who wanted dispassionate science.
> Maybe the issue is that so many people are quick to label anything that sounds like rationalism as alt-right.
That is an issue, but I'll hope it's uncontroversial to point out that people like, say Curtis Yarvin, who are closely associated with both the alt-right and rationalist movements. There is in fact some significant overlap between those communities.
I'm not all that familiar with Yarvin. Could you contextualize how he fits into the broader rationalist movement? I want to understand how someone with such strongly authoritarian beliefs finds common ground with rationalists.
He doesn't, when you really get into it. But the rationalist movement is generally willing to engage neutrally with new and interesting ideas, and there's no reason why neo-reaction would be an exception.
More: of course it never occurs to the author that NYT readers could include a similar number of randos who might just have taken enough prior offense to run off and be "unfriendly" to Scott. Physically in his face.
1) Scott Alexander wanted more attention, and he realized that deleting his site and blaming the NYT for it would garner dramatically more attention, creating opportunities that he wanted. He recognized that he could become a martyr to a certain group, and use that for future gains.
2) Scott Alexander is an absolute moron who did not foresee the Streisand Effect that he was going to cause.
I personally do not think he is a moron. I think he is a manipulative sociopath who knew that people who agree with him on other matters would line up to create future opportunities for him if he pretended that his hand was forced.
It saddens me that so many "smart" people fall for such transparent nonsense. There was no lapse of judgment. He is just a selfish sociopath. Nothing more.
Scott is extremely popular in the rationalist community (second only to EY and possibly RH), and has a sizeable following outside of it. He doesn't need to "pretend[] that his hand was forced" to get any sort of "future opportunities" he might want; he just needs to ask. This whole kerfuffle doesn't exactly help him, even from that POV.
He's had mental breakdowns over harassment tangential to the site's function (culture war debates). His relative degree of anonymity and obscurity shields him from the worst of the internet. He may write rationalist essays but he's human.
I understand that you're celebrating his loss, but that's just not a charitable read. He provided one the last bastions of nuance on the internet.
I'm surprised you don't consider other possibilities, like that he was genuinely concerned about his real name being made known, for the reasons he stated. You don't address these.
I'm also surprised that you feel able to diagnose someone you presumably don't know as a sociopath. This seem like hyperbole.
Honestly, I don't think this post is up to YC standards.
Thanks for the kind words. I stopped using reddit some time ago but good to know there are still good people there like you working to uphold standards. I am on keybase and I'm always happy to chat with fellow reasoners: keybase.io/memexy.
I dislike getting swept up in groups and that's what happened to me on reddit and other social media sites so now I make sure to deliberately talk with individuals without worrying about performing in front of a group.
I agree with you. His actions paint a very dark picture and I also don't understand why people are defending him.
It's like you said, he's either smart enough to know what he's doing, in which case his actions should be scrutinized as such, or he has no clue what he's doing and he should be called a "moron" and left to his own devices. It can't be both at the same time. He can't be a moron and a genius that was forced to do something he didn't want to do.
Article fails to defend the NYT in any substantive way, and the writer makes obvious their biases with statements like:
S.S.C. supporters on Twitter were quick to identify some of the Times’ recent concessions to pseudonymous quotation—Virgil Texas, a co-host of the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” was mentioned, as were Banksy and a member of ISIS—as if these supposed inconsistencies were dispositive proof of the paper’s secret agenda, rather than an ad-hoc and perhaps clumsy application of a flexible policy
Obviously this isn't and either/or. The lumping together of all SSC supporters is another cheap rhetorical trick. In any case, no matter which of these views you hold, the examples show the policy could accommodate Scott's request for pseudonymity.
Note too the lack of any real investigation or original reporting here; the author hasn't bother to talk to Metz?
Additionally, it seems difficult to fathom that a professional journalist of Metz’s experience and standing would assure a subject, especially at the beginning of a process, that he planned to write a “mostly positive” story; although there often seems to be some confusion about this matter in Silicon Valley, journalism and public relations are distinct enterprises.
This is just silly. How about you ask Metz? The cheap shot at all of Silicon Valley tips the hand too.
This article is just more propaganda in the evolving war of words between SV and journalism.
> Note too the lack of any real investigation or original reporting here; the author hasn't bother to talk to Metz?
The article specifically mentions that Metz did not want to be quoted directly; most likely, the author did talk to him. (Though, it's even less clear to me why Scott would want to lie about what Metz said, so I'm definitely inclined to trust Scott's account of the matter.)
yea "Metz declined to comment on the record" is the author strongly hinting that he did talk to him off the record, and perhaps the author does have some idea what Metz' article would have ultimately been about. The author could have chosen to say "Metz declined to comment" which would have suggested this less.
> This article is just more propaganda in the evolving war of words between SV and journalism.
There's no war between SV and journalism, theres a feud between technologically and business savvy content companies and decaying content companies. Op-eds, moral posturing and long forms are not journalism. Journalism is a truthful representation of facts with analysis added for context to inform the readers, which the NYT and many other big names haven't delivered in decades.
I understand where you're coming from, and while I do understand the value of institutionalized "debating and dissenting" parties (I even believe political parties in a democracy should have declared mouthpieces), there's absolutely no way one can say with a straight face that that is the role mainstream media (and by mainstream I include Al-Jazeera and other "non-allied" traditional-style newspapers) paints itself as having. The term "Newspaper of record" doesn't scream "One voice between many".
>the writer makes obvious their biases with statements like
Your refutations of the writers points on the surface level is still too charitable. The New Yorker writer knows very damn well that Metz could have just been lying to Scott about the real name "policy" and lying about the purpose of the piece in an effort to make Alexander cooperative.
> For one thing, the S.S.C. code prioritizes semantic precision, but Metz—if Alexander’s account is to be taken at its word—had proposed not to “doxx” Alexander but to de-anonymize him.
Oh? From Wikipedia:
> Doxing, or doxxing (from "dox", abbreviation of documents), is the Internet-based practice of researching and publicly broadcasting private or identifying information (especially personally identifying information) about an individual or organization.
Yes, doxxing is normally associated with publishing addresses or phone numbers of people whose real names are already known, but de-anonymizing an anonymous blogger still sounds like a form of it.
It seems to me that the level of "privateness" of the information is relevant. Obviously just saying the real name of a famous person who goes by a pseudonym is not considered doxxing. This article claims that his full name "can be ascertained with minimal investigation," and Scott's own blog deletion announcement seemed to agree. Where precisely to draw that line is an area where we can reasonably disagree.
I looked up his name a few weeks ago after the blog was brought down. It took be a couple of days to find it and even then I only found it because I've seen him in person. People here are discussing tracking down his old blog through archive.org, but I didn't think to do that. So, 'minimal investigation' is a relative term.
type "scott alexander slate star codex" into google and his real name, plus several pictures of him are on the first page of the image results.
Alternatively, given that he's made his profession as well as place of residence known, looking for psychiatrists named scott alexander in that region also returns an official result.
If it took you days to figure that out I'm sorry to say you don't have a future as a private eye.
Results a few weeks ago may be nothing much like results now. (If it took a rando on the internet to point that out to you you don't have ... No let's leave that kind of garbage out, yeah?)
his real identity has been up on the internet for ages, years in fact. He even used to blog under his actual name on less wrong, and has been at public events that he himself organised. Not to mention that as a medical professional that info is obviously going to be online as long as he practises.
If your pseudonym is your actual first and middle name and you're relevant enough to be on the frontpage of google right now you're not being doxed, that's just public information at that point.
The guy republished his own blog posts under his real name in print and online publications. If it's a "secret", it's a very open secret, even from the author himself.
Have they? The real name of anyone posting anonymously or under a pseudonym has always been the gold standard of doxxing.
It's usually easy to go from full real name to business and private addresses, emails and phone numbers, especially when the person has a web presence, but also for anyone with a few bucks to spare who's happy to pay a data broker.
> The real name of anyone posting anonymously or under a pseudonym has always been the gold standard of doxxing.
The word "doxx" comes from "documents" because it originally didn't refer to just a name, but an actual document listing out lots of personal information. Everything you mentioned afterwards and more.
It's particularly easy for Scott as a psychiatrist. The top Google result for his full name is the address and phone number of the clinic at which he works, plus a bio with portrait (he looks exactly like I thought he would) for prospective patients.
He's not an anonymous blogger. He's forthcoming with personal information. He's published his full name multiple times (even on his own blog). It's not doxing.
> He's published his full name multiple times (even on his own blog).
I'm almost certain this is untrue. Are you possibly mistaking his pseudonym "Scott Alexander" for this full name? If not, and you understand that Scott and Alexander are his first and middle names, could you please provide a link to an example of where he has published his last name on his blog (or at this point, on the relevant archive.org page)?
Edit: I'm guessing from your comments further down the page that you understand the pseudonym aspect, and have a different conception of "publish" than I do. Do you perhaps mean that he linked or referred to a scientific paper on which he was listed by full name as author? If so, and if true, the strongest I'd probably phrase this is "revealed" rather than "published". If not, and if I'm wrong, and he has directly published his last name on his blog in a manner intended to make it publicly known, I'd like to know so I stop making false claims in the future.
I don't want to link directly to it because I think it's kind of an asshole thing to do, but you can find a last name on a bunch of posts on Raikoth.net in archive.org. He reposted most that without the reveal on SSC.
> I don't want to link directly to it because I think it's kind of an asshole thing to do, but you can find a last name on a bunch of posts on
Telling the internet where to find his last name in the comment above was "an asshole thing to do", IMO. Especially given the security concerns mentioned in this article, I just don't see any good coming from making it easier for people to find him in the physical world.
I mean, when someone asked for proof, that seems like a reasonable way to "prove" it.
There are vastly easier ways to find his last name, and even work address, than to (presumably) stumble across a Hacker News comment and then follow my oblique instructions.
OK, I presumed by "his blog" you were referring to Slate Star Codex. Yes, if one includes his earlier internet presences (which I don't think are mentioned in the linked article?) I'm willing to believe he has at times posted his full name, and that if you are willing to dig through some links, you can associate his current writings with those older writings. I think that at some point about a decade ago, as his medical career began, he consciously decided to stop doing this. I'm pretty sure he's been protective enough of his identity since the beginning of SSC that he hasn't published it there. So while one might easily fault his "historical operation security", I think his intent to keep this last name unassociated with SSC was clear and consistent.
That's fair. The only real reason I disagree with you (and probably him) is he _did_ continue to publish personal information. Enough to identify him, even without the last name. If someone repeatedly reveals their own first/middle name, location, and occupation, I think it's silly to call "we'll publish your last name" doxing.
It seems like he might have just freaked out over a series of poor choices and didn't really own up to it. Easier to blame the NYT for "doxing" and do the honorable thing to protect his patients.
Here's a different take. I tried a few times over the last years to figure out his last name, and failed. I didn't spend much time on it, but there was definitely a barrier there. Had the NYT published it, not only would that barrier have disappeared, but a large spotlight would suddenly have been shone on the name, and probably an onslaught of much-higher-profile internet articles about him/it, and quite possibly a large scandal. We're getting a bit of that with things like this New Yorker piece, but it's probably nothing compared to what it would have been if the NYT article had named him and the blog had stayed up. You seem to be arguing that not much would have changed since his name was a poorly kept secret anyhow. I think that has to be wrong. Tons would have changed. There has been a minor avalanche of attention as it is, and probably like a lot of casual readers, I know his name now. But deleting the blog was maybe a good way to prevent the minor avalanche from turning into a major one. Of course, that doesn't mean that his stated reasons for deleting the blog were his real reasons. My thought was that he was looking for an out anyhow and this was a good pretext, though that theory isn't consistent with participating in an NYT profile to begin with (edit: unless he realized partway through the NYT process that it wasn't going to be in his interests to go through with it).
I think you're right about the amount of scrutiny. I think he's pretty firmly a "public figure" now (more deliberately than most), his name is obfuscated at best, and I don't have a problem with the NYT publishing his last name.
I would have a real problem with it if he published under a pseudonym and the NYT were truly doxing him. But I don't think they'd have bothered with his last name at all if he were writing as "Bert Axelrose" or something.
Haha. I just mean it wouldn't have been as immediately interesting. No one would know who "Scott Alexander _______" was. I could be wrong, but knowing the rest of a sequence is more interesting than the name behind a code name (which I'll forget, probably).
I don't follow him, but many of his early blog posts were posted under his full name. He changed that eventually, but it was the case for a while (I say third hand).
I'm unsure if that was before or after the slatestarcodex domain name.
This is fascinating. It's a New York take on the Bay Area take on New York. It's the Media take on the Tech take on Media. It's illuminating, and frustrating. I keep looking for some reflection, some attempt to learn something from another point of view.
Scott Alexander only recently moved to the Bay Area, and as a clinician, he is very unlikely to be associated with any tech companies, although many techies read his blog, of course.
The NYT behavior here was despicable. Not quite Wen-Ho Lee yellow-baiting despicable, but despicable nonetheless. The New Yorker shares the same envious hatred of tech companies most of the New York media scene seems to evince, not surprisingly as their livelihoods are evaporating. That said, the reason this is happening is not tech companies, but the take-over of news companies by entertainment conglomerates, the replacement of actual reporting by infotainment goop, and the turning of reporting from a slightly disreputable working-class scrabble to a respectable profession for fancy liberal-arts college graduates who would never dream of being rude to their fellow classmates working in PR, law or other professions dedicated to preserving the status quo, let alone afflicting the comfortable.
Writers who write for The New Yorker are not worried about their livelihoods evaporating because local papers are going bust any more than tenured professors at Harvard are endangered by funding cuts at Directional Statename University.
I keep seeing variations of your take, where techie types are convinced that journos have a chip on their shoulder. But the genuinely elite media types (in contrast to out-of-work former gawker writers) probably don't give two shits about us. We're just a bunch of nerds with nothing meaningful to add to the discourse.
>The New Yorker shares the same envious hatred of tech companies most of the New York media scene seems to evince, not surprisingly as their livelihoods are evaporating.
You really got to love how thin-skinned all the tech bros here are if they even receive the tiniest amount of scrutiny. You legitimately sound like Donald Trump ranting about the "failing New York Times", mocking people's livelihood evaporating? What kind of comment is that?
And how is the New Yorker "infotainment"? How is the NYT? The quality of reporting at either institution is the same it's always been, in fact they're doing better than they've done in a long time. What's wrong with a liberal-arts education or being a lawyer?
They're defending the status quo? Who brought Theranos to public attention, or Epstein, or Weinstein or much of the behaviour of the current administration over the last few years? Not Scott Alexander or the tech sector, they're too busy running their ads or writing arcane blog posts about the dangers of feminism with comment sections full of racists.
There were lots of very clear warnings about the whole Theranos situation at places like HN, well before the story hit the most elite media. The red flags were quite visible, and people did point them out. For that matter, Scott Alexander and the rationalist community in general are more insightful than even the most famous policy wonks and pundits. They don't do paid-for investigative journalism? Maybe, but so what - public policy commentary is just as impactful on its own terms.
Not sure why parent comment is grayed out; seems like it’s more for its viewpoint than anything else. Not that different in tone or broad assertions from lots of other posts in this thread.
I had a very similar take (probably not precise), and like you I'm about to start a second reading, to say "this is a fascinating read to me, personally" must come with the caveat lector that I'm not making any value judgements.
Agreed. I think there's a lot of overreaction in these comments. Yes, the writer has his own point of view, but he tries pretty hard to be fair and balanced, and I learnt a lot from reading it.
As a European whose exposure to SV's culture and politics has mainly been through HN and similar sites, it definitely was a fascinating read.
Apart from some unfair points (the definition of doxxing for example), I think it was a pretty reasonable old media take on SV tech libertarianish viewpoints.
It's a political and cultural disagreement that I don't think has a clear-cut "good" and "bad" side, but it's certainly an interesting back-and-forth discussion to follow.
> It remains possible that Alexander vaporized his blog not because he thought it would force Metz’s hand but because he feared that a Times reporter wouldn’t have to poke around for very long to turn up a creditable reason for negative coverage.
The reporter is unaware that the Internet Archive exists? The content is obviously still readily available, so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous.
> For one thing, the S.S.C. code prioritizes semantic precision, but Metz—if Alexander’s account is to be taken at its word—had proposed not to “doxx” Alexander but to de-anonymize him.
And no, the difference between "doxx" and "de-anonymize" is never explained.
The practical lesson that I'd take here is that semi-anonymity doesn't exist. Alexander should either have written under his own name, or taken sufficient technical precautions to make doxxing by the NYT impossible.
The higher-level lesson is that anyone expressing heterodox opinions is likely to write something that a reporter working for a mainstream outlet considers "a creditable reason for negative coverage". At that point, the reporter now seems happy to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to cause that person harm, with the implicit consent of the huge organization behind them. Probably this was always true to some extent, but I think it's getting worse.
Parts of this read as a smoothed-over hit piece. An honest and comprehensive effort to rip apart and debunk neo-reactionary ideology is painted guilt-by-association style as "possibly legitimizing" or "describing" it. "[Exploring] and [upholding] research into innate biological differences between men and women" is "[giving] safe harbor to some genuinely egregious ideas". Asking people to politely contact the editor of a major newspaper is "incitement". Not to mention the sheer bravado of simultaneously claiming that everybody involved is a grandiose conspiracy theorist for being worried about being targeted and misrepresented by the news media, while doing all of the above and providing direct quotes that show them being targeted and misrepresented about whether they "recruit people for white supremacy" in the comment section. This is being a "professional journalist", but disputing this narrative is being "quarrelsome" and "agitated". The writer admits that "a reporter would want to make them pay for" tolerating extreme positions in order to show how those positions may be mistaken.
I got the same impression. Even though it's couched in "respectful language", they really went out of their way to cover the half-dozen or so most cringe-worthy controversies to ever come out of SSC or SSC-adjacent spaces, whether it's relevant at all or not to the (very tenuous) point of the article.
Like, you really have to bring up Roko's basilisk? What is the point, besides "look at how silly these Silicon Valley types are"? They present it like a central example of "Grey Tribe" discourse, when it's pretty fringe, even by LessWrong standards.
Well, you're right, it's not fringe in the sense that no one knows about it, everyone has known about it for half a decade - taking it seriously is fringe.
I wouldn't say everyone knows about it. In fact one of the most baffling and stupid aspects of the Basilisk is the strong belief it propagates that nobody should talk about the Basilisk.
EDIT: I'm wrong, Scott Alexander is just his pen name.
The article also calls the author "Scott _____" instead of just "the author of S.S.C.".
Wasn't this exactly what he was trying to prevent with the NYT in the first place? So now other journalists feel like they have to step in and "doxx" him instead? And this New Yorker article ultimately got published in spite of all the controversy surrounding his identity. What kind of backlash is that going to generate? On top of the reaction to all the other veiled attacks on people in the article and irrelevant detours into "controversial" details about SSC and the rationalist community, etc.
I don't see a good outcome to this at all. Maybe it says something if the people who put the most effort into overcoming bias and trying to foster reasoned conversation couldn't prevent all of this from blowing up as it did. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know. It's certainly ugly.
One trick that I noticed that adds considerable amount of 'spin' while allowing the article to remain factually correct is to present positive things about the group as subjective - coming from the group itself (which paints them as self-serving and lacking self-awareness), vague 'some' or (even better) some negatively characterized person (which taints it as unreliable), but to describe negative stuff as if it is objective and factual. Some examples:
"...the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement." - ok, so his gentle manner is a "persona", but he "surely" incites his readers to harass journalists.
"Slate Star Codex is often held up as an example of what the well-behaved Internet can look like—a secret orchard of fruitful inquiry." - note the passive voice.
"Much of the support Alexander received was motivated simply by a love for his writing." - implies that the support was not founded on actual judgment of the situation.
"On the blog, Alexander strives to set an example as a sensitive, respectful, and humane interlocutor..." - note the word 'strives'. To be fair, the rest of the sentence is genuine praise for his skill as a writer.
"...the rationalists’ general willingness to pursue orderly exchanges on objectionable topics, often with monstrous people, remains not only a point of pride but a constitutive part of the subculture’s self-understanding." - note how willingness to pursue orderly exchanges (with people that are presented as objectively monstrous) is a subjective point of pride.
Compare:
"the business model of the Times has little to do with chasing “clicks,” per se, and, even if it did, no self-respecting journalist would conclude that the pursuit of clicks was best served by the de-anonymization of a "random blogger." - presented as a factual statement.
"...a near-pathological commitment to the reinvention of the wheel, using the language of game theory to explain, with mathematical rigor, some fact of social life that anyone trained in the humanities would likely accept as a given." - why is this commitment pathological? Why is it as worthless as presented?
"These conversations, about race and genetic or biological differences between the sexes, have rightfully drawn criticism from outsiders." - why was this criticism rightful?
"The rationalists regularly fail to reckon with power as it is practiced, or history as it has been experienced, and they indulge themselves in such contests with the freedom of those who have largely escaped discrimination." - fairly standard accusations of privilege presented as facts.
"there is some evidence to support the idea that he, like anyone, is wont to sacrifice rigor in moments of passion." - presented as a statement supported by evidence.
Similarly, concerns and worries of the group are presented as subjective, over-reacting and reaching into conspiracy theory territory. By contrast, worries that the group itself is problematic are presented as legitimate.
And of course 'rationalists' are consistently presented as low-status dorks, but I guess it is the usual New Yorker snobbery and not something nefarious.
> One trick that I noticed that adds considerable amount of 'spin' while allowing the article to remain factually correct is to present positive things about the group as subjective
It's a bit ironic that you would say that, even as others have complained that the "subjective" presentation is just weasel words and fake balance, i.e. saying "Some people think X." when you really really want to say "X." At least when the author is stating things directly from their POV ("News media is totally not chasing for clicks, honest!") it's clear that it's their own stance.
> It's a bit ironic that you would say that, even as others have complained that the "subjective" presentation is just weasel words and fake balance, i.e. saying "Some people think X." when you really really want to say "X."
Wait, didn't you just pull that trick on me, by referring to some vague 'others'? :) In seriousness, here is for example the Wikipedia policy that indeed discourages the use of weasel words in attributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... . The difference is, that policy explicitly prohibits presenting opinions as facts without any attribution so there is a temptation to write in some bogus attribution so that is prohibited too. In any case, an opinion stated with no attribution whatsoever appears to bear more weight.
Of course I am not advocating that magazine articles should be written in the encyclopedic style but I think it is important to be consistent. E.g. it is well-known that authors of The Economist write as omniscient gods and that's OK because readers can correct for that, but mixing styles is suspicious. And isn't it suspicious that almost all statements written from the author's POV in the article are negative?
> In any case, an opinion stated with no attribution whatsoever appears to bear more weight.
See, this is what I'm not sure about. An opinion stated with no attribution looks just like that, an opinion held primarily by the author. (After all, you can tell that it can't possibly be an uncontested fact, just by the subject matter. I mean, stuff like "news sites are not chasing for clicks" is bound to be controversial.) Whereas if the author says "Some people think X.", they're pointing to something that's supposedly the shared opinion of a whole group, so it looks a lot more relevant. Of course that's just my point of view, I may well be mistaken.
This is close but not quite the same. Russel Conjugation is a play on the emotional content of the words, and I was describing tricks with statement attribution.
But you are right, there are examples of Russel Conjugation too (e.g.: "Alexander’s supporters were working themselves into a tizzy") as well as other tricks. This article is quite a case study on spin!
> The practical lesson that I'd take here is that semi-anonymity doesn't exist. Alexander should either have written under his own name, or taken sufficient technical precautions to make doxxing by the NYT impossible.
He shows up in person to meetups and things like that, so that doesn't really work.
Semi-anonymity works fine as long as there are cultural norms toward respecting it. Nothing really works if people with resources acting in bad faith decide they want to make your life hard.
The higher-level lesson is that anyone expressing heterodox opinions [...]
I think the article both directly addresses this and also succinctly summarizes its tone: "[...] the stridency and hyperbole of the reactions of Alexander’s cohort to his cause bear the classic markers of grandiosity: the conviction that they are at once potent and beleaguered."
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Where did you get the "potent and beleaguered" from my comment? Heterodox doesn't mean good or bad or strong or weak, just that it's outside the norm. Lots of heterodox ideas are bad and deserve only criticism and rebuttal, including many of Alexander's. They don't deserve doxxing from the NYT, though.
The New Yorker reporter criticizes Alexander for calling on his audience to lobby the NYT not to publish his name, while ignoring entirely the much worse consequences that Alexander was likely to face from the NYT's own mob. I think it's hard to be that blind by accident, so I think it's deliberate, and that the proposed doxxing showed either an intent to harm Alexander or cheerful indifference to that harm. Do you disagree? Note that I'm asking whether the reporters were pleased to harm Alexander, not whether you think that harm was justified (i.e., whether you'd be pleased to as well).
I insulted the New Yorker article and reporter, but I accompanied that with an argument for why they deserved it--I believe the article contained many false or misleading statements that tend to impugn Alexander's character. If my reasoning wasn't clear from my brief comment, I've explained it to exhaustion elsewhere in this thread. Your comment quotes from the article to insult mine ("stridency", "hyperbole", and "grandiosity" are all strongly negative terms), but with no such accompanying argument for why the insult should hold.
What's your opinion of your grandparent post's description of my comment as "grandiose", "strident", and "hyperbolic"? Are you saying those are fine (without explanation), but "ugly", "disingenuous", and "stupid" (with explanation) aren't?
Are you sure that you're not focusing on language to avoid engaging with an argument that would lead you to a conclusion that you find undesirable (i.e., that the NYT intended harm to Alexander, and the New Yorker stepped in to excuse their actions)? That's another easy trap to fall into online.
I actually agree with the grandparent post, and, I'd originally tried to explain why I thought your previous comment was kinda grandiose, but I kept writing snarky things so ultimately decided to pivot ; ).
And, I don't think I'm doing that other thing you're saying but am all ears if you feel that's the case.
I actually agree that my original post was needlessly snarky (and I'm disappointed but not surprised that it got far more engagement than the more nuanced stuff I usually write). I believe that post clearly advanced an argument, though, and that the argument is sound. Leaving aside my language, do you think Alexander actually intended to conceal something from the NYT reporter by deleting his blog (while mirrors remain widely available)? If so, why did he choose such a spectacularly ineffective tactic? I think the deletion was just an (apparently successful) publicity stunt, and that suggesting that he was trying to conceal something in doing so is a smear. It seems like you disagree, but why?
And what do you think is grandiose? I think there's a decent chance that Alexander would have been forced out of his chosen career if the article ran, and that he might be yet. Do you doubt this? That seems like a pretty significant life event for anyone, an odd thing to minimize unless you're indifferent to harm to him.
Finally, what do you agree with in pvg's post? I don't see any argument there myself, just a lot of words with negative connotations.
To be honest, with regards to the ultimate intention of the New Yorker article, I don’t know. And with regards to your question, I ultimately don’t know what Alexander intended.
I think that the domain of plausible answers to the questions you raise is pretty big and that the article doesn’t really provide enough information to give definitive answers.
We obviously each had different overall impressions of the New Yorker article and it’s authors intent.
With regards to grandiosity, well, the way grandiosity was talked about in the article and the comment was a combination of “beleaguered” and “potent”, I think.
I may have jumped the gun , but to me your comment read as though you felt a particular group that you had some degree of sympathy with was being deliberately targeted by The NY Times. Thus - beleaguered.
At the same time, that particular comment also had a lot of judgements on various things and on various people’s intentions. Judgements which to me traveled a very narrow chain of logic. Lots of either/or black and white, basically. Which I do too at times. But - Thus - potent.
Hope that’s useful information and not crossing a line to say.
Also obviously I don’t believe that The NY Times is specifically targeting anyone or a group in that way. Which isn’t to say they haven’t. And, I could be wrong. My general take is that the motivations of an org like The NY Times are more multifaceted and nuanced than how they’ve mostly been discussed in this comment thread. Same with the New Yorker
Which isn’t to say I haven’t felt a lot of anger towards their reporting at times.
Thanks, and I also routinely read both the NYT and the New Yorker. I don't mean to suggest that most or all of their reporters want to use the tools of their trade to harm perceived opponents, just that some non-negligible subset do (as is inevitable in a large group), and their managers seem disinclined to hold them back (which seems new and scary to me). The personal consequences if you meet such a reporter seem potentially disastrous enough (what does a trained psychiatrist do with his life if he can no longer practice?) to be worth a strong warning. Maybe you think it's hyperbolic; but Alexander probably now wishes that someone had given him that warning before he started blogging.
I do think there's an ideological bias to whom an NYT reporter is likely to treat favorably or unfavorably. In this thread and elsewhere, people listed comparably semi-anonymous figures that the NYT declined to name that one might, in the usual oversimplified binary view, described as left-leaning. The world isn't perfectly orderly, and maybe they just got lucky and Alexander got unlucky. I see moderately strong evidence that's not the case, though.
But I'm more concerned that this is happening than to whom. I was aware that Alexander's blog existed before these events, but I hadn't read it much, and I had no particularly favorable or unfavorable impression. I wrote my comment not out of sympathy for Alexander's views, but out of concern that reporters from mainstream outlets now seem happy to bring about or abet actions that are likely to cause people serious and unfair ("Alexander deserved to get fired for what he wrote, so good" is a perfectly consistent and honest position, but I'm actually kind of surprised that no one said that here) harm. I think Marxists are dangerously wrong, but I don't think they should be run out of their unrelated jobs for that reason.
What Alexander feared the NYT would do to him seems to me more polished and subtler than a Project Veritas article on Breitbart, but basically in the same spirit. I do think it's to the NYT's credit that (so far) they dropped the piece, and to the New Yorker's that their piece didn't use Alexander's real name--no one doubts that Breitbart would have ploughed ahead. I'm disturbed that it got that far, though.
It just seems like a lot of conclusions to draw around an article that hasn't been released yet and which no one has read.
Plus, what if the New Yorker article got something wrong (not necessarily thru negligence)?
Or what if the NY Times article changes between now and its publication (if it's published)?
What if Alexander misunderstood something? Or, what if there are circumstances which people have not chosen to publicly share for whatever reason?
I appreciate you writing back. At the end of the day, it just seems like this whole topic struck an emotional chord with a lot of people for reasons I don't understand, or, don't agree with.
To be fair, I've definitely felt an emotional response. There's a lot of fear going around in the world right now, and understandably so.
I also appreciate the response, and I certainly agree that no one except the NYT reporter knew what would be published (and not even they knew what the ultimate consequences would be for Alexander). But since the only way for Alexander to know for sure would have been for him to wait and see if he gets fired, I can't blame him for acting speculatively.
Maybe people respond in proportion to their self-assessed risk that they themselves would end up in Alexander's predicament? That probably explains some of the left/right split on this and similar topics. I just can't help thinking that those with views broadly similar to an average NYT reporter's are underestimating that personal risk, given that: (a) the boundaries of acceptable thought may change quickly and unpredictably; and (b) a much greater fraction of their personal and professional network is likely to come along with the mob, increasing the risk that public censure has consequences to their daily life. "Cancel culture" poses much less risk to a Breitbart reporter (who's already beyond the pale) than to a broadly liberal writer who misses or disregards the latest change in that boundary.
I mean 'doxxing', 'mob', 'harm', 'cheerful indifference'. None of this has happened. All of it is based on the framing Alexander has given it - which is neither corroborated nor is he a disinterested party. It very much smacks of grandiosity and sense of grievance.
Sorry, in what sense didn't the NYT propose to "doxx" Alexander? As far as I can tell, everyone involved agrees that the NYT intended to publish his real name. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Or are you trying to draw a distinction between publishing his real name and publishing other identifying details like his address or phone number? But the word "doxxing" is widely used for both, and in this case it's clearly the former that would cause most of the harm.
Or are you doubting that the doxxing would have harmed him? A lot of his phrasing is creepy even to me--the word "like" goes poorly with "eugenics", regardless of one's views on anything. I haven't read his blog extensively, but from the full context of what I've seen I'd attribute that to autistic-style disregard for social conventions rather than any intent to cause harm; but I do believe an article quoting selectively from his writing and including his real name had a decent chance of making it impossible for him to continue in his present career. A Mexican-American utility worker just lost his job for resting his hand out the window of his van in a shape that the Twitter mob thought implied white supremacy. Would the sins they perceive in Alexander not be much, much worse?
Or are you just pointing out that thanks to Alexander's stunt, the NYT seems to have held off (for now)? But unless you're saying that the NYT was never actually going to publish his real name (which I see no reason to believe) or that threats of harm are fine until you act (which would make life easier for extortionists, but which I don't believe is a serious argument), I'm not sure how that's relevant.
Or is it just that you want to see him harmed for the views he expressed, but you consider yourself too nice a person to actually say that? "Alexander wrote stuff under a pseudonym that's so bad he should be forced to abandon his career as a psychiatrist, and if the NYT can make it happen then I'll be glad" is at least a consistent and honest position; so if that's what you think, why not say it?
I don't think we need to parse the precise meaning of 'doxx' or even agree on whether it would be ethical or not for the NYT to publish his name. The only thing that has happened to so far is an NYT writer started writing a piece on SSC and called some people.
This has caused Scott Alexander to faint on the couch and the response that warrants is probably smelling salts, not the mobilization of all legions west of Cappadocia. The only thing we have so far is his side of the story, his prone frame on the couch and his call for the mobilization of all legions west of Cappadocia.
From your implication that this is all an overreaction, it seems like you believe there's no reason to be concerned that Alexander might be forced out of his profession, even if the NYT did run the piece with his full name as they'd proposed (but haven't yet).
Is this because you think it's unlikely that would happen even if the piece did run? If so, then I gave the reasons in my previous post why I disagree--so we have a simple disagreement about a prediction for the future, and we could each give our reasons why we expected our respective outcomes. Why didn't you engage with any of those arguments?
Or is it just because you're indifferent to whether he loses his career, or indeed might be glad to see it happen? That seems most consistent to me with your statements so far--but would you feel the same if the person staring down the Twitter mob were your ideological ally? You yourself? If we normalize this behavior, then what makes you think that it won't be someone you care about next?
I don't have much interest in re-litigating the hypothetical outcomes via the Socratic Pinniped Textwall Method. I think my comment was quite straightforward - nothing happened and then a very mildly critical meta-article appeared in the New Yorker. Your response starts with hyperbole and ends with what is frankly a conspiracy theory about how journalism works. Which is the sort of thing that is gently ribbed in the article itself, completing the circle!
Have you ever considered the possibility that you're mistaken? I try to myself, which is why I want to discuss with people who hold opinions other than mine, in order to understand why they do and whether I should change my view. You've communicated clearly that you disagree with me, but I'm not sure what else I could get from your comments.
Is there any substantive argument that you'd be willing to engage with? I'm not sure why you keep responding if not. You can't actually believe that nothing happened here, unless you believe that nothing happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis because the missiles never flew.
Have you tried to consider the possibility that you're mistake on this forum, or just other ones? Can you point to an exchange here where that's happened? The search bar at the bottom of the page could help, if none come to mind.
I'm always curious about the expectations people when they write things like "have you ever considered the possibility that you're mistaken". It seems totally ineffective as a rhetorical move, but I wonder if might have some slim chance of being productive if accompanied by a show of good faith. Like, for instance, any evidence whatsoever that the person saying it had ever been inclined to concede anything on the forum.
I don't usually comment on political topics like this one, but here's a thread where someone corrected my oversimplified view of the Fed's current bond market interventions. It took several levels of replies for me to understand what they meant, and I later corrected someone else who continued to argue for my initial (and misleading) view:
Close enough? Or in a different sub-thread here (that the mods seem to have detached), another poster and I probably still disagree on the original question, but we did manage a respectful discussion in which we agreed on other related points:
I didn't mean it as a rhetorical device--I'm genuinely curious, how someone came to be so sure that I'm wrong that it's not even worth explaining why. There's very few things I'm that sure of.
It's easy to reach certainty that the conversation you're engaged in has no hope of becoming productive, far easier than reaching any kind of (ugh) "epistemic" certainty. It's helpful to recognize that; otherwise, you're at risk of being the annoying dude in the meme sitting behind a card table on a college quad, "change my mind".
I'm afraid that you're probably right. So what should I have done differently? What could have changed pvg's mind, or at least generated something like a respectful and substantive discussion in which they explained the reasons for their differing views (which you'll see that I did manage with several other posters who disagree with me in this thread)?
A snarky original post like the one I wrote here starts from a negative interaction with someone who disagrees, which I agree is bad. You'll find mostly more nuanced comments in my history, including those about semi-political topics like the coronavirus; but those mostly get no replies at all.
Doesn't that also mean the very act of "deleting" the blog is disingenuous? If deleting the blog doesn't meaningfully impede accessing the blog articles, then what's the point, other than drawing attention to the situation?
It's just the publicity stunt, leaving the NYT with the options to (a) drop the story, (b) omit a significant detail, or (c) report that he deleted the blog because they said they were going to doxx him. The story hasn't been published yet, so it's working so far.
Short-term, this has probably net increased the visibility of Alexander's content (slightly less convenient to access, but much more attention), and I assume he expected that. The reporter can't actually believe that Alexander is trying to hide something horrible that he wrote, so the sentence I quoted can only be knowingly dishonest innuendo. That's why I said "ugly".
> The story hasn't been published yet, so it's working so far.
How very optimistic of you. In my mind, it just changed the status of the story from "almost ready for publishing" to "Developing" - the action of taking down the blog and the words of the various parties are definitely news-worthy. The story can no longer be about one guy; the NYT will need a bigger canvas, and more time to work on it.
> The reporter can't actually believe that Alexander is trying to hide something horrible that he wrote
It might be a little farfetched, but no moreso than Alexander's own reasoning for deleting the blog. I think it's a little much to call the whole article "ugly" because of that.
What do you mean? Alexander said himself that he was doing this as a protest and publicity stunt, and he seems to have taken no actions beyond that publicity stunt to make the content less available (e.g., he hasn't (yet) requested deletion from the Internet Archive). His words and actions seem entirely consistent to me, so I'm not sure why you doubt him.
1. I believe the New Yorker reporter disingenuously made a statement that he knew to be false (because deleting the blog is clearly effective as a protest and publicity stunt, and clearly ineffective in removing access to content that's been widely mirrored elsewhere already) in order to create the false impression that Alexander might be trying to hide something.
2. I consider knowing falsehoods intended to harm others to be ugly.
I thought you were disagreeing with (1), which is why I thought it's relevant that Alexander himself said his goal was that publicity, and that his actions seem consistent with his words. Are you saying that you agree with (1) but disagree with (2)?
I think that both the New Yorker reporter and Alexander know that deleting the blog will not meaningfully impede people from accessing it who want to access it. I think that the reporter's claim that deleting it might impede people looking for dirt in past posts and Alexander's claim that deleting it might protect his practice and his patients are both far-fetched although not completely impossible.
I agree that the primary benefit to Alexander from deleting his blog was in discouraging the NYT from publishing his name, and that his arguments for why it might still help even after he gets doxxed are much weaker. I'd tend to apply a more charitable standard to weak arguments for something he has the absolute right to do and that doesn't harm anyone else (what if he just didn't want to pay the hosting bill anymore?), than to innuendo questioning someone's character (by implying that this "creditable reason" might be out there) in one of the world's most-read magazines.
Assertion 1: deleting his blog is a meaningful way of hiding his surname, by way of adding an extra step to anyone who wants to search for it.
Assertion 2: deleting his blog is NOT a meaningful way of hiding gross and reactionary discussion happening on his blog, by way of adding an extra step to anyone who wants to search for it.
These seem contradictory to me. He is absolutely trying to hide or obfuscate something, we're just debating what it is.
Exactly. It's absolutely more than a stunt, despite it drawing its own kind of Barbara attention. Dedicated people will still be able to find it, but the lowest effort attackers wont put in the work to dig. It silences a chunk of outrage culture who will just move on to the next target, rather than investigate broken links.
I never knew deleting anything automatically implied having no back ups. SSC even announced he had back ups. So... even for the assuming people out there he placed disclaimers. Yet more disingenuous statements.
In short, he's not worried about dedicated antagonists finding him. He's worried about his psychiatric patients finding his blog, and that interfering with his relationships with them. Deleting the blog makes it moderately more difficult for them to do that.
I don't understand. Publishing his name in the NYT will surely already cause any of his patients who read that to realize it's an article about their doctor. Surely that's where the interference would come from ("whoa, my doctor has been writing about his practice on a public blog for years"), not from the patient visiting the blog. If the patient wants to find the blog, I'm sure they will be able to.
Right, that's why he's trying to stop the NYT from publishing his name. The game isn't that he thinks that by deleting the blog he'll prevent people from finding him even if he's mentioned in the NYT, it's that by deleting the blog it'll make it untenable for the NYT to publish his name. He's gamblng that the NYT will blink.
He might at some later date decide that he needs to erase his iInternet presence entirely, but I don't think that's his current game.
Reading the Scott Aaronson affair described as being about the trouble of male nerds on the "dating market," was awfully ugly. Of course, this doesn't mean that the New Yorker has it out for "rationalists," it's just an example of the callous and not-exactly right coverage that subcultures usually get from the mainstream. The truth is that the Aaronson affair was that he had crippling anxiety when he was young, got mixed up with Judith Butler literature, and it didn't really help him. He never had any trouble finding a partner once his anxiety had resolved, so you really have to do some free word association to get from the reality to the description.
It seems to me that simplifying the entire Scott Aaronson affair was necessary, since it was just a brief part of this article. I thought their choice of simplification was reasonable and in good faith, but of course others might disagree (and unfortunately, whether we agree or disagree is likely to be effected by our overall level of agreement with the article).
There's simplifying, and then there's misrepresenting. Simplifying it would be calling it "crippling anxiety exacerbated by uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature."
Just because he wasn't the subject doesn't mean it's okay to make materially false statements about him...
>Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird.
Well, I'm not qualified to write for the New Yorker, but surely they could have written a sentence that wasn't false.
Maybe you could read a more detailed account on The Atlantic, and decide for yourself how it could be summarized. (Seriously, the "dating market," does not come up even once.)
I think the association with Butler came from somewhere else* . The Dworkin reference was a positive one in Aaronson's original post. If you're really interested in digging through all the details, the original post by Aaronson that sparked the whole thing was called "comment 171." You may come away from it with different ideas than I, but you'll definitely come away from it with different ideas than the New Yorker. ;)
* I admit that the "somewhere else" could have been my imagination.
I think we have to make a variety of assumptions to draw any conclusions about what the author of the New Yorker article intended. There’s too little info in the article to go on.
You can simplify, and then you can say Scott wrote an angry "screed" that misrepresents 99% of feminists and ignores the plight of vulnerable women in its bourgeois defense of the privileged, nerdy intellectual class. (The article doesn't actually say "bourgeois", but the dogwhistles are crystal-clear.)
I confess that any description of anything that uses the word "screed" will tend to seem to me to be in bad faith. Largely because every time I've dug into the origins of such a description, it has indeed been in bad faith.
It does strike me as ugly because there's just one "off" piece after the other.
The thing about hiding posts from reporters while they know there's an ebook.
Saying the NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning.
Arguing that "de-anonymizing" Scott shouldn't be a problem because it was easy for them to do.
Arguing that Scott should've expected unruly people to contact the NYT while drawing a complete blank that that's exactly what Scott would've been facing, except with possible physical violence rather than angry e-mails...
There's more but I'm lazy. My "wat?s per minute" were significantly above average. It went far enough for me to call it "ugly."
> NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning.
No need to generalize from the state of the media as an industry; NYT is a public company so their balance sheet is public. Here's their latest 10-Q, doesn't look like drowning to me.
But actually… that sheet also says that $51 million of their revenue is from digital advertising, down from $55.5 million a year ago. It's 11.5% of their total revenue, down from 12.7%. Not a huge problem but… it's still a business consideration.
And let's not forget zest and sensationalism can sell subscriptions and print media too. (Publishing the full name would at least have counted as "zest" IMHO, if not full-on sensationalism.)
Ad revenue is down but subscriptions and total revenue are up -- so doesn't that go counter to the "did it for clicks" narrative? My (admittedly simple) model of the media industry is that clickbait drives ad revenue, quality journalism drives subscriptions.
I totally agree your logic makes sense too. My model was going along the lines of, "hey, our digital ads are down a few million" -> manager telling the assembled team "hey let's try and get the ad revenue back up, all please set the dial just a little bit higher!"
Not even suggesting malice there, just my imagination :)
[Ed. add:]
It's also that I don't even think Metz was necessarily aware the name would be such a big deal. It's very much normal practice to name people, and even if they saw that Scott was privacy conscious it might not have registered properly and just seemed like a "little bit of extra zest." However, IMHO they just should have backed off after it became apparent to them.
Oops, I see what I did. I was comparing digital subscription revenue to overall ad revenue. Comparing digital subscription revenue to digital ad revenue is "only" a factor of 8.8 rather than 18 (because just over half the ad revenue is print).
Note that newspapers make little if any profit from print subscriptions in themselves, because they're little better than breakeven with the cost of printing and delivery. The real profit has always come from the advertising. Digital subscriptions are something new in that they're actually making money from subscription revenues instead of just using them to cover unit costs, but they're currently still tiny.
A more effective paywall drives subscriptions. Once you have a paywall, subscriptions are as much about clicks as ads.
I don't have a subscription myself, but I have considered paying for one because acquaintances with a low bar for quality occasionally want to share and discuss something behind the paywall and I can't rely on all of them to know how to print a pdf and share that with me.
As subscribers witness the quality decline, they'll cancel their subscriptions.
The NY Times today is not the NY Times of A.M. Rosenthal.
> But actually… that sheet also says that $51 million of their revenue is from digital advertising, down from $55.5 million a year ago. It's 11.5% of their total revenue, down from 12.7%. Not a huge problem but… it's still a business consideration.
But it's a business consideration that exactly supports the claim that NYT isn't about clicks and, in fact, that dependence on click-driven ad revenue is a declining focus of NYT and similar media outlets.
You can’t make that conclusion from the evidence presented.
The fact that ad revenue is declining doesn’t tell us that they intentionally moved focus away from clicks.
As another matter, all those subscriptions grant access to their website content. More clicks on their site probably lead to more new subscriptions, and better retention of existing subscribers. To the extent that clicks lead to subscriptions, they are undoubtably all about the clicks.
It's definitely a bit ugly (perhaps most clearly so wrt. SA's broadly sensible defense of Scott Aaronson being described as an angry "screed" against feminism) but overall, it's as fair a treatment of SSC as could appear in the elite media at this point.
Agreed. A handful of sentences were completely unfair, and they've been rightly criticized in other comments.
But it's a very long piece, and the majority of it came off as reserved and even-handed.
I've seen hit pieces, this is not one of them.
I really disagree. I thought it was a balanced take, for the most part, and represented the SSC extended community in a way that did much better than naively misunderstanding it, and much better than the community understands _itself_.
I think that a lot of commenters on here have the exact self-righteous tone that this article criticizes (well, discusses with a bit of an air of judgment, but let's just agree that it's criticism): to these commenters, it is inconceivable that the NYT's behavior could be acceptable and not... what, profit-motivated, desperate for clicks, a salvo in a media war? But that's mostly absurd. Not impossible, per se, but unfounded.
This is one of those things where the Internet At Large seems to think that everyone has to agree on who's right here (it's Scott and friends?), and anyone who disagrees is Evil, and it's just a matter of figuring out _how_ they Are Evil. But in reality people can actually coexist, and be allowed to coexist, with _different_ opinions of what is right or reasonable, and the NYT / persons who are removed from the SSC/Silicon Valley/HN bubble have very different opinions there.
The commenters here act like it is not okay for these differences of opinion to continue to exist, and so they must be crushed. It really, really doesn't look great to the community that when commenters encounter this difference of opinion, they... launch into uninhibited tirades against it at every opportunity. To an external observer, the commenters seem ridiculously worked up, and this article (among other takes) seems very mature and charitable in contrast.
It's "balanced" in so far as some parts are charitable, sure, but then it's also peppered with insinuations:
> This plea conformed with the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement.
I just can't see that being written in good faith.
Funnily enough, the slatestarcodex thread on this article agrees with you. I found this one comment extremely illustrative of the dynamics in this current thread:
>Overall, I’m pretty impressed by this article. It’s the sort of thing I could see myself aspiring to write. It spends ample time presenting SSC in its own terms, touches on enough of the major touchstones and obscurities of the blog to indicate a serious examination of it, and is precise and restricted in its criticisms. I appreciated in particular the attention it paid to the specific quirks of rationalist subculture rather than trying to lump it in as part of something it isn’t, and the way it (accurately) called out the people who were looking more for a war with the media and were willing rovers use Scott as a convenient casus belli.[0]
The Internet Archive provides an important historical archiving mission. Even when the content is made unavailable by express request from the owner, it is still preserved for future generations. This is not a frivolous purpose.
Why do you believe that a website would want the Internet Archive to archive it? There is clear evidence that some do not want to be archived (the existence of opt out option). What data shows that most do?
Being archived is all advantages. Users don't generally go to the internet archive instead of the source, so it isn't really competing with you for users. People trust it as an independent party, so if you want to be able to claim that you said something a year ago, it allows you to point to it there and prove that you didn't just put it on your website yesterday and post-date it. If you blow up your website by accident, they've backed up the content for free. People like the idea of what they wrote being preserved for posterity.
The percentage of websites that actually opt out of being in the archive rounds to zero. Compare this to the much larger percentage of internet users who opt out of ads by installing ad blocking software, despite many websites whinging at you or refusing to display content if you do.
> For any given website, more likely than not they would want the Internet Archive to archive it.
I really don't think you can make that assertion without asking the maintainer of the website.
AND if that's the case, IA can either reach out to the maintainer via the email address gotten from the public WHOIS data OR the maintainer can easily go to the IA website and opt in!
> I really don't think you can make that assertion without asking the maintainer of the website.
Let me rephrase. More websites would want to be archived than not. So that should be the default.
This is how defaults are meant to work. Unless the default is somehow harmful or dangerous, they should be the thing that the most people want, so as to reduce the amount of work involved in getting everyone to their preferred outcome. Having 1% of websites opt out is far less work for the websites than having 99% of websites opt in.
> AND if that's the case, IA can either reach out to the maintainer via the email address gotten from the public WHOIS data OR the maintainer can easily go to the IA website and opt in!
You do realize how many websites there are. Why would you want to dump a collective million man hours of work on all of them to opt in, or the even worse consequences when they forget and then don't get archived like they would've wanted?
If a website that wants to be archived doesn't opt-in that is a failure of the website. If a website that doesn't want to be archived is archived that is a (possibly non criminal) trespass by the archivist.
Remember when that bank used the Internet Archive as a CDN by mistake? The Internet Archive functioned as a primitive form of version control, allowing them to get some client-side code they'd accidentally lost, but needed again.
I don't think this is disingenuous. Unlike pretty much every other player scraping the internet, the Internet Archive is a transparent non-profit that has relatedly proven itself to be squarely on the side of the public. I think it's very reasonable to treat them as the exception.
I don’t think the article is saying that “negative coverage” would necessarily be warranted, just that it would exist, and be negative.
I don’t think a hit piece would explain how some potentially controversial SST articles were either later qualified by the author, or, qualified by the author at the time of publishing.
> The reporter is unaware that the Internet Archive exists? The content is obviously still readily available, so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous.
We would have to see what NY Times policy is on using The Internet Archive as a source. I don’t know, and, you didn’t go out of your way to find and share that information, so I think your conclusions are premature.
The New Yorker reporter said "creditable reason". "Creditable" usually means "somewhat praiseworthy" so it's weird phrasing; but I interpret the praise as going to the reporter for finding it, implying that the reason would be good. Or perhaps the author actually meant "credible" (or the alternative definition of "creditable" that's a near-synonym), directly stating that it's justified. Either way, I don't see any implication that the negative coverage would be anything but warranted. Where are you getting that?
As many other posters noted, there's also an e-book, and the article itself quoted from the blog. So are you asking me to prove the nonexistence of an NYT policy banning the use of any of those sources, despite the New Yorker somehow figuring it out? It's hard to prove a negative, but I could see what I could find online. But do you really think the burden of proof is on me here? Perhaps your impulse is to defend the New Yorker reporter here, and you think the burden of proof for accusing him (of false accusations against Alexander) should be high; but the reporter is accusing Alexander (of having written something that would be a "creditable reason" for negative coverage), so shouldn't the burden be on him?
I didn't say the article was a hit piece, and I don't think it was one. Another poster called it a "smoothed-over hit piece", and that seems closer to me, a piece designed to leave both a negative impression and an impression that Alexander has been treated fairly.
But the very fact we are arguing over the meaning of a single word is, I think, kind of a signal of an anti-pattern, so to speak.
It’s like bikeshedding over a single line of code. Sure, in certain cases that single line might be super important (part of an algorithm, performance critical, etc).
Often however there’s a range of acceptable ways to write a single line of code and, if we want to analyze and understand a codebase, it only makes so much sense to spend so much time on that one line.
There’s a lot more code to look at as well and to understand how something works or the intent of the author of the code we should look at individual lines in the context of the whole.
Plus if we’re going to get that specific about individual words, then it’s even more important to be comprehensive and correct and not jump to one of several plausible meanings ;).
That's the definition I meant by "or the alternative definition of 'creditable' that's a near-synonym [for 'credible']". I agree that might be what the author intended, but I don't see how that would imply the negative coverage would be unwarranted? If the reason is worthy of belief, then doesn't that mean it's probably a good reason, and the coverage is warranted?
Though I agree that judging a long piece of writing by a few quotes out of context is generally bad--indeed, I'm surprised no one suggested that I've done the same thing to the New Yorker reporter that Alexander was afraid the NYT would do to him (though with no foreseeable risk to the reporter's job).
I've tried not to--those sentences seemed particularly egregious to me, but broadly within the tone of the overall piece. Human attention behind limited, I'm afraid any discussion of a long piece of writing must either talk about subjective feelings and impressions (where it's hard to identify the reasons for those different feelings), or focus on a tiny subset at the cost you correctly note.
It's interesting how the HN discussion here is far more critical of the article than the /r/slaterstarcodex discussion is [1]. (although that is a much smaller community.)
I’d say the article’s coverage of Scott and rationalism is fairly neutral, while its attitude toward Silicon Valley is negative. Seems like the reactions of the two communities are what you’d expect based on that.
> The reporter is unaware that the Internet Archive exists? The content is obviously still readily available, so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous.
> If you read his last letter he clearly intended to rile up his followers into a frenzy and get them to attack the reporter
Um, unless you think Scott lied about what the reporter said, this is not a very sensible take. The blog takedown page reads like a factual account of what happened, and a request to direct any criticism towards the NYT's editors through the proper channels. He has never called for a mad frenzy or anything like that.
Scott encouraged people to raise objections in a civil way, and he really stressed that point. And yet both you and the article somehow accuse him of orchestrating a harassment campaign despite evidence to the contrary. Honest question, what else could he’ve done? Are you suggesting that he’s a villain for raising objections?
He was pointing to the appropriate channel for reporting such an issue. How else do you think people can signal objections? At least not by writing in their own diaries for sure.
He pointed to several channels including a twitter account, phone number and email. Are all of these channels equally appropriate ways to pursue civil discourse with the appropriate parties? Also, he only asked followers to be polite in parenthesis after this. Parenthesis are used for afterthoughts and explanations that deviate from the main topic. They also generally follow punctuation but the SSC blog post followed with the "be polite" bit after a paragraph break. For these reasons I do believe the "be polite" statement was disingenuous.
> He pointed to several channels including a twitter account, phone number and email. Are all of these channels equally appropriate ways to pursue civil discourse with the appropriate parties?
Um, yes? How does using any of these methods turn civil discourse into harassment?
> Also, he only asked followers to be polite in parenthesis after this
That's a real twist. He wouldn't want to sound like he assumes his readers are rude people, would he?
His suggestion wasn't civil and I already wrote why so I'm just going to quote the answer I already gave
> I don't think his words were polite, in fact I think it was quite the opposite. If I wanted a civil discussion I would not have listed any contact information about anyone. I would have said, "I am archiving the blog until further notice because I need to think about what kind of content should be made publicly available because words have power and it's important to think about what information and inferences we make available to others through those words".
The fact that he didn't do that means he did not have such intentions. There is now evidence for an actual harassment campaign against the journalists.
> If you have spoken with C_de M_tz, or if he has reached out to you, since the day that Scott took down Slate Star Codex: there may be something you can do to help
> Please feel free to reach out to me by DM and I can fill you in
The coded message is referring to the original journalist. I don't understand how people can look at all this evidence and still think the rationalist community isn't acting in bad faith when there is actual evidence on twitter of actual coordination among its members for a harassment campaign.
> There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS.
> (please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.)
Can you elaborate on what was un-civil about this? How is directly the users towards the feedback page of the New York Times and the editor in charge of the NYT technology section (the sub-group that Carl Metz belongs to), accompanied with explicit calls to be civil uncivil?
The notion that this is a harassment campaign is nothing less than laughable.
Even if the author's real name were used:
> Community message, pls share around as you like
> If you have spoken with Cade Metz, or if he has reached out to you, since the day that Scott took down Slate Star Codex: there may be something you can do to help
> Please feel free to reach out to me by DM and I can fill you in
How would this be considered harassment? This user is asking for people who have spoken to Cade Metz to get into contact. How is this evidence of harassment?
You seem to be inserting your own imagination that this tweet author is planning to release private contact information or something similar. When in reality this could easily be people sharing their experiences with Cade and whether similar situations of doxxing or de-anonymoization by the NYT authoer have occurred in the past.
Why is it laughable? I have already said several times what was uncivil about it. If I was a psychologist who read the comments of my posts I would have realize that subtle suggestions can be blown out of proportions and I would be very careful with what words I was using to express my intent.
A civil phrasing would have been, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved". That would have been civil. Asking anyone to act on your behalf by giving feedback to a 3rd party when it's obvious the intent is negative is not civil. It is sinister.
It's also becoming clear to me these conversations are no longer productive and I have started to re-iterate points I made in other posts. If you want to argue further make sure you understand what point I'm making and why and then make a good faith and pertinent point. Otherwise I will no longer engage with anyone responding to posts in this thread.
You can also email me if you want and make your points in a longer format. I will consider them and respond if you have well researched rebuttals.
> Why is it laughable? I have already said several times what was uncivil about it.
Perhaps this was the case, but you seem to have edited many parent comments in this chain with a '-'. Unless the flagging behavior has changed without my knowing. My understanding is that flagging removes the comment from users without showdead enabled, but does not edit the comment.
> If I was a psychologist who read the comments of my posts I would have realize that subtle suggestions can be blown out of proportions and I would be very careful with what words I was using to express my intent.
> A civil phrasing would have been, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved". That would have been civil. Asking anyone to act on your behalf by giving feedback to a 3rd party when it's obvious the intent is negative is not civil. It is sinister.
He explicitly tells people to be police, to not be a jerk, and to be mindful that they are representing the SSC community. How is this failing to express his intent that anyone commenting on his behalf to be civil? And how on Earth is it "obvious the intent is negative is not civil" when he explicitly tells any potential commenters to be civil?
Your suggestion that Scott instead write, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved" is not a rephrasing. It's a completely different message. He is not making this decision on his own volition, he was prompted to delete the blog due to the actions of another person. Your suggested phrasing not only completely omits this fact, but says the complete opposite.
> Your suggestion that Scott instead write, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved" is not a rephrasing. It's a completely different message. He is not making this decision on his own volition, he prompted to delete the blog due to the actions of another person. Your suggested phrasing not only completely omits this fact, but says the complete opposite.
If your argument is that he had no choice in the matter then I'm not really arguing with you because in my world people can make choices of their own free will. To assume otherwise is a slippery slope and so I'm not interested in making that argument. If you have compelling evidence that Scott had no choice in deleting his blog then present it and we can argue about it.
Actions have consequences. The kind of community SSC fostered was not able to stand up to scrutiny even though its members pride themselves on reasoned and rational argumentation and scrutiny. When push came to shove they did not uphold and stand up for their own principles, instead they adopted the same tactics that their detractors use (innuendo and vague insinuations of great moral crimes) to defend themselves. You can look at the Twitter threads where people actually "doxxed" the journalist and his interactions and as the kids say "dragged" him on Twitter. It was all very ugly. No sane person would want to associate themselves with that kind of behavior.
I have no opinions on the editors or journalists at NYT or any other news publication. I have no reason to believe they're the enemy and yet SSC and its members seem to think so. I find such opinions and the people that hold them confused and irrational (the opposite of certain, reasoned, and rational).
> If your argument is that he had no choice in the matter then I'm not really arguing with you because in my world people can make choices of their own free will. To assume otherwise is a slippery slope and so I'm not interested in making that argument. If you have compelling evidence that Scott had no choice in deleting his blog then present it and we can argue about it.
You're using the words "choice" and "voluntary" in a very pedantic way.
If someone puts a knife to your throat and demands the contents of your wallet under threat of being killed, you're also handing over the contents of your wallet out of your own free will. You chose to give up your property. You could have chosen to refuse and suffer the consequences. Your decision to give up your property was voluntary, in the sense that you could have chosen otherwise. This isn't technically wrong, but it also isn't what how the overwhelming majority of people use the word "voluntary".
When people talk about being forced to do something, they're talking about being pressured into taking a certain action due to the necessity of avoiding some consequence if they don't. In this case, Scott was being threatened with the consequence of having his identity revealed to a much broader audience with the probably consequence of adversely affecting his career and his patients. Yes, he chose to delete his blog. He could have left it up and lived with the adverse consequences to his livelihood. But this decision was made due to the threat of these consequences - it was not voluntary.
> Here is an actual trail of evidence for one of the members of the tech community actively harassing a reporter
This person isn't talking about either Cade Metz (the New York Times journalist that was writing about SSC), nor Pui-Wing Tam. The mention of Slate Star Codex comes at the end of this thread. How does this connect, in any way, to Scott's blog post? Furthermore, do you realize how absurd it is to form an opinion of an entire community of thousands if not tens of thousands of people based on the actions of a single person?
Furthermore, how is this harassment? This person is criticizing a journalist on false claims, and calling them a sociopath. You seem to be under the impression that the simple act of saying unfavorable things about someone is harassment. It isn't. If calling someone a liar and a sociopath is harassment, then a lot of people harassing a certain national leader on a regular basis (and rightly so, IMO. The point is to demonstrate that calling someone a liar and a sociopath isn't harassment).
What point are you making? That my definition of voluntary is incorrect? If so then I disagree because I use the word exactly how I mean it. No one put a knife to anyone's throat and forced them to do anything that they could have avoided if they had taken precautions. In Scott's case, he could have fostered a better community of individuals and been more careful about his anonymity but he didn't and he wasn't. So his problems spilled over into the larger tech community and people adopted the attitude of the free press being "anti-technology" and "evil".
Calling someone a sociopath is indeed harassment if you have no compelling evidence to prove your point. Because if you claim someone is a sociopath without providing compelling evidence then you're arguing in bad faith which is a characteristic of sociopathic people.
I don't know who Taylor is but I can tell that she's not a sociopath but the person harassing her on the other hand has certain sociopathic characteristics.
The author of the tweet pointed out that lied, and subsequently attacked others while playing the victim - which are sociopathic tendencies. If what he says it true, he could reasonably claim to have compelling evidence to prove his point.
But this is irrelevant. Calling someone a sociopath regardless of whether or not you have evidence isn't harassment. You realize that harassment is a crime, right? It's honestly quite astounding that you believe restrictions on speech are this tight. Being offended or insulted does not make speech harassment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that banning speech on the basis of offensiveness is not allowed [1]. Speech protections go even further than that - even burning a cross and calling for "revengeance" against minorities is protected [2]. No, Balaji's Tweets aren't harassment. They aren't even near it.
Harassment laws almost always revolve around non-consensual speech (e.g. someone following you or otherwise forcing you to be exposed to their speech), or a captive audience (a boss saying something to an employee. The employee is a captive audience, they can't avoid their boss without losing their job). Harassment is about keeping people from having to listen to speech that they do not consent to receiving. Harassment laws are not about preventing people from saying offensive things about other people. Taylor isn't a captive audience - if she does not consent to seeing Balaji's Tweets she can easily block him.
And on a side note: using your own expansive definition of harassment, aren't you now harassing Balaji by calling him a sociopath or saying he has "sociopathic tendencies"? If not why is it okay for your to call someone a sociopath, but harassment for him to call Taylor a sociopath?
> But this is irrelevant. Calling someone a sociopath regardless of whether or not you have evidence isn't harassment. You realize that harassment is a crime, right? It's honestly quite astounding that you believe restrictions on speech are this tight.
I have never argued for any restrictions on free speech and yet you continue to say that I have. Why is this confusing for you? I have continued to present evidence for why I think what I think and yet all I hear back is my definitions are wrong and pedantic. What in your opinion is not pedantic and correct? Can you provide the definitions so we can have a fruitful argument instead of going around in circles about what words means and how they can be associated with actions that can cause harm.
I also never called anyone a sociopath. I presented evidence for what I consider to be harassment and sociopathic actions. Here is my exact quote
> Calling someone a sociopath is indeed harassment if you have no compelling evidence to prove your point. Because if you claim someone is a sociopath without providing compelling evidence then you're arguing in bad faith which is a characteristic of sociopathic people.
I don't know who Balaji is or what he does. I'm just inferring his characteristics from his obsession with Taylor and his constant combative language about the free press and journalists (specifically targeting Taylor with his tweets and calls to action to harass her along with calling her a sociopath without compelling evidence). Balaji is using exactly the same tactics Trump uses to discredit his detractors.
I will again re-iterate what I said. This is getting tiresome. If you have an actual argument against anything that I have said then my email is in my profile. I will no longer respond to more replies to my posts in this thread.
> I have never argued for any restrictions on free speech and yet you continue to say that I have. Why is this confusing for you?
You have repeatedly said that Balaji's actions are harassment. Again, harassment is illegal. Why is this confusing for you? When you say that somebody is harassing someone, you're saying that their actions are illegal and it's the government's responsibility to put a stop to it. For the third time harassment is illegal.
Do you believe Balaji's Tweet are illegal? If not then you agree with me: he is not harassing people. Is he being a jackass? Sure. Is this harassment? No.
> I'm just inferring his characteristics from his obsession with Taylor and his constant combative language about free press and journalists.
Right. And Balaji is inferring Taylor's status as a sociopath given her actions. But apparently this isn't harassment when you do it, but it is harassment when other people do the same.
> I would have said, "I am archiving the blog until further notice because I need to think about what kind of content should be made publicly available because words have power and it's important to think about what information and inferences we make available to others through those words".
That's not a way him to raise objections. You're demanding that he shut up.
> His suggestion wasn't civil
The fact that you keep repeating this doesn't make any of this true. He didn't make any suggestions to harass anyone.
> I don't understand how people can look at all this evidence
Your "evidence" is unrelated to Scott himself, and it doesn't show any sort of harassment taking place either.
I did not [demand] that anyone do anything. I stated an opinion and backed it up with reasoning about why I believed what I believed. It's silly to jump from what I actually said to what you inferred.
> You're demanding that he shut up.
I did not demand anything. I gave reasons and arguments about what I thought. He silenced himself by deleting his blog, no one demanded that he do so, he took the action of deleting his blog of his own volition.
But you repeatedly criticized him for voicing his objections to being de-anonymized. When asked how he could’ve done so differently, you said that he should’ve wrote about how terrible his blog posts were instead. How is this different from demanding that he shut up?
> It's silly to jump from what I actually said to what you inferred.
That’s an explanation of what you’ve been doing all along with the whole “making suggestions” nonsense.
Is criticism no longer allowed? Isn't that the foundation of rational debate?
I have no opinions on his anonymity. I personally don't care or want to know who he is and wasn't planning on reading the NYT article. I have my own conclusions about SSC and its community that I doubt would be changed by the article and no one here has yet convinced me otherwise or given any compelling evidence to the contrary.
I have explained why I used the words that I did. If you have any more points to make then quote me in context and provide an actual rebuttal instead of calling what I wrote "nonsense".
Suppose I have a big following. Suppose I know that some of those followers are prone to exaggerating some things that I "suggest". If you know those two facts, would you have written the same letter?
I'm not saying your interpretation is incorrect. I'm saying, knowing what I know about SSC, I know that certain people would interpret his letter differently and cause problems for the editor and the original jouranlist and that seems to be exactly what happened. A vocal minority took up his cause and shaped the discourse around him being a victim and the editor and journalist being evil.
Even in this thread, any kind of actual discussion is almost impossible. The general opinion is very skewed by very specific interpretations of Scott's persona.
> Suppose I have a big following. Suppose I know that some of those followers are prone to exaggerating some things that I "suggest". If you know those two facts, would you have written the same letter?
By your standards, any form of activism is a harassment campaign unless you can control the actions of every single individual in your group. I see this line of argument a lot recently, but frankly it’s nonsense.
> Even in this thread, any kind of actual discussion is almost impossible. The general opinion is very skewed by very specific interpretations of Scott's persona (which I don't think is actually valid because in my opinion he was not a benevolent person).
We’re talking about non-debatable facts here. You keep saying that the blog take down post “suggested” people to harass NYT. That post is there in plain view, and it clearly does not.
Yeah, that's how the left operates now. There are no facts, the only truth is they only operate in good faith and their opponents only operate in bad faith. Therefore anything they say or do is just and anything their opponents say or do is evil.
Peaceful marches become nazi rallies while arsonist riots are stirring protests. Scott Alexander is nice to the point of stupidity, but he is the enemy therefore his actions are inherently nefarious, while the nyt - who recently accused Noam Chomsky and a black academic of white supremacy - become saints harassed by evil incels.
A hacker news thread about it spends god knows how long arguing about the definition of ad hominem, and even though the leftist is just plain fundamentally incorrect they refuse to back down and accuse others of bad faith for not buying their fantasy definition.
What you argue for matters as much as how you do it. I don't see anything wrong with criticizing people who advocate for racism. Peaceful marches for racism doesn't make racism just, you know.
I don't see any problem with criticising racism either, I just object to the attempts to paint them as violent while in the next breath pretending the Floyd riots were peaceful.
> he clearly intended to rile up his followers into a frenzy and get them to attack the reporter that was going to write the piece
I find this an interesting reaction. Could you defend "clearly intended"? I feel familiar with Scott's writing, and familiar with his audience, and I think his clear intention was exactly what he said --- "please be polite" and "I will be very sad if you are a jerk".
I could understand if you said "I took it to mean" or "He should have been aware that some people would take it to mean", but what gives you the confidence to say "clearly intended"? Are you sure you're familiar enough with his writing and his audience to make this claim?
It's hard to explain but his intention in much of his writing was coded. He would consistently use certain keywords and phrases to make certain associations and when you follow through the logic it becomes very sinister (in fact the comments would take his ideas to their natural conclusion and I did not like what was in the comments and the people that were writing them).
If he did not intend his followers to attack anyone then he should not have named anyone or put any kind of contact information in his post. Only someone that deliberately wants people to contact and pressure the editor would have used the language that he did. He created plausible deniability by saying "he doesn't want anyone to be harmed" and then in the next sentence listed contact information with "suggestions".
If you really wanted a civil discussion, would you have used the type of language that he did?
> It's hard to explain but his intention in much of his writing was coded. He would consistently use certain keywords and phrases to make certain associations and when you follow through the logic it becomes very sinister.
This reads to me like "his words were perfectly polite but I've decided that he must have intended a certain subtext and the subtext I believe that he intended is evil". Which ... I mean, you can certainly claim that, but when you're talking about the writings of somebody who used a lot of words to do his best to make his meaning clear in the text, accusation-via-subtext at least needs some sort of evidence to be a reasonable thing to do.
> If he did not intend his followers to attack anyone then he should not have named anyone or put any kind of contact information in his post.
The complaints form and the relevant editor are precisely how feedback is supposed to be given to news organisations. Some publications have a "Public Editor" position to handle such things, in which case they should have been contacted instead, but the NYT axed that position a while back.
I don't think his words were polite, in fact I think it was quite the opposite. If I wanted a civil discussion I would not have listed any contact information about anyone. I would have said, "I am archiving the blog until further notice because I need to think about what kind of content should be made publicly available because words have power and it's important to think about what information and inferences we make available to others through those words".
That seems like an "I would have said" based on your assumption that those "inferences" are the subtext that you believe to exist. I continue to believe that Scott did not believe any such subtext existed, so that would make no sense from his point of view.
I'm also unsure why you believe that providing the contact information of the correct person to contact given an issue with a potential article to be published by their department is a bad thing.
Are you sure you're not just starting with a belief that Scott is malicious and then reasoning backwards to find a way that his actions in this case could have been malicious? I'm quite probably missing something, but I find myself unable to follow your logic any other way.
We are all entitled to our beliefs. I merely outlined an argument for why I think how I do. Maybe Scott is a perfectly nice person but his writing is full of associations that say otherwise. I did not know anything about SSC when someone first introduced me to the blog, I did not even know who Scott was or what the blog was about but the more I read the more I noticed certain patterns. I did not start with a specific conclusion, I reasoned my way to one.
I already stated several times that if my intent was for civil discourse then I would not have used the language that was used in the letter because it is full of contradictions. It outlines victimhood and becomes a rallying cry for those that identify with Scott and that's exactly what has happened. Everyone discussing the post assumes the position of a victim. I think this is odd because if Scott is so smart then why is everyone making him out to be the victim? Even the logic used to justify Scott as a persona is contradictory, he's a victim and yet he's not a victim.
The letter is deceptive and that's why I attribute malice to it. It's intention and the words used are misaligned.
> We are all entitled to our beliefs. I merely outlined an argument for why I think how I do.
The point I'm trying to make here is that "It's hard to explain but his intention in much of his writing was coded. He would consistently use certain keywords and phrases to make certain associations and when you follow through the logic it becomes very sinister" does not, in fact, outline an argument. It merely asserts that "much of his writing" is "sinister" without making any argument for why - and you've now once again claimed "his writing is full of associations" ... without ever having named such an association.
There's no requirement to make such an argument, of course, but if you're simply going to state your beliefs with zero explanation then it would be preferable if you were up front about having chosen to do so rather than claim to have made an argument where none exists.
I didn't take very good notes but if you want to point me to the archive and posts you think are good I will be happy to go through them and outline what associations are being made and why.
I stopped reading SSC after I noticed certain patterns and decided I did not want those ideas rattling around in my head. So I gave you a high level impression / outline of what conclusions I reached without providing the actual trail of evidence that lead to it. If you want more precision then you will need to point me to specific posts of his so we can argue about them because even the people defending him are not providing any actual arguments for why his writing was good. They're providing very high level impressions shaped by an echo chamber.
since I suspect that will comfortably draw out our underlying disagreements (and if you don't know who Phedre no Delauney is, the Kushiel's Dart novels are fantastic and you've missed out).
andrewprock already found an example and I agree with his assessment. If you have snippets that you think are worthwhile then feel free to post them. Associating assassination with people, even as a question, is sinister. A polite and kind person would not make that association or even ask the question because it implants the idea in the reader's mind and they start thinking antagonistically towards certain groups that he's suggesting should be "assassinated".
It's terrible and dreadful writing (it elicits terror and dread in the reader).
Should people ask taboo questions? Yes, they should ask such questions in private conversations with people they trust. When the interpretation is out of your hands then you need to be really careful what information you are making available to the public / audience. It's clear he doesn't think through the logic and wants to come across as smart. It's juvenile. Adults speak with intent and they address people directly and respectfully. I have never seen any adult conversations on SSC, I've only ever seen people that are peacocking their intelligence.
Let me quote perhaps the most important part of the essay and the part that I believe truly defines this ethos.
-- begin quote
When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.
Luckily, since I was a classical liberal, my reaction to this mistake was – to not bother them, and to get very very angry at people who did bother them. I got upset with people trying to fire Phil Robertson for being homophobic even though homophobia is stupid. You better bet I also got upset with people trying to fire transgender people back when I thought transgender was stupid.
And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.
But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have.
-- end quote
I read the humility and desire to not to harm even when you're wrong inherent in that passage as the exact opposite of "peacocking intelligence" - and I find your choice to use PUA terminology to describe the behaviour to be either unintentionally gross or deliberately unkind depending on whether or not you were aware that was what you were doing.
Yes. I was aware of my characterization and the word peackocking (to make a vainglorious display; strut like a peacock) was used before it was co-opted by PUA community (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/peacocking).
Let's rewrite that paragraph and use fewer emotionally charged words.
--
As a younger person I thought transgenderism was about seeking attention. But being trained in the liberal arts I decided to question this assumption and not act antagonistically towards them because of my personal interpretation of their situation.
As I got older I realized my initial assumption about attention seeking was incorrect and I took responsibility for and corrected my beliefs.
I guess it could have turned out differently if I hadn't been trained in the liberal arts. So I'm glad my training included keeping an open mind and accepting people different from me and with different life circumstances.
--
Same exact content, none of the emotional baggage and vainglory.
Notice all the words I took out because I knew they would elicit negative reactions in the reader: stupid, dumb, mistake, very very angry, upset, homophobic. He repeated those words enough times that a perceptive reader would have picked up on the subtext of him trying to distance himself from those negatively valenced words. He's not trying to educate the reader, he's trying to put distance between himself and certain associations. That's why it's not good writing. It's about him, it's not about the reader. And in his attempt to "peacock" he's putting associations into the reader's mind that are detrimental to the reader's thought processes all the while elevating himself as a paragon of goodness. As the term "peacock" suggests, his writing is vainglorious.
The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".
You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.
And that part was the single most important part, and the principle he was arguing in favour of.
If you think your rewrite was the same exact content, then I'm afraid I don't think you understood what he was saying at all.
> If you think your rewrite was the same exact content, then I'm afraid I don't think you understood what he was saying at all.
Bingo!
He's obviously not a very good writer. I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens. I don't need to justify to myself or others why those truths are self evident. Nor do I need to recount a story about being young and stupid. Everyone used to be young and stupid, that's also a given. There is no need to write it on a blog and show how you're so much better than what you used to be. Let your actions show how you are better. I don't need to be told when I can infer directly from someone's actions whether they're good or not. Words are deceptive, actions are truthful.
I don't put words like "very stupid", "angry", "I'm afraid", "fearful", etc. in my writing because I don't identify with those things and I don't want anyone reading my words to identify with them either. If I intend to say something then I say it without flowery language about my youth or emotionally charged words because I reserve those words for private conversations with people that I trust.
> I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens.
The article was about somebody who was arguing that using falsified numbers about rape statistics was not only acceptable feminism but was actually a good thing and that anybody who disagreed with that deserved to be destroyed.
Speaking as somebody who believes that the truth is quite sufficient justification for feminism to win, and that lying serves only to hand our enemies means to attack us, I believe that sadly we live in a world where that argument does need to be made.
I would prefer to live in a word where these arguments don't need to be made. I would prefer to live in a world where those truths are self evident.
But we don't yet, as both Adria Richards and David Shor have found out to their detriment. So making the argument that we should continues to be valuable.
I am entirely fine with you believing that there are better ways to make those arguments - in fact, given any specific argument is almost certain to be imperfect, one would assume that there are.
But I would note that "there are better ways to make those arguments" is quite a distance from your original position.
You apparently know which one it was, and can look up the response. It isn't a very long response either.
I'm not going to quote it here, because it gives you a chance to talk about it at me rather than with the original person who brought up the counterpoint.
So then you weren't asking the question in good faith. When I asked you to clarify you dodged the question. I wouldn't ask if I knew, I asked because I didn't know what you were referring to.
If you want me to talk to you then make a direct point instead of confused remarks about what I know and don't know and conversations I had with other people that were unrelated to you.
> So then you weren't asking the question in good faith.
Yes, I was.
> When I asked you to clarify you dodged the question. I wouldn't ask if I knew, I asked because I didn't know what you were referring to.
If you didn't know what I was referring to, then you didn't know who you were referring to when you said the following: >> andrewprock already found an example and I agree with his assessment.
> If you want me to talk to you
I have no desire for you to talk to me: that was exactly why I asked you to respond to the other person and not me.
When it's a reply to somebody speaking of war and weapons and given as a disapproving extrapolation ad absurdum of that attitude, I don't see that it's intended to incite so much as to elucidate the idea that incitement is itself a bad thing.
> Popular consensus believes 100% X, and absolutely 0% Y.
He already starts off with antagonism. Where is the data for this? How does he know what the popular consensus is? Why is he drawing such a sharp delineation between "popular" and their association with X and Y?
> A few iconoclasts say that X is definitely right and important, but maybe we should also think about Y sometimes.
Seems like he thinks he's an iconoclast and the people that associate with that will start to act out iconoclastically themselves and if you look at the comments you will notice that. They're modeling what Scott is outlining in the post.
> I can see why this pattern is tempting.
How clever of him to notice this pattern and point out it is tempting.
> If somebody said the US should allocate 50% of its defense budget to the usual global threats, and 50% to the threat of reptilian space invaders, then even though the plan contains the number “50-50” it would not be a “moderate” proposal.
He's making a really weird analogy. This is not what people argue about and he has created an extreme view that does not exist by comparing a position to "space invaders".
Anyway, I'm not reading further. I'm already convinced he's not making any worthwhile point here. He's using emotionally charged language to draw the reader in and make them identify with him. It's a poor tactic. It only works on people that don't notice it. And I think this is the most damning evidence against him, as a psychologist he should know this is what he's doing by making these statements. He doesn't speak / write like someone that has knowledge of human psychology. He speaks / writes like someone that uses knowledge of human psychology to confuse his audience.
Yes, thanks for pointing it out. Both types of professionals receive training in understanding the human psyche so my point remains unchanged
> A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are medical doctors, unlike psychologists, and must evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments, or strictly psychiatric. A psychiatrist usually works as the clinical leader of the multi-disciplinary team, which may comprise psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, and nursing staff. Psychiatrists have broad training in a bio-psycho-social approach to assessment and management of mental illness.
> A psychologist is a person who studies normal and abnormal mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior by experimenting with, and observing, interpreting, and recording how individuals relate to one another and to their environments.
I have a doctorate in psychology, which gives me a PhD. It does not qualify me to prescribe drugs and save the lives of people on airplanes, which is something that a psychiatrist could be reasonably asked to do.
While psychiatrists spent time understanding physical and mental disorders, psychologists spend time understanding cognitive and behavioural aspects of humanity and running experiments (most of which are extremely difficult to control).
Which part of my statement about being trained in the human psyche was incorrect? Also, I didn't ask about your credentials and they're irrelevant to whatever point you're trying to make. I have a graduate degree in math. Have we dispensed with the credentials now?
I feel like you may be getting upset, which I am sorry for.
I am mentioning my credentials because I have been complaining about people not distinguishing between psychologists and psychiatrists for many, many years. I am a little triggered by such comparisons.
The human psyche (incidentally not a word you ever hear in psychology (and potentially psychiatry) classes) is large, and psychologist and psychiatrists focus on very different things.
Like it's fine if you don't see a difference between the two subjects, but others do as they are very, very different.
I guess the closest analogy would be if I called you (a mathematician by training, i assume) a statistician.
Many people might not see the difference between the two roles, but I am relatively confident that you would.
I will defend anyone who wants to speak and discuss things openly, but I will do so according to my principles, not theirs, and there is no hypocrisy in doing so. If you would defend a Christian's or Muslim's right to their beliefs without giving away all your possessions or travelling to Mecca then you are in the same boat. The values I would hold in a perfect world can be impediments in this one, especially when they are used to push orthogonal values.
More importantly though, I like Scott, but I think he is preposterously naive and friendly to a fault. And I think that has been weaponised against him countless times in the past, and is being weaponised against him now. And nothing makes me angrier than seeing friendly, charitable people being taken down by the vindictive and unscrupulous.
I think he put in the contact information because he very much did want people to contact the NYT, and for them to make clear their displeasure with the policies of the organization. I think his genuine hope was that this would cause them to change their policies in the future, both for him and for others. So yes, he wants to "pressure the editor", but in a manner that is applicable to their job rather than as any sort of personal attack.
> If you really wanted a civil discussion, would you have used the type of language that he did?
Maybe, it depends on how aware I was of my audience. If my intended audience was the primary public posters on SSC, I can see saying just what he said. If I remembered in my fluster that 98% of the readers who never post might react differently, then probably not. If you picture Scott (as I do) as a really bright semi-autist who communicates online primarily with self-declared "rationalists", it doesn't seem impossible that he might forget in the heat of the moment (this had to be a stressful decision for him) that some percentage of his audience is going to interpret his words counter to his stated intent, even if that intent is real.
(I appreciate your response, by the way. I don't think you needed to delete your earlier comments. Yeah, they'll be flagged and downvoted, then we'll vouch for them to recover them and vote them back up. As long as you try to phrase things politely, there are enough people here who'll stand up for you even if we disagree with your conclusion.)
I appreciate your response as well. I deleted the original comments not because of the downvotes but because I noticed I was attracting discussions I did not want to participate in.
I think your interpretation is valid but I still think his writing caused harm even if it was inadvertent and someone should have pointed these things out to him much sooner but the SSC echo chamber did not allow for dissenting opinions so it had to be NYT journalist to make these things obvious to him and he did not respond well.
It is notable that, having dicussed things at length, memexy's postition was refined from "coded writing" and "very sinister" to
> Then there are better ways to make those arguments.
which, yes, there quite possibly are. There are always better ways to make any given argument.
But memexy's claim that Scott's work was bad because
> I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens.
fails, in my opinion, to understand that there are many people for whom, sadly, those things aren't givens and that arguing that they should be is a lot of Scott's thing.
I would love to live in a world where those things are givens.
I appreciate Scott for making principled arguments for why, ideally, we would live in a world where those things are givens, and I appreciate Scott for, however imperfectly, trying to move us towards such a world as best he can.
(note, this is my (opinionated) summary of the thread that ensued from my sibling comment; if unsure whether I've captured things accurately, please read that whole thread and draw your own conclusions)
> I [mst] am entirely fine with you [memexy]believing that there are better ways to make those arguments - in fact, given any specific argument is almost certain to be imperfect, one would assume that there are.
> But I [mst] would note that "there are better ways to make those arguments" is quite a distance from your original position.
You [mst] made that conclusion, I did not. So I would appreciate it if you refined the phrasing to properly reflect the understanding that you are reaching the conclusion, not me.
I will also note the sophistic device being used here by mst of jumping up the thread to shortcircuit the evaluation of the actual evidence. This is quite deceptive.
Yes, and you [mst] provided an example of such associations with "youth", "stupidity", "anger", "fear", "transphobia", "homophobia", "atrocity", "anger at others", "anger with self", "dislike of others", "opposition to others", etc.
> When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.
> And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.
> The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".
> You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.
What word other than "sinister" would you use to characterize the cluster of words I quoted which are implicit in the writing I quoted?
I have explicitly encouraged poeple to read the rest of the thread.
Your choice to characterise my doing so as a "sophistic device" and "deceptive" is your own.
I continue to encourage people who are unsure if my attempted summary is appropriate to read the whole of the original thread and draw their own conclusions.
If you really wanted people to read the whole thread you would not have shortcircuited the process and replied upstream. That is what I mean by sophistic and deceptive. It was disingenuous of you to assume I would approve. You should have asked if you wanted to summarize my points and we could have come to an agreement but instead you did something (posting upstream and summarizing and pretending to speak for me) to derail the conversation and actual conclusion (which was actually inconclusive).
I was civil throughout this discussion and I don't appreciate how you ended it.
> If you really wanted people to read the whole thread you would not have shortcircuited the process and replied upstream.
And yet, I explicitly said: this is my (opinionated) summary of the thread that ensued from my sibling comment; if unsure whether I've captured things accurately, please read that whole thread and draw your own conclusions.
You are welcome to claim that my explicit invitation to people - in a situation where, as you say, your last comments are 'hidden away behind "more" button' - is deceptive, but given I was actively encouraging people to read things upstream that would otherwise have been, as you said, 'hidden away', I personally do not consider my actions to have been deceptive in the least.
As for 'civil', it seems to me that this conversation has, in and of itself, made very clear to anybody reading it that you and I have significantly different definitions of that concept, and how to interpret this fact can only be left as an exercise to the reader.
Where was I "un"-civil by your definition and conception of civility? Again, you [mst] are making vague provocations and insinuations and continuing to carry the conversation into a direction that is unproductive and trying to paint me in a poor light. By turning this into a meta-argument you have derailed the original conversation.
I used to just walk away from such conversation but realized I'm letting the bullies win when I do that. By walking away I'm letting sophistry become a viable strategy. We will continue this as long as you want. I am not backing down and will continue to argue my position and provide reasons for what I believe and why.
You have consistently used bad faith and misleading tactics to derail the entire conversation. Every time I have assumed good faith you have thwarted it. Every time I have extended an explanatory provision you have used it against me by quoting me out of context, and then tried to put words in my mouth and pretended to not have done so. Whereas I have taken no such actions and have always quoted you in context.
My actions have been civilized. Yours have been otherwise.
In case it wasn't clear I will spell it out. That choice was not what was being contended. It was your behavior of bad faith actions that I was contending. You tried to bias the actual argument and paint me in a certain way by quoting me out of context, which I rightfully called out.
I encourage people to read as well and reach their own conclusions without me putting words in their mouth or biasing their reasoning as you did in your shortcircuit post. Because rational and reasoned argument requires each individual to weigh the evidence and then respond with compelling arguments for refuting or accepting them.
FWIW: there is at least one HNer (me) who has read both subthreads and completely agrees with your assessment of the situation. 'mst is engaging in those time-honored tactics of the online troll - mischaracterise, redirect, disengage. Unfortunately these bad faith discussions are all too common recently and it's sad to see HN swallow the bait.
Even more reason to stand up for what's right. And I appreciate your encouragement. I want more people to act in good faith so I try to model the type of argument I want to see more of through actual actions.
Don't apologize. Stop using such tactics. I already pointed out what you did, how you did it, and why it was disingenuous. If you were sincere you would not have quoted me out of context, you would not have tried to bias the group opinion, and you would not have shifted the blame as you are doing now.
You should just stop because you are no longer making any points.
> I am sorry that you consider genuine attempts to get real answers to be trolling with no explanation as to twhy.
That's called shifting the blame because you're shifting the responsibility and consequences of your actions onto someone else. That is not how one begins an apology. An apology begins as "I am sorry. I will reflect and consider the feedback given and do better next time. Please feel free to give further feedback if you feel like it and I will consider it and improve my behavior".
After clarifying that what I said wasn't an apology memexy continues to criticise me because it didn't fit their standards of apology.
I accept that my phrasing was not entirely clear but given having made what I meant explicit and still being attacked I'm unsure that my mistakes were the primary problem in this case.
> his intention in much of his writing was coded. He would consistently use certain keywords and phrases to make certain associations and when you follow through the logic it becomes very sinister.
You mean I've been reading SSC wrong all this time and missed out on secret messages encoded in kabbalistic puzzles?
There is always subtext. There is no need for mystical allusions. You are welcome to go back and re-read his writing with a more critical eye and decide for yourself what you notice.
If "critical eye" means you're attempting to read his work through a critical theory lens then it would have been helpful had you mentioned that in advance so that those of us using other lenses could've been aware that you were doing so. Much confusion might thereby have been avoided.
It's incumbent upon whoever is confused to ask clarifying questions instead of making insinuations about the inadequacy of the person making the argument.
If you were confused then you should have asked clarifying questions instead of arguing with incomplete information.
I don't know what critical theory is and what it is used for. I use basic reasoning and back up what I say. I used the word critical as in "critical thinking" (unrelated to any actual academic theory of criticality). It's quite simple really. I'm not motivated to make a point other than clarify my own reasoning and I expect the same in return. When someone doesn't return the favor and act in kind then I assume they're operating in bad faith and they have no intention of making an actual argument to clarify but instead they seek to obscure and confuse.
You have demonstrated several times and very clearly you were not interested in a reasoned argument even though I gave you the benefit of the doubt by outlining what I thought and engaged every one of your examples in good faith. You did no such thing and went out of your way to shape and bias the discourse in your favor. So I'm no longer interested in arguing with you or making any more attempts to clarify my reasoning.
If you want to engage further then you can reach me by email or on keybase. I'm no longer interested in being a prop for your performance in front of a group.
"Critical theory is the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With origins in sociology as well as in literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation,[1] critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. The latter sociologist described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[2]
In sociology and political philosophy, the term Critical Theory describes the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s and draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, the capitalization of Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun particularly stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School"
Proof I was right - you don't like SA therefore his writing is bad and it has a secret evil message (never mind you couldn't even understand his point when you tried to write like him in another thread) and a 'critical' reading would validate your view, which is entirely unfalsifiable.
Your attempt to rewrite the 'when I was young and stupid' excerpt, where you missed half the point of the piece, excised most of the words and declared him clearly not a good writer. Despite his writing being the reason he was even getting a nyt profile in the first place. It can't be that his writing speaks to people in a way you don't get, he's obviously a bad writer and all of those public intellectuals who are supporting him are... Not critical enough?
As for unfalsifiable, you claim there are dog whistles in every second sentence SA writes, and dog whistles are, by definition, unfalsifiable. You can claim anyone can see it if they look critically enough because if someone suggests they have looked critically and found nothing, you can simply claim they didn't do it right and mosey on. Dog whistles are also, by the way, fundamentally incompatible with the principle of good faith you claim to want to prosper. It's an interesting conceit, I'll give you that.
> As for unfalsifiable, you claim there are dog whistles in every second sentence SA writes, and dog whistles are, by definition, unfalsifiable. You can claim anyone can see it if they look critically enough because if someone suggests they have looked critically and found nothing, you can simply claim they didn't do it right and mosey on. Dog whistles are also, by the way, fundamentally incompatible with the principle of good faith you claim to want to prosper. It's an interesting conceit, I'll give you that.
I don't know what a "dog whistle" is or what it's used for. I explained exactly what I meant by "coded" and I made a point about emotionally charged language by rewriting quoted texts to demonstrate good writing vs bad writing.
It's all clearly stated in all my posts. You are welcome to actually quote me and demonstrate directly instead of mis-directing and mis-characterizing what I said / wrote as being a "dog whistle".
Look up the definition of dog whistles then, and discover they mean 'talking in coded language that means one thing to an outside audience and another to the inner circle'. Pretending you don't understand a decades old political term so you can ignore an argument is also not going to engender the good faith dialogue you claim to desire, by the way.
And what was your point about emotionally charged language? Aside from that you don't like it?
My point about emotionally charged language is that it's deceptive. It's a trick some people use the draw in the reader and get them to identify with the writer instead of the argument they're making. So when I see emotionally charged language I rewrite it in my mind to use neutral words so that I can see without emotional bias what argument the writer is making and reason about it objectively. Emotionally charged language is a sophistic device, it's used to obscure and confuse instead of enlighten.
It's good to know I re-invented a concept that had been in politics for over a decade. Independent discoveries are always fun. I was just making observations but it's good to know what I observed is called dog whistling. So that's a correct assessment then. Scott's writing is full of dog whistles.
Yes what a remarkable cavalcade of coincidence your life is. And why look at that, you were so busy marvelling over your ability to engage left wing dialogue in the past five years without ever hearing of dog whistles that you plum forgot to address anything I said! What a lark. Let's just pretend I said SA's writing is full of dog whistles and didn't say 'dog whistles, aka coded language, is entirely unfalsifiable and in direct opposition to the principle of good faith argument' - after all, we are already pretending to be engaging arguments in good faith.
> Look up the definition of dog whistles then, and discover they mean 'talking in coded language that means one thing to an outside audience and another to the inner circle'.
I wasn't pretending. You said what I described is called a "dog whistle". I have no problem with using that phrase.
Yes, actually. It's a theme that Scott is annoyingly fond of, in his fiction and non-fiction. Unsong is entirely about kabbalistic puzzles as you know. Scott and others before him were enamored with the ideas of Leo Strauss. You can read more about Strauss' ideology of hidden truths that only the brilliant and/or worthy can perceive at the link below.
Scott Alexander uses the Kolmogorov post to have plausible deniability for his discussion of "race science". There's a reason writing "HBD" was banned in the comments section and it's that it was giving the game away to too many people.
(discussion of HBD is not banned, it's simply not permitted for that string to appear - i wonder why that might be)
> There's a reason writing "HBD" was banned in the comments section
The reason is that most people who casually reference "HBD" have no idea what they're talking about, and end up grossly misrepresenting the actual science as cover for unrelated ideas like ethno-nationalism or bigoted views about other groups. Tabooing "HBD" is a legitimate way of forcing everyone to unpack whatever it is that they actually have in mind; in many ways, it is the opposite of playing dog whistle politics.
Sorry about that. The point is, at least by now, HBD is a thoroughly confusing term that gets used in many, sometimes mutually contradictory ways. The SSC community has spent many years trying to handle the multiple sides of the many "nature vs. nurture" debates that are also referenced in OP's article, and ultimately decided that the 'HBD' term itself was not very helpful to that end. To ask for a "clarifying definition" of HBD given these circumstances is indeed rather pointless.
> If you read his last letter he clearly intended to rile up his followers into a frenzy and get them to attack the reporter that was going to write the piece.
He didn't even name the reporter in his last post, much less ask people to attack him.
I'm just pointing out that you either forgot your own comment, or were using a weird rhetorical trick where you pretend that the other commenter was calling the blog ugly, instead of the article.
I was making the point and deleted it because of the kind of misrepresentation that you just made. I was making a point about vague and emotionally charged language and you took it in a negative direction. So I deleted the message to prevent further associations and misrepresentations of what I said.
> I was making the point and deleted it because of the kind of misrepresentation that you just made.
Convenient, rather than modify it to clarify the vagueness you instead deleted it. Now no one can see for themselves what the evidence was, only take your word for it.
> This plea ... in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement.
That's unfair given that the alternative was supine acceptance. He made a good faith attempt to amplify his reasonable criticism while leashing the inevitable jerks. Can the author of this article say as much?
This is a formula to silence any popular speaker by association. Here's a dangerous person who listens to you, therefore you lose the right to complain in public.
I agree with the author that Scott definitely knew what was about to happen. He has consistently tried his best to "leash" his followers, but the response has been quite harsh nonetheless. And the whole SV + conservative politics vs. old media angle has made the situation even more intractable.
Calling it "plausible deniability" implies that he condoned any negative results.
I don't believe that to be true, and I do believe that if he'd made no comment at all about contacting the NYT, many - if not most - of the people who contacted them in an unconstructive fashion would have done so anyway.
I do agree that Scott knew what was about to happen - but I think his attempt to guilt trip his followers into not doing it even though he knew it would probably be futile was genuine.
A very drawn out low-spark attempt to whitewash the attempt by a NYT reporter to divulge (de-anonymize in their parlance) the person behind the blog by hiding behind speculation ('would the nyt really do that?') and semantics...
Journalism continues to go downhill and doesn't have a way to stop the trend.
You've heard of the thin blue line, well this is the thin grey line.
There's no attempt to stop any downhill trend. If they wanted that, they'd write to inform and attempt to give all relevant facts. Instead, they curate what the public is allowed to be showed, happily trumping up juicy anonymous rumors one moment and then failing to report well-documented, relevant facts the next.
They're losing because that information is getting out anyhow and every time it does, they lose a little more of the public trust. Gell-Mann amnesia remains in full effect, but a lot more people are simply unplugging. Legacy media is facing something much worse for them than a "war"--they're facing utter irrelevance as people figure out that they're mostly using unlinked online sources anyhow and we can completely bypass the middlemen.
Constant outrage porn is terribly unhealthy for your heart, anyhow, and if you have any friends, you'll hear about anything big enough to be important anyhow and can look into the original sources (if any).
I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientific paper should I care to, rather than some journalist's half-baked summary thereof.
> I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientific paper should I care to, rather than some journalist's half-baked summary thereof.
It's utterly shocking how often news articles summarize a paper incorrectly in some central, significant way. It's gotten to the point that, as you say, reading the paper and the comments on a sufficiently informed forum is my baseline for getting information about science one might care about. That's obviously a lot of work, so you can't do it for everything, but the second-place option is to accept that you're not informed about the topic and don't consider it worth informing yourself about. Reading science reporting is often literally worse than not being informed on the topic at all.
Part of this is not the journalists fault, though. Or it is, but only in the sense that they should be more adversarial.
Very often when I read bad journalism, it's based on a bad academic paper in which the university press or even the paper's abstract has lied about what's actually inside it. To fix this would require journalists to both read and understand the contents of every paper they base a report on. Arguably they need to do that, but, I don't believe that's ever been the standard used before. They generally don't expect "respectable" people like academics, institutional spokespeople etc to flat out lie to them even though it keeps happening.
As someone who works at the intersection of technology and journalism, it hurts to see how many misunderstandings there are in these comments and elsewhere. The tech world (and HN in particular) deeply needs a solid explainer on how journalism works. So many misunderstandings!
(Of course, many/most journalists also need an explainer about the tech world. And that is not to say that some of the more nuanced critiques on journalism or its implementation are not on point — as many journalists would agree! e.g. Jessica Lessin... and Taylor Lorenz https://twitter.com/Jessicalessin/status/1278332719974449152)
> As someone who works at the intersection of technology and journalism, it hurts to see how many misunderstandings there are in these comments and elsewhere. The tech world (and HN in particular) deeply needs a solid explainer on how journalism works. So many misunderstandings!
Are there one or two insights you could share that would make this article seem less bad than many people here perceive it to be?
> And that is not to say that some of the more nuanced critiques on journalism or its implementation are not on point — as many journalists would agree! e.g. Jessica Lessin... and Taylor Lorenz
The criticism isn't limited purely to monetary considerations. There are prestige and partisan political issues at stake here as well. The author touches on the political lens by bringing up the red/blue/grey tribe distinction. As for the prestige, it's worth noting how many prominent figures signed that petition. Some of the public comments of these individuals give me the impression that they trust SSC more than the NYT. My perception (in my own bubble at least) is that even if NYT's subscription revenue is doing OK, the NYT's position as the "paper of record" is in jeopardy.
> these individuals give me the impression that they trust SSC more than the NYT
Anyone who's read both and trust the NYT more has severe reading comprehension issues...
Note that "trust" here doesn't mean "their conclusion is definitely correct". It means trusting what's on the surface of the article: that descriptions of linked-to references aren't completely fabricated or misrepresentative, that some baseline level of honest reading of sources has been attempted, etc.
This isn't quite the apples-to-apples criticism that it appears: NYT has tons of people trying to cover a big chunk of all the events of note happening, and has no way of hiring at scale that narrowly selects for particularly intellectually honest or intelligent employees. Scott is a single person who happens to be really intelligent and quite intellectually honest, and he posts at the cadence he prefers about topics that he thinks he has something valuable to say about. If he had to scale his posting to the level of the NYT's, it's probably get more untrustworthy too.
Sure, I don't think either of those contradict what I'm saying. I have about as low an opinion of the NYT as possible, and have for years. I just wanted to temper my criticism by saying that it'd be more difficult for them to attain trustworthiness than Scott, even if they were run and staffed with intelligence and integrity.
I don't think we are in contradiction either. I think what I'm simply clarifying is why I am making the comparison. One point I am trying to make is that there is a shift in how some people (particularly some influential people) consume information.
I'm not simply criticizing the NYT, I'm saying that it is being replaced (as the authoritative voice on current affairs) by user curated lists of independent writers.
A little over a month ago someone asked what could be done to help with the spread of mis/disinformation present in media outlets and content providers. I suggested that more deliberate media literacy studies as an educational tool could possibly help.
Your comment here reminded me of that, and I think it's just as relevant for this issue as it is other discussions reflecting on our relationship with media and journalism.
Journalists needs to regain trust and credibility by writing with integrity and impartiality and not through a biased, cliquey, activist mindset before worrying about issuing "explainers".
Do the right thing; the explainers won't be necessary.
For all the other reasons that people on this site might hate this article, nevertheless it succeeds in doing the one thing that Scott asked of journalists: that they respect his pseudonym.
Right, I think the article shows a certain lack of self-awareness in places, but I see no reason not to believe that the author's heart was in the right place nonetheless.
> You think the outfit that took down Weinstein cares about some SV tantrums?
Metz cares about access to SV sources, probably. I'll quote Nostalgebraist[0]:
> The journalist also written a soon-to-be-published book about AI work at “Google, Microsoft, Facebook and OpenAI,” whose blurb makes it sound impressed with its subjects, and also touts his “exclusive access to each of these companies.” So, this is someone whose career depends on being in the good graces of the big-name Silicon Valley crowd, and presumably cares a lot whether e.g. Paul Graham is mad at him.
I don't think you can do the sort of work Cade Metz wants to do if the first thing anyone from OpenAI thinks of when you write to them is "oh, it's that asshole that doxed Scott Alexander".
An additional way to protest against their decision is to block nytimes.com on your devices. If you use adguard, nextdns or pihole this is easy to do. If a lot of people do this it will have a big impact, their links get posted a lot here on HN!
I don't think that will get the NYT to listen. A better idea is that if you are a subscriber, unsubscribe and give this as the reason. As recent history proves, the NYT truly listens to cancellations. A bunch of people running pihole, not so much for sure.
If you are a subscriber then a better signal would indeed be to unsubscribe rather than to block the site obviously, most of us probably aren't subscribers though. My guess is they're still earning some ad revenue from non-paying users, so reducing the number of readers should have an impact. I am aware that pihole users probably don't see the ads anyway. It might not make them listen, but I wouldn't underestimate the impact either. If they notice a drop in traffic from a big site like HN it might raise some eyebrows at least. At the same time you would have fewer people sharing the links to their other networks so you would get these second order effects as well. How big would this impact be? Hard to tell, only the nytimes would know for sure. I do feel that at least the people that signed the petition from above should stop using the nytimes. Actions speak louder than words after all.
My belief is that paywalled sources (NYT included) should not be allowed as HN links. It basically just clutters the front page with stuff I can't actually read.
The entire piece is an expression of an ideology digesting a perceived threat to itself and producing antibodies in the form of snide, cognitively limiting tropes. As an example of watching the beast in action, this is a truly valuable specimen.
Highly recommend reading it as an example of the form.
FYI I feel like the language you use is kind of dehumanizing - “the beast in action”, viruses and antibodies when talking about people and what they write, etc.
Not saying that was your intent but wanted to share my impression. Don’t know if it’s just me or if others feels similarly.
When you look in to what that means, dehumanizing seems like a pretty serious accusation. While I can't help with your appeal for sympathy from others, I can offer that this post was about the logic of ideas, abstracted from the people who write them. Doing so treats the people you disagree with as equals, which is about as humanizing as it gets.
Taylor Lorenz is mentioned once in the article, in the 29th paragraph, as an example of “the heightened sensitivity on both sides”
> At the end of last week, Srinivasan and the Times reporter Taylor Lorenz fell into their own public brawl; though it was not directly related to Alexander, it reflected the heightened sensitivity on both sides. Vice obtained leaked audio, from an invite-only app called Clubhouse, in which Srinivasan, who seems to believe that any critical coverage of a technologist must reflect a mistaken assumption, likened the media to a foreign interest: reliance on mainstream reporting, he said, is “outsourcing your information supply chain to folks who are disaligned with you.”
I’m aware - I read the article shortly after it went up.
In a narrow reading of the article, I think this critique tracks. However, given the broader prominence of that particular digital debate and Lorenz’ unique success in centering the discussion online to this purported “SV war on media”, their Twitter situation exists as the girder for the broader arguments in the article.
This article lacks the self awareness or nuance that I was hoping for. I don't think there's a single part where the media is portrayed in a negative light. I think it's save purely by the author's prose.
For example
> "bear the classic markers of grandiosity: the conviction that they are at once potent and beleaguered"
Is only applied to tech not journalism. But is so well written that you ignore that fact."Gray Lady against the Grey Tribe" is great turn of phrase and I hope it catches on.
I've been reading the NewYorker for decades. And this article makes me realize 100M Spotify is paying for Joe Rogan podcast is actually a bargain. Old media is done, they do not have a business valuable outside of adds driven model, all they can fight for is the power to develop narrative(s). In other words, they are fighting for status
Can you elaborate on why this article drives you to think that?
As someone with no stake in the issue (aware of LessWrong but not much else) I found it very interesting and well written and it made me want to immerse myself more in the rationalist community which I found appealing. There was definitely an angle to this piece, like any piece, but I found it only slightly unbalanced.
The unbalance was situated at the judgement of SSC's action of deleting the blog which clearly the reporter didn't view favorably.
Further thinking about it, I would not be surprised if the NewYorker writer collaborated with the NYT reporter on the piece. Taking in account when the blog deletion happened I don't see how the reporter could have done his research on the nature of the blog to such detail without the NYT reporter's material.
1. It makes claims about the SSC readership and the rationalist community intended to invoke an emotional response with little verifiable evidence.
> This plea conformed with the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing
2. It's overly general in how it addresses people involved; it tends to conflate very different people connected by little more than their professed belief in using evidence to make decisions and examining their preconceptions. Using a rationalist psychologist as representative of "Silicon Valley" is evidence of this point.
I may be influenced by the fact the fact that I have a good friend who is an avowed rationalist and I don't believe the broad strokes generalizations in the article represented him.
Also, it fails to grasp what I perceive as the main reason for Alexander's blog takedown, which I think is merely a game theory influenced attempt to prevent the NYT from printing his name, rather than anything more grand.
Your comment makes no sense. The companies that are upending old media, Facebook and Google, also have an ads-driven model. Youtube is ads-driven. Even Spotify runs ads if you aren't a subscriber. And Joe Rogan has sponsors.
The debate I had with someone at work is that these days I can only ascribe legitimacy to an individual that have demonstrated that they are acting in good faith and being intellectually honest. The keyword here is individual. The NYTimes and most subscription news media publishes content by many individuals of varying quality.
In the past, this model had value and individuals like A.M. Rosenthal made a point of carefully curating the individuals that were hired to publish in the NY Times. It's become increasingly clear that as news organizations have faced declining revenue, they've begun to compromise on this curation. The fallout from this starts small and people continue to consider content from the NY Times to have some mark of quality, but eventually it will reach the point where those with integrity will realize that the tools for them to go it alone are out there and they are better off not associating with the individuals the NY Times has hired that do not meeting the historical bar for integrity it once had.
It's not so much that subscription news is dying at the hands of new sources of information, but that it is committing reputational suicide in response to disruptive innovation that allows individuals with integrity to stand on their own.
The problem is that the media has lost people’s trust that it is not going to get things badly wrong or dig up whatever it can on you in the interest of controversy.
If people don’t know if something will be a hit piece, they need to respond as if it is.
I’ve worked with some great and curious journalists. I’ve also known some who don’t care to understand the issues at hand. They just want to write about them.
Can you really be both a public figure and keep your identity hidden by way of asking?
There’s a playbook for this. Look at Banksy for example. If you don’t want your identity out there it’s your job to protect it. Not the New York Times.
Banksy's identity is right on his Wikipedia page for anyone who really wants to know. I think NYT and other media are keeping him "anonymous" by way of asking. They could easily publish his name if they wanted. Unlike SSC, Banksy seems to hold similar political views to NYT, so they have no problem playing along.
The only truly anonymous public figure I'm aware of is Satoshi Nakamoto and I'm pretty sure that the only reason he stayed anonymous is that he died before he could be definitively found out.
> Banksy seems to hold similar political views to NYT, so they have no problem playing along.
Genuinely curious of your basis for this. As far as I can tell SSC and most rationalist adjacents are basically neo-libs which the NYT has been a bastion of for decades.
One belongs to the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912, and the other to 1897 [1].
It’s the narcissism of small differences, and the treatment of heretics versus pagans.
They- the NYT and SSC- do have, probably, 99% overlap politically, but that’s not too far off from the difference between humans and chimps either. It’s that last 1% that really generates a lot of friction between them.
As the article says, Scott would tolerate conversations with vile people and egregious ideas. The NYT would rather dox them.
As a lapsed Baptist and former theology student this has been a favorite joke of mine for years. It has even been a great proverb for demonstrating to friends not familiar with church history the banal origins of the many schisms that has spanned the tree of Christianity. I had no idea it had such a recent or conspicuous origin. Thanks for sharing.
SSC has been critical of the way the news media works in the past. Just because they might fit in the same ideological bucket in your schema doesn't mean that the NYT would see SSC as a friend. I'm not saying that's why we're at this impasse, just that your argument is flawed.
I did not assert that the NYT and SSC should be friends because they have similar political alignment. Whether they are friends or not is irrelevant to my question. The OP indicated that the NYT might be more inclined towards the politics of Banksy than to the politics of SSC. I am simply asking the basis of that assertion. As a casual reader of both they appear pretty aligned with one another politically.
There are a multitude of reasons the NYT might be biased in favor of Banksy and against SSC. But so far as I can tell political alignment is probably not the issue. Though I could be wrong. That is why I asked for clarity.
If you weren't making an argument then I'm sorry for assuming you were.
I'd suggest that you are probably dismissing political alignment too quickly, however. Even if they seem similar to you, the difference might seem important to them. Late Roman Christians fought literal wars over the presence of a letter 'i' in a single word, denoting a difference that probably wouldn't seem all that important to someone who wasn't a Christian, for instance.
I do not follow. The paper seems to be basically the same as it has been for almost a century, an institution which essentially does the work of the news from the perspectives and prejudices of its North Eastern upper middle class constituency and which gives wide deference to institutions which it deems qualified such as the military, civil service and certain NGOs.
But I am open to the idea that my interpretation is missing something.
It doesn't seem like Alexander tried that hard to stay pseudonymous anyway. He has published under his full name.
It seems that his major issue was his full name becoming NYT-level famous, which is reasonable. I think that happens to lots of private citizens who get covered by mainstream news, like a IRL "hug of death".
If my premises are correct, then it doesn't seem like NYT's responsibility to keep his name private when he himself didn't do it.
A reasonable claim of principle, but difficult in practice. Consider that quite a few people believe they know the true identity of Banksy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy
> A second person who checked out the women’s restroom — and who asked not to be identified because she has always wanted to be an anonymous source — reported her findings by email...
> Mr. Moss, which is not his real name — more on that to come — took part in a doomed attempt to save the Café Edison, a beloved Times Square coffee shop whose landlord was looking to replace it with a classier establishment. ... A therapist and a writer, he says he is worried that clients might object to his activism.
"A therapist and a writer", hmmm... who else fits that description? Oh right, Scott Alexander!
> Even when a subject's legal name is known, the NYT regularly uses a pen name or pseudonym to protect their identity. Here are some examples:
I don't think using the examples of performing artists is a good one. Vermin and the Drag queens don't use pseudonyms to protect their identities any more than Beyonce (a stage name that is a part of her legal name, as in SSC's case) or Lady Gaga (a stage name) use those names for "protection" or privacy. They aren't really, they're branding.
In fact, from the draq queen article you cite:
> “I started a big fuss,” said Sister Roma, whose legal name is Michael Williams. “Then Facebook called me and offered to organize a meeting.”
Not that the NYT has any business printing somebody's name who doesn't want it to be printed, but I kind of feel like he had been looking for an excuse to shut down the blog for a while - it had been a long time since any of his posts really felt inspired like they were even a year ago. This gives him an excuse to make a clean break.
I’m genuinely surprised that getting doxxed wasn’t part of his playbook. It’s not like he went to the greatest of lengths to hide his identity, Bay Area psychiatrists named Scott is a pretty small pool of people.
This is pure speculation but my hunch is that the Scott Alexander of a few years ago wouldn’t care about being doxxed. I agree with your take on this. Become a well known writer on the internet and doom yourself to being forced to live by the principles you articulate. It gets claustrophobic and cognitively dissonant after a few years. I think he didn’t want to be married to the content he’d created forever, was looking for an excuse to shut down the blog, and when this NYT thing happened it was a blessing in disguise because it allowed him to shut it down without losing face.
I think Scott Alexander would be very sympathetic to this line of reasoning too.
"It’s not like he went to the greatest of lengths to hide his identity, Bay Area psychiatrists named Scott is a pretty small pool of people."
This is a misunderstanding. He was not trying to prevent "Scott Alexander" -> real name inferences. He was only trying to limit the rate of incidental inferences in the other direction; the primary effect of greatly increasing that rate is to harm his professional life.
That seems at best a very narrow sense of "doxxing." If his name is for all practical purposes already public, and he just does not want readers of a specific newspaper to see his name mentioned, does that really count as "doxxing?"
It's not for all practical purposes public. I'm very tech literate and google-literate, and I have tried multiple times to find his name, and was unable to.
Pure curiosity. I tried it a few years ago, I think because he posted something about keeping his identity secret and I was curious how hard it was to find. Then again with these recent articles I did some basic searching.
Scott, answering to a different question: "I’m not sure what kind of evidence you want me to give. But if you want, you can confirm with Cade that I begged him, at great length, many times, over the course of days, not to use my real name in the article. I gave him a warning that I would delete the blog if he used my real name, in order to pressure him to reconsider, and I only deleted the blog after he refused."
Additionally, this is a much less clean break than "blah blah blah thank you all blah blah blah new projects blah blah blah goodbye" would be. Also, the NYT could have backed down on the spot and he would be expected to put the blog back up.
I detected the same shift in blog content, but figured (or, assumed) it was due to caution given the current political and social climate, more than lack of inspiration.
No, it supports it. Why not use the excuse to shut it down, killing “SSC” forever. He’s no longer tied to those posts or opinions. And then he can create a new blog not linked to it at all, and start fresh.
Wow, this is pretty juicy. I’m surprised that this hasn’t gotten more traction on HN considering the community, plus with Paul Graham / Sam Altman having already directly spoken out in support.
Does anyone have links to the Twitter threads mentioned in the articles? Twitter’s direct search querying is pretty terrible.
The wonders of language. Here you have a hit piece but worded ever so carefully as to seem neutral.
Correct pandemic predictions or no, I still don't get why the media was interested in this blog in the first place.
I have always enjoyed SSC because it reminded me of old (better?) internet. The conversations were intellectually stimulating (much like here), it wasn't on a soc-med platform and as the article mentioned, they are for the most part commited to civil discourse. Its imho everything you would want especially in this age of Stshows like fb and twatter.
This is worth emphasizing. All these folks "worried" about our democracy because of the spread of disinfo on facebook should consider that this was a relatively small tight-knit community that had low risk of spreading outside. Yet the media still showed interest. This is getting ranty, I guess I'm just mad at the things we have to deal with.
>Alexander, whose role has been to help explain Silicon Valley to itself, was taken up as a mascot and a martyr in a struggle against the Times, which, in the tweets of Srinivasan, Graham, and others, was enlisted as a proxy for all of the gatekeepers—the arbiters of what it is and is not O.K. to say, and who is allowed, by virtue of their identity, to say it.
Oh, the irony! The same journalists who report primarily, nowadays, on who next to be canceled due to "problematic" views they may have had years or decades ago now feel that _they_ are having their journalistic freedoms called into question. As though that would not _necessarily_ follow.
Largely used? A scan through my local paper, and frankly most of my experience, is that journalism is largely used to report the news. I'm not going to wade in on the moral debate here, but I count among the new stories in the first few pages today:
3 stories about a major storm that came through last night
1 story about changes to unemployment rules
1 story about a major conference being canceled due to travel restrictions
"Largely" probably was the wrong word. The usage I describe will probably always be a minority, but my assumption is that it's been a relatively constant minority since journalism started. There's always an incentive to demonize and vilify someone somewhere.
Am I the only one who feels like this is just posturing on both sides?
SSC seems to want both fame and anonymity. The New York Times calling him controversial is more self fulfilling prophecy than truth. Both sides seem pretty absurd.
skipped in the article, but the deleted website specifies that the purpose of deletion is partially to ensure that if the Times were to publish an article then they'd also have to answer as to why they needlessly endangered Scott's patients and housemates.
"If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks."
It's clear that Alexander has tried to maintain a level of anonymity for good reason. This article shows how easy it is for any independent thinker to get pulled into a broader "us vs. them" conflict, and be at the mercy of the worst actors from each side.
Assuming you believe Metz and his editor, and note that "angry" is a pretty milquetoast adjective. Usually when people try to engage in nutpicking, they at least cite death threats, which are a dime a dozen online when people are really angry.
I'm sure they were exceedingly efficient at constructing a convoluted pseudo-logical rational at how their abusive behaviour constituted a "winning" strategy.
Maybe Silicon Valley really should have a war against the media. Because right now the media is waging a one-sided war against Silicon Valley. Media coverage of tech has become almost uniformly negative—the way the media used to talk about fracking or Wall Street. Silicon Valley needs to realize that being somewhat liberal on social issues will not protect it from a media that has set its sights on the kind of intellectual and (little “l”) libertarianism that characterizes Silicon Valley.
One-sided? Have you seen what has happened to revenues of news publications since the advent of Google and Facebook? The idea that the tech sector is seriously threatened by the news media is silly. All this fretting about negative coverage basically amounts to persecutory delusion from what is easily the most powerful sector in the US economy.
I was a very loyal reader of SSC and thought I followed the "doxing" incident and fallout rather closely. I read numerous related blog posts about it and followed the discussion on the main remaining discussion space the community has, /r/slatestarcodex.
Never once did I see the comments of said "Bay Area attorney" or Srinivasan, or see them discussed. It's certainly possible they were there and I missed them, but they weren't so important that it was impossible to miss them either. It's these ones the article focuses on because they went overboard in striking back at the NYT in a way not really consistent with the principles of Scott or SSC, in my opinion anyways.
A shame this article is basically trying to use those few hotheads to tar and feather the whole community.
My reading of the article, or at least the second half, is that there's a sort of culture war going on in which "old media" and "new media", journalists and SV, "grey" and "blue".
I was more skeptical until I read the comments section here.
> The mind-set of logical serenity, for all of the rationalists’ talk of “skin in the game” and their inclination to heighten every argument with a proposition bet, only obtains as long as their discussions feel safely confined to the realm of what they regard, consciously or otherwise, as sport.
Contrast and compare with the New Yorker writers and readership who regard their own high-minded observational detachment as art, consciously or otherwise.
I'm saddened by reading most of the HN comments in this thread, the "war against the media" line seems to have actually inspired people to do that, instead of doing the right thing and calling it out as the exact kind of tribalistic nonsense that SSC is all about preventing.
> The Times, although its policy permits exceptions for a variety of reasons, errs on the side of the transparency and accountability that accompany the use of real names. S.S.C. supporters on Twitter were quick to identify some of the Times’ recent concessions to pseudonymous quotation—Virgil Texas, a co-host of the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” was mentioned, as were Banksy and a member of isis—as if these supposed inconsistencies were dispositive proof of the paper’s secret agenda, rather than an ad-hoc and perhaps clumsy application of a flexible policy. Had the issue been with Facebook and its contentious moderation policies, which are applied in a similarly ad-hoc and sometimes clumsy way, the reaction in Silicon Valley would likely have been more magnanimous.
This is a weak defense. What is the actual rationale for doxxing a blogger over their vigorous objection? How do you actually justify this decision on the merits?
My disagreement with this paragraph was with the implication that "these supposed inconsistencies were [intended as] dispositive proof of the paper’s secret agenda", as opposed to the more obvious accusation that there simply was no hard and fast real name policy: perhaps the reporter was mistaken that there were no exceptions allowed, or was not willing to make the case to his editor that anonymity was justified, or had already made the case and had explicitly been denied. Only the last two of these might fall under "secret agenda", and even then it's still more likely to be the opinion of one editor or one reporter than the agenda of the paper as a whole.
The beauty of the article is in exposing the fundamentally emotional, illogical reaction of the SSC's author and associated community. For a group that seems to value dispassionate rationality and intelligence as inherently morally good, their overreaction to this unpublished article is deliciously ironic. Instead of allowing the "marketplace of ideas" to play out, Scott Alexander decided to take his ball and go home.
Ultimately discrediting the "rationalist" ideology was as easy as making them angry.
As I understand your comment, you are arguing that according to Scott Alexander’s principles of free discourse, the New York Times publicizing Scott’s real name should be no different from a random online writer arguing a controversial view, e.g. neoreactionary views. Thus, you say that Scott’s objection to the New York Times publishing its article proves Scott’s hypocrisy, because he allows discussion of neoreactionism but not of his real name.
I think that is an unfair comparison. Controversial ideas such as neoreactionism are part of the “marketplace of ideas” in that both arguments for them and arguments against them can be publicized. Someone who encounters a neoreactionary idea can research additional arguments for and against the idea and use those arguments to decide on their own position.
Unlike an idea in a marketplace of ideas, publicizing Scott’s real name on nytimes.com, a site highly-ranked in search engines, is irrefutable. No matter how many people subsequently post to their own websites arguing that Scott’s real name shouldn’t be publicized, it wouldn’t change Google’s behavior of showing the New York Times article about Slate Star Codex when a psychiatric patient searches for “Scott Alexander [real name]”. Rather than two sides of a figurative ideological war fighting until the stronger idea proves the victor, publicizing Scott’s name would be one side leading the battle with a nuclear bomb.
Additionally, Scott’s real name isn’t an idea that can be argued for or against, not is it relevant to the New York Times reporter’s ideas. Scott suggested in his takedown post that he wouldn’t object so strongly to his name being publicized if it were actually relevant to the article:
> If someone thinks I am so egregious that I don’t deserve the mask of anonymity, then I guess they have to name me, the same way they name criminals and terrorists. This wasn’t that. By all indications, this was […] going to be a nice piece […]. Getting punished for my crimes would at least be predictable, but I am not willing to be punished for my virtues.
Thus, Scott’s takedown of his blog does not prove hypocrisy or ‘[discredit] the “rationalist” ideology’.
I also doubt that the takedown is an “emotional, illogical” action on Scott’s part (no comment on his community). As zucker42 suggested elsewhere in these comments, Scott’s takedown is probably “a game theory influenced attempt to prevent the NYT from printing his name”. Scott saw the upcoming NYT article’s inclusion of his name as a danger to his career and personal safety, and used his blog’s readership to threaten the NYT with bad PR if they followed through with that apparently-dangerous action. Seems reasonable to me. At worst, you could accuse Scott of overestimating the actual danger of the NYT’s action and thus threatening the NYT with a disproportionate amount of bad PR.
1. The content of the article is still unknown. Scott — and from what I can tell most of the rest of the SSC chud community — made an assumption about the ill intent of the author for which there is no evidence. Again the hypocrisy here is delightful given how much of rationalist ideology relies on giving people the benefit of the doubt.
2. Scott's last name is already out there and is ridiculously easy to find. The idea that he was actually anonymous as the author of SSC is silly.
3. There's an implicit admission of guilt in the way Scott anticipates that his clients and the broader public will react negatively to his views. I wonder, what is it about Scott's views that makes him so certain the reaction will be negative? Why hasn't he allowed for the possibility that his clients and the NYT readership will react positively to the article? Couldn't it raise his profile and that of his blog in a way that is beneficial to both?
4. I recognize that this is heresy to rationalist ideology, but his identity matters in a discussion of his ideas, especially his political ideas. It's easier to assess his sincerity or credibility given the background his real identity provides. Is Scott really the Grand Wizard of the KKK in real life? Is he a saint who spends his days serving the homeless? Is he just some guy?
5. If nothing else Scott is making the tactical mistake of adding fuel to the fire. My guess is that not only will the NYT still publish, this entire kerfuffle will almost certainly now be part of the story. Traditional news media thrives on controversy and sensationalism. Scott has just made this whole thing far more interesting and already drawn more attention to himself via the New Yorker article. As of my writing this comment the Google autocomplete for "Scott Alexander" is his last name. His knee-jerk reaction to the unpublished NYT piece has already ensured the loss of anonymity. Seems kind-of irrational.
Starting with #1, why do you believe that "Scott — and from what I can tell most of the rest of the SSC chud[1] community — made an assumption about the ill intent of the author for which there is no evidence."
From what I've seen, everything Scott has written has claimed exactly the opposite. He claimed several times that his expectation was the article would probably be mostly positive. In his explanation for taking down the blog, his words were "It probably would have been a very nice article."
In one of the most discussed postmortems, Scott Aaronson explains why he personally vouched for the NYT reporter and encouraged people to cooperate: "I told Scott Alexander and others that I knew Cade, his intentions were good, he was only trying to understand the community, and everyone should help him by talking to him openly."
While there were a few opinions on the blog pre-shutdown that suspected it would be a negative article, these were generally people who had poor earlier experiences with reporters in general, and weren't specific to this case. Countering them were multiple reports from interviewed posters saying that the reporter seemed genuine and well intentioned.
But somehow you've reached the exact opposite impression: that led by Scott, practically everyone assumed ill intent. Since it's easier to define the opinion of an individual than a group, let's concentrate on just Scott. Could you explain how Scott demonstrated his belief that the reporter had ill intent? Has he written anything that would back this interpretation, or is it based on the assumption he actually believes the opposite of everything that he has said in public? Conversely, what would he have said differently if in fact he didn't assume ill intent?
[1] Chud as in Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller? Or is this a typo I haven't been able to decipher?
I am surprised that the New Yorker decided to publish this. While I admire SSC and Scott Alexander, I did not read SSC regularly or subscribe to even a significant majority of his views, this article is circling the wagons around the Times and the media establishment.
The writer conveniently buries that he used to work at the NYT Magazine somewhere down in the article:
"Until recently, I was a writer for the Times Magazine, and the idea that anyone on the organization’s masthead would direct a reporter to take down a niche blogger because he didn’t like paywalls, or he promoted a petition about a professor, or, really, for any other reason, is ludicrous; stories emerge from casual interactions between curious reporters and their overtaxed editors. Perhaps Metz was casting about for something on Silicon Valley’s good sense on the coronavirus, found Alexander’s post, and thought he’d look into it."
Newyorker's hot takes are lower quality than it's core offering of slowed down reporting about something big. This is no exception. The concluding paragraph seems the most telling. The author seems to simply throw his hands up and say, 'I don't know, this is all about power or media or culture or something.'
I think people here are looking for a deep read of this, but my read is that the assignment didn't interest the reporter and he just tried to rush it.
This is a mistake in the understanding of the situation. The NYTimes and all major press outlets anonymize sources. For example for this article, the NYTimes journalist gave people who spoke with him about SSC the choice to remain anonymous.
The article was going to frame Scott as a subject. The real debate is if subjects of articles also deserve full anonymity. The NYTimes' policy is to generally not give subjects a right to anonymity.
The New Yorker article author does bring up another article the NYTimes published about Chapo Trap House where host Virgil Texas was one of the subjects but also given anonymity.
The question is if the decision not to give Scott anonymity as a subject despite others receiving it in recent history is one borne out of maliciousness, callousness, incompetence or a cultural disagreement between NYTimes reporter and an internet blogger.
No, this part of the situation is both well known and already rebutted. Look at ggreer's comment up thread. They've made multiple exceptions to this policy in the past.
The harm to Scott's patients and their ability to have continuity of care alone should outweigh any supposed interest in needing to know the man behind the pseudonym when the writing under the pseudonym is all that's relevant here.
One of the exceptions is Virgil Texas, whose real name is about five entries down when you google him, and Banksy, whose real name is on his wikipedia page.
On another dimension it's maybe somehow a dig from The New Yorker to the NYT, there seem to be bad blood between them (e.g. Ben Smith's article on Ronan Farrow's writings).
This article could've been a lot worse, but it still suffers from the mistake that the press is axiomatically good and anyone voicing upset at it must be evil and/or have something to hide. If you take that as a baseline assumption, instead of an empirical hypothesis that is looking increasingly shaky, then you're going to end up with an article like this one where the tone clearly conveys who you're supposed to sympathize with in a way that is not supported by the facts.
I think folks who feel like this is a hit piece need to watch out for the biases that Scott himself described in https://web.archive.org/web/20200619200544/https://slatestar.... I don't want to assume that no one has done that accounting, but I want to highlight that it's important.
Some scattered observations:
> Alexander, in another widely circulated essay, published in 2018, has popularized an alternative heuristic—a partition between what he calls “mistake theorists” and “conflict theorists.”
I think it speaks well of the piece that the author spent so much time on mistake theory vs conflict theory. To someone who isn't already an SSC reader, that's probably a pretty boring topic. But it's a big piece of context for what regular readers consider important and interesting. If I were writing a hit piece, or a clickbait piece, I don't think I would've made space for this.
> By their own logic of gamesmanship, some of the positions they tolerate actually have to be extreme, because only a tolerance of a truly extreme position is costly—that is, something for which they might have to pay a price.
This is an interesting take. I don't know if I fully agree with it, but at the same time I don't think it's shallow.
> “Feels like tech pieces would benefit from pre- or at least post-publication peer review by experts in the field, namely the investors and engineers and founders”—in other words, the subjects of stories should be allowed to edit them.
A case of one group misunderstanding the fundamental, traditional values of another group. I haven't thought before about how the "Gell-Mann amnesia problem" might be fundamentally at odds with journalistic objectivity. It's not just that journalists don't have the time or the background to understand technical topics -- it might be that sometimes one must not have that background in order to write about a subject objectively. Or maybe that's one way to be objective, which can work in cooperation with other ways. Who knows. Again, not sure if I totally agree, but it's an interesting observation.
I saw quite a few people here, as well as the two SSC subreddits, going out of their way to encourage polite outreach to the editor and to avoid antagonizing the actual author. So far as to discourage the naming of the author.
Not denying it may be happening, it just does not seem to jive with the majority response (in my bubble).
I'm not sure how directly the cancelling is affiliated with SSC, but the #ghostnyt hashtag is a pretty good cancellation motion. The only thing that's really reached my bubble has been outrage and cancellation, though.
"They tweeted something bad" -> "get them fired," is substantially different from, "the reporters working for this organization are dangerous," -> "don't talk to them." One is going on the offense, the other is defensive.
I'm fairly sure that #ghostnyt was a reaction to the NYTimes airing of the Tom Cotton op-ed. I don't doubt that some SSC fans latched onto it, but I'd be surprised if even a third of those using #ghostnyt were from SSC aligned people.
Was there backlash because the NYT published an opinion some disagree with? Or was PPI going to be exposed that hurt a medical professional maintain his practice?
I think one carries a very real reason for backlash. The other, not so much.
Also, what was being requested? Did Scott make this personal and ask for someone to get fired? If he did, equating this with actions like that makes sense. If not, it makes no sense.
Last, your use of the word tantrum for an adult making rational decisions related to the well being of himself and his patients only highlights your own emotive state.
Personal information that Scott Alexander _already published_ was going to be republished. He's published all his own personal info repeatedly for years.
Deleting a site you've posted on thousands of times is a quality tantrum.
You can consider it an over-reaction. But calling it a tantrum, using that specific word, really highlights your flared emotions. When people resort to value laden language instead of more objective, reasonable language, it says a lot about their mindset.
On the actual subject, scale and magnitude are issues that most rational beings consider. His avoiding people knowing his name on scale makes sense. Our society in general has even codified this difference in law by separating 'public figures' from 'private individuals'. It seems disingenuous to ignore this concern or equate using your name online with having it published on one of the most read publications in the world.
An over-reaction is by definition the result of an emotional response. Pretending that it's not is being just as emotional even if they're pretending to be objective.
> Our society in general has even codified this difference in law by separating 'public figures' from 'private individuals'.
Scott Alexander is far more likely to be on the side of a public figure than a private individual, given the laws we've seen and the way these things play out in court. An example of such a thing is the Sandy Hook school shooting where the parents are considered public figures and not private individuals despite them being thrust into the public spotlight through no action of their own. Note that this codified difference in law matters primarily for defamation cases.
> An over-reaction is by definition the result of an emotional response. Pretending that it's not is being just as emotional even if they're pretending to be objective.
Over-reacting is not 'by definition the result of an emotional response'. I'm not sure why you feel the need to make things up. My immune system over-reacts to many external stimuli and causes allergic reactions. These are not emotional. So you're stating things that are easily and demonstrably wrong. This is the epitome of disingenuous.
> Scott Alexander is far more likely to be on the side of a public figure than a private individual
If you're a lawyer and want to expand on this, I'll listen. Otherwise, your lack of accuracy in previous statements makes me dubious about your argument.
> Over-reacting is not 'by definition the result of an emotional response'. My immune system over-reacts to many external stimuli and causes allergic reactions. These are not emotional. So you're stating things that are easily and demonstrably wrong. This is the epitome of disingenuous.
The dictionary definition of overreaction is "a more emotional or forcible response than is justified". You're attempting to use the clinical definition of an overreaction in place of someone personally overreacting, which is incorrect. He didn't take down his blog as a result of his immune system overreacting, he had an emotional reaction which made him take down his blog. From a rationalist standpoint you're wrong.
> Otherwise, your lack of accuracy in previous statements makes me dubious about your argument.
This would be an emotional reaction to me defining the term overreaction correctly.
> You're attempting to use the clinical definition of an overreaction
Someone can 'overreact when driving' and flip the car on a turn. I regularly over react when playing video games and miss a jump. Companies over react to data and make bad choices.
So not just in a 'clinical definition'. I've given you plenty of examples of over reacting being non-emotional. Even your definition, the one you quote, says that over reactions can be non emotional. An over reaction can be, by the very definition of the word, a reasonable miscalculation of risk/reward without having to imply emotion.
> This would be an emotional reaction to me defining the term overreaction correctly.
Actually, it's quite reasonable that if someone says demonstrably false statements, the next thing they say is put into question. If you choose to see this reasoning as inherently emotional, that's your prerogative, but it seems quite baseless.
Yes, and none of those apply in this situation. It's an emotional overreaction, per the dictionary definition. You seem to be letting your bias cloud the actual definition of the word and the context of which the word was used in, followed by irrationally dismissing my argument based on said bias.
I thank you for your honesty. At least your being open about your position. Too many times people argue against rationality in disguise, acting like they like it but secretly hating it.
My last name is easy to find. My first name is Kurt, I live in Chicago, I work on startups. I've published with my last name within the last decade.
Scott Alexander's last name is also easy to find. His first name is Scott, his middle name is Alexander, he's a psychiatrist, and he lives in Michigan. This is all information he publicized.
And he has also published under his last name, even on SSC, within the last decade.
I'm not sure how to best capture it, but I think there is some irony to be found in the way you state that his last name is "easy to find" and "he lives in Michigan". The first paragraph of the linked article introduces him (correctly, I believe) as "Scott Alexander, the pseudonym of a Bay Area psychiatrist". He once lived in Michigan, but no longer does. One wonders if there is another psychiatrist named "Scott Alexander [something]" who currently lives in Michigan who has been having a really bad few weeks.
I'm confused, are you agreeing with Scott? Both of you have last names that are "easy to find," but neither of you are purposely making it easily available. You both believe that there is a difference between "technically can be found" and "is printed everywhere my pseudonym is." If I were to write your last name in this comment, I would be going against your implied wishes, where your implied wishes are visible because you didn't write it in your comment.
Is the bar for doxing really that low now? My last name is not private. Nor is Scott Alexander's.
My implied wishes (and really, his wishes) aren't terribly important. If either of us do something newsworthy, it's not doxing to attach our name to the news.
Also, if merely linking a real name to a pseudonymous online identity is doxing, then Alexander self-doxxed himself by republishing one of his SSC posts under his real name (while noting their origin) in book published by Springer.
An accurate definition of doxing would contain several components, a few of which would be: it's not doxing if you make the link yourself, and it's not doxing for a 3rd party to repeat the link you made (akin to the first sale doctrine).
Scott Alexander wasn't worried about readers of Slate Star Codex finding out his real name, he was worried about patients who knew his real name finding Slate Star Codex. Using a pseudonym on the blog was a reasonably effective trapdoor function.
Psychiatrists want perfect isolation, so that they can treat everyone from far right nuts to far left nuts to plain unsalted nuts. The only way to do that would be to publish nothing, and surely you must agree that at least some psychiatrists must be cursed with good writing skills and something to say.
Isn't he effectively doxxing his patients by revealing personal information (albeit slightly jumbled)? He's been writing under the thinnest veneer of anonymity and if he's considered about the things he writes affecting his patients, maybe he's either not taking enough measures to be anonymous or shouldn't be writing those things in the first place as a professional.
It's not easy to find, and I know, because I have tried to find it multiple times, and I haven't found it, and I'm quite google-savvy. I don't doubt that I could find it if I put in enough time, or if I was lucky to try the "right" method on the first try. It's probably also significantly easier to find it now that there is a bunch of chatter about it.
Ive never found it either. And there are always comments saying “it’s easy to find” which feeds into the notion that he’s not really anonymous. I don’t buy any of it.
I think the words going unsaid here are 'if you look in the right places', probably because the right places in this situation are not places respectable people want to associate with (for good reason).
Lol, fair point, although I was thinking in the other direction - I may not be able to define a respectable part of the internet, but I can definitely think of areas that are less reputable than others. The chans, etc. And it is pretty much exclusively in those places I have been able to find Scott's irl details.
In the US currently it appears that "cancel" equates to "criticize". There's no nuance possible, seems to me, so why bother?
It's no wonder so many people are not playing the game. Equally so it's telling that "silence equals consent" is the reaction to people checking out of the game - the invested players and GMs really don't like people not playing along.
I think the Harper's letter[0] being viciously attacked on the left is what's hilarious. There are no conservatives remaining in the left media, so they have to find new enemies among each other. This is textbook witch hunt / McCarthyism stuff. I just keep eating popcorn and watching it unfold!
I am speculating on behalf of GP, but I think the reason it might be relevant is because the New Yorker has a far-left bias (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart) and the motivation to go after SSC in the first place (for some on the left) seems to be that SSC's author and comments on SSC were willing to hold objective conversations about race and other touchy matters that the far left often dismisses as off limits (for instance using the label of "scientific racism"). This Harper's letter is in support of open debate, free inquiry, and free thought, and therefore it is in effect in support of SSC.
"Personally I feel the Gray Tribe is just as annoying as the Gray Lady"/ "Well the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both".
> Until recently, I was a writer for the Times Magazine, and the idea that anyone on the organization’s masthead would direct a reporter to take down a niche blogger because he didn’t like paywalls, or he promoted a petition about a professor, or, really, for any other reason, is ludicrous;
Niche? A blog that get's 600K page views a month and is highly regarded (aruably even moreso than the NYT) by numerous intellectuals and public figures?
I will concede that perhaps no one would direct a reporter to take down Scott. However, that leaves open the possibility that they tend to hire the kind of people who would take on that initiative themselves. As Noam Chomsky once told a reporter "I'm sure you actually say what you believe, but you would not have your job if you believed differently".
> For one thing, the S.S.C. code prioritizes semantic precision, but Metz—if Alexander’s account is to be taken at its word—had proposed not to “doxx” Alexander but to de-anonymize him
What, pray tell, is the difference?
> as if these supposed inconsistencies were dispositive proof of the paper’s secret agenda, rather than an ad-hoc and perhaps clumsy application of a flexible policy.
They also have previously given anonymity to a psychiatrist political blogger for the exact reasons Scott asked for anonymity. I think there was really very little differences between Scott and this other blogger, but I'm sure we can all guess what those differences might be.
> They have given safe harbor to some genuinely egregious ideas, and controversial opinions have not been limited to the comments.
Merely arguing against neo-reactionaries (rather than banning the outright/deplatforming them) is considered providing "safe-harbor"? This is why the re-assurances of benign intent don't hold much water.
> in which Alexander explored and upheld research into innate biological differences between men and women. (As it turned out, the Damore memo was written before the post, but there was a noticeable overlap between them.)
If I recall correcty, that post was actually a sort of defense of Damore (or at least a response to Damore's detractors).
> Many technologists and their investors believe that media coverage of their domain has become histrionic and punitive, scapegoating tech companies for their inability to solve extremely difficult problems, such as political polarization, that are neither of their own devising nor within their ability to solve.
Not that I don't share skepticism of SV, but I see no self-reflection here on whether skepticism of corporate media is ever justified.
I found that line calling it Scott a niche blogger a little odd as well given that the article as a whole seems to be designed to establish the greater importance of Scott within the wider Silicon Valley and Rationalist communities. Unless those communities are just small little niche groups, but then why end with "Everyone has skin in the game, and the stakes are high."
I would say the Rationalist community in general is probably pretty niche, but the significance of Scott is that his blog appeals to a much broader audience than the Rationalist community or even Silicon Valley.
> so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous
IMO your comment would be better without the ad-hominems
> anyone expressing heterodox opinions is likely to write something that a reporter working for a mainstream outlet considers "a creditable reason for negative coverage"
I get that you're angry, but this is unsubstantiated by anything you or the article says.
"this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself."
tripletao chose to attack the character of a journalist instead of engaging with the arguments.
I doubt the character of the journalist because of the disingenuous nature of his arguments, not the other way around.
To be clear, do you think Alexander actually intended to conceal a "creditable reason for negative coverage" by deleting his blog? If so, why didn't he e.g. request deletion from the Internet Archive, to at least make the reporter's job noticeably harder? In any case, Alexander surely understands how the Streisand effect works, and that a big public gesture that makes information slightly less available (but still available with modest effort) tends to disseminate that information, not conceal it. So do you really think that was his goal?
And do you think the journalist really believed what he wrote? I don't, and I think he was disingenuously reaching for stuff to smear Alexander with. I think that's ugly.
Finally, I didn't intend to express anger in my last paragraph. I intend to express caution, that anyone dealing with a journalist should consider the possibility that the journalist is out to cause them serious personal harm. This is true regardless of whether that's deliberate and targeted based on their opinions (which I suspect, based on the inconsistent application of the NYT's policy on anonymity, but which I agree no one can prove), or just out of habit (which is fairer I suppose, but doesn't make the harm any less).
First, thanks for responding. I really didn't intend for my comment to derail a discussion so far into the weeds.
> I doubt the character of the journalist because of the disingenuous nature of his arguments, not the other way around.
I believe you experienced it that way. But I don't believe that was communicated well. IMO you intended to make a case against the article but ended up actually make a case against the journalist without addressing any of the article's substantive points. That was the context of my original comment. That is, to me, the comment reads as if the insults are themselves the case you're making against the article. Maybe other people didn't read it that way.
For example, the reporter obviously has access to several of SSC posts. If the reporter believed that deleting the blog caused it to be forever lost to history, then he couldn't possibly have written this piece. So obviously he's aware that at least some of the controversial content of SSC is still accessible. In fact, he believes that enough of the content is accessible to write an entire long-form New Yorker article about the controversial content. So surely he must believe that enough of the content is available to write an NYT article about the content.
So I'm not sure what the existence of the Internet Archive is supposed to say about his character. It doesn't seem to impact his argument in any way, because it's possible to simultaneously know about the Internet Archive and also believe Alexander deleted his blog to dodge/mitigate negative press.
> do you think Alexander actually intended to conceal a "creditable reason for negative coverage" by deleting his blog?
I honestly have no idea. I don't follow the blog. I think it's possible he wanted less scrutiny if his name was going to be released. I believed Alexander's reasoning about the deletion when I read them when this first made the rounds on HN.
> And do you think the journalist really believed what he wrote?
Yes, absolutely. I also believe Alexander believed what he wrote in all his blog posts. I don't think there's a reason to assume bad faith on either party. Journalists have flaws like everybody else, but I think they generally believe in what they do.
> reaching for stuff to smear Alexander with
Again, I don't know anything really about Alexander or SSC, but personally I find this a bit hard to believe. I also don't think it can be inferred from the article. And more to the point for the (IMO extremely boring) ad-hominem debate is: even if he was deliberately looking for things to smear him with, it's still an ad hominem to make the case against the journalist for having an axe to grind. The journalist can both have an axe to grind and also be genuinely saying truthful things.
> I didn't intend to express anger
Fair enough, my apologies.
> that anyone dealing with a journalist should consider the possibility that the journalist is out to cause them serious personal harm
My natural tendency is to bristle at this. I get that journalists do sometimes cause harm. I also get that you want to be cautious about anything you say that might end up circulated in a major paper.
What troubles me is that this fits in with an overall anti-journalist narrative that I've seen a lot on HN recently and in tech in general.
For that reason, my preference is to focus on the content of this particular article and focus less on the angle that this piece might be part of a larger attempt of journalistic nefariousness.
Thanks, and I agree that there's an increased and harmful tendency to assume bad faith in political and other discussion--we should engage as much as possible with the arguments presented, regardless of what motivations we think exist behind them. I try to avoid suspecting bad faith myself, but in this case I didn't see how.
> For example, the reporter obviously has access to several of SSC posts. If the reporter believed that deleting the blog caused it to be forever lost to history, then he couldn't possibly have written this piece. So obviously he's aware that at least some of the controversial content of SSC is still accessible. In fact, he believes that enough of the content is accessible to write an entire long-form New Yorker article about the controversial content. So surely he must believe that enough of the content is available to write an NYT article about the content.
So we agree that the content remains readily available, to journalists and others. So I think that means if Alexander "feared that a Times reporter wouldn’t have to poke around for very long to turn up a creditable reason for negative coverage", then we agree that deleting the blog wouldn't (and didn't) help.
> It doesn't seem to impact his argument in any way, because it's possible to simultaneously know about the Internet Archive and also believe Alexander deleted his blog to dodge/mitigate negative press.
So this is where I don't understand. Alexander surely knew about the Internet Archive (and his e-book, and whatever other countless copies of his popular content existed). So why do you think it's possible that he'd delete his blog in order to dodge/mitigate bad press due to content that a journalist might uncover there, when he knows that action would be ineffective (and indeed probably counterproductive, due to the Streisand effect)? That seems so implausible to me that I'm unable to believe the argument was presented in good faith.
In any case, I agree that journalists do important work, and I have great respect especially for those who reveal information of public importance, against the wishes of powerful governments, companies or other entities that seek to conceal it, sometimes at the cost of the journalists' lives. This (and most "tech" and "culture" journalism) seems pretty far from that, though.
> why do you think it's possible that he'd delete his blog in order to dodge/mitigate bad press due to content that a journalist might uncover there
This is a reasonable question. I don't honestly know enough about the topic to make even a hypothetical argument that such a thing is likely. But it does seem possible any time a high profile blogger shuts down in the face of a news story, that this is one of the reasons for the shut down.
For example, Alexander gives one reason it's possible on his blog: "If there’s no blog, there’s no story." The NYT doesn't really have an incentive to run a story about an ex-blog. So by shutting down, he puts pressure to shut the story down altogether.
Regarding the Streisand effect, I'm not sure. But I think, based on his blog post, that he thinks the story is less likely to run now.
Plus, accessing the blog is now at least an order of magnitude harder. Can you access some of the pages? Sure. Will NYT readers? No, probably not. Search doesn't work, it's painfully slow, only some URLs are snapshotted. It may even be that most readers probably don't even know about the Archive.
So yeah at least to me it seems possible. For example, he's come out as saying he likes eugenics. It's reasonable to fear that if a NYT story ran giving his surname and saying he supported eugenics, then he may have a hard time practicing as a psychiatrist.
I agree that deleting the blog makes it less likely that NYT readers would investigate and find something objectionable, both because the blog becomes less accessible (but not inaccessible) and because if the story doesn't run (as it seems not to have) then there's no readers in the first place. The New Yorker claim was about the NYT reporter, though, not the readers. If I had an embarrassing secret out in public and a reporter was sniffing around, then conspicuously deleting some but not all copies of it seems like the stupidest possible thing I could do, just encouraging them to dig further for it. That's the reason I doubt that could be Alexander's motivation in deleting the blog.
As to the Streisand effect, we're talking about this now at least, and you're aware that he "likes" eugenics[1]--indeed, if anyone's still reading this thread then perhaps they learned that Alexander likes eugenics specifically because of this article, which appeared specifically because he deleted the blog. I can't imagine the NYT reporter doesn't know too. So as a tactic to conceal his writing, I think deleting the blog has empirically failed.
Though I agree that he probably did fear that an NYT story that said "[Scott Alexander's full name] likes eugenics" would harm his ability to practice as a psychiatrist, and reasonably so. Eugenics obviously has an abhorrent history in its purported application, and he treats the subject casually enough to creep me out too. I didn't read his blog extensively, but the creepier stuff always felt to me more like autistic-style disregard for social context than a desire to revive those horrors. I think the remedy to that should be for someone to point that out to him (as they have, of course), rather than for a journalist to quote his worst phrasing out of context and thus end his career.
Uh, no. "You made a bad argument and therefore you are stupid" is not an ad-hominem argument "You are stupid and therefore your argument is bad" _is_ an ad-hominem argument. The OP's comment clearly follows the pattern of the former, not the later, so it is not an ad-hominem.
Bear in mind that tripletao's thesis is clearly that the NY article is a bad faith essay. That's his conclusion, not his premise.
This is one of the most intense HN nerdsnipes I've seen in a while, reminds me of code reviews :P
TL;DR: google.com -> define ad hominem -> "(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining" -> go back to the quote we're arguing about, it reads: "so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous" -> looks like those are words directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining
y'all are mistaking doing a technical word by word breakdown of an argument and picking which words are which logical fallacies with, well, the definition of ad hominem
Dear God, the number of people who think any kind of insult constitutes an ad hominem would be hilarious if it wasn't so depressing.
Ad hominem means you're replacing a reasoning based argument with character attacks. Throwing in character attacks on top of a reasoning based argument -- especially when the insults are just used as a conclusion -- is not what an ad hominem is.
This is important, because the fact that this is what an ad hominem is, is why it's considered a logical fallacy. "Your argument is dumb because of X & Y, and also I think you suck" is not a logical fallacy. There is no fallacious thinking there.
"I think you suck, therefore I don't even have to bother refuting X & Y, they're automatically wrong because of how much you suck" clearly is a logical fallacy: just because someone sucks, doesn't mean any possible reasoning of theirs is automatically invalid.
It took me a moment to realize that the poster is trying to use a different definition of ad-hominem which isn't actually a logical fallacy. He's just criticizing the fact that the OP is bothering to criticize article's author at all. Personally, I don't like that usage because it cheapens the definition of ad-hominem and makes it harder to call someone out when they make an actual logical fallacy.
I'm not "trying to use" a "different definition" - I used the dictionary definition as a reasonable middle ground, and you keep using dehumanizing language as if I'm not here as well, and repeatedly asserting I'm trying to trick you, when the difference here is fairly simple and clear to you. Be well.
It's a sort of bait and switch tactic. They're relying on the notion that an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy, which everyone agrees is bad, an invalid method of argument.
Except that they're using a uselessly vague definition of ad hominem that amounts to "any insult", which is extra stupid because we already have a word for that: insult. So why even use the Latin, then, other than to make yourself sound fancy?
Please try to be civil - accusing people of lying to win an argument is bad faith and doesn't belong on HN.
You may also note that having a "word for that already" is also called a "synonym", and we don't accuse people of bait and switch, misrepresentation, being uselessly vague, and making themselves sound fancy because they say "synonym"
> accusing people of lying to win an argument is bad faith
I didn't do that. I accused someone of using a cheap -- though fairly common -- type of rhetorical trick. It's a form of motte and bailey, which is itself a logical fallacy.
Is accusing someone of using a logical fallacy against the rules of HN as well? Would be ironic in the current context.
You might prefer a looser definition of ad-hominem, but I think that the technical definition holds value. This looser definition reads like a means of implying that the poster's intent was different that what it was.
It is mildly humorous that we've gotten this far in and you're telling me "hm I don't like the definition in the dictionary, we should pick something more technical" (???)
I have a CS and law degree and IMHO the divide here is the CS people tend to believe "ad hominem" has a technical definition beyond, well, the definition
> "(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person >> rather << than the position they are maintaining"
You seem to have missed the operative word there: rather.
Saying that someone's argument is bad so they must be real dumb means you're saying "A (the reasoning attack) implies B (character attack)", not "B (character attack) means I don't have to even bother with A". The latter is an ad hominem, the former is not.
An ad hominem here would be, "jesus I already know this author is so dumb/bad that I don't even have to bother addressing any of their arguments". "This author's reasoning is awful, so clearly they're dumb/bad" is simply not the same thing.
I cannot believe you went ad hominem and wrote all that to justify making up a definition for ad hominem because you're not happy with the dictionary definition.
Be well, sir. I'll try to digest later, not in the mood when it starts off with "ah HA my interlocutor is being intentionally obtuse, that explains why they believe in dictionaries! If I just tell them that, I'm sure it'll be convincing!"
Edit: Alas, it appears I can no longer read it, got flagged. Must have been even worse than the bit I did read :/
No, they engaged the arguments, and then also made a character attack based on their reasoning.
If you, in the midst of a counter-argument, point out that someone was lying in their original argument, calling them a liar is not an ad hominem. It's a conclusion.
you're the 3rd reply saying this so I don't have much hope of fighting the crowd, but, this is pretty much as ad hominem as it gets. The reasoning provides two and only two options for which flaw the speaker exhibits as evidence for the argument
So what's the third option? Do you believe that Alexander deleted his blog because he was trying to hide something, as the sentence I quoted implies?
If so, why did he take an action that he must have known would draw wide public attention (from a wide audience, including people much less sympathetic to his opinions than his usual readers), while leaving the content available with only slight inconvenience? You can read his blog on the Internet Archive now, and cherry-pick whatever fragments you want. As another poster notes, the IA does allow webmasters to request removal, but he doesn't seem to have done so.
This whole thing flummoxes me and honestly I don't care enough to speculate on it. I do believe that's a reasonable explanation for his behavior, and most definitely reasonable enough that I don't need to accuse the writer of bad faith.
When I first heard about it on Twitter two weeks, there was a ton of angry mob behavior and unfounded assertions over a non-anonymous writer's claim that he was going to be made non-anonymous by a newspaper article.
I have an mob budget, and can't afford anymore on this topic until the non-anonymous writer is named by the newspaper article, and I'll give him a 2 for 1 at that point and keep pretending his name isn't readily available and hear out his argument further.
Since you don't propose a third possibility, it seems like you just didn't like my language? If I wrote "the reporter is either unaware that widely-available backups of the blog exist (despite apparently quoting from one in this story), or trying to create public speculation that something damaging about Alexander might be true when he knows it to be false", then would you agree with me?
yes, that is why this thread exists. grandparent of grandparent telling you that you would have won significantly more hearts and minds by skipping the attacks
> Since you don't propose a 3rd possibility
n.b. off the top, the whole problem here is you're reasoning about this like you're omniscient because theres a finite # of logic gates, but we're human and know there isn't a finite number of possibilities, so it's nails on a chalkboard in what otherwise is a coherent argument
I affirmed the 3rd (n.b. of many!) possibility you offered already, so I won't waste your time by reaffirming it
I'm confused, and I'm not sure what you mean by the "3rd possibility [I] offered already". The New Yorker reporter suggested that maybe Alexander deleted his blog in order to conceal something bad that he'd written there from the NYT. That seems like a serious accusation to me, and I believe:
1. That this accusation is overwhelmingly likely to be false, because deleting the blog while leaving countless mirrors won't actually conceal what he wrote (and will actually popularize it short-term, due a sort of Streisand effect), and Alexander knows that, and Alexander is unlikely to take an action that would be futile or counter-productive.
2. That (1) is sufficiently obvious that the New Yorker reporter had to realize it.
3. That the New Yorker reporter published the accusation anyways, in bad faith (i.e., disingenuously, while knowing or believing that it's false), in order to smear Alexander.
For each step, do you agree or disagree? From your reply earlier, it seemed like you were simply declining to take a position? But you call it an otherwise coherent argument; so maybe you agree the New Yorker reporter probably did write in bad faith? So is our disagreement just whether it's okay to call a reporter for a major magazine who uses that platform to falsely degrade a pseudonymous blogger's reputation "stupid or disingenuous"? I agree that's an insult and not too polite, but it didn't seem particularly harsh given the public smear.
For what it's worth, I agree that my original post was generally flippant, because I was in a hurry and I strongly disliked the article. If you read through my post history, then you'll see that I typically write with more nuance (and that those posts get much less engagement, I guess demonstrating what everyone already knows about social media).
It sounds like we agree, ignoring qualifiers like subconclusion: the lanuage was directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining, the definition of ad hominem is "(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining." QED.
No it's not. An ad hominem is saying, "your character sucks, therefore your argument must be wrong", or focusing your attack mostly on their character rather than any line of reasoning. Throwing in an insult here and there may be poor form, but that does not an ad hominem make.
Especially when the character attack is a result of the line if reasoning you're making. If your whole argument is, "between X and Y and Z, we can see that Politician is corrupt", calling them corrupt is an insult but not an ad hominem.
That's not how it works. It's on the party making the assertion to have proof. So far, the "yes that's an ad hominem" side seems disinclined to provide any evidence or engage directly.
Anyway, from Wikipedia's explanation:
> Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion to some irrelevant but often highly charged issue.The most common form of this fallacy is "A makes a claim x, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument x is wrong".
Note that "rather" in the explanation. It's a matter of substituting character attack for reasoning critique. "Based on their shitty reasoning, I conclude that they're real dumb" is not an ad hominem in the least, it does not fit the definition, the causation has to go the other way.
Please try to be civil, things like "That's not how this works, you give the definition and example" and "So far, the "yes that's an ad hominem" side seems disinclined to provide any evidence or engage directly." are factually untrue and ad hominem, we're downthread from me doing exactly that.
Okay, I'll try to refrain from that where it's unwarranted. That's a fair critique. Though you didn't address my argument here.
You seem to be thinking that that definition means that a character attack at literally any point in an essay or report constitutes an ad hominem. It's not: the 'rather' implies a substitution, where the character attack essentially is the reasoning used.
If I do an investigative report on a campaigning politician, detailing that he once beat his wife, neglected his kids, cheated on his taxes, etc. and then concluded that "his morals appear to be rather severely in question", that's a character attack, but it's not an ad hominem.
Calling someone names is not ad-hominems. Saying that someone is wrong because of the aforementioned names would be ad-hominems, but the GP didn't do that.
It is there with folks who know about those people and feel connected to them. SSC has a lot of it's audience on HN. Hence you see the outrage here. People can't feel similarly outraged by every doxxing since they have limited time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. If people were forced to worry about issues just on their impact, a large number of kids are starving in Africa, and by that logic people shouldn't worry about anything else till they can do something about that.
In my opinion the best reason people are interested in this situation is Scott Alexander is considered to be NOT someone who will unquestioningly ride an empty wave of reactionary outrage if it's pointed in an advantageous direction:
People are hoping rational thought can be used to change norms when something bad happens.
That's why this is interesting and different than a thousand other sad situations involving people who likely don't have the tools to solve it in that way.
"War against the media" strikes me as ridiculous hyperbole in this context. I have met some of these people in real life, and none of them expressed that attitude to me, nor any kind of utopian superiority. It seemed like they were just trying to live morally considered lives and improve themselves a little at a time if they could -- and maybe do a little networking.
I think if Scott knew that his blog would get so big it would screw up his career and living arrangements, he probably wouldn't have published it in the first place. That might have been a lapse of judgment, but begging the NYT not to make him mainstream famous is hardly war on the media.