Scott Alexander, a very, very popular blogger deleted his blog because the NYT was going to dox him. After uprooting his life to deal with that he has returned to blogging. Many people expressed their support, for which he is very grateful. The NYT is still committed to doxxing people if they feel like it, which Scott abhors. As part of radically changing his life he quit his previous psychiatrist job and is going to see if it’s possible to make a living treating the uninsured for a lot cheaper than most psychiatrists. He signs off with his real name.
So just now I did a small experiment. I used Google to try to figure out his last name. It was pretty hard, took me a good ten minutes, but not so hard once I went to image search.
On the other hand, once I had his last name, I typed it into Google and I immediately had search suggestions for slate star codex.
So if, as I understand it, the worry was that patients of his would discover based on his actual name that he was writing on the side, well, that cat was well out of the bag NYT or not...
Robin Hanson had a 2013 blog post titled "Hail Scott Siskind" - the surname was redacted from both the post title and the URL slug sometime between 8 Jan [1] and 24 June 2020 [2] (Slate Star Codex was deleted on 22 June 2020 [3]).
So if a patient had googled "Scott Siskind" before the NYTimes contacted him, they may well have found the post linking the name to the blog.
Alexander's name was public (in fact: it was, before the drama occurred, exposed by one of the most naive possible Google queries for it --- as well, some of his better-known writing was originally published under his real name) prior to his encounter with the NYT; Alexander's demand was that the NYT pretend the fact of his name was a secret. The principled arguments about how the NYT was in the wrong revolve around an NYT story simply being more visible than the other public places you could read his name; of course, that's true for practically anybody and any source, the NYT being one of the most visible sources in the world.
He gives good reasons for not wanting his name more public than it already is; they're hard to argue with. But some genies are hard to put back in the bottle, and reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which the NYT is obligated to help with the attempt.
> reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which the NYT is obligated to help with the attempt
Just framing the issue this way tilts the playing field in the NYT's favor. As Scott says in the article, in the NYT's worldview, they start with the right to dox anyone they like, but if you make a strong enough case, maybe they'll decide not to dox you. But why should the right to dox be the default? Why shouldn't respecting everyone's privacy be the default?
The notion that everyone is entitled to cooperative anonymity is a message board meme, not an actual norm of society. It has never been the case that journalists have honored a right to public pseudonymity. I am allergic to the argument that, because something is a norm on HN or Reddit, that norm binds on the rest of the world. HN and Reddit are in a variety of ways fucked up places that operate on principles not necessarily compatible with civil society --- nor is that HN's job!
There are comparable norms on HN that you can imagine someone trying to infect the real world with. For instance: on HN, it violates a norm to pull in things someone has said on other sites (like Twitter or Reddit) as a way of impeaching their authority in a discussion here. That norm makes sense on HN; the collaborative discussion we are having here doesn't work if people flagrantly violate it. But that's a downright dysfunctional norm to import into ordinary life, where the things people say in different places are profoundly relevant to their reputation and credibility.
In multiple very real ways, "journalism" is about doxing, the way medicine is about pharmaceuticals, or woodworking is about joinery.
> It has never been the case that journalists have honored a right to public pseudonymity.
Even if this is true, that doesn't make it right.
> ordinary life, where the things people say in different places are profoundly relevant to their reputation and credibility
That depends on why you are interested in their reputation and credibility. I'm not saying there are never cases where it's justified to reveal things the person would rather not reveal. But "we're writing a story and we have a policy" is not enough justification (even if the policy is consistently understood by all the newspaper's employees, which it doesn't seem like it was in this case). There needs to be an actual reason why people have a right to know details about a person that that person would rather keep private, and it has to be a strong enough reason to outweigh that person's choices.
In this case, we're talking about someone's blog, and the whole point of a blog is that it stands or falls by what is written there and what is referenced there, and personal details about the writer that aren't included are irrelevant. So it seems like this is an obvious case where a choice to remain anonymous should be respected.
No, it doesn't depend on why. You hear this all the time on message boards; for instance, it's at times been an article of faith around here that reference checks aren't OK, unless they're directed specifically to people candidates provide as references. But that's not how reputation works in reality! In reality, people can share unfavorable information about you for their own reasons and, as long as that information isn't false, there really isn't much you can do about it. Nor should you be able to! You can't coerce random people into not sharing true things about you.
You italicize "blog", like there's some important norm of "blogging" that was violated here, but Alexander wrote that blog for years under his own name, and, as I said upthread, some of his better-known pieces originally bore that name. I get that he had a bad experience when employers came across it, and can totally understand why he'd want to undo the decision to publish his name. But that doesn't mean he can.
God help me if I ever try to, like, run for village trustee where I live, and someone thinks to look my name up on this site. Can I reasonably ask the Chicago Tribune to forget about my real name, and use some different one instead? If not, where's the line between me and Alexander?
Ultimately, I think the NYT made the right decision here: that Alexander simply isn't important enough to publish a profile under these fraught circumstances. But the next person in this situation might not fit that fact pattern; they might actually be important, not just a "blogger", and it'll be important that nobody in the NYT buys into this message board kabuki dance about how we have to cooperate to maintain a psuedonymity anybody who can reach Google can puncture.
To be clear, the norm I am describing has nothing to do with "message boards" or even with the Internet. It has to do with the stated justification for journalists publishing information about people that they would rather keep secret. That justification is "the public's right to know". That has always been the stated justification, for as long as there have been journalists. And in cases where that justification did not apply, journalists were supposed to not publish that kind of information. That is not something that Internet message boards invented.
Alexander's point is basically that the mere fact of him writing a blog, even a blog that got popular, did not mean the public had a right to know personal information about him that he chose to keep secret. (Yes, I know it wasn't actually secret, but it was still, as he notes in the article, quite a bit more secret than it would have been once published in the NYT. More on that below.) I agree with him.
> it's at times been an article of faith around here that reference checks aren't OK, unless they're directed specifically to people candidates provide as references
I agree there is no such "rule" in reality, but this has nothing whatever to do with journalism or journalistic norms, which is what is involved in Alexander's case, so it's irrelevant to this discussion.
> In reality, people can share unfavorable information about you for their own reasons and, as long as that information isn't false, there really isn't much you can do about it. Nor should you be able to! You can't coerce random people into not sharing true things about you.
In terms of what people can do, yes, you are absolutely right. People can do these things, and there isn't much one can do to stop them.
But that in no way means they should do these things just because they can.
> You italicize "blog", like there's some important norm of "blogging" that was violated here
No, I italicized "blog" to make the point that it's not a big deal. It's just stuff that someone wrote about stuff that interested him. It's not nuclear weapons secrets or diplomatic communications or official pronouncements whose provenance needs to be verified. In short, it wasn't the kind of thing where "the public's right to know" was even involved.
> Alexander wrote that blog for years under his own name
No, he wrote a different blog, which, as he explains explicitly in the article (and as you note), he took down when he realized that having it under his own name was causing issues. The blog of his that the NYT wanted to write about was not the one he wrote under his own name, and had no visible connection with that older blog of his; what's more, the NYT article had nothing to do with that older blog of his, and as far as I can tell, the NYT wasn't even aware of it. So the fact of its existence is irrelevant to any judgment about what the NYT did.
> where's the line between me and Alexander?
Simple: Alexander wasn't running for office. Or doing anything else that would imply "the public's right to know". He was just writing stuff.
> The notion that everyone is entitled to cooperative anonymity is a message board meme, not an actual norm of society ... I am allergic to the argument that, because something is a norm on HN or Reddit, that norm binds on the rest of the world.
Well, luckily, neither Scott nor any of the ancestor comments uses "it's a norm on message boards" as the sole justification for their position. Or, indeed, as justification at all, from what I can see—that seems to be an argument you brought in.
Instead, they talk about the expected negative impacts of name-publishing: death threats, loss of professional opportunities (citing examples of what's happened to other people and to Scott himself in his earlier career), etc., while also saying there's no positive impact to name-publishing. In other words, they argue for the norm on its own merits.
The NYT is free to say "Yeah, we'll cheerfully do this unnecessary net-negative-impact thing for no good reason we've been able to articulate", but they should suffer reputational costs for that. Even if—or especially if—that thing is standard operating procedure for them.
When you begin to publish opinions prolifically, you have to consider that it could result in things like a loss of professional opportunities. You might decide to go ahead and use a pseudonym, but there's no right or expectation in the real world that your works must not be attributed to you.
You can blame the NYT but Scott's basic problem is that he published a bunch of stuff on his blog that could interfere with his practice as a psychiatrist. When you have multiple sources of significant income it's not abnormal for conflicts of interest to arise. It's not really a journalist's responsibility to protect them. The rule that they identify the WHO in their story is a good one.
It could be a norm in journalism that trans people are referred to by their birth names.
In fact, it used to be. It was a bad norm, we changed it.
I don't think this should be an unprincipled exception, that journalists should casually refer to people in ways they don't want to be referred to, unless they happen to be trans.
I think it should be the rule. Because not doing that makes you an asshole. And journalists shouldn't be assholes.
Sure, but this wasn't about calling Lana Wachowski "Lana" instead of "Larry", but rather about disclosing that Lana was formerly known as Larry, which is something the NYT still does.
And, of course, not all norm changes are bad. But I'm suspicious of norms imported from message boards, especially if they have the effect of depriving people of information. Better, in a situation like Alexander's, that the article simply not get written --- which is what happened.
Presumably the NYT would be referencing "Larry Wachowski" for some deliberate purpose, like tying into previous work or detailing some aspect of being trans. Bringing up the past is unavoidable if its an integral part of the story.
This situation is more like reporting on someone who transitioned long ago, didn't do anything of note before then, doesn't broadcast trans as part of their public identity, and yet NYT still felt the need to inform everyone that they used to be a man. We'd rightly question their motives for that unkindness.
One of the most popular beauty vlogger (NikkieTutorials) is trans. She became the most popular before that was publicly known about a year ago.
Would it have been ok for a newspaper to write about "One the most popular beauty vlogger" and then add somewhere in the article: "oh some other factoid she was able to keep hidden all these years: she's trans!"?
> The notion that everyone is entitled to cooperative anonymity is a message board meme, not an actual norm of society.
Is the notion of "right-to-anonymity-on-the-internet" about as old as "the internet is a common thing in human life"? I assume it predates HN and Reddit, but unsure when it started.
> It has never been the case that journalists have honored a right to public pseudonymity.
I imagine this could be answered empirically by finding articles -and the reaction to said articles- that revealed the true identity of a similarly situated pen-name writer. But I'll take your word for it.
Maybe I just come from a different part of the Internet than you do --- the parts I came from involved a little bit more X.25 --- but where I came from, "doxxing" people was a sport, not a transgression. I think this norm really does come from 2000s-era message boards.
> But why should the right to dox be the default? Why shouldn't respecting everyone's privacy be the default?
If there is no danger (legal (i.e. whistleblower sources) or physical) then accountability for people to stand by their /should/ reduce 'fake news' where people can just say whatever they like.
Don't forget that we've just come from a world where the US president would continually cite "people are saying". Which people? Name them.
> accountability for people to stand by their /should/ reduce 'fake news' where people can just say whatever they like
The way you do that is to look at what sources the person gives for the claims they are making. Not by revealing personal details that the person has chosen to keep private, and which are irrelevant to the claims they are making.
Scott Alexander was pretty meticulous about citing sources, so to say he should have been doxxed to "preserve accountability" is way off the mark.
I was responding very specifically to "But why should the right to dox be the default? Why shouldn't respecting everyone's privacy be the default?". I'm not speaking in the context of the article because the article depends on a whole bunch of other articles that were deleted, not linked to, or not published:
> I think the New York Times wanted to write a fairly boring article about me, but *some guideline said they had to reveal subjects' real identities, if they knew them, unless the subject was in one of a few predefined sympathetic categories (eg sex workers)*. I did get to talk to a few sympathetic people from the Times, who were pretty confused about whether such a guideline existed, and certainly it's honored more in the breach than in the observance (eg Virgil Texas). But *I still think the most likely explanation for what happened was that there was a rule sort of like that on the books, some departments and editors followed it more slavishly than others, and I had the bad luck to be assigned to a department and editor that followed it a lot.* That's all. Anyway, *they did the right thing and decided not to publish the article*, so I have no remaining beef with them.
Stopping people from putting out Fake News is less important than protecting people from having their lives ruined by a mob for daring to voice heterodox opinions. Anonymity and Pseudonymity protect the weak, not the strong- in that they protect from punishment.
That's supposed to be covered by the policy of protecting sex workers and the like. I think we all agree with you in spirit and we only differ in how we rate the implementation.
But the point is that it the default shouldn't be being NYT exposing you, unless you can make a appeal that puts in you one of the Socially Correct Categories (according to the NYT!).
I want the default to be revulsion for doxing, and widely-used strong pseudonymity or anonymity, whereas from what you've said it seem you'd rather people's real names were out there by default.
Fundamentally the journalist has to make a call to dox or not.
People who took advantage of tax havens as described in the Panama Papers - good to dox.
People who obtained the Panama Papers - bad to dox.
People who fund special interest groups trying to support $GOOD_GOVERNMENT dissidents (e.g. jan6 activists) - good to dox.
People who fund special interest groups to support $BAD_GOVERNMENT dissidents - bad to dox.
There is a great deal of taste involved. Sometimes they will get it wrong. In the example we have in front of us, it worked itself out in the end. In the case of e.g. _why, it did not work and he supposedly quit the Ruby community.
If you are a dissident and want to remain anonymous I urge you to not rely on anyone to keep your information secret for you. Use signal, tor, etc.
But the nytimes wasn't try to hold him him accountable. They were writing a positive piece about his blog.
The question isn't should you dox your enemies who you are trying to hold accountable. It's should organizations just default to doxing anyone online they write about even when their full name has no relevance to the story and that persons asks them not to?
Should it be illegal? No. Was the NYT a dick about it? Yes
Media in the US is a competitive field, so if a newspaper (NYT or other) withholds information that another media also has access to, then another media will likely publish the story anyway. In the US it's ok to republish facts that were published elsewhere, even if someone had sought at some point for the facts to remain secret. The same principle also gives us things like revenge porn, mugshot publishing, and the like. Some places might have more protections against publishing information, for example when it relates to private persons, but usually in the US what I've seen is that it ends up considered to go against the principle of free speech.
> so if a newspaper (NYT or other) withholds information that another media also has access to, then another media will likely publish the story anyway
and yet, a bunch of other news organizations wrote about the issue without disclosing his name.
Which news organizations are you thinking of? The top tier newspapers are the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, and the LA Times. It's less interesting if, like, Reason wades into the controversy about story and doesn't deliberately poke a stick in Alexander's eye. Frankly, at the point where we're batting the process story around rather than the substantive piece about Alexander, even the NYT would be unlikely to use his real name; what would be the point?
Sure, but again, this is a story about the controversy. I knew Alexander's real name when the story broke a few months ago, and I flagged posts here that used it, because again: what would be the point? But in a profile of Alexander in the NYT? With his name so obviously available? Why would the NYT be obligated to pretend they didn't know what his name was, or to collaborate with Alexander on how best to portray him? They're reporting on Alexander, not for him.
First, you responded to a comment saying other news organizations wrote about "the issue" without using his name with a request for examples, so the New Yorker is one.
Second, the NYT isn't obligated to withhold his name, just like the NYT isn't obligated to pretend what Trump says makes sense, or to fact-check its own Iraq WMD reporting, or to publish Tom Cotton, or to publish CCP apologia for the Hong Kong crackdown. It's just making a bunch of decisions that positively and negatively impact its reputation. [Considering] publishing Scott's last name was one that negatively impacted it with no appreciable upside; nobody who read a putative article about him without his real last name would have cared.
I think the proposed Alexander article hurt the NYT's reputation among a cohort of potential readers who firmly believe in Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect and have weird ideas about journalism to begin with. I don't think it cost them meaningfully. I am certain that the way Alexander handled the situation more or less ensured that his name would be on the tips of lots of people's tongues --- that's the infamous "Streisand Effect" in action.
I don't so much care about Alexander. I won't use his real name, because there's no upside to it for anyone here or on HN. I do care about the idea of Reddit norms infecting journalism; that sounds horrible, because Reddit is atrocious at journalism.
I didn't say it was a large effect, I just said it existed. Do you think there were any negative effects to just leaving his pseudonym to stand, like they did for Banksy?
Editing to add:
> I don't so much care about Alexander. I won't use his real name, because there's no upside to it for anyone here or on HN. I do care about the idea of Reddit norms infecting journalism; that sounds horrible, because Reddit is atrocious at journalism.
You can feel free to use his real name, he does so himself in the article we're discussing.
I don't really see how Reddit enters into any of this apart from you just carrying a weird grudge against it. I don't personally care for Reddit culture either, but it doesn't make a ton of sense to me that it should matter in this case.
His concern was not that people familiar with his blog could deliberately find his real name, but that patients who searched for his real name would find his blog, which would make him unable to do his job. He justifies his concern pretty convincingly in the first post on the new blog.
Exactly. The concern was that you'd immediately and mostly find Slate Star Codex (or NYT articles discussing it) when googling "Dr Scott Siskind", i.e. the name of your psychiatrist. The other direction, successfully googling "Scott Alexander real name" is much less problematic.
If I was writing a blog post about an online persona and they requested that I not use their real life name due to fear of job loss or violence, and their given name added no journalistic value to the piece, I'd be a real dick to print their name anyway.
I don't think anyone at the NYT intended to cause him any harm, but organizationally they acted like a dick.
It's your last predicate there, about "journalistic value", that the whole debate take place within. Further: the NYT will studiously refer to Lana Wachowski as Lana, and not Larry, because deadnaming people is a dick move. But the NYT does not avoid pointing out that Lana used to be named Larry.
I don't see any "journalistic value" in linking Scott Siskind to Scott Alexander. I don't remember anyone at the NYT or elsewhere arguing there was any value. (Plenty of publications posted about the incident without dropping his irl name). Do you think there was journalistic value in linking the two in this instance?
The key word in the sentence "I don't see any journalistic value in linking Scott Siskind to Scott Alexander" is "I". But it's also an easy argument to knock down: he wrote other stuff under his real name. It's valuable to know there's a link between those writings and the writings he chooses to surface today.
Unless there are some of his writing I'm not familiar with, he's written under Yvain, Squid, shireoth(sp?) and he's published a journal article under his real name.
Having written something online under your real name is a bar that is so low that effectively everyone meets it.
