NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog
PS: One suggestion I have is to allow anonymous posts on Lesswrong that show the author’s anonymized karma. This is far from a good or complete solution, but I imagine it would at least come in handy in situations like this.
In general, responses I've seen so far to this have seemed to come more from a "conflict theory" (rather than "mistake theory") interpretation of what's going on. And perhaps too much so.
I thought these comments by ricraz were a good contribution to the discussion:
...Scott Alexander is the most politically charitable person I know. Him being driven off the internet is terrible. Separately, it is also terrible if we have totally failed to internalise his lessons, and immediately leap to the conclusion that the NYT is being evil or selfish.
Ours is a community *built around* the long-term value of telling the truth. Are we unable to imagine reasonable disagreement about when the benefits of revealing real names outweigh the harms? Yes, it goes against our norms, but different groups have different norms.
If the extended rationalist/SSC community could cancel the NYT, would we? For planning to doxx Scott? For actually doing so, as a dumb mistake? For doing so, but for principled reasons? Would we give those reasons fair hearing? From what I've seen so far, I suspect not.
I feel very sorry for Scott, and really hope the NYT doesn't doxx him or anyone else. But if you claim to be charit
But if you claim to be charitable and openminded, except when confronted by a test that affects your own community, then you’re using those words as performative weapons, deliberately or not.
I guess "charitable" here is referring to the principle of charity, but I think that is supposed to apply in a debate or discussion, to make them more productive and less likely to go off the rails. But in this case there is no debate, as far as I can tell. The NYT reporter or others representing NYT have not given a reason for doxxing Scott (AFAIK, except to cite a "policy" for doing so, but that seems false because there have been plenty of times when they've respected their subjects' wishes to remain pseudonymous), so what are people supposed to be charitable about?
If instead the intended meaning of "charitable and openminded" is something like "let's remain uncertain about NYT's motives for doxxing Scott until we know more", it seems like absence of any "principled reasons" provided so far is already pretty strong evidence for ruling out certain motives, leaving mostly "dumb mistake" and "evil or selfish" as the remaining possibilities. Given that, I'm not sure what people are doing that
...Tl;dr: A boycott is the central case here, not cancel culture. We need to promote a measured response and keep the Times' perspective charitably in mind.
Is there a difference between cancel culture and a boycott? I think so. Cancel culture inflicts 1) significant emotional, financial, or potentially physical harm on a 2) a specific individual who 3) never signed up for a position of responsibility to field these kinds of threats and 4) can't walk away from the cancellation.
Boycotting uses a much narrower set of tactics, primarily protests and advocating that people not buy a certain product. Typically they target an organization, not an individual. When specific individuals are on the receiving end, their professional role typically is in part to deal with those problems. They can quit if they choose and seek employment elsewhere.
This distinction has its grey areas:
Consider entrepreneurs. They can't necessarily just quit their business, and they're the face of it so even if they did, the accusations might follow them. They didn't start the business to field protests, but to sell products, often when the business was so small that the prospect of the former ...
There is a power imbalance in place. It's not like NYT is engaging this side in its decision. It's also true that NYT's norms are self-serving while hurting others. And this community does not have anywhere near the power to "cancel" NYT. Even if we assume the "mistake theory", making NYT hurt a bit (which is the strongest response this community can hope for) is necessary for creating a feedback loop. Mistakes are seldom corrected when their prices are paid by others.
This initially felt to me like it ignored some of the ramifications of its parent comment, but I'm also not sure the parent comment intended to imply them. So I would like to put forth the more specific idea that the line of action “there is a power imbalance, therefore, we have to amplify our motions by a large factor to counteract it, which is safe because we know we can't do any real damage to them” may not be universally wrong but is still dangerous and, for those acting on the sort of charitability norms ESRogs/ricraz describe, requires a lot of extra scrutiny. Specifically, I think nonrigorously with medium confidence that:
I think it makes sense to be precise and polite, and to make allowances for misunderstandings. I also think it makes sense to have boundaries and have the hypothesis of malice (with a low prior, both because malice is rare and it's easy to see it where none exists).
That said, my prior for malice from the NYT was pretty high, and various details have updated me further towards that hypothesis.
You can email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com to voice concern (they are not the one writing the article, so might not be aware of the situation).
You can also tweet them @puiwingtam or retweet me (https://twitter.com/matiroy9/status/1275335651186094080).
You can also leave feedback here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/homepage/contact-newsroom.html
From Scott's blog:
> 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.
> If you are a journalist who is willing to respect my desire for pseudonymity, I’m interested in talking to you about this situation (though I prefer communicating through text, not phone). My email is scott@slatestarcodex.com.
EtA: petition: https://www.d
...This reminds me of the time that Slate published hilzoy's real name, in 2009.
I think what happened there is that the Slate author was following journalistic customs of using real names and didn't realize that hilzoy wanted to stay pseudonymous online, and hilzoy had been even less vigilant than Scott about keeping her real name unfindable. And then once the article had been published, hilzoy's request to remove her name ran into Slate's policy of never changing published articles unless they contain a factual error, and this was not a factual error. (It's possible that the author also had some adversarial motives for publishing the name - it did happen in the context of a disagreement between her and hilzoy - but I don't know of any clear or direct evidence for that.)
So the main storyline here might be about the media having its own customs and not much caring about what happens to the people that they cover. The press does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of stories which it can tell to its audience. I'm not sure what implications (if any) this has about what to do now.
I have a few more suggestions here.
In short, if there is only one person with 1497 karma, (and statistically, given the number of users and amount of karma, most users will have a unique amount of karma) then the karma rating on each blog post will link them to each other. Over many posts, any clues will add up.
So sort users by karma, and only share the decile. So you would know that between 10% and 20% of less wrong users have higher karma. (Or just allow all people with at least X karma to post anonymous posts) Also, use karma at the time of posting. If a whole lot of posts suddenly bump up a rank at the same time, that strongly indicates that they are by the same person.
It's not like we've lost the articles published to SSC so far. There are backups, and not just Scott's. We can even link to some of them. The past SSC still exists.
What we're losing is the future--The part that hasn't been written yet. Scott has more to say and I want to hear it. SSC was my favorite blog. I am not alone in thinking this. Now it's gone. Maybe just until the NYT blinks. Maybe forever. Or maybe only for years, but at a time when we desperately need voices of reason like Scott's. And that is very sad and I feel bummed out about it.
This doesn't have to be over. Scott has won some influential allies. I'm interested in how this all plays out.
I don't think "wants to doxx Scott" is the best description of their goals. This looks like part of a pervasive rule that also leads many media companies to deadname trans people.
I've become a bit more suspicious of Cade Metz, now that I've noticed that he had some sort of association with former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. My impression of Byrne has long been that his personality is sort of like Trump's, but a bit less intelligent.
Anyone writing puff pieces about Byrne is likely to, at best, have poor judgment. That doesn't tell me much about the current controversy, but I now put a moderate probability on the idea that Metz knows he's working for some malicious people.
Also, Metz contacted me on June 1, wanting to ask questions about the rationality community and its overlap with Silicon Valley (he did not mention SSC). I offered to answer questions by email, but not by phone. He did not respond. I don't infer much from this, beyond the fact that his initial interest in a story was not due to something controversial that Scott posted in June.
I sent the following email to pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com (before I noticed Metz's puff pieces about Byrne):
I'm puzzled by your apparent plan to publicize Scott Alexander's real name.
...It sounds like you're following a policy which has a chilling effect on any psychiatrist who wishes to comment on public affairs.
Is dox the right word here? I guess this fits inside the definition but it feels kinda non-central to me. A typical example would include some intent to do harm. Considering a different principle more important feels importantly different.
Not that this is much consolation to Scott and I think the NYT is wrong to reveal Scott's identity (and have written in to say this), I just think doxxing is the wrong way to describe it.
"The Latest Squabble Inside The New York Times": https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-slate-star-codex-doxxing-is-the-latest-squabble-inside-new-york-times
Since hating on the mainstream media is itself mainstream now....would it be a net benefit for SSC to pass this story (about NYT doxxing) to some of NYT's competitors/new media? Just brainstorming, not suggesting this as potential course of retaliation/threat, since it could backfire if it causes NYT to double down when feeling attacked.
I feel like the more places report on this, the higher the probability that at least one of them will publish Scott's real name.
It has already happened. I checked.
I’ve tried to keep my last name secret. I haven’t always done great at this, but I’ve done better than “have it get printed in the New York Times“.
It's not like his real name was ungoogleable before. The determined could find him (and have). Therefore, I expect a few tweets from nobodies would likely remain obscure when this blows over. Do not amplify them when you see them. Ignore. But a NYT article is a bigger deal.
It likely makes more sense to follow Scotts advice to contact the NYTimes to advice not to doxx him then focus on preparing for retaliation.
Given that Steven Pinker retweeted Scott's deletion post and this news article , this issue will probably keep getting publicity for better or worse. Given this, some people will start looking for Scott's real name, and thus it would be a great idea to increase the entropy here by promoting a value for Scott's real name that is not ahem entirely accurate. Thoughts?
"New York Times Threatens To Doxx Slate Star Codex. Journalist Explains."
If it happens before the publication, it wouldn't be retaliation, but more like a commitment to retaliate. If there's people making a fuss about the reporter's current intention to publish, it's a pretty clear signal what would happen if they follow through.
If it gets them to change their minds in time before the publication, that seems like the best outcome.