Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"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.
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.
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.
EY = Eliezer Yudkowsky, I don't immediately recognize an RH.
Edit: Ah, Robin Hanson, I guess?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Too many narratives being constructed from coincidence, because a narrative is more enjoyable to write and read than a set of coincidences.
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.
Seemingly, Lewis-Kraus does not believe this. I wonder if the extra verbiage was his own decision or the result of editorial feedback.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
When has journalism ever stuck to “facts”?
When has the “news” and “history” been more than short stories and opinion?
Hint: Never
Read: A History of News by Mitchell Stephens https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1854941W/A_history_of_news
Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_journalism
The role of press is not to be “right” or even factual.
The role of the press is dissent and debate.
The sooner you realize this, you’ll have a deeper appreciation for even those outlets you disagree with.
Read: RT, Al-Jazeera, Fox News, Guardian, WaPo, NYT, NYPost, WaTimes, National Review, New Yorker, Vice
Even if we take your rather controversial definition for granted, the press suck at dissent and debate as well.
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.
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'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.
Everyone is hunting for the real name of an anonymous person.
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.
Bronze at best if the pseudonymous person has already told you most of their name, their profession, and where they work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm unsure if that was before or after the slatestarcodex domain name.
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?)
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.
I'll have to read it again more closely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of the posts were pretty cringe worthy but the comments were far more reliably cringe worthy.
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".
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.
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)?
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.
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
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.
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.
Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird.
“Childhood exposure to radical literature”?
“radical literature” almost sound like a disease.
>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.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blo...
FYI it mentions Andrea Dworkin though -- not Judith Butler, who you mentioned earlier. Not an expert but think they're fairly different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin
I dunno, just seems like emotions are running high. To be fair, mine included. Sigh ...
* I admit that the "somewhere else" could have been my imagination.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169...
Feel free to ignore that item.
…
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.)
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.
edit: Compare digital advertising to digital subscriptions, not overall subscriptions
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 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.
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.
In fact there has even been an article in the New York Times arguing that the New York Times financial strength and power may be bad for news:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/media/ben-smith-...
>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]
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slat...
For any given website, more likely than not they would want the Internet Archive to archive it.
For any given internet user, more likely than not they wouldn't want a website to track them for the purposes of advertising and price discrimination.
This tells us what the defaults should be in each case, and let the exceptions change the setting if they want.
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.
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!
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?
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.
But you’re right it’s not part of the “discourse” except mostly as a joke.
Looks like it didn't propagate very well. I'm a few degrees removed from the "rationalist community" and I heard about it years ago.
Yudkowsky tried to prevent people from talking about it, which predictably backfired. The LessWrong wiki has an entry on the whole thing.
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.
"...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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
(Or both.)
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slate...
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.
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."
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.
This. It’s a really easy trap to fall into online, but, the whole idea of someone deserving an insult is, 99.9% of the time, toxic.
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.
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.
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.
And, I enjoy both those publications FWIW.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421917
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23783613
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.
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.
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.
Honestly the article didn’t seem ugly to me.
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 ;).
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.
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 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.
Journalism continues to go downhill and doesn't have a way to stop the trend.
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.
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.
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.
(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)
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.
The comment spawned quite a discussion at the time, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23323009
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.
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.
Totally agree.
> This isn't quite the apples-to-apples criticism that it appears
Fair, but I have have two responses to that.
The first is that the ability to discover and access high quality writers (not just Scott) directly means that the NYT brand has less value.
The second is that people increasingly feel that NYT has an agenda (not merely a bias) that colors the quality of their reporting.
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.
Do the right thing; the explainers won't be necessary.
Scott had his panicked meltdown the second this guy started asking questions, which was probably just the beginning of the investigation.
You think the outfit that took down Weinstein cares about some SV tantrums?
The article was supposed to drop a couple weeks ago, the same week Scott took down his blog (if I remember correctly).
> Scott had his panicked meltdown the second this guy started asking questions, which was probably just the beginning of the investigation.
Pretty sure that's false.
> You think the outfit that took down Weinstein cares about some SV tantrums?
Taking down Weinstein was a noble endeavor. Taking down Scott is not. If you think the concern is just limited to SV, you are not reading the room.
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".
[0]: https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/621772274317623296/my...
It's a small thing to do and only takes a little time to complete.
Highly recommend reading it as an example of the form.
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.
Which is not where I think your comment is at all :).
But because it’s a spectrum I think and hope my sharing how some of the language in your comment struck me is helpful.
Lol the irony is I think that “the logic of ideas, abstracted away from the people that write them”, is in a literal sense, de-humanizing ;).
Worth thinking about imho since the ideas we are talking about are about language and people and societies :).
Clever, likely effective, if not ethically and logically dubious.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe, but it's not confirmed.
"Banksy's name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy#Personal_life_and_dis...
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.
That New York Times no longer exists and hasn't for well over a decade.
But I am open to the idea that my interpretation is missing something.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religio...
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.
- Virgil Texas, co-host of the Chapo Trap House podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...
- Vermin Supreme, performance artist: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/us/politics/libertarians-...
- Drag queens such as Lil Miss Hot Mess, Sister Roma, and Heklina: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/fashion/drag-performers-f...
- Baseball statistician Tom Tango: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/magazine/why-are-some-new...
- Gay niche erotica writer Chuck Tingle: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/opinion/chuck-tingles-int...
- A Canadian who traveled to Syria to fight for ISIS: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/podcasts/caliphate-transc...
- A random person: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/nyregion/commodes-if-not-...
> 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...
- Jeremiah Moss: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/nyregion/a-cranky-blogger...
> 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!
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.”
It's a direct counterexample.
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.
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.
I'm not sure it's as simple as that. Surely newspapers should be able to name Brock Turner or Donald Trump no matter how much they'd dislike that?
At the very least, we'd have to be able to articulate some line that Scott Alexander was on the other side of.
https://www.coindesk.com/i-failed-terribly-at-keeping-my-ide...
Does anyone have links to the Twitter threads mentioned in the articles? Twitter’s direct search querying is pretty terrible.
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.
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
2 crime stories
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.
"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."
Surprise! The rationalist community is made up of human beings after all.
No, burn the witch-burners!
No, burn the witch-burner-burners!
But then what about the witches? Burn them too or...?
Okay, just burn people who burn any people!
Er, doesn't that mean we have to burn ourselves?
Why don't we just not burn anyone at all?
Burn that guy!
And so it goes...
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.
I was more skeptical until I read the comments section here.
Contrast and compare with the New Yorker writers and readership who regard their own high-minded observational detachment as art, consciously or otherwise.
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?
Ultimately discrediting the "rationalist" ideology was as easy as making them angry.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
What a sorry excuse for journalism.
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.
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.
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.
All because Scott Alexander retroactively decided his last name is private information and threw a tantrum.
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).
EDIT 2: Whoops, this was meant as a reply to charia's point.
This reply about Scott Alexander appears to be the first usage[0]: https://twitter.com/ChrisSt41125908/status/12755577894154649...
[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=until%3A2020-06-24%20since%3A20...
[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=until%3A2020-06-24%20since%3A20...
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.
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).
Publishing under your real first names, and letting people know where you work, is pretty far from "perfect isolation", isn't it?
He's not stupid. Why did he chose such a terrible pseudonym?
Retconning SSC as an "anonymous" publication is silly, though, and really dilutes the efforts of people who truly want to or need to remain anonymous.
[0] https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Free thought and free inquiry and the freedom to research/discuss/publish unpopular ideas has been a hot topic in recent times. For instance, see the protest of Omar Wasow's paper on protesting (https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Protesting-of-a-Protes...) or the firing of Steven Hsu (https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campai...).
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.
Deleting a site you've posted on thousands of times is a quality tantrum.
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.
As soon as an argument becomes "you're not sticking to the of X" it's become fruitless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
--
At the very least the author didn't doxx Scott.
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.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Deception-Introduction-Critical-T...
That's not what an ad hominem is. The word you're looking for is "insult".
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.
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.
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.
I'll hang up and listen.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
"Your argument is wrong, therefore you are a bad person" is not.
"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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
1. Literally with the word "like", too, https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarc...
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.
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.