Update on My Situation
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
Has anybody applied the Dark Forest metaphor to internet publicity? It's fascinating (horrifying) how simply catching the attention of too big a piece of the internet can start wreaking havoc on different parts of your life. You don't even have to have done anything controversial. Attention itself appears to be caustic, at the extreme.
I haven't read it but I assumed the blog was controversial based on all the concern about anonymity. Is that not the case?
Any time you criticize the crazies you get attacked.
So it's not hard to find something that "looks bad", even if it's really not.
First, people who need a psychiatrist (or doctor in general) sometimes do a simple background check on them. Like, put their name in Google and try to find some reviews, just to see if other patients were satisfied with them or not. Some topics that Scott debates would be quite inappropriate for people seeking psychiatric help. For example, imagine that you are suffering from paranoia, and you find out that your psychiatrist seriously considers the possibility that superintelligent robots may soon exterminate the humankind.
Second, although Scott is generally left-wing, he is not fully 100% on the side of the left-wing orthodoxy. For example, he would write an article about how Trump is a horrible person and a disaster for America, but would also mention that a few details that the mainstream media said about him were factually incorrect. For some people, anything less than 100% compliance is unacceptable. (Often heretics are more triggering than full enemies, because the enemies at least fit into the black-and-white picture, while the heretic ruins it.)
Third, in the discussions below the articles, multiple political opinions are allowed. Again, this is quite triggering for some people, because according to their logic, why would you allow anyone to express their opinion on your website, unless you actually agree with them? Of course, this is reported selectively, like "did you know there are fans of reactionary politics on SSC?!" without mentioning that they are debating there with e.g. hardcore stalinists, and that both sides are just a small minority in the mostly moderate audience.
The second and third point are why some people are so eager to expose Scott's identity, and the first point is why he tries to prevent it.
It always has been. And, often the “cancelling” has been total and irreversible, not, as it often is with the “cancel culture” of recent complaints, just a reduction in current popularity with a particular segment of society (frequently accompanied by profitable celebrity status with an opposing and at least roughly equivalent power social group.)
In fact, those complaining about modern “cancel culture” often make hyperbolic analogies to these historical, more total cancellings, such as lynchings.
> It always has been.
This is a significant plot point in Musashi. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musashi_(novel) )
this is wildly untrue. ted bundy escaped police custody (from being charged with multiple murders), moved a couple states, and kept raping and murdering for years. this was 50 years ago.
if someone catches you on video on a field trip like the covington high kids, you might get death threats of such credibility that your school will have to shut down and youll have to sue major "news" networks because their "reporting" was so bad it was tantamount to libel. a grown adult celebrity called them nazis and wanted them doxed.
how can you in any seriousness claim cancel culture now is the same as even 10 years ago, much less 100 or more?
If we break cancel culture up into roughly before the internet and after. Being canceled (I'd call a non-violent black-sheep status) was a local phenomenon, it was in your town, your church, or your local group. You could move away to reclaim anonymity.
Today, you can't hide from it, but it's as you said, a quick burst. But I think you're forgetting that these ramifications aren't just about you being hated by the internet, they can follow you by alienating friends/family. They have made people lose jobs. They take a person's worst moment and give it permanence in a way that wasn't possible in the past.
I'd probably say that cancel culture requires the internet to really be a thing, because now we can take anyone who's worst moment is caught on video and have it follow them around forever. Sure the internet as a whole might not hate you for more than a week or so, but the ramifications of unwanted massive celebrity must be profound.
To be clear, I'd consider cancellations to be people who are not famous and don't want to be famous. Even that level of positive reception by half of a socially powerful group might be unwanted, especially if you don't really align with them.
I'll finish with this, cancel culture is a minor problem compared to those of our ancestors. But it's still something we as a society can try to work on. As individuals when we see someone being canceled, don't dog pile on them, look for context and dig deeper. Sometimes it will make you more angry there are people you're not going to like out there.
Side story: When I was a kid I had a bully for all of 1 year in elementary school, he'd trip me at recess every day. One day I lost it and punched him in the face. I remember this clearly, he waited a few weeks then tripped me one more time. For most of us that'd be the end of the story, but a few years later, a family friend of mine brought him by our house and I had to play with him for an afternoon. We got to talking and playing. Just two kids playing as if we didn't know each other. I found out he had dealt with some shit I never had to, and it showed me that his behavior wasn't all his own. I don't regret punching him, I don't begrudge him being a bully for a year, but I do thank that family friend for giving me an afternoon of seeing more context. It showed me that, I don't have to like everyone, and I don't have to let people walk on me, but I do have to do my best to understand people even when I don't like them.
Sorry maybe that's not relevant, but I think about the kid that I was getting thrust onto the internet for punching someone, no context, no background and I'd probably not have learned from it.
Edit: context around the link. Just a really good video I watched from a person I like on this topic. Sometimes I'll haunt my threads to reply to people but I don't really feel like it tonight, so have a good night everyone.
Blacklisting with more than local scope (and, while nonviolent in themselves, again, vastly more drastic practical impact than modern “cancel culture”—and particularly, often, a much more direct and total impact on employability, and often impacting people with less socioeconomic privilege and associated security than are at issue with “cancel culture” complaints) was a thing long before the internet, to the point that laws curtailing it in certain contexts were adopted (and fought against by blacklisters) before WWII.
EDIT: The internet or something like it may help the less privileged coordinate against the more privileged, changing who is potentially exposed to something that the powerful have always had in their toolbox, though.
Blacklisting isn't cancel culture, I don't understand how it equates at all. I think, we're talking past each-other a bit here just because cancel culture can be hard to define. It's defined by some as boycotting like "cancel Netflix". It'd defined by others as canceling an individual like "this person tweeted about XYZ when they were 17 fire them." It can also be, "Celebrity XYZ said something I disagree with cancel them (Kapernick comes to mind)." One is targeted against the less privileged and elevates those without a voice or a platform to celebrity. The other is just a re-branding of boycotting. The third targets celebrities who making a social stand.
I'd define the cancel culture I'm concerned about as the form that is against an individual who was not previously famous, doesn't want to be famous and is thrust into the spotlight without the ability to control the narrative or provide context. They got caught on a bad day and just want to be left alone. This is a form of "witch hunt" that thrives on the mob mentality of twitter and other social networks out there that feed on our baser human instincts.
I also think that canceling celebrities because you disagree with them is dumb, but that's privilege vs less privilege and I don't see it as big of an issue.
Cancel culture that's really just boycotting is not something I'm concerned about.
I'll re-iterate, the past had some awful and yet socially acceptable shit going on. I don't think there is a similar phenomenon where the mob went after other individuals in such a global manner. The level of cancel culture that I'm talking about wasn't a global phenomenon before. It wasn't more local, mobs stayed in towns and cities. But they also carried pitch forks and hurt people. So before we had, potential death in your city/town, and now we have humiliation and loss of job but globally. I dislike them both and if I had to pick I think the later is the obvious choice.
OK really trying to close this down now, but this conversation is more fun than what I'd be doing othewise!
I think the issue may be that you're defining cancel culture in a way that's very different than what most people in general, and in this thread, do. That's not wholly your fault, but it does mean that the conversation probably won't be fruitful.
I ask this mostly because I'm having a hard time coming up with a lot of examples of what you mean by "cancel culture" outside of the 3-4 well trodden examples of "cancellation gone wrong" (Justice Sacco, and the recent examples from the Atlantic Article "Stop Firing the Innocent").
Off the top of my head...
Stephen Hsu of MSU
Greg Patton of USC
Bret Weinstein (a few years ago.. this backfired).
Jonathan Friedland (fired for using the N-Word in a meeting discussing sensitive words in PR),
Peter Boghossian (still is employed, but was harassed IRL and investigated under ethics charges after the grievance studies papers).
But, it's the famous people that are the most important for signalling that if you publicly voice an unpopular opinion you will have to endure retribution. It's the chilling effect that important as that will silence multiples for each public witch burning.
For most of human history being ostracized from your social group was a death sentence. We are wired to respond to negative group pressure. We learn the rules pretty quickly. Avoid certain topics, post anodyne content, virtue signal to my in group.
Hsu, Weinstein, and Boghossian definitely do not meet GPs definition. After a second look, Freidland also does not. He was fired by netflix solely due to their preferences and without any sort of external hubbub at all. (I'm also not clear how Friedland's firing meets any definition of cancel culture, so I'd like to hear your definition as well).
An executive fired by their own company isn't "thrust into the spotlight".
If your personal definition of cancel culture is "a non famous person faces consequences for an act", that's fine, but it's also a uselessly loose definition.
Just to be clear, I'm using a definition that I did not come up with on my own. Cancel culture doesn't have one definition. I linked a video where T1J kinda covers this. He's not a definitive source, but at least two people are confused by this definition.
Examples => I've got to google it. The best example I can think of was the lady who got on the flight and when she landed she didn't have a job. Her tweet was taken out of context, and while made in poor taste still.... kinda lame.
Other examples would be the google memo guy (kind of a reverse order firing iirc), the maga hat kid, the lady from brookfield zoo, and the manager at Chipotle off the top of my head.
Google some examples of this. Should you post stupid things to Facebook/Twitter? No you shouldn't. Should you get fired for it? I'd lean to the no side more than most people I'd guess. I think free speech is important, but companies have the right to fire people.
Is it the end of the world? In most mild cases, not so much. But there are some more extreme cases where there are much more long lasting effects to people. We don't typically hear about it unless the cancellation is something that was taken out of context and some people feel bad for the person being canceled. A lot of times it's just someone getting fired.
That's Justine Sacco.
> Other examples would be the google memo guy (kind of a reverse order firing iirc)
I (as a firsthand account) argue that Damore had ample opportunity to contextualize his comments, so I'd disagree that this meets your definition, although there's been so much misleading information since that it's an easy mistake to make.
> the maga hat kid
Sure. Although there's an argument that he was able to control the narrative eventually. At this point in time the prevailing narrative is that he was libeled by the media, even though legally speaking, that's probably false.
> lady from brookfield zoo
I honestly can't figure out what you mean. There's a 2019 story about an old lady who crashed her car and may have lost her license? I can't find enough information on this to see why it would be an instance of cancellation.
> manager at Chipotle
Ok, sort of. I mean she was able to recontextualize the situation and was offered her job back the same week.
This is sort of why the sky is falling concerns about cancellation don't resonate with me. The definition you picked is, I'd argue one that frames cancellation as an objectively unfair thing. And one that is concerning even when it ultimately makes the right choice.
But the examples you gave don't really meet that objectively bad definition.
I'm not trying to write a dictionary definition. You are correct that my way of phrasing this definition is really objectively bad. What is a non-celebrity, how do we quantify this? If you google people who lost their jobs for facebook posts etc you'll find some example.
The ones that concern me more are the people who flashed across your screen, an image, a video, some "Karen" who did something on social media or someone video'd them and their company saw it, then they got fired. The context doesn't get picked up by the news so there really is no story other than a post by someone who was picked up and a life that was ruined.
>This is sort of why the sky is falling concerns about cancellation don't resonate with me. The definition you picked is, I'd argue one that frames cancellation as an objectively unfair thing. And one that is concerning even when it ultimately makes the right choice.
Fairness, is for courts and groups of people who have time and inclination to look at context to determine. My issue with cancellations I've seen is if you get a post blown up (even moderately so) and you lose your job, no one knows or cares.
This is not a sky is falling issue, but it is a new issue that's come up in the modern internet era and Laws lag behind this sort of thing. You should not be able to be fired for being pro-Insert your politician here-. Even annoyingly so. That should not affect where you work, I believe that right now that freedom is at risk on both sides in the US. Is it a top 10 political risk on my whiteboard? No, I don't have a board. But it's an issue, and we can agree to disagree that it even is an issue. You won't get any argument that I made a good definition.
At least this way Scott was able to size up his readership and work on solving this problem for good (for himself), plus the cat is out of the bag regarding how fickle the NYT is.
This solution is fine now that there's no chance.
But that just means he wanted to change the NYT's mind (the journalist's and/or the editor's at least), not to forever give up blogging. (So it seems to me his preferences are rather complex and they depend on various time-frames.)
https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...
As your pseudonym's popularity grows, chances increase that someone will be interested in unmasking your identity. The only solutions are to reduce your pseudonym's visibility or staying fully anonymous in the first place.
There seems to be two opposing imperatives for online social identity. On one hand you want reputation and accountability for what people say to fight trolling, bullying, and misinformation. On the other hand you want some level of anonymity to encourage free speech and expression. I don’t know if this core tension can ever be fully resolved but our current online environment is clearly far from optimal.
You can be anonymous and at he same time have some valuable history of past interactions.
Slashdot, Stack Overflow, etc. are good examples.
Or maybe don't use a super secret identity that includes most of your real name, and your job, and where you work?
But maybe I am being too cynical.
Every future development has to either treat him as a special snowflake (so they have to implement a VIP tier) or eventually bulldoze every perk of his blog back into uniformity.
I don't understand why doesn't he goes full patreon.
I don't consider this a part of cancel culture because there was no specific attempt to cancel him.
So maybe he's saying that the Times doesn't realize they screwed up, so there's no "ill intent". But in my moral system, if you know you are causing serious harm to an innocent person for no good reason but are so callous that you don't even care, you are still responsible for that harm.
I don't want to split hairs over cultural terms. I will accept your definitions for you.
Because cancel culture seems to be when someone does something (discussing eugenetics, speaking Mandarin that sounds like a racial slur ... or blurts racists shit on live TV, sexually harasses others, and so on) and a mob attacks them and their host institution. Some of that is really justified some doesn't seem so.
In this case Scott wasn't attacked by any mob. He simply wanted to keep his relationship with his patients that, a strictly exclusively doctor-patient relationship, no need for a third channel (eg the NYT, and his blog linked by the NYT).
Wait, what? Why?
What'd he write that's so incompatible with employment as a psychiatrist?
I don't get it. Why is it a risk for any employer anywhere to keep him on payroll? What's the worst possible outcome for the employer?
This post is putting on a tough front, but I'd be terrified if I were him. Imagine being forced to start your own business or go bankrupt.
> First, I’m a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work. You can read more about this in this Scientific American article – and remember that the last psychiatrist blogger to get doxxed abandoned his blog too. I am not one of the big sticklers on this, but I’m more of a stickler than “let the New York Times tell my patients where they can find my personal blog”.
> At some point, I may start my own private practice, where I’m my own boss and where I can focus on medication management – and not the kinds of psychotherapy that I’m most worried are ethically incompatible with being a public figure
It seems believable to me that "medication management" (you've been diagnosed with a mental illness, we have an idea how to treat this chemically, but it's a really complex balance that needs constant professional intervention) is less sensitive to being a public figure than other aspects of psychiatry (lie on the couch and open up to me with your personal secrets).
I'm sure this is a ridiculous simplification and as I said in another post here I'd like to hear SSC's take on it (but don't expect to). But it's uncharitable to say "something doesn't add up".
I always figured people's chemical imbalances were influenced by behavior. If you just treat the chemical imbalance without addressing the behavior, isn't that rather risky?
Either way, pharmacotherapy is rarely administered alone, usually psychotherapists refer patients to psychiatrists if they believe pharmacotherapy can be beneficial, and with patient's consent they can share notes. He will be that therapist.
I see, thank you for your reply.
All the "behavioral" problems I may have had were largely caused by the underlying imbalance and just stopped once I was on it. Or at least, stopped enough that they are no longer a problem for me, and I think really once a behavior isn't causing issues in your life it is probably hard to classify it as a "problem"
I think this really is the issue here with his employer, and I honestly always found it extremely weird, maybe unethical that he wants to avoid his patients figuring out that their stories may appear on a public blog.
Do you happen to know of any examples of articles he published along those lines? Now I’m curious what he said...
here's one, I don't know if he put that preface on all of them, apparently he fictionalises them and mixes them up.
I think your theory is spot on.
> The maxim is “do what lets you sleep at night”, so I punted. I kept him on his medications and turned him over to the next guy. I just hope the next guy gets my documentation instead of thinking “Dr. Alexander kept him on all this medication…I wonder what he knows that I don’t.”
Oh man, I have noticed this same behaviour with doctors.
I think how we portray doctors and hospitals as isn't aligned with practice. People really lack the skills to express their issues succinctly to doctors and expect them to figure out everything when they couldn't in months or years. The idea that a 30 min conversation is enough for doctors to know your entire life and medical history to prescribe you relevant medicine and diagnosis is flawed. Many people omit details out of fear and shame. Not that doctors are better at communicating that as a message. It's really like an interview.
Um, yes, burying your emotions is unhealthy! I'm surprised to see this coming from anyone in the realm of mental health. It is much more surprising coming from a supposed mental health professional who created a decently sized discussion forum via his blog. He continues,
> My relationship strategy is the same. Date really low-conflict, low-drama, agreeable people. If we have a conflict anyway, then agree to disagree and wait for the problem to go away. Apparently this is terrible
Yes... Yes it is. When you are motivated to be your best and you still fail, such as when people have kids, you realize you're better off dealing with your emotions rather than ignoring them. Some people realize this earlier than others. I hope the number of people practicing in mental health while maintaining this blogger's attitude is small.
This is exactly the kind of question I'd expect SSC to tackle thoughtfully on his blog if it wasn't so close to home. But without clear evidence against it, it's hard to criticise him for taking the conservative approach.
Further, I'd expect he'd admit these days that using (most of) his real name for his blog was a mistake. He shouldn't be expected to further overreach professional standards of anonymity just because he previously made that misstep.
Some therapists position themselves as an authority figure for their patients. If they were to open up about themselves, the patient might think they're incapable after seeing the therapist has doubts in their own life.
This has advantages and drawbacks. It may be more efficient in earning trust, thus helping some patients heal faster. OTOH, some patients may never really accept this kind of therapist.
In my experience, psychiatrists more often position themselves as authorities, and among psychologists/therapists/counselors there is a mix.
It's really hard IMO to get communicable science out of talk therapy because there are so many variables and it is extremely subjective and personal. The whole point is to help a patient navigate their own issues.
I draw the above opinion on therapy from reading a few books about the history of psychoanalysis and the various branches it has taken.
> Some therapists position themselves as an authority figure for their patients.
It is not obvious that the person who gets to recline while the other person must sit is the one with lower status or authority.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrapesOfLuxury
Eliza did this for some people decades ago. An app with GTP-3 could do a lot if it could navigate the legal and ethical issues.
Maybe that's true in the US. In the UK I follow a bunch of psychiatrists on twitter and they all use their real name. And they're strongly encouraged to use their real name by their regulator (the GMC) if they're making claims as a doctor on social media.
Or for a less formal, more distributed solution, there is of course Patreon.
Diogenes replied, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king".
Siskind dug his own grave here, and the NYT has done his patients a huge service.
> I may start my own private practice, where I’m my own boss and where I can focus on medication management – and not the kinds of psychotherapy that I’m most worried are ethically incompatible with being a public figure.
This is why privacy is important - to maintain boundaries between different parts of your life, like work and personal.
We are all complex human beings and we deserve to be 3-dimensional, not 1-dimensional.
Capitalism prefers that humans be one-dimensional cogs in its machine. That we be specialised. One type of personality or field of expertise only. If not, you're paid less, you're respected less, you're listened to less. And it's only because people know more about you than they did before.
It is a real shame what has happened here. But even more, it is a shame that humans treat each other in 1-dimensional ways. We dehumanise and objectify one another, in transactional and very non-personal ways. But we're all persons, who deserve to feel, operate, and be treated as such. There is much about capitalism and trade that is problematic.
I wish Scott well in his endeavours.
The main reason we treat people as 1-dimensional is because we interact with many people, and can only deeply care about few. Dunbar's number, etc. The alternative is spending your entire life with only a few dozen people, like in a medieval village or something. This is why we have friends and relatives, who care about us in a complex way, and the rest of the world, which only perceives a selected part.
Yes, everyone needs a friend. No, everyone can't be everyone's friend. This is not about capitalism, it is about existentialism.
It's a shame any airing of concerns about capitalism per se trigger people so much. We need to air our concerns about the world in order to discuss and hopefully solve them together.
Your reply helped do that. I'm immediately convinced. OF course, socialism is just as much a machine too. So it's not the system, the problem is scale and 'overpopulation' relative to our evolutionary adaptation. Something for me to think about.
I appreciate the correction.
Marx made a lot of criticism of capitalism, and a lot of it is valid. (He underestimated the possibility of huge technological progress, but let's ignore this for the moment.) The problem was not with criticism, but with the proposed solution; the entire plan could be simply summarized as "1: socialist revolution; 2: ???; 3: all problems gone".
And it turned out, you can organize a successful socialist revolution, but the problems will stay, and often get worse. Now you don't have a capitalist competing against a capitalist, but a politician competing against a politician. The workers are no longer exploited by private factories, they are exploited by state-owned factories instead. You are no longer afraid of losing your job and starving to death; you are afraid of men in dark coats knocking on your door after midnight. Your kids don't go to university not because they can't afford to pay tuition, but because they said a politically incorrect joke and someone reported them. (Not all things are the same: you probably get universal healthcare and free education, which is nice, but also universal censorship and ban on everything that was not approved by your political superiors, which sucks.) But this is even more general than politics.
The best text I know written about this problem is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The second best is the first noble truth of Buddhism: "It sucks to be born, it sucks to become old, it sucks to get sick, it sucks to die; it sucks to not get what you want, it sucks to get what you don't want; briefly, everything you see sucks." (You can make some people applaud if you add "...in capitalism" after each clause, but that just offers a fake hope.)
To really improve the world requires solving ten thousand independent problems. That is a lot of hard work. If only it was so simple that you merely need to abolish "capitalism" and then live happily ever after...
If (you feel that) your job is incompatible with a personal association to a popular 'rationalist' blog, and you write a rationalist blog under your own partial name, and it then becomes popular - well you will have to take that decision at some point - resign, or shut down the blog.
Scott has put off that decision as long as he could, and the NYT journalist's behaviour certainly forced him in one direction; but fundimentally this controversy is of his own creation.
Evidently he has taken the logical decision that the blog matters more to him (or there are more opportunities as the writer of a popular blog) than his old job and he's actioned this; I don't think it's fair to characterise this as the New York Times 'costing him his job'.
Scott did shut down the blog and it still cost him his job.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/surv...
He got death threats, and I'm sure you have no idea what his employer and patients told him. So don't make such assumptions without any evidence. What he described as problems is entirely reasonable and adheres to a professional standard of care.
'Fifth, if someone speaks up against the increasing climate of fear and harassment or the decline of free speech, they get hit with an omnidirectional salvo of “You continue to speak just fine, and people are listening to you, so obviously the climate of fear can’t be too bad, people can’t be harassing you too much, and you’re probably just lying to get attention.” But if someone is too afraid to speak up, or nobody listens to them, then the issue never gets brought up, and mission accomplished for the people creating the climate of fear. The only way to escape the double-bind is for someone to speak up and admit “Hey, I personally am a giant coward who is silencing himself out of fear in this specific way right now, but only after this message”. This is not a particularly noble role, but it’s one I’m well-positioned to play here, and I think it’s worth the awkwardness to provide at least one example that doesn’t fit the double-bind pattern.'