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> would you like to live in a world where the New York times lets powerful people who are doing awful, unethical things remain anonymous as they would like to?

I think there's a structural difference between anonymity in actions and anonymity in writing, where in actions it is easy to leverage resources from one persona to benefit in the other, hence anonymity providing you with a structural advantage. But writing generally rests only on your skill as a writer, not your financial or political resources.

The one case where writing benefits structurally from political resources in your de-anonymized persona is whistleblowing - a situation where journalists do their level best to keep people anonymous!

Likewise, I think there's a difference between a newspaper trying to drag corruption into the light, and a newspaper, made up by writers, depriving another writer of a layer of protection, against community norms and their own standard, in order to (or at least accepting the risk to) destroy their livelihood. The NYT and Scott Alexander are not in direct competition, but it's still hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to bring harm on a fellow writer for their own gain.

In other words, the goal of a newspaper should be to increase the views and voices available to the public, not to shut them up.

"lots of people would like to remain anonymous. would you like to live in a world where the New York times lets powerful people who are doing awful, unethical things remain anonymous as they would like to?"

That's a false dichotomy. You can respect a wish for anonymity in cases like Scott's without giving up the possibility of making the names of other people public, when there's a good reason for it.

what are the 'good reasons' exactly, though? Is it whether we like them or not? And should the NY Times be in the business of adjudicating that?

In principle, I really like the legal situation in Germany, where I live: There’s a fundamental right to “informational self-determination”, but this right is not absolute. Journalists have the duty to weigh the freedom of the press and especially the "interests of the public to be informed" against this “personality right”.

In the end, a person like Scott would be able to sue the newspaper, if he thinks that in their case the interests of the public did not outweigh his personality rights and a court would decide.

(Sorry, this post contains a lot of ad hoc translations of German legal terms, I hope it's still understandable and more or less correct English)

I think that people were frustrated with the large inconsistencies in how the NYT handled that policy.

Yup. I don't think anybody has an inherent right to make a significant ongoing attempt to influence the public without people saying, "Well who is this person really?"

People living private lives should have that privacy respected. And journalists certainly have the right to agree to protect somebody's anonymity when they think the circumstances merit it. But if somebody is going to step onto the national stage, they don't have any sort of right to demand that everybody else help conceal obvious facts about them. Somebody is welcome to try that, of course, but the opsec burden is on them, not every other person with a keyboard.

As an aside, one of the things linked in this article was really helpful to me in understanding why Siskind's prose never worked for me: http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-...

But what does it mean to step onto the national stage here? As far as has been reported, Alexander didn’t seek publicity, or obtain any position of power, or make himself available for the rich and powerful to privately consult. He just wrote a blog that a lot of people happen to like. There can be very serious costs to being thrust onto the national stage, so I’m not comfortable with the idea that you can just get promoted there by default.

He apparently wrote, "Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people." [1] That to me is very clear intent to influence. And it's not like this was a blog about knitting. So whatever the bar is, he's well over it.

Another way to come at it is not intent, but impact. Whatever one thinks of Metz's article, I think he's correct that a) Silicon Valley has huge influence in the world, b) that the people making big decisions there are worth covering, and c) the ideas that shape those decisions are relevant. More disputable is the last piece of his chain is d), SSC has some influence on those ideas, and is a useful case study. But given the strident defenses of SSC here and elsewhere, I think the reaction to the article proves that the topic is significant enough to merit coverage.

I agree one shouldn't get promoted to national prominence "by default". But spending years publishing something to the world with an ever-growing audience is not something one does by accident. I'm sure Siskind put at least thousands of hours into his blog, and now it's his full-time job. One can't reasonably spend years courting public attention and then be mad that the public will attend to something as they see fit. Freedom of speech goes both ways.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.c...

I have no idea who Topher Brennan is, and he appears to have deleted these tweets, so it's pretty hard for me to evaluate whether this is a credible accusation. I definitely agree that it's fair for journalists to unveil someone's pseudonym if they're networking with important people.

You are welcome to evaluate his general credibility and the merits of the emails for yourself. He did remove the emails, but hasn't removed the claim that Siskind said a key point that was in them: https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/136066305645645004...

I'm open to finding out that they're fake, but on the "balance of probabilities" standard, I believe they're real.

The NYT article gives a pretty clear explanation for why they believed it was of interest: someone influencing a lot of high-level people in an industry which has an outsized influence on society.

It might be useful to think about it in terms of similar but older mediums: would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.? This wasn’t at the level of, say, Norman Vincent Peale but it’s not like every single story is required to be about national level politics, either. I’ve certainly read plenty of articles over the years about people who are influential in a community but not well known outside of it - it’s one of the reasons why journalism matters for helping you learn about things you wouldn’t have thought to ask about on your own.

"Influencing" covers a lot of things that don't seem equivalent to me. If he were swapping investment advice with Sam Altman, discussing the future of AI with Paul Graham, playing around on jetpacks with Elon Musk - sure, that's a mover and shaker, and in order to be properly informed on the tech industry you'd need to know who he is.

On the other hand, if Sam Altman and Paul Graham regularly made small talk with a barista at a coffee shop near YC headquarters, it would be strange and invasive for the NYT to put a spotlight on her against her will and identify her as a woman with the ear of Silicon Valley elites. And I'd argue that's a much closer analogy to what's happening here. It doesn't seem (again, as far as has been reported) that he had any concrete personal relationship with any VCs or tech executives.

A widely cited public blog which those people have referenced seems a lot closer to the public end of the spectrum than talking to a barista, especially when you consider that the topics covered have a significant public interest. It’s not like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – for example, topics like gender or racial differences create a pretty legitimate area of interest when you think about how many people run or work at SV companies influenced by the people named, or use systems designed by them — the flip side to talk about eating the world is that the rest of the world is going to be watching closely.

I'd point to those topics as perfect examples of why pseudonymous debate is valuable. In the modern US, most subcultures have a standard perspective on race and gender and ostracize people who don't agree with it. So if everyone has to fear that their opinions might be promoted to the national spotlight, there's a huge range of thought that the public will never get to see at all.

Consider affirmative action for a concrete example. It consistently loses at the ballot box in even the most left-leaning states, but it's incredibly rare to hear a left-wing case for why we might not want it, because in the Internet age, anyone who presents such a case is putting their career and social circle in significant jeopardy. This kind of mismatch between what people think and what they can say is deeply unhealthy for our political environment, and I think pseudonymous blogging is a very important outlet to alleviate that.

If something is written pseudonymously, we can't possibly know whether it is a "left-wing case". It's just an argument.

If you want that argument to be situated, given context and weight, then you at best need mediated anonymity, where a trusted source like a newspaper verifies pertinent context without exposing an actual identity. But there's good reason that's quite rare. So we end up pretty quickly back at people needing to own their words when they try to influence the public.

That's especially true on a topic like race in America. The most prominent people who wanted to intercede on race anonymously were the KKK. And they make especially clear why there's no broad moral obligation to preserve the anonymity of people trying to act publicly while concealing their identity.

> would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.?

Potentially, yes. What does the biographic information add to the story?

If this hypothetical philosopher were influencing people under a pseudonym, then their real identity is important only if it somehow interacts with their influence. Maybe there's a conflict of interest; maybe there's some sort of fraud (i.e. it'd be remarkable of Alexander were not in fact a psychiatrist); maybe the person is otherwise independently notable in a surprising way.

The Times article was written from the perspective that Alexander's blog is harmful, dangerous, or risky because of its message. That perspective is neither strengthened nor weakened by hearing irrelevant details about the messenger, so in a publication always short on column-inches I'd think that the balance of convenience is in preserving the pseudonymity.

What the biographic information adds is context. If we want to ask, "Why is this person doing X? What makes them say Y?" then we naturally inquire into who the person is. Their situation in society, their interests, their sources of power and wealth.

There's a reason that biography is a major genre. If you never have gotten anything out of a biography, that's fine. But you shouldn't be surprised that other people do.

But what public good, in this instance, was served by depriving the writer of their anonymity? It was a puerile attempt at harming someone they disagreed with.

If it had been someone who was already a public figure or someone who was leveraging their writing into something beyond the ideas presented, it would have been newsworthy.

The infantilization of the NYT from its glory years continues apace.

Scott lost his anonymity when he chose to publish under his real name, not to mention blogging under his real first and middle names with a fair amount of biographical information. The NYT highlighting this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t public for years prior.

Ah, I think I have a maybe simpler way to describe my anger about this:

Consider the difference between these two reported pieces of information:

1. Senator McSenatorface has, anonymously via a shell company, accepted donations from Boeing in a quid pro quo to adjust the regulations to require less oversight.

2. Senator McSenatorface has, anonymously, booked three holiday tickets for himself and his family at the Isolated Mountain Lodge in Canada, where he will be out of phone contact for the coming four weeks.

Both are true information, that the person prefers to keep hidden, that some readers would find informative or useful, and both can be used to harm their interests. But I hope we are in agreement that one is valid and important journalism and the other is three inches away from incitement of violence. So by what criterion do we divide them? To me, the distinguishing factor is whether the information is more useful to moral or immoral action. In my opinion, revealing Scott's name is primarily of benefit to not just immoral action, but action that is near-universally acknowledged as immoral. If it has a redeeming moral justification, I don't see it.

> Their job is to report the news

I think they should report news of public interest. Is he of public interst has to be discussed?