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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

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One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities: https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976

The journalist themselves is a real piece of work: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/463503-sarah-jeong-out-at...

Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.

> A third tweet posted by Jeong in 2014 said, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”

It's not like she's any browner..

I moderated a large Reddit community (circa 2014). She threatened to have articles written about how we were racist/misogynistic, unless we removed comments she didn't like.

Her being nasty elsewhere doesn't surprise me...

Incredible, some people think that minorities can't be racist, by that definition Japanese weren't at all racist in 1937 Nanjing.

There’s a context to that you’re missing. The people saying that are usually using the formulation that racism = prejudice + power. So can black people in the U.K. be prejudiced? Yes, definitely. Racist? They’d need to be in a position of authority for it to matter.

Other people use the formulation racism = prejudice about race, and end up talking past each other.

You are correct that there are multiple somewhat-conflicting definitions of racism but “taking past each other” isn’t really what’s happening.

The “classic” definition of racism is something like “a system of oppression based on race”. People pull that out to explain why “[minority] people can’t be racist”, but that that definition isn’t about people. It’s about systems, so if we take that definition, no individual can be racist. Most of the same people who trot out this definition will still call majority-race individuals racist (clearly using a different definition). It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand to swap definitions in a self serving way like this.

> racism = prejudice + power

This seems like an oversimplified perversion of the “systemic” definition and doesn’t make sense if you actually consider it. By this definition a poor white woman basically couldn’t be racist, while a rich black man could.

the prejudice + power statement while still ascribing veing racist to individuals is a definite motte and bailey tactic in my eyes.

There's a term for that: systemic racism. The redefining racism thing just comes from a bunch of people who wanted to be racist without admitting racism -- often, ironically, from a position of power.

Systemic racism is something different. It's the legal system being set up in a way that favors/disfavors certain groups. It's not something a person does.

Yes, it's power + racism, which is the idea that the "power+prejudice" redefinition was getting at with the added clarification that the power has to be real rather than in the eye of the beholder. It achieves the stated purpose of the redefinition but without providing cover for people who want a reason why their racism is good while yours is bad.

Racism has multiple conflicting definitions, and indeed “a system of oppression based on race” is a classic one.

“Systemic racism” seems to a modern answer to this vagueness. I suppose the other side would be “individual racism”.

Honestly these loudmouths are usually quite privileged themselves. These theatrics are either to deflect from themselves, or they are delusional about how tough their life is.

I agree with your first statement. However I wouldn't dismiss them just because of that: as an analogy, most of the most effective campaigners against slavery were not slaves themselves.

I do agree that in this particular case the lady in question seems rather nasty, and the whole woke movement seems to be quite the circular firing squad.

for a good counterbalance to those just finding out the nyt is a state dept mouthpiece at best, read about real journalists and why there seem to be so few of them, read Pegasus by laurent richard. Spoiler alert, real journalists who expose powerful peoples' wrongdoings simply get killed.

One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.

404media is good stuff, one of the few news outlets I pay for. I didn't dig too deep on the above comment because I have a deep respect for journalists despite admittedly many of them servicing things I dislike by choice or coercion or for remuneration or fame, etc. Reading about journalists in more authoritarian countries was seriously depressing

Yep Googlers... Metans... don't throw stones.

Glen Greenwald is alive and kicking.

Along with his zero credibility. Dude torched his career just like Taibbi.

Sure but releasing the Snowden files wasn't what did that. He did that all by himself cozying up to Russia.

Reminds me of a related principle:

“How do you know if a conspiracy theorist is really on to something?”

“Check the missing persons list.”

when journalism is a business, stuff like this happens...

And it's always been a business.

but there's also state funded journalism, so they are not forced to do whats commercially viable

And then it's a business that is funded by political patronage.

okay so the police is a business too? Just like private security firms?

The point is that, just like journalists if they are paid by the government, the police also have biases regarding which laws to enforce. I suppose you consider the BBC a shining example of unbiased reporting?

They deliver what readers what.

That would imply that the readers are the customers.

They are in a business relationship.

Just like Knight Rider and Matlock had to deliver enough entertainment to keep you from switching channels and instead have you watch the next beer ad.

Btw I don't know how closely you follow Naomi Wu, but take that with grain of salt. (def. not defending bad journalists)

Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.

She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.

Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.

And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.

I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.

Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".

Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.

I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video.

Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.

The journalist knew what she was doing. Naomi was in China, agreed to do an interview about her self & her work, then the journo tried to drum up clicks by putting her on the spot about politics.

Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.

I've read the original article again and I don't think people read it. The whole interview is very supportive and based around how much shit she is getting. How she is hated for he appearance, how people don't believe she is technically skilled, that people thinks she is a fake persona or that some male is designing her whole career. Also that she gets many personal threats.

This is just her talking about herself and I am not sure how this is about chinese gov politics or how it is damning/doxing her.

Anyway her response was to find home address of one of the editors and put it in her next video. If i would be journalist and somebody did that to me i would expect my company to use their lawyers.

How do you "dox" a journalist? Are they writing under anonymous bylines now?

By releasing personal information which a reasonable person would expect to be private? I don't know the specifics of this case (only responding to the overly vague question) but information like address, private contact info, details about their families. Anything you would not immediately expect to become public knowledge simply by writing about topic(s).

In the US at least owning a residence is public record. It can be obfuscated with shell companies and things like that but most people don’t do.

Putting home address of one of the journalists in a video when you have milion subscribers (many of which know about your beef)... that's not fun.

> “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” Jeong said in one tweet from 2014 that has since been deleted.

You weren't messing, she seems lovely.. /s

Are you able to explain in 1 short sentence what Vice did wrong to her? Because I can't. I remember reading Wu's explanation and couldn't find anything in there, like at all. It was filled with prejudice.

They outed her as lesbian, in a country where this is increasingly unacceptable.

> Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories.

People can opt to not read and pay such people.

Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..

> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.

It's the use of the word "quest" here that really bothers me. It seems ignoble.

Much like the "unmasking" of Banksy or Belle de Jour. Why do it other than nosiness?

Is the person committing a crime? No? Then leave them in peace.

This is just a journalist using the resources of NYTimes to show off that they can exert control over someone else.

I had a good chuckle going from Banksy on one line to whether the person is committing a crime on the other - that it's a crime was key to how the article claimed to find Banksy's identity and mentioned as one of the likely factors in why Banksy chose to be anonymous early on :D.

I get you mean whether they are causing any actual harm though (and agree for many such unmaskings), it was just an amusing juxtaposition of literal statements.

Although people repeatedly say this, NYT did not in fact dox Slate Star Codex. He revealed his own information because he said they were going to reveal his name based on a draft of the article he says he saw. The verge apparently reported that no draft had been written and the NYT was still in news gathering stage. Who knows what the truth of that is, but factually he released the information.

> The New York Times published an article about the blog in February 2021, three weeks after Alexander had publicly revealed his name.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#The_New_York_...

Funnily enough, in the blog post you linked Scott Alexander also ruminates about how he never previously questioned journalistic attempts to dox Satoshi Nakamoto.

I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.

It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pissed if I recognized something I told my psychiatrist on an internet blog. Frankly given how strongly one has to consent to even legally process clinical data I've never been sure if that was at all legal.

When someone's identity is in the public interest an investigative journalist isn't doxxing anyone, they're doing their job. Both true for Nakamoto and arguably Scott

He was not blogging under his real name. Scott Alexander is not his real name.

It's his first and middle name. At least that's what he said in the post about shutting down the blog.

It's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.

Yes, but a patient who googled his real name would not find his blog. That was the point.

That part of things is what really made this entire argument all apart of me.

There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number.

Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.

> Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott.

Seems to be more like one in 425 per SSA.

Take a moment and apply some common sense to your math. Do you really think there are 5 psychiatrists in the country named Scott? That's off by multiple orders of magnitude.

No, but I doubt there are more than 100.

The magnitude is so small that anonymity is essential broken.

It is his real name, and he also used his real surname in early blog posts.

It is not his real name. Once he upended his life, he revealed his real name here[1]. It is not Scott Alexander.

[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive

Scott Alexander are his first and middle names, and Siskind his last name, or that's what I've understood.

His pre-SSC blogging was, and he’d link those posts directly from time to time.

> I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.

Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?

It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged.

Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.

Case studies are done with consent, typically. That’s pretty different.

In principle, anonymized case studies do not require consent and historically, they were often published without. Without personally identifiable information, this is and always has been 100% legal. But in modern practice, many journals acknowledge that making a case fully anonymous in the age of the internet might not even be possible without taking away everything noteworthy, so they require some form of consent nowadays.

Alternatively they can do what Scott Alexander did and change irrelevant details.

That's not so easy, especially for clinical case studies. If any data points are irrelevant, they should not be stated at all, because they actually might not be irrelevant after all and by arbitrarily changing them, you could confound results. On the other hand, it has been shown that three or more indirect data points can already be enough to unmask you in an anonymized report. And most reports usually contain many more than that. So it's not surprising that journals would cover their backs by requiring consent, even if the law does not explicitly demand it.

It’s been known since at least the 90s that it’s really hard to fully anonymize patient records. You can’t be certain but you can infer probabilities from very little information.

For anyone who disagrees with this statement there’s been a lot of research done in the area.

I don’t know how typical it is, but HIPAA explicitly doesn’t cover patient data after anonymization, and anecdotally I’ve had an anonymous case study published about me without my consent (although I was notified after).

The NYT has no authority to dox people. If they or anyone believed that SSC was acting unethically or illegally, that should be processed through proper legal or ethical channels, which exist for a reason. The solution is not that NYT should abuse their power to skip those channels.

You can't doxx someone who already publicly identified themselves.

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