The NYT article[1] can hardly be called a hit piece at all, considering how little 'dirt' it actually contains.
What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".
The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.
Thank you for the link to the NYT article. I completely agree with your reading.
Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.
Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again:
>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Because if we let people be anonymous, then more people will feel comfortable writing insightful things for us to read. I'd rather have a wider selection of content than know everyone's real name. Knowing who writers are "in real life" is useless and uninteresting most of the time.
In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?
Anonimity is certainly not a right but sometimes is the only protection for other rights. And we must acknowledge the consequences of technology, unintended or not. For example, nobody expects privacy in public spaces but I think everybody agrees camera surveillance can be abused. Sometimes quantity is a quality of its own.
It's not a legal right if that's what you're getting at. Otherwise, do you also not understand why basically all platforms have pretty assertive (if questionably enforced) anti-doxxing rules?
Where’d you get that idea? You not only have a right to privacy in your own bathroom, the courts have declared a reasonable expectation of privacy inside public bathroom stalls, and/or behind privacy partitions. CNN publishing nude photos of anyone going to the bathroom would generally be completely illegal.
Thanks for including this link. I read the response before I read the NYT article. And while it was a pretty uninteresting article, the tactics used to obfuscate who holds what beliefs are laid bare. It's illuminating to see.
The underlying point of the article is that a large number of tech leaders are rationalists, what is rationalism, what are they reading (the blog), and what does that mean for society.
My reading of the article was that it wasn't about Scott at all. It was about the comment sections on Slate Star Codex, the Rationalist community (which the general public knows very little about), and its connection to the centers of power in Silicon Valley.
If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.
As the article points out, the name is hardly a secret, and I suspect the important thing is that the NYT has no practice of using pseudonyms. If a writer submits a story and the editor says, "Why'd you use a pseudonym," I'm not sure the writer gets to say, "They asked for one," because then why wouldn't everyone who genuinely is newsworthy and thinks they aren't newsworthy ask for one? If the writer says, "I didn't think it was worth finding out," the editor probably ought to question if the writer has actually done enough research on what they're reporting on - especially if the editor can find the name trivially. Remember that the NYT got in very public trouble recently for telling a story that turned out be false because they trusted a subject of the story too much. And even if it wasn't for that, the NYT is regularly in the business of reporting on situations where people would love to use pseudonyms to avoid accountability.
It makes sense to me that they have a default policy/norm against it, and weren't able to justify overriding it in this particular case, especially given that the name was already public information.
To be clear, I agree that there was no need to use his name to tell the story they were telling, and I think the world would have been a better place if they were able to. But I don't think it's only attributable to malice that they did.
> I suspect the important thing is that the NYT has no practice of using pseudonyms
NYT was happy to write about Virgil Texas of Chapo Trap House without revealing his real name [0].
Implying that their actual rule is: yes to pseudonymity for people with whom we politically sympathise, no to pseudonymity for people with whom we don't.
That kind of inconsistency isn't worthy of respect.
I don’t think consistency is actually that important here. I don’t expect the NYT’s editorial decisions to be perfectly consistent with each other as (a) they’re not necessarily being made by the same people and (b) the NYT makes a very large number of editorial decisions. I do expect those decisions to be justifiable considered individually on their merits.
I don’t see any reason not to give Scott Alexander’s real name. The mere fact that he’d rather keep it a secret doesn’t strike me as a good reason.
When an organisation justifies its decisions by reference to its policies, evidence that it doesn't apply its policies consistently is relevant to the question of how much we should believe its purported justifications. An organisation worthy of respect will either be consistent, or will openly admit its inconsistency as a shortcoming when called out on it. I'm not expecting the NYT to do that, which is part of why I don't respect the NYT. (The NYT is free to prove me wrong, in which case I will adjust my view of it accordingly.)
What reason did they have not to give Virgil Texas' real name? The article I cited acknowledged it as a pseudonym, so they knew it wasn't his real name. I'm sure they either know what his real name is, or they could have easily found it out – indeed, the first page of a Google search for "Virgil Texas real name" contains the answer.
I think they should respect people's requests for pseudonymity unless there is a compelling public interest in not doing so – which means they wouldn't reveal either Virgil Texas or Scott Alexander's real names. Alternatively, if they don't agree they should default to respecting people's requests for pseudonymity, then they should be consistent in denying it, and deny it to Virgil Texas as well.
Policies get applied inconsistently all the time for very uninteresting reasons. Inconsistency is what happens by default unless people make an enormous and concerted effort to be consistent. I don’t personally see any inconsistency - just two case-by-case decisions that went in different directions. But even if we grant that the two decisions are inconsistent, I don’t see why this is supposed to be a big deal. It certainly doesn’t mean that one of the decisions is necessarily wrong or unjustified. The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case.
The only interesting question here is whether there’s some overriding reason why the NYT should collude with Scott Alexander in keeping his identity semi-secret (it’s not like it was actually secret anyway). There just isn’t any such reason.
> The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case and isn’t obliged to be perfectly consistent.
I think the NYT is perfectly within its legal rights to publish bad journalism. If the NYT decided tomorrow to transform itself into the left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, that would be entirely legal, and so it should be.
But just as NYT has every right to publish what it wants, others have just as much a right to judge it negatively for doing so.
It is not legally obliged to be consistent, and I don't think it should be legally obliged to be consistent either. Giving the legal system the power to police journalism is very risky business, and I don't think the risk is worth it.
However, I personally think it is morally obliged to be consistent, and I will judge it negatively if it fails to be so – you may disagree, but maybe that's a sign that you and I have different moral values.
> The only interesting question here
Maybe the questions that interest you are different from the questions that interest me.
Why do you think consistency in itself is a moral obligation? To me that seems weird. For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice? The NYT is morally obliged to apply its editorial policies in good faith, but it’s not obliged to ensure that the many thousands of editorial decisions that it makes in a given year are all perfectly consistent.
I notice that other than consistency (which is symmetrical and could equally argue that the NYT should have published the other person’s real name) you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret.
> For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice?
No you are not. But I think, if someone points out your inconsistency, a person (or group/organisation) really ought to have the honesty to be able to say "Yes, you are right, that's a fair criticism, I am being inconsistent, I will try to be more consistent in the future". And one way of being more consistent in the future would be to do the moral thing from now on, and obviously that would be morally superior to achieving consistency by choosing to consistently make the bad choice instead.
> you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret
He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable. Faced with a reasonable request from a person that their privacy be respected, I think the ethical thing to do is to respect their request, unless there is a strong public interest in disregarding it – which I don't think there is in this case. (And I'd add that if you are going to justify violations of the privacy of others by appeals to the public interest, you ought to clearly state your claim in doing so, which NYT has failed to do here.)
I was one of the many people who already knew Scott Alexander's real name. I don't know him personally, I'd just worked it out. But I wouldn't have posted that info publicly, because he asked people not to, and even though I don't know him personally, he seems like a decent guy and respecting his wishes in this matter was the moral thing to do.
I don’t understand why you think that consistency in itself is a moral obligation. In any case, the consistency argument, even if successful, doesn't show that the NYT was wrong to reveal Scott Alexander's real name. It shows – at most – that it was either wrong to do this or wrong not to publish Virgil Texas's real name. That is why the only interesting question here is the one that you've finally addressed.
>He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable.
His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
In the end the NYT has to come to its own evaluation of the merits of anyone's request for anonymity. The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it. So just because Scott asked and the request wasn't granted doesn't mean that something has gone wrong.
> I don’t understand why you think that consistency in itself is a moral obligation
Cicero defined justice as giving each their due; not a definition original to him, Plato and Aristotle said more or less the same thing. Inconsistency is a form of injustice because you are giving to one different from what you give to another without a good reason. Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification – I give my own children hugs, I don't give hugs to the children of strangers, but that is not injust, since there is a good reason to justify that difference in treatment. Justice is a key part of ethics, indeed classically it is one of the four cardinal virtues.
> His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity
He had specific reasons due to his dual role as both blogger and psychiatrist, that do not apply to the average person. The profession of psychiatry has certain expectations about psychiatrists hiding their opinions from their patients which don't apply to most other professions. Those reasons don't apply to "almost everyone" because most people are not psychiatrists, and most other professions don't care anywhere near as much if clients find out your opinions on unrelated issues.
> It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
But what is "fit to print"? Traditionally journalism justified itself as serving the public interest. What is the public interest in publishing Scott Alexander's real name? I don't see how there was one.
> The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it
Yes they can: If someone asks for pseudonymity, they should grant it unless there is a strong public interest in refusing it; and if they refuse it, they should be explicit about why they believe denying it serves the public interest in that particular case.
Psychiatrists shouldn't go on political rants with their patients, but the idea that psychiatrists must completely conceal their political leanings from their patients is an idea that Scott has just made up. The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one.
> Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that *for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification*
There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason. Take gifts as an example. It's inconsistent if I give one friend a big gift and another friend a small gift, but it's not unjust, as I'm under no obligation to give any of them gifts at all – and consistency in itself isn't an ethical constraint on behavior. I'm certainly not required to have a specific reason for spending $15 on Bob's gift and $100 on Mary's gift.
How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you.
> The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one.
As I said, they ought to default to granting requests for pseudonymity unless there is strong public interest not to, which there wasn't any in this case.
> There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason
The difference with your example of gifts, is that neither Bob nor Mary have any right to expect any particular gift. By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to. It is one thing to be inconsistent in gifts to friends, when we don't owe them anything in particular. It is another thing to be inconsistent in fulfilling one's obligations to others.
>How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you.
Sure, maybe I'm wrong. I'm open to evidence of this. As far as I can determine, psychiatrists are not required to keep their political views a secret.
>By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to.
But what are the implications of that for consistency? Consider that you're free to grant someone's request for privacy even if there isn't an overriding reason to do so
or not to do so (just as you're free to give someone a gift without a reason). So just because the NYT honored one such request in the past doesn't entail that they're bound to honor all such requests in future. Again, the only interesting question is whether their reasons were good in each case.
I think rather than continuing to debate relatively peripheral issues (such as consistency or the culture of psychiatrists), let me just state what I think the crux of the issue is:
I believe that journalists ought to honour all requests for pseudonymity, unless they believe there is a strong public interest in not doing so in any particular case, and if they believe there is such a strong public interest, they should be explicit about what they think it is, so others can judge their public interest claim. I think this is the decent thing to do, and sustains a culture of respecting people's privacy.
NYT did not follow that standard in the case of Scott Alexander.
What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
3. He now has a new blog.
Cool story, NYT.
[1]: https://archive.is/b1tyQ