12 ms·

Pseudonymity as a Trivial Concession to Genius

142 points by MindGods 6y ago

Y_Y 6y ago
Maybe this is what MacArthur should give to geniuses instead of cash.
krallja 6y ago
VERY highly voted and discussed topic earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416
- etrabroline 6y ago
  I wonder why it isn't anywhere to be found on the home page then.
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    It's on page two, I'm guessing because HN prioritizes newer articles with higher upvote/comment ratios.
  - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
    Flamewar detector I think. IIRC HN posts are automatically down-ranked if the ratio of comments to upvotes gets above a certain threshold, because a large number of comments relative to upvotes frequently indicates that there's a flamewar going on in the comments section.
    - nkurz 6y ago
      > Flamewar detector I think. I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments than upvotes, which isn't true for this article. Judging by the drops (http://hnrankings.info/23610416/ http://hnrankings.info/23610416/) I wonder if the site might be penalized in some way, so that it decays faster than one would expect. Or perhaps an editorial penalty added specifically for this story, to kick it out of the top spot to make room for a more technical article.
      - mundo 6y ago
        > I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments than upvotes I guess that might explain why someone who really dislikes SSC might add a lot of short, repetitive comments in this thread :|
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
throwaway4666 6y ago
>In a year of historic ironies, here’s another one: that it was the decent, reasonable, and well-meaning Cade Metz, rather than any of the SneerClubbers Okay so what's with the obsession with a niche subreddit whose sole purpose is to dunk on rationalists/SSCers who talk too often about the IQ of black people. I mean it's not like Aaronson is himself an HBD blogger. I kind of like Aaronson but his online anxiety is really getting the better of his judgement.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  To treat this in good faith, I point to here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestar... "A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers." That is SneerClub. "Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to. Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me. One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired. ... I had a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t even that bad a nervous breakdown. I was able to keep working through it. I just sort of broke off all human contact for a couple of weeks and stayed in my room freaking out instead. ... The first few [subreddit mods] I approached were positive; some had similar experiences to mine; one admitted that even though he personally was not involved with the CW thread and only dealt with other parts of the subreddit, he taught at a college and felt like his job would not be safe so long as the subreddit and CW thread were affiliated. Apparently the problem was bigger than just me, and other people had been dealing with it in silence."
  - throwaway4666 6y ago
    There's no evidence that any of the things mentioned came from SneerClub. As far as I know the original doxxing came from some alt-right dude with mental issues on tumblr who thought he was shadowbanned and posted in response to a SA reblog on tumblr 'Care to comment, Scott Alexander [Real Surname], working at [Actual clinic] in [Actual location]?' to which SA replied with 'No one's shadowbanned, you're banned for doxxing me though'. This is all relatively easy to look up and check. SneerClub was always ever about venting about rationalists when the dumb speculation about evopsych and the IQ of black people went out of hand, and people who have attempted to doxx Scott on there have been banned. (Doxxing people at all is against the rules of reddit anyway.) Yes, it's a circlejerk subreddit, yes it's petty etc. But it's not the evil den of terrorists rationalists think it is.
mellosouls 6y ago
Even though the article was going to be positive No. That's what the NYT said it was going to be. Despite Professor Aaronson's assurances of the writer's good character and pure intentions in this case, Scott Alexander - apart from his duty of care to his clients - is wise to not take that for granted considering his open-minded approach to various subjects which is liable by certain elements of the Ctrl-Left to warrant a cancel-attack.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pvg 6y ago
  That's what the NYT said it was going to be. That's what Scott Alexander said the NYT writer said. Everything we know about this story is entirely his portrayal and version of it. You can give it as much credence as you like but it is, so far, one party's representation.
  - tgb 6y ago
    Well it's also what Scott Aaron's on says about the story, as he explains in this post, he knew the writer and knew the story he was working on.
    - pvg 6y ago
      He doesn't really say anything about the story. He says he knows the journalist and believes them to be well-intentioned. A well-intentioned journalist can find something worth reporting that the subject of the reporting doesn't like. We don't really know anything about the story other than what subjects and sources have inferred about it. Such inferences aren't always accurate and they certainly shouldn't be attributed to the writer before they've actually said or published anything themselves.
      - tgb 6y ago
        Aaronson was interviewed for this story and gave has (positive) opinion about the story specifically to Alexander.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Maybe, the "Don't ever talk to the police" rule is also good for journalists. "Don't ever talk to journalists." Just like in real life, if you need to talk to the police, you hire a lawyer whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf, so if you need to talk to a journalist, you hire a publicist whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf. This has to do with incentives. Police, no how nicely they talk to you, ultimately want to close the case. If they can do that by having you take the fall, they will do that. Journalists, no matter now nicely they talk to you, just want to create an article that will optimize for engagement from their readers. If they can do that by a misleading portrayal or something that otherwise harms your reputation or safety, they will do that. It is just business to them.
- 205guy 6y ago
  Yes, I think this is a good idea. If your blog/hobby/project is just a side-gig to your main employment, I’m not sure national media scrutiny is desirable. If you wanted to go full-time as a writer or pundit/speaker, perhaps like MMM or James Kunstler, and if you are media-savvy, then maybe it is worth playing the game.
voidhorse 6y ago
I'm sorry, but if I may be frank, I feel ascriptions like "genius" to be massively overblown in this context, masturbatory, and nothing more than the signal of how inflated egos may become once they gain modest degrees of influence. Is it possible epoch defining ideas are lying around on a blog somewhere, sure, but it's highly unlikely. In order to become an intellectual legend, you need to have ideas with reach stoking the ire of a few thousand redditors and having even a few million views on posts in 2020 is not a significant amount of reach to shape zeitgeists. Yes, sad but true, those who are going through the traditional channels and publishing institutions still have the most impact on the world (it's easy to feel like your contributions and small internet following is a more significant player in shaping the future than it really is). While it's quite possible/likely the ideas on this blog will be immensely important and thoroughly studied in a field of specialization, I will wager they will have no effect on the overall social field. I'd argue pseudonymity is actually harmful in a community of specialists, since it blocks the proper exchange and verification of results and creates opportunity for plagarization. There is a distinction between internet/niche community "cancellation" and "cancellation" in the real world. In my personal estimation, everyone's fear of "cancel culture" is grossly exaggerated when it comes to the way it operates in the real world. Typically, most of the notable "cancel" incidents are not the result of some "leftists" ruining someone's career over indelicate statements, they stem rather from direct allegations of criminal behavior; sexual assault, abuse of power for personal gain, clear-cut hate crimes, etc. Sure, there may be small communities more susceptible to flimsy, purely speech-based "cancellations" but that is a failure of the community in question to uphold ideals of open discussion (assuming the speech isn't in fact harmful); if you think "cancel culture" is an unstoppable global phenomenon that can ruin anyone's life in a moment's notice you only need look at the current US president to assure yourself otherwise. Finally, I'd like to say that the vast majority of people that continue to cling to some antiquated enlightenment ideal of reason, in which reason is some pure, untrammeled, untainted instrument that will unite us all and lead us to the promised land, only prove themselves ignorant of all of post-WWII philosophy. WWII blew gaping holes in the entire enlightenment enterprise and philosophers from all sides (even legendary logicians such as Quine, Russell, and Wittgenstein) all make some fundamental appeal to relativity in their work, and clearly state there are problems that logical reasoning (by extension strictly economic/utilitarian reasoning, by extension purely technological reasoning) cannot solve (or in the case of Wittgenstein, cannot even express). Many people have switched to using so-called "reason" as a defense mechanism for promulgating ideas they know would bring them flak were it not for the guise of "objectivity" or the shield of (usually suspect) statistics (another thing philsopshers have throughly dismantled, by the way, as early as the 1800s with Neitzsche and more recently in the philosophy of science).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 6y ago
In my view, for SSC to be permanently deleted would be an intellectual loss on the scale of, let’s say, John Stuart Mill or Mark Twain burning their collected works. That might sound like hyperbole, but You can stop right there. I don't want to get into a prolonged litigation of the Slate Star Codex oeuvre. You can like it or loathe it. But at some point people on these threads need to speak up and say that this blogger is not in fact the second coming of John Stuart Mill --- or at least, that's not the universally held opinion of people in tech. I know, he goes on to hedge his claim the same way. But let's retain candor. You can employ hyperbole if you feel it helps a valid argument, but it remains hyperbole.
- papeda 6y ago
  In slight fairness to Aaronson, he doesn't present this as a "universally held opinion of people in tech", as the rest of that excerpt goes to say: > . . . but not (I don’t think) to the tens of thousands who read Scott’s essays and fiction, particularly during their 2013-2016 heyday, and who went from casual enjoyment to growing admiration to the gradual recognition that they were experiencing, “live,” the works that future generations of teachers will assign their students when they cover the early twenty-first century. So he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot. (I do agree with you that the comparison is pretty nuts, even as someone who thinks Slate Star Codex has a lot of good stuff.)
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot No, he's not, he's saying, explicitly, in what you quoted, that "future generations of teachers will assign their students" Slate Star Codex as reading material. That's waaaay beyond "fans who will miss it a lot".
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Can I say that the plain meaning of these words --- "generations" connoting teachers en masse, the way generations of teachers have for decades assigned the "I Have A Dream Speech" --- is also pretty obviously hyperbolic. Maybe you believe the blog was headed in some genius direction, and lament a lost future. But you can't reasonably suggest that the SSC that exists today is going to be taught in schools. Or, again, if you do, you can't claim to hold the mainstream opinion on the matter. I believe all sorts of weird shit nobody else believes; I'm not casting stones.
mirimir 6y ago
I'm struck by this in TFA: > In effect, Scott was trying to erect a firewall between his Internet persona and his personal and professional identities, and was relying on the entire world’s goodwill not to breach that firewall. And it obviously did matter to him, because he took his blog down over the coming NYT article. So what I wonder is why he didn't erect a far more effective firewall, one that didn't rely on goodwill. If he was writing pseudonymously, I don't get how his blog's credibility would rely on his true identity. But perhaps it did, in a subtle way.
- tptacek 6y ago
  I don't believe it's reasonable to claim that any "firewall" existed. There are very basic things you can do to protect your identity, especially if you blogged at length and with a fair amount of notoriety under your real name, that Scott Alexander didn't do. I'm genuinely confused as to how he could in good faith claim his identity to have been a secret. You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how it works.
  - strstr 6y ago
    There’s a pretty big gradient between “in a national news article with his name” and “only posts on his blog using tor, from a coffee shop, on a burner device, under a pseudonym, with no personal details revealed” (or whatever constitutes a “firewall”). At this point, casual observers do not know Scott’s identity. With a few hours of time most people on HN could probably figure it out, but in that same amount of time they’d also probably calm down if they were interested in sending death threats.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      No. You've comically overestimated the amount of effort required. I understand why: the way he wrote his announcement, you'd think it'd be tricky. I'd say more, but I'll respect the norm --- you may have to take my word for it --- and just say: people I've talked to have been shocked to discover how easy it was to find out. No firewall existed here at all.
KirinDave 6y ago
What's confusing about all this is that Scott Alexander [redacted, see 0] doesn't seem to be in any way "pseudonymous." A non-profiled Google search autocompletes this, and then links to numerous fan-driven Reddit threads including talk about podcasts and authors.[1] Given that his name was already out there to the point where it's trivially discoverable, did he even have pseudonymous status to begin with? I still have to work to recover Dril's name, and I confess I never heard Infosec Taylor Swift's name. But I actually had this name in the back of my head for years now. If an NYT reported had asked me to name him, I probably could have in a heartbeat. A lot is being said about the transgression of the press here, but if you've got a fan-run reddit where they're using your full name publicly, maybe it's somewhat futile to delete your blog and blame the NYT no matter how much your purported genius entitles you. I am definitely one of those spooky antifa types that folks here label with derision as the "ctrl-left". If anyone wanted to somehow threaten his safety, they're a google search away. That places him closer to discoverability for most folks than any NYT article which will squat behind a paywall. Far more likely is that few have bothered Scott or substantially transgressed his safety because he's actually a very small niche blogger with a loyal but admittedly small fan community. I admit I'm a famously uncharitable audience for bloggers, but I'm much more inclined to think that this entire series of events is either a fit of pique that blew up in Scott's face, or a deliberate attempt to create a controversy to gain publicity. [0]: I've been informed that as there is a central controversy over if this man is in fact anonymous, the mods are going to err on the side of caution, and so I've re-presented this post with the item redacted even though it turns out all it took to find the name was to let google autocomplete the name, populated from content 7 years old. [1]: I've screenshotted what _I_ see when I use an incog to search for him on this tweet: [redacted], it turns out even THIS is too much of a concession to reality. My twitter account has the screenshot if you'd like to see it. But it consists of typing "scott alexander"
- scarmig 6y ago
  Yeah, it's too cute by half to pretend you're working to respect his pseudonymity and then link a tweet you sent out with his real name attached. That's also clearly not a clean incognito search, as it has your previous search with his name included.
luord 6y ago
There are enough comments in this thread discussing whether this guy has any real privacy (read: is pseudonymous) or not that I decided to see for myself. After half an hour, I couldn't ferret out his last name no matter the search I tried, regardless of incognito mode, open session, etc. In fact, google kept trying to point me to some screenwriter, at least whenever I searched while logged in. Admittedly, I don't remember ever reading his blog nor anything about him... But then again, that is probably true of most of his patients too, so my search results might be more representative of the results he cares about. Now, something tells me that an NYT article would definitely bring his two personas closer together in anyone's search results. So, even assuming that my google-fu is weaker than I thought it was and it turns out that literally everyone (but me) can immediately know who he is, his fear still seems warranted to me.
- tptacek 6y ago
  I don't know what to tell you, since I had his real name on the simplest imaginable search, and other people have had his name autocomplete.
  - luord 6y ago
    That doesn't surprise me, to be honest. From what I've seen in this thread, you seem to care more about this guy than I do, and google adapts results according to one's history and all the other data google collects. As for our incognito results, mine aren't even in English, so that also factors in why they might be so different. Though I doubt this Scott Alexander person cares about someone who won't ever be his patient.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      I think I care less than you do, since I spent less than 4 minutes, and you spent a whole half hour. I do care about bad arguments, though; very little Google skill is required to rebut them, though.
      - luord 6y ago
maybel_syrup 6y ago
"In his takedown notice, Scott writes that it’s considered vitally important in psychiatry for patients to know almost nothing about their doctors, beyond their names and their areas of expertise." I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk, and everyone in modern mental health knows it. I've worked as a clinician in the types of settings Mr. Alexander works in (locked inpatient psychiatric units), and others in mental health as well, and while there's certainly a longstanding debate within psychotherapy (talk therapy) about so-called "self-disclosure", the days when clinicians were expected to be "impenetrable to the patient" and "reflect nothing but what is shown to him" are long over. Researchers and practitioners from nearly every therapeutic modality that rose up to challenge (and in many cases mostly displace) these leftovers from Freud have challenged the notion of "psychiatrist-as-cipher" from within their own perspectives. And there's even a very good case to be made that hiding oneself as aggressively as Freud wanted clinicians to do (and as aggressively as S. Alexander seems to want to maintain) only augments an already severely lopsided "power dynamic" in the therapeutic relationship. In plain English: it's attitudes like these that allow "the therapeutic class" of which I am a part to lord it over the populations we are ostensibly treating, people who in many cases aren't treated as people and who have valuable expertise and experience in matters relevant to them but who we, historically, have been eager to ignore. But it's funny because these debates have occurred within the universe of "talk therapy", a universe that psychiatry as such abandoned about fifty years ago. Dr. Alexander is a psychiatrist in 2020 - not a psychologist, not a social worker, not even a nurse. His profession left all pretense of actually talking to patients behind when they fully embraced medications as the first-line treatments for nearly all mental disorders; psychiatrists today do "medication management". None of this is to slander the guy, by the way; he's really good at what he does (the blogging, I mean), and I've enjoyed a lot of his output over the years. But this specific reason for remaining anonymous got under my skin a bit, because it's wobbly for the reasons I listed. It's _also_ wobbly, I'll add, because the rest of us in mental health could have no such luxury of privacy these days even if we wanted it - and 99.9999% of us do not maintain ultra-popular and highly public-facing blogs. I value my privacy greatly, perhaps more than Alexander, but citing ancient and highly contested professional mores to maintain it is pulling a fast one on the public he very much needs right now.
- 6y ago

142 points by MindGods 6y ago

Y_Y 6y ago

Maybe this is what MacArthur should give to geniuses instead of cash.

VERY highly voted and discussed topic earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416

etrabroline 6y ago
I wonder why it isn't anywhere to be found on the home page then.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  It's on page two, I'm guessing because HN prioritizes newer articles with higher upvote/comment ratios.
- JoshuaDavid 6y ago
  Flamewar detector I think. IIRC HN posts are automatically down-ranked if the ratio of comments to upvotes gets above a certain threshold, because a large number of comments relative to upvotes frequently indicates that there's a flamewar going on in the comments section.
  - nkurz 6y ago
    > Flamewar detector I think. I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments than upvotes, which isn't true for this article. Judging by the drops (http://hnrankings.info/23610416/ http://hnrankings.info/23610416/) I wonder if the site might be penalized in some way, so that it decays faster than one would expect. Or perhaps an editorial penalty added specifically for this story, to kick it out of the top spot to make room for a more technical article.
    - mundo 6y ago
      > I think the "flamewar" penalty only kicks in when there are more comments than upvotes I guess that might explain why someone who really dislikes SSC might add a lot of short, repetitive comments in this thread :|
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

throwaway4666 6y ago

>In a year of historic ironies, here’s another one: that it was the decent, reasonable, and well-meaning Cade Metz, rather than any of the SneerClubbers Okay so what's with the obsession with a niche subreddit whose sole purpose is to dunk on rationalists/SSCers who talk too often about the IQ of black people. I mean it's not like Aaronson is himself an HBD blogger. I kind of like Aaronson but his online anxiety is really getting the better of his judgement.

waterhouse 6y ago
To treat this in good faith, I point to here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200313231227/https://slatestar... "A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers." That is SneerClub. "Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to. Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me. One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired. ... I had a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t even that bad a nervous breakdown. I was able to keep working through it. I just sort of broke off all human contact for a couple of weeks and stayed in my room freaking out instead. ... The first few [subreddit mods] I approached were positive; some had similar experiences to mine; one admitted that even though he personally was not involved with the CW thread and only dealt with other parts of the subreddit, he taught at a college and felt like his job would not be safe so long as the subreddit and CW thread were affiliated. Apparently the problem was bigger than just me, and other people had been dealing with it in silence."
- throwaway4666 6y ago
  There's no evidence that any of the things mentioned came from SneerClub. As far as I know the original doxxing came from some alt-right dude with mental issues on tumblr who thought he was shadowbanned and posted in response to a SA reblog on tumblr 'Care to comment, Scott Alexander [Real Surname], working at [Actual clinic] in [Actual location]?' to which SA replied with 'No one's shadowbanned, you're banned for doxxing me though'. This is all relatively easy to look up and check. SneerClub was always ever about venting about rationalists when the dumb speculation about evopsych and the IQ of black people went out of hand, and people who have attempted to doxx Scott on there have been banned. (Doxxing people at all is against the rules of reddit anyway.) Yes, it's a circlejerk subreddit, yes it's petty etc. But it's not the evil den of terrorists rationalists think it is.

mellosouls 6y ago

Even though the article was going to be positive No. That's what the NYT said it was going to be. Despite Professor Aaronson's assurances of the writer's good character and pure intentions in this case, Scott Alexander - apart from his duty of care to his clients - is wise to not take that for granted considering his open-minded approach to various subjects which is liable by certain elements of the Ctrl-Left to warrant a cancel-attack.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pvg 6y ago
That's what the NYT said it was going to be. That's what Scott Alexander said the NYT writer said. Everything we know about this story is entirely his portrayal and version of it. You can give it as much credence as you like but it is, so far, one party's representation.
- tgb 6y ago
  Well it's also what Scott Aaron's on says about the story, as he explains in this post, he knew the writer and knew the story he was working on.
  - pvg 6y ago
    He doesn't really say anything about the story. He says he knows the journalist and believes them to be well-intentioned. A well-intentioned journalist can find something worth reporting that the subject of the reporting doesn't like. We don't really know anything about the story other than what subjects and sources have inferred about it. Such inferences aren't always accurate and they certainly shouldn't be attributed to the writer before they've actually said or published anything themselves.
    - tgb 6y ago
      Aaronson was interviewed for this story and gave has (positive) opinion about the story specifically to Alexander.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

Maybe, the "Don't ever talk to the police" rule is also good for journalists. "Don't ever talk to journalists." Just like in real life, if you need to talk to the police, you hire a lawyer whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf, so if you need to talk to a journalist, you hire a publicist whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf. This has to do with incentives. Police, no how nicely they talk to you, ultimately want to close the case. If they can do that by having you take the fall, they will do that. Journalists, no matter now nicely they talk to you, just want to create an article that will optimize for engagement from their readers. If they can do that by a misleading portrayal or something that otherwise harms your reputation or safety, they will do that. It is just business to them.

205guy 6y ago
Yes, I think this is a good idea. If your blog/hobby/project is just a side-gig to your main employment, I’m not sure national media scrutiny is desirable. If you wanted to go full-time as a writer or pundit/speaker, perhaps like MMM or James Kunstler, and if you are media-savvy, then maybe it is worth playing the game.

voidhorse 6y ago

I'm sorry, but if I may be frank, I feel ascriptions like "genius" to be massively overblown in this context, masturbatory, and nothing more than the signal of how inflated egos may become once they gain modest degrees of influence. Is it possible epoch defining ideas are lying around on a blog somewhere, sure, but it's highly unlikely. In order to become an intellectual legend, you need to have ideas with reach stoking the ire of a few thousand redditors and having even a few million views on posts in 2020 is not a significant amount of reach to shape zeitgeists. Yes, sad but true, those who are going through the traditional channels and publishing institutions still have the most impact on the world (it's easy to feel like your contributions and small internet following is a more significant player in shaping the future than it really is). While it's quite possible/likely the ideas on this blog will be immensely important and thoroughly studied in a field of specialization, I will wager they will have no effect on the overall social field. I'd argue pseudonymity is actually harmful in a community of specialists, since it blocks the proper exchange and verification of results and creates opportunity for plagarization. There is a distinction between internet/niche community "cancellation" and "cancellation" in the real world. In my personal estimation, everyone's fear of "cancel culture" is grossly exaggerated when it comes to the way it operates in the real world. Typically, most of the notable "cancel" incidents are not the result of some "leftists" ruining someone's career over indelicate statements, they stem rather from direct allegations of criminal behavior; sexual assault, abuse of power for personal gain, clear-cut hate crimes, etc. Sure, there may be small communities more susceptible to flimsy, purely speech-based "cancellations" but that is a failure of the community in question to uphold ideals of open discussion (assuming the speech isn't in fact harmful); if you think "cancel culture" is an unstoppable global phenomenon that can ruin anyone's life in a moment's notice you only need look at the current US president to assure yourself otherwise. Finally, I'd like to say that the vast majority of people that continue to cling to some antiquated enlightenment ideal of reason, in which reason is some pure, untrammeled, untainted instrument that will unite us all and lead us to the promised land, only prove themselves ignorant of all of post-WWII philosophy. WWII blew gaping holes in the entire enlightenment enterprise and philosophers from all sides (even legendary logicians such as Quine, Russell, and Wittgenstein) all make some fundamental appeal to relativity in their work, and clearly state there are problems that logical reasoning (by extension strictly economic/utilitarian reasoning, by extension purely technological reasoning) cannot solve (or in the case of Wittgenstein, cannot even express). Many people have switched to using so-called "reason" as a defense mechanism for promulgating ideas they know would bring them flak were it not for the guise of "objectivity" or the shield of (usually suspect) statistics (another thing philsopshers have throughly dismantled, by the way, as early as the 1800s with Neitzsche and more recently in the philosophy of science).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 6y ago

In my view, for SSC to be permanently deleted would be an intellectual loss on the scale of, let’s say, John Stuart Mill or Mark Twain burning their collected works. That might sound like hyperbole, but You can stop right there. I don't want to get into a prolonged litigation of the Slate Star Codex oeuvre. You can like it or loathe it. But at some point people on these threads need to speak up and say that this blogger is not in fact the second coming of John Stuart Mill --- or at least, that's not the universally held opinion of people in tech. I know, he goes on to hedge his claim the same way. But let's retain candor. You can employ hyperbole if you feel it helps a valid argument, but it remains hyperbole.

papeda 6y ago
In slight fairness to Aaronson, he doesn't present this as a "universally held opinion of people in tech", as the rest of that excerpt goes to say: > . . . but not (I don’t think) to the tens of thousands who read Scott’s essays and fiction, particularly during their 2013-2016 heyday, and who went from casual enjoyment to growing admiration to the gradual recognition that they were experiencing, “live,” the works that future generations of teachers will assign their students when they cover the early twenty-first century. So he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot. (I do agree with you that the comparison is pretty nuts, even as someone who thinks Slate Star Codex has a lot of good stuff.)
- pdonis 6y ago
  > he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot No, he's not, he's saying, explicitly, in what you quoted, that "future generations of teachers will assign their students" Slate Star Codex as reading material. That's waaaay beyond "fans who will miss it a lot".
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Can I say that the plain meaning of these words --- "generations" connoting teachers en masse, the way generations of teachers have for decades assigned the "I Have A Dream Speech" --- is also pretty obviously hyperbolic. Maybe you believe the blog was headed in some genius direction, and lament a lost future. But you can't reasonably suggest that the SSC that exists today is going to be taught in schools. Or, again, if you do, you can't claim to hold the mainstream opinion on the matter. I believe all sorts of weird shit nobody else believes; I'm not casting stones.

mirimir 6y ago

I'm struck by this in TFA: > In effect, Scott was trying to erect a firewall between his Internet persona and his personal and professional identities, and was relying on the entire world’s goodwill not to breach that firewall. And it obviously did matter to him, because he took his blog down over the coming NYT article. So what I wonder is why he didn't erect a far more effective firewall, one that didn't rely on goodwill. If he was writing pseudonymously, I don't get how his blog's credibility would rely on his true identity. But perhaps it did, in a subtle way.

tptacek 6y ago
I don't believe it's reasonable to claim that any "firewall" existed. There are very basic things you can do to protect your identity, especially if you blogged at length and with a fair amount of notoriety under your real name, that Scott Alexander didn't do. I'm genuinely confused as to how he could in good faith claim his identity to have been a secret. You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how it works.
- strstr 6y ago
  There’s a pretty big gradient between “in a national news article with his name” and “only posts on his blog using tor, from a coffee shop, on a burner device, under a pseudonym, with no personal details revealed” (or whatever constitutes a “firewall”). At this point, casual observers do not know Scott’s identity. With a few hours of time most people on HN could probably figure it out, but in that same amount of time they’d also probably calm down if they were interested in sending death threats.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    No. You've comically overestimated the amount of effort required. I understand why: the way he wrote his announcement, you'd think it'd be tricky. I'd say more, but I'll respect the norm --- you may have to take my word for it --- and just say: people I've talked to have been shocked to discover how easy it was to find out. No firewall existed here at all.

KirinDave 6y ago

What's confusing about all this is that Scott Alexander [redacted, see 0] doesn't seem to be in any way "pseudonymous." A non-profiled Google search autocompletes this, and then links to numerous fan-driven Reddit threads including talk about podcasts and authors.[1] Given that his name was already out there to the point where it's trivially discoverable, did he even have pseudonymous status to begin with? I still have to work to recover Dril's name, and I confess I never heard Infosec Taylor Swift's name. But I actually had this name in the back of my head for years now. If an NYT reported had asked me to name him, I probably could have in a heartbeat. A lot is being said about the transgression of the press here, but if you've got a fan-run reddit where they're using your full name publicly, maybe it's somewhat futile to delete your blog and blame the NYT no matter how much your purported genius entitles you. I am definitely one of those spooky antifa types that folks here label with derision as the "ctrl-left". If anyone wanted to somehow threaten his safety, they're a google search away. That places him closer to discoverability for most folks than any NYT article which will squat behind a paywall. Far more likely is that few have bothered Scott or substantially transgressed his safety because he's actually a very small niche blogger with a loyal but admittedly small fan community. I admit I'm a famously uncharitable audience for bloggers, but I'm much more inclined to think that this entire series of events is either a fit of pique that blew up in Scott's face, or a deliberate attempt to create a controversy to gain publicity. [0]: I've been informed that as there is a central controversy over if this man is in fact anonymous, the mods are going to err on the side of caution, and so I've re-presented this post with the item redacted even though it turns out all it took to find the name was to let google autocomplete the name, populated from content 7 years old. [1]: I've screenshotted what _I_ see when I use an incog to search for him on this tweet: [redacted], it turns out even THIS is too much of a concession to reality. My twitter account has the screenshot if you'd like to see it. But it consists of typing "scott alexander"

scarmig 6y ago
Yeah, it's too cute by half to pretend you're working to respect his pseudonymity and then link a tweet you sent out with his real name attached. That's also clearly not a clean incognito search, as it has your previous search with his name included.

luord 6y ago

There are enough comments in this thread discussing whether this guy has any real privacy (read: is pseudonymous) or not that I decided to see for myself. After half an hour, I couldn't ferret out his last name no matter the search I tried, regardless of incognito mode, open session, etc. In fact, google kept trying to point me to some screenwriter, at least whenever I searched while logged in. Admittedly, I don't remember ever reading his blog nor anything about him... But then again, that is probably true of most of his patients too, so my search results might be more representative of the results he cares about. Now, something tells me that an NYT article would definitely bring his two personas closer together in anyone's search results. So, even assuming that my google-fu is weaker than I thought it was and it turns out that literally everyone (but me) can immediately know who he is, his fear still seems warranted to me.

tptacek 6y ago
I don't know what to tell you, since I had his real name on the simplest imaginable search, and other people have had his name autocomplete.
- luord 6y ago
  That doesn't surprise me, to be honest. From what I've seen in this thread, you seem to care more about this guy than I do, and google adapts results according to one's history and all the other data google collects. As for our incognito results, mine aren't even in English, so that also factors in why they might be so different. Though I doubt this Scott Alexander person cares about someone who won't ever be his patient.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    I think I care less than you do, since I spent less than 4 minutes, and you spent a whole half hour. I do care about bad arguments, though; very little Google skill is required to rebut them, though.
    - luord 6y ago

maybel_syrup 6y ago

"In his takedown notice, Scott writes that it’s considered vitally important in psychiatry for patients to know almost nothing about their doctors, beyond their names and their areas of expertise." I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk, and everyone in modern mental health knows it. I've worked as a clinician in the types of settings Mr. Alexander works in (locked inpatient psychiatric units), and others in mental health as well, and while there's certainly a longstanding debate within psychotherapy (talk therapy) about so-called "self-disclosure", the days when clinicians were expected to be "impenetrable to the patient" and "reflect nothing but what is shown to him" are long over. Researchers and practitioners from nearly every therapeutic modality that rose up to challenge (and in many cases mostly displace) these leftovers from Freud have challenged the notion of "psychiatrist-as-cipher" from within their own perspectives. And there's even a very good case to be made that hiding oneself as aggressively as Freud wanted clinicians to do (and as aggressively as S. Alexander seems to want to maintain) only augments an already severely lopsided "power dynamic" in the therapeutic relationship. In plain English: it's attitudes like these that allow "the therapeutic class" of which I am a part to lord it over the populations we are ostensibly treating, people who in many cases aren't treated as people and who have valuable expertise and experience in matters relevant to them but who we, historically, have been eager to ignore. But it's funny because these debates have occurred within the universe of "talk therapy", a universe that psychiatry as such abandoned about fifty years ago. Dr. Alexander is a psychiatrist in 2020 - not a psychologist, not a social worker, not even a nurse. His profession left all pretense of actually talking to patients behind when they fully embraced medications as the first-line treatments for nearly all mental disorders; psychiatrists today do "medication management". None of this is to slander the guy, by the way; he's really good at what he does (the blogging, I mean), and I've enjoyed a lot of his output over the years. But this specific reason for remaining anonymous got under my skin a bit, because it's wobbly for the reasons I listed. It's _also_ wobbly, I'll add, because the rest of us in mental health could have no such luxury of privacy these days even if we wanted it - and 99.9999% of us do not maintain ultra-popular and highly public-facing blogs. I value my privacy greatly, perhaps more than Alexander, but citing ancient and highly contested professional mores to maintain it is pulling a fast one on the public he very much needs right now.

6y ago