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> why do you think it's possible that he'd delete his blog in order to dodge/mitigate bad press due to content that a journalist might uncover there This is a

> why do you think it's possible that he'd delete his blog in order to dodge/mitigate bad press due to content that a journalist might uncover there This is a reasonable question. I don't honestly know enough about the topic to make even a hypothetical argument that such a thing is likely. But it does seem possible any time a high profile blogger shuts down in the face of a news story, that this is one of the reasons for the shut down. For example, Alexander gives one reason it's possible on his blog: "If there’s no blog, there’s no story." The NYT doesn't really have an incentive to run a story about an ex-blog. So by shutting down, he puts pressure to shut the story down altogether. Regarding the Streisand effect, I'm not sure. But I think, based on his blog post, that he thinks the story is less likely to run now. Plus, accessing the blog is now at least an order of magnitude harder. Can you access some of the pages? Sure. Will NYT readers? No, probably not. Search doesn't work, it's painfully slow, only some URLs are snapshotted. It may even be that most readers probably don't even know about the Archive. So yeah at least to me it seems possible. For example, he's come out as saying he likes eugenics. It's reasonable to fear that if a NYT story ran giving his surname and saying he supported eugenics, then he may have a hard time practicing as a psychiatrist.

tripletao 6y ago
I agree that deleting the blog makes it less likely that NYT readers would investigate and find something objectionable, both because the blog becomes less accessible (but not inaccessible) and because if the story doesn't run (as it seems not to have) then there's no readers in the first place. The New Yorker claim was about the NYT reporter, though, not the readers. If I had an embarrassing secret out in public and a reporter was sniffing around, then conspicuously deleting some but not all copies of it seems like the stupidest possible thing I could do, just encouraging them to dig further for it. That's the reason I doubt that could be Alexander's motivation in deleting the blog. As to the Streisand effect, we're talking about this now at least, and you're aware that he "likes" eugenics[1]--indeed, if anyone's still reading this thread then perhaps they learned that Alexander likes eugenics specifically because of this article, which appeared specifically because he deleted the blog. I can't imagine the NYT reporter doesn't know too. So as a tactic to conceal his writing, I think deleting the blog has empirically failed. Though I agree that he probably did fear that an NYT story that said "[Scott Alexander's full name] likes eugenics" would harm his ability to practice as a psychiatrist, and reasonably so. Eugenics obviously has an abhorrent history in its purported application, and he treats the subject casually enough to creep me out too. I didn't read his blog extensively, but the creepier stuff always felt to me more like autistic-style disregard for social context than a desire to revive those horrors. I think the remedy to that should be for someone to point that out to him (as they have, of course), rather than for a journalist to quote his worst phrasing out of context and thus end his career. 1. Literally with the word "like", too, https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarc...

tripletao 6y ago

I agree that deleting the blog makes it less likely that NYT readers would investigate and find something objectionable, both because the blog becomes less accessible (but not inaccessible) and because if the story doesn't run (as it seems not to have) then there's no readers in the first place. The New Yorker claim was about the NYT reporter, though, not the readers. If I had an embarrassing secret out in public and a reporter was sniffing around, then conspicuously deleting some but not all copies of it seems like the stupidest possible thing I could do, just encouraging them to dig further for it. That's the reason I doubt that could be Alexander's motivation in deleting the blog. As to the Streisand effect, we're talking about this now at least, and you're aware that he "likes" eugenics[1]--indeed, if anyone's still reading this thread then perhaps they learned that Alexander likes eugenics specifically because of this article, which appeared specifically because he deleted the blog. I can't imagine the NYT reporter doesn't know too. So as a tactic to conceal his writing, I think deleting the blog has empirically failed. Though I agree that he probably did fear that an NYT story that said "[Scott Alexander's full name] likes eugenics" would harm his ability to practice as a psychiatrist, and reasonably so. Eugenics obviously has an abhorrent history in its purported application, and he treats the subject casually enough to creep me out too. I didn't read his blog extensively, but the creepier stuff always felt to me more like autistic-style disregard for social context than a desire to revive those horrors. I think the remedy to that should be for someone to point that out to him (as they have, of course), rather than for a journalist to quote his worst phrasing out of context and thus end his career. 1. Literally with the word "like", too, https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarc...