8 ms·

The debate about the contents of the blog and ideologies etc. is complex. But here's a simple question - Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's r

The debate about the contents of the blog and ideologies etc. is complex. But here's a simple question - Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? It's just not a nice thing to do, simple as that. It may be easy to find if you go looking, but most people don't have any reason to go looking, so the pen name serves its purpose of providing anonymity. The NYT author makes it seem as if publishing the guys real name in a widely read paper is the same as it being googleable to someone who looks. Its a COMPLETELY different level of exposure. The other key point is that doxxing someone who has been writing anonymously for decades is very different than believing that people should not have the right to write anonymously. Scott began writing under a pseudonym, under the expectation that it would stay anonymous - and so the space of things he said was much more controversial than what it would have been if he expected to be doxxed one day. NYT shows up to the world of blogs 10 years later, knowing nothing and starts pulling the rug out from under people who began writing in a different world, under completely different norms. Its just a shitty, shitty thing to do. > I woke up the next morning to a torrent of online abuse, as did my editor, who was named in the farewell note. My address and phone number were shared by the blog’s readers on Twitter. Protecting the identity of the man behind Slate Star Codex had turned into a cause among the Rationalists. One paragraph after detailing why Scott requested his name to be kept out, the reporter complains about the online abuse he received, which could have easily been prevented by not using real names.

88 6y ago
> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? I thought the NYT held off publishing the original article, and although the article published in the last week did name him, this was only after Scott relaunched his blog under his real name? I know they were threatening to reveal his name prior to this, but in the end Scott revealed his own identity first.
downandout 6y ago
Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? The “why” is easy. The first part of this article makes the reason quite clear. This reporter believed that Scott’s site was giving safe harbor to “white supremacists” while making it hard for “social justice warriors’” voices to be heard [1]. So the reason he was doxxed is in keeping with a recent trend in the media: punish perceived right-leaning people for their views. Drag them out in the public square, and get them fired or at least ensure that their life will never be the same. It’s Mccarthyism, 2021 edition. Welcome to the newly “united” America. [1] The part of the article I am referring to is this: “...The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were "social justice warriors.". The author knew that the left-leaning readers of the NYT would be upset over this, and would want to know whom the person behind such a community was so that cancel culture could carry out its duties.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Because Scott is the most talented writer of the 21st century (so far, anyway) and he’s _not playing their game_. He’s not beholden to a publisher, an editor, or advertising cartels, and he’s demonstrating that their power is more tenuous than they’d like to believe.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Note that Dr. Friedman has explicitly said that the NYTimes article includes fabricated "quotes" that he never actually said. IIRC, Scott Aaronson's Shtetl-Optimized blog talks about this.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I read the blog you mentioned and saw no mention of fabricated quotes. In fact Aaronson has blogged twice. The first time he said he words to the effect of: I talked to Metz extensively and told everyone else to, I didn't like the article but I'll keep talking to journalists as much as they want because the NYT is the "blockchain of civilisation". In the second he says he read the comments on his first blog post and changed his mind.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  I'm going to point out that McCarthy was a fierce right-winger, and the "punish people for wrongthink" mentality has been almost exclusively a right-wing thing until very recently. "Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox. Personally, I don't think "only we're allowed to cancel people" is a good enough reason to denounce this article. A better argument would be that Scott isn't the right-winger the article writer thinks they are, and that the article is poorly researched. At worst, I'd say he's probably a little too dismissive of privilege narratives, but that doesn't make him a white supremacist or a neo-fascist. Of course, that doesn't make an article, and we gotta keep the content grill sizzling, so here's some tenuous connections to make an interesting story to meet quotas.
  - thu2111 6y ago
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
> It's just not a nice thing to do No, this goes far beyond "not nice" This is an attempt to bully competition (both in ideology and in business) off the internet by putting their personal well-being in danger. This kind of defamation+doxxing is just utterly despicable. Journalists who repeatedly pull this kind of stunt should be fired. And setting aside how this type of thing affects the individual victim, consider how it harms journalism as a whole, by painting journalists as untrustworthy immoral backstabbing asshats. Put bluntly: when populists like trump call the media liars, the saddest part is that they're not wrong.
- downandout 6y ago
  What’s sad is that most people, whether on the left or right, are decent, hardworking people that would never set out to so violently steal someone’s privacy like this. There are perfectly rational reasons for people to lean either left or right. But members of the media are stoking the fires of division to satisfy their lust for money and attention. It’s wrong, and I hope that everyone can see these actions for what they are. The NYT and the reporter that wrote the article should be roundly criticized by both sides for what they did here. They should be canceled.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    Indeed. Most discussions I've had other than on reddit and similar platforms have tended to be very pleasant and rational. It is possible to discuss something with someone who holds completely different opinions on the topic in such a way that everyone walks out of the discussion understanding it a bit better than before. How this flips around into the mirror-world that is social media, is beyond my understanding. Either people who discuss on large platforms and those that do it offline or in more personal online communities are two distinct groups of people with little overlap, or some magic switch just flips in peoples heads when they put their hands on a keyboard. The media are ultimately just following the market: outrage sells, so they deliver. Sure, we can blame them for abusing their power in cases like these, but more importantly, we should ask the question how they ended up in a position where everyone just blindly trusts what they read in a newspaper.
thinkingemote 6y ago
It's possible that the newspaper didn't understand what a web search entails. Yes, if you search for the name of the blog you can find his personal name, but the issue is that if you searched for the personal name you wouldn't find the blog. A search of term to result is not symmetric if reversed. The wish was that by publishing the name it connected the name to the blog, even though previously the blog was connected to the name. Thats not the same thing and it requires a bit of effort to understand. For example, if you use the name of one of my online identities it could probably bring up a wiki page saying that I went to the web 2.0 conference a decade ago, but if you searched for the web 2.0 conference you would never find that identity in the search results.
- zepto 6y ago
  > It's possible that the newspaper didn't understand what a web search entails. Doesn’t this imply that the newspaper is simply not competent to report responsibly in the year 2021?
  - mhb 6y ago
    Have you read the Times lately?
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  You would find people linking to his pseudonymous writing if you searched for his real name.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Newspapers are in the business of publishing information. Part of that are the names of people involved in stories, who don’t get veto power unless they are clearly just passive “victims”. Specifically, (potential) patients of Alexander might have a legitimate interest in knowing about his writing. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with being treated by him. But therapy is among the most sensitive subject, and I could easily see people having a legitimate interest in being given the opportunity to decide for themselves.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility. After all, if it's important to an individual's therapy, it's even more important for government policy (foreign or domestic) affecting the lives and futures of millions of people.
  - rpadovani 6y ago
    Is this sarcasm, right?
    - yeetawayhn 6y ago
      Why?
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility. Boy, is that a false equivalency. You do realize that anonymizing a source is part of a bargain for the journalist to get access to information they wouldn't otherwise have had access to, often information the source isn't authorized to disclose (and thus could face punishment for disclosing it)? It's also worth nothing that, in the real world, revealing someone's real name isn't the high crime of "doxxing," rather it's normal and expected. Journalists aren't typically creatures of pseudonymous web forums, and it's a category error to expect them to abide by the peculiar norms of them.
watwut 6y ago
> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? That is completely normal thing to publish when you are writing about something like that.
fallingknife 6y ago
Because they want him to stop writing. Scott Alexander believes in open debate on any issue and to any participant. The NYT believes that "open" debate should only occur within limits, and that they are entitled to set these limits. If people like Scott Alexander can have a large audience then the NYT does not have the power that they believe they are entitled to. If the NYT did not have the motive to stop Scott Alexander from writing, then why didn't they publish the piece after he took down his blog? Why did the wait until right after he started writing again to run the piece? If their motive was real journalism they would have just run the article as planned.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Frankly, I think it's even simpler than that. It's a tattle-tale culture. Did someone post wrongthink in your comments? "I'm telling!" Do you have a different opinion about some outrage du jour? "I'm telling!" Did you make an offhand mention of some ideas from a bad scary man? "I'm telling!" In the past few years at the NYT, all of the old-school journalists in leadership positions have been railroaded by the tattle-tales. Millenial and Gen Z apparatchiks have largely taken full reigns of the paper. In general these generations are broadly more supportive of limits on free speech and open discussion[1]. Even more so among journalists specifically. We're a long way from the era of journalists like HL Mencken or Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. But we do have world class tattle-tales. [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    Right, but you also have to acknowledge the elephant in the room that the market really, really likes tattle-tale stories. They share well on Twitter, which itself is a strange attractor of this kind of reporting. And it's not even a liberal thing or a social-justice thing. Conservatives and status-quo warriors do this all the time, and I'd argue more maliciously. Project Veritas's entire reason for being was to construct tattle-tale narratives around whatever organization conservatives were expected to hate this week.
tfehring 6y ago
> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? It's just not a nice thing to do, simple as that. As the saying goes, journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published, everything else is public relations. That said, Metz’s claim that the NYT editors consistently require real names is inaccurate. Notably the NYT previously did a piece on Chapo Trap House and reported on host Virgil Texas using that pseudonym even though his real name is trivially discoverable.
- xondono 6y ago
  > As the saying goes, journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published, everything else is public relations. There's a world of difference between this and what's happening here. I'm pretty confident that Scott would not have mind if the NYT run a hit piece on his blog while keeping his real name out.
- chmod600 6y ago
  > journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published By thay standard, the NYT, and especially Twitter/FB, are antijournalism. They crush stories and ideas they don't like.
spopejoy 6y ago
> One paragraph after detailing why Scott requested his name to be kept out, the reporter complains about the online abuse he received, which could have easily been prevented by not using real names. This is a false equivalence. Alexander is an author publishing under a pseudonym, plain and simple. Elena Ferrante was "unmasked" and while I'm sure she didn't appreciate it, it's not illegal or even particularly unethical. Somebody published a photo of Thomas Pynchon despite his best efforts to avoid it. Annoying sure but hardly a social crisis. Alexander has no more claim to anonymity than any of the above. If you publish long enough in a public forum to gain some amount of fame, it's unrealistic to expect your identity to be protected from all comers. Meanwhile, a group organized to dox a reporter. It doesn't really matter what the reporter wrote: organized doxxing is deliberate, malicious, anti-social and probably illegal.

88 6y ago

> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? I thought the NYT held off publishing the original article, and although the article published in the last week did name him, this was only after Scott relaunched his blog under his real name? I know they were threatening to reveal his name prior to this, but in the end Scott revealed his own identity first.

downandout 6y ago

Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? The “why” is easy. The first part of this article makes the reason quite clear. This reporter believed that Scott’s site was giving safe harbor to “white supremacists” while making it hard for “social justice warriors’” voices to be heard [1]. So the reason he was doxxed is in keeping with a recent trend in the media: punish perceived right-leaning people for their views. Drag them out in the public square, and get them fired or at least ensure that their life will never be the same. It’s Mccarthyism, 2021 edition. Welcome to the newly “united” America. [1] The part of the article I am referring to is this: “...The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were "social justice warriors.". The author knew that the left-leaning readers of the NYT would be upset over this, and would want to know whom the person behind such a community was so that cancel culture could carry out its duties.

commandlinefan 6y ago
Because Scott is the most talented writer of the 21st century (so far, anyway) and he’s _not playing their game_. He’s not beholden to a publisher, an editor, or advertising cartels, and he’s demonstrating that their power is more tenuous than they’d like to believe.
zozbot234 6y ago
Note that Dr. Friedman has explicitly said that the NYTimes article includes fabricated "quotes" that he never actually said. IIRC, Scott Aaronson's Shtetl-Optimized blog talks about this.
- thu2111 6y ago
  I read the blog you mentioned and saw no mention of fabricated quotes. In fact Aaronson has blogged twice. The first time he said he words to the effect of: I talked to Metz extensively and told everyone else to, I didn't like the article but I'll keep talking to journalists as much as they want because the NYT is the "blockchain of civilisation". In the second he says he read the comments on his first blog post and changed his mind.
kmeisthax 6y ago
I'm going to point out that McCarthy was a fierce right-winger, and the "punish people for wrongthink" mentality has been almost exclusively a right-wing thing until very recently. "Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox. Personally, I don't think "only we're allowed to cancel people" is a good enough reason to denounce this article. A better argument would be that Scott isn't the right-winger the article writer thinks they are, and that the article is poorly researched. At worst, I'd say he's probably a little too dismissive of privilege narratives, but that doesn't make him a white supremacist or a neo-fascist. Of course, that doesn't make an article, and we gotta keep the content grill sizzling, so here's some tenuous connections to make an interesting story to meet quotas.
- thu2111 6y ago

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago

> It's just not a nice thing to do No, this goes far beyond "not nice" This is an attempt to bully competition (both in ideology and in business) off the internet by putting their personal well-being in danger. This kind of defamation+doxxing is just utterly despicable. Journalists who repeatedly pull this kind of stunt should be fired. And setting aside how this type of thing affects the individual victim, consider how it harms journalism as a whole, by painting journalists as untrustworthy immoral backstabbing asshats. Put bluntly: when populists like trump call the media liars, the saddest part is that they're not wrong.

downandout 6y ago
What’s sad is that most people, whether on the left or right, are decent, hardworking people that would never set out to so violently steal someone’s privacy like this. There are perfectly rational reasons for people to lean either left or right. But members of the media are stoking the fires of division to satisfy their lust for money and attention. It’s wrong, and I hope that everyone can see these actions for what they are. The NYT and the reporter that wrote the article should be roundly criticized by both sides for what they did here. They should be canceled.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  Indeed. Most discussions I've had other than on reddit and similar platforms have tended to be very pleasant and rational. It is possible to discuss something with someone who holds completely different opinions on the topic in such a way that everyone walks out of the discussion understanding it a bit better than before. How this flips around into the mirror-world that is social media, is beyond my understanding. Either people who discuss on large platforms and those that do it offline or in more personal online communities are two distinct groups of people with little overlap, or some magic switch just flips in peoples heads when they put their hands on a keyboard. The media are ultimately just following the market: outrage sells, so they deliver. Sure, we can blame them for abusing their power in cases like these, but more importantly, we should ask the question how they ended up in a position where everyone just blindly trusts what they read in a newspaper.

thinkingemote 6y ago

It's possible that the newspaper didn't understand what a web search entails. Yes, if you search for the name of the blog you can find his personal name, but the issue is that if you searched for the personal name you wouldn't find the blog. A search of term to result is not symmetric if reversed. The wish was that by publishing the name it connected the name to the blog, even though previously the blog was connected to the name. Thats not the same thing and it requires a bit of effort to understand. For example, if you use the name of one of my online identities it could probably bring up a wiki page saying that I went to the web 2.0 conference a decade ago, but if you searched for the web 2.0 conference you would never find that identity in the search results.

zepto 6y ago
> It's possible that the newspaper didn't understand what a web search entails. Doesn’t this imply that the newspaper is simply not competent to report responsibly in the year 2021?
- mhb 6y ago
  Have you read the Times lately?
pseudalopex 6y ago
You would find people linking to his pseudonymous writing if you searched for his real name.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

Newspapers are in the business of publishing information. Part of that are the names of people involved in stories, who don’t get veto power unless they are clearly just passive “victims”. Specifically, (potential) patients of Alexander might have a legitimate interest in knowing about his writing. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with being treated by him. But therapy is among the most sensitive subject, and I could easily see people having a legitimate interest in being given the opportunity to decide for themselves.

caseysoftware 6y ago
Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility. After all, if it's important to an individual's therapy, it's even more important for government policy (foreign or domestic) affecting the lives and futures of millions of people.
- rpadovani 6y ago
  Is this sarcasm, right?
  - yeetawayhn 6y ago
    Why?
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility. Boy, is that a false equivalency. You do realize that anonymizing a source is part of a bargain for the journalist to get access to information they wouldn't otherwise have had access to, often information the source isn't authorized to disclose (and thus could face punishment for disclosing it)? It's also worth nothing that, in the real world, revealing someone's real name isn't the high crime of "doxxing," rather it's normal and expected. Journalists aren't typically creatures of pseudonymous web forums, and it's a category error to expect them to abide by the peculiar norms of them.

watwut 6y ago

> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? That is completely normal thing to publish when you are writing about something like that.

fallingknife 6y ago

Because they want him to stop writing. Scott Alexander believes in open debate on any issue and to any participant. The NYT believes that "open" debate should only occur within limits, and that they are entitled to set these limits. If people like Scott Alexander can have a large audience then the NYT does not have the power that they believe they are entitled to. If the NYT did not have the motive to stop Scott Alexander from writing, then why didn't they publish the piece after he took down his blog? Why did the wait until right after he started writing again to run the piece? If their motive was real journalism they would have just run the article as planned.

dcolkitt 6y ago
Frankly, I think it's even simpler than that. It's a tattle-tale culture. Did someone post wrongthink in your comments? "I'm telling!" Do you have a different opinion about some outrage du jour? "I'm telling!" Did you make an offhand mention of some ideas from a bad scary man? "I'm telling!" In the past few years at the NYT, all of the old-school journalists in leadership positions have been railroaded by the tattle-tales. Millenial and Gen Z apparatchiks have largely taken full reigns of the paper. In general these generations are broadly more supportive of limits on free speech and open discussion[1]. Even more so among journalists specifically. We're a long way from the era of journalists like HL Mencken or Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. But we do have world class tattle-tales. [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Right, but you also have to acknowledge the elephant in the room that the market really, really likes tattle-tale stories. They share well on Twitter, which itself is a strange attractor of this kind of reporting. And it's not even a liberal thing or a social-justice thing. Conservatives and status-quo warriors do this all the time, and I'd argue more maliciously. Project Veritas's entire reason for being was to construct tattle-tale narratives around whatever organization conservatives were expected to hate this week.

tfehring 6y ago

> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? It's just not a nice thing to do, simple as that. As the saying goes, journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published, everything else is public relations. That said, Metz’s claim that the NYT editors consistently require real names is inaccurate. Notably the NYT previously did a piece on Chapo Trap House and reported on host Virgil Texas using that pseudonym even though his real name is trivially discoverable.

xondono 6y ago
> As the saying goes, journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published, everything else is public relations. There's a world of difference between this and what's happening here. I'm pretty confident that Scott would not have mind if the NYT run a hit piece on his blog while keeping his real name out.
chmod600 6y ago
> journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published By thay standard, the NYT, and especially Twitter/FB, are antijournalism. They crush stories and ideas they don't like.

spopejoy 6y ago

> One paragraph after detailing why Scott requested his name to be kept out, the reporter complains about the online abuse he received, which could have easily been prevented by not using real names. This is a false equivalence. Alexander is an author publishing under a pseudonym, plain and simple. Elena Ferrante was "unmasked" and while I'm sure she didn't appreciate it, it's not illegal or even particularly unethical. Somebody published a photo of Thomas Pynchon despite his best efforts to avoid it. Annoying sure but hardly a social crisis. Alexander has no more claim to anonymity than any of the above. If you publish long enough in a public forum to gain some amount of fame, it's unrealistic to expect your identity to be protected from all comers. Meanwhile, a group organized to dox a reporter. It doesn't really matter what the reporter wrote: organized doxxing is deliberate, malicious, anti-social and probably illegal.