> would you like to live in a world where the New York times lets powerful people who are doing awful, unethical things remain anonymous as they would like to?

> would you like to live in a world where the New York times lets powerful people who are doing awful, unethical things remain anonymous as they would like to? I think there's a structural difference between anonymity in actions and anonymity in writing, where in actions it is easy to leverage resources from one persona to benefit in the other, hence anonymity providing you with a structural advantage. But writing generally rests only on your skill as a writer, not your financial or political resources. The one case where writing benefits structurally from political resources in your de-anonymized persona is whistleblowing - a situation where journalists do their level best to keep people anonymous! Likewise, I think there's a difference between a newspaper trying to drag corruption into the light, and a newspaper, made up by writers, depriving another writer of a layer of protection, against community norms and their own standard, in order to (or at least accepting the risk to) destroy their livelihood. The NYT and Scott Alexander are not in direct competition, but it's still hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to bring harm on a fellow writer for their own gain. In other words, the goal of a newspaper should be to increase the views and voices available to the public, not to shut them up.