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But what does it mean to step onto the national stage here? As far as has been reported, Alexander didn’t seek publicity, or obtain any position of power, or ma

But what does it mean to step onto the national stage here? As far as has been reported, Alexander didn’t seek publicity, or obtain any position of power, or make himself available for the rich and powerful to privately consult. He just wrote a blog that a lot of people happen to like. There can be very serious costs to being thrust onto the national stage, so I’m not comfortable with the idea that you can just get promoted there by default.

acdha 6y ago
The NYT article gives a pretty clear explanation for why they believed it was of interest: someone influencing a lot of high-level people in an industry which has an outsized influence on society. It might be useful to think about it in terms of similar but older mediums: would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.? This wasn’t at the level of, say, Norman Vincent Peale but it’s not like every single story is required to be about national level politics, either. I’ve certainly read plenty of articles over the years about people who are influential in a community but not well known outside of it - it’s one of the reasons why journalism matters for helping you learn about things you wouldn’t have thought to ask about on your own.
- mrkstu 6y ago
  But what public good, in this instance, was served by depriving the writer of their anonymity? It was a puerile attempt at harming someone they disagreed with. If it had been someone who was already a public figure or someone who was leveraging their writing into something beyond the ideas presented, it would have been newsworthy. The infantilization of the NYT from its glory years continues apace.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Scott lost his anonymity when he chose to publish under his real name, not to mention blogging under his real first and middle names with a fair amount of biographical information. The NYT highlighting this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t public for years prior.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  "Influencing" covers a lot of things that don't seem equivalent to me. If he were swapping investment advice with Sam Altman, discussing the future of AI with Paul Graham, playing around on jetpacks with Elon Musk - sure, that's a mover and shaker, and in order to be properly informed on the tech industry you'd need to know who he is. On the other hand, if Sam Altman and Paul Graham regularly made small talk with a barista at a coffee shop near YC headquarters, it would be strange and invasive for the NYT to put a spotlight on her against her will and identify her as a woman with the ear of Silicon Valley elites. And I'd argue that's a much closer analogy to what's happening here. It doesn't seem (again, as far as has been reported) that he had any concrete personal relationship with any VCs or tech executives.
  - acdha 6y ago
    A widely cited public blog which those people have referenced seems a lot closer to the public end of the spectrum than talking to a barista, especially when you consider that the topics covered have a significant public interest. It’s not like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – for example, topics like gender or racial differences create a pretty legitimate area of interest when you think about how many people run or work at SV companies influenced by the people named, or use systems designed by them — the flip side to talk about eating the world is that the rest of the world is going to be watching closely.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I'd point to those topics as perfect examples of why pseudonymous debate is valuable. In the modern US, most subcultures have a standard perspective on race and gender and ostracize people who don't agree with it. So if everyone has to fear that their opinions might be promoted to the national spotlight, there's a huge range of thought that the public will never get to see at all. Consider affirmative action for a concrete example. It consistently loses at the ballot box in even the most left-leaning states, but it's incredibly rare to hear a left-wing case for why we might not want it, because in the Internet age, anyone who presents such a case is putting their career and social circle in significant jeopardy. This kind of mismatch between what people think and what they can say is deeply unhealthy for our political environment, and I think pseudonymous blogging is a very important outlet to alleviate that.
- Majromax 6y ago
  > would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.? Potentially, yes. What does the biographic information add to the story? If this hypothetical philosopher were influencing people under a pseudonym, then their real identity is important only if it somehow interacts with their influence. Maybe there's a conflict of interest; maybe there's some sort of fraud (i.e. it'd be remarkable of Alexander were not in fact a psychiatrist); maybe the person is otherwise independently notable in a surprising way. The Times article was written from the perspective that Alexander's blog is harmful, dangerous, or risky because of its message. That perspective is neither strengthened nor weakened by hearing irrelevant details about the messenger, so in a publication always short on column-inches I'd think that the balance of convenience is in preserving the pseudonymity.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    What the biographic information adds is context. If we want to ask, "Why is this person doing X? What makes them say Y?" then we naturally inquire into who the person is. Their situation in society, their interests, their sources of power and wealth. There's a reason that biography is a major genre. If you never have gotten anything out of a biography, that's fine. But you shouldn't be surprised that other people do.
wpietri 6y ago
He apparently wrote, "Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people." [1] That to me is very clear intent to influence. And it's not like this was a blog about knitting. So whatever the bar is, he's well over it. Another way to come at it is not intent, but impact. Whatever one thinks of Metz's article, I think he's correct that a) Silicon Valley has huge influence in the world, b) that the people making big decisions there are worth covering, and c) the ideas that shape those decisions are relevant. More disputable is the last piece of his chain is d), SSC has some influence on those ideas, and is a useful case study. But given the strident defenses of SSC here and elsewhere, I think the reaction to the article proves that the topic is significant enough to merit coverage. I agree one shouldn't get promoted to national prominence "by default". But spending years publishing something to the world with an ever-growing audience is not something one does by accident. I'm sure Siskind put at least thousands of hours into his blog, and now it's his full-time job. One can't reasonably spend years courting public attention and then be mad that the public will attend to something as they see fit. Freedom of speech goes both ways. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/1362108632070905857 https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.c...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I have no idea who Topher Brennan is, and he appears to have deleted these tweets, so it's pretty hard for me to evaluate whether this is a credible accusation. I definitely agree that it's fair for journalists to unveil someone's pseudonym if they're networking with important people.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    You are welcome to evaluate his general credibility and the merits of the emails for yourself. He did remove the emails, but hasn't removed the claim that Siskind said a key point that was in them: https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/1360663056456450048 https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/136066305645645004... I'm open to finding out that they're fake, but on the "balance of probabilities" standard, I believe they're real.

acdha 6y ago

The NYT article gives a pretty clear explanation for why they believed it was of interest: someone influencing a lot of high-level people in an industry which has an outsized influence on society. It might be useful to think about it in terms of similar but older mediums: would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.? This wasn’t at the level of, say, Norman Vincent Peale but it’s not like every single story is required to be about national level politics, either. I’ve certainly read plenty of articles over the years about people who are influential in a community but not well known outside of it - it’s one of the reasons why journalism matters for helping you learn about things you wouldn’t have thought to ask about on your own.

mrkstu 6y ago
But what public good, in this instance, was served by depriving the writer of their anonymity? It was a puerile attempt at harming someone they disagreed with. If it had been someone who was already a public figure or someone who was leveraging their writing into something beyond the ideas presented, it would have been newsworthy. The infantilization of the NYT from its glory years continues apace.
- acdha 6y ago
  Scott lost his anonymity when he chose to publish under his real name, not to mention blogging under his real first and middle names with a fair amount of biographical information. The NYT highlighting this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t public for years prior.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
"Influencing" covers a lot of things that don't seem equivalent to me. If he were swapping investment advice with Sam Altman, discussing the future of AI with Paul Graham, playing around on jetpacks with Elon Musk - sure, that's a mover and shaker, and in order to be properly informed on the tech industry you'd need to know who he is. On the other hand, if Sam Altman and Paul Graham regularly made small talk with a barista at a coffee shop near YC headquarters, it would be strange and invasive for the NYT to put a spotlight on her against her will and identify her as a woman with the ear of Silicon Valley elites. And I'd argue that's a much closer analogy to what's happening here. It doesn't seem (again, as far as has been reported) that he had any concrete personal relationship with any VCs or tech executives.
- acdha 6y ago
  A widely cited public blog which those people have referenced seems a lot closer to the public end of the spectrum than talking to a barista, especially when you consider that the topics covered have a significant public interest. It’s not like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – for example, topics like gender or racial differences create a pretty legitimate area of interest when you think about how many people run or work at SV companies influenced by the people named, or use systems designed by them — the flip side to talk about eating the world is that the rest of the world is going to be watching closely.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'd point to those topics as perfect examples of why pseudonymous debate is valuable. In the modern US, most subcultures have a standard perspective on race and gender and ostracize people who don't agree with it. So if everyone has to fear that their opinions might be promoted to the national spotlight, there's a huge range of thought that the public will never get to see at all. Consider affirmative action for a concrete example. It consistently loses at the ballot box in even the most left-leaning states, but it's incredibly rare to hear a left-wing case for why we might not want it, because in the Internet age, anyone who presents such a case is putting their career and social circle in significant jeopardy. This kind of mismatch between what people think and what they can say is deeply unhealthy for our political environment, and I think pseudonymous blogging is a very important outlet to alleviate that.
Majromax 6y ago
> would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.? Potentially, yes. What does the biographic information add to the story? If this hypothetical philosopher were influencing people under a pseudonym, then their real identity is important only if it somehow interacts with their influence. Maybe there's a conflict of interest; maybe there's some sort of fraud (i.e. it'd be remarkable of Alexander were not in fact a psychiatrist); maybe the person is otherwise independently notable in a surprising way. The Times article was written from the perspective that Alexander's blog is harmful, dangerous, or risky because of its message. That perspective is neither strengthened nor weakened by hearing irrelevant details about the messenger, so in a publication always short on column-inches I'd think that the balance of convenience is in preserving the pseudonymity.
- wpietri 6y ago
  What the biographic information adds is context. If we want to ask, "Why is this person doing X? What makes them say Y?" then we naturally inquire into who the person is. Their situation in society, their interests, their sources of power and wealth. There's a reason that biography is a major genre. If you never have gotten anything out of a biography, that's fine. But you shouldn't be surprised that other people do.

wpietri 6y ago

He apparently wrote, "Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people." [1] That to me is very clear intent to influence. And it's not like this was a blog about knitting. So whatever the bar is, he's well over it. Another way to come at it is not intent, but impact. Whatever one thinks of Metz's article, I think he's correct that a) Silicon Valley has huge influence in the world, b) that the people making big decisions there are worth covering, and c) the ideas that shape those decisions are relevant. More disputable is the last piece of his chain is d), SSC has some influence on those ideas, and is a useful case study. But given the strident defenses of SSC here and elsewhere, I think the reaction to the article proves that the topic is significant enough to merit coverage. I agree one shouldn't get promoted to national prominence "by default". But spending years publishing something to the world with an ever-growing audience is not something one does by accident. I'm sure Siskind put at least thousands of hours into his blog, and now it's his full-time job. One can't reasonably spend years courting public attention and then be mad that the public will attend to something as they see fit. Freedom of speech goes both ways. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/1362108632070905857 https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.c...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I have no idea who Topher Brennan is, and he appears to have deleted these tweets, so it's pretty hard for me to evaluate whether this is a credible accusation. I definitely agree that it's fair for journalists to unveil someone's pseudonym if they're networking with important people.
- wpietri 6y ago
  You are welcome to evaluate his general credibility and the merits of the emails for yourself. He did remove the emails, but hasn't removed the claim that Siskind said a key point that was in them: https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/1360663056456450048 https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/136066305645645004... I'm open to finding out that they're fake, but on the "balance of probabilities" standard, I believe they're real.