SlateStarCodex deleted because NYT wants to dox Scott
NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog
PS: One suggestion I have is to allow anonymous posts on Lesswrong that show the author’s anonymized karma. This is far from a good or complete solution, but I imagine it would at least come in handy in situations like this.
In general, responses I’ve seen so far to this have seemed to come more from a “conflict theory” (rather than “mistake theory”) interpretation of what’s going on. And perhaps too much so.
I thought these comments by ricraz were a good contribution to the discussion:
https://twitter.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1275472175806451721
I guess “charitable” here is referring to the principle of charity, but I think that is supposed to apply in a debate or discussion, to make them more productive and less likely to go off the rails. But in this case there is no debate, as far as I can tell. The NYT reporter or others representing NYT have not given a reason for doxxing Scott (AFAIK, except to cite a “policy” for doing so, but that seems false because there have been plenty of times when they’ve respected their subjects’ wishes to remain pseudonymous), so what are people supposed to be charitable about?
If instead the intended meaning of “charitable and openminded” is something like “let’s remain uncertain about NYT’s motives for doxxing Scott until we know more”, it seems like absence of any “principled reasons” provided so far is already pretty strong evidence for ruling out certain motives, leaving mostly “dumb mistake” and “evil or selfish” as the remaining possibilities. Given that, I’m not sure what people are doing that Richard thinks is failing the test to be “charitable and openminded”, especially given that NYT has not shown a willingness to engage in a discussion so far and the time-sensitive nature of the situation.
Tl;dr: A boycott is the central case here, not cancel culture. We need to promote a measured response and keep the Times’ perspective charitably in mind.
Is there a difference between cancel culture and a boycott? I think so. Cancel culture inflicts 1) significant emotional, financial, or potentially physical harm on a 2) a specific individual who 3) never signed up for a position of responsibility to field these kinds of threats and 4) can’t walk away from the cancellation.
Boycotting uses a much narrower set of tactics, primarily protests and advocating that people not buy a certain product. Typically they target an organization, not an individual. When specific individuals are on the receiving end, their professional role typically is in part to deal with those problems. They can quit if they choose and seek employment elsewhere.
This distinction has its grey areas:
Consider entrepreneurs. They can’t necessarily just quit their business, and they’re the face of it so even if they did, the accusations might follow them. They didn’t start the business to field protests, but to sell products, often when the business was so small that the prospect of the former was remote. Sometimes, they do receive death threats and have their lives permanently constrained for safety reasons.
Furthermore, a successful boycott can get out of control, attracting the attention of psychopaths who’ll try to personally intimidate the target. When a group of people coordinates to put a BAD GUY sticker on a corporation, there’s no guarantee that the boycott won’t lead to a lunatic with a weapon waiting outside the business in question. Nobody organizing the boycott is taking responsibility for the possibility that the boycott spirals out of control, a feature shared with cancel culture.
However, part of being an entrepreneur is shouldering the risks of the business. That includes the risk that it gets big and incites a boycott from which they can’t extricate themselves. In exchange for this, successful entrepreneurs are heavily rewarded.
A boycott’s not a legal entity, so there’s no way for the organizers to be shouldered with the responsibility of even minimal accountability for any potential harmful outcomes. But at the same time, a boycott doesn’t come with the possibility of profit.
In this case, the NY Times isn’t owned by its founder. So the main reason not to boycott is the threat of it spiraling out of control. A catastrophic result might be that personally-targeted violence is visited on someone at the Times by a psychopath who uses the boycott as their excuse. Another bad outcome would be that we damage our own aspiring culture of measured thought and action, high valence for free speech, and charity for those we see as our opponents.
I’ve already made my decision about how to respond, but I’ll leave it up to the individual conscience of other readers to decide if they accept this reasoning or not, and how it leads them to act.
Which would not be the case for a journalists who decided to take the repsonsibility of doxxing someone. That seems like a clear way of signing up for the responsibility.
You might also prevent a psychopath from visiting someone at home because Times journalists might be more careful about writing attack pieces in the future. That likely happens much more often then Times journalists getting visited.
I think what you should actually care about is minimizing the amount of people in general that get visited by psychopaths. It’s also good if being more innocent reduces the changes of it happening.
There is a power imbalance in place. It’s not like NYT is engaging this side in its decision. It’s also true that NYT’s norms are self-serving while hurting others. And this community does not have anywhere near the power to “cancel” NYT. Even if we assume the “mistake theory”, making NYT hurt a bit (which is the strongest response this community can hope for) is necessary for creating a feedback loop. Mistakes are seldom corrected when their prices are paid by others.
This initially felt to me like it ignored some of the ramifications of its parent comment, but I’m also not sure the parent comment intended to imply them. So I would like to put forth the more specific idea that the line of action “there is a power imbalance, therefore, we have to amplify our motions by a large factor to counteract it, which is safe because we know we can’t do any real damage to them” may not be universally wrong but is still dangerous and, for those acting on the sort of charitability norms ESRogs/ricraz describe, requires a lot of extra scrutiny. Specifically, I think nonrigorously with medium confidence that:
This line of action can create a violence cascade if some of the assumptions are wrong. (And in this concrete context specifically, it is not clear to me that the assumptions are right enough.)
In the case of “soft power” (as opposed to, for instance, physical violence, where damage is more readily objectively measurable and is often decisive by way of shutting down capacity), this is much more true when there is a lot of “fog of war” going on, where perceptions of who has power over what and whom don’t have a lot of consensus. It is very easy to assume you’re in the weak position when you actually have more power than you think, and even if that power is only in some spheres, it can do lasting damage.
Some of the possible lasting damage is polarization cascades which operate independently of whether you can damage someone’s reputation in the “mainstream”: if each loosely-defined party over-updates on decrements to an opposing party’s reputation just among itself, this opens up a positive feedback loop.
In the case of decentralized Internet communities, it’s hard to tell how large the amplification factor is actually going to be unless there’s actually a control loop involved (such as a leader with the social credentials to say “our demands have been met, now we will stop shouting”).
In the presence of the ability of soft-power actions to “go viral” quickly and out of control from tiny sources, unilateralist’s curse amplifies all of the above for even very localized decisions about when to “put the hurt on”.
I think with less confidence that the existing polarization cascades across the Internet involve a growing memetic strain that incentivizes strategic perception of self as weak in the public sphere, so there’s some amount of “if you think you’re in the weak position and should hit back, it might also be your corrupted hardware emulating status-acquiring behavior” in there too.
At this point the specific SSC articles “Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness” and “The Toxoplasma of Rage” come to mind, but I don’t remember clearly enough whether they directly support any of this, and given Scott’s current position, I don’t feel like it would be appropriate for me to try to check directly.
I do think there are plausibly more concrete points against a “mistake theory”-like interpretation of the events. For instance, Scott reported the reporter describing that there was an NYT policy, and others say this is not actually true. But the reporter could have misspoken, which would still be a legitimate grievance against the reporter, but frames it in a different light. Or Scott could have subtly misrepeated the information; I am sure he tries to be careful, but does he get every such fact exactly right under the large stresses of an apparent threat?
So, I generally endorse “tread cautiously here”.
I also think Scott’s own suggestions of sending polite, private feedback to the NYT expressing disapproval of revealing Scott’s name are not unusually dangerous and do not have much potential for creating cascading damage per above, especially since “news organizations should be able to deal with floods of private feedback” is a well-established norm. So this shouldn’t be interpreted as a reason to suppress that.
this is precisely the argument that cancel culture often makes, often with good reason, with outside actors piling on what may have started as a parochial dispute.
I think it makes sense to be precise and polite, and to make allowances for misunderstandings. I also think it makes sense to have boundaries and have the hypothesis of malice (with a low prior, both because malice is rare and it’s easy to see it where none exists).
That said, my prior for malice from the NYT was pretty high, and various details have updated me further towards that hypothesis.
My prior for malice was also pretty high, and had updated in that direction significantly in the last year or so from monitoring the coverage, and also with recent details. It may not be an “evil villain” highly coordinated malice, but the incentives and dynamics led in the direction of enough general “bad faith” insinuation to be net negative. It didn’t have to be intended as an attack on Scott or the blog, but rather as a morally obligatory denunciation of perceived ideas or associations—the increase of obligatory denunciation in its pieces makes it structurally very difficult for them to cover many topics in a net positive way. Ten, even five, years ago, I would have had totally different priors and been much less suspicious. I feel like people are treating the legacy media like a programmed computer and not like a group of humans in a specific set of circumstances. Of course, we can’t know anything for sure, and people too easily assume malice. And I’m not claiming most people at the NYT are malicious. But I’m surprised at how much people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NYT at this point, especially in terms of principled consistency. If this were a policy matter, it should have been settled long ago—what could be so complicated?
Here’s an example of one thing that made me wary of the paper: https://medium.com/@lessig/lessig-v-nyt-very-good-news-d8b3c57150c4
We are in a situation where the decision whether or not to publish Scott’s name isn’t yet made. As such it’s important to build up pressure to affect that decision and it’s not useful to be charitable. Even if canceling the whole NYT would not be proportional canceling the reporter in question might be.
You could argue that influential writers on political topics should have skin in the game and Scott being pseudonymous prevents him from having enough skin in the game. If that’s the argument then I don’t see the reporter who writes such an article shouldn’t have the same likelihood of losing his job over the article then Scott.
I think journalists bullying people they perceive to be easy targets is a general problem and not specific to Scott. The NYT times also frequently runs attack pieces which are hard to defend on utilitarian grounds. From a mistake perspective living in a world where Moloch rewards journalists for causing harm to people is bad.
I don’t think it’s so cut and dried as that. I think Scott’s move to delete the blog was a reasonable one. But after that it’s not clear to me whether all of us effectively saying “Fuck you!” to the NYT is more likely to result in them not publishing the name, or something more like, “Hey, I know you’ve got norms in favor of publishing real names, but I think you’re making a mistake here, and hopefully the fact that Scott actually deleted his blog makes you realize he was more serious about this than you might have thought. I hope you make the right decision.”
Like, maybe the latter won’t work. But it’s not obvious to me one way or the other. It seems like it depends on facts about the state of mind of various folks who work at the NYT that are hard for us to know.
EDIT: Or maybe a better way to put it is that being charitable might be part of how you “build up pressure to affect that decision”. See Richard and Patrick’s threads here. A charitable reading of what’s happening from Metz’s perspective might factor into your calculus of how to act to get the result you want.
I don’t think say effectively saying “Fuck you!” is a good description of what most people are writing.
I think that’s very different then saying the incentives should be changed in a way so that Moloch doesn’t let reporters destroy the good.
I think it kinda matters how people perceive it as being said, and, well, note that someone who is friendly on-your-side initially perceived it that way.
(This is not really a strong claim about strategy, it just seemed like something one should be weighing while formulating their overall strategy)
In general there’s no cost to ignoring it when people curse. Different comments imply a variety of costs such as canceled subscriptions.
Fair points.
What do you mean by “mistake theory” and “conflict theory”?
I’m really confused by this comment and I think you are using the terms backwards. Telling someone that they’ve made a mistake is a violent act, a form of conflict, but it is an example of mistake theory.
Some people theorize that there is an irreducible conflict. They generally recommend that their side not talk to NYT. Until the doxing came up, they were the dominant voices on the topic of this article in preparation, or at least the ones causing discussion. But after the topic moved on to doxing, they have nothing more to say and have been overwhelmed by
This LW thread is almost entirely about mistake theory. Maybe you see different things on twitter, but if so, you should say that, because the one thing all your readers have in common is that they’re on LW.
This comment section is not what I was responding to. (There weren’t many comments on this post when I made mine.) It was responses I’d seen in general across media, and yeah, a lot of that was on twitter. Apologies for ambiguous wording.
Metaculus question: Will the New York Times doxx Scott Alexander?
I think that even if the NYT doesn’t dox Scott in a first article, his identity is now part of the story, and he’ll be doxed in various major media, probably including a second article from the NYT.
Woah, that’s fancy. When did that happen?
We implemented Metaculus hoverovers a few weeks ago (I assume that’s what you’re asking). We mentioned in the open thread.
Looks beautiful. Great work! :)
The Metaculus folk actually did the embedded iframe, we just implemented the use of the frame in the LW link previews.
There’s also a similar question on Polymarket, a new prediction market. (Note that the Metaculus question is conditional on the NYT publishing a story on Scott, whereas the Polymarket is unconditional.)
On preventing this
You can email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com to voice concern (they are not the one writing the article, so might not be aware of the situation).
You can also tweet them @puiwingtam or retweet me (https://twitter.com/matiroy9/status/1275335651186094080).
You can also leave feedback here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/homepage/contact-newsroom.html
From Scott’s blog:
> please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.
> If you are a journalist who is willing to respect my desire for pseudonymity, I’m interested in talking to you about this situation (though I prefer communicating through text, not phone). My email is scott@slatestarcodex.com.
EtA: petition: https://www.dontdoxscottalexander.com/
As a heads up it looks like you need to be logged in to use the contact-newsroom page.
This reminds me of the time that Slate published hilzoy’s real name, in 2009.
I think what happened there is that the Slate author was following journalistic customs of using real names and didn’t realize that hilzoy wanted to stay pseudonymous online, and hilzoy had been even less vigilant than Scott about keeping her real name unfindable. And then once the article had been published, hilzoy’s request to remove her name ran into Slate’s policy of never changing published articles unless they contain a factual error, and this was not a factual error. (It’s possible that the author also had some adversarial motives for publishing the name—it did happen in the context of a disagreement between her and hilzoy—but I don’t know of any clear or direct evidence for that.)
So the main storyline here might be about the media having its own customs and not much caring about what happens to the people that they cover. The press does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of stories which it can tell to its audience. I’m not sure what implications (if any) this has about what to do now.
I have a few more suggestions here.
In short, if there is only one person with 1497 karma, (and statistically, given the number of users and amount of karma, most users will have a unique amount of karma) then the karma rating on each blog post will link them to each other. Over many posts, any clues will add up.
So sort users by karma, and only share the decile. So you would know that between 10% and 20% of less wrong users have higher karma. (Or just allow all people with at least X karma to post anonymous posts) Also, use karma at the time of posting. If a whole lot of posts suddenly bump up a rank at the same time, that strongly indicates that they are by the same person.
It’s not like we’ve lost the articles published to SSC so far. There are backups, and not just Scott’s. We can even link to some of them. The past SSC still exists.
What we’re losing is the future—The part that hasn’t been written yet. Scott has more to say and I want to hear it. SSC was my favorite blog. I am not alone in thinking this. Now it’s gone. Maybe just until the NYT blinks. Maybe forever. Or maybe only for years, but at a time when we desperately need voices of reason like Scott’s. And that is very sad and I feel bummed out about it.
This doesn’t have to be over. Scott has won some influential allies. I’m interested in how this all plays out.
Tom Chivers has a nice opinion piece here.
I don’t think “wants to doxx Scott” is the best description of their goals. This looks like part of a pervasive rule that also leads many media companies to deadname trans people.
I don’t think that their principal goal is to doxx him. But there is a big difference between a habit and a rule. It’s not that they used the name without thinking about it, but they specifically rejected his complaint and said that they were just following orders.
On many other places I see people discussing this, they point out that the reporter’s claim that there is an NYT policy is a bald-faced lie. You are the first person I have seen that took it at face value. This LW discussion is striking because no one else acknowledges the claim at all. I think that they believe that it is a lie, but don’t want to rudely point that out, so they pretend it was not uttered.
Added, next day: I estimate that 99% of the time that NYT writes about someone with a professional pseudonym, they treat it as a real name. 1% of the time, they note that it is a pseudonym and 1⁄10 of those times, 1/1000 of all times they print the real name.
Seriously, 99% of the time. I am not being hyperbolic. The main source of uncertainty is how often they write about someone with a professional pseudonym. I estimate that NYT writes about someone with a professional surname every day.
I’ve become a bit more suspicious of Cade Metz, now that I’ve noticed that he had some sort of association with former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. My impression of Byrne has long been that his personality is sort of like Trump’s, but a bit less intelligent.
Anyone writing puff pieces about Byrne is likely to, at best, have poor judgment. That doesn’t tell me much about the current controversy, but I now put a moderate probability on the idea that Metz knows he’s working for some malicious people.
Also, Metz contacted me on June 1, wanting to ask questions about the rationality community and its overlap with Silicon Valley (he did not mention SSC). I offered to answer questions by email, but not by phone. He did not respond. I don’t infer much from this, beyond the fact that his initial interest in a story was not due to something controversial that Scott posted in June.
I sent the following email to pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com (before I noticed Metz’s puff pieces about Byrne):
I’ve seen a lot of complaints about Metz’s history, but they all seem backwards to me. They seem like a satire of virtue ethics.
Who do you think he’s “working for”? If he is working for outside forces (eg, keeping a source happy), then drawing attention to it is exactly the best way to take it out of his hands and force him to work for his editor; and force his editor to work for the paper.
Writing puff pieces sounds more lazy than malicious to me.
Is dox the right word here? I guess this fits inside the definition but it feels kinda non-central to me. A typical example would include some intent to do harm. Considering a different principle more important feels importantly different.
Not that this is much consolation to Scott and I think the NYT is wrong to reveal Scott’s identity (and have written in to say this), I just think doxxing is the wrong way to describe it.
I don’t think I agree that a central example of doxxing requires intent to do harm. I think if you carelessly reveal, say, someone’s home address on the internet, you have doxxed them. If the person first asks you not to, and you do it anyway in spite of them, then the fact that you didn’t intend to do harm seems fairly irrelevant to me. I don’t buy the intend/foresee distinction at the best of times, and this one seems especially shaky.
Revealing someone’s name against their will isn’t as bad as revealing their address or workplace or so on, but it seems close enough in spirit that I don’t think splitting hairs over the definition of doxxing is very useful.
I think its hard to argue that a central example of doxxing doesn’t involve intent to cause harm. The central example I think in most people’s minds would be something like the hit list of abortion providers or anonymous. Wikipedia has a list of examples of doxxing - a rough count suggests ~13/15 involve providing information about someone ideologically opposed to the doxxer (confirming intent is more difficult). The non-centrality here isn’t as extreme as it is in, say, “Martin Luther King was a criminal” but it is there.
On the relevance of the distinction, yes, I do think it is important. I would support different responses to the NYT depending on whether I thought they were acting out of a desire to endanger/silence Scott or were following a journalistic norm in a way I considered wrong.
The dispute here, then, is whether doxing is a concept like murder[1] (with intent built into the definition) or homicide (which is defined solely by the nature of the act and its consequences).
I think it is useful to have a general word for “publicly revealing personal information about someone without/against their consent in a manner that is likely to foreseeably damage them”. Calling that thing “doxing”, and saying that doxing is generally bad unless you have a very compelling reason, seems more useful to me than restricting the use of “doxing” to malicious cases and being left without a good handle for the other thing.
That said, I am generally pretty opposed to label creep; I think it’s often very harmful when terms that were previously restricted to very bad things get applied to less bad (or just differently bad) things (Scott’s own work has plenty of good examples of this), especially when this is done as a rhetorical technique to coerce action. So I’m in agreement with the general spirit of the objection, I’m just not convinced it applies in this particular case.
Murder in the UK, that is; I think the US does things differently?
I feel like we’re still talking past each other a bit here. I don’t dispute that doxxing can mean any revealing of information about someone, it could be used even when no foreseeable damage is implied and someone just wanted to remain private. The strict definition is not the question.
The non-central fallacy is when a negative affect word is used to describe something where the word is technically true but the actual thing should not have that negative affect associated with it. Martin Luther King fits the definition of a criminal but the negative affect of the word criminal (the reasons why crimes are bad) shouldn’t apply to him.
The problem I have using “dox” here is that some portion of the word’s negative affect doesn’t (or at least might not) apply in this case. An alternative phrasing would be “reveal Scott’s true identity” or, to be snappier, “unmask Scott” which are more neutral. dontdoxscottalexander.com’s title is Don’t De-Anonymize Scott Alexander which I think is better than my ideas.
But the pitch for the non-central fallacy is that this is an intentional deviation. For example, if everyone everywhere has always talked about “the criminal, MLK” then saying MLK is a criminal wouldn’t be non-central anymore, it would just be the way he is described.
I’ve never heard any other term except doxxing for deliberately revealing another person’s identity on the internet; it is even common use when describing accidental cases. As a practical matter and according to our (or at least the American-centered internet) norms it is a fundamentally malicious act.
“The Latest Squabble Inside The New York Times”: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-slate-star-codex-doxxing-is-the-latest-squabble-inside-new-york-times
Since hating on the mainstream media is itself mainstream now....would it be a net benefit for SSC to pass this story (about NYT doxxing) to some of NYT’s competitors/new media? Just brainstorming, not suggesting this as potential course of retaliation/threat, since it could backfire if it causes NYT to double down when feeling attacked.
I feel like the more places report on this, the higher the probability that at least one of them will publish Scott’s real name.
I fear the growing Twitter storm will have the same effect, even if successful.
It has already happened. I checked.
It’s not like his real name was ungoogleable before. The determined could find him (and have). Therefore, I expect a few tweets from nobodies would likely remain obscure when this blows over. Do not amplify them when you see them. Ignore. But a NYT article is a bigger deal.
Did a cursory look through Twitter and found several critical accounts spreading it, so as gilch said, it’s already happening to an extent :/
I agree with that prediction, but that seems a given, with how Scott has called his supporters to action with emailing the NYT. Such a coordination is gonna draw the attention regardless.
I suspect the strategy more to make it obvious the paper is aware of what it is doing, not allowing them to spin it as a misunderstanding after the fact. I think this changes their calculation more than people realize, but it’s impossible to say what the final decision will be.
Retaliation only makes sense if the article gets published with the name which hasn’t yet happened.
If it happens before the publication, it wouldn’t be retaliation, but more like a commitment to retaliate. If there’s people making a fuss about the reporter’s current intention to publish, it’s a pretty clear signal what would happen if they follow through.
If it gets them to change their minds in time before the publication, that seems like the best outcome.
I think it “not being retaliation” makes it any more less edgy. If I credibly threaten to beat you up if you do something I have made an illegal threat even if I never punch someone. And I feel it goes along the same lines on the moral level. The relevant distinction would be emotive “I didn’t really mean to” speech vs credible communication of intent. If it is intentional and credible it is very comparable to actually carrying it out.
Given the news cycle speed, it makes sense to get ready for the likely scenarios.
It likely makes more sense to follow Scotts advice to contact the NYTimes to advice not to doxx him then focus on preparing for retaliation.
Of course, that was a given. I just assumed that most of us don’t need days of exclusive focus to write an email.
It’s quite possible to invest more time into “contacting the NYTimes” then writing a single email. You could for example encourage other people to write as well. Especially people who they NYTimes might more care about than random people.
Fair enough.
Given that Steven Pinker retweeted Scott’s deletion post and this news article , this issue will probably keep getting publicity for better or worse. Given this, some people will start looking for Scott’s real name, and thus it would be a great idea to increase the entropy here by promoting a value for Scott’s real name that is not ahem entirely accurate. Thoughts?
Considering Scott’s name is known by many, spreading false names might break the taboo against doxxing and let the genie out of the lamp. If his name does get out, then the solution might work, but I’m not hopeful. What are the methods you are thinking of spreading the false info? Twitter? Wikipedia?
Huh, what, Russia Today’s article is used for defending SSC??? These times we’re living in are strange indeed..
“New York Times Threatens To Doxx Slate Star Codex. Journalist Explains.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiAhDKKrinI
https://mindsarentmagic.org/2020/06/23/nyt-plan-to-dox-scott-alexander-for-no-real-reason
On retaliating
EtA: I wonder if most of the downvotes are coming from what people associate with “retaliating” as opposed to the concrete actions I’m proposing (ex.: boycott).
If they go ahead with doxing Scott, I will at least do the following.
1. Open a bounty for ways to legally retaliate against the New York Times and the author (which I will keep anonymous for now)
2. Raise money (and finance myself) to buy out people subscribed to the New York Times.
3. Create a website for blocknytimes.com with the following information (maybe also buy Google Ads):
General reasons the New York Times sucks
How to block them
To block the New York Time from your Google Searches, install this Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe
To block yourself from accessing their website, install: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site-website-blocke/eiimnmioipafcokbfikbljfdeojpcgbh?hl=en
If someone sends you a link from them, feel free to refer them to blocknytimes.com
EtA: https://cancelnyt.net/
EtA: Someone told me we could build up a list of NYT advertisers and start calling them as well. “Costing them ad revenue is going to be way more effective than just losing subscribers.” Ze said ze had already started doing that.
EtA: Stop offering quotes to the NYT (prominent people have already started doing that as a response)
Is there any legal basis for Scott?
Revealing people’s names is protected by the first amendment. But then there are also plenty of legal ways to ruin the live of that NYTimes reporter and warning the reporter that his actions might make him enemies that he doesn’t want to have as Scott has done might be the only way forward.
When Peter Thiel’s legal attack on Gawker isn’t enough to deter this kind of unethical journalism maybe going against the individual journalists who engage in that kind of behavior is better to create a deterence effect. It might now be up to the NYTimes journalist whether painting that target on his back is what he wants to do.
While I think it’s wrong for the NYT to publish Scott’s name and I support disincentivizing them from doing that, I don’t support “ruining [the reporter’s life]”, “making [the reporter an enemy]”, or “painting a target on [their] back”. I understand the game theory here, but I also don’t want us to be the kind of community that does stuff like that.
Especially since Scott explicitly asked people to be nice, and has written whole essays about not using those kinds of tactics.
Scott can be wrong though. In fact, if his blog does get shut down, that is a major update against his conciliatory world-views. That post is also years old. It might not even be his current position.
Another complication is that in the current climate of victim-worshiping, he has incentives not to act belligerently himself (or ask others to do so). Other people retaliating for Scott without his request will be much better for his reputation. (What I’m trying to say is, he has incentives to underplay his desire for revenge. Obviously I am not in his head so all this is mere speculation.)
There’s a difference between painting a target on someone’s elses back and making them aware that engaging in a specific action is equivalent to painting a target on their back. Scott made a point not to name the journalist in question. Whether or not they want to publish an article that links their own name to this is their own choice.
I do think that a person who works to shut down an important blog is an enemy and should be fully informed of the responsibility he takes. If the reporter does that there’s a benefit from being clear about what they are doing and that they picked the fight, so it’s easier to explain in the future to bullies that they don’t want to pick the fight.
I do believe in people who go around running people’s lives having skin in the game and that being more effective to encourage ethical behavior then going after institutions. The institution of the NYT won’t force the reporter to put in Scott’s real name, so they should take the responsiblity for their actions.
Why do you believe that bullies should be get away from personal consequences for their actions? Or more specifially shouldn’t be warned that their bullying might have negative consequences for them? Why do you think our community shouldn’t defend itself against someone shutting down key parts of our infrastructure? Do you also think nerds on the schoolyard should let themselves be bullied?
I don’t think we should organize retaliation here on LW, but that likely won’t be necessary for the journalist predictably facing consequences for bringing down a major blog for reasons of vanity.
Not really. It’s so strange that the US journalistic code of ethics has very strict rules about revealing information from anonymous sources, but doesn’t seem to have any rules about revealing information from pseudonymous sources.
I don’t think the code cares about the distinction between anonymous / pseudonymous but about whether there’s a journalist-source relationship.
https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Peter-Gawker-Anatomy-Intrigue-ebook/dp/B07637TDJJ
Patience and discretion. And no point in targeting an individual.
For me personally this is the last straw in flipping an internal switch towards considering this kind of thing The Enemy. I’ll take some time and introspection before I can define its identity in words, but so far it’s pretty clear it’ll NOT be “the left”, and it will definitely include “cancel culture”. Intuitively I already have a feel for it.
How could an outside observer tell the difference between this, and a cult trying to stifle criticism?
The difference is, I think, that we’re just asking them to not publish Scott’s name. I would not support this kind of pushback against criticism, even if it were silly.
Edit: This is not an endorsement of Mati_Roy’s list. I do endorse politely writing to NYT.
You’re literally replying this to a top level comment with the headline “On retaliating” that gives examples for how to retaliate.
I literally did not reply to the top-level comment, but rather to its child. Did you reply to the wrong person?
Here’s what happened:
1. There’s a top level comment called “on retaliating
2. agc repleid to that comment and asked how this was different from trying to silence criticism.
3. You replied saying “we’re just asking them to not publish scotts name”—even though agc was asking about the “retaliating” comment
I still don’t get it. agc asked how is the retaliation NOT at attempt to stifle criticism. TurnTrout answered that it is not: it’s retaliation for a doxing attack, not for criticism. Then wolflow said something that’s “literally” wrong, and metaphorically I didn’t get it; probably TurnTrout didn’t get it too so he answered the literal interpretation. Etc etc.
But the upvotes-downvotes show I’m not seeing something here.
Makes sense. I hadn’t realized my comment might be seen as an endorsement of Mati_Roy’s list.
To clarify: I think it’s more reasonable to respond like this to the name issue than to criticism. I don’t personally endorse that list.
Your post seemed (and still seems) to be claiming that retaliating for name publication is so significantly different from retaliating for criticism that observers will probably understand.
I can’t tell if you think that, or if you think retaliating is counterproductive, and polite requests are the way to go.
I think it’s more understandable that reasonable people would be upset about doxxing than about criticism. I don’t think it’s understandable to the point that outside observers would actually go “oh, OK, fair reply to the NYT’s bad taste”. Realistically speaking, I think they would think very poorly of us for “retaliating”.
It seems improbable that the responses suggested by Mati_Roy would lead to positive changes at NYT.
If you want to clarify, edit your original post.
Done!
They couldn’t. Retaliating, or threatening to retaliate, is simply an incorrect avenue to address this behavior. The NYT, and most observers, will immediately discount all opinions from a direction that contains members who behave this way.
Retaliation or threats is applying a wrong theory of mind/decisions to the organization. It’s not an individual, and doesn’t feel fear. It’s not irrationally averse to your anger or actions, and it VERY rationally will decide whether to ignore or crush you, with no thought at all to giving in or reconciling.
Organizations, and entire nations for that matter, can absolutely be made to “feel fear”. The retaliation just needs to be sufficiently expensive for the organization. Afterwards, it’ll factor in the costs of that retaliation when deciding how to act. If the cost is large enough, it won’t do things that will trigger retaliation.
Oops, meant to cancel, rather than post. I don’t agree, and it’s probably not useful to debate.
s/for the organization/for many influential members of the organization/
Yes, they _can_ be manipulated and threatened in this way. But not easily, and not without pretty significant commitment on the part of a coordinated and resource-heavy attacker. Below the threshold of ”
doxing =/= criticism
As a side note, I strongly recommend the uBlacklist extension Mati mentions for preventing toxic websites from appearing on your search results (e.g. a certain “rational” wiki that writes cruel stuff about people they dislike).
Can you give me a headsup on RationalWiki? It did not shout “unfair bullshit” to me. Are their facts wrong or are they just mean?
I do not expect RationalWiki to write favorably of LW/EY in worlds where LW/EY is net-good, and unfavorably in worlds where LW/EY is net-bad. I expect RW to write unfavorably of LW/EY either way, so I don’t care much for their analysis (although I have read some of it, to make sure I’m not missing something).
I think LW cares much more about truth-seeking, while RW gives me more of a “360-degree-spin-and-then-dunk on the Outgroup” vibe.
Disclaimer: I’ve only read a few articles on there.
I doubt many of the ‘facts’ they provide are provably wrong but a number of RationalWiki articles struck me as very tendentious and one-sided and as such portraying a subject matter in a way that leads to wrong conclusions unless one gathers additional information.
E.g. from the RW article on SA: “He is highly critical of communism, [...] Much as with neoreaction, this hasn’t stopped him from writing long book reports and getting very interested, for example, in the details of central planning in the USSR.”. Rhetorics like ‘Much as with neoreaction [...]’ don’t belong in a wiki, much less one that names itself RationalWiki.
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