I Am Deleting the Blog

One wonders what criteria the Times must be using to determine that it's worth putting Scott at credible risk for further harassment but not women gamers. Is the Times really more sympathetic to gamers than psychiatrists or bloggers? That seems like an unlikely policy, but what else could explain it? I'm stumped.

Nothing like selective enforcement of the rules as your politics so moves you.

Hm, I don't know if I'd draw the cause/effect so directly.

To me, these are two separate problems: 1) NYT doxxes sources, 2) NYT serves advertisers rather than readers. There might be some relation between these two problems but I don't personally have enough information to conclude that.

I didn't make that clear in my previous post, my apologies. No implication was intended.

> The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?

This shows a lack of how journalism works. Using real names isn't to "drive clicks" and "appease advertisers." It's to add credibility to a story.

Think about it: Does a furniture business advertising in the local paper care whether the victim of a shooting is named in a piece? Sure, the owner might know the victim, but that doesn't mean the business will determine its expenditures based on names.

It’s multi-faceted. In some cases NYT (or any news org of any prevailing political inclination) might want to expose real names to exercise control or rally people to cancel someone. Other times it might be more mundane, just wanting a better angle for the story or more solid corroborative details.

In the case of SSC I really worry that NYT would be trying to exercise control. They probably like many things written on the blog, but also hate other things like diving into statistics of gender based pay discrimination or statistics of racial motivation in police violence.

These are topics which the modern left (which I’m a million percent a part of) is increasingly pushing out of scope of the Overton window and treating them like they are not allowed to be subject to statistical evidence or neutral discussion.

There is only One Right Thing To Believe about police violence (that is targets blacks and minorities, even if this is simply not supported by data). There is only One Right Thing To Believe about gender-based pay discrimination (the popular notion of “women make 70 cents on the dollar” which is not close to the real effect size, and requires a ton of uncomfortable nuance to discuss properly because of confounding effects of women staying at home more often and choosing to stay home after maternity leave).

I think they want SSC to write about things that comply with their moral narrative, and see doxxing as a way to turn the screws and essentially promote a vague threat that if he writes something controversial about IQ or sexism or income inequality or whatever, and it doesn’t stick to liberal talking points, they can do a damaging hit piece.

I think it's best to hear from NYT about why they strictly only use real names.

Generally it's anonymous sources who tell the wild and not-necessarily-true stories that drive clicks. A policy limiting their use is intended to make the publication more sober. But that's supposed to happen by just not printing the story. Outing people who don't want to be outed is something else.

Advertisers do not directly care about real names.

What matters is journalistic integrity. We are in a time when reporters are consistently hammered for quoting anonymous sources.

ITM?

> ... Well one of the reasons is that people working at this companies read and follow the precepts of Slate Star Codex. ...

This claim alone ought to suggest to you - given its obvious implausibility - that this person has a political axe to grind. (Same as the bunch of Twitter users who are now apparently gloating over the fact that Scott might soon get doxxed by the NYT - and who seemingly think "Orange site bad!" is a cogent argument. No, I won't be linking to them due to the obvious doxxing infohazard involved.)

Funny how this argument on how SSC is a white supremacist reactionary blog does not show a single, you know, written word by him. At all.

He did criticize sometimes SJW, some feminist bloggers, as he also criticizes libertarians, reactionaries, communists. But, hell, since he does not subscribe to The One True And Moral Opiniom, he is a monster, definitely. And, God forbid him for not paying attention 24/7 in a subreddit that is not even his, just because he has a day job amd such.

Yes, I created this account just to answer this complete bullshit.

This is pretty true on Hacker News. I engaged with the post as if I were in a conversation with the original author, not by posting here, but by sending an email to the original author.

I can't help but think that this effect isn't what I want from this community, however. I want reasoned discussion that helps me to see issues from various points of view, but instead I get a bunch of uninformed opinions from people who didn't even read the thing they're opining on.

> People in comments sections (doesn’t matter which) don’t really “react to” or “engage with” the article very often. What they’re really doing is being reminded by the article of some thought that’s been affecting them in their own lives lately—which they then hold forth about.

Don't want to go off on a tangent, but HN trains its users to do that by posting one article after another that's behind a paywall. Of course there will be comments vaguely related to the article when you've created a culture of commenting without reading.

Well not for nothing, thanks for your comment - this is a really good insight!

> There are still people and AFAIK organized communities on Reddit that target him.

Though one of the more wholesome things I've seen is when I visited that subreddit you're referring to and the consensus seemed to be that doxxing Scott was not justified.

> Yes, there are also random crazies.

The issue here is that he's a psychiatrist. Dealing with random crazies, some of whom might literally try to kill him if they knew where he lived, is his day job.

It should be noted here that "culture war topics" that are banned means literal white supremacists, nazis and their ilk.

You are acting as if it is a great injustice done to the man that he was forced to do the absolute bare minimum to stop giving nazis a forum.

> Isn't it obvious that the upcoming NYT articles is going to be a hit piece with the goal of ruining his personal credibility and professional career.

I suppose if i had and axe to grind against NYT it might be "obvious". Even the blog author mentions it would be a "mostly positive piece". Where are you getting your information from?

one explanation: the policy exists and symbolizes the ideal for a news organization that prides itself on integrity and transparency. when this journalistic ideal conflicts with the practical concern of creating a story, the organization allows for discretion and trusts the writer to make an ethical decision.

in the ISIS case, the article likely doesn't happen without the fighter's cooperation, so the writer must defer to the subject or risk losing the story.

in the scott alexander case, the article can happen with or without subject cooperation, so the writer can afford to obey the stated policy and increase "transparency" on this story.

That's a lot of trust in the government. It's also the exact opposite of what the whole blog post is about, preserving anonymity.

I don't think I've seen anyone right-of-center have anything really bad to say about Scott. I doubt any of those outlets (Breitbart, etc.) would want to do that to him.

This may itself be reason for some people to distrust Scott, except that he's probably done more to bring people to a moderate or left-of-center position on some topics than all the people shouting "racist!" combined.

The article is about Scott, as a person who runs a popular blog. The source is named "Scott Alexander". There is no need to publish his personal information. If the NYT wants to verify that he is actually a practicing psychiatrist etc, then they can gather that information, do the legwork, publish the information ("NYT can confirm that SA is who he says he is"), without jeopardizing that practice.

Slate Star Codex says they were expecting a relatively nice article, not a hit piece.

Are you referring to Episode 207? https://overcast.fm/+KhqFMR3J4

I think Sam did a very poor job in that episode -- he was preaching exclusively to the choir. He spends the start of the podcast explaining the important distinction between justified and unjustified police involved killings. This is a very important distinction, and I would love to see data about the racial breakdown of unjustified killings, relative to a racial breakdown of police interactions.

But, Sam then completely abandons this distinction. He discusses "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force", Roland G. Fryer, Jr. July 2007, a NYC-only study that does not measure unjustified killings.

Then, as usual, he spends an awful lot of time spouting his usual rhetoric of truth, epistemology, science, data, facts, and knowledge. This is merely rhetoric because his reference to that study is clearly meant to be evidence that we have the truth -- that police brutality is the issue, and unjustified killings do not disproportionately affect black Americans. He even discusses the Fryer study and moments later is confidently stating "race isn't the relevant variable". This is a grand claim that can't possibly be justified based on the Fryer study.

All interspersed with more rhetoric such as:

- "expiation of sins" for you Botox as if you're "woke as AOC"

- "ecstasy of ideological conformity"

- "woke analysis" is where "democratic politics goes to die" (probably means Democratic Party politics)

- "social activists playing chicken with the forces of chaos"

- "form of political pornography"

- "unable to speak or even think about facts"

Sam's usual parade of platitudes about epistemology are best understood by another quotation from this episode: "the difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims, that's why propaganda works".

it has the feel of the religious witch hunt because that is exactly what is has become. Many of these groups no longer look at data or science or any empirical evidence for the basis of their positions or policy, it is pure emotional dogma at this point. They are non-theistic religions

I'm in the field - though not as prominent as Yann (who has been very nice and helpful in my few interactions with him) - and your interpretation is off. People are disagreeing with his stance that researchers should not bother exploring bias implications of their research. (He says this is because bias is a problem of data - and therefore we should focus on building cool models and let production engineers worry about training production models on unbiased data.)

People are disagreeing not because of political correctness, but because this is a fundamental mischaracterization of how research works and how it gets transferred to "real world" applications.

(1) Data fuels modern machine learning. It shapes research directions in a really fundamental way. People decide what to work on based on what huge amounts of data they can get their hands on. Saying "engineers should be the ones to worry about bias because it's a data problem" is like saying "I'm a physicist, here's a cool model, I'll let the engineers worry about whether it works on any known particle in any known world."

(2) Most machine learning research is empirical (though not all). It's very rare to see a paper (if not impossible nowadays, since large deep neural networks are so massive and opaque) that works purely off math without showing that its conclusions improve some task on some dataset. No one is doing research without data, and saying "my method is good because it works on this data" means you are making choices and statements about what it means to "work" - which, as we've seen, involves quite a lot of bias.

(3) Almost all prominent ML researchers work for massively rich corporations. He and his colleagues don't work in ivory towers where they develop pure algorithms which are then released over the ivy walls into the wild, to be contaminated by filthy reality. He works for Facebook. He's paid with Facebook money. So why draw this imaginary line between research and production? He is paid to do research that will go into production.

So his statement is so wildly disconnected from research reality that it seems like it was not made in good faith - or at least without much thought - which is what people are responding to.

Also, language tip - a "woman researcher" is a "researcher".

It has been this way for a while. Outrage/cancel culture is an absolute pox upon our population that really needs to stop.

>>"Here is a story I heard from a friend, which I will alter slightly to protect the innocent. A prestigious psychology professor signed an open letter in which psychologists condemned belief in innate sex differences. My friend knew that this professor believed such differences existed, and asked him why he signed the letter. He said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t. My friend asked why he expected everyone else in his department to sign it, and he said “Probably for the same reason I did”.

this post is no longer available, of course

I don't even think he said "model's don't cause bias," he just said "ML systems are biased when data is biased."

I don't understand how people can defend his detractors in this particular case. Are you telling me that an image upsampling model that does not contain hard coded bias, and trained on unbiased data will produced biased result? Especially the kind of biased result represented by the error made by the original tweeter who fucked up?

>will request FB to fire him... (which thankfully won't happen)

Corporations don't fire this fast, give it couple weeks and he will move to other position "for personal reasons", where he will rest-and-vest for the few months, before finally being let go.

> To be great is to be misunderstood.

I would be content with being ordinary—permission to ask obvious questions about the narrative handed down from on high—without fear of defamation that costs me my livelihood.

If you are a history nerd, reading what people wrote 90 years ago you will realize that we are exactly the same species, and our attitudes have not changed a bit. One of my favorite readings are the essays of french philosopher Simone Weil after two visits to germany in the thirties. She was concerned with the rise of the nazis, while at the same time describing the natural and understandable forces that were making them gain support.

I do not think that there is an analogy between the groups of then and the groups of today. Still, the "outrage" mechanisms that steer our will seem to be identical.

> The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism.

Question is, what totalitarianism do you think we're headed towards? Trump/MAGA totalitarianism or Left/Cancel culture totalitarianism?

Living outside the US and watching what's going on (ok, it's not just the US, but it is just a few countries) is like watching a friend's slow motion descent into madness. It's pitiful and sad, and I feel powerless to do anything about it.

At the same time, so long as I stay away from news and social media, I'm pretty much unaffected. Society in the various countries I've spent time in over the last few years (Ireland, Spain, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia are the main ones) seems much the same as ever.

Is it a power-grab or an attempt by individuals to gain social status?

I think that it has all those trappings, but underneath is a deep addiction to anger, outrage and the rush of adrenaline that accompanies it.

There is also a sort of religiosity that your comment alludes to.

>Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But, for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone.

It's unclear which country and which side of the spectrum you're referring to.

This is why I like to use science as a guide (not a decision point), for then there is a chance to be self-correcting.

The problem is that it's a vicious circle. You can't attempt to understand/reason with someone going against societal norms otherwise you will be seen by your peers as agreeing with that person and thus ostracized because they themselves do not want to be seen as understanding/reasoning with someone (you) that now appears to be going against societal norms.

this forum literally hides opinions people disagree with.

The up and down arrow are really bad icons for UX.

> I wish more people would genuinely listen to those they disagree with.

I had a bit of this discussion on HN not long ago. I love to debate and hear ideas from those I disagree with. But, that's not what people are often doing today. They are using your statement to appeal to others to listen and accept their clearly racist ideas or provable wrong, anti-science ideas.

IMO, it's intellectually dishonest and a debate I have a hard time continuing.

I read somewhere that downvotes are capped to -4 and it made me much less likely to self-censor when I felt like I had a valid point.

I know that the people who disagree with me outnumber those that agree, but the way that the upvotes bounce up and down tells me there are more people out there that agree with me than I would have assumed.

(Plus I think I've only made it down to -4 once or twice)

I self censor for a different reason. What if someone decides to find that one political comment I made few years ago after I am back on my legs again to drown me?

What I have learned from struggling a lot with issues normal people don't face (at least going by majority) is that we are all toxic to each other. Some things are more visible and easily understandable for others while many aren't. It may feel pretty shitty for a disabled person inside a room of normal people complaining about very trivial things and calling for others to become disabled as a joke. Some autism jokes may actually invoke sad memories for others. But there are groups of young people who do all those and don't think it is toxic. Joking about depression is another. There are many examples where line of toxicity isn't so visible for a specific majority.

People have difficulty imagining the scale of time and when that difficulty helps them form a tribalistic decision to justify their own biases, it's much more easier to do that than fight against the urge.

The rise of short attention span only means people are much less empathetic than they seem to think they are by social media.

It's only my opinion but an empathetic person will look beyond that this person has some horrible political opinions and I want to run a witch hunt. A tweet out of 20k tweets in isolation doesn't say much about the person especially if it's old. They might be having a bad day, may want attention and said something controversial to get it. Maybe they do have medical problems (I know I do, I am on meds and my behavior changes a lot). And even if that person is officially shitty, I don't see why would you try to burn their house. It's ok to inform others but what's the point of attacking someone that they think "nobody" cares about them?

If nobody cares about improving those people, then they might as well become too extreme in their opinion. If nobody wants to hear them, they might as well be racist. We all strive for connection and the reason why we don't want discrimination to exist is we don't want to lose our ability to interact with people we care about. If all racists can get are other racist people or no one, why would they change?

Side note, most if not all outrage on social media (esp twitter and youtube) seems to be created by sufficiently motivated individuals. It's as obvious as a bright sky. So I wonder if you can live sharing your opinions while not getting bad side on one of those twitter mob groups.

This feels like an instance of negativity-bias. If you're willing to self-censor to avoid downvotes shouldn't you also be willing to shill / virtue signal for upvotes?

My problem with downvotes isn't the effect on my score. It's the fact that the font becomes paler. Dissenting opinions are singled out in a way that makes them look bad/wrong. I also don't like how the UX doesn't represent the distribution. A post with no votes will look like a post with 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes.

I am fine with downvotes, and with some UX mechanism to let people know that a post is being downvoted. But I think the current UX engenders groupthink.

Why are you afraid of downvotes? There's little reason to self-censor due to an internet currency.

And I wouldn't say the forum is "exactly this" unless you're saying that downvotes are on par with getting "fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or killed."

There's a bit of a difference between "not saying things because you may lose a dozen of meaningless internet points" and "not saying things because you can have a mob of haters try to get you and you family fired, you life ruined and maybe send men with guns drawn to your home to get you murdered if they're lucky".

I don’t self-censor. I don’t really pay attention to votes except as a barometer for how HN interpreted the topic or content of my post or comment. I try to post within the guidelines and rules and generally not be divisive. And yet I often get a warning that I’m posting too fast. Seems like a form of HN’s invisible soft mod power that suppresses legitimate comments and posts. I know this because I tried to post something yesterday afternoon, got the posting too fast error, and now the post is made by someone else 12 hours ago or so. How can these kinds of casual censorship be quantified across HN? It’s hard to talk about that which you can’t say.

Why do you care about invisible internet points? Create an alt-account and use it in good faith.

There is a chilling effect happening, and people need to be able to make unpopular arguments -- again, in good faith.

Exactly, downvotes hurt so much!

Dudes, this comment has gone from 0 to 5 votes, I don't even know what to make of it any more.

I do this, but generally the comment wouldn’t have added much to the discussion in that case anyway.

Why do you care about fake internet points?

> Left-wing social movements, while initially well intentioned, tend to eat their own in escalating purity spirals.

That's not particularly true of left-wing movements; to the extent it's true of them it's also true of right-wing movements. The relevant factors are orthogonal to the left-right axis.

> But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development. I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.

It's easy to require due process prior to anyone being deprived of freedom, and we generally see this as a positive development, compared to the alternative. Using "shame" (aka witch hunts, cyber bullying and the like) to punish unwelcome views is the opposite of due process.

> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.

This blog post is literally about someone fearing that it'll escalate to "beaten up" or "fired" if their name is published.

How about you and your partner being fired from your job because your 13 year old wrote 1 year ago in Instagram : "Guacamole nigga penis". Is that shame treatment good enough or you prefer it more severe?

It's not simply being called names (though that can cause some level of psychological distress). The big concern is economic consequences. People are losing their jobs, losing access to the platforms their customers are using, being canceled by payment services, etc.

There's also some level of physical safety concerns as well, but (as of yet) that's not as big of a concern.

Maybe it is like police and tasers?

In theory, tasers are good because they can substitute shooting.

In practice, you had 5 shootings, and now you have 4 shootings and 200 taser uses

Luckily, one can never lead to the other.

Bruises heal and prisons have limited terms. Twitter lasts forever.

> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN

Would you also like being hellbanned on HN?

It seems that by "smart" she meant "knowledgeable", in particular about how things work in her field. Of course people at the top know more (on average) about how the industry works. They are in a position to know.

From my observations nuclear energy is the holliest cow on HN.

Raising any sort of doubt regarding nuclear energy safety will quickly get you downvoted, flagged or banned:

Fukushima proved that nuclear energy is not that safe.

It may have been a conservative talking point back in the day, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. "Broken clocks, twice daily" etc.

It's undoubtedly more dangerous to be critical of the mainstream narrative now than it was 10-20 years ago.

There's an alt right author called Vox Day (and I'm a little afraid to be referencing him here) who makes the following argument: if mainstream thought becomes increasingly constricted, and disagreeing with it becomes increasingly dangerous, people will do one of two things. Either they'll self-censor, or they'll "flip the switch" and just go totally anti-mainstream, because it's safer to associate and identify with people who won't get them fired for their opinions. The greater the censorship and fear, the more people will "flip" in a search for safety.

Now he is alt right and he has a vested interest in portraying the ascendancy of the alt right as inevitable, but the point is nonetheless logical, and quite disturbing. It may be that punishing moderately "wrong" speech will ultimately drive moderates into the waiting arms of the extreme right, where they won't be judged so harshly for their errors. Moreover if the purity spiral [1] theory is correct, this phenomenon may be hard to stop, because punishing people for their dissenting speech is an effective way to gain status in many communities!

[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

It's not just commenting--it's any interaction at all:

https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_...

> People aren't allowed to make mistakes, it seems.

Not even mistakes. Things that were considered progressive as little as 15-20 years ago have now been flipped into "microaggressions".

> I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now.

I've wondered a couple times recently how dangerous it is that I'm easily discoverable. I tell myself that since I live in the Midwest, the worst of it hasn't reached here yet. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.

Per a comment up-thread, I wouldn't place too big a bet on pseudonyms remaining pseudonyms forever. Sure, absent a real effort to unmask you, you'll probably be fine. But sustained efforts to figure out pseudonymous identities often succeed.

You have to make giant, sweeping mistakes a part of your career or personality. Rush Limbaugh lost one tangential job, but is still influential and wealthy.

Do you think regular people out there who are not experts in housing, policing, government, economics should remain silent and not express opinions on things they don’t have insight to?

Everyone has a right to express their opinion even on topics they are woefully unqualified for. Including clueless techies.

The only instance I agree is when celebrities spout opinions as fact (or promote a pet diet or cause) only because it could send millions of people on wild goose chases. That said it’s more of a wish and really not a desire to censor them.

> Sometimes the world doesn't need to hear our opinion. That doesn't mean we're being censored.

That...pretty much is being censored?

"Techies" are not academics in general.

I didn't need to hear your opinion.

Hah, yes, like JK Rowling! If you are a self made billionaire, you are pretty immune from the twitter mobs, and can make controversial statements such as "there are only two genders."

It's not the "truth" and the "facts" that people are afraid to discuss. It's their opinions about truth and facts.

When you see phrases like "wrong/right side of history" and you see things happening like mass cancellation of brands or people for their opinions, you are seeing it. When a police officer is immediately fired and then charged with murder for performing his job the way he was trained to do it, you are seeing people fear the mob more than they care about the truth.

JK Rowling and Terry Crews are two famous people that come to mind who recently stated unpopular opinions and were attacked by mobs of people. There was no desire on the part of the mob to look for logical reasons for someone to have a valid opinion that differs from the mainstream.

>Where can one go to learn these controversial truths?

Bits and pieces are strewn all over the place. But you have learn to separate the wheat from the chaff for yourself. Then you might start noticing the places with limited quantities of slightly more observant commentary.

>Are they literally so confronting/offensive that they don’t exist on the internet?

No, they just don't exist on the internet the same way most real conversations don't exist on the internet. The internet is great for information of the type that would be found in traditional publications, is of professional interest, or are marketing materials. It sucks for everything else.

People being real exist in very small quantities, usually on lighter topics to avoid exposing themselves, and are always outnumbered by people preforming for the audience or (untempered by people openly talking like reasonable people) have taken an extreme position on the topic.

There is a pizza restaurant in suburban Arlington, Virginia in which these truths are stored in a filing cabinet in the basement. Certain inner-circle members of those who know are familiar with its whereabouts and its indexing system.

https://humanvarieties.org

I am going to respond with a paraphrasing of a well known quote about one such truth. The truth is that you are a slave in a prison without walls where prisoner never dreams of escaping.

They exist, but the woke crowd is purging them hard now. Any moment now I expect Columbus city to be renamed.

Scott's coronavirus articles were reliably ahead of the media. He was early with insights such as the insufficiencies of the flattening the curve model, the efficacy of masks, and warning it could become a pandemic.

These opinions are now mainstream. He gave them a platform earlier than the media did, because he was more open to being wrong and to exploring heterodox ideas, but also applied research and rigour when writing about them.

The point I was trying to make is tangential, but related to the post.

Scott has created one of the most thoughtful, level-headed, and interesting places on the internet. And yet he's shutting it down because it has led to a huge downside risk for his personal and professional life:

> I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.

What does this mean for others who want to start similar blogs or engage in these sorts of discussions? They're going to see this sort of thing happening and think: "Why bother? It's not worth the trouble."

If you had bothered to read the article, you would see that Scott lists two reasons why he is shutting down the blog. The reason that you mentioned is one. The other reason is:

> The second reason is more prosaic: some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for).

You write:

> What's the hidden truth, controversial opinion or super secret insight at stake here?

There is no one opinion at stake here. What is at stake is the ability to hold any dissenting opinion. Or not even hold it, but merely discuss it openly.

In the case of the anti-psychiatry lobby it's not even a dissenting opinion! It's basically the opinion that psychiatry ought to exist. There is just a small community of dissidents who disagree and want to get Scott fired (or worse). They now have a lot more leverage, because we've collectively decided that we should foster a culture where it's totally normal to try and get someone fired for things that are totally unrelated to work.

Just as the members of an anti-psychiatry subreddit should have a right to freedom of speech and association without the fear that their posts will get them fired (or worse), so should Scott.

This is pretty easy. Scott does have controversial opinions at times. He uses a pseudonym to make them public without fear of that impinging on his life and work.

So yes. He's being silenced because he cannot enjoy speaking publicly without fear of retribution.

I think GP and many people ITT project their current political concerns on OP's post. It doesn't seem apparent to me that Scott is deleting his blog due to any recent political changes.

His name is...

I mean, the NYT during the Clinton and Bush years was hardly some golden age of journalism. Off the top of my head, there was Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee, the Jayson Blair thing, and the Judith Miller / Curveball / Iraq war stuff.

Lets be honest here. This will be a big story here in Hacker News for a few days, then we will get on with our lives. It will not spread out from that.

This is ironically how the News works. It's new - novel, interesting, unique, temporary.

We will stand up for Scott - but it won't really change anything, and it will be temporary. It's naive to think that what we find important for a bit will have any impact on the real world and real lives. Especially as this is literally what the News does and has done for a hundred or so years.

> specially the NYT,that earns more money in real state

This is verifiably untrue. As a public company, their balance sheets are public, and almost 90% of their revenue is accounted for by subscriptions and advertising.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/71691/000007...

I'm not convinced that this is a new problem. Newspapers used to make money, but they have always been owned by someone rich enough to buy a printing press.

What's different now is that people have more access to primary sources. The story says that the boy was 11, because kids in that grade are usually 11 and the reporter was lazy, but the boy was really 12.

In the world where only one organization in the city has a printing press, the boy is now officially 11 years old because nobody who knows any better has the means to contradict it. In the world where your cat can get more hits on YouTube than there are people in New York City, the inaccuracies get publicized left and right, and then, rightly or wrongly, people lose faith in the news media.

This is kind of what we asked for. Give everyone a chance to speak to the world instead of only a privileged few and you get all the stories instead of only the rich man's story.

The problem now is instead of one party telling you a lie you didn't know was a lie, you have two parties saying contrary things and you know they can't both be right but the average person has no way to know who to believe and also doesn't have the capacity to verify everything personally.

So we end up with camps who are absolutely convinced that the other camp is nothing but angry malicious idiots who can't see the truth, even though that's what they think about you.

Other comments on this thread are suggesting switching the mode of payment to PayPal which let's you cancel instantly. Or credit card chargebacks if you can document that you exhausted reasonable efforts to ask NYT to cancel the subscription

I think that's a very good point. If that reporter takes the story to their editor, what's it going to sound like?

R: So, this article is about a blog and the person that writes it...

E: Ok, cool, why can't I find the blog?

R: Err... it doesn't exist anymore

E: Why not?

R: Because I doxx the author in this article.

If you were an editor, would you publish that? The subject of the story no longer exists, so the story is less interesting, _and_ you come off looking like an asshole.

I think any reasonable editor, would either not publish the story, or not publish the name. Seems like a great move to me.

I'm not surprised that someone who has given tons of thought to prisoner's dilemma type problems can make good moves in this type of game.

Anonymity is not some sort of natural right. For most of our existence as a species, we lived in small groups where you quite naturally knew everyone you dealt with. True strangers were rare, and quite rightly regarded with a certain suspicion. Anonymity only became possible when we started living in groups large enough that you might have to deal with people you hadn't met before, because there were just too many people around for you to know all of them. And even in such circumstances, if you were going to enter into some sort of serious agreement, like buying on credit or renting property, you would absolutely have been required to identify yourself. Historically, anonymity of any sort has only sometimes been possible, and anonymity in serious matters has generally not been possible at all. It is therefore not reasonable to speak of a natural right to anonymity.

My position, strictly speaking, is that anonymity is generally permissible. If you want to try to remain anonymous, that is in many cases fine. But it is also quite difficult, particularly in the face of determined investigation, and is therefore rather unrealistic. Unless you really know what you are doing, your attempts will fail as soon as someone really cares about finding out. This makes combining anonymity with any sort of public prominence or celebrity status a particularly bad fit, because plenty of people care about knowing all sorts of details about celebrities, so there is plenty of reason for both amateur snoops and professional investigators to go looking.

I don't find your example of celebrity pseudonyms particularly convincing. These are simply terms of convenience, part of crafting a public image. They are not true attempts to hide anyone's identity. Pull up the wiki page of most any celebrity that goes by a stage name, and you'll find their real or original name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_John

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne

(FWIW, psychotherapists and psychiatrists are not the same thing.)

I have occasionally been curious about that, but never curious enough to try to make an effort to find out. Call it a mix of laziness and respect for the preferences of others.

You HAVE to contact them to cancel, there's no way to do it without talking to a human that I can find.

Seconding this. A threat is only credible if known.

> The reporter just doesn't get it.

Full-time reporters don't get why a source might not want to be named? Dude that's a high-school level journalism discussion. If you're a full-timer at the NYT you get why, and are either complying with a corporate policy or grinding a political axe.

My point was demonstrating that there are broadly accepted professional situations where even quite public people operate under pseudonyms due to perceived risk of harm, in a way which is probably not legible to the news media.

I read the desk name comment as a suggestion to have psychiatrists perform their jobs pseudonymously.

> Obviously, Scott didn’t expect the blog to be so big or his anonymity to be such and issue when he started using his real first and middle names

He definitely did. Slatestarcodex was started to replace his old blog which was not anonymous and was becoming too popular for him to be comfortable with that, especially with his career starting to take-off. The old blog linked to the new one briefly to allow current readership to migrate, and then cut ties. That's why I know his real name. Perhaps he didn't expect it to be quite that big, but it being too big to be linked to his real name was part of the equation when he chose to use his first and middle names.

First and middle names are hardly better for tracking someone down than than first names only, since middle names aren't really used anywhere except very official things. Unless you have access to some official database that contains addresses and middle names or something (hey, isn't this what phone books used to be?), the middle name doesn't really add much IMHO.

Patrick is loser who made bingo cards and later a bunch of failures to only end up working for Stripe. Why the fuck would anyone listen to that blabber mouth hack who hasn’t achieved anything than tricking dumb people he has shit of value to say like a fucking Mullah.

> Do you feel that that addresses your concerns?

Many of the responses critical of his decision seem to read as "Here's reason X that his decision is non-sensical, and I didn't read the actual link where he clearly and reasonably addresses reason X."

      1  |  2  |  3  
         | ABC | DEF 
    -----|-----|-----
      4  |  5  |  6  
     GHI | JKL | MNO 
    -----|-----|-----
      7  |  8  |  9  
    PQRS | TUV | WXYZ
    -----|-----|-----
      *  |  0  |  #  
         |  +  |     

Now 0800-INFO becomes 0800-4636 — you just press the key corresponding to the letter once.

You press the number on the dial pad which also has the letter in question. Just once.

This is just a popular (in the US?) way to make numbers easier to remember.

This refers to the letters that are on phone keypads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#/media/File:T...

You may find this relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#Letter_mappin...

mobile phones have letters on their dial pads also.

Yes. Doxxing people whose only crime is producing good but complex content for the world to enjoy is cyberbullying. If bullies are on the right side of history I have no interest in the metric.

In short: yes.

To expand: nobody here is harassing the journalist. The journalist harassed the blogger. The commenters are providing polite, critical feedback.

Harassing?

Investigative?

If I click on the first google image result from a search for his real name in an "incognito" window, I see plenty of stuff about SSC and rationalists https://i.imgur.com/0hWxzp3.png

>>I thought "maybe he doesn't want his real name to link to his blog if a patient googles it"--but, it already does that. In fact, it's a suggested search in google!

>That's not true. I just searched his real name and I get results about him but none of them are SSC-related at least on the first pages. Maybe your customized results lead to that or maybe you are including Scott Alexander or SSC in the search - either way most patients googling him wouldn't see SSC at all.

I get slatestarcodex as the fourth google autocomplete suggestion when I search "Scott RealLastName" but I don't get SSC in the first page of results. And the third autocomplete suggestion is Alexander. Incognito mode of course.

No, I don't think harassment in any form is acceptable.

I do think the case of Hsu is worth using as an example here: an intra-university conflict; a group of grad students is petitioning for a professor that they believe is actively harmful to the institution to step down as director of research. Now, I don't think it really matters what you or I think about any of this--whether or not we agree with the students or the prof is immaterial. This is an issue for the university, the students at the university, the professor, and any professional relations the professor has within his field of academia.

If I'm a student at the school, and I'm pro-grad student faction, I'd probably be rightly annoyed and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting an erroneous cause via his immensely popular website.

If I'm a professor at the school, and I'm pro-prof faction, I'd probably be rightly bewildered and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting, albeit for a good cause, via his immensely popular website, with no apparent reason to do so, seeing as how he doesn't seem to be a geneticist or faculty. It would definitely give me pause, to say the least.

I can think of things even in my personal life or business where, if an outsider were involving himself trying to "signal boost" a resolution (even if in my favor), I think I'd very rightly want to know the motivations and identity of said person.

The above examples don't illustrate that he should be identified, rather, that he's presenting people with a compelling reason to want him identified. I don't think he should be ID'd, but if a campus paper wrote an OP-ed about it, I'd have a hard time faulting them.

I don't think anyone should harass anyone else, which I think is somewhat what Scott has been doing (perhaps for a righteous cause) with this affair (as, by nature, signal boosting pro-prof draws some fire upon the grad student faction in question), so his response here rings a little bit hollow to me. But, to be crystal clear, even if I think Scott is using his platform to ever so slightly browbeat institutions via his followers (in the most mild sense & with the best of intentions), I still think the NYT is very much clearly in the wrong.

Is it really just new online norms? As a German I am astonished that this is even legal, let alone journalistic norm.

Here in Germany a “right to informational self-determination” is legally well-established going back to a judgement in 1983 and journalists know that they have to weigh freedom of press and public interest against this right. I am pretty sure that what the times is doing in this case would actually be illegal here, if they cannot justify why public interest in knowing Scott’s real name would outweigh his right to informational self-determination.

Does anybody know what the legal situation regarding doxxing is in the US?

That isn't TLP, it's one of TLP's millennial disciples. They mentioned working as a trainee doc in the ER but TLP was a psychiatrist at a large university hospital.

Also I don't think TLP quit because he was doxxed necessarily. If that were the case, he wouldn't have kept paying the site hosting fees all this time. I think he decided the blog had become too much about his identity as a sort of minor messiah figure in the eyes of his readers, which is sort of against the founding principles of the blog itself. The character or voice he created for the blog was gaining too much power. Having his real name revealed was only a secondary concern.

He probably still writes somewhere though... probably, he's a well-respected/beloved voice on some obscure phpBB board or similar (real TLP heads will know he used to read/post on Metafilter back in the day.)

Trying to make sense of this reminds me of reading monad tutorials. To dense with references (self- and otherwise) and analogy for me to make sense of.

It's definitely possible I'm just not smart enough to understand this, but how does one go about learning to comprehend stuff like this?

I love you.

I propose an experiment.

Create two separate web servers. Open both of their ports to the internet. Put a bitcoin on each one. Only publish the IP/URL to one of them on a website with millions of DAUs.

My hypothesis is the address you publish will see its bitcoin disappear more quickly than the other.

There's a difference between being able to easily find an answer, and knowing which question to ask. This is basically the entire point of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Not entirely, -- e.g. in some cases the information might only be available by breaching confidentiality.

But the fact that it was technically openly available to some degree doesn't change the fact that the people most likely to cause harm with it often lack the mental facilities to actually do the work to dig it up.

The same lack of judgement that makes someone more likely to engage in harassment or violence often also makes them less skilful researchers than a blinking NYT reporter.

Maybe a way I'd express your sentiment instead: If it didn't matter because the information was already public then why write the article in the first place? -- after all, anyone else could also learn these things so no one needs the article. The answer is because articles do matter and by that same token we can't disregard the ethical considerations regarding their content, even if it's entirely derived from open sources.

The theoretical open availability of the information also doesn't change the fact that many other venues (e.g. sites like Reddit and Wikipedia) will protect your personal information but not if the NYT has printed it with neon blinkers.

Wow, i’ve read all her 3 long blog posts about what happened and it angers me so much. I knew Vice was shit, but I had higher expectations from NY Times, Google or Twitter.

Here are the other parts:

- part 2: https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...

- part 3: https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...

There was a positive outcome too, though, check out this video where she helps save someone’s life (SFW): https://youtu.be/4VKZTmTP7oY

Jeong worked for Vice at the time and then the NYT hired her correct?

Maybe, revealing the true (or full) name is seen as a journalistic contribution? (As in "I'm not just reporting on what is there for everyone to see, I also did some actual research. See, here's the real name nobody was meant to know." – Obviously, this would be more proof of an issue with professional self-esteem, rather than of anything else.)

> Can't think of any, unless the reporter was also misrepresenting the subject of the story or the angle he is taking.

That is exactly what was happening there. There is no other plausible explanation for the behavior.

Vice is the epitome of garbage so no surprise there

Or with your tween kid sitting next to you.

That would be counterproductive. The reporter would get abuse from random people, the article would definitely get published with the blogger's name, with the twist of "blogger tries to suppress publication of article by leveraging an online mob."

I would like to know who the journalist is. Not so they can be threatened or put in danger. But so their reputation can take a hit. Part of the reason people do these things is because they can get away with it without any consequences.

There is no need to do that. As long as the reporter remains unnamed, for now, they can decide to either not publish the article, or not publish the name, and they will be able to go along with there life, without getting the negative backlash.

If they do dox the person, though, their name will be on the article, and you'll be able to find it.

Presumably the NYT article would be under the reporters name.

Since it seems that the reporter might have been named after all, did anyone take a quick look at their previous work to check whether they have a history of publishing problematic or misleading 'hit pieces'? It might be useful to figure out if concern really is warranted here.

Why would he stoop that low?

That's been done, unsurprisingly, on Twitter already.

And there's the rub. What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"?

In theory I would gladly support the theory of "quality investigative reporting", but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news.

Some examples of "oligarch news": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI

As a former developer who worked closely on Thomson Reuters News feed (in the 00's), I've seen how there is almost zero fact checking for the information that appears on news feeds. Instead, news outlets trust the 'upstream' feeds and then quote the reports verbatim.

To be fair, there are those who are really awesome at doing research and releasing information that are part of the MSM. Unfortunately, there are plenty others who are not affiliated with MSM news outlets and hence aren't regarded as "reporters" per-se. These latter ones are regularly attacked via "fact checking" websites as a way to discredit them.

An article on the latter is here: https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-381-who-will-fact-chec...

In short, there's a bunch of information out there and without each and every news report clearly citing original sources, then MSM or not, it must be regarded as suspect.

So for "quality investigative reporting", the actual reports must rigorously cite objective sources.

> I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting.

Where do I find quality investigative reporting?

I support the Guardian and two regional/local newspapers and I' also forced to pay for the state run broadcaster here but I have to say that I also find myself reading a number of other sources to figure out what is really going on (for the Scandinavians here I'm one of those who will happily look to both Klassekampen and Document, in addition to vg.no and nrk to figure out what is really going on in certain cases, and I understand I am not alone in this).

Once you know a bit of history and a number of different angles you realize some things are horribly complicated and big media is making things worse by pushing misinformation, and by conveniently omitting facts. My favourite example from my favourite (i.e. least despised) local mainstream media source: X fired at a number of positions in neighbouring country Y yesterday. <Long article about this>. <Towards the end:> This happened after a barrage of rockets was fired from these positions shortly before. And that is the most honest of them. The rest seemed to just omit the fact that part Y fired first.

PS: The reason I support some of them is 1) because I feel it is the right thing to do. 2) because I feel at least one of them have actually managed to do some great quality investigative reporting as well as some great feature stories in between. We talk about certain companies and public healthcare organizations getting some much needed sunlight.

I'm all for quality investigative reporting, but that is not something that 99% of journalists do.

I've been interviewed by journalists a few times and I've seen at least a half-dozen other people be interviewed. The articles published are totally disconnected from what was actually said. Heck, I've had a journalist make up a quote and attribute it to me.

Don't talk to journalists. If you must, record everything.

How would you measure good journalism? In OP’s case they could only see a given journalist was bad by personally witnessing the falsity. You don’t get many opportunities like that unfortunately.

I do think some journalism is good. Many reporters at the Financial Times come to mind for example. But I found your reply did not really address the nature of OP’s complaint.

Also stopped reading any news and reports from big media about 3 years ago.

Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon/subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.

> Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society.

Statistical significance is not the only epistemological tool around. I would even argue that, outside of some scientific fields, it is really not that important (and might even lead to a lot of wrong conclusions in the context that is used nowadays, but that is a different discussion altogether).

We are not some dumb statistical machine. We have an entire model of the world in our heads, and one single observation can have profound implications on it. The journalist reports to an editor, who maintains a system of job promotions, and all of this is connected to an institution that holds very real power. The OP observed this journalist manipulating the story, not in a random direction, but in their view in a direction that would appeal to the status quo. It is normal to update one's map of reality when confronted with first-person experience of an event that goes against what you've been told, and when the simplest explanation for how the world works changes in light of this direct observation.

And this is also how your mind works, and this is also how you formed your views on reality, including repeating the "N=1" cliché. None of it has anything to do with p-values.

Quality investigative reporting is even more tricky because it's even harder to double-check

In my country, there's a supposedly quality investigative reporting outlet. I did trust them for years. Then one time they did report on something I happened to know more details from other sources. Their reporting was complete BS bending facts to come to opposite conclusions.

Months later it turned out that political party loved favoured by those journalists had an internal struggle and the dude in article above happened to be on the "wrong" side. The report was about his overseas business, not political affairs. As a bonus point, "good" side was involved in bribery scandal.

Another investigative outlet recently published a series of reports on another politician that comes from unfavourable party in among mainstream media journalists. So far all of those reports seem to have little substance and they seem to be in she-said, he-said gray area at best. I'm pretty sure the dude do have skeletons under his bed. But investigative journalists seem to just post whatever rumors they got and see what sticks. Which is not exactly helping their quality investigative reporting image.

I was going to say that we could defer to whistleblowers instead but I realized that that term has also been loosely used. That said, it’s not journalists but news organizations that shouldn’t be trusted.

Most of the reported news is N=1 events. If the news reported averages instead, it wouldn't sell

Wealth is one of the classic ones that journalists like stretching. My mom, a classical musician, got asked about her wages, and after some back and forth (since they varied by the job, of course), she was given this more specific question: "what's the most you made from a gig?" The sum she replied with, of course, made it into the resulting magazine article as an hourly average. Cue the stinkeyes from colleagues.

Those are not journalists. They are outrage-farming ad impression generators.

My friend's cousin got involved in some shady activities and some regional newspaper ran a full page article on this. That's where a 2 bedroom semi detached in a not so glamorous part of a small town became: a large villa in a leafy part of the town...

My favourite example of all time of journalistic shamelessness is ABC reporting that Robin Williams's were "respectfully asking for privacy" following his death, while a banner at the top of the same page advertised live aerial footage of Robin Williams's home:

http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=abc_classy

Doesn't the UK have strong laws about libel and slander? Or do they not apply to Ireland?

> Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on.

A good follow up would be "How?"

The coverage might have been factually correct, but just because they didn't like it doesn't mean the information was wrong.

I'd say even more simply, don't talk to the press without the intermediation of a competent PR professional.

It's the same reason you don't talk to the police without a lawyer. Even if you're the cleverest person in the world, you're playing a game against an opponent who does this for a living and holds all the cards.

> NYT is a reputable journal

The people who lied us into Iraq?

The NYT isn't reputable anymore. Haven't been for a while. Case in point, this article they might publish.

They fired most of their senior editors in 2017 because they were both too expensive and enforcing old school journalist standards and integrity which doesn't generate clicks like hot handed opinion pieces followed by reverse opinion pieces does.

Though mind you that senior group was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, so take their integrity with a grain of salt.

> I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired.

Not going to happen. The reporter was doing his job. No one will lose their job just because your favorite blogger agreed to go on the record for an interview and is not upset that his identity will be revealed.

> I hope that the journalist gets revealed

The name of the journalist in question is no secret; spend 5 minutes browsing Twitter or the SSC subreddit and you'll figure it out.

You can always agree for an interview on a condition of receiving final draft before it gets published and having a say on it. Whether they agree or not depends on how many other sources they have for that story.

This may be slightly off topic here, but I attended a birthday party of a friend last year. Long story short, there was a guy at the same pub who OD'd and my wife and I helped him until the ambulance arrived. There was a 'reality' TV cameraman with them and we didn't want him filming us so I asked him to stop. His tactic was to shove the camera in my face and make snide remarks to provoke a reaction. When I put my hand up and stepped back, the guy tilted the camera back really quickly and took a knee panning it up at me, and started saying things like "you hit me! That's assault". To this day I have no idea what ended up being shown, if anything, but it was an eye opening experience about the abject dishonesty involved in reality TV. I can just as easily see that applied to TV journalism.

Could I ask what the CNN article got wrong? I'm curious how different their story was to the actual attack.

One underrated option is to just not read the news:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

Getting the news from "both sides" is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn't in the middle.

You can get "just the facts" from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn't really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want "the spin", you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation.

From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.

For UK sources, I'd suggest adding The Spectator. They're not perfect (some of their columnists strike me as fairly obvious shills), but overall I've found them the most intelligent right-of-centre source.

For the Americans reading, they have a US site too, might be worth checking out?

Most news is worthless. What's important will have more perspective available six months from now (or, better, six years from now); what's not important is just parlor room gossip.

Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn't belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there's no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that.

It's probably necessary to know enough about this week's going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it's necessary to know who's playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.

They should use the Slashdot epithet. “An anonymous coward familiar with the discussion said ...”

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu

There is no way to fix advertising funded, it's the problem with facebook and google too.

Advertising means the consumers aren't customers to be served but eyeballs to be harvested and served up.

The problem is that the press drives policy decisions, so you cannot disengage completely. You would need to find a direct line of communication towards representatives without the press. We have the means for that theoretically, but it needs a lot of engagement. I think most people would benefit when cutting out classical papers.

A book that opened my eyes is Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life by Rolf Dobelli.

* What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics?

* What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health?

* What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics?

Unfortunately all US media, and most international media, is equally bad and built on bad intentions for varying levels of nefarious purposes.

Me, sure. From then on they'd have to earn my trust - not just get it because they're doctors...

If you buy a frozen pizza and it tastes terrible, should you continue buying and eating them for a week until you have enough data points?

If a single sample of corn in a shipment is contaminated with aflatoxin should you keep testing it and trying to find the good corn?

If a program corrupts your data on first use should you keep trying it on different data before rejecting it?

Would you trust a hospital with a reputation for employing doctors that never get pulled up or fired for their bad work?

The bar to be a doctor is higher than having internet and a blog.

How many bad doctors do you need to meet before deciding that they're also human? As the saying goes, "trust, but verify".

Can you find any recent examples of good journalism?

Doctors are heavily regulated. Journalists aren't.

I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous.

Professional journalism has a long, long track record of opposing any consequences to their actions whatsoever.

I love the idea of professional journalists. But the reality of them just does not work in practice in our current media industries.

Professionally relevant information - insider sources, other information that is important for you for whatever reason - from original sources. If there aren't any original sources (e.g. politics, history etc) - cross reference multiple interpretations that present story from different angles, e.g. Fox vs CNN, Guardian vs BBC, Washington Post vs Al Jazeera vs Russia Today. Of course for some stories there are sources that are better suited than others due to their focus (e.g. throw in Democracy Now for anything about grassroots movements, various scientific/medical news are discussed most in-depth by specialized podcasts, etc).

And then there is information that isn't important (it doesn't affect you and you can't act on it) and you're just seeking it out of habit (addiction really).

The Economist is the rare case of a news source that's not too bad, at least at present. We can't let ourselves become complacent, however - just see what's happening to the NYT.

For me, it’s difficult to “trust”. I assume I know next to nothing about India vs Pakistan or the Mexican drug war and that Journalism isn’t going to change that. At best it’s a source of stories like any novel, at worst it’s trying to mislead.

In the case of Mexico’s drug war, most Americans are probably very misguided as to how dangerous it is for tourists and also how much of it is seen by the average Mexican on a given day. I feel I’ve learned infinitely more in one conversation on Tandem with someone who lives in Mexico than I ever will from a newspaper.

If I read about riots in my city, I know there was something going on but I can’t really trust that the news correctly identified the place, people, or motive. I may have the desire to learn more and so I will reach out to someone who was there our lives in that neighborhood.

I had a waking up moment in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. I learned that the NYT, which was my favorite because each issue was a literary work that could be read from front to back, reported as though they’d never been to NYC. If they couldn’t get basic details right when the story was literally on the same street (Broadway) then I don’t know what they’re actually capable of reporting.

But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either. I prefer the Economist - they clearly have a very strong bias in some political & economical stories, but that bias is predictable and consistent. At least their factual reporting seems on the point.

Gell-Mann amnesia effect:

""" Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

- Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002) """

This isn’t to say that all journalists are “bad apples”, but as the full aphorism says, “A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel”.

> How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?

"Professional journalist" shouldn't invoke any more trust than "professional fund manager".

Surely they're not all bad apples, but they're not inherently incentivized to have integrity, so you must assume that they do not have integrity, for your own safety.

There are many newspapers that do not have as much money as the New York Times or Washington post, and many of them struggle with tight margins.

It also seems likely that there would be other costs than the salary of a public editor: typically they would have a column which costs space on paper and the results of the editor’s opinions on ethics could increase other costs for the paper (higher standards, more discarded stories, being slower to print because of higher standards, possibly higher employee turnover or hiring difficulties or exposure to lawsuits)

It doesn't even need to be about political stuff.

I'm a moderator on Reddit for a gaming related television-show-turned-into-internet-streaming company with various shows and format.

The related circle jerk subreddit is very vocal and after some minor discussions about normal moderator actions of removing insulting posts, it kind of spiraled out of control and all of a sudden, lots of postings on the circle jerk appear, targeting me.

Somewhat amusing in the beginning but some of those posts were somewhat disturbing enough to let me actually consider for the first time how much information is out there for identifying me or persons in my personal circle.

My real name is easy enough to find out (I never tried to hide it) but it is kind of generic enough to have lots of hits so you can't go from there to where I live or work. But for other people which might even have different personas on the internet, this can be much more difficult.

Was certainly a chilling moment and this only on the topic of something completely apolitical.

Is there any public figure on the internet who doesn't receive death threats? You could maintain a blog for photos of puppies, and some lunatic would have a deadly-serious problem with it. The web isn't working. The saner and wiser a person is, the less likely they are to contribute content. The design of the web selects for morons with neither any reputation to lose, nor foresight to worry.

Anonymity cuts both ways. You can keep your personal details secret for a while. It's becoming more and more difficult the more well known you become. On the other hand anonymous people are able to continue making threats, call for violence or otherwise making your life more difficult basically forever without consequences.

There are many problems with the way the Internet works. Having anonymous people with nothing to lose broadcasting political opinions and threats is one of them. This creates anonymous angry mob which is very successful at silencing interesting authors and ruining lives of those who have even slightly controversial thoughts.

I don't know what the solution is. It's not clear to me more anonymity is going to solve anything. I believe the world would be a better place if you had to work to have your opinion heard. Do something interesting, work in certain industry for a few years, achieve something, live through something. Just because you are able to make an account on a website doesn't make what you have to say in any way interesting or worthwhile.

> But, having your real name attached to posts that are against certain political topics or narrives, can be borderline-lethal in 2020

It's also unavoidable in 2020 to be doxxed eventually if you have a lot of enemies, unless you take care not to publish any personal details and hide your identity with the best methods available from the beginning. But when you make it easy to identify you with details such as those on the RationalWiki page, all bets are off and it's a bit late to mourn now.

What kind of "people like Scott", and what kind of political extremists?

I see a dead comment has cited "racial science" and "conservatives", seemingly out of nowhere. Has Scott written something "controversial" that I missed? Something that would offend the left wing?

If so, I can well believe that NYT would take it into their heads to write a semi-hit-piece on someone they perceive to be some sort of Jordan Peterson type.

[flagged]

Is there an author in the United States who has been killed in 2020?

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Murdered_American_wri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Assassinated_American...

No doubt, it would be just as interesting of an article without his real name.

No. There is a slightly higher chance with NYT than say TMZ but still. I've read many people saying the journalist told them it was for a fluff piece or positive article.

In 2015 their columnists were arguing for arming ISIS as a ‘homegrown Sunni resistance’ and the “last Sunni bulwark” against Iran[0]. That’s in the print edition too.

It’s not like their ethos were suddenly made worse in 2018 with Sulzberger.

As a bonus, that same columnist argued for arming a Kurdish-Shiite anti-Sunni militia in 2005 and fawning over a civil war.

He’s got three Pulitzer Prizes.

The cream of the crop.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/opinion/go-ahead-ruin-my-...

The NYT published Walter Duranty’s denials of the Ukrainian Holocaust, and other warmed over Soviet propaganda. They were full on in their support for the Iraq war. Far less has changed about them than about your knowledge of them.

That assertion seems rather at odds with "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name", doesn't it?

Again, the idea that journalists routinely burn their sources as a matter of course is clearly wrong. Source anonymity is inviolate, especially at the level of papers like the Times. They just don't do what is being alleged here.

If they want to tell us who he is, it's because his identity IS the story.

I don't agree that he wasn't a source. He seems to be the subject of the article, but he made contact with the reporter and claimed to explain his concerns which were not heeded.

I've seen the New York Times omit the names of refugees who face persecution in their home countries. (I'm trying to find an example, but it's surprisingly hard to search for.) This is a different case, but I think it's broadly comparable.

But he is a medical professional that explains that releasing his identity is possibly detrimental for those he treats. Is "hospital" the important part of that policy we should be focusing on, instead of the implications of why they might not want to report that person's name?

> Sure, but is this one of them?

I don't know - I don't know who the guy is, or what the journalistic justification may be. Hopefully the journalists's editor does.

Point taken regarding the Hsu case. Maybe I jumped the gun there.

I don't want it to be the norm for any journalistic organ/employee to function/perform the way this one did. There are many ways to accomplish adoption of that norm, including (but certainly not limited to) firing people who do that.

There is a clear division to be made between firing someone for what they do on their own time vs. actions they take in the course of their employment for you.

When being a responsible journalist is your job, it's not unreasonable to expect to get fired for not being a responsible journalist.

I think it's just in general dangerous and disruptive for the entire world to know who you are online. They will find you and threaten you and everyone you love. Sure only 1% of them are actually dangerous but it only takes one bullet or knife in the back from a psychotic person to end everything. Or just someone doing some crazy made up nonsense like pizzagate. The loonies are out there.

> I don't think this is a "that one writer" issue.

I think the problems with journalism are bigger than this one writer. Simultaneously, I would like to see NYT take a stance against its writers doing what this one did to Scott.

> I don't think Scott is saying this is a "that one writer" issue.

Point taken, but I didn't claim to speak for him.

> Any such choice is down to newspaper-wide policy.

Agreed. I wrote another comment in response to 'rachelshu, adjusting my original comment to something more reflecting my actual views.

Proposition: The NYTimes editorial board has long addressed the matter of revealing identity of anonymous bloggers on interent.

From a political point of view, anonymous (and more critcally, independent) bloggers are a threat to the (local/global) establishment's propaganda organs. This may in fact be editorial policy, as you suggest. It doesn't matter of the blogger is 'friendly' in terms of political views.

Furthermore, Scott has repeatedly argued against trying to get other people fired as a way of expressing disagreement.

Please see my revised position in a comment to 'rachelshu.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611133

That said: I don't understand how I'm repeating a mistake here. "Cancel culture" has become a problem because people get fired from their day jobs (or suffer other consequences) for opinions not pertaining to their day jobs, which are expressed outside their work hours.

In contrast, the NYT writer engaged in crappy professional conduct.

I agree that the writer is not the root problem. I've changed my mind about whether firing should happen; other solutions addressing journalistic incentives, or this journalist's team, or whatever, would probably go further.

Wow, had not read about that!

Or, as with much else in the woke lexicon[1], they don't use the word "safety" in the way that most people understand it.

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/

You missed my point. Sure, blogs are written by "some guy on the internet", and anyone should be skeptical about anything they write. But journalists are also "some guys on the internet"! They should be kept in the same security ring. There's no difference in competence or accountability between a rando and an entitled journalist.

Do you have any links to articles you find particularly egregious?

Edit: OP originally I said "I work at one of the companies that nyt constantly disparages," hence my last line. He edited that out after I posted my reply, so my comment now sounds snipey and out of place. I figure FB is a fair guess for the intersection of his remark and HN audience.

> where their opinion amazingly veered far right on virtually every topic

If you think SSC, the blog that sources anything remotely controversial, is alt-right for the conclusions it comes to... Maybe you should show the issues in the logic that led him there?

But I think you're doing a great job of demonstrating why he's afraid of having his name published.

> They have given in to internal activists who have no desire to learn, think, or report the truth.

I am shocked and saddened this is where we are as a society. Literally one man's opinion distressed so many people, in such a way, they felt the need to raise an army and then descend on their employer and demand they remove, recant and say it will never happen again?

We have arrived at a time in place where you cannot have your own opinion without fear of the rage mob coming after you.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell

-1984

That's Matt Taiabbis proposition too.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...

This is stunning false equivalence. None of the opinions you offered are similar to Tom Cotton’s apologia for “sending in the tanks”. The NYT Opinions section is still, for better or worse, still quite diverse in its opinions. Ross Douthat and David Brooks are not leaving anytime soon.

Thank you so much!

> society body emerge with a coalition of Pulitzer Prize winners ... backed by the biggest news media companies

If biggest media companies were interested in upholding any ethical standards - the would have been doing that already. Allowing them to create a coalition and giving that coalition any more power would make things only worse.

Pulitzers have lost a lot of credibility because of Hannah Jones/1619.

You don't have a self-governing body for journalism?

I don’t see it as much different than the general societal norms that we tend to teach children, like “try to be nice” and “it’s okay to avoid people who aren’t nice.” Is that a violation of freedom of speech, or some top-down regulation? I don’t think so.

It probably shouldn’t be “licensing” in the sense of using state or otherwise organized violence to seek out people who violate the norms. We generally don’t teach people to punch anyone in the face who is rude. But having general standards of conduct don’t seem to bad to me.

There is no accountability, no repercussions [1] for causing any amount of personal and economic damage. No real need to offer retraction and corrections even when reporting isn't just unethical, but also blatantly wrong.

If you want an easy example look at this Super Micro spy chip story [2] by Bloomberg Businessweek. It's absolutely unsubstantiated [3], caused 40% drop for SM share price, but two years later it's still up.

[1] except that one time Tiel funded a lawsuit

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/22/super_micro_chinese_s...

It seems to me that protecting sources and mandating some degree of truthfulness (like don't outright lie about verifiable facts, as some statements are not disprovable) are orthogonal to dictating the subject of the stories?

The AMA and bar associations are not without their issues either (they end up driving prices up since they have a monopoly on their service), but it seems to me that people don't have to worry about doctors doxxing their patients on social media or lawyers making deals behind a client's back as much. When it does happen, these professionals are usually ejected from their profession, which is a pretty big disincentive.

Doctors were once upon a time not very highly trained, medicine was a crapshoot, now things have changed. I'm sure it was a tremendous upheaval at the time. That it's a lot of work doesn't mean it can't be done.

A more interesting argument against doing this is considering the tradeoffs if implemented:

* e.g. the AMA has pretty successfully restricted the supply of doctors and driven the prices of medicine up,

* people are so paranoid about giving medical or legal advice they have to say things like "I'm not a doctor but... I'm not a lawyer but..."

etc.

> There is already a sort-of licence. Being employed by a company as a journalist, especially if the company is a recognised media "name".

But this obviously fails as seen in this instance (and many others). Companies have interests that do not align with the public's interest of ethical standards. Much like we've generally understood (but unfortunately not really everywhere) that letting other industries regulate themselves isn't a good idea, I don't think it's any different in the media.

Scott Alexander may not have been the original source, but he is a definitely _a_ source as it seems he was in touch with the reporter. The reporter has an undeniable ethical duty to decide whether to publish his full name after he raises concerns about his safety.

I see limited to no news value in publishing his name and substantial risk of harm, but I'm a frequent reader and admirer of the blog.

Scott Alexander was a source for the article. He just wasn't the source for his name.

And then there's Washington Post whose entire editorial board signed a letter asking the US Gov to arrest and charge their own source. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/edward-snowden-doesn...

Licensing of reporters would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Not in some countries but it's the 1st amendment of the US Constitution that protects freedom of speech and the press. So it's considered pretty important here.

Thank you - could you provide a link about those requests and discussion? I'd like to update my understanding (and comment) based on those.

The intent and nature of the article could be important; and where it exists on various spectrums including newsworthiness, public importance, accuracy, information content.

It's also possible that the article - even if hardly read today - could become relevant in future in ways that we can't currently understand.

It could be argued that deleting the blog was an attempt to influence or close down aspects of the yet-unpublished article and reporting process. In other ways it may have actually added additional context.