Comment by sov
6 years ago
Unfortunate, for sure. The NYT has no real reason to post his name (as far as I'm aware--the tone of the article could affect that conclusion), so I'm not really sure why they'd dig their heels in here.
Though, he really does post a lot of personal and identifying information on his blog--literally any motivated party could find his name very easily. 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!
Ultimately though, in some respect, I do think Scott's trying to have his cake and eat it too a bit here. I think when he starts trying to influence certain events in the real world; eg. like his Signal Boosting for Hsu to give an example within the last week, where he takes umbrage against the Grad student organization at MSU to drum up support in defense of Prof. Hsu--whether or not you agree with Hsu or you agree with the graduate students at MSU, Scott is decidedly an outsider attempting to exert his influence. People have mentioned that these sorts of actions legitimize the "fair play" of the NYT revealing his real identity, and I'm having a hard time finding umbrage with that statement.
I don't think the NYT should post his full name but I also do think Scott has been playing fast and loose; both with revelatory facts about his identity and by putting himself in situations where there are legitimate reasons for blog-outsiders to inquire about his real identity. Hopefully there will be an amicable end to this conflict.
>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.
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
An image of EY is hardly something that will alert your average patient. They'll just think it's an irrelevant result like a bunch of the other stuff that shows up. I do admit, if you are already familiar with the rationalist community, you will figure it out based on that. Anyway, that takes more leaps than the top result being an article from the NYT about SSC.
On 'All' I at least get 0 rationalist results or autocompletes with his name. I do get them if I google Scott Alexander <LastName> but he doesn't feature Alexander in the professional results and I doubt patients know that's his middle name.
2 replies →
>>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.
Scott was not "taking umbrage against the Grad student organization at MSU", he was merely defending academic freedom. Hsu ended up resigning from an administrative and politically-sensitive position at the university while still being free to pursue his (somewhat contentious) research interests, and that may well have been the right call. I'm not sure Scott would have any reason to object to that choice.
> People have mentioned that these sorts of actions legitimize the "fair play" of the NYT revealing his real identity, and I'm having a hard time finding umbrage with that statement.
I don't see how these things legitimize each other at all, unless you're advocating or favoring personal harassment as a legitimate political strategy.
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.
I feel you're using a lot of noncentral meanings of terms here - "harassing" a "group" by drawing attention to something they're doing, publically, to another person, which severely impacts that person's life in a comparison with revealing somebody's identity in order to enable harassment of their private life.
I note that it's "the same" side in both situations that you're comparing, who thinks imposing personal consequences for civil, public speech is a legitimate substitute for debate. What Scott is doing is very dissimilar from what that group of students was doing, but what they were doing is very similar to what the NYT is trying to do.
I'm curious what those "legitimate reasons" are.
> I'm not really sure why they'd dig their heels in here.
I was wondering the same thing, until other HN comments mentioned both his support of Hsu and tirade against paywalls. His support of Hsu seemed to be based on a mutual respect and started off looking like support for academic freedom, but comments on that post did reveal a lot of questionable positions on Hsu’s part with no update from Scott himself.
The anti-paywall article however was much more likely to get the attention of the NYT, because he was viscerally against them and NYT is one of the big paywall sites—it’s their entire business model now and they might feel the need to push back on the criticism. Frankly, I thought Scott’s anti-paywall position wasn’t very rational or well-argued, but I didn’t really have time to follow that comment thread. But in the end, I think he might have attracted the Eye of Sauron on his relatively peaceful little kingdom.