Comment by johnfn
7 days ago
The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could.
7 days ago
The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could.
One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities: https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976
The journalist themselves is a real piece of work: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/463503-sarah-jeong-out-at...
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
> A third tweet posted by Jeong in 2014 said, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
It's not like she's any browner..
I moderated a large Reddit community (circa 2014). She threatened to have articles written about how we were racist/misogynistic, unless we removed comments she didn't like.
Her being nasty elsewhere doesn't surprise me...
Incredible, some people think that minorities can't be racist, by that definition Japanese weren't at all racist in 1937 Nanjing.
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Honestly these loudmouths are usually quite privileged themselves. These theatrics are either to deflect from themselves, or they are delusional about how tough their life is.
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for a good counterbalance to those just finding out the nyt is a state dept mouthpiece at best, read about real journalists and why there seem to be so few of them, read Pegasus by laurent richard. Spoiler alert, real journalists who expose powerful peoples' wrongdoings simply get killed.
One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.
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Glen Greenwald is alive and kicking.
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Reminds me of a related principle:
“How do you know if a conspiracy theorist is really on to something?”
“Check the missing persons list.”
when journalism is a business, stuff like this happens...
And it's always been a business.
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They deliver what readers what.
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Btw I don't know how closely you follow Naomi Wu, but take that with grain of salt. (def. not defending bad journalists)
Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.
She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.
Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.
And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.
I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.
Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".
Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.
I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video.
Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.
The journalist knew what she was doing. Naomi was in China, agreed to do an interview about her self & her work, then the journo tried to drum up clicks by putting her on the spot about politics.
Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.
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How do you "dox" a journalist? Are they writing under anonymous bylines now?
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> “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” Jeong said in one tweet from 2014 that has since been deleted.
You weren't messing, she seems lovely.. /s
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Are you able to explain in 1 short sentence what Vice did wrong to her? Because I can't. I remember reading Wu's explanation and couldn't find anything in there, like at all. It was filled with prejudice.
They outed her as lesbian, in a country where this is increasingly unacceptable.
> Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories.
People can opt to not read and pay such people.
Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..
> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.
It's the use of the word "quest" here that really bothers me. It seems ignoble.
Much like the "unmasking" of Banksy or Belle de Jour. Why do it other than nosiness?
Is the person committing a crime? No? Then leave them in peace.
This is just a journalist using the resources of NYTimes to show off that they can exert control over someone else.
I had a good chuckle going from Banksy on one line to whether the person is committing a crime on the other - that it's a crime was key to how the article claimed to find Banksy's identity and mentioned as one of the likely factors in why Banksy chose to be anonymous early on :D.
I get you mean whether they are causing any actual harm though (and agree for many such unmaskings), it was just an amusing juxtaposition of literal statements.
Although people repeatedly say this, NYT did not in fact dox Slate Star Codex. He revealed his own information because he said they were going to reveal his name based on a draft of the article he says he saw. The verge apparently reported that no draft had been written and the NYT was still in news gathering stage. Who knows what the truth of that is, but factually he released the information.
> The New York Times published an article about the blog in February 2021, three weeks after Alexander had publicly revealed his name.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#The_New_York_...
Funnily enough, in the blog post you linked Scott Alexander also ruminates about how he never previously questioned journalistic attempts to dox Satoshi Nakamoto.
I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.
It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pissed if I recognized something I told my psychiatrist on an internet blog. Frankly given how strongly one has to consent to even legally process clinical data I've never been sure if that was at all legal.
When someone's identity is in the public interest an investigative journalist isn't doxxing anyone, they're doing their job. Both true for Nakamoto and arguably Scott
He was not blogging under his real name. Scott Alexander is not his real name.
It's his first and middle name. At least that's what he said in the post about shutting down the blog.
It's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.
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It is his real name, and he also used his real surname in early blog posts.
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His pre-SSC blogging was, and he’d link those posts directly from time to time.
> I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.
Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?
It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged.
Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.
Case studies are done with consent, typically. That’s pretty different.
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The NYT has no authority to dox people. If they or anyone believed that SSC was acting unethically or illegally, that should be processed through proper legal or ethical channels, which exist for a reason. The solution is not that NYT should abuse their power to skip those channels.
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I think you have that backwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Anti-reaction...
Yes, he had to distance himself from it because his audience turned out to be significantly more horrible than him and it was getting on his nerves. But he still holds significant sympathy towards race science views.
No, unfortunately they don't. Scott Alexander Siskind is definitely sympathetic to race science and neoreaction, that's WHY he wrote the "anti"-reactionary FAQ. It's probably the most popular document about "neoreaction" on the internet and made many many people more aware of neoreactionary ideas. He did this intentionally because he likes neoreactionaries and thinks they are correct about race science and that they're useful allies.
There is simply no other way to explain this email [0] that he wrote.
One critical point, he discusses "criticizing" the neoreactionaries, and says he disagrees with them on several points.
> I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
There are a "few other things" he thinks they're right about, but he specifically lists all four things that he thinks are problematic. None of them are race science, which implies that race science is one of the "few other things" he thinks they're correct about.
You can put this together with enough of his public writing to see where he stands on the issue. He's clearly aligned with "race realism".
This entire email is also accompanied by a threat never to reveal these thoughts of Scott's. Why? Because he knows that being outed for his real views would do serious damage to his reputation. That's also why he got mad at the NYT, because they had his number and he didn't want anyone to find out about his real politics.
If you're the kind of person who is naive enough to think "He wrote an anti-reactionary FAQ, how could he be a reactionary?", I am sorry, but you're dealing with a lying snake.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/comment/g...
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Could you share a link to where he promotes race science?
This one is more direct than most, but comments about the subject are not uncommon on the older blog. I think reading this material is why the journalist turned against him but never stated why. "Psychiatrist has dozens of charts on their secret personal blog comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel" is a headline you might try to hide out of politeness to the uninvolved.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/
(How can anyone who has read slatestarcodex not know?)
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You can't doxx someone who already publicly identified themselves.