Here’s the petition Scott asked us to make.
This is a request for a specific action by the New York Times editors:
We, the undersigned, urge the New York Times to respect Scott Alexander’s request to not reveal his real name in a planned piece discussing the Slate Star Codex blog and community.
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That’s all. It seems to me really important for public discourse on the internet for journalists to respect this norm in this situation.
Please share it in the places you share things, and email it to the prominent people who you know that the New York Times respects and care about.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jacob Lagerros and Rob Bensinger for making the petition with me.
Thanks to Paul Graham, Steven Pinker and many others for their early signatures.
Thanks to Sarah Haider and Tanner Greer for independently organising a petition and then joining forces with ours.
Thanks to so many other people who are still unsubscribing from the NYT, giving them respectful-but-firm feedback, and otherwise supporting Scott in this situation. It’s been great to see so much love and support for SSC these past 48 hours.
That list of names is amazing! I realize now how many like-minded people are out there, I’m not as alone as it felt before. Let’s not delete it quickly, it’s great that we’re all able to find each other.
I understand Scott Alexander’s arguments for why he doesn’t want to be doxxed.
I haven’t heard NYT’s arguments for why they think it’s OK to doxx him.
I’m sure they must have some. (Nobody says “I do action X because I’m a moustache-twirling villain”)
But I can’t judge the difference between “that sounds like unconvincing post-hoc rationalisations” and “actually, that’s a reasonably argument” if I haven’t heard their side of the story at all.
Does anyone know where I can hear NYT’s point of view? I tried emailing them and haven’t had a reply yet.
What they say is that they don’t respect pseudonyms in stories unless there’s a compelling reason to do so in that particular case. There appears to be a political bias to the exceptions, but good luck getting an editor to admit that even to themself, let alone to others.
There can be a difference between having reasons and being able to present them. Humans are known to take cookies from a cookie jar when nobody is looking even if nobody says “I take the cookie althought I am not allowed to”. Even young people know to try to spin it somehow. People will not call themselfs villains but there are villains in the world.
In a situation where your stance is indefencible staying silent might make you more credible than making a bad defence.
Thus it might matter more whether both sides have had opportunity and effective means to express themselfs rather what all sides stories are.
In the case of a an actual policy it could also be that multiple people compromise to uphold the standard and different parties have different rationales for defending the standard. Then it could be that there is no rationale because there is no unified decision making process behind it.
NYT hasn’t made a public decision to actually publish the article, so there’s not really a situation for them to make a public statement about the individual case.
Is anyone worried about Streisand effect type scenarios with this?
I get that the alternative is Scott being likely doxxed by the article being published, so this support against the NYT seems like a much better outcome.
At the same time, it seems like this might also lead to some malicious people being more motivated (now that they’ve heard of Scott through these channels) to figure out who he is and then share that to people who Scott would like to not know?
I am not worried, because I prefer the world where internet mobs occasionally dox people to the world where internet mobs occasionally dox people and major news outlets systematically dox people.
Oh, right, that’s a fair point.
if by some malicious people you’re including people at the NYT who view controversy as a good thing as a proxy for clicks, yes.
I mistakenly signed twice. Will there be a duplicate check, or could you simply remove my second entry?
[I forgot I had NoScript enabled, so after the first attempt nothing seemed to have happened. That’s why I disabled it, which refreshed the site, and submitted again. Then I saw that first time worked already, so now my name appears twice.]
We can remove duplicates. Thanks for highlighting.
Signing my agreement. His wealth of content is far more important than a single line in this single article. Will substantially impact my view of NYT if they want to move forward.
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I signed the petition on the assumption that it was all just a misunderstanding, but I’m willing to fight dirty if they ignore the petition and publish the name anyway.
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NYT as an org has a simple metric: profit. If they lose more subscriptions than they gain ad revenue, there is a good chance they will stop.
It is really hard for companies to get unambiguous signals of don’t do this thing; it’s why there are marketing budgets. This is a simple and unambiguous way for the broader community to express its unhappiness.
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For one ordinary person, I agree. But Scott isn’t one, and neither are his high-profile fellows. However, leaving that aside...
Destroying NYT reporters is hard work for billionaires and presidents. My expectation for success is very low, because it is something that large newspapers are accustomed to dealing with and specific protections are provided by the law to prevent it.
Indeed I go as far as to say the press considers retaliation as a mark of success; based on Scott’s version of his interaction with the reporter I am confident this specific reporter also holds that view. All stories are improved by retaliation against the reporter; this will generate many more eyeballs than one blurb on one corner of the internet would. In summary, it is a very hard task and anything less than total success actually serves the reporter in particular and the NYT in general. Further, if you are unable or unlikely to do it to the next reporter, it doesn’t have any real deterrent value.
Consider: in order to ruin him, you’d have to convince the NYT to fire him. If you can do that, why not convince them to leave out one unimportant detail from an unimportant article instead?
The effects of weaponizing claims of sexism and racism against the NYT might have undesireable effects on the power conflicts inside of the organization.
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Not all of the NYTimes is the enemy.
The Daily Beast article has some information about how other NYTimes employees are against de-anonymising Scott.
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I think you confuse judging moral responsibility with judging effective action.
Whenever you want to deal with a large political organization that you want to change it’s actions you want that faction win internal political battles that push the organization towards the ends you want.
If you don’t take that into account you will often end up with an organization reacting towards being attacked by getting even worse.
I’m In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization.
The article sees the claim it defends as “It is not okay to use lies, insults, and harassment against people, even if it would help you enforce your preferred social norms.”
Responding to force with force is different then enforcing preferred social norms.
Scott also doesn’t seem to want to act according the the role models of Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela who all share the effect that they wouldn’t let themselves be silenced.
The claim I was against was that there’s no point trying to petition as force is the only solution which is covered in some depth in that piece. Currently there is a clash of norms but no force has been used. My feelings will change somewhat if they do publish.
I do agree that engaging in preemptive violence would be a stupid move.
I’m supposing the “violence” and “force” here is figurative, as in “a forceful response to their deanonymization of Scott”?
Yes, I’m meaning something along the lines of the actions suggested in the original comment but am doing a rubbish job at explaining this properly. Violence in particular was a poor choice of words and I have changed it to force in the grandparent comment.
All I was really wanting to say was that escalation isn’t the only solution and is usually a bad idea.
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