He chose to be a super-popular blogger and to have this influence as a psychiatrist. His name—when I sat down to figure out his name, it took me less than five minutes. It’s just obvious what his name is.
Can we apply the same logic to doors? “It took me less than five minutes to pick the lock so...”
Or people’s dress choices? “She chose to wear a tight top and a miniskirt so...”
Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander’s real name in order to critique his ideas.
This is not a good metaphor. There’s an extreme difference between spreading information that’s widely available and the general concept of justifying an action. I think your choice of examples adds a lot more heat than light here.
I agree on the latter example, which is a particularly unhelpful one to use unless strictly necessary, and not really analogous here anyway.
But on the lock example, what is the substantive difference? His justification seems to be ‘it was easy to do, so there’s nothing wrong with doing it’. In fact, the only difference I detect makes the doxxing look much worse. Because he’s saying ‘it was easy for me to do, so there’s nothing wrong with me doing it on behalf of the world’.
So while it’s also heat-adding, on reflection I can’t think of any real world example that fits better: wouldn’t the same justification apply to the people who hack celebrities for their private photos and publicise them? Both could argue:
It was easy for me (with my specialist journalist/hacker skills) to access this intended-to-be-private information, so I see no problem with sharing it with the world, despite the strong, clearly expressed preference of its subject that I not do so.
I’d be amenable to quibbles over the lock thing, though I think it’s still substantially different. A better metaphor (for the situation that Cade Metz claims is the case, which may or may not be correct) making use of locks would be “Anyone can open the lock by putting any key in. By opening the lock with my own key, I have done no damage”. I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott’s last name unless this forum is unaware of how to use search engines.
I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott’s last name
I said “specialist journalist/hacker skills”.
I don’t think it’s at all true that anyone could find out Scott’s true identity as easily as putting a key in a lock, and I think that analogy clearly misleads vs the hacker one, because the journalist did use his demonstrably non-ubiquitous skills to find out the truth and then broadcast it to everyone else. To me the phone hacking analogy is much closer, but if we must use a lock-based one, it’s more like a lockpick who picks a (perhaps not hugely difficult) lock and then jams it so anyone else can enter. Still very morally wrong, I think most would agree.
I think you are dramatically overestimating how difficult it was, back in the day, to accidentally or incidentally learn Scott’s full name. I think this is the crux here.
It was extremely easy to find his name, and often people have stories of learning it on accident. I don’t believe it was simple enough that Scott’s plea to not have his name be published in the NYT was invalid, but I do think it was simple enough that an analogy to lockpicking is silly.
Your comment is actually one of the ones in the thread that replied to mine that I found least inane, so I will stash this downthread of my reply to you:
I think a lot of the stuff Cade Metz is alleged to say above is dumb as shit and is not good behavior. However, I don’t need to make bad metaphors, abuse the concept of logical validity, or do anything else that breaks my principles to say that the behavior is bad, so I’m going to raise an issue with those where I see them and count on folks like you to push back the appropriate extent so that we can get to a better medium together.
Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander’s real name in order to critique his ideas.
It’s not obvious that that should be the standard. I can imagine Metz asking “Why shouldn’t I publish his name?”, the implied “no one gets to know your real name if you don’t want them to” norm is pretty novel.
One obvious answer to the above question is “Because Scott doesn’t want you to, he thinks it’ll mess with his psychiatry practice”, to which I imagine Metz asking, bemused “Why should I care what Scott wants?” A journalist’s job is to inform people, not be nice to them! Now Metz doesn’t seem to be great at informing people anyway, but at least he’s not sacrificing what little information value he has upon the altar of niceness.
I not getting the “he should never have published his last name” thing. If Scot didn’t want his surname to be published then it would be a kindness to respect his wishes. But can you imagine writing a newspaper article where you are reporting on the actions of an anonymous person? Its borderline nonsense. Especially if it is true that 5 minutes is all that it takes to find out who they are. If I read a newspaper article about the antics of a secret person, then I worked out who they were in 5 mins, my estimate of the journalist writing it would drop through the floor. Imagine you read about the mysterious father of bitcoin, or an unknown major donor to a political party, all dressed in secrecy, and then two googles later you know who it is. It would reflect so badly on the paper you were reading.
I think our journalist is correct when he says that the choice was not to write about him at all, or to give his full name, by the standards of every newspaper I have ever read (only UK papers, maybe there are differences in the US). In print journalism it is the standard to refer to people by Title Firstname Surname, the/a REASON WE CARE. (EG. “Mr Ed Miliband, the Shadow Secretary for the Environment”, “Dr Slate Star a prominent blogger”).
Maybe there is an angle on this I am missing? (His name is a BIG DEAL for some reason? But that just makes publishing it more essential not less.)
But can you imagine writing a newspaper article where you are reporting on the actions of an anonymous person? Its borderline nonsense.
I can easily imagine writing a newspaper article about how Charlie Sheen influenced the film industry, that nowhere mentions the fact that his legal name is Carlos Irwin Estévez. Can’t you? Like, here’s one.
(If my article were more biographical in nature, with a focus on Charlie Sheen’s childhood and his relationship with his parents, rather than his influence on the film industry, then yeah I would presumably mention his birth name somewhere in my article in that case. No reason not to.)
I think there’s a tradeoff where on one side it seems fair to keep the two identities separate, on the other as a journalist it makes sense that if it takes five minutes for someone to find out Scott’s last name, including it in the article doesn’t sound like a big deal.
The problem is that from the point of view of view of a patient you probably needed more than 5 minutes and Scott’s full name to find out about the blog.
Suppose Carlos Irwin Estévez worked as a therapist part-time, and he kept his identities separate such that his patients could not use his publicly known behavior as Sheen in order to update about whether they should believe his methods work. Should journalists writing about the famous Estevéz method of therapy keep his name out of the article to support him?
That might be relevant if anyone is ever interested in writing an article about Scott’s psychiatric practice, or if his psychiatric practice was widely publicly known. It seems less analogous to the actual situation.
To put it differently: you raise a hypothetical situation where someone has two prominent identities as a public figure. Scott only has one. Is his psychiatrist identity supposed to be Sheen or Estevéz, here?
Estevéz. If I recall this correctly, Scott thought that potential or actual patients could be influenced in their therapy by knowing his public writings. (But I may mistemember that.)
In that case, “journalists writing about the famous Estevéz method of therapy” would be analogous to journalists writing about Scott’s “famous” psychiatric practice.
If a journalist is interested in Scott’s psychiatric practice, and learns about his blog in the process of writing that article, I agree that they would probably be right to mention it in the article. But that has never happened because Scott is not famous as a psychiatrist.
I said Estevéz because he is the less famous aspect of the person, not because I super-finetuned the analogy.
Updating the trust into your therapist seems to be a legitimate interest even if he is not famous for his psychiatric theory or practice. Suppose for example that an influential and controversial (e.g. White-supremacist) politician spent half his week being a psychiatrist and the other half doing politics, but somehow doing the former anymously. I think patients might legitimately want to know that their psychiatrist is this person. This might even be true if the psychiatrist is only locally active, like the head of a KKK chapter. And journalists might then find it inappropriate to treat the two identities as completely separate.
I assume there are reasons for publishing the name and reasons against. It is not clear that being a psychiatrist is always an argument against.
Part of the reason is, possibly, that patients often cannot directly judge the quality of therapy. Therapy is a credence good and therapists may influence you in ways that are independent of your depression or anorexia. So having more information about your psychiatrist may be helpful. At the same time, psychiatrists try to keep their private life out of the therapy, for very good reasons. It is not completely obvious to me where journalists should draw the line.
That’s a reasonable argument but doesn’t have much to do with the Charlie Sheen analogy.
The key difference, which I think breaks the analogy completely, is that (hypothetical therapist) Estevéz is still famous enough as a therapist for journalists to want to write about his therapy method. I think that’s a big enough difference to make the analogy useless.
If Charlie Sheen had a side gig as an obscure local therapist, would journalists be justified in publicizing this fact for the sake of his patients? Maybe? It seems much less obvious than if the therapy was why they were interested!
I’m thinking it’s not Metz’s job to critique Scott, nor did his article admit to being a critique, but also that that’s a strawman; Metz didn’t publish the name “in order to” critique his ideas. He probably published it because he doesn’t like the guy.
Why doesn’t he like Scott? I wonder if Metz would’ve answered that question if asked. I doubt it: he wrote “[Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q.” even though Scott did not align himself with Murray about race/IQ, nor is Murray a friend of his, nor does Alexander promote Murray, nor is race/IQ even 0.1% of what Scott/SSC/rationalism is about―yet Metz defends his misleading statement and won’t acknowledge it’s misleading. If he had defensible reasons to dislike Scott that he was willing to say out loud, why did he instead resort to tactics like that?
Not hugely important, but I want to point out because I think the concept is in the process of having its usefulness significantly diluted by overuse: that’s not a straw man. That’s just a false reason.
A straw man is when you refute an argument that your opponent didn’t make, in order to make it look like you’ve refuted their actual argument.
To me this reads as a person caught in the act of bullying who is trying to wriggle out of it. Fair play for challenging him, yuck at the responses.
The last answer is especially gross:
Can we apply the same logic to doors? “It took me less than five minutes to pick the lock so...”
Or people’s dress choices? “She chose to wear a tight top and a miniskirt so...”
Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander’s real name in order to critique his ideas.
This is not a good metaphor. There’s an extreme difference between spreading information that’s widely available and the general concept of justifying an action. I think your choice of examples adds a lot more heat than light here.
I agree on the latter example, which is a particularly unhelpful one to use unless strictly necessary, and not really analogous here anyway.
But on the lock example, what is the substantive difference? His justification seems to be ‘it was easy to do, so there’s nothing wrong with doing it’. In fact, the only difference I detect makes the doxxing look much worse. Because he’s saying ‘it was easy for me to do, so there’s nothing wrong with me doing it on behalf of the world’.
So while it’s also heat-adding, on reflection I can’t think of any real world example that fits better: wouldn’t the same justification apply to the people who hack celebrities for their private photos and publicise them? Both could argue:
I’d be amenable to quibbles over the lock thing, though I think it’s still substantially different. A better metaphor (for the situation that Cade Metz claims is the case, which may or may not be correct) making use of locks would be “Anyone can open the lock by putting any key in. By opening the lock with my own key, I have done no damage”. I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott’s last name unless this forum is unaware of how to use search engines.
I said “specialist journalist/hacker skills”.
I don’t think it’s at all true that anyone could find out Scott’s true identity as easily as putting a key in a lock, and I think that analogy clearly misleads vs the hacker one, because the journalist did use his demonstrably non-ubiquitous skills to find out the truth and then broadcast it to everyone else. To me the phone hacking analogy is much closer, but if we must use a lock-based one, it’s more like a lockpick who picks a (perhaps not hugely difficult) lock and then jams it so anyone else can enter. Still very morally wrong, I think most would agree.
I think you are dramatically overestimating how difficult it was, back in the day, to accidentally or incidentally learn Scott’s full name. I think this is the crux here.
It was extremely easy to find his name, and often people have stories of learning it on accident. I don’t believe it was simple enough that Scott’s plea to not have his name be published in the NYT was invalid, but I do think it was simple enough that an analogy to lockpicking is silly.
Your comment is actually one of the ones in the thread that replied to mine that I found least inane, so I will stash this downthread of my reply to you:
I think a lot of the stuff Cade Metz is alleged to say above is dumb as shit and is not good behavior. However, I don’t need to make bad metaphors, abuse the concept of logical validity, or do anything else that breaks my principles to say that the behavior is bad, so I’m going to raise an issue with those where I see them and count on folks like you to push back the appropriate extent so that we can get to a better medium together.
It’s not obvious that that should be the standard. I can imagine Metz asking “Why shouldn’t I publish his name?”, the implied “no one gets to know your real name if you don’t want them to” norm is pretty novel.
One obvious answer to the above question is “Because Scott doesn’t want you to, he thinks it’ll mess with his psychiatry practice”, to which I imagine Metz asking, bemused “Why should I care what Scott wants?” A journalist’s job is to inform people, not be nice to them! Now Metz doesn’t seem to be great at informing people anyway, but at least he’s not sacrificing what little information value he has upon the altar of niceness.
Or explain why the NYT does use the chosen name of other people, like musicians’ stage names.
I not getting the “he should never have published his last name” thing. If Scot didn’t want his surname to be published then it would be a kindness to respect his wishes. But can you imagine writing a newspaper article where you are reporting on the actions of an anonymous person? Its borderline nonsense. Especially if it is true that 5 minutes is all that it takes to find out who they are. If I read a newspaper article about the antics of a secret person, then I worked out who they were in 5 mins, my estimate of the journalist writing it would drop through the floor. Imagine you read about the mysterious father of bitcoin, or an unknown major donor to a political party, all dressed in secrecy, and then two googles later you know who it is. It would reflect so badly on the paper you were reading.
I think our journalist is correct when he says that the choice was not to write about him at all, or to give his full name, by the standards of every newspaper I have ever read (only UK papers, maybe there are differences in the US). In print journalism it is the standard to refer to people by Title Firstname Surname, the/a REASON WE CARE. (EG. “Mr Ed Miliband, the Shadow Secretary for the Environment”, “Dr Slate Star a prominent blogger”).
Maybe there is an angle on this I am missing? (His name is a BIG DEAL for some reason? But that just makes publishing it more essential not less.)
I can easily imagine writing a newspaper article about how Charlie Sheen influenced the film industry, that nowhere mentions the fact that his legal name is Carlos Irwin Estévez. Can’t you? Like, here’s one.
(If my article were more biographical in nature, with a focus on Charlie Sheen’s childhood and his relationship with his parents, rather than his influence on the film industry, then yeah I would presumably mention his birth name somewhere in my article in that case. No reason not to.)
I think there’s a tradeoff where on one side it seems fair to keep the two identities separate, on the other as a journalist it makes sense that if it takes five minutes for someone to find out Scott’s last name, including it in the article doesn’t sound like a big deal.
The problem is that from the point of view of view of a patient you probably needed more than 5 minutes and Scott’s full name to find out about the blog.
Suppose Carlos Irwin Estévez worked as a therapist part-time, and he kept his identities separate such that his patients could not use his publicly known behavior as Sheen in order to update about whether they should believe his methods work. Should journalists writing about the famous Estevéz method of therapy keep his name out of the article to support him?
That might be relevant if anyone is ever interested in writing an article about Scott’s psychiatric practice, or if his psychiatric practice was widely publicly known. It seems less analogous to the actual situation.
To put it differently: you raise a hypothetical situation where someone has two prominent identities as a public figure. Scott only has one. Is his psychiatrist identity supposed to be Sheen or Estevéz, here?
Estevéz. If I recall this correctly, Scott thought that potential or actual patients could be influenced in their therapy by knowing his public writings. (But I may mistemember that.)
In that case, “journalists writing about the famous Estevéz method of therapy” would be analogous to journalists writing about Scott’s “famous” psychiatric practice.
If a journalist is interested in Scott’s psychiatric practice, and learns about his blog in the process of writing that article, I agree that they would probably be right to mention it in the article. But that has never happened because Scott is not famous as a psychiatrist.
I said Estevéz because he is the less famous aspect of the person, not because I super-finetuned the analogy.
Updating the trust into your therapist seems to be a legitimate interest even if he is not famous for his psychiatric theory or practice. Suppose for example that an influential and controversial (e.g. White-supremacist) politician spent half his week being a psychiatrist and the other half doing politics, but somehow doing the former anymously. I think patients might legitimately want to know that their psychiatrist is this person. This might even be true if the psychiatrist is only locally active, like the head of a KKK chapter. And journalists might then find it inappropriate to treat the two identities as completely separate.
I assume there are reasons for publishing the name and reasons against. It is not clear that being a psychiatrist is always an argument against.
Part of the reason is, possibly, that patients often cannot directly judge the quality of therapy. Therapy is a credence good and therapists may influence you in ways that are independent of your depression or anorexia. So having more information about your psychiatrist may be helpful. At the same time, psychiatrists try to keep their private life out of the therapy, for very good reasons. It is not completely obvious to me where journalists should draw the line.
That’s a reasonable argument but doesn’t have much to do with the Charlie Sheen analogy.
The key difference, which I think breaks the analogy completely, is that (hypothetical therapist) Estevéz is still famous enough as a therapist for journalists to want to write about his therapy method. I think that’s a big enough difference to make the analogy useless.
If Charlie Sheen had a side gig as an obscure local therapist, would journalists be justified in publicizing this fact for the sake of his patients? Maybe? It seems much less obvious than if the therapy was why they were interested!
I’m thinking it’s not Metz’s job to critique Scott, nor did his article admit to being a critique, but also that that’s a strawman; Metz didn’t publish the name “in order to” critique his ideas. He probably published it because he doesn’t like the guy.
Why doesn’t he like Scott? I wonder if Metz would’ve answered that question if asked. I doubt it: he wrote “[Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q.” even though Scott did not align himself with Murray about race/IQ, nor is Murray a friend of his, nor does Alexander promote Murray, nor is race/IQ even 0.1% of what Scott/SSC/rationalism is about―yet Metz defends his misleading statement and won’t acknowledge it’s misleading. If he had defensible reasons to dislike Scott that he was willing to say out loud, why did he instead resort to tactics like that?
(Edit: I don’t read/follow Metz at all, so I’ll point to Gwern’s comment for more insight)
Not hugely important, but I want to point out because I think the concept is in the process of having its usefulness significantly diluted by overuse: that’s not a straw man. That’s just a false reason.
A straw man is when you refute an argument that your opponent didn’t make, in order to make it look like you’ve refuted their actual argument.