I think this is a perfectly valid argument for why NYT shouldn’t publish it, it just doesn’t seem very strong or robust… Like, if the NYT did go out and count the number of pebbles on your road, then yes there’s an opportunity cost to this etc., which makes it a pretty unnecessary thing to do, but it’s not like you’d have any good reason to whip out a big protest or anything.
The context from above is that we’re weighing costs vs benefits of publishing the name, and I was pulling out the sub-debate over what the benefits are (setting aside the disagreement about how large the costs are).
I agree that “the benefits are ≈0” is not a strong argument that the costs outweigh the benefits in and of itself, because maybe the costs are ≈0 as well. If a journalist wants to report the thickness of Scott Alexander’s shoelaces, maybe the editor will say it’s a waste of limited wordcount, but the journalist could say “hey it’s just a few words, and y’know, it adds a bit of color to the story”, and that’s a reasonable argument: the cost and benefit are each infinitesimal, and reasonable people can disagree about which one slightly outweighs the other.
But “the benefits are ≈0” is a deciding factor in a context where the costs are not infinitesimal. Like if Scott asserts that a local gang will beat him senseless if the journalist reports the thickness of his shoelaces, it’s no longer infinitesimal costs versus infinitesimal benefits, but rather real costs vs infinitesimal benefits.
If the objection is “maybe the shoelace thickness is actually Scott’s dark embarrassing secret that the public has an important interest in knowing”, then yeah that’s possible and the journalist should certainly look into that possibility. (In the case at hand, if Scott were secretly SBF’s brother, then everyone agrees that his last name would be newsworthy.) But if the objection is just “Scott might be exaggerating, maybe the gang won’t actually beat him up too badly if the shoelace thing is published”, then I think a reasonable ethical journalist would just leave out the tidbit about the shoelaces, as a courtesy, given that there was never any reason to put it in in the first place.
I get that this is an argument one could make. But the reason I started this tangent was because you said:
Here CM doesn’t directly argue that there was any benefit to doxxing; instead he kinda conveys a vibe / ideology that if something is true then it is self-evidently intrinsically good to publish it
That is, my original argument was not in response to the “Anyway, if the true benefit is zero (as I believe), then we don’t have to quibble over whether the cost was big or small” part of your post, it was to the vibe/ideology part.
Where I was trying to say, it doesn’t seem to me that Cade Metz was the one who introduced this vibe/ideology, rather it seems to have been introduced by rationalists prior to this, specifically to defend tinkering with taboo topics.
Like, you mention that Cade Metz conveys this vibe/ideology that you disagree with, and you didn’t try to rebut I directly, I assumed because Cade Metz didn’t defend it but just treated it as obvious.
And that’s where I’m saying, since many rationalists including Scott Alexander have endorsed this ideology, there’s a sense in which it seems wrong, almost rude, to not address it directly. Like a sort of Motte-Bailey tactic.
The context from above is that we’re weighing costs vs benefits of publishing the name, and I was pulling out the sub-debate over what the benefits are (setting aside the disagreement about how large the costs are).
I agree that “the benefits are ≈0” is not a strong argument that the costs outweigh the benefits in and of itself, because maybe the costs are ≈0 as well. If a journalist wants to report the thickness of Scott Alexander’s shoelaces, maybe the editor will say it’s a waste of limited wordcount, but the journalist could say “hey it’s just a few words, and y’know, it adds a bit of color to the story”, and that’s a reasonable argument: the cost and benefit are each infinitesimal, and reasonable people can disagree about which one slightly outweighs the other.
But “the benefits are ≈0” is a deciding factor in a context where the costs are not infinitesimal. Like if Scott asserts that a local gang will beat him senseless if the journalist reports the thickness of his shoelaces, it’s no longer infinitesimal costs versus infinitesimal benefits, but rather real costs vs infinitesimal benefits.
If the objection is “maybe the shoelace thickness is actually Scott’s dark embarrassing secret that the public has an important interest in knowing”, then yeah that’s possible and the journalist should certainly look into that possibility. (In the case at hand, if Scott were secretly SBF’s brother, then everyone agrees that his last name would be newsworthy.) But if the objection is just “Scott might be exaggerating, maybe the gang won’t actually beat him up too badly if the shoelace thing is published”, then I think a reasonable ethical journalist would just leave out the tidbit about the shoelaces, as a courtesy, given that there was never any reason to put it in in the first place.
I get that this is an argument one could make. But the reason I started this tangent was because you said:
That is, my original argument was not in response to the “Anyway, if the true benefit is zero (as I believe), then we don’t have to quibble over whether the cost was big or small” part of your post, it was to the vibe/ideology part.
Where I was trying to say, it doesn’t seem to me that Cade Metz was the one who introduced this vibe/ideology, rather it seems to have been introduced by rationalists prior to this, specifically to defend tinkering with taboo topics.
Like, you mention that Cade Metz conveys this vibe/ideology that you disagree with, and you didn’t try to rebut I directly, I assumed because Cade Metz didn’t defend it but just treated it as obvious.
And that’s where I’m saying, since many rationalists including Scott Alexander have endorsed this ideology, there’s a sense in which it seems wrong, almost rude, to not address it directly. Like a sort of Motte-Bailey tactic.