Yeah, it is very poor. Knowing Scott Alexander’s real name doesn’t help their readers make better decisions or understand Scott’s influence or know the history of his ideas, or help place him in a larger context. It is gossip. And I imagine they can’t understand the harms of releasing private info can be quite large, so they don’t see why what they did was bad. Personally, I feel like a lot of journalists are a particular sort of aggresively conventional-minded people who feel the need to reveal private info because if you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide.
EDIT: Last sentence is malformed. I meant “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide”.
Yeah, it is very poor. Knowing Scott Alexander’s real name doesn’t help their readers make better decisions or understand Scott’s influence or know the history of his ideas, or help place him in a larger context. It is gossip. And I imagine they can’t understand the harms of releasing private info can be quite large, so they don’t see why what they did was bad. Personally, I feel like a lot of journalists are a particular sort of aggresively conventional-minded people who feel the need to reveal private info because if you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide.
EDIT: Last sentence is malformed. I meant “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide”.