I mean, Scott seems to be in a pretty good situation now, in many ways better than before.
And yes, this is consistent with NYT hurting him in expectation.
But one difference between doxxing normal people versus doxxing “influential people” is that influential people typically have enough power to land on their feet when e.g. they lose a job. And so the fact that this has worked out well for Scott (and, seemingly, better than he expected) is some evidence that the NYT was better-calibrated about how influential Scott is than he was.
This seems like an example of the very very prevalent effect that Scott wrote about in “against bravery debates”, where everyone thinks their group is less powerful than they actually are. I don’t think there’s a widely-accepted name for it; I sometimes use underdog bias. My main diagnosis of the NYT/SSC incident is that rationalists were caught up by underdog bias, even as they leveraged thousands of influential tech people to attack the NYT.
I don’t think the NYT thing played much of a role in Scott being better off now. My guess is a small minority of people are subscribed to his Substack because of the NYT thing (the dominant factor is clearly the popularity of his writing).
My guess is the NYT thing hurt him quite a bit and made the potential consequences of him saying controversial things a lot worse for him. He has tried to do things to reduce the damage of that, but I generally don’t believe that “someone seems to be doing fine” is almost ever much evidence against “this action hurt this person”. Competent people often do fine even when faced with substantial adversity, this doesn’t mean the adversity is fine.
I do think it’s clear the consequences weren’t catastrophic, and I also separately actually have a lot of sympathy for giving newspapers a huge amount of leeway to report on whatever true thing they want to report on, so that I overall don’t have a super strong take here, but I also think the costs here were probably on-net pretty substantial (and also separately that the evidence of how things have played out since then probably didn’t do very much to sway me from my priors of how much the cost would be, due to Scott internalizing the costs in advance a bunch).
I don’t think the NYT thing played much of a role in Scott being better off now. My guess is a small minority of people are subscribed to his Substack because of the NYT thing (the dominant factor is clearly the popularity of his writing).
What credence do you have that he would have started the substack at all without the NYT thing? I don’t have much information, but probably less than 80%. The timing sure seems pretty suggestive.
(I’m also curious about the likelihood that he would have started his startup without the NYT thing, but that’s less relevant since I don’t know whether the startup is actually going well.)
My guess is the NYT thing hurt him quite a bit and made the potential consequences of him saying controversial things a lot worse for him.
Presumably this is true of most previously-low-profile people that the NYT chooses to write about in not-maximally-positive ways, so it’s not a reasonable standard to hold them to. And so as a general rule I do think “the amount of adversity that you get when you used to be an influential yet unknown person but suddenly get a single media feature about you” is actually fine to inflict on people. In fact, I’d expect that many (or even most) people in this category will have a worse time of it than Scott—e.g. because they do things that are more politically controversial than Scott, have fewer avenues to make money, etc.
What credence do you have that he would have started the substack at all without the NYT thing? I don’t have much information, but probably less than 80%.
I mean, just because him starting a Substack was precipitated by a bunch of stress and uncertainty does not mean I credit the stress and uncertainty for the benefits of the Substack. Scott always could have started a Substack, and presumably had reasons for not doing so before the NYT thing. As an analogy, if I work at your company and have a terrible time, and then I quit, and then get a great job somewhere else, of course you get no credit for the quality of my new job.
The Substack situation seems analogous. It approximately does not matter whether Scott would have started the Substack without the NYT thing, so I don’t see the relevance of the question when trying to judge whether the NYT thing caused a bunch of harm.
Just because someone wasn’t successfully canceled, doesn’t mean there wasn’t a cancellation attempt, nor that most other people in their position would have withstood it
Just because they’re doing well now, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have been doing better without the cancellation attempt
Even if the cancellation attempt itself did end up actually benefiting them, because they had the right personality and skills and position, that doesn’t mean this should have been expected ex ante
(After all, if it’s clear in advance to everyone involved that someone is uncancellable, then they’re less likely to try)
Even if it’s factually true that someone has the qualities and position to come out ahead after cancellation, they may not know or believe this, and thus the prospect of cancellation may successfully silence them
Even if they’re currently uncancellable and know this, that doesn’t mean they’ll remain so in the future
E.g. if they’re so good at what they do as to be unfireable, then maybe within a few years they’ll be offered a CEO position, at which point any cancel-worthy things they said years ago may limit their career; and if they foresee this, then that incentivizes self-censorship
The point is, cancellation attempts are bad because they create a chilling effect, an environment that incentivizes self-censorship and distorts intellectual discussion. And arguments of the form “Hey, this particular cancellation attempt wasn’t that bad because the target did well” fall down to one or more of the above arguments: they still create chilling effects and that still makes them bad.
But it wasn’t a cancellation attempt. The issue at hand is whether a policy of doxxing influential people is a good idea. The benefits are transparency about who is influencing society, and in which ways; the harms include the ones you’ve listed above, about chilling effects.
It’s hard to weigh these against each other, but one way you might do so is by following a policy like “doxx people only if they’re influential enough that they’re probably robust to things like losing their job”. The correlation between “influential enough to be newsworthy” and “has many options open to them” isn’t perfect, but it’s strong enough that this policy seems pretty reasonable to me.
To flip this around, let’s consider individuals who are quietly influential in other spheres. For example, I expect there are people who many news editors listen to, when deciding how their editorial policies should work. I expect there are people who many Democrat/Republican staffers listen to, when considering how to shape policy. In general I think transparency about these people would be pretty good for the world. If those people happened to have day jobs which would suffer from that transparency, I would say “Look, you chose to have a bunch of influence, which the world should know about, and I expect you can leverage this influence to end up in a good position somehow even after I run some articles on you. Maybe you’re one of the few highly-influential people for whom this happens to not be true, but it seems like a reasonable policy to assume that if someone is actually pretty influential then they’ll land on their feet either way.” And the fact that this was true for Scott is some evidence that this would be a reasonable policy.
(I also think that taking someone influential who didn’t previously have a public profile, and giving them a public profile under their real name, is structurally pretty analogous to doxxing. Many of the costs are the same. In both cases one of the key benefits is allowing people to cross-reference information about that person to get a better picture of who is influencing the world, and how.)
The benefits are transparency about who is influencing society
In this particular case, I don’t really see any transparency benefits. If it was the case that there was important public information attached to Scott’s full name, then this argument would make sense to me.
(E.g. if Scott Alexander was actually Mark Zuckerberg or some other public figure with information attacked to their real full name then this argument would go through.)
Fair enough if NYT needs to have a extremely coarse grained policy where they always dox influential people consistently and can’t do any cost benefit on particular cases.
If it was the case that there was important public information attached to Scott’s full name, then this argument would make sense to me.
In general having someone’s actual name public makes it much easier to find out other public information attached to them. E.g. imagine if Scott were involved in shady business dealings under his real name. This is the sort of thing that the NYT wouldn’t necessarily discover just by writing the profile of him, but other people could subsequently discover after he was doxxed.
To be clear, btw, I’m not arguing that this doxxing policy is correct, all things considered. Personally I think the benefits of pseudonymity for a healthy ecosystem outweigh the public value of transparency about real names. I’m just arguing that there are policies consistent with the NYT’s actions which are fairly reasonable.
Many comments pointed out that NYT does not in fact have a consistent policy of always revealing people’s true names. There’s even a news editorial about this which I point out in case you trust the fact-checking of NY Post more.
I think that leaves 3 possible explanations of what happened:
NYT has a general policy of revealing people’s true names, which it doesn’t consistently apply but ended up applying in this case for no particular reason.
There’s an inconsistently applied policy, and Cade Metz’s (and/or his editors’) dislike of Scott contributed (consciously or subconsciously) to insistence on applying the policy in this particular case.
There is no policy and it was a purely personal decision.
In my view, most rationalists seem to be operating under a reasonable probability distribution over these hypotheses, informed by evidence such as Metz’s mention of Charles Murray, lack of a public written policy about revealing real names, and lack of evidence that a private written policy exists.
Ok, let’s consider the case of shadowy influencers like that. It would be nice to know who such people were, sure. If they were up to nefarious things, or openly subscribed to ideologies that justify awful actions, then I’d like to know that. If there was an article that accurately laid out the nefarious things, that would be nice. If the article cherry-picked, presented facts misleadingly, made scurrilous insinuations every few paragraphs (without technically saying anything provably false)—that would be bad, possibly quite bad, but in some sense it’s par for the course for a certain tier of political writing.
When I see the combination of making scurrilous insinuations every few paragraphs and doxxing the alleged villain, I think that’s where I have to treat it as a deliberate cancellation attempt on the person. If it wasn’t actually deliberate, then it was at least “reckless disregard” or something, and I think it should be categorized the same way. If you’re going to dox someone, I figure you accept an increased responsibility to be careful about what you say about them. (Presumably for similar reasons, libel laws are stricter about non-public figures. No, I’m not saying it’s libel when the statements are “not technically lying”; but it’s bad behavior and should be known as such.)
As for the “they’re probably robust” aspect… As mentioned in my other comment, even if they predictably “do well” afterwards, that doesn’t mean they haven’t been significantly harmed. If their influence is a following of 10M people, and the cancellation attempt reduces their influence by 40%, then it is simultaneously true that (a) “They have an audience of 6M people, they’re doing fine”, and (b) “They’ve been significantly harmed, and many people in such a position who anticipated this outcome would have a significant incentive to self-censor”. It remains a bad thing. It’s less bad than doing it to random civilians, sure, but it remains bad.
But one difference between doxxing normal people versus doxxing “influential people” is that influential people typically have enough power to land on their feet when e.g. they lose a job.
It may decrease their influence substantially, though. I’ll quote at length from here. It’s not about doxxing per se, but it’s about cancellation attempts (which doxxing a heretic enables), and about arguments similar to the above:
If you’re a writer, artist or academic who has strayed beyond the narrow bounds of approved discourse, two consequences will be intimately familiar. The first is that it becomes harder to get a hearing about anything. The second is that if you do manage to say anything publicly — especially if you talk about the silencing — it will be taken as proof that you have not been silenced.
This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead.
The only counter to this is specific examples. But censorship is usually covert: when you’re passed over to speak at a conference, exhibit in a gallery or apply for a visiting fellowship, you rarely find out. Every now and then, however, the censors tip their hands.
And so, for everyone who says I can’t have been cancelled because they can still hear me, here’s the evidence.
The first time I know I was censored was even before my book criticising trans ideology came out in mid-2021. I had been asked to talk about it on the podcast of Intelligence Squared, a media company that, according to its website, aims to “promote a global conversation”. We had booked a date and time.
But as the date approached I discovered I had been dropped. When I asked why, the response was surprisingly frank: fear of a social-media pile-on, sponsors getting cold feet and younger staff causing grief. The CEO of Intelligence Squared is a former war correspondent who has written a book about his experiences in Kosovo. But at the prospect of platforming a woman whose main message is that humans come in two sexes, his courage apparently ran out.
Next came the Irish Times, my home country’s paper of record. Soon after my book came out a well-known correspondent rang me, said he had stayed up all night to finish it and wanted to write about it. He interviewed me, filed the piece, checked the quotes — and then silence. When I nudged by email, he said the piece had been spiked as it was going to press.
Sometime around then it was the BBC’s turn. I don’t know the exact date because I only found out months later, when I met a presenter from a flagship news programme. Such a shame you couldn’t come on the show, he said, to which I replied I had never been asked. It turned out that he had told a researcher to invite me on, but the researcher hadn’t, instead simply lying that I wasn’t available. I’ve still never been on the BBC to discuss trans issues.
Next came ABC, the Australian state broadcaster, which interviewed me for a radio show about religion and ethics. This time, when I nudged, I was told there had been “technical glitches” with the recording, but they would “love to revisit this one in the future”. They’ve never been back in touch. [… several more examples …]
Now, the author has a bestselling book, has been on dozens of podcasts, and now works for an advocacy organization that’s 100% behind her message (she’s not technically listed as a cofounder, but might as well be). She has certainly landed on her feet and has a decent level of reach; yet, clearly, if not for a bunch of incidents like the above—and, as she says, probably a lot more incidents for which she doesn’t have specific evidence—then she would have had much greater reach.
In Scott’s case… if we consider the counterfactual where there wasn’t a NYT article drawing such smears against Scott, then, who knows, maybe today some major news organizations (perhaps the NYT itself!) would have approached him for permission to republish some Slate Star Codex articles on their websites, perhaps specifically some of those on AI during the last ~year when AI became big news. Or offered to interview him for a huge audience on important topics, or something.
So be careful not to underestimate the extent of unseen censorship and cancellation, and therefore the damage done by “naming and shaming” tactics.
I mean, Scott seems to be in a pretty good situation now, in many ways better than before.
And yes, this is consistent with NYT hurting him in expectation.
But one difference between doxxing normal people versus doxxing “influential people” is that influential people typically have enough power to land on their feet when e.g. they lose a job. And so the fact that this has worked out well for Scott (and, seemingly, better than he expected) is some evidence that the NYT was better-calibrated about how influential Scott is than he was.
This seems like an example of the very very prevalent effect that Scott wrote about in “against bravery debates”, where everyone thinks their group is less powerful than they actually are. I don’t think there’s a widely-accepted name for it; I sometimes use underdog bias. My main diagnosis of the NYT/SSC incident is that rationalists were caught up by underdog bias, even as they leveraged thousands of influential tech people to attack the NYT.
I don’t think the NYT thing played much of a role in Scott being better off now. My guess is a small minority of people are subscribed to his Substack because of the NYT thing (the dominant factor is clearly the popularity of his writing).
My guess is the NYT thing hurt him quite a bit and made the potential consequences of him saying controversial things a lot worse for him. He has tried to do things to reduce the damage of that, but I generally don’t believe that “someone seems to be doing fine” is almost ever much evidence against “this action hurt this person”. Competent people often do fine even when faced with substantial adversity, this doesn’t mean the adversity is fine.
I do think it’s clear the consequences weren’t catastrophic, and I also separately actually have a lot of sympathy for giving newspapers a huge amount of leeway to report on whatever true thing they want to report on, so that I overall don’t have a super strong take here, but I also think the costs here were probably on-net pretty substantial (and also separately that the evidence of how things have played out since then probably didn’t do very much to sway me from my priors of how much the cost would be, due to Scott internalizing the costs in advance a bunch).
What credence do you have that he would have started the substack at all without the NYT thing? I don’t have much information, but probably less than 80%. The timing sure seems pretty suggestive.
(I’m also curious about the likelihood that he would have started his startup without the NYT thing, but that’s less relevant since I don’t know whether the startup is actually going well.)
Presumably this is true of most previously-low-profile people that the NYT chooses to write about in not-maximally-positive ways, so it’s not a reasonable standard to hold them to. And so as a general rule I do think “the amount of adversity that you get when you used to be an influential yet unknown person but suddenly get a single media feature about you” is actually fine to inflict on people. In fact, I’d expect that many (or even most) people in this category will have a worse time of it than Scott—e.g. because they do things that are more politically controversial than Scott, have fewer avenues to make money, etc.
I mean, just because him starting a Substack was precipitated by a bunch of stress and uncertainty does not mean I credit the stress and uncertainty for the benefits of the Substack. Scott always could have started a Substack, and presumably had reasons for not doing so before the NYT thing. As an analogy, if I work at your company and have a terrible time, and then I quit, and then get a great job somewhere else, of course you get no credit for the quality of my new job.
The Substack situation seems analogous. It approximately does not matter whether Scott would have started the Substack without the NYT thing, so I don’t see the relevance of the question when trying to judge whether the NYT thing caused a bunch of harm.
In general, I would say:
Just because someone wasn’t successfully canceled, doesn’t mean there wasn’t a cancellation attempt, nor that most other people in their position would have withstood it
Just because they’re doing well now, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have been doing better without the cancellation attempt
Even if the cancellation attempt itself did end up actually benefiting them, because they had the right personality and skills and position, that doesn’t mean this should have been expected ex ante
(After all, if it’s clear in advance to everyone involved that someone is uncancellable, then they’re less likely to try)
Even if it’s factually true that someone has the qualities and position to come out ahead after cancellation, they may not know or believe this, and thus the prospect of cancellation may successfully silence them
Even if they’re currently uncancellable and know this, that doesn’t mean they’ll remain so in the future
E.g. if they’re so good at what they do as to be unfireable, then maybe within a few years they’ll be offered a CEO position, at which point any cancel-worthy things they said years ago may limit their career; and if they foresee this, then that incentivizes self-censorship
The point is, cancellation attempts are bad because they create a chilling effect, an environment that incentivizes self-censorship and distorts intellectual discussion. And arguments of the form “Hey, this particular cancellation attempt wasn’t that bad because the target did well” fall down to one or more of the above arguments: they still create chilling effects and that still makes them bad.
But it wasn’t a cancellation attempt. The issue at hand is whether a policy of doxxing influential people is a good idea. The benefits are transparency about who is influencing society, and in which ways; the harms include the ones you’ve listed above, about chilling effects.
It’s hard to weigh these against each other, but one way you might do so is by following a policy like “doxx people only if they’re influential enough that they’re probably robust to things like losing their job”. The correlation between “influential enough to be newsworthy” and “has many options open to them” isn’t perfect, but it’s strong enough that this policy seems pretty reasonable to me.
To flip this around, let’s consider individuals who are quietly influential in other spheres. For example, I expect there are people who many news editors listen to, when deciding how their editorial policies should work. I expect there are people who many Democrat/Republican staffers listen to, when considering how to shape policy. In general I think transparency about these people would be pretty good for the world. If those people happened to have day jobs which would suffer from that transparency, I would say “Look, you chose to have a bunch of influence, which the world should know about, and I expect you can leverage this influence to end up in a good position somehow even after I run some articles on you. Maybe you’re one of the few highly-influential people for whom this happens to not be true, but it seems like a reasonable policy to assume that if someone is actually pretty influential then they’ll land on their feet either way.” And the fact that this was true for Scott is some evidence that this would be a reasonable policy.
(I also think that taking someone influential who didn’t previously have a public profile, and giving them a public profile under their real name, is structurally pretty analogous to doxxing. Many of the costs are the same. In both cases one of the key benefits is allowing people to cross-reference information about that person to get a better picture of who is influencing the world, and how.)
In this particular case, I don’t really see any transparency benefits. If it was the case that there was important public information attached to Scott’s full name, then this argument would make sense to me.
(E.g. if Scott Alexander was actually Mark Zuckerberg or some other public figure with information attacked to their real full name then this argument would go through.)
Fair enough if NYT needs to have a extremely coarse grained policy where they always dox influential people consistently and can’t do any cost benefit on particular cases.
In general having someone’s actual name public makes it much easier to find out other public information attached to them. E.g. imagine if Scott were involved in shady business dealings under his real name. This is the sort of thing that the NYT wouldn’t necessarily discover just by writing the profile of him, but other people could subsequently discover after he was doxxed.
To be clear, btw, I’m not arguing that this doxxing policy is correct, all things considered. Personally I think the benefits of pseudonymity for a healthy ecosystem outweigh the public value of transparency about real names. I’m just arguing that there are policies consistent with the NYT’s actions which are fairly reasonable.
Many comments pointed out that NYT does not in fact have a consistent policy of always revealing people’s true names. There’s even a news editorial about this which I point out in case you trust the fact-checking of NY Post more.
I think that leaves 3 possible explanations of what happened:
NYT has a general policy of revealing people’s true names, which it doesn’t consistently apply but ended up applying in this case for no particular reason.
There’s an inconsistently applied policy, and Cade Metz’s (and/or his editors’) dislike of Scott contributed (consciously or subconsciously) to insistence on applying the policy in this particular case.
There is no policy and it was a purely personal decision.
In my view, most rationalists seem to be operating under a reasonable probability distribution over these hypotheses, informed by evidence such as Metz’s mention of Charles Murray, lack of a public written policy about revealing real names, and lack of evidence that a private written policy exists.
In effect Cade Metz indirectly accused Scott of racism. Which arguably counts as a cancellation attempt.
Ok, let’s consider the case of shadowy influencers like that. It would be nice to know who such people were, sure. If they were up to nefarious things, or openly subscribed to ideologies that justify awful actions, then I’d like to know that. If there was an article that accurately laid out the nefarious things, that would be nice. If the article cherry-picked, presented facts misleadingly, made scurrilous insinuations every few paragraphs (without technically saying anything provably false)—that would be bad, possibly quite bad, but in some sense it’s par for the course for a certain tier of political writing.
When I see the combination of making scurrilous insinuations every few paragraphs and doxxing the alleged villain, I think that’s where I have to treat it as a deliberate cancellation attempt on the person. If it wasn’t actually deliberate, then it was at least “reckless disregard” or something, and I think it should be categorized the same way. If you’re going to dox someone, I figure you accept an increased responsibility to be careful about what you say about them. (Presumably for similar reasons, libel laws are stricter about non-public figures. No, I’m not saying it’s libel when the statements are “not technically lying”; but it’s bad behavior and should be known as such.)
As for the “they’re probably robust” aspect… As mentioned in my other comment, even if they predictably “do well” afterwards, that doesn’t mean they haven’t been significantly harmed. If their influence is a following of 10M people, and the cancellation attempt reduces their influence by 40%, then it is simultaneously true that (a) “They have an audience of 6M people, they’re doing fine”, and (b) “They’ve been significantly harmed, and many people in such a position who anticipated this outcome would have a significant incentive to self-censor”. It remains a bad thing. It’s less bad than doing it to random civilians, sure, but it remains bad.
It may decrease their influence substantially, though. I’ll quote at length from here. It’s not about doxxing per se, but it’s about cancellation attempts (which doxxing a heretic enables), and about arguments similar to the above:
Now, the author has a bestselling book, has been on dozens of podcasts, and now works for an advocacy organization that’s 100% behind her message (she’s not technically listed as a cofounder, but might as well be). She has certainly landed on her feet and has a decent level of reach; yet, clearly, if not for a bunch of incidents like the above—and, as she says, probably a lot more incidents for which she doesn’t have specific evidence—then she would have had much greater reach.
In Scott’s case… if we consider the counterfactual where there wasn’t a NYT article drawing such smears against Scott, then, who knows, maybe today some major news organizations (perhaps the NYT itself!) would have approached him for permission to republish some Slate Star Codex articles on their websites, perhaps specifically some of those on AI during the last ~year when AI became big news. Or offered to interview him for a huge audience on important topics, or something.
So be careful not to underestimate the extent of unseen censorship and cancellation, and therefore the damage done by “naming and shaming” tactics.