In general, responses I’ve seen so far to this have seemed to come more from a “conflict theory” (rather than “mistake theory”) interpretation of what’s going on. And perhaps too much so.
I thought these comments by ricraz were a good contribution to the discussion:
Scott Alexander is the most politically charitable person I know. Him being driven off the internet is terrible. Separately, it is also terrible if we have totally failed to internalise his lessons, and immediately leap to the conclusion that the NYT is being evil or selfish.
Ours is a community *built around* the long-term value of telling the truth. Are we unable to imagine reasonable disagreement about when the benefits of revealing real names outweigh the harms? Yes, it goes against our norms, but different groups have different norms.
If the extended rationalist/SSC community could cancel the NYT, would we? For planning to doxx Scott? For actually doing so, as a dumb mistake? For doing so, but for principled reasons? Would we give those reasons fair hearing? From what I’ve seen so far, I suspect not.
I feel very sorry for Scott, and really hope the NYT doesn’t doxx him or anyone else. But if you claim to be charitable and openminded, except when confronted by a test that affects your own community, then you’re using those words as performative weapons, deliberately or not.
But if you claim to be charitable and openminded, except when confronted by a test that affects your own community, then you’re using those words as performative weapons, deliberately or not.
I guess “charitable” here is referring to the principle of charity, but I think that is supposed to apply in a debate or discussion, to make them more productive and less likely to go off the rails. But in this case there is no debate, as far as I can tell. The NYT reporter or others representing NYT have not given a reason for doxxing Scott (AFAIK, except to cite a “policy” for doing so, but that seems false because there have been plenty of times when they’ve respected their subjects’ wishes to remain pseudonymous), so what are people supposed to be charitable about?
If instead the intended meaning of “charitable and openminded” is something like “let’s remain uncertain about NYT’s motives for doxxing Scott until we know more”, it seems like absence of any “principled reasons” provided so far is already pretty strong evidence for ruling out certain motives, leaving mostly “dumb mistake” and “evil or selfish” as the remaining possibilities. Given that, I’m not sure what people are doing that Richard thinks is failing the test to be “charitable and openminded”, especially given that NYT has not shown a willingness to engage in a discussion so far and the time-sensitive nature of the situation.
Tl;dr: A boycott is the central case here, not cancel culture. We need to promote a measured response and keep the Times’ perspective charitably in mind.
Is there a difference between cancel culture and a boycott? I think so. Cancel culture inflicts 1) significant emotional, financial, or potentially physical harm on a 2) a specific individual who 3) never signed up for a position of responsibility to field these kinds of threats and 4) can’t walk away from the cancellation.
Boycotting uses a much narrower set of tactics, primarily protests and advocating that people not buy a certain product. Typically they target an organization, not an individual. When specific individuals are on the receiving end, their professional role typically is in part to deal with those problems. They can quit if they choose and seek employment elsewhere.
This distinction has its grey areas:
Consider entrepreneurs. They can’t necessarily just quit their business, and they’re the face of it so even if they did, the accusations might follow them. They didn’t start the business to field protests, but to sell products, often when the business was so small that the prospect of the former was remote. Sometimes, they do receive death threats and have their lives permanently constrained for safety reasons.
Furthermore, a successful boycott can get out of control, attracting the attention of psychopaths who’ll try to personally intimidate the target. When a group of people coordinates to put a BAD GUY sticker on a corporation, there’s no guarantee that the boycott won’t lead to a lunatic with a weapon waiting outside the business in question. Nobody organizing the boycott is taking responsibility for the possibility that the boycott spirals out of control, a feature shared with cancel culture.
However, part of being an entrepreneur is shouldering the risks of the business. That includes the risk that it gets big and incites a boycott from which they can’t extricate themselves. In exchange for this, successful entrepreneurs are heavily rewarded.
A boycott’s not a legal entity, so there’s no way for the organizers to be shouldered with the responsibility of even minimal accountability for any potential harmful outcomes. But at the same time, a boycott doesn’t come with the possibility of profit.
In this case, the NY Times isn’t owned by its founder. So the main reason not to boycott is the threat of it spiraling out of control. A catastrophic result might be that personally-targeted violence is visited on someone at the Times by a psychopath who uses the boycott as their excuse. Another bad outcome would be that we damage our own aspiring culture of measured thought and action, high valence for free speech, and charity for those we see as our opponents.
I’ve already made my decision about how to respond, but I’ll leave it up to the individual conscience of other readers to decide if they accept this reasoning or not, and how it leads them to act.
a specific individual who 3) never signed up for a position of responsibility to field these kinds of threats
Which would not be the case for a journalists who decided to take the repsonsibility of doxxing someone. That seems like a clear way of signing up for the responsibility.
A catastrophic result might be that personally-targeted violence is visited on someone at the Times by a psychopath who uses the boycott as their excuse.
You might also prevent a psychopath from visiting someone at home because Times journalists might be more careful about writing attack pieces in the future. That likely happens much more often then Times journalists getting visited.
I think what you should actually care about is minimizing the amount of people in general that get visited by psychopaths. It’s also good if being more innocent reduces the changes of it happening.
There is a power imbalance in place. It’s not like NYT is engaging this side in its decision. It’s also true that NYT’s norms are self-serving while hurting others. And this community does not have anywhere near the power to “cancel” NYT. Even if we assume the “mistake theory”, making NYT hurt a bit (which is the strongest response this community can hope for) is necessary for creating a feedback loop. Mistakes are seldom corrected when their prices are paid by others.
This initially felt to me like it ignored some of the ramifications of its parent comment, but I’m also not sure the parent comment intended to imply them. So I would like to put forth the more specific idea that the line of action “there is a power imbalance, therefore, we have to amplify our motions by a large factor to counteract it, which is safe because we know we can’t do any real damage to them” may not be universally wrong but is still dangerous and, for those acting on the sort of charitability norms ESRogs/ricraz describe, requires a lot of extra scrutiny. Specifically, I think nonrigorously with medium confidence that:
This line of action can create a violence cascade if some of the assumptions are wrong. (And in this concrete context specifically, it is not clear to me that the assumptions are right enough.)
In the case of “soft power” (as opposed to, for instance, physical violence, where damage is more readily objectively measurable and is often decisive by way of shutting down capacity), this is much more true when there is a lot of “fog of war” going on, where perceptions of who has power over what and whom don’t have a lot of consensus. It is very easy to assume you’re in the weak position when you actually have more power than you think, and even if that power is only in some spheres, it can do lasting damage.
Some of the possible lasting damage is polarization cascades which operate independently of whether you can damage someone’s reputation in the “mainstream”: if each loosely-defined party over-updates on decrements to an opposing party’s reputation just among itself, this opens up a positive feedback loop.
In the case of decentralized Internet communities, it’s hard to tell how large the amplification factor is actually going to be unless there’s actually a control loop involved (such as a leader with the social credentials to say “our demands have been met, now we will stop shouting”).
In the presence of the ability of soft-power actions to “go viral” quickly and out of control from tiny sources, unilateralist’s curse amplifies all of the above for even very localized decisions about when to “put the hurt on”.
I think with less confidence that the existing polarization cascades across the Internet involve a growing memetic strain that incentivizes strategic perception of self as weak in the public sphere, so there’s some amount of “if you think you’re in the weak position and should hit back, it might also be your corrupted hardware emulating status-acquiring behavior” in there too.
At this point the specific SSC articles “Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness” and “The Toxoplasma of Rage” come to mind, but I don’t remember clearly enough whether they directly support any of this, and given Scott’s current position, I don’t feel like it would be appropriate for me to try to check directly.
I do think there are plausibly more concrete points against a “mistake theory”-like interpretation of the events. For instance, Scott reported the reporter describing that there was an NYT policy, and others say this is not actually true. But the reporter could have misspoken, which would still be a legitimate grievance against the reporter, but frames it in a different light. Or Scott could have subtly misrepeated the information; I am sure he tries to be careful, but does he get every such fact exactly right under the large stresses of an apparent threat?
So, I generally endorse “tread cautiously here”.
I also think Scott’s own suggestions of sending polite, private feedback to the NYT expressing disapproval of revealing Scott’s name are not unusually dangerous and do not have much potential for creating cascading damage per above, especially since “news organizations should be able to deal with floods of private feedback” is a well-established norm. So this shouldn’t be interpreted as a reason to suppress that.
this is precisely the argument that cancel culture often makes, often with good reason, with outside actors piling on what may have started as a parochial dispute.
I think it makes sense to be precise and polite, and to make allowances for misunderstandings. I also think it makes sense to have boundaries and have the hypothesis of malice (with a low prior, both because malice is rare and it’s easy to see it where none exists).
That said, my prior for malice from the NYT was pretty high, and various details have updated me further towards that hypothesis.
My prior for malice was also pretty high, and had updated in that direction significantly in the last year or so from monitoring the coverage, and also with recent details. It may not be an “evil villain” highly coordinated malice, but the incentives and dynamics led in the direction of enough general “bad faith” insinuation to be net negative. It didn’t have to be intended as an attack on Scott or the blog, but rather as a morally obligatory denunciation of perceived ideas or associations—the increase of obligatory denunciation in its pieces makes it structurally very difficult for them to cover many topics in a net positive way. Ten, even five, years ago, I would have had totally different priors and been much less suspicious. I feel like people are treating the legacy media like a programmed computer and not like a group of humans in a specific set of circumstances. Of course, we can’t know anything for sure, and people too easily assume malice. And I’m not claiming most people at the NYT are malicious. But I’m surprised at how much people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NYT at this point, especially in terms of principled consistency. If this were a policy matter, it should have been settled long ago—what could be so complicated?
We are in a situation where the decision whether or not to publish Scott’s name isn’t yet made. As such it’s important to build up pressure to affect that decision and it’s not useful to be charitable. Even if canceling the whole NYT would not be proportional canceling the reporter in question might be.
You could argue that influential writers on political topics should have skin in the game and Scott being pseudonymous prevents him from having enough skin in the game. If that’s the argument then I don’t see the reporter who writes such an article shouldn’t have the same likelihood of losing his job over the article then Scott.
I think journalists bullying people they perceive to be easy targets is a general problem and not specific to Scott. The NYT times also frequently runs attack pieces which are hard to defend on utilitarian grounds. From a mistake perspective living in a world where Moloch rewards journalists for causing harm to people is bad.
We are in a situation where the decision whether or not to publish Scott’s name isn’t yet made. As such it’s important to build up pressure to affect that decision and it’s not useful to be charitable.
I don’t think it’s so cut and dried as that. I think Scott’s move to delete the blog was a reasonable one. But after that it’s not clear to me whether all of us effectively saying “Fuck you!” to the NYT is more likely to result in them not publishing the name, or something more like, “Hey, I know you’ve got norms in favor of publishing real names, but I think you’re making a mistake here, and hopefully the fact that Scott actually deleted his blog makes you realize he was more serious about this than you might have thought. I hope you make the right decision.”
Like, maybe the latter won’t work. But it’s not obvious to me one way or the other. It seems like it depends on facts about the state of mind of various folks who work at the NYT that are hard for us to know.
EDIT: Or maybe a better way to put it is that being charitable might be part of how you “build up pressure to affect that decision”. See Richard and Patrick’s threads here. A charitable reading of what’s happening from Metz’s perspective might factor into your calculus of how to act to get the result you want.
I think it kinda matters how people perceive it as being said, and, well, note that someone who is friendly on-your-side initially perceived it that way.
(This is not really a strong claim about strategy, it just seemed like something one should be weighing while formulating their overall strategy)
What do you mean by “mistake theory” and “conflict theory”?
I’m really confused by this comment and I think you are using the terms backwards. Telling someone that they’ve made a mistake is a violent act, a form of conflict, but it is an example of mistake theory.
Some people theorize that there is an irreducible conflict. They generally recommend that their side not talk to NYT. Until the doxing came up, they were the dominant voices on the topic of this article in preparation, or at least the ones causing discussion. But after the topic moved on to doxing, they have nothing more to say and have been overwhelmed by
This LW thread is almost entirely about mistake theory. Maybe you see different things on twitter, but if so, you should say that, because the one thing all your readers have in common is that they’re on LW.
This LW thread is almost entirely about mistake theory.
This comment section is not what I was responding to. (There weren’t many comments on this post when I made mine.) It was responses I’d seen in general across media, and yeah, a lot of that was on twitter. Apologies for ambiguous wording.
In general, responses I’ve seen so far to this have seemed to come more from a “conflict theory” (rather than “mistake theory”) interpretation of what’s going on. And perhaps too much so.
I thought these comments by ricraz were a good contribution to the discussion:
https://twitter.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1275472175806451721
I guess “charitable” here is referring to the principle of charity, but I think that is supposed to apply in a debate or discussion, to make them more productive and less likely to go off the rails. But in this case there is no debate, as far as I can tell. The NYT reporter or others representing NYT have not given a reason for doxxing Scott (AFAIK, except to cite a “policy” for doing so, but that seems false because there have been plenty of times when they’ve respected their subjects’ wishes to remain pseudonymous), so what are people supposed to be charitable about?
If instead the intended meaning of “charitable and openminded” is something like “let’s remain uncertain about NYT’s motives for doxxing Scott until we know more”, it seems like absence of any “principled reasons” provided so far is already pretty strong evidence for ruling out certain motives, leaving mostly “dumb mistake” and “evil or selfish” as the remaining possibilities. Given that, I’m not sure what people are doing that Richard thinks is failing the test to be “charitable and openminded”, especially given that NYT has not shown a willingness to engage in a discussion so far and the time-sensitive nature of the situation.
Tl;dr: A boycott is the central case here, not cancel culture. We need to promote a measured response and keep the Times’ perspective charitably in mind.
Is there a difference between cancel culture and a boycott? I think so. Cancel culture inflicts 1) significant emotional, financial, or potentially physical harm on a 2) a specific individual who 3) never signed up for a position of responsibility to field these kinds of threats and 4) can’t walk away from the cancellation.
Boycotting uses a much narrower set of tactics, primarily protests and advocating that people not buy a certain product. Typically they target an organization, not an individual. When specific individuals are on the receiving end, their professional role typically is in part to deal with those problems. They can quit if they choose and seek employment elsewhere.
This distinction has its grey areas:
Consider entrepreneurs. They can’t necessarily just quit their business, and they’re the face of it so even if they did, the accusations might follow them. They didn’t start the business to field protests, but to sell products, often when the business was so small that the prospect of the former was remote. Sometimes, they do receive death threats and have their lives permanently constrained for safety reasons.
Furthermore, a successful boycott can get out of control, attracting the attention of psychopaths who’ll try to personally intimidate the target. When a group of people coordinates to put a BAD GUY sticker on a corporation, there’s no guarantee that the boycott won’t lead to a lunatic with a weapon waiting outside the business in question. Nobody organizing the boycott is taking responsibility for the possibility that the boycott spirals out of control, a feature shared with cancel culture.
However, part of being an entrepreneur is shouldering the risks of the business. That includes the risk that it gets big and incites a boycott from which they can’t extricate themselves. In exchange for this, successful entrepreneurs are heavily rewarded.
A boycott’s not a legal entity, so there’s no way for the organizers to be shouldered with the responsibility of even minimal accountability for any potential harmful outcomes. But at the same time, a boycott doesn’t come with the possibility of profit.
In this case, the NY Times isn’t owned by its founder. So the main reason not to boycott is the threat of it spiraling out of control. A catastrophic result might be that personally-targeted violence is visited on someone at the Times by a psychopath who uses the boycott as their excuse. Another bad outcome would be that we damage our own aspiring culture of measured thought and action, high valence for free speech, and charity for those we see as our opponents.
I’ve already made my decision about how to respond, but I’ll leave it up to the individual conscience of other readers to decide if they accept this reasoning or not, and how it leads them to act.
Which would not be the case for a journalists who decided to take the repsonsibility of doxxing someone. That seems like a clear way of signing up for the responsibility.
You might also prevent a psychopath from visiting someone at home because Times journalists might be more careful about writing attack pieces in the future. That likely happens much more often then Times journalists getting visited.
I think what you should actually care about is minimizing the amount of people in general that get visited by psychopaths. It’s also good if being more innocent reduces the changes of it happening.
There is a power imbalance in place. It’s not like NYT is engaging this side in its decision. It’s also true that NYT’s norms are self-serving while hurting others. And this community does not have anywhere near the power to “cancel” NYT. Even if we assume the “mistake theory”, making NYT hurt a bit (which is the strongest response this community can hope for) is necessary for creating a feedback loop. Mistakes are seldom corrected when their prices are paid by others.
This initially felt to me like it ignored some of the ramifications of its parent comment, but I’m also not sure the parent comment intended to imply them. So I would like to put forth the more specific idea that the line of action “there is a power imbalance, therefore, we have to amplify our motions by a large factor to counteract it, which is safe because we know we can’t do any real damage to them” may not be universally wrong but is still dangerous and, for those acting on the sort of charitability norms ESRogs/ricraz describe, requires a lot of extra scrutiny. Specifically, I think nonrigorously with medium confidence that:
This line of action can create a violence cascade if some of the assumptions are wrong. (And in this concrete context specifically, it is not clear to me that the assumptions are right enough.)
In the case of “soft power” (as opposed to, for instance, physical violence, where damage is more readily objectively measurable and is often decisive by way of shutting down capacity), this is much more true when there is a lot of “fog of war” going on, where perceptions of who has power over what and whom don’t have a lot of consensus. It is very easy to assume you’re in the weak position when you actually have more power than you think, and even if that power is only in some spheres, it can do lasting damage.
Some of the possible lasting damage is polarization cascades which operate independently of whether you can damage someone’s reputation in the “mainstream”: if each loosely-defined party over-updates on decrements to an opposing party’s reputation just among itself, this opens up a positive feedback loop.
In the case of decentralized Internet communities, it’s hard to tell how large the amplification factor is actually going to be unless there’s actually a control loop involved (such as a leader with the social credentials to say “our demands have been met, now we will stop shouting”).
In the presence of the ability of soft-power actions to “go viral” quickly and out of control from tiny sources, unilateralist’s curse amplifies all of the above for even very localized decisions about when to “put the hurt on”.
I think with less confidence that the existing polarization cascades across the Internet involve a growing memetic strain that incentivizes strategic perception of self as weak in the public sphere, so there’s some amount of “if you think you’re in the weak position and should hit back, it might also be your corrupted hardware emulating status-acquiring behavior” in there too.
At this point the specific SSC articles “Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness” and “The Toxoplasma of Rage” come to mind, but I don’t remember clearly enough whether they directly support any of this, and given Scott’s current position, I don’t feel like it would be appropriate for me to try to check directly.
I do think there are plausibly more concrete points against a “mistake theory”-like interpretation of the events. For instance, Scott reported the reporter describing that there was an NYT policy, and others say this is not actually true. But the reporter could have misspoken, which would still be a legitimate grievance against the reporter, but frames it in a different light. Or Scott could have subtly misrepeated the information; I am sure he tries to be careful, but does he get every such fact exactly right under the large stresses of an apparent threat?
So, I generally endorse “tread cautiously here”.
I also think Scott’s own suggestions of sending polite, private feedback to the NYT expressing disapproval of revealing Scott’s name are not unusually dangerous and do not have much potential for creating cascading damage per above, especially since “news organizations should be able to deal with floods of private feedback” is a well-established norm. So this shouldn’t be interpreted as a reason to suppress that.
this is precisely the argument that cancel culture often makes, often with good reason, with outside actors piling on what may have started as a parochial dispute.
I think it makes sense to be precise and polite, and to make allowances for misunderstandings. I also think it makes sense to have boundaries and have the hypothesis of malice (with a low prior, both because malice is rare and it’s easy to see it where none exists).
That said, my prior for malice from the NYT was pretty high, and various details have updated me further towards that hypothesis.
My prior for malice was also pretty high, and had updated in that direction significantly in the last year or so from monitoring the coverage, and also with recent details. It may not be an “evil villain” highly coordinated malice, but the incentives and dynamics led in the direction of enough general “bad faith” insinuation to be net negative. It didn’t have to be intended as an attack on Scott or the blog, but rather as a morally obligatory denunciation of perceived ideas or associations—the increase of obligatory denunciation in its pieces makes it structurally very difficult for them to cover many topics in a net positive way. Ten, even five, years ago, I would have had totally different priors and been much less suspicious. I feel like people are treating the legacy media like a programmed computer and not like a group of humans in a specific set of circumstances. Of course, we can’t know anything for sure, and people too easily assume malice. And I’m not claiming most people at the NYT are malicious. But I’m surprised at how much people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NYT at this point, especially in terms of principled consistency. If this were a policy matter, it should have been settled long ago—what could be so complicated?
Here’s an example of one thing that made me wary of the paper: https://medium.com/@lessig/lessig-v-nyt-very-good-news-d8b3c57150c4
We are in a situation where the decision whether or not to publish Scott’s name isn’t yet made. As such it’s important to build up pressure to affect that decision and it’s not useful to be charitable. Even if canceling the whole NYT would not be proportional canceling the reporter in question might be.
You could argue that influential writers on political topics should have skin in the game and Scott being pseudonymous prevents him from having enough skin in the game. If that’s the argument then I don’t see the reporter who writes such an article shouldn’t have the same likelihood of losing his job over the article then Scott.
I think journalists bullying people they perceive to be easy targets is a general problem and not specific to Scott. The NYT times also frequently runs attack pieces which are hard to defend on utilitarian grounds. From a mistake perspective living in a world where Moloch rewards journalists for causing harm to people is bad.
I don’t think it’s so cut and dried as that. I think Scott’s move to delete the blog was a reasonable one. But after that it’s not clear to me whether all of us effectively saying “Fuck you!” to the NYT is more likely to result in them not publishing the name, or something more like, “Hey, I know you’ve got norms in favor of publishing real names, but I think you’re making a mistake here, and hopefully the fact that Scott actually deleted his blog makes you realize he was more serious about this than you might have thought. I hope you make the right decision.”
Like, maybe the latter won’t work. But it’s not obvious to me one way or the other. It seems like it depends on facts about the state of mind of various folks who work at the NYT that are hard for us to know.
EDIT: Or maybe a better way to put it is that being charitable might be part of how you “build up pressure to affect that decision”. See Richard and Patrick’s threads here. A charitable reading of what’s happening from Metz’s perspective might factor into your calculus of how to act to get the result you want.
I don’t think say effectively saying “Fuck you!” is a good description of what most people are writing.
I think that’s very different then saying the incentives should be changed in a way so that Moloch doesn’t let reporters destroy the good.
I think it kinda matters how people perceive it as being said, and, well, note that someone who is friendly on-your-side initially perceived it that way.
(This is not really a strong claim about strategy, it just seemed like something one should be weighing while formulating their overall strategy)
In general there’s no cost to ignoring it when people curse. Different comments imply a variety of costs such as canceled subscriptions.
Fair points.
What do you mean by “mistake theory” and “conflict theory”?
I’m really confused by this comment and I think you are using the terms backwards. Telling someone that they’ve made a mistake is a violent act, a form of conflict, but it is an example of mistake theory.
Some people theorize that there is an irreducible conflict. They generally recommend that their side not talk to NYT. Until the doxing came up, they were the dominant voices on the topic of this article in preparation, or at least the ones causing discussion. But after the topic moved on to doxing, they have nothing more to say and have been overwhelmed by
This LW thread is almost entirely about mistake theory. Maybe you see different things on twitter, but if so, you should say that, because the one thing all your readers have in common is that they’re on LW.
This comment section is not what I was responding to. (There weren’t many comments on this post when I made mine.) It was responses I’d seen in general across media, and yeah, a lot of that was on twitter. Apologies for ambiguous wording.