Dan Luu
patreon
Reactions to the NYT's potential doxxing of Scott Alexander
🕑 Added 2020-06-24 09:09:05 +0000 UTCFor those of you who haven't been following along, Scott Alexander took down his blog, Slate Star Codex, "because" Cade Metz, an NYT reporter, said he was going publish an article that includes Scott Alexander's real name (Scott Alexander is a pseudonym) despite Scott's protestations that this might cause problems.
I think that's unfortunate. There's no upside for anyone in publishing his name and Scott would prefer that his real name isn't published. However, I've found the reaction from the tech community to be a bit of an overreaction. Considering Scott's position in intellectual honesty and rigour, I would hope that he feels the same way.
Here are some examples of viral tweets that have high RT and fav counts after only a day:
https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1275436315484450818: Impossible to understand why the @nytimes is so cruel. They unnecessarily endanger the privacy and work of the writer and psychiatrist Scott Alexander. To protect himself he decided to delete his incredibly beautiful blog Slate Star Codex
https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1275330659523989504: Scott Alexander is about to be doxxed by the NYT. This is ethically outrageous. If @puiwingtam and the other NYT editors choose to run with this they are crossing a clear line in the sand in front of a lot of people who will not take it lying down.
https://twitter.com/anderssandberg/status/1275342033796960256: It is deeply disturbing that
@nytimes appear willing to reveal name of @slatestarcodex ... If @nytimes is willing to doxx personally threatened sources, what does that say about the ethical standards of the newspaper?
https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1275323991054401536: .@nytimes threatens to dox @slatestarcodex. This is despicable. I've cancelled my subscription.
There are two parts to my argument for why this might be an overreaction.
1. It's quite easy to find out who Scott is. If you type is pseudonym into Google (at least as of this writing, in an incognito window in the U.S.), the top autocomplete option is his real. And, conversely, if you type his real name into Google, one of pages on the links on the first page outs him (it's a link on Robin Hanson's blog, which is ironic since Robin is one of the people who's outraged about the NYT article).
2. If you read the text of the tweets above and knew nothing about the NYT, you would think that this is either one of the worst things the NYT has ever done, or perhaps actually the worst thing ("crossing a line in the sand"). But, if you're familiar with the NYT, although doxxing someone with only thinly veiled pseudonymity isn't great, if they go ahead, there's no way this would rank in the top 100 worst things the NYT has done so far this century, and it's probably wouldn't even rank in the top 1000.
I'm not going to try to make a top 100 list, but to pick one item, just so we can compare the magnitude of the sin, let's look at the NYT's relationship with Scooter Libby and the resultant cover-up.
I'm writing this from memory of old events, so there may be a couple of inaccuracies here, but I believe the shape of events is correct here (if this were on my "real" blog, I'd go back and make sure everything here is correct, sorry, think of this more like the ramblings of some anonymous person on tumblr).
Scooter Libby was Dick Cheney's chief of staff. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration needed to justify an invasion and chose "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) as a good justification. Evidence on this was not conclusive (some say we had good evidence that Iraq didn't have WMD, some say it could have gone either way, and some say it was incontrovertible, though from what we know now, the last claim cannot have been true).
In order to justify the war, Scooter Libby leaked false information to an NYT reporter, Judith Miller, claiming that Iraq had bought materials ("thousands specially designed aluminum tubes") that were designed to and could only be used to enrich uranium. These tubes were, in fact, meant to be used as artillery casings and, even at the time, thought that was the intended use case.
Judith Miller credulously published the story she was fed by Scooter Libby. The same day the story was published, White House staffers did the TV circuit and used Judith Miller's article as evidence that we needed to go to war with Iraq. Of course, the evidence was fed to Judith by them, but Judith didn't disclose that and the public didn't know that. At this point, we might say, the the U.S. went to war and the rest is history, but the cover-up for this created an even larger scandal, one that resulted in the conviction of Scooter Libby, which gave him the dubious distinction of being the highest ranking White House official to be convicted since Oliver North (though his sentence was commuted by Bush and he was later pardoned by Trump).
At one point, Bush made a speech claiming that, among the other evidence we had, we had evidence that Iraq was buying yellowcake from Niger (yellowcake could, in theory, be used to create enriched uranium). Some of you may be too young to remember this, but yellowcake dominated the news cycle for quite some time for a while due to this speech.
Well, funny thing is, Joseph Wilson, the person who wrote the report that Bush speech cited, the person who went to Niger to determine if such a deal took place, saw Bush's speech and thought it was outrageous. He then wrote a series of editorials claiming that there was poor evidence for starting the war, starting with one titled "What I Didn't Find In Africa". In order to discredit Wilson, Karl Rove and others decided to leak his CIA operative wife's identity to journalists, which led Scooter Libby to leak her identity to Judith Miller and other journalists. To be fair to the NYT, WaPo beat the NYT to the punch in terms of being the the first doxxing of Wilson's CIA operative wife.
There's actually a lot more to the story (e.g., the NYT also published an op-ed by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, titled "Why We Know Iraq Is Lying", which we now know to be full of incorrect claims, but even with just this content mentioned above, I think we can see that Scott Alexander's doxxing, while pointless and unethical, isn't even close to the same magnitude as the actions taken by the NYT and NYT reporters in the lead-up to the Iraq war and during the Iraq war.
Yes, doxxing someone against their wishes is bad. But on the one hand, we have someone whose identity is easily google-able and on the other hand, an active CIA operative. And on top of burning an active CIA operative, there's also the printing of false information from the White House which was used to rile the country up for a war where the justifications were fabrications.
Doing one terrible act doesn't justify doing other bad but less terrible acts. However, when so many of the most outspoken "thought leaders" of the tech community respond by acting is if one of the less terrible acts, one probably not even in the top 1000, is an incomprehensible injustice, the likes of which has never been seen ("crossing a clear line in the sand", "impossible to understand why the nytimes is so cruel", "what does that say about the ethical standards of the nyt", etc.), they mostly just show how insular the tech community is.
Appendix
The argument I'm making above doesn't apply to the quote below, but I believe the quote below, from Scott Aaronson, also illustrates my point.
In my view, for SSC to be permanently deleted would be an intellectual loss on the scale of, let’s say, John Stuart Mill or Mark Twain burning their collected works. That might sound like hyperbole, but not (I don’t think) to the tens of thousands who read Scott’s essays and fiction, particularly during their 2013-2016 heyday, and who went from casual enjoyment to growing admiration to the gradual recognition that they were experiencing, “live,” the works that future generations of teachers will assign their students when they cover the early twenty-first century.
As noted by tptacek, an even more extreme quote is this one from Marc Hochstein, the "execute editor of CoinDesk", writing on CoinDesk:
This week has brought what many would call the blogosphere’s equivalent of the torching of the Library of Alexandria as an unintended consequence of an outdated media practice.
To be clear, we're talking about the voluntary removal of a blog which, as of this writing, is fully archived on archive.org and likely backed up by many different people at this point.
Comments
Femi Agbabiaka
So true. It brought this recent controversial Taibbi piece back to mind: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself. Taibbi was talking about left media, but it applies cleanly here as well. IDW/tech types created an outrage cycle for itself based on beliefs it already had about the world.
Yes, I agree there are degrees and that this would make it easier to find his pseudonym from his real identity and that the NYT should respect Scott's preferences since there appears to be no real reason not to do so. As it is now, searching for his real identity turns up a blog post by Robin Hanson which links to his old domain, and if you search for the old domain, it's clear that he's Scott Alexander of SSC fame. Alternately, you can look up the domain in archive.org and browse for a bit. If there's an NYT article, that removes the two step process and makes it one step, reducing his level of privacy. I don't think that's a huge leap, I've found out the identities of a number of pseudonymous authors doing pretty much just that, following one or two links to find out who they are. I wouldn't be sure that Robin editing Scott's name will cause Google to de-index the page -- Google commonly returns pages that don't contain all or even any exact search terms based on other data about what Google thinks the page is about. AFAIK, the click stream is a more powerful ranking signal than just plain page text and I would guess that Scott's taking down of his blog has caused enough interest in the post to generate enough clicks that his name will be associated that post indefinitely unless someone at Google takes a manual action. And more generally, I think that the Streisand effect of Scott taking down his blog and all that's been written about it is going to have a much larger impact than the NYT story could possibly have had. But putting aside the self-inflicted Streisand effect and as bad is the NYT behavior is, the tweets I quoted (and many other online comments) speak of this as if this would be the worst thing the NYT has ever done. The Iraq war stuff I mentioned above is arguably not even worst thing they've done in my lifetime (though it's probably inarguably at least top 10) and one single sub-plot of that has a doxxing of a CIA operative. Just that one sub-plot is already much worse than doxxing Scott. I get why a lot of "public intellectual contrarians" are taking a stand on this one and I generally don't like arguments of the form I'm making, which are a kind of whataboutism, but I do think it's a valid response to comments that explicitly or implicitly claim this would be an egregious breach of journalistic ethics the likes of which have never been seen. Ironically, this is the kind of thing Scott uses as an example in his outgroup post, but a lot of Scott's public supporters seem to be supporting the idea of Scott more than Scott's ideas.
I don't think I have anything useful to add on the question of what qualifies as overreaction; but I will say that know Scott well enough to tell you the the quotation marks around "because" are not warranted. There's no secret agenda here; Scott really does not want his patients easily finding his blog, which would be very problematic for his psychiatric practice. (He also does not want online trolls finding his employer, or other personal information about him that could be used to harass him; but that is a more ordinary problem that any outspoken blogger has, except insofar as it feeds into the other problem. Although if I had a commenter get SWATted, I would be worried too.) I think his situation is not quite as bad as it would be if he were, say, a teacher. But it seems apparent that he's still in an unfortunately sensitive profession for this sort of thing. Aside from that, though, I think a lot of us are increasingly aware of just how easy it is for online strangers to harm us, if they know too much about us. Anybody in the US (I don't know how SWATting plays out in other countries) is just one anonymous phonecall away from a serious risk of having their door kicked in, or worse. That feels to me like it goes a long way towards explaining the outpouring of support here. In Scott's particular case, it may be that the genie is already out of the bottle, but I think there are still degrees, and there's nothing quite like a New York Times article to attract Google juice to an otherwise-private fact. (Also, regarding the Hanson link: I see that Hanson has actually removed Scott's real name from his post, so it should get deindexed on its own. But even if he hadn't, that post did not "out" Scott, because it created no _link_ between his real name and his pseudonym / his blog. It was old enough that it dated to before Scott was posting under the pseudonym, and to before Scott's current blog.)
