One wonders what criteria the Times must be using to determine that it's worth putting Scott at credible risk for further harassment but not women gamers. Is the Times really more sympathetic to gamers than psychiatrists or bloggers? That seems like an unlikely policy, but what else could explain it? I'm stumped.

Nothing like selective enforcement of the rules as your politics so moves you.

Hm, I don't know if I'd draw the cause/effect so directly.

To me, these are two separate problems: 1) NYT doxxes sources, 2) NYT serves advertisers rather than readers. There might be some relation between these two problems but I don't personally have enough information to conclude that.

I didn't make that clear in my previous post, my apologies. No implication was intended.

> The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?

This shows a lack of how journalism works. Using real names isn't to "drive clicks" and "appease advertisers." It's to add credibility to a story.

Think about it: Does a furniture business advertising in the local paper care whether the victim of a shooting is named in a piece? Sure, the owner might know the victim, but that doesn't mean the business will determine its expenditures based on names.

It’s multi-faceted. In some cases NYT (or any news org of any prevailing political inclination) might want to expose real names to exercise control or rally people to cancel someone. Other times it might be more mundane, just wanting a better angle for the story or more solid corroborative details.

In the case of SSC I really worry that NYT would be trying to exercise control. They probably like many things written on the blog, but also hate other things like diving into statistics of gender based pay discrimination or statistics of racial motivation in police violence.

These are topics which the modern left (which I’m a million percent a part of) is increasingly pushing out of scope of the Overton window and treating them like they are not allowed to be subject to statistical evidence or neutral discussion.

There is only One Right Thing To Believe about police violence (that is targets blacks and minorities, even if this is simply not supported by data). There is only One Right Thing To Believe about gender-based pay discrimination (the popular notion of “women make 70 cents on the dollar” which is not close to the real effect size, and requires a ton of uncomfortable nuance to discuss properly because of confounding effects of women staying at home more often and choosing to stay home after maternity leave).

I think they want SSC to write about things that comply with their moral narrative, and see doxxing as a way to turn the screws and essentially promote a vague threat that if he writes something controversial about IQ or sexism or income inequality or whatever, and it doesn’t stick to liberal talking points, they can do a damaging hit piece.

I think it's best to hear from NYT about why they strictly only use real names.

Generally it's anonymous sources who tell the wild and not-necessarily-true stories that drive clicks. A policy limiting their use is intended to make the publication more sober. But that's supposed to happen by just not printing the story. Outing people who don't want to be outed is something else.

Advertisers do not directly care about real names.

What matters is journalistic integrity. We are in a time when reporters are consistently hammered for quoting anonymous sources.

ITM?

> ... Well one of the reasons is that people working at this companies read and follow the precepts of Slate Star Codex. ...

This claim alone ought to suggest to you - given its obvious implausibility - that this person has a political axe to grind. (Same as the bunch of Twitter users who are now apparently gloating over the fact that Scott might soon get doxxed by the NYT - and who seemingly think "Orange site bad!" is a cogent argument. No, I won't be linking to them due to the obvious doxxing infohazard involved.)

Funny how this argument on how SSC is a white supremacist reactionary blog does not show a single, you know, written word by him. At all.

He did criticize sometimes SJW, some feminist bloggers, as he also criticizes libertarians, reactionaries, communists. But, hell, since he does not subscribe to The One True And Moral Opiniom, he is a monster, definitely. And, God forbid him for not paying attention 24/7 in a subreddit that is not even his, just because he has a day job amd such.

Yes, I created this account just to answer this complete bullshit.

This is pretty true on Hacker News. I engaged with the post as if I were in a conversation with the original author, not by posting here, but by sending an email to the original author.

I can't help but think that this effect isn't what I want from this community, however. I want reasoned discussion that helps me to see issues from various points of view, but instead I get a bunch of uninformed opinions from people who didn't even read the thing they're opining on.

> People in comments sections (doesn’t matter which) don’t really “react to” or “engage with” the article very often. What they’re really doing is being reminded by the article of some thought that’s been affecting them in their own lives lately—which they then hold forth about.

Don't want to go off on a tangent, but HN trains its users to do that by posting one article after another that's behind a paywall. Of course there will be comments vaguely related to the article when you've created a culture of commenting without reading.

Well not for nothing, thanks for your comment - this is a really good insight!

> There are still people and AFAIK organized communities on Reddit that target him.

Though one of the more wholesome things I've seen is when I visited that subreddit you're referring to and the consensus seemed to be that doxxing Scott was not justified.

> Yes, there are also random crazies.

The issue here is that he's a psychiatrist. Dealing with random crazies, some of whom might literally try to kill him if they knew where he lived, is his day job.

> Isn't it obvious that the upcoming NYT articles is going to be a hit piece with the goal of ruining his personal credibility and professional career.

I suppose if i had and axe to grind against NYT it might be "obvious". Even the blog author mentions it would be a "mostly positive piece". Where are you getting your information from?

one explanation: the policy exists and symbolizes the ideal for a news organization that prides itself on integrity and transparency. when this journalistic ideal conflicts with the practical concern of creating a story, the organization allows for discretion and trusts the writer to make an ethical decision.

in the ISIS case, the article likely doesn't happen without the fighter's cooperation, so the writer must defer to the subject or risk losing the story.

in the scott alexander case, the article can happen with or without subject cooperation, so the writer can afford to obey the stated policy and increase "transparency" on this story.

That's a lot of trust in the government. It's also the exact opposite of what the whole blog post is about, preserving anonymity.

I don't think I've seen anyone right-of-center have anything really bad to say about Scott. I doubt any of those outlets (Breitbart, etc.) would want to do that to him.

This may itself be reason for some people to distrust Scott, except that he's probably done more to bring people to a moderate or left-of-center position on some topics than all the people shouting "racist!" combined.

The article is about Scott, as a person who runs a popular blog. The source is named "Scott Alexander". There is no need to publish his personal information. If the NYT wants to verify that he is actually a practicing psychiatrist etc, then they can gather that information, do the legwork, publish the information ("NYT can confirm that SA is who he says he is"), without jeopardizing that practice.

Slate Star Codex says they were expecting a relatively nice article, not a hit piece.

Are you referring to Episode 207? https://overcast.fm/+KhqFMR3J4

I think Sam did a very poor job in that episode -- he was preaching exclusively to the choir. He spends the start of the podcast explaining the important distinction between justified and unjustified police involved killings. This is a very important distinction, and I would love to see data about the racial breakdown of unjustified killings, relative to a racial breakdown of police interactions.

But, Sam then completely abandons this distinction. He discusses "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force", Roland G. Fryer, Jr. July 2007, a NYC-only study that does not measure unjustified killings.

Then, as usual, he spends an awful lot of time spouting his usual rhetoric of truth, epistemology, science, data, facts, and knowledge. This is merely rhetoric because his reference to that study is clearly meant to be evidence that we have the truth -- that police brutality is the issue, and unjustified killings do not disproportionately affect black Americans. He even discusses the Fryer study and moments later is confidently stating "race isn't the relevant variable". This is a grand claim that can't possibly be justified based on the Fryer study.

All interspersed with more rhetoric such as:

- "expiation of sins" for you Botox as if you're "woke as AOC"

- "ecstasy of ideological conformity"

- "woke analysis" is where "democratic politics goes to die" (probably means Democratic Party politics)

- "social activists playing chicken with the forces of chaos"

- "form of political pornography"

- "unable to speak or even think about facts"

Sam's usual parade of platitudes about epistemology are best understood by another quotation from this episode: "the difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims, that's why propaganda works".

it has the feel of the religious witch hunt because that is exactly what is has become. Many of these groups no longer look at data or science or any empirical evidence for the basis of their positions or policy, it is pure emotional dogma at this point. They are non-theistic religions

I'm in the field - though not as prominent as Yann (who has been very nice and helpful in my few interactions with him) - and your interpretation is off. People are disagreeing with his stance that researchers should not bother exploring bias implications of their research. (He says this is because bias is a problem of data - and therefore we should focus on building cool models and let production engineers worry about training production models on unbiased data.)

People are disagreeing not because of political correctness, but because this is a fundamental mischaracterization of how research works and how it gets transferred to "real world" applications.

(1) Data fuels modern machine learning. It shapes research directions in a really fundamental way. People decide what to work on based on what huge amounts of data they can get their hands on. Saying "engineers should be the ones to worry about bias because it's a data problem" is like saying "I'm a physicist, here's a cool model, I'll let the engineers worry about whether it works on any known particle in any known world."

(2) Most machine learning research is empirical (though not all). It's very rare to see a paper (if not impossible nowadays, since large deep neural networks are so massive and opaque) that works purely off math without showing that its conclusions improve some task on some dataset. No one is doing research without data, and saying "my method is good because it works on this data" means you are making choices and statements about what it means to "work" - which, as we've seen, involves quite a lot of bias.

(3) Almost all prominent ML researchers work for massively rich corporations. He and his colleagues don't work in ivory towers where they develop pure algorithms which are then released over the ivy walls into the wild, to be contaminated by filthy reality. He works for Facebook. He's paid with Facebook money. So why draw this imaginary line between research and production? He is paid to do research that will go into production.

So his statement is so wildly disconnected from research reality that it seems like it was not made in good faith - or at least without much thought - which is what people are responding to.

Also, language tip - a "woman researcher" is a "researcher".

It has been this way for a while. Outrage/cancel culture is an absolute pox upon our population that really needs to stop.

>>"Here is a story I heard from a friend, which I will alter slightly to protect the innocent. A prestigious psychology professor signed an open letter in which psychologists condemned belief in innate sex differences. My friend knew that this professor believed such differences existed, and asked him why he signed the letter. He said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t. My friend asked why he expected everyone else in his department to sign it, and he said “Probably for the same reason I did”.

this post is no longer available, of course

I don't even think he said "model's don't cause bias," he just said "ML systems are biased when data is biased."

I don't understand how people can defend his detractors in this particular case. Are you telling me that an image upsampling model that does not contain hard coded bias, and trained on unbiased data will produced biased result? Especially the kind of biased result represented by the error made by the original tweeter who fucked up?

>will request FB to fire him... (which thankfully won't happen)

Corporations don't fire this fast, give it couple weeks and he will move to other position "for personal reasons", where he will rest-and-vest for the few months, before finally being let go.

> To be great is to be misunderstood.

I would be content with being ordinary—permission to ask obvious questions about the narrative handed down from on high—without fear of defamation that costs me my livelihood.

If you are a history nerd, reading what people wrote 90 years ago you will realize that we are exactly the same species, and our attitudes have not changed a bit. One of my favorite readings are the essays of french philosopher Simone Weil after two visits to germany in the thirties. She was concerned with the rise of the nazis, while at the same time describing the natural and understandable forces that were making them gain support.

I do not think that there is an analogy between the groups of then and the groups of today. Still, the "outrage" mechanisms that steer our will seem to be identical.

> The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism.

Question is, what totalitarianism do you think we're headed towards? Trump/MAGA totalitarianism or Left/Cancel culture totalitarianism?

Living outside the US and watching what's going on (ok, it's not just the US, but it is just a few countries) is like watching a friend's slow motion descent into madness. It's pitiful and sad, and I feel powerless to do anything about it.

At the same time, so long as I stay away from news and social media, I'm pretty much unaffected. Society in the various countries I've spent time in over the last few years (Ireland, Spain, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia are the main ones) seems much the same as ever.

Is it a power-grab or an attempt by individuals to gain social status?

I think that it has all those trappings, but underneath is a deep addiction to anger, outrage and the rush of adrenaline that accompanies it.

There is also a sort of religiosity that your comment alludes to.

>Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But, for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone.

It's unclear which country and which side of the spectrum you're referring to.

This is why I like to use science as a guide (not a decision point), for then there is a chance to be self-correcting.

The problem is that it's a vicious circle. You can't attempt to understand/reason with someone going against societal norms otherwise you will be seen by your peers as agreeing with that person and thus ostracized because they themselves do not want to be seen as understanding/reasoning with someone (you) that now appears to be going against societal norms.

this forum literally hides opinions people disagree with.

The up and down arrow are really bad icons for UX.

> I wish more people would genuinely listen to those they disagree with.

I had a bit of this discussion on HN not long ago. I love to debate and hear ideas from those I disagree with. But, that's not what people are often doing today. They are using your statement to appeal to others to listen and accept their clearly racist ideas or provable wrong, anti-science ideas.

IMO, it's intellectually dishonest and a debate I have a hard time continuing.

I read somewhere that downvotes are capped to -4 and it made me much less likely to self-censor when I felt like I had a valid point.

I know that the people who disagree with me outnumber those that agree, but the way that the upvotes bounce up and down tells me there are more people out there that agree with me than I would have assumed.

(Plus I think I've only made it down to -4 once or twice)

I self censor for a different reason. What if someone decides to find that one political comment I made few years ago after I am back on my legs again to drown me?

What I have learned from struggling a lot with issues normal people don't face (at least going by majority) is that we are all toxic to each other. Some things are more visible and easily understandable for others while many aren't. It may feel pretty shitty for a disabled person inside a room of normal people complaining about very trivial things and calling for others to become disabled as a joke. Some autism jokes may actually invoke sad memories for others. But there are groups of young people who do all those and don't think it is toxic. Joking about depression is another. There are many examples where line of toxicity isn't so visible for a specific majority.

People have difficulty imagining the scale of time and when that difficulty helps them form a tribalistic decision to justify their own biases, it's much more easier to do that than fight against the urge.

The rise of short attention span only means people are much less empathetic than they seem to think they are by social media.

It's only my opinion but an empathetic person will look beyond that this person has some horrible political opinions and I want to run a witch hunt. A tweet out of 20k tweets in isolation doesn't say much about the person especially if it's old. They might be having a bad day, may want attention and said something controversial to get it. Maybe they do have medical problems (I know I do, I am on meds and my behavior changes a lot). And even if that person is officially shitty, I don't see why would you try to burn their house. It's ok to inform others but what's the point of attacking someone that they think "nobody" cares about them?

If nobody cares about improving those people, then they might as well become too extreme in their opinion. If nobody wants to hear them, they might as well be racist. We all strive for connection and the reason why we don't want discrimination to exist is we don't want to lose our ability to interact with people we care about. If all racists can get are other racist people or no one, why would they change?

Side note, most if not all outrage on social media (esp twitter and youtube) seems to be created by sufficiently motivated individuals. It's as obvious as a bright sky. So I wonder if you can live sharing your opinions while not getting bad side on one of those twitter mob groups.

This feels like an instance of negativity-bias. If you're willing to self-censor to avoid downvotes shouldn't you also be willing to shill / virtue signal for upvotes?

My problem with downvotes isn't the effect on my score. It's the fact that the font becomes paler. Dissenting opinions are singled out in a way that makes them look bad/wrong. I also don't like how the UX doesn't represent the distribution. A post with no votes will look like a post with 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes.

I am fine with downvotes, and with some UX mechanism to let people know that a post is being downvoted. But I think the current UX engenders groupthink.

Why are you afraid of downvotes? There's little reason to self-censor due to an internet currency.

And I wouldn't say the forum is "exactly this" unless you're saying that downvotes are on par with getting "fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or killed."

There's a bit of a difference between "not saying things because you may lose a dozen of meaningless internet points" and "not saying things because you can have a mob of haters try to get you and you family fired, you life ruined and maybe send men with guns drawn to your home to get you murdered if they're lucky".

I don’t self-censor. I don’t really pay attention to votes except as a barometer for how HN interpreted the topic or content of my post or comment. I try to post within the guidelines and rules and generally not be divisive. And yet I often get a warning that I’m posting too fast. Seems like a form of HN’s invisible soft mod power that suppresses legitimate comments and posts. I know this because I tried to post something yesterday afternoon, got the posting too fast error, and now the post is made by someone else 12 hours ago or so. How can these kinds of casual censorship be quantified across HN? It’s hard to talk about that which you can’t say.

Why do you care about invisible internet points? Create an alt-account and use it in good faith.

There is a chilling effect happening, and people need to be able to make unpopular arguments -- again, in good faith.

Exactly, downvotes hurt so much!

Dudes, this comment has gone from 0 to 5 votes, I don't even know what to make of it any more.

I do this, but generally the comment wouldn’t have added much to the discussion in that case anyway.

Why do you care about fake internet points?

> Left-wing social movements, while initially well intentioned, tend to eat their own in escalating purity spirals.

That's not particularly true of left-wing movements; to the extent it's true of them it's also true of right-wing movements. The relevant factors are orthogonal to the left-right axis.

> But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development. I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.

It's easy to require due process prior to anyone being deprived of freedom, and we generally see this as a positive development, compared to the alternative. Using "shame" (aka witch hunts, cyber bullying and the like) to punish unwelcome views is the opposite of due process.

> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.

This blog post is literally about someone fearing that it'll escalate to "beaten up" or "fired" if their name is published.

How about you and your partner being fired from your job because your 13 year old wrote 1 year ago in Instagram : "Guacamole nigga penis". Is that shame treatment good enough or you prefer it more severe?

It's not simply being called names (though that can cause some level of psychological distress). The big concern is economic consequences. People are losing their jobs, losing access to the platforms their customers are using, being canceled by payment services, etc.

There's also some level of physical safety concerns as well, but (as of yet) that's not as big of a concern.

Maybe it is like police and tasers?

In theory, tasers are good because they can substitute shooting.

In practice, you had 5 shootings, and now you have 4 shootings and 200 taser uses

Luckily, one can never lead to the other.

Bruises heal and prisons have limited terms. Twitter lasts forever.

> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN

Would you also like being hellbanned on HN?

It seems that by "smart" she meant "knowledgeable", in particular about how things work in her field. Of course people at the top know more (on average) about how the industry works. They are in a position to know.

From my observations nuclear energy is the holliest cow on HN.

Raising any sort of doubt regarding nuclear energy safety will quickly get you downvoted, flagged or banned:

Fukushima proved that nuclear energy is not that safe.

It may have been a conservative talking point back in the day, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. "Broken clocks, twice daily" etc.

It's undoubtedly more dangerous to be critical of the mainstream narrative now than it was 10-20 years ago.

There's an alt right author called Vox Day (and I'm a little afraid to be referencing him here) who makes the following argument: if mainstream thought becomes increasingly constricted, and disagreeing with it becomes increasingly dangerous, people will do one of two things. Either they'll self-censor, or they'll "flip the switch" and just go totally anti-mainstream, because it's safer to associate and identify with people who won't get them fired for their opinions. The greater the censorship and fear, the more people will "flip" in a search for safety.

Now he is alt right and he has a vested interest in portraying the ascendancy of the alt right as inevitable, but the point is nonetheless logical, and quite disturbing. It may be that punishing moderately "wrong" speech will ultimately drive moderates into the waiting arms of the extreme right, where they won't be judged so harshly for their errors. Moreover if the purity spiral [1] theory is correct, this phenomenon may be hard to stop, because punishing people for their dissenting speech is an effective way to gain status in many communities!

[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

It's not just commenting--it's any interaction at all:

https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_...

> People aren't allowed to make mistakes, it seems.

Not even mistakes. Things that were considered progressive as little as 15-20 years ago have now been flipped into "microaggressions".

> I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now.

I've wondered a couple times recently how dangerous it is that I'm easily discoverable. I tell myself that since I live in the Midwest, the worst of it hasn't reached here yet. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.

Per a comment up-thread, I wouldn't place too big a bet on pseudonyms remaining pseudonyms forever. Sure, absent a real effort to unmask you, you'll probably be fine. But sustained efforts to figure out pseudonymous identities often succeed.

You have to make giant, sweeping mistakes a part of your career or personality. Rush Limbaugh lost one tangential job, but is still influential and wealthy.

Do you think regular people out there who are not experts in housing, policing, government, economics should remain silent and not express opinions on things they don’t have insight to?

Everyone has a right to express their opinion even on topics they are woefully unqualified for. Including clueless techies.

The only instance I agree is when celebrities spout opinions as fact (or promote a pet diet or cause) only because it could send millions of people on wild goose chases. That said it’s more of a wish and really not a desire to censor them.

> Sometimes the world doesn't need to hear our opinion. That doesn't mean we're being censored.

That...pretty much is being censored?

"Techies" are not academics in general.

Hah, yes, like JK Rowling! If you are a self made billionaire, you are pretty immune from the twitter mobs, and can make controversial statements such as "there are only two genders."

It's not the "truth" and the "facts" that people are afraid to discuss. It's their opinions about truth and facts.

When you see phrases like "wrong/right side of history" and you see things happening like mass cancellation of brands or people for their opinions, you are seeing it. When a police officer is immediately fired and then charged with murder for performing his job the way he was trained to do it, you are seeing people fear the mob more than they care about the truth.

JK Rowling and Terry Crews are two famous people that come to mind who recently stated unpopular opinions and were attacked by mobs of people. There was no desire on the part of the mob to look for logical reasons for someone to have a valid opinion that differs from the mainstream.

>Where can one go to learn these controversial truths?

Bits and pieces are strewn all over the place. But you have learn to separate the wheat from the chaff for yourself. Then you might start noticing the places with limited quantities of slightly more observant commentary.

>Are they literally so confronting/offensive that they don’t exist on the internet?

No, they just don't exist on the internet the same way most real conversations don't exist on the internet. The internet is great for information of the type that would be found in traditional publications, is of professional interest, or are marketing materials. It sucks for everything else.

People being real exist in very small quantities, usually on lighter topics to avoid exposing themselves, and are always outnumbered by people preforming for the audience or (untempered by people openly talking like reasonable people) have taken an extreme position on the topic.

There is a pizza restaurant in suburban Arlington, Virginia in which these truths are stored in a filing cabinet in the basement. Certain inner-circle members of those who know are familiar with its whereabouts and its indexing system.

I am going to respond with a paraphrasing of a well known quote about one such truth. The truth is that you are a slave in a prison without walls where prisoner never dreams of escaping.

They exist, but the woke crowd is purging them hard now. Any moment now I expect Columbus city to be renamed.

Scott's coronavirus articles were reliably ahead of the media. He was early with insights such as the insufficiencies of the flattening the curve model, the efficacy of masks, and warning it could become a pandemic.

These opinions are now mainstream. He gave them a platform earlier than the media did, because he was more open to being wrong and to exploring heterodox ideas, but also applied research and rigour when writing about them.

The point I was trying to make is tangential, but related to the post.

Scott has created one of the most thoughtful, level-headed, and interesting places on the internet. And yet he's shutting it down because it has led to a huge downside risk for his personal and professional life:

> I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.

What does this mean for others who want to start similar blogs or engage in these sorts of discussions? They're going to see this sort of thing happening and think: "Why bother? It's not worth the trouble."

If you had bothered to read the article, you would see that Scott lists two reasons why he is shutting down the blog. The reason that you mentioned is one. The other reason is:

> The second reason is more prosaic: some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for).

You write:

> What's the hidden truth, controversial opinion or super secret insight at stake here?

There is no one opinion at stake here. What is at stake is the ability to hold any dissenting opinion. Or not even hold it, but merely discuss it openly.

In the case of the anti-psychiatry lobby it's not even a dissenting opinion! It's basically the opinion that psychiatry ought to exist. There is just a small community of dissidents who disagree and want to get Scott fired (or worse). They now have a lot more leverage, because we've collectively decided that we should foster a culture where it's totally normal to try and get someone fired for things that are totally unrelated to work.

Just as the members of an anti-psychiatry subreddit should have a right to freedom of speech and association without the fear that their posts will get them fired (or worse), so should Scott.

This is pretty easy. Scott does have controversial opinions at times. He uses a pseudonym to make them public without fear of that impinging on his life and work.

So yes. He's being silenced because he cannot enjoy speaking publicly without fear of retribution.

I think GP and many people ITT project their current political concerns on OP's post. It doesn't seem apparent to me that Scott is deleting his blog due to any recent political changes.

His name is...

I mean, the NYT during the Clinton and Bush years was hardly some golden age of journalism. Off the top of my head, there was Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee, the Jayson Blair thing, and the Judith Miller / Curveball / Iraq war stuff.

Lets be honest here. This will be a big story here in Hacker News for a few days, then we will get on with our lives. It will not spread out from that.

This is ironically how the News works. It's new - novel, interesting, unique, temporary.

We will stand up for Scott - but it won't really change anything, and it will be temporary. It's naive to think that what we find important for a bit will have any impact on the real world and real lives. Especially as this is literally what the News does and has done for a hundred or so years.

> specially the NYT,that earns more money in real state

This is verifiably untrue. As a public company, their balance sheets are public, and almost 90% of their revenue is accounted for by subscriptions and advertising.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/71691/000007...

I'm not convinced that this is a new problem. Newspapers used to make money, but they have always been owned by someone rich enough to buy a printing press.

What's different now is that people have more access to primary sources. The story says that the boy was 11, because kids in that grade are usually 11 and the reporter was lazy, but the boy was really 12.

In the world where only one organization in the city has a printing press, the boy is now officially 11 years old because nobody who knows any better has the means to contradict it. In the world where your cat can get more hits on YouTube than there are people in New York City, the inaccuracies get publicized left and right, and then, rightly or wrongly, people lose faith in the news media.

This is kind of what we asked for. Give everyone a chance to speak to the world instead of only a privileged few and you get all the stories instead of only the rich man's story.

The problem now is instead of one party telling you a lie you didn't know was a lie, you have two parties saying contrary things and you know they can't both be right but the average person has no way to know who to believe and also doesn't have the capacity to verify everything personally.

So we end up with camps who are absolutely convinced that the other camp is nothing but angry malicious idiots who can't see the truth, even though that's what they think about you.

Other comments on this thread are suggesting switching the mode of payment to PayPal which let's you cancel instantly. Or credit card chargebacks if you can document that you exhausted reasonable efforts to ask NYT to cancel the subscription

I think that's a very good point. If that reporter takes the story to their editor, what's it going to sound like?

R: So, this article is about a blog and the person that writes it...

E: Ok, cool, why can't I find the blog?

R: Err... it doesn't exist anymore

E: Why not?

R: Because I doxx the author in this article.

If you were an editor, would you publish that? The subject of the story no longer exists, so the story is less interesting, _and_ you come off looking like an asshole.

I think any reasonable editor, would either not publish the story, or not publish the name. Seems like a great move to me.

I'm not surprised that someone who has given tons of thought to prisoner's dilemma type problems can make good moves in this type of game.

Anonymity is not some sort of natural right. For most of our existence as a species, we lived in small groups where you quite naturally knew everyone you dealt with. True strangers were rare, and quite rightly regarded with a certain suspicion. Anonymity only became possible when we started living in groups large enough that you might have to deal with people you hadn't met before, because there were just too many people around for you to know all of them. And even in such circumstances, if you were going to enter into some sort of serious agreement, like buying on credit or renting property, you would absolutely have been required to identify yourself. Historically, anonymity of any sort has only sometimes been possible, and anonymity in serious matters has generally not been possible at all. It is therefore not reasonable to speak of a natural right to anonymity.

My position, strictly speaking, is that anonymity is generally permissible. If you want to try to remain anonymous, that is in many cases fine. But it is also quite difficult, particularly in the face of determined investigation, and is therefore rather unrealistic. Unless you really know what you are doing, your attempts will fail as soon as someone really cares about finding out. This makes combining anonymity with any sort of public prominence or celebrity status a particularly bad fit, because plenty of people care about knowing all sorts of details about celebrities, so there is plenty of reason for both amateur snoops and professional investigators to go looking.

I don't find your example of celebrity pseudonyms particularly convincing. These are simply terms of convenience, part of crafting a public image. They are not true attempts to hide anyone's identity. Pull up the wiki page of most any celebrity that goes by a stage name, and you'll find their real or original name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_John

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne

(FWIW, psychotherapists and psychiatrists are not the same thing.)

I have occasionally been curious about that, but never curious enough to try to make an effort to find out. Call it a mix of laziness and respect for the preferences of others.