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
You can stop right there.
I don't want to get into a prolonged litigation of the Slate Star Codex oeuvre. You can like it or loathe it. But at some point people on these threads need to speak up and say that this blogger is not in fact the second coming of John Stuart Mill --- or at least, that's not the universally held opinion of people in tech. I know, he goes on to hedge his claim the same way. But let's retain candor. You can employ hyperbole if you feel it helps a valid argument, but it remains hyperbole.
I know this will go down like a lead balloon on HN but I've never seen anything as cringeworthy and pseudo-intellectual as this entire rationalist subculture, where weird obsessions with Bayesianism or other highly technical lingo is applied to all sorts of topics in ways that just make anyone else roll their eyes.
I think this also ties into this latest drama because apparently Scott seems himself like some medieval scholar being persecuted by the authorities if his name ever comes up, which is dramatic given that his pseudonym is his actual first and middle name which together with "psychiatrist ann arbor" gives you his actual name on a google search and a picture. Any of his patients who has ever googled his name knows who he is.
Also, it should go down. If you're going to call something vile, you should at least provide some argument to that effect.
Second, and not that it matters, but searching Scott's real name does not link him as the author of SSC, which is what Scott cares about.
Rationalists have written a lot about:
- making better arguments, and discursive standards
- holding truer beliefs no matter if it goes against your current beliefs or makes you appear "cringeworthy"or "pseudo-intellectual"
In slight fairness to Aaronson, he doesn't present this as a "universally held opinion of people in tech", as the rest of that excerpt goes to say:
> . . . 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.
So he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot.
(I do agree with you that the comparison is pretty nuts, even as someone who thinks Slate Star Codex has a lot of good stuff.)
> he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot
No, he's not, he's saying, explicitly, in what you quoted, that "future generations of teachers will assign their students" Slate Star Codex as reading material. That's waaaay beyond "fans who will miss it a lot".
So what? If I'm honest, I'd take Dominic Armato, the guy who wrote the Top Chef Power Rankings, over James Joyce. But, for obvious reasons, I wouldn't write a public appeal suggesting that Armato is more important than Joyce.
There are enough comments in this thread discussing whether this guy has any real privacy (read: is pseudonymous) or not that I decided to see for myself.
After half an hour, I couldn't ferret out his last name no matter the search I tried, regardless of incognito mode, open session, etc. In fact, google kept trying to point me to some screenwriter, at least whenever I searched while logged in.
Admittedly, I don't remember ever reading his blog nor anything about him... But then again, that is probably true of most of his patients too, so my search results might be more representative of the results he cares about.
Now, something tells me that an NYT article would definitely bring his two personas closer together in anyone's search results. So, even assuming that my google-fu is weaker than I thought it was and it turns out that literally everyone (but me) can immediately know who he is, his fear still seems warranted to me.
Scott has been doxed in the past, as is alluded in the post. It's not about not having anyone know who he is. It's about the volume (and the quality) of the attention he'll receive if his name is in a high-profile thing. Basically it's about the mob.
And he has already been on the receiving end of the mob pseudonimously, and clearly does not want to be in his own real-name capacity.
That doesn't surprise me, to be honest. From what I've seen in this thread, you seem to care more about this guy than I do, and google adapts results according to one's history and all the other data google collects.
As for our incognito results, mine aren't even in English, so that also factors in why they might be so different. Though I doubt this Scott Alexander person cares about someone who won't ever be his patient.
I think he wants it the other way around... Sadly some troll posted his real name here yesterday, so I know it too. I tried and didn't get his blog as a result.
I think if a (potential) patient googles him right now, they similarly won't get his blog as a result. If the NYT associates his blog and his full name, googling his name will surely show the NYT article, and people will follow on to his blog. Which he does not want.
Despite Professor Aaronson's assurances of the writer's good character and pure intentions in this case, Scott Alexander - apart from his duty of care to his clients - is wise to not take that for granted considering his open-minded approach to various subjects which is liable by certain elements of the Ctrl-Left to warrant a cancel-attack.
That's what Scott Alexander said the NYT writer said. Everything we know about this story is entirely his portrayal and version of it. You can give it as much credence as you like but it is, so far, one party's representation.
I was interviewed for the article, and it did seem like it was likely to be positive. The questions Metz was asking were things like (paraphrased) "how did SSC and rationalists end up being so ahead of the curve on COVID?" and "Does this mean that we should take them more seriously on AI?"
This doesn't make sense - the writer is hardly going to say its gonna be a hatchet job, and if he said it was going to be anything other than positive then Scott Alexander would have mentioned that as it would have made his caution all the more understandable.
There is no reason to disbelieve that the writer said it was going to be positive and that Professor Aaronson believed him from experience.
> Everything we know about this story is entirely his portrayal and version of it.
This isn't true. Multiple other people on the SSC blog talked with the reporter, and they publicly compared notes on their impressions. Just because you haven't read these other sources doesn't allow you to claim that these versions don't exist.
Wait... Even the linked piece by Aaronson says: So in recent weeks, I’d spent a couple hours on the phone with Cade, answering his questions about the rationality community, the history of my interactions with it, and why I thought SlateStarCodex spoke to so many readers.
So presumably you have read reports from at least two people who had contact with the reporter. Why then do you say that it is solely "one party's representation"?
Maybe, the "Don't ever talk to the police" rule is also good for journalists. "Don't ever talk to journalists." Just like in real life, if you need to talk to the police, you hire a lawyer whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf, so if you need to talk to a journalist, you hire a publicist whose professional job it is to talk to them on your behalf.
This has to do with incentives. Police, no how nicely they talk to you, ultimately want to close the case. If they can do that by having you take the fall, they will do that. Journalists, no matter now nicely they talk to you, just want to create an article that will optimize for engagement from their readers. If they can do that by a misleading portrayal or something that otherwise harms your reputation or safety, they will do that. It is just business to them.
Yes, I think this is a good idea. If your blog/hobby/project is just a side-gig to your main employment, I’m not sure national media scrutiny is desirable. If you wanted to go full-time as a writer or pundit/speaker, perhaps like MMM or James Kunstler, and if you are media-savvy, then maybe it is worth playing the game.
Flamewar detector I think. IIRC HN posts are automatically down-ranked if the ratio of comments to upvotes gets above a certain threshold, because a large number of comments relative to upvotes frequently indicates that there's a flamewar going on in the comments section.
> In effect, Scott was trying to erect a firewall between his Internet persona and his personal and professional identities, and was relying on the entire world’s goodwill not to breach that firewall.
And it obviously did matter to him, because he took his blog down over the coming NYT article.
So what I wonder is why he didn't erect a far more effective firewall, one that didn't rely on goodwill. If he was writing pseudonymously, I don't get how his blog's credibility would rely on his true identity. But perhaps it did, in a subtle way.
Likely, he started out blogging when he was comparatively unknown. His audience grew, but he could not flip a switch a fix his prior lack of opsec without nuking his community.
He is definitely maximizing whatever damage could accrue to him through his outing, because he is fully into Streisand territory here. Just about the worst conceivable thing you could say, if in fear of being outed to nerds, is "I haven’t always done great" at hiding my identity.
I'm skeptical that there's really much damage to be done to him through disclosure at this point.
I don't believe it's reasonable to claim that any "firewall" existed. There are very basic things you can do to protect your identity, especially if you blogged at length and with a fair amount of notoriety under your real name, that Scott Alexander didn't do. I'm genuinely confused as to how he could in good faith claim his identity to have been a secret.
You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how it works.
The firewall wasn't burner phones and foreign VPNs, it was Scott emailing people who use his real name to respond to his blogging, and asking them not to do that. And it has worked pretty well up til now - when I search his real name I see nothing about SSC in the first 50 google results.
There’s a pretty big gradient between “in a national news article with his name” and “only posts on his blog using tor, from a coffee shop, on a burner device, under a pseudonym, with no personal details revealed” (or whatever constitutes a “firewall”).
At this point, casual observers do not know Scott’s identity. With a few hours of time most people on HN could probably figure it out, but in that same amount of time they’d also probably calm down if they were interested in sending death threats.
"In his takedown notice, Scott writes that it’s considered vitally important in psychiatry for patients to know almost nothing about their doctors, beyond their names and their areas of expertise."
I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk, and everyone in modern mental health knows it. I've worked as a clinician in the types of settings Mr. Alexander works in (locked inpatient psychiatric units), and others in mental health as well, and while there's certainly a longstanding debate within psychotherapy (talk therapy) about so-called "self-disclosure", the days when clinicians were expected to be "impenetrable to the patient" and "reflect nothing but what is shown to him" are long over.
Researchers and practitioners from nearly every therapeutic modality that rose up to challenge (and in many cases mostly displace) these leftovers from Freud have challenged the notion of "psychiatrist-as-cipher" from within their own perspectives. And there's even a very good case to be made that hiding oneself as aggressively as Freud wanted clinicians to do (and as aggressively as S. Alexander seems to want to maintain) only augments an already severely lopsided "power dynamic" in the therapeutic relationship. In plain English: it's attitudes like these that allow "the therapeutic class" of which I am a part to lord it over the populations we are ostensibly treating, people who in many cases aren't treated as people and who have valuable expertise and experience in matters relevant to them but who we, historically, have been eager to ignore.
But it's funny because these debates have occurred within the universe of "talk therapy", a universe that psychiatry as such abandoned about fifty years ago. Dr. Alexander is a psychiatrist in 2020 - not a psychologist, not a social worker, not even a nurse. His profession left all pretense of actually talking to patients behind when they fully embraced medications as the first-line treatments for nearly all mental disorders; psychiatrists today do "medication management".
None of this is to slander the guy, by the way; he's really good at what he does (the blogging, I mean), and I've enjoyed a lot of his output over the years. But this specific reason for remaining anonymous got under my skin a bit, because it's wobbly for the reasons I listed. It's _also_ wobbly, I'll add, because the rest of us in mental health could have no such luxury of privacy these days even if we wanted it - and 99.9999% of us do not maintain ultra-popular and highly public-facing blogs. I value my privacy greatly, perhaps more than Alexander, but citing ancient and highly contested professional mores to maintain it is pulling a fast one on the public he very much needs right now.
> I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk
It's bunk to call Scott's concerns bunk. You may think that he ought to self-disclose, but that's simply not his call: he has a job as a psychiatrist and has to stick to what his employers require of him if he wants to keep working in the field, and support his patients.
I didn't say he ought to; I said that if he were to self-disclose, there'd be little damage that could occur to his effectiveness as a clinician, contrary to what he claimed.
Further, to cite that as his first reason for wanting to remain pseudonymous is odd, because it's flimsy for the reasons I cited. His second reason (that he's gotten death threats) is much more compelling, and to me is all he needs to make a good argument here. Why sully it with things like this?
Readit News
You can stop right there.
I don't want to get into a prolonged litigation of the Slate Star Codex oeuvre. You can like it or loathe it. But at some point people on these threads need to speak up and say that this blogger is not in fact the second coming of John Stuart Mill --- or at least, that's not the universally held opinion of people in tech. I know, he goes on to hedge his claim the same way. But let's retain candor. You can employ hyperbole if you feel it helps a valid argument, but it remains hyperbole.
I think this also ties into this latest drama because apparently Scott seems himself like some medieval scholar being persecuted by the authorities if his name ever comes up, which is dramatic given that his pseudonym is his actual first and middle name which together with "psychiatrist ann arbor" gives you his actual name on a google search and a picture. Any of his patients who has ever googled his name knows who he is.
Second, and not that it matters, but searching Scott's real name does not link him as the author of SSC, which is what Scott cares about.
Rationalists have written a lot about: - making better arguments, and discursive standards - holding truer beliefs no matter if it goes against your current beliefs or makes you appear "cringeworthy"or "pseudo-intellectual"
Maybe you really ought to check them out?
Deleted Comment
> . . . 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.
So he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot.
(I do agree with you that the comparison is pretty nuts, even as someone who thinks Slate Star Codex has a lot of good stuff.)
No, he's not, he's saying, explicitly, in what you quoted, that "future generations of teachers will assign their students" Slate Star Codex as reading material. That's waaaay beyond "fans who will miss it a lot".
I'll take Scott Alexander over Mark Twain any day, and this is my my belief and not hyperbole, thank you very much.
So what? People disagree over the internet, big whoop.
What's your comment supposed to achieve exactly? Chastize us for our profanity? Recast our sincere appreciation as mere hyperbole? Please.
After half an hour, I couldn't ferret out his last name no matter the search I tried, regardless of incognito mode, open session, etc. In fact, google kept trying to point me to some screenwriter, at least whenever I searched while logged in.
Admittedly, I don't remember ever reading his blog nor anything about him... But then again, that is probably true of most of his patients too, so my search results might be more representative of the results he cares about.
Now, something tells me that an NYT article would definitely bring his two personas closer together in anyone's search results. So, even assuming that my google-fu is weaker than I thought it was and it turns out that literally everyone (but me) can immediately know who he is, his fear still seems warranted to me.
And he has already been on the receiving end of the mob pseudonimously, and clearly does not want to be in his own real-name capacity.
Is this really that hard to understand?
As for our incognito results, mine aren't even in English, so that also factors in why they might be so different. Though I doubt this Scott Alexander person cares about someone who won't ever be his patient.
I think if a (potential) patient googles him right now, they similarly won't get his blog as a result. If the NYT associates his blog and his full name, googling his name will surely show the NYT article, and people will follow on to his blog. Which he does not want.
No. That's what the NYT said it was going to be.
Despite Professor Aaronson's assurances of the writer's good character and pure intentions in this case, Scott Alexander - apart from his duty of care to his clients - is wise to not take that for granted considering his open-minded approach to various subjects which is liable by certain elements of the Ctrl-Left to warrant a cancel-attack.
Deleted Comment
That's what Scott Alexander said the NYT writer said. Everything we know about this story is entirely his portrayal and version of it. You can give it as much credence as you like but it is, so far, one party's representation.
There is no reason to disbelieve that the writer said it was going to be positive and that Professor Aaronson believed him from experience.
This isn't true. Multiple other people on the SSC blog talked with the reporter, and they publicly compared notes on their impressions. Just because you haven't read these other sources doesn't allow you to claim that these versions don't exist.
Wait... Even the linked piece by Aaronson says: So in recent weeks, I’d spent a couple hours on the phone with Cade, answering his questions about the rationality community, the history of my interactions with it, and why I thought SlateStarCodex spoke to so many readers.
So presumably you have read reports from at least two people who had contact with the reporter. Why then do you say that it is solely "one party's representation"?
This has to do with incentives. Police, no how nicely they talk to you, ultimately want to close the case. If they can do that by having you take the fall, they will do that. Journalists, no matter now nicely they talk to you, just want to create an article that will optimize for engagement from their readers. If they can do that by a misleading portrayal or something that otherwise harms your reputation or safety, they will do that. It is just business to them.
Deleted Comment
> In effect, Scott was trying to erect a firewall between his Internet persona and his personal and professional identities, and was relying on the entire world’s goodwill not to breach that firewall.
And it obviously did matter to him, because he took his blog down over the coming NYT article.
So what I wonder is why he didn't erect a far more effective firewall, one that didn't rely on goodwill. If he was writing pseudonymously, I don't get how his blog's credibility would rely on his true identity. But perhaps it did, in a subtle way.
It seems he is now taking the nuclear route.
I'm skeptical that there's really much damage to be done to him through disclosure at this point.
You can't have a firewall of "nobody is allowed to Google me". That's not how it works.
would you say the same of kendric lamar or mf doom? both fail the google test and yet the nytimes respected their pseudonyms.
At this point, casual observers do not know Scott’s identity. With a few hours of time most people on HN could probably figure it out, but in that same amount of time they’d also probably calm down if they were interested in sending death threats.
I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk, and everyone in modern mental health knows it. I've worked as a clinician in the types of settings Mr. Alexander works in (locked inpatient psychiatric units), and others in mental health as well, and while there's certainly a longstanding debate within psychotherapy (talk therapy) about so-called "self-disclosure", the days when clinicians were expected to be "impenetrable to the patient" and "reflect nothing but what is shown to him" are long over.
Researchers and practitioners from nearly every therapeutic modality that rose up to challenge (and in many cases mostly displace) these leftovers from Freud have challenged the notion of "psychiatrist-as-cipher" from within their own perspectives. And there's even a very good case to be made that hiding oneself as aggressively as Freud wanted clinicians to do (and as aggressively as S. Alexander seems to want to maintain) only augments an already severely lopsided "power dynamic" in the therapeutic relationship. In plain English: it's attitudes like these that allow "the therapeutic class" of which I am a part to lord it over the populations we are ostensibly treating, people who in many cases aren't treated as people and who have valuable expertise and experience in matters relevant to them but who we, historically, have been eager to ignore.
But it's funny because these debates have occurred within the universe of "talk therapy", a universe that psychiatry as such abandoned about fifty years ago. Dr. Alexander is a psychiatrist in 2020 - not a psychologist, not a social worker, not even a nurse. His profession left all pretense of actually talking to patients behind when they fully embraced medications as the first-line treatments for nearly all mental disorders; psychiatrists today do "medication management".
None of this is to slander the guy, by the way; he's really good at what he does (the blogging, I mean), and I've enjoyed a lot of his output over the years. But this specific reason for remaining anonymous got under my skin a bit, because it's wobbly for the reasons I listed. It's _also_ wobbly, I'll add, because the rest of us in mental health could have no such luxury of privacy these days even if we wanted it - and 99.9999% of us do not maintain ultra-popular and highly public-facing blogs. I value my privacy greatly, perhaps more than Alexander, but citing ancient and highly contested professional mores to maintain it is pulling a fast one on the public he very much needs right now.
It's bunk to call Scott's concerns bunk. You may think that he ought to self-disclose, but that's simply not his call: he has a job as a psychiatrist and has to stick to what his employers require of him if he wants to keep working in the field, and support his patients.
Further, to cite that as his first reason for wanting to remain pseudonymous is odd, because it's flimsy for the reasons I cited. His second reason (that he's gotten death threats) is much more compelling, and to me is all he needs to make a good argument here. Why sully it with things like this?