The NYTimes infamously doxxed Slate Star Codex[1], despite him basically begging them not to because it would upend his psychiatry practice, back in 2020 for no reason other than because they could.
One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities:
https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
> A third tweet posted by Jeong in 2014 said, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
There’s a context to that you’re missing. The people saying that are usually using the formulation that racism = prejudice + power. So can black people in the U.K. be prejudiced? Yes, definitely. Racist? They’d need to be in a position of authority for it to matter.
Other people use the formulation racism = prejudice about race, and end up talking past each other.
You are correct that there are multiple somewhat-conflicting definitions of racism but “taking past each other” isn’t really what’s happening.
The “classic” definition of racism is something like “a system of oppression based on race”. People pull that out to explain why “[minority] people can’t be racist”, but that that definition isn’t about people. It’s about systems, so if we take that definition, no individual can be racist. Most of the same people who trot out this definition will still call majority-race individuals racist (clearly using a different definition). It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand to swap definitions in a self serving way like this.
> racism = prejudice + power
This seems like an oversimplified perversion of the “systemic” definition and doesn’t make sense if you actually consider it. By this definition a poor white woman basically couldn’t be racist, while a rich black man could.
There's a term for that: systemic racism. The redefining racism thing just comes from a bunch of people who wanted to be racist without admitting racism -- often, ironically, from a position of power.
Systemic racism is something different. It's the legal system being set up in a way that favors/disfavors certain groups. It's not something a person does.
Yes, it's power + racism, which is the idea that the "power+prejudice" redefinition was getting at with the added clarification that the power has to be real rather than in the eye of the beholder. It achieves the stated purpose of the redefinition but without providing cover for people who want a reason why their racism is good while yours is bad.
I moderated a large Reddit community (circa 2014). She threatened to have articles written about how we were racist/misogynistic, unless we removed comments she didn't like.
Honestly these loudmouths are usually quite privileged themselves. These theatrics are either to deflect from themselves, or they are delusional about how tough their life is.
I agree with your first statement. However I wouldn't dismiss them just because of that: as an analogy, most of the most effective campaigners against slavery were not slaves themselves.
I do agree that in this particular case the lady in question seems rather nasty, and the whole woke movement seems to be quite the circular firing squad.
for a good counterbalance to those just finding out the nyt is a state dept mouthpiece at best, read about real journalists and why there seem to be so few of them, read Pegasus by laurent richard. Spoiler alert, real journalists who expose powerful peoples' wrongdoings simply get killed.
One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.
404media is good stuff, one of the few news outlets I pay for. I didn't dig too deep on the above comment because I have a deep respect for journalists despite admittedly many of them servicing things I dislike by choice or coercion or for remuneration or fame, etc. Reading about journalists in more authoritarian countries was seriously depressing
Just like Knight Rider and Matlock had to deliver enough entertainment to keep you from switching channels and instead have you watch the next beer ad.
I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video.
Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.
The journalist knew what she was doing. Naomi was in China, agreed to do an interview about her self & her work, then the journo tried to drum up clicks by putting her on the spot about politics.
Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.
I've read the original article again and I don't think people read it.
The whole interview is very supportive and based around how much shit she is getting. How she is hated for he appearance, how people don't believe she is technically skilled, that people thinks she is a fake persona or that some male is designing her whole career. Also that she gets many personal threats.
This is just her talking about herself and I am not sure how this is about chinese gov politics or how it is damning/doxing her.
Anyway her response was to find home address of one of the editors and put it in her next video. If i would be journalist and somebody did that to me i would expect my company to use their lawyers.
By releasing personal information which a reasonable person would expect to be private? I don't know the specifics of this case (only responding to the overly vague question) but information like address, private contact info, details about their families. Anything you would not immediately expect to become public knowledge simply by writing about topic(s).
Btw I don't know how closely you follow Naomi Wu, but take that with grain of salt.
(def. not defending bad journalists)
Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.
She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.
Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.
And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.
I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.
Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".
Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.
Let me shed a tear for the old white men, who hold all the money and power in today’s world p- these heinous social media “attacks” will leave them crying and shaking
I really didn't want to comment on this, but racism, ironically enough doesn't discriminate. If you want to discriminate against white rich people, you then say that you wouldn't against black rich people.
I'm not saying you shouldn't feel upset about rich people's behavior, but their skin color shouldn't enter the conversation.
I don’t want to discriminate against anyone - my point is that you can’t discriminate against people who hold all the power, so I won’t have much sympathy if someone trolls them online.
And yea I believe anyone who is really rich (like 8+ figures rich) is morally bankrupt.
You just validated exactly what I said was going to happen. You think every old white person holds all the money, you sir are a racist. Do you admit it?
Are you able to explain in 1 short sentence what Vice did wrong to her? Because I can't. I remember reading Wu's explanation and couldn't find anything in there, like at all. It was filled with prejudice.
Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..
> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.
I had a good chuckle going from Banksy on one line to whether the person is committing a crime on the other - that it's a crime was key to how the article claimed to find Banksy's identity and mentioned as one of the likely factors in why Banksy chose to be anonymous early on :D.
I get you mean whether they are causing any actual harm though (and agree for many such unmaskings), it was just an amusing juxtaposition of literal statements.
Although people repeatedly say this, NYT did not in fact dox Slate Star Codex. He revealed his own information because he said they were going to reveal his name based on a draft of the article he says he saw. The verge apparently reported that no draft had been written and the NYT was still in news gathering stage. Who knows what the truth of that is, but factually he released the information.
> The New York Times published an article about the blog in February 2021, three weeks after Alexander had publicly revealed his name.
Funnily enough, in the blog post you linked Scott Alexander also ruminates about how he never previously questioned journalistic attempts to dox Satoshi Nakamoto.
I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.
It was upending his psychiatry practice because he blogged, albeit in anonymized fashion, about his patients without disclosing it to them which I'd say is unethical but at the very least in the interest of his patients to be made known to them. I would be pretty pissed if I recognized something I told my psychiatrist on an internet blog. Frankly given how strongly one has to consent to even legally process clinical data I've never been sure if that was at all legal.
When someone's identity is in the public interest an investigative journalist isn't doxxing anyone, they're doing their job. Both true for Nakamoto and arguably Scott
It's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.
That part of things is what really made this entire argument all apart of me.
There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number.
Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.
Take a moment and apply some common sense to your math. Do you really think there are 5 psychiatrists in the country named Scott? That's off by multiple orders of magnitude.
> I always found that case a bit odd. For one he was blogging under his real name and had made his medical practice known, so you could just google him.
Cade Metz wrote the article under his real name, and his home address is public information, but presumably he wouldn't appreciate it being published on the internet. Why is that any different?
It’s legal to publish anonymous patient data, doctors do it frequently e.g. in “case studies”. As long as it can’t be traced back to the patient I don’t see why they should care (I wouldn’t). And since it increases public knowledge (e.g. how to treat future patients) I think it’s not only ethical, but should be encouraged.
Doxxing also increases public knowledge, but knowing who’s behind some online pseudonym is much less useful than patient anecdotes (what would you do with the former? Satisfy your interest (or what else do you mean by “public interest”)?). Moreover, unlike anonymous patient data, it has a serious downside: risking someone’s job, relationships, or even life.
In principle, anonymized case studies do not require consent and historically, they were often published without. Without personally identifiable information, this is and always has been 100% legal. But in modern practice, many journals acknowledge that making a case fully anonymous in the age of the internet might not even be possible without taking away everything noteworthy, so they require some form of consent nowadays.
That's not so easy, especially for clinical case studies. If any data points are irrelevant, they should not be stated at all, because they actually might not be irrelevant after all and by arbitrarily changing them, you could confound results. On the other hand, it has been shown that three or more indirect data points can already be enough to unmask you in an anonymized report. And most reports usually contain many more than that. So it's not surprising that journals would cover their backs by requiring consent, even if the law does not explicitly demand it.
It’s been known since at least the 90s that it’s really hard to fully anonymize patient records. You can’t be certain but you can infer probabilities from very little information.
I don’t know how typical it is, but HIPAA explicitly doesn’t cover patient data after anonymization, and anecdotally I’ve had an anonymous case study published about me without my consent (although I was notified after).
The NYT has no authority to dox people. If they or anyone believed that SSC was acting unethically or illegally, that should be processed through proper legal or ethical channels, which exist for a reason. The solution is not that NYT should abuse their power to skip those channels.
Yes, he had to distance himself from it because his audience turned out to be significantly more horrible than him and it was getting on his nerves. But he still holds significant sympathy towards race science views.
No, unfortunately they don't. Scott Alexander Siskind is definitely sympathetic to race science and neoreaction, that's WHY he wrote the "anti"-reactionary FAQ. It's probably the most popular document about "neoreaction" on the internet and made many many people more aware of neoreactionary ideas. He did this intentionally because he likes neoreactionaries and thinks they are correct about race science and that they're useful allies.
There is simply no other way to explain this email [0] that he wrote.
One critical point, he discusses "criticizing" the neoreactionaries, and says he disagrees with them on several points.
> I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
There are a "few other things" he thinks they're right about, but he specifically lists all four things that he thinks are problematic. None of them are race science, which implies that race science is one of the "few other things" he thinks they're correct about.
You can put this together with enough of his public writing to see where he stands on the issue. He's clearly aligned with "race realism".
This entire email is also accompanied by a threat never to reveal these thoughts of Scott's. Why? Because he knows that being outed for his real views would do serious damage to his reputation. That's also why he got mad at the NYT, because they had his number and he didn't want anyone to find out about his real politics.
If you're the kind of person who is naive enough to think "He wrote an anti-reactionary FAQ, how could he be a reactionary?", I am sorry, but you're dealing with a lying snake.
This one is more direct than most, but comments about the subject are not uncommon on the older blog. I think reading this material is why the journalist turned against him but never stated why. "Psychiatrist has dozens of charts on their secret personal blog comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel" is a headline you might try to hide out of politeness to the uninvolved.
What's wrong with comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel? What's wrong with talking about any real phenomena? Is the assumption that he must have a hidden bad-faith agenda?
It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.
> It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.
It’s because the machine is their god. Service to the machine provides your value, and by extension your right to exist. If someone is no longer capable of the serving the machine, they are discard. What that looks like exactly is not pretty
Some people are inherently incapable of proving more value to the machine than they consume. What is to be done with these “extra” people?
Who's they? The subset of politically correct types who reject the idea of universal human dignity and instead tie your moral worth to material output, but still keep insisting that everyone's equal? Honestly I don't think it's a large group.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416