Here’s the petition Scott asked us to make.
This is a request for a specific action by the New York Times editors:
We, the undersigned, urge the New York Times to respect Scott Alexander’s request to not reveal his real name in a planned piece discussing the Slate Star Codex blog and community.
[...]
That’s all. This seems to me an important moment for a large group of people to jointly agree on basic good norms around public discourse on the internet.
Consider signing, sharing, and emailing it to prominent people who you know the New York Times respects and care about.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ben Pace and Rob Bensinger for making the petition with me.
Thanks to Paul Graham, Steven Pinker and many others for their early signatures.
Thanks to Sarah Haider and Tanner Greer for independently organising a petition and then joining forces with ours.
Thanks to so many other people who are still unsubscribing from the NYT, giving them respectful-but-firm feedback, and otherwise supporting Scott in this situation. It’s been great to see so much love and support for SSC these past days.
It doesn’t seem to me this has much relevance to EA.
In addition to what Aaron said, I’d guess Scott is responsible for probably 10% of EA recruiting over the last few years.
As someone who first encountered EA through Slate Star Codex, this is also my sense.
I’ll add some context to clarify to readers why this could be seen as relevant:
Scott Alexander has done a huge amount of writing about effective altruism, including the following posts that many would regard as “classic” (or at least I do):
Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others
Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable
No Time Like the Present for AI Safety Work (and other posts on this topic)
Fear and Loathing at Effective Altruism Global 2017
His most recent reader survey found that 13% of his readers self-identified as being “effective altruists” (this is from his summary of the survey; I don’t know the original text of the question). That’s about 1600 people.