Very disappointed to see down votes without comments on such an important topic. I had barely heard of SSC before this recent controversy, but my cursory initial fact-check seems to support the facts of this post. I would like to hear from the down-voters what, if anything, is untrue, or where they think this argument goes wrong.
(As a meta-level point, everyone, downvoting someone for asking for clarification on why you’re downvoting someone is not a good look.)
Hi Michelle. I’m sorry you’re getting downvotes for this comment. There are several reasons I strong-downvoted this post, but for the sake of “brevity” I’ll focus on one: I think that the OP’s presentation of the current SSC/NYT controversy – and especially of the community’s response to that controversy – is profoundly biased and misleading.
The NYT plans to use Scott Alexander’s real name in an article about him, against his express wishes. They have routinely granted anonymous or pseudonymous status to other people in the past, including the subjects of articles, but refused this in Alexander’s case. Alexander gives several reasons why this will be very damaging for him, but they plan to do it anyway.
I think that pretty clearly fits the definition of “doxing”, and even if it doesn’t it’s still clearly bad. The post is scathing towards these concerns, scare-quoting “doxing” wherever it can and giving no indication that it thinks the Times’s actions are in any way problematic.
In his takedown post, Scott made it very clear that people should be polite and civil when complaining about this:
There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS.
(please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.)
The response has overwhelmingly followed these instructions. People have cancelled their subscriptions, wrote letters, organised a petition, and generally complained to the people responsible. These are all totally appropriate things to do when you are upset about something! The petition is polite and conciliatory; so are most of the letters I’ve seen. Some of the public figures I’ve seen respond on Twitter have used strong wording (“disgraceful”, “shame on you”)) but nothing that seems in any way out of place in a public discourse on a controversial decision.
The OP’s characterisation of this? “Attack[ing] a woman of color on [Alexander’s] word”. Their evidence? Five tweets from random Twitter users I’ve never heard of, none of whom have more than a tiny number of followers. They provide no evidence of anyone prominent in EA (a high-karma Forum user, say, or a well-known public figure) doing anything that looks like harassment or ad hominem attacks on Ms Tam.
I hope it’s obvious why this is bad practice: if the threshold for condemning the conduct of a group is “a few random people did something bad in support of the same position”, you will never have to change your mind on anything. Somehow, I doubt the OP had much sympathy for people who were more interested in condemning the riots in Minneapolis than supporting the peaceful protesters; yet here they use a closely analogous tactic. If they want to persuade me the EA community has acted badly, they should cite bad conduct from the EA community; they do not.
The implicit claim that one shouldn’t publicly criticise Pui-Wing Tam because she is a woman of colour is also profoundly problematic. Pui-Wing Tam is the technology editor of the NYT, the most powerful newspaper in the world. She is a powerful and influential person, and a public figure; more importantly, she is the powerful and influential public figure directly responsible for the thing all these people are mad about. Complaining to her about it, on Twitter and elsewhere, is entirely appropriate. Obviously personal harrassment is unacceptable; if you give me a link to that kind of behaviour, I will condemn it, wherever it comes from. But implying that you can’t publicly complain about the conduct of a powerful person if that person is a member of a favoured group is incredibly dangerous.
That’s my position on how the OP has presented the current controversy. I think the way they have misrepresented those who disagree with them on this is sufficient by itself for a strong downvote. I also disagree with their characterisation of Scott Alexander and the SSC project, but as I said, I don’t want this comment to be any longer than it already is. :-)
I think people are quite reasonably deciding that this post isn’t worth taking the time to engage with. I’ll just make three points even though I could make more:
“A good rule of thumb might be that when InfoWars takes your side, you probably ought to do some self-reflection on whether the path your community is on is the path to a better world.”—Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
“In response, the Slate Star Codex community basically proceeded to harass and threaten to dox both the editor and journalist writing the article. Multiple individuals threatened to release their addresses, or explicitly threatened them with violence.”—The author is completely ignoring the fact that Scott Alexander specifically told people to be nice, not to take it out on them and didn’t name the journalist. This seems to suggest that the author isn’t even trying to be fair.
“I have nothing to say to you — other people have demonstrated this point more clearly elsewhere”—I’m not going to claim that such differences exist, but if the author isn’t open to dialog on one claim, it’s reasonable to infer that they mightn’t be open to dialog on other claims even if they are completely unrelated.
Quite simply this is a low quality post and “I’m going to write a low quality post on topic X and you have to engage with me because topic X is important regardless of the quality” just gives a free pass on low quality content. But doesn’t it spur discussion? I’ve actually found that most often low quality posts don’t even provide the claimed benefit. They don’t change people’s minds and tend to lead to low quality discussion.
Also the sleight of hand where the author implies that Scott is a white supremacist, and supports this not by referencing anything that Scott said, but by referencing things that unrelated people hanging out on the SSC subreddit have said and which Scott has never shown any signs of endorsing. If Scott himself had said anything that could be interpreted as an endorsement of white supremacy, surely it would have been mentioned in this post, so its absence is telling.
It’s part of the SSC ethos that “if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do”, then you should consider the possibility that that’s because you don’t understand, rather than because they’re stupid; the “principle of charity”. So that means taking ideas seriously — even ones you’re uncomfortable with. And the blog and its associated subreddit have rules of debate: that you’re not allowed to shout things down, or tell people they’re racist; you have to politely and honestly argue the facts of the issue at hand. It means that the sites are homes for lively debate, rare on the modern internet, between people who actually disagree; Left and Right, Republican and Democrat, pro-life and pro-choice, gender-critical feminists and trans-activist, MRA and feminist.
And that makes them vulnerable. Because if you’re someone who wants to do a hatchet job on them, you can easily go through the comments and find something that someone somewhere will find appalling. That’s partly a product of the disagreement and partly a function of how the internet works: there’s an old law of the internet, the “1% rule”, which says that the large majority of online comments will come from a hyperactive 1% of the community. That was true when I used to work at Telegraph Blogs — you’d get tens of thousands of readers, but you’d see the same 100 or so names cropping up every time in the comment sections.
(Those names were often things like Aelfric225 or TheUnBrainWashed, and they were usually really unhappy about immigration.)
That’s why the rationalists are paranoid. They know that if someone from a mainstream media organisation wanted to, they could go through those comments, cherry-pick an unrepresentative few, and paint the entire community as racist and/or sexist, even though surveys of the rationalist community and SSC readership found they were much more left-wing and liberal on almost every issue than the median American or Briton. And they also knew that there were people on the internet who unambiguously want to destroy them because they think they’re white supremacists.
The downvotes are probably because, indeed, the claims only make sense if you look at the level of something like “has Scott ever said anything that could be construed as X”. I think a complete engagement with SSC doesn’t support the argument, and it’s specifically the fact that SSC is willing to address issues in their whole without flinching away from topics that might make a person “guilty by association” that makes it a compelling blog.
Not to be rude, but what context do you recommend would help for interpreting the statement, “I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics,” or describing requiring poor people to be sterilized to receive basic income as “probably better than what we have right now?” Because those seem fairly clear.
I think that a lot of these comments are subtle is what makes them so concerning. If I ran a cooking blog where I talked about cooking 95% of the time, and 5% of the time talked about eugenics, the cooking community would be justified in being deeply concerned about associating with me. What’s concerning is precisely that a large portion of our community finds a blog that unflinchingly endorses something like eugenics compelling. Analysis is never without values, and SSC has been explicit in its values at many points, as cited above.
Do you find it frightening that in defending the blog, people who associate with a community that wants the world to be better openly threatened journalists? Or that we overlap with a community that has endorsed neo-Nazi slogans like the 14 words?
Not to be rude, but what context do you recommend would help for interpreting the statement, “I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics,” or describing requiring poor people to be sterilized to receive basic income as “probably better than what we have right now?”
The part from the middle of that excerpt that you left out certainly seems like relevant context: “Even though I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics, I don’t think these are two things that go well together – making the income conditional upon sterilization is a little too close to coercion for my purposes. Still, probably better than what we have right now.” (see my top-level comment)
I had written a good answer here, but it got deleted because I accidentally tapped a link. Comments should save drafts …
The TLDR of it is:
Censorship serves the elite and has historically been used to oppress and not empower.
It does not matter that people are evil [OUTGROUP HERE]. I have personally known people who openly said they were terrorists-if-opportunity-allows, nazis (literal Hitler supporters), thieves, etc. NONE OF THEM did anything out of the ordinary. Their incentives made them act just like others. See this book for a treatise on how mere capitalism mitigated apartheid racism.
Even if censorship worked, it is inherently wrong itself. It is a form of manipulation and oppression. I don’t say its benefits could not trump its costs, but there definitely are costs which are often neglected. Our society generally does not care about people’s intellectual integrity and dignity. That doesn’t mean those don’t matter.
I actually think it’s true that the OP hasn’t advocated for censoring anyone. They haven’t said that SA or SSC should be suppressed, and if they think it’s a good thing that SA has willingly chosen to delete it, well, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t internet contributors I think we’d be better off without, even if I would strongly oppose attempts to silence them.
It’s important to be able to say things are bad without saying they should be censored: that’s basically the core of free-speech liberalism. “I don’t think this should be censored, but I think it’s bad, and I think it’s worrying you don’t think it’s bad” is on its face a reasonable position, and it’s important that it’s one people can say.
I downvoted the post for several reasons, but I don’t think pro-censorship is one of them. I might be wrong about this. But the horns effect is real and powerful, and we should all be wary of it.
I have heavily updated on you being a bad faith actor. If you seriously believe your argument is not significantly pro-censorship, I suggest studying censorship historically in cases it clashes with your political views. Then compare those historical cases with what you advocate. Political censorship always believes itself to be something else. As the theocracy I live in says on my textbooks, “Freedom is not to do what anyone wants. Freedom is doing what the divine leader says.” Or as famous fiction has it, “war is peace.”
The original post makes highly damaging claims, but it at least provides links to the sources that led the author to make said claims, allowing for in-depth engagement from commenters. One could argue that it breaks certain Forum rules (e.g. around accuracy), but I wouldn’t call it “spam”.
This comment breaks Forum rules itself; it is unclear and unnecessarily rude. I appreciate that you feel strongly about the post’s claims, but please refrain from referring to posts as “spam” or “trolling” unless you are at least willing to explain why you believe they are spammy or insincere.
Another way this could have been phrased:
“I don’t think the OP uses appropriate context when making serious, damaging claims about the motives and beliefs of another writer. (IDEALLY, MORE DETAIL AS TO WHY YOU THINK THE OP IS WRONG.) I don’t think engaging with this author will be very productive.”
Keeping conversation civil takes more time and effort, but it’s really important to do this if we want the Forum to avoid many of the standard pitfalls of online discourse.
Very disappointed to see down votes without comments on such an important topic. I had barely heard of SSC before this recent controversy, but my cursory initial fact-check seems to support the facts of this post. I would like to hear from the down-voters what, if anything, is untrue, or where they think this argument goes wrong.
(As a meta-level point, everyone, downvoting someone for asking for clarification on why you’re downvoting someone is not a good look.)
Hi Michelle. I’m sorry you’re getting downvotes for this comment. There are several reasons I strong-downvoted this post, but for the sake of “brevity” I’ll focus on one: I think that the OP’s presentation of the current SSC/NYT controversy – and especially of the community’s response to that controversy – is profoundly biased and misleading.
The NYT plans to use Scott Alexander’s real name in an article about him, against his express wishes. They have routinely granted anonymous or pseudonymous status to other people in the past, including the subjects of articles, but refused this in Alexander’s case. Alexander gives several reasons why this will be very damaging for him, but they plan to do it anyway.
I think that pretty clearly fits the definition of “doxing”, and even if it doesn’t it’s still clearly bad. The post is scathing towards these concerns, scare-quoting “doxing” wherever it can and giving no indication that it thinks the Times’s actions are in any way problematic.
In his takedown post, Scott made it very clear that people should be polite and civil when complaining about this:
The response has overwhelmingly followed these instructions. People have cancelled their subscriptions, wrote letters, organised a petition, and generally complained to the people responsible. These are all totally appropriate things to do when you are upset about something! The petition is polite and conciliatory; so are most of the letters I’ve seen. Some of the public figures I’ve seen respond on Twitter have used strong wording (“disgraceful”, “shame on you”)) but nothing that seems in any way out of place in a public discourse on a controversial decision.
The OP’s characterisation of this? “Attack[ing] a woman of color on [Alexander’s] word”. Their evidence? Five tweets from random Twitter users I’ve never heard of, none of whom have more than a tiny number of followers. They provide no evidence of anyone prominent in EA (a high-karma Forum user, say, or a well-known public figure) doing anything that looks like harassment or ad hominem attacks on Ms Tam.
I hope it’s obvious why this is bad practice: if the threshold for condemning the conduct of a group is “a few random people did something bad in support of the same position”, you will never have to change your mind on anything. Somehow, I doubt the OP had much sympathy for people who were more interested in condemning the riots in Minneapolis than supporting the peaceful protesters; yet here they use a closely analogous tactic. If they want to persuade me the EA community has acted badly, they should cite bad conduct from the EA community; they do not.
The implicit claim that one shouldn’t publicly criticise Pui-Wing Tam because she is a woman of colour is also profoundly problematic. Pui-Wing Tam is the technology editor of the NYT, the most powerful newspaper in the world. She is a powerful and influential person, and a public figure; more importantly, she is the powerful and influential public figure directly responsible for the thing all these people are mad about. Complaining to her about it, on Twitter and elsewhere, is entirely appropriate. Obviously personal harrassment is unacceptable; if you give me a link to that kind of behaviour, I will condemn it, wherever it comes from. But implying that you can’t publicly complain about the conduct of a powerful person if that person is a member of a favoured group is incredibly dangerous.
That’s my position on how the OP has presented the current controversy. I think the way they have misrepresented those who disagree with them on this is sufficient by itself for a strong downvote. I also disagree with their characterisation of Scott Alexander and the SSC project, but as I said, I don’t want this comment to be any longer than it already is. :-)
I think people are quite reasonably deciding that this post isn’t worth taking the time to engage with. I’ll just make three points even though I could make more:
“A good rule of thumb might be that when InfoWars takes your side, you probably ought to do some self-reflection on whether the path your community is on is the path to a better world.”—Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
“In response, the Slate Star Codex community basically proceeded to harass and threaten to dox both the editor and journalist writing the article. Multiple individuals threatened to release their addresses, or explicitly threatened them with violence.”—The author is completely ignoring the fact that Scott Alexander specifically told people to be nice, not to take it out on them and didn’t name the journalist. This seems to suggest that the author isn’t even trying to be fair.
“I have nothing to say to you — other people have demonstrated this point more clearly elsewhere”—I’m not going to claim that such differences exist, but if the author isn’t open to dialog on one claim, it’s reasonable to infer that they mightn’t be open to dialog on other claims even if they are completely unrelated.
Quite simply this is a low quality post and “I’m going to write a low quality post on topic X and you have to engage with me because topic X is important regardless of the quality” just gives a free pass on low quality content. But doesn’t it spur discussion? I’ve actually found that most often low quality posts don’t even provide the claimed benefit. They don’t change people’s minds and tend to lead to low quality discussion.
Also the sleight of hand where the author implies that Scott is a white supremacist, and supports this not by referencing anything that Scott said, but by referencing things that unrelated people hanging out on the SSC subreddit have said and which Scott has never shown any signs of endorsing. If Scott himself had said anything that could be interpreted as an endorsement of white supremacy, surely it would have been mentioned in this post, so its absence is telling.
As Tom Chivers recently noted:
The downvotes are probably because, indeed, the claims only make sense if you look at the level of something like “has Scott ever said anything that could be construed as X”. I think a complete engagement with SSC doesn’t support the argument, and it’s specifically the fact that SSC is willing to address issues in their whole without flinching away from topics that might make a person “guilty by association” that makes it a compelling blog.
Not to be rude, but what context do you recommend would help for interpreting the statement, “I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics,” or describing requiring poor people to be sterilized to receive basic income as “probably better than what we have right now?” Because those seem fairly clear.
I think that a lot of these comments are subtle is what makes them so concerning. If I ran a cooking blog where I talked about cooking 95% of the time, and 5% of the time talked about eugenics, the cooking community would be justified in being deeply concerned about associating with me. What’s concerning is precisely that a large portion of our community finds a blog that unflinchingly endorses something like eugenics compelling. Analysis is never without values, and SSC has been explicit in its values at many points, as cited above.
Do you find it frightening that in defending the blog, people who associate with a community that wants the world to be better openly threatened journalists? Or that we overlap with a community that has endorsed neo-Nazi slogans like the 14 words?
The part from the middle of that excerpt that you left out certainly seems like relevant context: “Even though I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics, I don’t think these are two things that go well together – making the income conditional upon sterilization is a little too close to coercion for my purposes. Still, probably better than what we have right now.” (see my top-level comment)
I had written a good answer here, but it got deleted because I accidentally tapped a link. Comments should save drafts … The TLDR of it is:
Censorship serves the elite and has historically been used to oppress and not empower.
It does not matter that people are evil [OUTGROUP HERE]. I have personally known people who openly said they were terrorists-if-opportunity-allows, nazis (literal Hitler supporters), thieves, etc. NONE OF THEM did anything out of the ordinary. Their incentives made them act just like others. See this book for a treatise on how mere capitalism mitigated apartheid racism.
Even if censorship worked, it is inherently wrong itself. It is a form of manipulation and oppression. I don’t say its benefits could not trump its costs, but there definitely are costs which are often neglected. Our society generally does not care about people’s intellectual integrity and dignity. That doesn’t mean those don’t matter.
I’m not advocating for censoring anyone. I’m interested in complicity with racism in the EA community.
I actually think it’s true that the OP hasn’t advocated for censoring anyone. They haven’t said that SA or SSC should be suppressed, and if they think it’s a good thing that SA has willingly chosen to delete it, well, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t internet contributors I think we’d be better off without, even if I would strongly oppose attempts to silence them.
It’s important to be able to say things are bad without saying they should be censored: that’s basically the core of free-speech liberalism. “I don’t think this should be censored, but I think it’s bad, and I think it’s worrying you don’t think it’s bad” is on its face a reasonable position, and it’s important that it’s one people can say.
I downvoted the post for several reasons, but I don’t think pro-censorship is one of them. I might be wrong about this. But the horns effect is real and powerful, and we should all be wary of it.
I have heavily updated on you being a bad faith actor. If you seriously believe your argument is not significantly pro-censorship, I suggest studying censorship historically in cases it clashes with your political views. Then compare those historical cases with what you advocate. Political censorship always believes itself to be something else. As the theocracy I live in says on my textbooks, “Freedom is not to do what anyone wants. Freedom is doing what the divine leader says.” Or as famous fiction has it, “war is peace.”
This (the OP) is blatant political spam / concern trolling. It doesn’t deserve a response.
The original post makes highly damaging claims, but it at least provides links to the sources that led the author to make said claims, allowing for in-depth engagement from commenters. One could argue that it breaks certain Forum rules (e.g. around accuracy), but I wouldn’t call it “spam”.
This comment breaks Forum rules itself; it is unclear and unnecessarily rude. I appreciate that you feel strongly about the post’s claims, but please refrain from referring to posts as “spam” or “trolling” unless you are at least willing to explain why you believe they are spammy or insincere.
Another way this could have been phrased:
“I don’t think the OP uses appropriate context when making serious, damaging claims about the motives and beliefs of another writer. (IDEALLY, MORE DETAIL AS TO WHY YOU THINK THE OP IS WRONG.) I don’t think engaging with this author will be very productive.”
Keeping conversation civil takes more time and effort, but it’s really important to do this if we want the Forum to avoid many of the standard pitfalls of online discourse.