I understand Scott Alexander's arguments for why he doesn't want to be doxxed.
I haven't heard NYT's arguments for why they think it's OK to doxx him.
I'm sure they must have some. (Nobody says "I do action X because I'm a moustache-twirling villain")
But I can't judge the difference between "that sounds like unconvincing post-hoc rationalisations" and "actually, that's a reasonably argument" if I haven't heard their side of the story at all.
Does anyone know where I can hear NYT's point of view? I tried emailing them and haven't had a reply yet.
There can be a difference between having reasons and being able to present them. Humans are known to take cookies from a cookie jar when nobody is looking even if nobody says "I take the cookie althought I am not allowed to". Even young people know to try to spin it somehow. People will not call themselfs villains but there are villains in the world.
In a situation where your stance is indefencible staying silent might make you more credible than making a bad defence.
Thus it might matter more whether both sides have had opportunity and effective means to express themselfs rather what all sides stories are.
In the case of a an actual policy it could also be that multiple people compromise to uphold the standard and different parties have different rationales for defending the standard. Then it could be that there is no rationale because there is no unified decision making process behind it.
Is anyone worried about Streisand effect type scenarios with this?
I get that the alternative is Scott being likely doxxed by the article being published, so this support against the NYT seems like a much better outcome.
At the same time, it seems like this might also lead to some malicious people being more motivated (now that they've heard of Scott through these channels) to figure out who he is and then share that to people who Scott would like to not know?
I mistakenly signed twice. Will there be a duplicate check, or could you simply remove my second entry?
[I forgot I had NoScript enabled, so after the first attempt nothing seemed to have happened. That's why I disabled it, which refreshed the site, and submitted again. Then I saw that first time worked already, so now my name appears twice.]
Here's the petition Scott asked us to make.
This is a request for a specific action by the New York Times editors:
That's all. It seems to me really important for public discourse on the internet for journalists to respect this norm in this situation.
Please share it in the places you share things, and email it to the prominent people who you know that the New York Times respects and care about.
Please sign.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jacob Lagerros 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 48 hours.