I Am Scott Alexander

At least I wish I were. He's a much better writer than I am. If you're reading this, I suggest you go to his blog at https://slatestarcodex.com/ and read him instead. Here are a few of my favorite posts:

Meditations On Moloch

Beware The Man Of One Study

Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable

I Can Tolerate Anything Except For the Outgroup

Against Lie Inflation

Toxoplasma of Rage

The Categories Were Made For Man, not Man for the Categories

And so many others!

Oh wait...

SlateStarCodex is dead. Here's what happened.

The New York Times wants to doxx Scott Alexander and reveal his real name. Scott is a psychiatrist and doesn't want his patients to know much about him outside of work. This is fairly typical for psychiatrists who deal with severe mental disorders like Scott does.

But also Scott writes some controversial things from time to time. He's known for being counter-culture, contradicting the narrative, and giving thorough reasons for doing so. He has always been good at stating the opposing point of view accurately and giving them the benefit of the doubt, but the world is big so with the attention of so many minds some people have threatened to kill or ruin his life. All the more reason to stay pseudonymous.

Why is the New York Times doing this? According to Scott, it's just policy.

Scott gave an interview to a NYTs journalist before he knew they wanted to reveal his real name. By Scott's account, this wasn't a disguised hit piece like some others have been. They wanted to talk about the rationalist community that Scott is a part of, and how they got a lot about Coronavirus right early on. It was in this good faith context that the NYTs wanted to doxx Scott and potentially ruin his life.

I mean, this blog that's so beloved by so many people, including Scott, has been removed. They didn't even have to doxx him to strike a severe hit to Scott and the community. The threat was powerful enough that the defensive counter-measure cost the whole blog, potentially forever.

There's a more insidious interpretation of events. Everybody is getting canceled in these last couple weeks and they went after Scott Alexander. Scott, the smart guy that he is, realized the NYTs were interviewing him for a hit-piece and removed his blog as a dodge and counter-punch move. The NYTs now looks awful before they even got a chance to publish their piece.

With this sort of thing, the first punch has a way of determining the entire fight. That's why hit-pieces are so effective. It becomes the main argument that most people are going to see, fewer people get to see the counter-argument, and even fewer get to see the counter-counter-argument. Attention is a scarce resource, and people are willing to give less and less of it the deeper into the weeds of an issue they go.

So that's the conspiracy theory of what's going on. It's probably wrong and stupid and I shouldn't be mentioning it. But it strikes me as a coincidental moment for Scott Alexander's blog to disappear. In the last 2 weeks, there's been a rush of cancellations against people just like Scott Alexander. Whether it was deliberate or not, they did end up canceling Scott Alexander. Maybe it's not forever. Maybe it's more accurate to say he canceled himself. But this whole thing has a lot of people upset and if there's one person who deserves to win against the cancel mob it's Scott Alexander.