Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

It's just the publicity stunt, leaving the NYT with the options to (a) drop the story, (b) omit a significant detail, or (c) report that he deleted the blog because they said they were going to doxx him. The story hasn't been published yet, so it's working so far.

Short-term, this has probably net increased the visibility of Alexander's content (slightly less convenient to access, but much more attention), and I assume he expected that. The reporter can't actually believe that Alexander is trying to hide something horrible that he wrote, so the sentence I quoted can only be knowingly dishonest innuendo. That's why I said "ugly".

One of the exceptions is Virgil Texas, whose real name is about five entries down when you google him, and Banksy, whose real name is on his wikipedia page.

> He's published his full name multiple times (even on his own blog).

I'm almost certain this is untrue. Are you possibly mistaking his pseudonym "Scott Alexander" for this full name? If not, and you understand that Scott and Alexander are his first and middle names, could you please provide a link to an example of where he has published his last name on his blog (or at this point, on the relevant archive.org page)?

Edit: I'm guessing from your comments further down the page that you understand the pseudonym aspect, and have a different conception of "publish" than I do. Do you perhaps mean that he linked or referred to a scientific paper on which he was listed by full name as author? If so, and if true, the strongest I'd probably phrase this is "revealed" rather than "published". If not, and if I'm wrong, and he has directly published his last name on his blog in a manner intended to make it publicly known, I'd like to know so I stop making false claims in the future.

You've heard of the thin blue line, well this is the thin grey line.

There's no attempt to stop any downhill trend. If they wanted that, they'd write to inform and attempt to give all relevant facts. Instead, they curate what the public is allowed to be showed, happily trumping up juicy anonymous rumors one moment and then failing to report well-documented, relevant facts the next.

They're losing because that information is getting out anyhow and every time it does, they lose a little more of the public trust. Gell-Mann amnesia remains in full effect, but a lot more people are simply unplugging. Legacy media is facing something much worse for them than a "war"--they're facing utter irrelevance as people figure out that they're mostly using unlinked online sources anyhow and we can completely bypass the middlemen.

Constant outrage porn is terribly unhealthy for your heart, anyhow, and if you have any friends, you'll hear about anything big enough to be important anyhow and can look into the original sources (if any).

I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientific paper should I care to, rather than some journalist's half-baked summary thereof.

> What is the summary? Ugly? If so then I agree, SSC was an ugly place.

And yet, the original context of you asking what was ugly was

> Your points are valid but what is the point of calling the article ugly?

You somehow managed to forget your own comment in the space of a few minutes.