a specific individual who 3) never signed up for a position of responsibility to field these kinds of threats 

Which would not be the case for a journalists who decided to take the repsonsibility of doxxing someone. That seems like a clear way of signing up for the responsibility. 

A catastrophic result might be that personally-targeted violence is visited on someone at the Times by a psychopath who uses the boycott as their excuse. 

You might also prevent a psychopath from visiting someone at home because Times journalists might be more careful about writing attack pieces in the future. That likely happens much more often then Times journalists getting visited. 

I think what you should actually care about is minimizing the amount of people in general that get visited by psychopaths. It's also good if being more innocent reduces the changes of it happening.

This initially felt to me like it ignored some of the ramifications of its parent comment, but I'm also not sure the parent comment intended to imply them. So I would like to put forth the more specific idea that the line of action “there is a power imbalance, therefore, we have to amplify our motions by a large factor to counteract it, which is safe because we know we can't do any real damage to them” may not be universally wrong but is still dangerous and, for those acting on the sort of charitability norms ESRogs/ricraz describe, requires a lot of extra scrutiny. Specifically, I think nonrigorously with medium confidence that:

• This line of action can create a violence cascade if some of the assumptions are wrong. (And in this concrete context specifically, it is not clear to me that the assumptions are right enough.)
• In the case of “soft power” (as opposed to, for instance, physical violence, where damage is more readily objectively measurable and is often decisive by way of shutting down capacity), this is much more true when there is a lot of “fog of war” going on, where perceptions of who has power over what and whom don't have a lot of consensus. It is very easy to assume you're in the weak position when you actually have more power than you think, and even if that power is only in some spheres, it can do lasting damage.
• Some of the possible lasting damage is polarization cascades which operate independently of whether you can damage someone's reputation in the “mainstream”: if each loosely-defined party over-updates on decrements to an opposing party's reputation just among itself, this opens up a positive feedback loop.
• In the case of decentralized Internet communities, it's hard to tell how large the amplification factor is actually going to be unless there's actually a control loop involved (such as a leader with the social credentials to say “our demands have been met, now we will stop shouting”).
• In the presence of the ability of soft-power actions to “go viral” quickly and out of control from tiny sources, unilateralist's curse amplifies all of the above for even very localized decisions about when to “put the hurt on”.

I think with less confidence that the existing polarization cascades across the Internet involve a growing memetic strain that incentivizes strategic perception of self as weak in the public sphere, so there's some amount of “if you think you're in the weak position and should hit back, it might also be your corrupted hardware emulating status-acquiring behavior” in there too.

At this point the specific SSC articles “Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness” and “The Toxoplasma of Rage” come to mind, but I don't remember clearly enough whether they directly support any of this, and given Scott's current position, I don't feel like it would be appropriate for me to try to check directly.

I do think there are plausibly more concrete points against a “mistake theory”-like interpretation of the events. For instance, Scott reported the reporter describing that there was an NYT policy, and others say this is not actually true. But the reporter could have misspoken, which would still be a legitimate grievance against the reporter, but frames it in a different light. Or Scott could have subtly misrepeated the information; I am sure he tries to be careful, but does he get every such fact exactly right under the large stresses of an apparent threat?

So, I generally endorse “tread cautiously here”.

I also think Scott's own suggestions of sending polite, private feedback to the NYT expressing disapproval of revealing Scott's name are not unusually dangerous and do not have much potential for creating cascading damage per above, especially since “news organizations should be able to deal with floods of private feedback” is a well-established norm. So this shouldn't be interpreted as a reason to suppress that.

There is a power imbalance in place.

this is precisely the argument that cancel culture often makes, often with good reason, with outside actors piling on what may have started as a parochial dispute.

My prior for malice was also pretty high, and had updated in that direction significantly in the last year or so from monitoring the coverage, and also with recent details. It may not be an "evil villain" highly coordinated malice, but the incentives and dynamics led in the direction of enough general "bad faith" insinuation to be net negative. It didn't have to be intended as an attack on Scott or the blog, but rather as a morally obligatory denunciation of perceived ideas or associations---the increase of obligatory denunciation in its pieces makes it structurally very difficult for them to cover many topics in a net positive way. Ten, even five, years ago, I would have had totally different priors and been much less suspicious. I feel like people are treating the legacy media like a programmed computer and not like a group of humans in a specific set of circumstances. Of course, we can't know anything for sure, and people too easily assume malice. And I'm not claiming most people at the NYT are malicious. But I'm surprised at how much people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NYT at this point, especially in terms of principled consistency. If this were a policy matter, it should have been settled long ago--what could be so complicated?

We are in a situation where the decision whether or not to publish Scott's name isn't yet made. As such it's important to build up pressure to affect that decision and it's not useful to be charitable.

I don't think it's so cut and dried as that. I think Scott's move to delete the blog was a reasonable one. But after that it's not clear to me whether all of us effectively saying "Fuck you!" to the NYT is more likely to result in them not publishing the name, or something more like, "Hey, I know you've got norms in favor of publishing real names, but I think you're making a mistake here, and hopefully the fact that Scott actually deleted his blog makes you realize he was more serious about this than you might have thought. I hope you make the right decision."

Like, maybe the latter won't work. But it's not obvious to me one way or the other. It seems like it depends on facts about the state of mind of various folks who work at the NYT that are hard for us to know.

EDIT: Or maybe a better way to put it is that being charitable might be part of how you "build up pressure to affect that decision". See Richard and Patrick's threads here. A charitable reading of what's happening from Metz's perspective might factor into your calculus of how to act to get the result you want.

This LW thread is almost entirely about mistake theory.

This comment section is not what I was responding to. (There weren't many comments on this post when I made mine.) It was responses I'd seen in general across media, and yeah, a lot of that was on twitter. Apologies for ambiguous wording.

We implemented Metaculus hoverovers a few weeks ago (I assume that's what you're asking). We mentioned in the open thread.

I think its hard to argue that a central example of doxxing doesn't involve intent to cause harm. The central example I think in most people's minds would be something like the hit list of abortion providers or anonymous. Wikipedia has a list of examples of doxxing  - a rough count suggests ~13/15 involve providing information about someone ideologically opposed to the doxxer (confirming intent is more difficult). The non-centrality here isn't as extreme as it is in, say, "Martin Luther King was a criminal" but it is there.

On the relevance of the distinction, yes, I do think it is important. I would support different responses to the NYT depending on whether I thought they were acting out of a desire to endanger/silence Scott or were following a journalistic norm in a way I considered wrong.

I fear the growing Twitter storm will have the same effect, even if successful.

I agree with that prediction, but that seems a given, with how Scott has called his supporters to action with emailing the NYT. Such a coordination is gonna draw the attention regardless.

If it happens before the publication, it wouldn't be retaliation, but more like a commitment to retaliate. If there's people making a fuss about the reporter's current intention to publish, it's a pretty clear signal what would happen if they follow through.

If it gets them to change their minds in time before the publication, that seems like the best outcome.

Given the news cycle speed, it makes sense to get ready for the likely scenarios.

Revealing people's names is protected by the first amendment. But then there are also plenty of legal ways to ruin the live of that NYTimes reporter and warning the reporter that his actions might make him enemies that he doesn't want to have as Scott has done might be the only way forward.

When Peter Thiel's legal attack on Gawker isn't enough to deter this kind of unethical journalism maybe going against the individual journalists who engage in that kind of behavior is better to create a deterence effect. It might now be up to the NYTimes journalist whether painting that target on his back is what he wants to do. 

Not really. It's so strange that the US journalistic code of ethics has very strict rules about revealing information from anonymous sources, but doesn't seem to have any rules about revealing information from pseudonymous sources.

The difference is, I think, that we're just asking them to not publish Scott's name. I would not support this kind of pushback against criticism, even if it were silly. 

Edit: This is not an endorsement of Mati_Roy's list. I do endorse politely writing to NYT.

They couldn't. Retaliating, or threatening to retaliate, is simply an incorrect avenue to address this behavior. The NYT, and most observers, will immediately discount all opinions from a direction that contains members who behave this way.

Retaliation or threats is applying a wrong theory of mind/decisions to the organization. It's not an individual, and doesn't feel fear. It's not irrationally averse to your anger or actions, and it VERY rationally will decide whether to ignore or crush you, with no thought at all to giving in or reconciling.

doxing =/= criticism

Can you give me a headsup on RationalWiki? It did not shout "unfair bullshit" to me. Are their facts wrong or are they just mean?