I Am Scott Alexander*

Scott Alexander† has deleted his blog because the most influential progressive publication in the legacy media threatened to use its reach to dox him. Anyone with an open mind should be offended.

The blog was Slate Star Codex. It was so high brow it was tough to read sometimes: literally exhausting to process.

Slate Star Codex had been around for perhaps 15 years. I have linked to it many times, both on this blog and others. I still have some Slate Star Codex webpages open in tabs on one of my PCs (and probably more in my caches).

Scott Alexander titled his blog Slate Star Codex to retain anonymity. He is a psychiatrist in private practice, who lives by separating his professional life from his private one.

Slate Star Codex was to be the subject of an article in The New York Times. The employee putting the article together told Scott Alexander that he would reveal his true identity in the article (this has happened to other bloggers, like those behind Zero Hedge).

That employee claimed this is a policy of that newspaper. This is false. As noted by Geoff Lewis, one telling example is that the Times has published over 1,500 about Banksy while preserving his anonymity. Other examples are easy to find.

Scott Alexander’s response was a post entitled “NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog”, and then he did. The post contains details about the situation, fears, and advice to others.

Do note that, of course, The New York Times can still dox Scott Alexander. They hold all the cards, because in a situation like this all that counts is the willingness to play them.

I think I’m going to puke.

* I am shamelessly copying Tyler Cowen.

† Apparently this is part, but not all of his real name.

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You wanna’ know why I read stuff like Slate Star Codex? Here’s an example of something I’ve been ruminating on since I first read it there a month ago, but have yet to post about.

What is it? All our experts need to explain Switzerland. Switzerland has a national policy for COVID-19, that … didn’t work equally well everywhere. Gee, do you think that might be important?

it turns out that German areas of Switzerland have far lower death tolls than the French and Italian regions (no word about the Romansh region). This matches the outcomes in Europe so far, where Germany has far fewer deaths than France or Italy. It is astonishingly important to establish how shared language and culture can influence the progress of a pandemic, and furthermore seem more important than the well-intentioned policies of bureaucrats and politicians.

You simply did not find insights like that if you, say, only read The New York Times.