Seen on LessWrong:

"On many other places I see people discussing this, they point out that the reporter's claim that there is an NYT policy is a bald-faced lie..." 1/?

"...This LW discussion is striking because no one else acknowledges the claim at all. I think that they believe that it is a lie, but don't want to rudely point that out, so they pretend it was not uttered." 2/?

I think there very likely IS a policy, in the sense of words written down on a sheet of paper twhich they can point to when they want to avoid having to explain why they made the call when they want to use someone's real name. 3/?

But as a lot of people are pointing out, those words don't seem very predictive of what they'll actually *do* in any given instance. It isn't a 'policy' in the sense that it actually describes what they in fact do.

As @TheZvi noted last year, this is actually actually a pretty common pattern:

"Somehow, “... “start with a lower baseline to reserve resources for special treatment” don’t seem to trigger people’s notions of intentional harm..."

5/?

"... They should. It’s intentional harm, much more directly than many things that are objected to as intentional harm."

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NgXCYBaWeP4bGkaB3/more-notes-on-simple-rules

6/6