A great response, in my opinion. Succinctly and effectively points out what was wrong with the NYT article, then tries to move on. Somewhat more of a sober tone than Scott's typical writing, but still with a dash of his typical wit:
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.
Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:
> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"]
I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.
Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example,
Q. What if I take too much?
A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.
This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.
Even as large as WebMD is, it would surprise me if they weren't using a third-party drug database to drive their public database. When I worked at a similar site, we used First DataBank [0], but there may be others too. The world of pharmaceuticals changes so rapidly that you need a small army of pharmacists and doctors scouring medical journals and materials from big pharma companies to keep your information up-to-date and it's just a lot easier to pay one of the dedicated companies that focus on that to do that work for you.
However it wouldn't surprise me if the NHS took on that task itself. Unlike WebMD, the NHS is also responsible for prescribing medications and would need to give their doctors and pharmacists up-to-date information, software and guidance for prescribing. Their scale and scope would allow them to take on this task in a way that makes less sense in the US system, where insurance providers, doctors, pharmacies and online health information are all separate entities with separate budgets/funding.
The legal and financial situations are quite different. WebMD is a US publishing company and Americans sue for everything so it has to be careful. The UK legal system makes it much harder to sue for dumb stuff and the NHS isn't going to be bankrupted being government owned.
I don't have any specifics handy, but over the years I've found a lot of information on webmd that is plainly false. Maybe it's better now, but I have been ignoring it for years and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Even Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a better source of medical information.
(To clarify, I'm not suggesting Wikipedia is a good source of medical information -- it's not. Often I find articles say one thing and the citation says the opposite. But in spite of that, it's a much better starting point than webmd, in my non-expert opinion).
I don't get it. Scott's response very clearly lays out the ways in which the NYT article was misleading--so clearly that it seems obvious that it was intentionally misleading. But to what end? What are the motivations driving NYT to try and create these poor associations with Scott and his writing? It seems a poor and short-sighted motivation for them to do this out of "revenge" for the bad press they got from the situation, it feels like there has to be something else going on here.
Rage clicks pay, shallow dismissals are easy to produce -- no
time-consuming investigative journalism necessary.
Most important perhaps is that new media like
Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the
NYT.
Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the
Firm, 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of
scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing,
paper distribution, subscriber and advertiser management. Essentially
all of this is gone. What modern newspaper scale on is branding, and
and selling influence, but this is in direct contradiction with strong
journalists' interest (who do not like to be told by their editors what to write and how). Until recently, top journalists could not go alone, since they lacked the expertise to handle monetisation of their writing. This changed with the likes of Substack, which centralises
(automates) subscriber management, and technical infrastructure, but
without editorship.
Hence, top writers are increasingly moving away from
traditional newspapers to something like Substack, with Greenwald
and Scott Siskind being two high-profile examples. They won't be the
last.
Newspapers see the writing on the wall and fight back.
Things like integrity and trust matter more than ever, so the idea that newspapers would jeopardize that to get back at a somewhat meaningless scoop is pathetic.
The time will soon come when we cannot trust anything we don't see with our own eyes, and we will then need to have a web of trust with reliable sources.
Newspapers can still capitalize on being a source of trust and truth, if they don't fuck it up.
Of course, the NYT is still pretty reliable on citations of fact, even if their slant is worse than it should be.
I don't know, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. I wonder if we can apply Hanlon's Razor[1] and say it was just a poorly researched article. If the author did some brief googling for things people have said about Scott and his blog, they'll find other people who have quoted him out of context. For the example of "feminists are voldemort", Scott did mention that he's been quoted out of context lots of times on that line so it should show up lots of time on the internet. It might have been a sloppy re-quote instead of original research. Maybe it wasn't so much a hit-piece as a reflection of the easy-to-find popular trends of discussion about Scott's writing. In that case the NYT piece was very irresponsible, but not really malicious.
Part of the reason I'm leading this way is because and the end of the day, Scott just doesn't seem important enough to the NYT to focus on for a hit piece. And even then it reads more like a condemnation of SV tech culture than it does as a condemnation of Scott (however unfair it was to him).
Unfortunately, we know for sure that it was not just a poorly researched article. From Scott Aaronson[0]:
> I spent many hours with Cade, taking his calls and emails morning or night, at the playground with my kids or wherever else I was, answering his questions, giving context for his other interviews, suggesting people in the rationalist community for him to talk to…
and
> Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.
I take your point with regard to the economic incentives at play. But at the end of the day, it seems likely that the net effect of this article will be to drive more readers to the new Subspace blog? (A sort of Streisand effect.)
That is likely to be the case. However the performance metrics that the authors are being evaluated on (like clicks, retweets, word-count) are unlikely to include hard-to-measure long-term effects like Streisand.
I think we are seeing a wounded animal's fight for survival ....
I have concluded that there's a fundamental conflict of interest between "mainstream" media like the New York Times and tech companies and people related to them. The former and the latter are competitors in the attention economy, and this manifests in substantial negative bias. I have observed this since the mid 2010s at least.
“Look at the evil ideas that people in the tech community are flirting with” is one more argument towards NYT’s overarching thesis that Tech is too powerful, doesn’t deserve its power, and must be smacked down.
It was misleading and unfair. But to understand it, you have to imagine yourself as a young, woke, sheltered person who went to a top private high school, a top college, and then got an internship and a job writing at the NY Times. To these people, there's only one correct world-view and anyone who even questions it, or thinks some truths are nuanced, is evil.
The only way to resolve the dissonance is to read Scott's work and the NYTimes article and see if they are talking about the same thing. Looks for things taken out of context, look for discussion at different levels etc...
Any potential community nexus that encourages sub-group-solidarity and class-unity is a threat to TPTB who maintain their power by encouraging us to view each other as potential threats to our various cultural/ethnic/gender/sexual/etc identities. It's Playstation-vs-Xbox playground mindset on a global scale. Ordo ab Chao.
> ConTracked: A proposed replacement for government contracting. For example, the state might issue a billion ConTracked tokens which have a base value of zero unless a decentralized court agrees that a bridge meeting certain specifications has been built over a certain river, in which case their value goes to $1 each. The state auctions its tokens to the highest bidder, presumably a bridge-building company. If the company builds the bridge, their tokens are worth $1 billion and they probably make a nice profit; if not, they might resell the tokens (at a heavily discounted price) to some other bridge-building company. If nobody builds the bridge, the government makes a tidy profit off the token sale and tries again. The goal is that instead of the government having to decide on a contractor (and probably get ripped off), it can let the market decide and put the risk entirely on the buyer.
This seems like a good idea.
The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.
> Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy.
>This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn't. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated."
Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts:
A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.
Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.
The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.
> Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience.
This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.
[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally
>His own cite of his comment about how there's a thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort is another good example. Yeah he's edited it and seems to be going for "it's just a joke bro", but if you live in the kind of bubble where you casually condemn the whole of "feminism" as an evil then you've probably got a weirdly fascistic friend group and/or auudience.
How can you honestly not see the delicious irony of this statement?
The specific people he was condemning in that essay really were pretty bad. Mostly a few women trying to advance a political agenda on an uncharitable reading of the other Scott and then a lot of men piling on in case it got them laid.
I dislike that you call people dumb or facist because they made a different judgement than you did, in regards of the "Is Trump worse than campus authoritarianism". Other people are able to feel differently about things.
Well in the context of fascism one of those things is an authoritarian government leader that praised dictators and tried to take over the government and another is a paid activity that's voluntary.
If you want to make obviously dumb claims about fascists, you might get called out.
Perhaps you should articulate a well-defined definition of fascism and provide arguments for why you clasify someone as a fascist if you are going to criticize someone else whose viewpoint is dfferent. Calling out someone for 'obviously dumb' claims assumes a universal non-subjective definition at the very least. It's also a seriously lazy way to argue a point.
>I think I originally started reading his stuff because he had informed and humorous takedowns of some extremist libertarian/fascist ideas like neoreaction and dark enlightenment, but I guess to know that much about the topics probably is a reflection of the circles he's moving in.
So you read and liked stuff that confirmed your likely ideological priors, but you disliked stuff that questioned them.
Do you actually expect a less-partial observer to agree that the fault here is with Scott rather than you?
"Against murderism" was the last time it came up, I think? In context I believe it was supposed to be anti-anti-Trumpism, or at least that you should talk to Trumpists more rather than deplatform them.
The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.
>The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.
Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?
I'm not OP, but I find it easier to read a 50k word book than 10k blog article. The latter had better be really good (and many of Scott's are) if I'm going to make it to the end.
It's probably something about the nature of reading on a screen, on a device that's capable of fifty zillion other things at the press of a button. When I'm reading a book, there's only the book. Less willpower is required to maintain my focus.
Long blog posts are much easier to read if I send them to my Kindle, but I rarely bother.
I read many books but skip many long blog entries. Blogs tend to be in sore need of editing, and most the books that make it to print are in general far higher quality. The main strength blogs have to me are time to print, which makes them more “real time” than books.
Reading them feels different, right? Books have pages so you can go back and forth, they have editors, and so on.
More importantly, dense literary works exist but usually pop essay books are trying to prove a point. SSC essays usually try to make you forget you had a point, and instead go up a meta level in service of his extremely evenhanded let's-all-be-friends persona.
Which conflicts with the pretty bad comment section that always wants to sit around discussing culture war. (Which exists but is not worth quite as much time as they want to put into it.)
The NYT article[1] can hardly be called a hit piece at all, considering how little 'dirt' it actually contains.
What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".
The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.
Thank you for the link to the NYT article. I completely agree with your reading.
Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.
Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again:
>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Because if we let people be anonymous, then more people will feel comfortable writing insightful things for us to read. I'd rather have a wider selection of content than know everyone's real name. Knowing who writers are "in real life" is useless and uninteresting most of the time.
In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?
Anonimity is certainly not a right but sometimes is the only protection for other rights. And we must acknowledge the consequences of technology, unintended or not. For example, nobody expects privacy in public spaces but I think everybody agrees camera surveillance can be abused. Sometimes quantity is a quality of its own.
It's not a legal right if that's what you're getting at. Otherwise, do you also not understand why basically all platforms have pretty assertive (if questionably enforced) anti-doxxing rules?
Where’d you get that idea? You not only have a right to privacy in your own bathroom, the courts have declared a reasonable expectation of privacy inside public bathroom stalls, and/or behind privacy partitions. CNN publishing nude photos of anyone going to the bathroom would generally be completely illegal.
Thanks for including this link. I read the response before I read the NYT article. And while it was a pretty uninteresting article, the tactics used to obfuscate who holds what beliefs are laid bare. It's illuminating to see.
The underlying point of the article is that a large number of tech leaders are rationalists, what is rationalism, what are they reading (the blog), and what does that mean for society.
My reading of the article was that it wasn't about Scott at all. It was about the comment sections on Slate Star Codex, the Rationalist community (which the general public knows very little about), and its connection to the centers of power in Silicon Valley.
If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.
As the article points out, the name is hardly a secret, and I suspect the important thing is that the NYT has no practice of using pseudonyms. If a writer submits a story and the editor says, "Why'd you use a pseudonym," I'm not sure the writer gets to say, "They asked for one," because then why wouldn't everyone who genuinely is newsworthy and thinks they aren't newsworthy ask for one? If the writer says, "I didn't think it was worth finding out," the editor probably ought to question if the writer has actually done enough research on what they're reporting on - especially if the editor can find the name trivially. Remember that the NYT got in very public trouble recently for telling a story that turned out be false because they trusted a subject of the story too much. And even if it wasn't for that, the NYT is regularly in the business of reporting on situations where people would love to use pseudonyms to avoid accountability.
It makes sense to me that they have a default policy/norm against it, and weren't able to justify overriding it in this particular case, especially given that the name was already public information.
To be clear, I agree that there was no need to use his name to tell the story they were telling, and I think the world would have been a better place if they were able to. But I don't think it's only attributable to malice that they did.
> I suspect the important thing is that the NYT has no practice of using pseudonyms
NYT was happy to write about Virgil Texas of Chapo Trap House without revealing his real name [0].
Implying that their actual rule is: yes to pseudonymity for people with whom we politically sympathise, no to pseudonymity for people with whom we don't.
That kind of inconsistency isn't worthy of respect.
I don’t think consistency is actually that important here. I don’t expect the NYT’s editorial decisions to be perfectly consistent with each other as (a) they’re not necessarily being made by the same people and (b) the NYT makes a very large number of editorial decisions. I do expect those decisions to be justifiable considered individually on their merits.
I don’t see any reason not to give Scott Alexander’s real name. The mere fact that he’d rather keep it a secret doesn’t strike me as a good reason.
When an organisation justifies its decisions by reference to its policies, evidence that it doesn't apply its policies consistently is relevant to the question of how much we should believe its purported justifications. An organisation worthy of respect will either be consistent, or will openly admit its inconsistency as a shortcoming when called out on it. I'm not expecting the NYT to do that, which is part of why I don't respect the NYT. (The NYT is free to prove me wrong, in which case I will adjust my view of it accordingly.)
What reason did they have not to give Virgil Texas' real name? The article I cited acknowledged it as a pseudonym, so they knew it wasn't his real name. I'm sure they either know what his real name is, or they could have easily found it out – indeed, the first page of a Google search for "Virgil Texas real name" contains the answer.
I think they should respect people's requests for pseudonymity unless there is a compelling public interest in not doing so – which means they wouldn't reveal either Virgil Texas or Scott Alexander's real names. Alternatively, if they don't agree they should default to respecting people's requests for pseudonymity, then they should be consistent in denying it, and deny it to Virgil Texas as well.
Policies get applied inconsistently all the time for very uninteresting reasons. Inconsistency is what happens by default unless people make an enormous and concerted effort to be consistent. I don’t personally see any inconsistency - just two case-by-case decisions that went in different directions. But even if we grant that the two decisions are inconsistent, I don’t see why this is supposed to be a big deal. It certainly doesn’t mean that one of the decisions is necessarily wrong or unjustified. The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case.
The only interesting question here is whether there’s some overriding reason why the NYT should collude with Scott Alexander in keeping his identity semi-secret (it’s not like it was actually secret anyway). There just isn’t any such reason.
> The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case and isn’t obliged to be perfectly consistent.
I think the NYT is perfectly within its legal rights to publish bad journalism. If the NYT decided tomorrow to transform itself into the left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, that would be entirely legal, and so it should be.
But just as NYT has every right to publish what it wants, others have just as much a right to judge it negatively for doing so.
It is not legally obliged to be consistent, and I don't think it should be legally obliged to be consistent either. Giving the legal system the power to police journalism is very risky business, and I don't think the risk is worth it.
However, I personally think it is morally obliged to be consistent, and I will judge it negatively if it fails to be so – you may disagree, but maybe that's a sign that you and I have different moral values.
> The only interesting question here
Maybe the questions that interest you are different from the questions that interest me.
Why do you think consistency in itself is a moral obligation? To me that seems weird. For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice? The NYT is morally obliged to apply its editorial policies in good faith, but it’s not obliged to ensure that the many thousands of editorial decisions that it makes in a given year are all perfectly consistent.
I notice that other than consistency (which is symmetrical and could equally argue that the NYT should have published the other person’s real name) you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret.
> For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice?
No you are not. But I think, if someone points out your inconsistency, a person (or group/organisation) really ought to have the honesty to be able to say "Yes, you are right, that's a fair criticism, I am being inconsistent, I will try to be more consistent in the future". And one way of being more consistent in the future would be to do the moral thing from now on, and obviously that would be morally superior to achieving consistency by choosing to consistently make the bad choice instead.
> you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret
He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable. Faced with a reasonable request from a person that their privacy be respected, I think the ethical thing to do is to respect their request, unless there is a strong public interest in disregarding it – which I don't think there is in this case. (And I'd add that if you are going to justify violations of the privacy of others by appeals to the public interest, you ought to clearly state your claim in doing so, which NYT has failed to do here.)
I was one of the many people who already knew Scott Alexander's real name. I don't know him personally, I'd just worked it out. But I wouldn't have posted that info publicly, because he asked people not to, and even though I don't know him personally, he seems like a decent guy and respecting his wishes in this matter was the moral thing to do.
I don’t understand why you think that consistency in itself is a moral obligation. In any case, the consistency argument, even if successful, doesn't show that the NYT was wrong to reveal Scott Alexander's real name. It shows – at most – that it was either wrong to do this or wrong not to publish Virgil Texas's real name. That is why the only interesting question here is the one that you've finally addressed.
>He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable.
His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
In the end the NYT has to come to its own evaluation of the merits of anyone's request for anonymity. The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it. So just because Scott asked and the request wasn't granted doesn't mean that something has gone wrong.
> I don’t understand why you think that consistency in itself is a moral obligation
Cicero defined justice as giving each their due; not a definition original to him, Plato and Aristotle said more or less the same thing. Inconsistency is a form of injustice because you are giving to one different from what you give to another without a good reason. Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification – I give my own children hugs, I don't give hugs to the children of strangers, but that is not injust, since there is a good reason to justify that difference in treatment. Justice is a key part of ethics, indeed classically it is one of the four cardinal virtues.
> His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity
He had specific reasons due to his dual role as both blogger and psychiatrist, that do not apply to the average person. The profession of psychiatry has certain expectations about psychiatrists hiding their opinions from their patients which don't apply to most other professions. Those reasons don't apply to "almost everyone" because most people are not psychiatrists, and most other professions don't care anywhere near as much if clients find out your opinions on unrelated issues.
> It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
But what is "fit to print"? Traditionally journalism justified itself as serving the public interest. What is the public interest in publishing Scott Alexander's real name? I don't see how there was one.
> The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it
Yes they can: If someone asks for pseudonymity, they should grant it unless there is a strong public interest in refusing it; and if they refuse it, they should be explicit about why they believe denying it serves the public interest in that particular case.
Psychiatrists shouldn't go on political rants with their patients, but the idea that psychiatrists must completely conceal their political leanings from their patients is an idea that Scott has just made up. The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one.
> Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that *for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification*
There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason. Take gifts as an example. It's inconsistent if I give one friend a big gift and another friend a small gift, but it's not unjust, as I'm under no obligation to give any of them gifts at all – and consistency in itself isn't an ethical constraint on behavior. I'm certainly not required to have a specific reason for spending $15 on Bob's gift and $100 on Mary's gift.
How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you.
> The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one.
As I said, they ought to default to granting requests for pseudonymity unless there is strong public interest not to, which there wasn't any in this case.
> There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason
The difference with your example of gifts, is that neither Bob nor Mary have any right to expect any particular gift. By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to. It is one thing to be inconsistent in gifts to friends, when we don't owe them anything in particular. It is another thing to be inconsistent in fulfilling one's obligations to others.
>How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you.
Sure, maybe I'm wrong. I'm open to evidence of this. As far as I can determine, psychiatrists are not required to keep their political views a secret.
>By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to.
But what are the implications of that for consistency? Consider that you're free to grant someone's request for privacy even if there isn't an overriding reason to do so
or not to do so (just as you're free to give someone a gift without a reason). So just because the NYT honored one such request in the past doesn't entail that they're bound to honor all such requests in future. Again, the only interesting question is whether their reasons were good in each case.
I think rather than continuing to debate relatively peripheral issues (such as consistency or the culture of psychiatrists), let me just state what I think the crux of the issue is:
I believe that journalists ought to honour all requests for pseudonymity, unless they believe there is a strong public interest in not doing so in any particular case, and if they believe there is such a strong public interest, they should be explicit about what they think it is, so others can judge their public interest claim. I think this is the decent thing to do, and sustains a culture of respecting people's privacy.
NYT did not follow that standard in the case of Scott Alexander.
This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-...
It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for actual things you said years ago, now that’s not enough, they will go out of their way to form a narrative around you, whether the cap fits or not, in order to ostracise, they aren’t afraid to stretch the truth or outright lie. This is not unique to the NYT but it’s a concerning trend.
This is nothing new from them. The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.
Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization playing politics, just as it has been since 1851. I still mostly respect them because they tend to report facts accurately and mostly follow the ideal of journalistic integrity better than many other media outlets. But there are certain topics now, just as always, where their prevailing politics shines through loud and clear.
A publication can be politically titled to one side and still be factually accurate and stay true to journalistic integrity principles (or at least that's what I want).
With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible just 10 years ago.
In the case of NYT, their political tilt is very clear (that's ok) but their journalistic integrity is being called into question more and more (that's problematic).
I think tilted is better, unless you can somehow be titled towards center. The BS they've published attacking Bernie and AOC should feel familiar to their attacks on the right.
This seems to be contradictory. It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias? The NYT and others like it go out of their way to pretend they have no political bias, using the passive voice to give authority to slanted reporting which favours one "team" over another.
Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of its supporters repeatedly and falsely claim) that items described in the paper are more objective and carries greater weight than those in your average political party's weekly newsletter.
> It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias?
Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."
What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.
Not all partisan mouthpieces are equivalent. You can be factually accurate while leading people to the wrong conclusion. However, it’s much less work to find someone willing to lie, and much harder to detect lies than misleading statements.
Journalistic integrity is therefore critical when selecting which biased sources to pay attention to.
Leading people to believe things that are wildly untrue using statements that are technically not lies does as much damage to society as doing it any other way, in my opinion. Sure, in theory smart people might be able to spot that what the article is trying to convince them of isn't backed up by the facts it uses - but in practice they almost never seem to, not even other journalists. (Here in the UK, the BBC seems to be a bit of a repeat offender - some other partisan rag publishes something designed to lead people to an untrue conclusion without technically lying, and then the BBC just outright repeats the untrue claim.)
I've noticed this thought pattern with many people who argue against freedom of speech and for tighter control of media or "canceling" them recently:
1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about.
2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false" are defined by the arguer).
3. The arguer portrays himself at the same the victim of those media and the person who knows better than those media and therefore can decide between wrong and right, true and false better than the accused media.
4. The arguer presents no evidence of knowing better and when you ask them about their sources, they tend to be highly problematic, based on blogging and websites who often do not even employ journalists.
Paraphrase: "I know better than large group of people X but everybody else is mislead by X" - I don't think so.
Here's an alternative form of the "NYT/CNN should be canceled" argument: they should be held to the same standard as a private citizen when they behave poorly.
If you write a blog post that doxxes a prominent figure and link to it from Facebook and Twitter, you are going to get banned from those platforms. The NYT can apparently do this with impunity, and calls for canceling other people and organizations who do this.
In US law, there is a different standard for libel against "public figures" than against other people. The NYT gets to take advantage of this much looser libel law whenever they write a hit piece because they can argue that anyone who does something "newsworthy" is de-facto a public figure.
As far as I have seen, the "cancel NYT" crowd is arguing that the NYT should be held to the standards that it pushes into others and obviously doesn't follow.
In almost all cases I can think of I'm also against canceling individuals, so I agree with you. If NYT openly spread hate speech or called for murder and violence, then they should be "canceled" (boycotted).
You used the term "biased," not them -- just to be clear. Which way a publication leans can be determined by things that have nothing directly to do with integrity or truth telling -- which stories they cover, for instance. In practice, lean often comes along with audience. Like any publication, news outlets have audiences, and the interests of that audience group will determine what stories it covers and how it covers them. This can be done with full journalistic integrity; in fact, it's harder (and perhaps impossible) for a publication to have zero political lean.
Political lean != acting as a mouthpiece.
Do also please note that your personal political leanings will determine whether you view the reporting of any publication as unethically biased or not. No matter which sides we're talking about, what one party reports as truth, another will hear as politically motivated.
> Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians"
There is always "a side that benefits politically" from literally every statement. What is clear, irrespective of the side that benefits politically from stating it: the NYT is willing to use its influence to distort the political opinions of its readers, using innuendo and cherrypicked facts.
Those who look to the NYT (and The Washington Post) for accurate facts are literally (mis)guided into holding a specific political opinion, and defending that opinion even against facts that would rationally moderate that opinion.
I am as certain as stone that most people who read the NYT will forever associate Scott Alexander Siskind with white supremacy, conservatism, and anti-woke ideology because of that hit piece; for these people, this will be a fact. For them "Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from calling that article a 'hit piece'" is a statement that actually has meaning, and they will operate on that assumption. His Wikipedia page will be inundated with editors who insist that the NYT interpretation is "true" while Scott's blog is "opinion", and will dutifully and duly note these interpretations as facts onto his Wikipedia entry. For these people, reading and discussing Scott Alexander will be tantamount to supporting white supremacy, and so a whole encyclopedia of delightful, thoughtful inquiry will be foreclosed.
It is reprehensible, and I cannot in future take anyone who cites the NYT without caution as a serious person who actually understands their world.
This is similar to arguments I frequently make about the paper. The reason it has such standing as it does is because it was a mast of Northeast elite hedgemony. I mean this more in a sociological sense than in a true dynastic political sense. The Northeast had been thought for very long to have the best schools, culture, technology, leadership and values.
There was a time when that culture was not just dominant among elite circles but often revered by everyday people as something to live up to. As much as the 80s, 90s and on were seemingly about the decline of that power nexus, the institutions retained a lot of mystique and fascination.
That ideal of American life is in a tailspin. Norman Rockwell is more a punchline than a comfort to people. The nation's opinions aren't filtered through New York TV personalities any more.
The paper has weakend and that has allowed the social agreement about it to change. Before if you expressed a negative opinion about such a paper it was mostly washed away in a consistent wave of accolade. If disagreement always meets reproach it is hard for it to spread. Agreement is an innoculatiom against criticism.
This. Housing associations in the Northeast are getting completely out of control. Whatever happened to people trimming their own hedges in the style they see fit?
> The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.
This seems a silly line to toe that accomplishes nothing. Worse, it feels in bad faith.
The crowd is constantly crying foul. And often shouting noise for the sake of being noisy. As such, it is all too easy for any supposed side to claim that the crowd is intrinsically party of the other sides.
To that end, did this person make particular claims that others have to reveal who they are? If not, I'm not clear on how this was hypocritical. Are there inconsistencies in the crowd? Absolutely. But, they could be easily ascribed to the side you appear to be taking up, as well.
> they could be easily ascribed to the side you appear to be taking up
1) Your argument is whataboutism at its finest.
2) I'm not taking a side in favor of establishment journalism.
3) I'm showing that leaders of the anti-cancel-culture movement are themselves more than willing to intimidate, suppress and cancel the free speech of anyone who criticizes them.
4) Either you're in favor of unrestricted free speech for everyone, or you're not.
My point was more that the subjects of this odd battle are not the actors in it. Such that the line you are drawing with the context you are drawing it in, feels in bad faith.
From all I have seen, which I confess is not everything, The blogger was asking for basic courtesy to not be named such that their practice could stay easily separate.
For my part, I care more for unpersecuted speech. I don't like the active screaming culture, but I can't bring myself to feel that someone should be able to have consequence free speech, either. Such that most of this debate is around gotcha moments that are people yelling at someone to reach the crowd.
It gets muddy, because I absolutely believe we have to allow people to be wrong. But I don't think we should tolerate active lying and gas lighting with deceptive rhetorical tricks that punish courage in openly exploring the boundaries of your knowledge.
If you're in favor of unrestricted free speech for everyone, it necessarily, logically means:
- you oppose "cancel culture";
- you're okay with white supremacists having access to audiences via platforms, if someone is willing to provide them with that.
Intimidation and suppression cannot be avoided; they go hand in hand with having any sort of rules.
For instance, the law against stealing uses intimidation and suppression: people are intimidated against stealing with the threat of jail sentences, and offenders are suppressed with actual imprisonment.
You can't have guarantees of freedom of speech written in law without the intimidation and suppression being written into the same law: there have to be negative consequences for a law breaker infringing on someone else's constitutionally granted freedom of speech, which are written and enforced, in order for the law to have meaning.
If you scream about private platforms canceling speech you agree with, and then you intimidate and suppress other private platforms when they publish speech you don't agree with, that puts the lie to your ostensible unlimited-free-speech principles.
What if I criticize platforms canceling speech I disagree with, and don't intimidate anyone?
You've built a strawman model of a free speech advocate and are focusing on that. There may be some real life personalities who call themselves free speech advocates who resemble that strawman, but it's still a strawman.
>It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians.
I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.
Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
As someone who majored in journalism and who graduated in 2009, what most people consider traditional journalism has been slowly dying since at least the 07/08 crisis. They were already struggling due to not knowing how to properly handle the internet. Giving away content for free was a mistake made in the 90s that was proving impossible to claw back, and online ads were nowhere close to making up for the lost revenue from print ads (because, in a bit of news surprising no one, there's no real proof that online ads work).
Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.
Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.
> I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands.
This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.
There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.
One quite possible scenario is that this is the dying process of the "legacy media", as it gets replaced by... whatever comes next.
That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.
> Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.
I lost count of the number of times the NYT used the same numbers and switched from praising to blaming and back the Swedish corona startegy.
I want facts and information goddammit. Not a tearjerking drama to fill my inbox. I was already annoyed with the NYT before this incident. This just broke the camel's back. I unsubscribed.
There's a huge tension in the society caused by the wealth shift from individuals to corporations. As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirecting the tension between people and corporations into tension between artificially created identity groups. So far they are very successful at it. Plenty of people are so busy trying to ruin someone else's life, they completely don't notice the decline of their own long-term perspectives.
> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership
This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.
Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
>The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.
>Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
There's enough space in the U.S. to build new housing. Like nice 2000+ sqft houses with lots, owned by the people living there. If only a huge chunk of the economy wasn't tied to a few megacorporations located in a handful of cities. So instead, we keep fighting for a right to live in a rented 500sqft box with barely enough space to sleep.
I think you are confusing cause and effect. Cities like SF aren't crowded because megacorporations are located there, but rather megacorporations are located there because they are crowded. SF, NYC, Paris, and London are cities that people have moved to for well over a century, because they were excited to live in places with so much culture, shopping, and restaurants. This has always meant that housing in these cities is much more expensive than elsewhere. People have tried to start tech centers elsewhere, which generally fail (In the 1990s the big new thing was the so called "Silicon Prairie" in the Midwest, but that didn't really take off). Some new centers, like Austin, TX do seem to be taking off, but that's because Austin is an exciting city.
Austin is not "new". It was at competition with Silicon Valley and used to be referred to as Silicon Hill. A lot of hardware manufacturing happened in Texas. At some point, between favorable business laws and Google starting large scale recruiting events it sucked a lot of the talent out of places like Texas.
So your statement is more accurately framed as, "Austin is finally recovering as a tech hub."
While businesses these days may move to SV because of the large population and other businesses, that was not the case in the beginning.
I think the modern attraction of Austin has a bit more to do with its reputation as a "cool" city with its music scene than its history of chip manufacturing.
Silicon Valley was built in the valley because that was cheap available land that was mostly empty but still accessible to a major coastal port. It only became the crowded modern environment after the corporations were built there and became successful. San Francisco became big because it was a major shipping port.
Not that long ago it was Detroit, Buffalo, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Princeton, Pittsburgh, Trenton, and more than I can count that were the bustling megalopolis' of America where you went to if you wanted engineering talent or culture for that matter.
The Valley and SF are different, despite being near each other. The Valley, as you say, started as a chip manufacturing hub and has transitioned over to software and services now that manufacturing mostly gone to Asia. SF is different. While it indeed started (as did NYC) as a shipping port, it has more recent history as a center of creative workers such as authors and artists. The reason that many Internet companies are located now in SF rather than the valley is that they (and the workers they want to attract) want to suggest that their work is cool and creative like that of authors and artists. Of course, an unfortunate side effect of this is making the city even more expensive and displacing the creative people that made the city "cool" to start with.
I can't speak for the others, but why do you think Dallas and Houston are moribund? Based on the last decade of population growth, their respective metro areas certainly seem to be doing well for themselves.
> It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.
This is false, why would you think this? My youngest sister makes $70k and bought a 3br/2ba house with a 2 car garage for $215k that’s 20 mins from where she works. That is in just a random medium city in the Midwest.
I have another friend who works in San Antonio. Got his house for $300k and makes $90k as a SWE.
Housing is seriously just an isolated problem in particular hot spots. Unless you need to be there, get the fuck out. The governments are broken.
>As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
No, this is not "typical" of most cases, it is typical of millennials living in a small subset of property markets (DC, LA, SF, NYC) who have low earnings relative to their educational attainment + age but also a vastly disproportionate media influence. The delusion that the Ivy grad journo living in Brooklyn whose Twitter follower count is larger than their salary somehow reflects the voice of their generation is a huge problem.
> As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there?
In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will personally find you a wife if you don't have one, and will give you a raise if you have kids.
>That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist.
Except, with globalization, it's cheaper to import people from 3rd-world countries and then pay them just enough so that the current generation will keep doing its duties.
I'm a first-generation immigrant myself and I'm quite baffled at how unaffordable it is to raise 2+ kids and make sure their life quality will be similar to mine. It's almost like the expectation is that I won't do that because they will instead import those who were raised at a fraction of the cost elsewhere.
What I find noteworthy about this story is how contentious and weaponized have gender and race become. Out of the four negative claims, one accused Scott of racism and two accused him of of some variant of misogyny. The fourth associated him with some other form of non-pure thinking.
I am afraid things will get worse before they get better. I expect the trumpism/fascism wave will provoke unhealthy reaction and further chain-reaction. My personal lacmus paper is the use of "white male" label as an argument, which is not totally uncommon even here on HN.
The whole story background story is extremely alarming. NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered. This whole situation gives even more credence to the idea that decentralisation is the only way forward for mankind if we intend to preserve the liberties our ancestors enjoyed for the past 300 years.
> NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered.
I completely disagree. That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly. I think it was the wrong decision to publish his name, but it shouldn't be illegal. Like it or not, Scott has become a fairly important intellectual given who his readers are (and may I say, completely deservedly so).
> That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly
Not really. Doxxing someone mostly leads to harm. Anyone that was on the internet in the early days knows this, these days it's worse because the mobs that attack you aren't just doing mindless trolling, they're seeking something more intrinsic.
I look at it as in defense of free speech. That said, I don't generally believe in total anonymity. I believe in PGP style pseudo anonymity. With someone's real name you can attack their friends, family, and the place they live. With an online identity you can attack their ideas and if you're one of these people that enjoys grey areas you can attack their platform. That, to me, seems more fair.
While I don't think the NYT had a strong reason to reveal Scott's real name, it's absurd to say that newspapers shouldn't "reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes" in the general case.
As the saying goes, journalism means printing things that certain people don't want published, and everything else is PR. Journalists are supposed to reveal things against the subject's wishes.
Can you articulate a coherent framework for how and why an American news publication should be prohibited from revealing legally obtained true information about the leader of a large, popular, or otherwise noteworthy community?
I haven’t thought up a framework, but one thing I’m wondering is why the identity of the person alone is newsworthy.
I’m probably missing part of the background here, I’m new to the controversy. Did some kind of mystery arise around the true identity of the author? Your comment implies that NYT obtained the true identity of the author through legal means — how exactly did they do that?
I don’t think finding out the identity of someone who wishes to remain anonymous is, in itself, sufficiently newsworthy to overcome the privacy interests of the individual. I also wonder if this story has a more interesting angle buried in it about the complexities of identity in the internet age: the author of the blog achieved notoriety, but in some ways that character is distinct from the physical person living their life and doing their job. The NYT wanted to publish a link between those two personas over their objection. Why should they be able to if the story can be written in a way that doesn’t?
Consider someone like... Satoshi, of bitcoin. The character has achieved this powerful notoriety and managed to remain anonymous. Do people want to know which person on the planet created that persona? Sure; do they need to know, is the identity alone newsworthy without some reason to need to publish it?
Honestly I tend to say no. That’s just... gossip, isn’t it? How is knowing a different name to associate with the character going to enrich and inform me in any way?
Examples where I think revealing the identity might be of substance:
- suppose someone committed crimes to keep their identity secret
- suppose government officials intervened to help them remain anonymous
- suppose the person turns out to BE a powerful government official
> I’m probably missing part of the background here, I’m new to the controversy. Did some kind of mystery arise around the true identity of the author?
Not really.
Originally, the blog was pseudonymous. It was the first and middle name of the author, which he did because he's a psychiatrist who didn't want someone Googling his real name and finding his blog (for various professional and personal reasons).
But it wasn't exactly hidden super well - I found out his full name kind of by accident while googling for some random info about him, it would take most people a few minutes to find his name I imagine. This was ok by him because he mostly wanted to protect the reverse direction - someone googling his full name and finding his blog, not the other direction of someone finding his blog and discovering his full name (mostly - not exclusively).
In any case, after a year of "arranging his life" to allow him to do so, as he puts it, he is now publishing under his full name.
I don't really get why the NYT wanted to publish his name against his wishes. At first I thought it was sensationalism but I read elsewhere that the regular readership of the blog was estimated at around 8.5 thousand. No idea if that's right but if it's within an order of magnitude then I rather think the NYT should have more pressing stories to develop.
I mean, on the one hand the readership is higher than that but probably not crazy high. On the other hand, his readers really are fairly influential, so I think he really is worthy of an article in the NYT. (I mean I'm a huge fan of his as well and think he's one of today's leading intellectuals, so I might be biased)
The NYT initially said they wanted to publish his name because of editorial policy. The reported said it was kind of being forced on him because "them's the rules" or something like that.
> Consider someone like... Satoshi, of bitcoin. The character has achieved this powerful notoriety and managed to remain anonymous. Do people want to know which person on the planet created that persona? Sure; do they need to know, is the identity alone newsworthy without some reason to need to publish it?
If a journalist were to learn the identity of Satoshi of course that would be newsworthy. Is this a serious question?
Prohibited? They shouldn't be, any more than they should be prohibited from replacing their logo to a swastika. We have freedom of speech, and that's important. If the government tried to go after NYT for a swastika logo, I'd be 100% on the side of the NYT; free speech should be legal even if I disagree with it.
On the other hand, I'd never visit NYT again, and I think most of the population would do likewise.
This isn't as extreme, but events like this should cause the general public to adjust their views of NYT. This shouldn't be a cancel-culture style slander, but simply starting to treat NYT as a random tabloid which makes stuff up for clicks.
I won't because I'm neither American nor a lawyer, but I will answer your question.
The person in question wanted to remain anonymous for good reasons, they didn't consent to have their true identity revealed and yet a powerful news corp decided to do that anyway, clearly in bad faith and for their own gain, violating that person's and their relatives' privacy. It's obvious the aim was to incite verbal violence against and "cancel" that man because he committed the heinous crime of wrongthink.
They should absolutely be allowed to reveal legally obtained true information about people's identities, but the vital 'legally' part of the process should encompass said people's consent.
If I start a blog that sees some success, and avoid using my full name in order to protect my privacy, then I obviously don't want my full name linked to my blog and I don't see why random businesses should be allowed to doxx me for the sake of some ad revenue.
Couldn't agree more. If there's one thing the last 5 or so years should teach us is that newspeak isn't a language, it's the entire technological communications apparatus of the West.
Weaponized is the correct word. The word "racist" is morphing into a racial slur. It's now just a bludgeon to shut up someone with the wrong views. I believe this comes from the idea that the only possible way to be moral is to wield power by any means necessary because you're right and "they" are evil.
This has been used for years, but only recently became weaponized.
I can recall in the early 80s, going to ACT UP meetings in NYC, we'd have random people come in and raise crazy issues about "racism" like "the word 'gay' is racist! You need to say 'queer'!"
Often these people who came to throw a monkey-wrench into meetings weren't gay men; they were just old-school Greenwich Village agitators. Their tactics work and have been mainstreamed.
As an Indian, I'd say this kind of "SJW" rhetoric serves no purpose other than causing a reactionary change -- of more normal people favoring extreme right wing instead, and leaving a bad impression about the total social justice thing.
The other alternative is to be independent. No tribe. Or you can be in a tribe, but as a critic and reformer. (Well, some tribes allow you to criticize them. Not the modern GOP.)
Do you think the NYT tribe allows criticism or non-orthodoxy to exist? They encourage certain “criticism” exist to be sure, but only so far as it reënforces their prestige, to be reflexively believed and turned to as authoritative.
Not an option anymore: you're either with us or against us.
This article is actually an excellent example of this in action: by any objective standard SSC was a pretty liberal blog, but the NYT cherrypicked 4 quotes from 1700+ articles where he dared to deviate from dogma and used them to paint him a Nazi.
It sure will happen in Europe because people here are not really ashamed to admit they are sick and tired of that American 'justice' bullying. The only hope for America is when slightly more intelligent character than Trump suppress their political gains to put end to this madness.
As a white person from a poor post communist country with no colonial history (99.999% white) I cringe when some local SJW parrots the "white privilege" agenda. It just makes no sense in large parts of the world other than US.
The NYT abusing these kinds of allegations in a hit piece doesn't say anything about whether such claims can are "contentious and weaponized".
Hit pieces latch on current topics. In the 1950s, the NYT would have had invented ties to communists. Or, if possible, hit pieces often imply corruption or paedophilia. That doesn't necessarily mean that corruption or paedophilia are topics that are "contentious" or related to "pure thinking".
I feel like the NYT used to be more credible and run fewer hit pieces. I'm not trying to argue zero, by any means, but I feel like in a very short time -- basically the past 4-8 years -- they've gone from one of the most credible source of media to where I trust them as much as I do Fox News (and I read both, as well as a number of international news sources, to have a complete picture).
This sort of stuff seems to be their modus operandi now.
The NYT lost credibility for me when they endorsed the Iraq War in 2003. I have been very vocal about their credibility ever since, even though I agree with some of their journalism.
Your heroes will disappoint you. Even the NYT have traded their credibility for clicks, I mean “engagement.”
For me, credibility isn't binary, but a spectrum. I saw problems before (NYT was never one of my heroes, per se, but just a high-quality, thoughtful, high-integrity newspaper). It always had its flaws, but for the most part, it seemed okay pre-Trump. Especially during the Trump years, but a little before as well, it seemed like the ends (on both sides of the increasingly polarized political spectrum) became more important than the means, and a lot of formerly credible institutions moved into a post-truth era.
Sadly, the NYT was one of the victims. So was a big segment of academia.
The American civic discourse feels disingenuous and hollow in a way it's never felt before in my life.
Bari Weiss complained about internal war at the NYT: older staff vs. young woke employees.
If universities have gone fully woke, no wonder they churn out a lot of woke graduates. In that case, natural generational exchange will change things for worse across the board, at least until a new generation comes that scoffs at wokeism because it is what their stupid, old parents do.
I avoid both NYT and Fox, because it's too much effort to fact check every detail of every article I read. Both have too high an error-to-fact ratio IMO. That sort of thing has a way of affecting one's thought.
Seriously, WTF is going on with NYT. I think something has seriously gone off the deep end with their newsroom, but I feel like it must be so culturally ingrained in their newsroom now that even questioning some basic assumptions will get one vilified as a racist or sexist.
Now, I can certainly understand, and consider valid, the arguments both for and against capitalizing Black. However, the decision to capitalize Black, but not White, is completely non-sensical to me, as is NYT's bizarre 1 sentence explanation in that article: "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups." What? They don't even try to give any argument behind "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does", which reads like a poorly researched high school English paper. And the fact that some bad people have decided to capitalize White is their rationale that it must be lower-cased?
If anything, the top comments in response to that article make a hell of a lot more sense than the NYT's decision itself. I'll also note that many other news organizations, like the Washington Post and CNN, have decided to capitalize both Black and White, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post...
It seems very and crudely racist to assume all black people have a shared culture, in the same way assuming two black people must be related, would be.
I'm stealing this point from Twitter, but Africa is the most diverse continent on Earth - culturally, linguistically, even genetically. There are 250 ethnic groups within Nigeria alone, most of which have little in the way of shared language or culture, and had even less before colonists drew a circle around them and insisted they were a single nation. How on Earth does it make sense to say that all black people have a shared culture, especially if you simultaneously insist that white people don't?
You may find this philosophy bizarre, and I agree, but it's important to understand that it doesn't come from nowhere; it's been brewing in academia for decades and is spreading into the mainstream at alarming speed. I highly recommend learning more about "critical race theory" if you want to understand why what many now call "neoracism" is gaining so much traction within our elite institutions.
> "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does"
To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."
The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.
A stereotype is a negative amplification of facets of a group's culture. You can find stereotypes of white Americans everywhere, from /r/whitepeopletwitter to the movie Undercover Brother(great movie btw). The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.
I tried browsing /r/whitepeopletwitter for the first time, and as far as I can tell it mainly consists of meme-like language that mocks views typically ascribed to Republicans or, in the case of race issues, white Americans that espouse white supremacy. This seems more like an expression of the political reality of some white Americans than any cultural aspect that applies to "white Americans" in general.
> The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.
I would also disagree with this premise. There were stereotypes about black Americans as soon as the first slave ships landed, despite these populations being from vastly different parts of the continent, different ethnic groups, different linguistic groups, etc. They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around.
There are also stereotypes about various immigrant and second-generation American groups today (e.g. "Asian-Americans are smart") despite most of these primarily being a result of selection bias due to immigration policies that were ostensibly racist until recently, not a result of a general cultural attribute (e.g. "superior Asian intelligence").
>They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around.
The thing that I don't accept about this argument is that this would seem to imply then that not expressing these differences could be seen as "white culture." It seems like only you try to disentangle Black Culture from American Culture, then the non-black aspects of American Culture can be thought of interchangeably with "White Culture." It's almost like a straightforward semantic thing, but it's aggressively resisted for reasons that I can't see as stemming from anything other than a prior desire to somehow elevate blacks.
Note that the argument can scale up to encompass other racial cultures as well - once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"? Is the because it would be argued that these cultural dimensions didn't arise because of a specifically-shared white identity? It seems pretty odd to find that relevant, however, as the specific practices of other racial cultures largely did not originate/propagate based on conscious racial identity. I think that it's really difficult to justify all of this stuff without embracing an axiomatic "white people are different" assumption somewhere in the argument.
Like, what does it matter for the definition of culture if group X and Y are different because X was "forced" to adopt different practices? Does this means that X culture exists but Y culture doesn't? That seems arbitrary to me.
> once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"?
Perhaps because on the one hand you still need to subtract so many other immigrant cultures (Italian American, Polish American, Irish American, etc.), and on the other the "melting-pot" residue is still a set of (largely regional) subcultures that don't have all that much in common (California Surfers, Utah Mormons, Mountain Westerners, Texan Cattle Ranchers, Minnesota Nice, New England Yankees, Deep Southerners, etc.), and if you subtract those what's left over is a fiction that mostly exists only in media and advertising, like the Standard American Newscaster accent that no-one actually speaks natively, although you might make a case for the existence of a generic Suburban American culture that, if it can be said to exist, only came into being after World War II.
The same sort of decomposition can be done towards black culture as well though.
It also strikes me as untenable that one can simultaneously support the notion of "white privilege" while attacking the notion of "white culture" - many things that are commonly-cited as reflective of white privilege are cultural in nature.
> The same sort of decomposition can be done towards black culture as well though.
You can, and it has been done, but that's a bit more like noting regional differences within a subculture than it is, for example, like examining the differences between Americans who identify as Latino/Tejano/Hispanic.
There are fewer differences between East Coast vs. West Coast Rap and Hip-hop than there are between "Country" and "Western" music.
> It also strikes me as untenable that one can simultaneously support the notion of "white privilege" while attacking the notion of "white culture" - many things that are commonly-cited as reflective of white privilege are cultural in nature.
There are plenty of privileges that have cultural markers that don't necessarily have a corresponding culture per-se. Rich, straight, and male privileges come to mind.
The privilege, in many respects, often simply comes from the assumption that members of your group are in some sense considered the default type of human, and that other humans are the exceptions (even if they actually outnumber the 'default') that the world may or may not choose to accommodate in various ways. That doesn't necessarily imply that the privileged 'default' groups have distinct cultures surrounding that core assumption.
Gah. Intersectionality is hard.
Perhaps a bit of nuance is in order. Rather than saying that "there is no such thing as White Culture", it would make more sense to say "in America there are many white cultures"?
>The privilege, in many respects, often simply comes from the assumption that members of your group are in some sense considered the default type of human, and that other humans are the exceptions (even if they actually outnumber the 'default') that the world may or may not choose to accommodate in various ways.
Sure, but obviously the modally-raised examples of privilege are not stuff like "'flesh-colored' crayons correspond to white skin tones." It pertains to perceived social norms and such that benefit white people as a class at the expense of non-white people. But if you posit that those social norms may constitute a shared cultural experience, then you've crossed a line? I don't buy it.
If you go on Twitter and find someone talking about hating white people for whatever reasons (shouldn't be too hard), I'm sure that many of the critiques will be cultural in nature (eg. look at all the culturally-laden digs towards "white-girl feminism".) But again, this shouldn't be taken to imply the existence of white culture? Why not?
I'm not particularly hung up on trying to prove that white culture exists in particular, but I just don't think the arguments for why black culture exists but not white culture are very good, and I think they are clearly subverted by how woke narratives collectively treat white people in pretty much any sort of critical context.
> One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper
Interesting also that the overwhelming majority of the readers who commented on the article itself seem to find it pure nonsense. It's somewhat telling when a newspaper stubbornly keeps serving its readers one specific opinion which they keep refusing to subscribe to. You would expect a news outlet to publish a diversity of opinions centered around their readership's average- roughly half of the readers will be challenged every time. But what's the point in consistently presenting an opinion all your readership rejects? Who are you serving exactly?
Normalizing it for future generations. Once you grow up in a world where you only ever see Black capitalized but white not, it will feel natural to you, just like capitalizing the President is. (Not done in some languages like mine.)
As a non-native English speaker and European, I find these "minor language tweaks" pure distraction. I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone -- like many European countries already do. One could also enforce more wage transparency to fight systematic salary discrimination. But it's so much cheaper to capitalize one letter.
white Black
There! Now everyone knows I am actively fighting discrimination and it costs me zero.
> white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does
I have always found such statements to be... Observationally stunted. Without referencing my own beliefs at all, I go to Reddit and on the front page is see posts from /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/WhitePeopleTwitter. If there is no such thing as white culture, what do people post in the second subreddit?
This is shameful, and the second time this month NYT puts out such a shameful piece (the first time was the JetBrains/ Solarwinds article). I guess this should be enough to disregard everything NYT will write, and stop reading them.
Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott deleting the blog, and this is still the piece they decided to go with. It's a bit hard to trust the NYT's integrity..
No, it's a product of the ideological drivel the NYT chose to embrace, identity politics. Not all news outlets are like that.
It became obvious with the literal journalist purge going on there. You can't be a moderate and work there anymore, you have to subscribe to a certain thought framework, if you question it, you're deemed "offensive" and you're out.
I recently dropped my NYT sub; jetbrains nonsense was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I know it's a meme to bring up Gell-mann amnesia here, but I will raise it as a basic test for quality in journalism.
When NYT writes about something I know about, I almost always have serious problems with it. Jetbrains in particular. And honestly some of the writing is so bad that even without knowing about the subject, I can tell it is crap, like the article about the SlateStarCodex. I had never read it before that post, but had heard it mentioned in passing. Also, NYT Opinion is Hannity/Shapiro level crap and should be dumped. Stick to the facts please.
On the other hand, The Economist has consistently impressed me; I read/listen with a critical ear and they do a wonderful job even with very niche topics. I've worked on some AR tech and they had a special report that just really nailed it and got into the weeds. Every time I thought "but they didn't mention..." they would mention or clarify a paragraph later.
Economist has a liberal viewpoint and they're not shy about it. I prefer that approach and accept that I disagree with the conclusions/advice from time to time, but the facts are right and error corrections are almost always very minor in nature.
There is good journalism out there, just maybe not from NYT. Please don't give up hope.
Yeah, the Jetbrains article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-...) was just too over-the-top conspiracy fluff. It’s sad to see some liberals critiquing QAnon and then immediately eating any kind of Russian conspiracy shit without any doubt.
It's not really. SolarWind uses a JetBrains component as a critical piece of infrastructure in the government which may have basically been built by Russia. Now maybe everything is above board but JetBrains does employ developers in Russia and was originally a Russian company. We don't run Kaspersky in the government either.
More to the point this should never have happened.
JetBrains was started in the Czech Republic [0] by three Russians. The same people who started it no longer run it.
Calling it a "Russian" company would be totally inaccurate. The hack that I saw cited, though I believe it was an unidentified source, was one that was injected at compile time. That would be very difficult to notice for any programmer.
So, here's my question:
Why did you refer to them as "Russian" when it's obviously not true?
I mean everything might be above board but it's probably bad or lax US policy and/or regulations that Solarwinds was deployed through out the government.
Yeah, none of that is accurate to the phrasing of "a Russian company" as a rhetorical device. This kind of quasi-hyperbole about Russians is also getting old. Russia has been an ideological enemy for a long time, maybe even as long as time. I've never second guessed the motivations of business owners and citizens from Russia the way certain crowds do. That's pretty tantamount to something dubious.
Does the government need to be scrupulous in whatever open and closed source software it chooses to vend? Yes. Do we need to be chiding about the motivations of every day Russians as one of our first order investigations? Probably not.
Yet you clearly second guess and misunderstand my intentions. The real problem is the threat vector. Where is it is easier for intelligence services to operate?
> Yet you clearly second guess and misunderstand my intentions
I can only go off of what you put in plaintext.
> The real problem is the threat vector
So, explain to me the threat vector. If we have a threat vector that is substantiated by, "is Russian" then I think we have a problem. If we have a threat vector of, "Government vets first order software dependencies, but not the second order and soft dependencies of software vendors" then we have something more akin to analysis.
It took Kaspersky being affiliated with, cooperating (and serving) the FSB in order for it to be banned, not because it was established by Russians.
I wasn't trying to move goal posts. Admittedly I might be sensitive to all the question of anything affiliated with Russia is now a conspiracy style thinking that has come from certain crowds. If I unfairly lumped you in with these folks, then I apologize.
> Russian intelligence
Someone will need to prove that there is a link between JetBrains as a company and Russian intel (aka the FSB) just as what happened with Kaspersky. I doubt that this is the case. It could certainly be a rogue employee, but that's a good amount of speculation. We've seen that the FSB has no issue hacking into companies and organizations without a mole.
> and a lack of due diligence.
I described the attack. What due diligence protects against something that injects itself during compile time and only triggers on specific events?
The risk here is that Jetbrains has significant operations in Russia. It is likely a lot easier to get an FSB agent hired into a Russian office. And in fact the Russian government can just order and enforce cooperation. The USA does this all the time and every operation is classified. I would not expect anything less from Russia or China. The companies registration in the Czech Republic (or anywhere) does not prevent this.
Kasperkey is even more obvious because the founder was involved with the KGB even before the 2017 ban. It should never have been used. Now maybe Kasperkey's affiliation is akin to a "communist youth party" card and not necessarily a genuine affiliation but the point is that you can't trust and then verify in these situations. You have to assume that everyone is hostile unless proven safe.
> the point is that you can't trust and then verify in these situations. You have to assume that everyone is hostile unless proven safe.
Are you getting this from somewhere or are you explaining how you perceive the standards?
The laws I'm familiar with generally have to do with pretty specific criteria for delivering software that touches specific types/classifications of data. None of that would've caught how the JetBrains software was allegedly used to exploit the SolarWinds product. This was some pretty sophisticated stuff.
Could you discuss in a bit more detail what you might want from such a study? My first guess was simply that you want a newspaper to be fact-checked from beginning to end.
I guess I was thinking, get a random sample of newspaper issues from each of a number of newspapers, and for each article in each of them, get a subject matter expert (or, not necessarily an expert, but someone knowledgeable in the field), and give a random ordering of (a selection of) the articles in the issue, and have them read them in that order, reviewing how accurate they think the information is before going on to the next one,
And then evaluate whether, if they thought any inaccuracies they found in the article about the topic that they have a good understanding of, whether that influences the accuracy they estimate of the later articles.
Or something like that.
Maybe have them answer some other questions about the articles other than just accuracy, such as quality of writing, in order to be less likely to cause them to re-consider how they are estimating accuracy?
And I suppose by “accuracy” I mean to also include “not misleading”, in addition to just “not false”.
The times is very pessimistic on tech, largely I believe because they're upset about being run over by google/facebook. It's definitely unfortunate, but the future of journalism is really not bright at all. No one is willing to pay for unbiased news, so you need to find a niche to attract people or churn out clickbait. The times has found their niche as technocrat skeptics.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.
But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.
Nikkei = FT. The FT has... interesting politics, and seems far more progressive than anyone would expect, although considering the cost of a subscription it's also a fairly exclusive crowd.
WSJ and Economist are hardly unbiased. (IMO The Economist is essentially a straightforward neoliberal pro-Gilded Age propaganda outlet, and always has been.)
The NYT has always been 'dodgy' as we say in the UK. I remember finding their op-eds clownishly stupid when I first started encountered them back in the 00s, and they don't seem to have improved since then.
But there's been a shift to woke since then. And the problem with woke is that so often it operates on the level of personal witch hunts and straightforward public bullying - which makes it depressingly close to its equivalent on the far right, but without the insane weapon fetish.
You can argue that sometimes this is justified. And sometimes - as with Weinstein, etc - it is. But it's harder to support it when it becomes an exercise in tokenism and tribal identity.
It's interesting how often woke goes after individuals deemed guilty of alleged bad-think and how rarely it goes after egregious corporate behaviour. Or even how rarely it mobilises to destroy the careers of politicians who act in unconscionable ways.
Ah, right, I forgot about the FT/Nikkei connection. I subscribe to the latter and not the former.
Economist is very opinionated, sure, but when I do read them I find the reporting on world business issues pretty informative and the tone a good test of how I feel about globalization that week. At least I know who's talking to me... well not literally "who" of course.
I don't trust any mainstream news other than local because it all seems like either propaganda or theater. In my opinion, NYT and The Washington Post are the two most despicable out there.
They also outed a Chinese Twitter maker a few years ago. Or maybe that was vice and the reporter now works at nyt. I don't remember except that nyt these days is lame.
I have never read the blog, or have any positive or negative association with it, but after all the attention this story has garnered, I just read both the NYT article and Mr. Siskind's response.
The main takeaway from the NYT article is that there is a group of people in whose writings/blog comment sections/etc racists/sexists have found a home, and his is one of them. He does not address this assertion, or what the root cause may be if it is true, or if it is not true, why not. This is the whole point of 1, 3 and 4 in his statement but he does not address it.
As to the only concrete point he addresses (point 2), he does something that is dishonest. He wrote (pre-edit):
> "blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort“"
and then claimed it's taken out of context. I read the whole article, especially the surroundings carefully to see if there was any context as to which could change the meaning of what he wrote here, but there is none. This simply states that there is a thin line between feminism and evil. If you believe that, then don't delete it. But if you don't, don't tell the reader it's taken out of context, just admit you made a mistake in writing this, or you have changed your mind despite this was what you believed when you wrote the article.
So there are 4 points in the rebuttal, 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best. I am not impressed.
A while back I mentioned to my mother that I had been to a "reddit meet up" and my mother, predictably, had never heard of reddit. Later, reddit made the news, I forget exactly what for, but in was the category of harboring child pornographers, racists, or nude celebrity photos. What I did remember is hoping my mother didn't see this news article and conclude that I was out meeting with racist pedophiles.
The thing is, it's not wrong to say that pedophiles and such use reddit. They do, in the same way they use phones, TVs, and cars. It's not an apt description though, if someone asks you what reddit is, to talk about the racism and hate and what not. The reason being is that the bad stuff isn't the typical reddit experience and doesn't describe the whole thing well.
In Scott's post he gives the example of the Wizard of Oz review (girl goes to a surreal landscape, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again). Maybe it's technically true, but it's not an apt description. It doesn't really capture what the movie is like.
Where I'm going with this is: maybe you can find neo-reactionary or pro-eugenics or racist comments on the blog. I don't recall any examples of horrible comments from the NYT but maybe they are there. Maybe you can find a line or two, like the "feminists are Voldemort" that seem bad and worse outside of context. That's not really what the blog is about though and in a newspaper article describing it probably shouldn't zero in on minor blemishes or debatable flaws and use them as the main focus. Wasn't this supposed to be about Silicon Valley's Safe Space, or getting into the zeitgeist of the "rationalists"? How did the NYT article even attempt to do that? To my reading the NYT was just focused on complaining about the "problematic" aspects and nothing else.
I think it's fair to talk about problematic comments on a blog but it's not fair to act like problematic comments or loose associations to objectionable figured are the main thing when they really aren't.
Regarding your point about the feminists and Voldemort, if memory serves Scott was referring to a specific group of feminists and not likening all feminists to Voldemort. That's not really the impression I got from the NYT though.
This leads to several keys questions: Are all feminist such people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them?
The second question is, are all people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them feminist?
The third question is if this definition of "nice guy" is the informal term or the sarcastic meaning, and how useful either are to describe a psychology profile or human male stereotype?
The fourth question is if a discussion around "nice guy" stereotype of either profile is of strategist benefit to goals of some feminist theory, and then which ones?
>The quote is explicitly only about "people who talk about “Nice Guys”
He refers to the "already rather thin line between 'feminism' and literally 'Voldermort'", so it's clear that he's talking about feminism more broadly. Elsewhere in his writings there are statements that are completely consistent with this. For example, here he is alluding in passing to the supposed fact that only 30% of feminists are "sane": https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f... At some point you've just got to accept that he's been broadly critical of the feminist movement, and said disparaging things about large numbers of feminists (in aggregate).
My personal take away from this is that editors are good. Scott's ended up writing a long series of unedited blog posts, and as a consequence has made some comments over the years that are flippant, exaggerated, in poor taste, or just plain wrong. Such are the perils of blogging. That's his responsibility. The NYT has no obligation to shield him from it.
One should always avoid finding hidden meanings and attributing quotes to people who has not said them. If he wanted to call feminist voldemort then we would have used the word feminist. Assuming that he actually meant that all feminist are voldemort is simply an interpretation, one which clearly not everyone share including the author.
If the New York Times Article had accused the author of being critical to parts of feminist movement it would likely been more true, and it would likely also be less of a news item to include. A lot of people are critical to parts of the feminist movement. If one wanted to gain outrage then the "sane" quote might have been useful, and at least it would then be a true quote rather than an interpretation. I doubt however it too would sounds enough outrageously, which is why they did not use it.
> If he wanted to call feminist voldemort then we would have used the word feminist
Sorry, you’ve lost me here. Are you nitpicking over the difference between ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’? I don’t see how that helps. The comparison to Voldermort makes it pretty clear that he’s talking about people and not just an abstract ideology.
> If the New York Times Article had accused the author of being critical to parts of feminist movement it would likely been more true.
This is exactly what it said: “some feminists”. (“He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort.”)
The word "feminists" is not in the quote, and being critical to part of the feminist movement is not the same as calling specific feminist people for being Voldemort.
"He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort" is about as hand wave phrase as it gets, and trying to convince people about an interpretation of a quote is an enterprise doomed before it even started unless the reader already has the same interpretation.
As some last words I have on the subject, I find the whole article utterly dated as well as the quoted sections in it. "Nice guy/bad guy" stereotype hold as much useful utility for social discussions as "Nice girl/bad girl" stereotype. They are example gender based violence direct at getting conformity to gender roles. To the amount the author disagree when people use them I agree with him, and to the amount he himself uses it I disagree with him. Nothing useful can be had from normalize such stereotyping.
>And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”
It's clear that the 'literally Voldermort' phrase is intended to apply at least to "the people who talk about 'Nice Guys'" (and given the 'already', to plenty of other feminists too).
The NYT said that Scott had used this phrase with respect to 'some feminists'. That is 100% accurate. Especially when you consider that the post the quote is taken from references specific feminist writers.
I fully understand your point re reddit, but I think a single person's blog is different than that. A blog is like a book and reddit is like a bookstore if you will, if you go to a bookstore selling a book that racists read that is not concerning to me (wrongly concerning to your mom as you said), but if you bought the book in question (even if non/anti-racists read it too) I would be concerned if I were your mother - just to make sure you are not aligned with them.
I am not saying this is the case (as I have no connection with the blog), but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great (which is the main takeaway I got from the article), that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there, and Mr. Siskind does not do that. If the claim is bogus, then the claim is bogus, but Mr. Siskind does not refute that they are attracted to his blog.
As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
Regarding the difference between a blog and reddit I would say that the comment section harbors people with many different views. Some of the comments may be objectionable (again: I didn't see examples) but so what? That's got to be true of everywhere with a comments section. Why make that a focus?
You write "if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great" - but this isn't even the kind of thing that could be true. Imagine how you would prove this claim, do you go to the National Association of Racists and ask for their stance on SSC? Is there a poll of racists and their opinion on niche blogs somewhere?
"Racists" is ill defined by itself. People aren't racist or not the way they are right or left handed. Racism is a spectrum and much of it is debatable and nuanced and affected by context and all that. This is like saying "Some number of an undefined group like something. Prove me wrong." That's not a legitimate claim and there is no need to try and rebut it.
I have no doubt that some racists like the blog and other racists don't like it. Do more racists (proportionally) like and read SSC or the NYT? I don't think you can answer that.
Regarding the feminist issue I'll have to go back and read that post before writing more.
Some of our applied social scientists are being allowed to work with very large datasets at places like Facebook and I believe they are increasingly in a position to make quantifiable statements on what racists or any other cluster-able groups of humans like. If by spectrum you mean “distance from a centroid” it might be more precise.
Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and marketers know a lot about human preferences and how to link them to motivation.
> Some of our applied social scientists are being allowed to work with very large datasets at places like Facebook and I believe they are increasingly in a position to make quantifiable statements on what racists or any other cluster-able groups of humans like. If by spectrum you mean “distance from a centroid” it might be more precise.
Just because you have more data, it doesn't mean that you can identify constructs like racism from this loads of data. You'd need some kind of ground truth mechanism (like an index of behaviour towards different races) which neither Facebook (nor anyone else) has. It's just wildly implausible.
Maybe, in ten years, NLP will be good enough to identify this, but I don't think these constructs are easily identifiable from text, certainly not in a public space such as Facebook.
> Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and marketers know a lot about human preferences and how to link them to motivation.
I get what you're trying to say here, and maybe that works in a small number of places, but having worked with marketers in analytics for the past decade or so, suffice it to say that I rarely praise the standards of experimention and (lack of) rigour employed by them.
That still relies on the scientists defining and labeling racists which will be an arbitrary process. Regardless - do you think anything of the kind was done by the NYT?
Unsupervised learning doesn’t give us named labels. Someone still has to name cluster 1, 2, 3... etc. So not sure that actually gets around what amounts to a semantic question.
This seems pretty crazy to me - you're saying that if I happen to enjoy anything that also happens to be enjoyed by racists/sexists, you would be concerned? Guess what? Racists and sexists like Harry Potter, and Star Wars, and Marvel movies, and Coca-Cola, and everything else that people who aren't racists and sexists like. I guarantee that you enjoy many, many things that are also enjoyed by people who have detestable beliefs, because people with detestable beliefs sometimes like things that have nothing to do with those detestable beliefs. Racists don't spend all their time reading Mein Kampf and watching Birth of a Nation, they also read the same books you read, watch the same movies and television shows you watch, and, yes, read the same blogs you read.
If the blog has sexist/racist content that attracts sexists and racists, sure, that's a problem, but if the blog had such content, the NYT article wouldn't have resorted to pointing out the commenters, they would have linked the content.
> As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
Specifically, in context, he said "People who go out of their way to be horrifically mean to other people who are pretty unfortunate and unhappy and don't understand why, just for asking why, are pretty much pure evil", it wasn't an attack on all feminists ever, it was an attack on people who he specifically thinks are doing something extremely terrible. That's the context.
I never read that blog and don’t read the NYT but I will say in response only to your comment that racists and sexists don’t seem to enjoy Star Wars like they used to. Someone should write a (hopefully thoughtful-seeming) long form rumination on the parallels between what has (allegedly) happened to Disney and what has (allegedly) happened to the NYT.
>I never read that blog and don’t read the NYT but I will say in response only to your comment that racists and sexists don’t seem to enjoy Star Wars like they used to.
Most of the ire is directly at the sequel trilogy, notably the last two movies thereof. So if one of your coworkers says they hated The Last Jedi but loved The Mandalorian, then you can reasonably report them to HR for engaging in discomforting behavior.
> but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great... that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there
I'll try to put this as objectively as I can. There is now a cultural overlap between those that support varying degrees of "censorship" and progressives, and between those that support "free speech" and, let's say, anti-progressives. This makes sense because now racism/sexism is more likely to be censored than extreme progressivism. Probably if it were the other way around (if extreme progressivism were more likely to be censored) then those same progressives would become staunch free-speech advocates and anti-progressives would be fighting for more "content moderation".
So if you are generally for the toleration of ideas, perhaps holding some unpopular opinions yourself, and against censorious tactics, you tend to attract extreme anti-progressives as well. For the most part, racists and sexist do not see themselves as racists and sexists, they see themselves as holding true but unpopular beliefs. Another interesting example of this is Sam Harris somehow having a fair amount of Trump-supporting listeners even though he spends a lot of time ranting about how incompetent and morally-bankrupt he thinks Trump is.
It's amusing to watch HN lose its collective shit over the NYT article, which I believe you succinctly and correctly summarize.
This is the highest rated top level post that presents any degree of skepticism at all in Scott's rebuttal, below pages of anger against the NYT "hit." So much for that quality, rationalist examination of the facts. As somebody who read both his blog and HN throughout its run, I find the NYT article on the money.
Scott's own cowardice about revealing his real name is incredibly telling, too. So long as he remained anonymous the NYT actually respected his wishes and buried the story, while this champion of free speech refused to stand behind his own words publicly and lamented the abuse of the MSM coming to dox him. Now that the checks are coming in, he seems to have no problem, though.
My advice to you, dear HN, is to take a look in the mirror. This isn't a hit piece and Scott isn't a saint. If you believe his long winded rants have merit, you should also believe they stand on their own, and you should welcome the scrutiny.
Your characterization of point 1, at least, makes no sense to me. All the NYT article says on that point is:
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
I don't understand why you would say it is dishonest to dissect that paragraph and point out that Scott agreed with Murray on something non-racist, and quoted a racist statement without agreeing with it. Scott is not agreeing with "The Bell Curve" and Scott has not said that he believes that black people are "genetically less intelligent than white people.” Before defending yourself against such accusations it would be wise to point out that they are baseless, and of course it's much wiser to leave it at that.
> 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best
I meant counts of points, i.e., three of them not addressing the issue (points 1,3,4) and one dishonest (point 2) - reasons above. So dishonesty was not related to point 1, sorry if it reads like that.
To further elaborate for 1,3, and 4; I don't contend with his explanations - but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.
>but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.
Whether or not that is something you can and should address is of course one of the main issues here. The NYT would like if you only quote, welcome, converse, engage with people who are 100% correct and approved in all their views. If you disagree with that then there is also not much to explain. Sometimes unpleasant people like to read good blogs, and sometimes unpleasant people say insightful things that you might want to incorporate in your blogpost. Such is life.
Had I not been prepped by reading about the controversy here on HN, I wouldn't have guessed that the NYT article was a hit piece. On the other hand, had I not noticed that the article came from the NYT, I wouldn't have guessed that it wasn't just another blog.
Lots of blogs praise one another while also including disagreements and disclaimers that they don't fully believe their own writing, much less the writing of others. But they consider the articles to be worth reading anyway.
Some of my opinions are unpopular and may even make people uncomfortable. So I admit with trepidation that I still like the NYT and will continue to subscribe.
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I laughed out loud at this paragraph, and it's such a perfect example of why I love Scott's writing.
At the end of the day, whatever slimey hatchet jobs the NYT chooses to run, Scott's still an enormously influential, successful and respected figure, and most of the hacks who write these terrible hit pieces or support them can only dream of gaining 1% of the admiration Scott's earned. Envy's a cruel mistress, and if the price to pay for success is that bitter haters take misjudged pot shots at you which achieve little except to reveal their own securities... well, I haven't achieved enough success myself to know for certain that the price is worth paying, but I'd pick Scott's life over Cade Metz's any day of the week.
Keep up the good work, Scott. You're doing great things, you matter, and you're winning - three things that can't be said for Cade Metz.
I wonder whether the intended endpoint of this tactics is widespread deplatforming - e.g. support for vaporizing anyone who can be guilted-by-association in the same way that Scott Alexander is in this article. If Scott's reputation is groomed to be cancelable, anyone's is.
>I wonder whether the intended endpoint of this tactics is widespread deplatforming
Isn't this obviously the case? The "Grey Tribe" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...) and its "Dark Enlightenment" fellow travelers associated with SV is commonly targeted activist media orgs. The goal is to hobble the grey tribe's narratives by allowing woke mobs to say that they're based in cryptofascism and white supremacy. This has already been partially successful and probably just needs a few more big pushes to get to the point that we can start firing people from tech jobs for publicly saying that they like Scott's posts.
The piece was bad. After all the time they had to work on it, it was a lazy hack job that normally wouldn't make the cut at the NYT. It is a sign of the days we live in when a Mean Girls style burn book page makes it into what used to be the paper of record.
You’re not kidding. It’s surprising how bad it is, and that’s after reading all these comments saying how bad it is. It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.
> It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.
This is a great summation.
To me it reads like the best attempt the journalist could pull off at writing a hit piece against some guy who just started a low cost medical practice, and has never actually done anything bad in his life. A whole lot of vague insinuations and guilt by association.
If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this was Metz's way to tell himself that he is a better person than this guy trying to make psychiatric care more accessible, just because he might disagree on some political issues.
This is well said. The article is so weak and poorly laid out its like listening to a bad pop song through cheap speakers. It doesn’t even have a proper closing. Just ends abruptly.
I think the closing was effective in what it was going for: implying that this has all been a "grift." The abruptness is intended to leave the reader with a reverberating final note in their mind. "$250,000... $250,000..."
Seemed fine to me, not negative in the slightest. Today's internet is not the same as Ender's Game. You don't get to become popular while remaining anonymous. Only the politburo can do that.
Wow, the NYT's actions on this one really made my blood boil. I don't even know how to process this... they typically put out reasonably high quality journalism that I read and enjoy on a regular basis. And then... this. They completely went beserk, like little children, with their heads firmly up their rears despite everything everyone begging them to keep Scott Alexander anonymous to preserve his profession and blog.
They lost literally hundreds of subscriptions (at least $20k worth). Yet they remained so stubborn... so closed to dialogue, and put out their little shitpiece. Can somebody reasonable explain why they would do such a thing? I don't care much for the 'liberal MSM' theories, I just wanna know what was in it for them. It makes no sense. Does it reflect on the entire newspaper to the point where I should stop reading it?
Consider that you know a lot about this topic and are disgusted by their handing of it. Consider that this might not be an outlier, and you may not be outraged by their handling of other topics simply because you know a bit less about them.
I don't know if this is true for you, but I've found it to be true for me. It took a good deal of time researching and revisiting to realize.
Yeah, the NYT was never perfect, but in the past few years it has declined sharply. There are still few other organizations as credible, but that's more of an indictment of the news media than it is praise of the New York Times.
Every NYT article should be read extremely critically. The story selection should be viewed critically. People will say this was always true, and sure, in an ideal sense, but I mean that you will very, very often find paragraphs that consists of five factual sentences chained together and cleverly worded in such a way as persuade you of something absolutely untrue or for which is there is no evidence. You'll find NYT repeating "facts" they reported early on, and then themselves debunked. And of course, the plague of "anonymous" sources (sometimes these anonymous sources are just, literally, the PR department saying 'report this anonymously so it seems like a leak) that have their own agendas and which tell the NYT BS over and over, but somehow still get an airing.
This has increasingly happened with topics I know about over the past five years at accelerating rate. [If you want to be uncomfortable, consider noticing this repeatedly is part of what has driven half of the US mad.]
An interjection here. Not directly related to the NYT article, just your comment.
I feel the entire US has "gone mad". I'm a Canuck, and US and Canadian politics don't 'mesh'. So whenever I've spoken to Americans over the decades, often their politics make little sense, don't align, seem cogent to me. This, of course, I consider normal for a non-local such as myself.
However over the last decade or so, I've noticed that the "two sides" in the US now each turn into gibbering mad lunatics when you discuss certain topics. Prior, I could at least discuss topics, without enraged foaming-at-the-mouth type of responses.
IMO both sides have gone entirely, and completely mad. Politics in the US now seems to have lost all capability to talk to "the other side", and instead transitioned into immutable lines drawn in the sand, adopted with the logic often employed with religion, taken as gospel and truth merely for tribal sake.
It's almost like the death of religion, has transition that same unyielding faith-only, non-empirically backed up logic into politics. On both sides. As if the US psyche requires some faith based belief system as the central core of its existence.
Alternatively, it just could be endless whispers from external, hostile nations... designed to create endless turmoil and the eventual downfall of the US empire. Which, to me, is quite sad.
edit:
To highlight what I mean here... "talking points". In the past, I could have real, meaningful discussions with Americans about political topics.
I'd "say things", and they'd say things back, and we'd have a conversation about a specific political stance. Now, this has devolved into almost everyone, whether left or right, having "talking points". Most often, these talking points have not even been examined by those I'm talking to.
They are simply repeated, without the speaker even having thought of what it means, or even able to debate that position with any clarity.
And again, this is "both sides".
It's like each is merely repeating words from a "holy book", and heresy is the result if one diverges. It's like each side has a Pope, which issues edicts, and even if it doesn't make sense, the duty is to repeat, obey, and try to find wisdom in the words one must follow.
I pretty much fully agree. I started noticing about five years ago that some people I knew for years were sometimes writing and talking in a way that was essentially gibberish to me. Now it has spread and become sort of what you describe even with old friends. I sometimes cannot even just state what I see with my own eyes without triggering the madness. It's like a decentralized psychological breakdown which I am witnessing from abroad. My phrase "half of the US" was a bit tongue and cheek. Pick your half. [Edit: just to engage the point about religion. It now seems to me that national politics in America is a religion. And maybe this was always and must be the case---if you read the founding documents and follow the early development. What is happening now looks like a potential schism. Staring at the other person and not understanding the words is what a schism looks like. No longer in communion.]
Interestingly, politics in Poland, a rapidly de-religionizing country, seem to follow the same trend, even though it is a very homogeneous country otherwise.
As a Pole, IMO that's because the non-religious side imported the US extreme-left ideology wholesale, complete with talking points irrelevant to our country. So now we have loud fanatics fighting on both sides.
One of my favorite moments of the past five years is getting called a "trumpist piece of shit". The discussion was something about rural decay and inequality and I think I implied they had reason to be angry. I did not vote for Trump.
In one group of former co-workers I've quit speaking to almost all of them because of the above.
The simplest answer might be that the people running NYT have big egos and can make stubborn emotional decisions when their egos are threatened. I think it’s a point to consider when evaluating what’s published but not necessarily a reason to write off the paper entirely and as you said, not a political media conspiracy.
You can play a fun game with this snippet from the NYT article. You can replace the word "Rationalists" with the name of any group at all and the resulting statement seems vaguely true due to the imprecise nature of the language.
> Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.
"Republicans" and "Democrats" and "college students" and "Californians" all work, etc.
The whole thing is bizarre. The author has been working on this piece for something like 10 months now, and he can't get a basic definition of EA right? I saw a hot take on twitter that Metz deliberately did a bad job because he didn't actually want to write a hit piece and his superiors forced him into it.
This is an interesting theory. It also seems somewhat testable, because if true and Metz's superiors are not tone-deaf they we'd expect they will fire him, no?
I wonder if it was Metz who had the idea for the original more positive-angled story re SSC's COVID info.
Reading the NYT piece was mortifying.[1] They were my primary source of all things news and then published this strange hit that's just... off base. They were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive. How can a reliable news source write an article like that? Why throw your reputation down the toilet for what seems like a grudge?
I could come up with more examples but the times have a very clear slant, much more marked than say the washington post. The NYT produces good reporting too but they can produce some real garbage.
I could have sworn the times wrote a really bad article about islam in London but can’t find it.
Some of it is featured in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
"The film presents and illustrates Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model thesis that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination of the history of The New York Times' coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky says exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticize an ally of the elite."
> Then in the 2016 election the NYT had a front page spread implying major scandal regarding Clinton’s emails. This probably cost Clinton the election.
// hey were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive.
You probably have heard of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" but in case not, it really explains a lot:
"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. ... Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect... you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page ... and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read"
That's just happened to you - you read a story you happened to already know the ground truth on and it struck you as obviously wrong. If you had an equivalent background in other stories, you'd be seeing this kind of falseness everywhere.
I have examples too numerous to cite of matters I knew well (eg: companies/industries I worked in, wealthy people I happened to know, countries/cultures/conflicts I studied or experienced first hand) that were covered completely backwards in the Times and other media.
Like: good employers characterized as horrible. Military conflict response characterized as provocation. Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.
A century ago, Times had whitewashed Stalin in a way that anyone who knew Russia would have instantly recognized as false. So I doubt the times was ever not "Fake News" it's just that it was so much harder to see it back then when your newspaper was how you knew anything.
Hence my frustration with the relentlessy inept articles across the MSM about the 737MAX crisis. Aviation Week's coverage was the only one that was even remotely credible.
BTW, if you're interested in the facts, this report should help:
// Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.
I actually want to explain what I meant here and what opened my eyes to this big-time.
Background: I am a dual (EU/US) citizen and care about both a lot. In 2016 I voted for Clinton and had the typical attitude towards Trump that you'd expect from a liberal New Yorker.
In early 2017, Trump was in the news for having said offensive/alienating things to our European allies. I was outraged and worried because this fit the narrative of him selling us out to Russia.
Until I chanced to watch the actual speech - what I heard was affirming and comforting for someone who cares about NATO and totally opposite of how it was presented.
The subsequent 4 years, this pattern repeated over and over - I'd watch the administration consistently make geopolitical moves against Russia and its allies (Iran being the crystalizing example) while the news kept telling me he was Putin's bitch.
I came out of this experience with a complete lack of belief in how things are presented in the media, which is a radical departure from my stance as a literate liberal New Yorker just 4 years prior.
If the clock strikes thirteen times, you don't just question the last strike, you must doubt the previous twelve too, even if they sounded reasonable before.
I suggest that perhaps you just have not had as much knowledge about previous hit pieces as you had about this one. The NYT did this to Jordan Peterson and no doubt others. They are completely morally bankrupt and do not deserve anyone's trust.
Several months ago, people were saying that the Times was probably going to write a sympathetic piece. But they wrote a hitpiece. So, one wonders: Did the NYT write a hitpiece because of Scott's reaction -- deleting his blog, calling on his readers to send angry emails to NYT, etc -- or was it going to be a hitpiece from the beginning?
Scott's thermonuclear reaction seems justified now. But back then, some comments here convinced me that "They probably weren't going to write a hitpiece. Why would they do that?"
But we were wrong. So I'm wondering why we thought they'd do anything else.
Well here is an intelligent guy who writes long-form pieces that are fairly influential within a sector of society that is small, but also relatively powerful. But he's not aligned to the NYT ideological agenda. Of course it was gonna be a hit piece, no question about it IMHO.
So I may have come at this backwards- I read Scott's rebuttal and then read the NYT peice. No offence to Scott but I think he's got this all wrong. The NYT piece isn't about Scott, it's just a writing gimmick. The article is about the self-styled rationalists, Scott is just an entry point to open the discussion around these group of people. It's not trying to tie Scott to Thiel, it's describing the pantheon of people who move in this world, and it is a world, these people don't all agree on one thing, although they do fall into a sort of groupthink on some topics.
For example, almost every group likes to find a reason to think of itself as somehow better and more evolved than the outsiders, which is essentially exactly what you see with the people who frequent these groups. The rationalists think they're better than the NYT, largely because they look down on examining the world as it is, rather than inventing the world from first principles (in my view a key to the IQ debate between Harris & Klein).
There are genuine critiques to be made of the "rationalists" (let's just accept the label as a term for the group of people having discussions in and around Scott's blog). I don't think the NYT is particularly making any. It is quite clear to me however, that the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism and is entirely unwilling to actually debate the value of their approach with people who aren't already bought in to the appraoch. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone either from the Red tribe or the Blue tribe to say to the Grey tribe - "Sorry, but you can't be indifferent on the topics that you claim to be indifferent on". And the argument that the liberal end of the spectrum uses mob tactics seems rather... bizarre when made by an author who quite literally brags about the mob he stirred up against the NYT.
I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it - especially with anyone they've decided who isn't part of their Tribe.
>The NYT piece isn't about Scott, it's just a writing gimmick. The article is about the self-styled rationalists, Scott is just an entry point to open the discussion around these group of people.
Do you think Scott actually disagrees with this? Regardless of whether it's a hit piece on Scott or rationalists more broadly, he realizes that if he gets cancelled or otherwise has his livelihood impacted then it impacts the rationalist community as well. I mean, maybe someone with better anonymity would step up to fill his intellectual niche, but it would still representment a blow to the movement.
>The rationalists think they're better than the NYT, largely because they look down on examining the world as it is
Weird complaint, and one that I don't think you'd find many rationalists ascribing to. I'm not sure what the non-strawman version of this claim is supposed to be here though. That rationalists don't bother to check their theories against reality enough? According to whom?
>I don't think it's unreasonable for someone either from the Red tribe or the Blue tribe to say to the Grey tribe - "Sorry, but you can't be indifferent on the topics that you claim to be indifferent on".
You can say that, it's how you attack the other tribe that matters. Hence the Wizard of Oz analogy in Scott's post. Attempts at showing that they Grey Tribe really is the Red Tribe or is somehow empowering them against shared Grey/Blue values need to rely on more than observing that the Grey Tribe is less enthusiastic about cancelling the Red Tribe.
This is "blue tribe member discovers existence of grays, and denounces them as not true blues".
Blue tribe be wary, the grays are among us and can be hard to tell apart. At first glance they often look like us, believe many of the "right" things. But something is... off?
How can we spot grays? Well, grays (as almost the definition of their in-group) are supposed to value the substance of an argument more than appearances so if you say something nonsensical about, for example, race, you can smoke them out if they don't uncritically agree with you like a proper blue should. They can't help themselves! These optically challenged idiots will try to do _math_ on what you said, or something equally silly. It's perfect.
A side benefit of this identification process is that you get to call them racist.
Since gray tribe is vastly overrepresented here compared to general NYT readership I think this also explains the reaction of many commenters.
> No offence to Scott but I think he's got this all wrong. The NYT piece isn't about Scott
I'd be willing to entertain that hypothesis—but for how they knowingly and defiantly chose to unmask/dox a practising psychiatrist. Not printing names of sources is standard practice in media and to suggest that exceptions must be made in a case like this is dishonest.
By your lights, Scott's name added zero value to the story; printing it demonstrated that the piece was most definitely about Scott.
> the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism
Misrepresentation isn't criticism. Lumping a diverse group under one label and then using individual traits to infer criticism upon the whole—isn't criticism. You appear to be overly enthralled by group narratives rather than talking about individuals.
> I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it
An interesting assertion which smells a bit like mind-reading to me. Can you point to any instances where honest, civilised debate of "rationalist" ideas was refused? You can criticise the "rationalists" of many things, but given the proliferation of unedited and undigested conversations they churn out, being unwilling to debate isn't one of them.
(And yes, I realise that prior paragraph offers you plenty of rope: I haven't head the term "rationalist" used much and so I have no idea who you think a "rationalist" is. I have no idea what examples you might unearth. To be clear, I am not asking rhetorically, I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious what source data you used to form this unwillingness to debate hypothesis.)
Christians like to think of ourselves as less degraded than our neighbors, rather than less evolved. It amounts to the same thing in the end - a false superiority.
(seriously, don't miss on reading some of Scott's posts -- you will be disappointed by almost every piece of nonfiction you read afterwards)
It's definitely one of those cases of "If everyone thought a little more like X, Earth would be a much better place.", (let X=Scott Alexander) -- and notably it becomes quite clear how to think like he does (he just tells you!).
Didn't spoil the nonfiction in general for me, but definitely did make me ask "why more people on the left can't be like Scott?" I'm not a leftist myself, and this makes me disagree with Scott - who is definitely on the left - from time to time, but even when I disagree I feel like I learned something and maybe improved my knowledge, understanding and appreciation for opposing points. I wonder if more people were like that, maybe we could have proper political discussions instead of the catastrophic calamity we are witnessing now.
Definitely, he is definitely not always right, and you should avoid taking any person's word as gospel. Scott's point isn't "I'm always correct/You should always agree with me", it is "We should be charitable and examine things without prejudice, and look into everything with as much depth and reason as possible". I've read a few of his articles where he was out of his depth (some related to math and statistics), but they have been generally well researched and open to criticism. I guess what I wrote about other non-fiction is how well he embraces not being right; it's almost a point of celebration -- to have learned something new (and approaching the truth), not a point of defense of ego. It's a radical[1] (at least in current culture) position of collaboration. Some of his posts remind me of the Polymath Project (see Tao, and others): the point is to get to the truth, together.
[1]: I also give you that, if this position weren't radical, then SSC might seem not so special -- a good psychiatry blog with interesting philosophical and rational thought.
If you speculated this might be the cause of the current calamity, I believe you're right. I don't think it's because we've suddenly changed and suddenly people have become polarized and dogmatic. I think culturally, and instinctively, we've been generally dogmatic for a really long time, with few individual exceptions. Most people want to quickly associate with a tribe, or dogmatic system, and blindly defend it without questioning its assumptions. It is extremely difficult to get an average person to change his mind on say his favored political party -- much more than you would expect from factual and philosophical basis alone (if you frame it as an abstract philosophical discussion, e.g. a trolley problem, I think it's easier to get people engaged and open to change their minds; an engineer that measures a poor performance of a system won't usually die on the hill of defending the system at all costs).
It's really counterintutive: by being shown a new point of view, by changing your view of how the world works (in description or aspiration), you are gaining, you are learning, it should be a good thing (for everyone) -- and yet we frequently over-attach to beliefs. I don't want to speculate too much, but it sometimes does make sense to defend yourself not to be convinced by anyone of anything (potentially with selfish or malicious intent), so this may be an over-correction (cultural and or evolutionary) trait. See the post "Epistemic Learned Helplessness"
I am wondering if these 'hit pieces' are more like sermons of The Church of the NYT. Deriding sinners and their evil ways. They are not meant to reflect an objective reality, but hyperbole to act as a cautionary tale with enough plausible sounding details to allow the prefrontal cortex to accept them. A modern This way there be dragons Or Reefer Madness. The NYT has found it's tithing flock and they are pandering all the way to the bank.
Much of this behavior becomes a lot easier to understand when you realise that "wokeism" is a religion. I don't mean that ironically. John McWhorter is currently serialising a book on this topic on his own Substack, and he's far from the only person to make the observation.
I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police".
Even Macron felt the need to tell them they fucked up.
That one was Reuters, mind you, but does the same thing. The actual story being a Syrian man died from a bomb he was planning on using in a terror attack.
> I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police".
That was so bizarre. As a minority, I am afraid to openly discuss about the racism I face. I don't want to participate in oppression olympics or let other people use my suffering as their own political agenda. I want to be treated as a human being. I want neither discrimination nor preferential treatment. I want my work to speak for myself, not my skin color. It just saddens me the amount of identity politics out there and lack of any nuanced discussion.
The motivations of the hit piece seem extremely petty to me - they wanted to do an article about how he was an early proponent of mask wearing which I guess everyone agrees now is a good thing (is it like being prematurely anti-fascist or something) and they wanted to use his real name and he didn't want that, instead of saying ok, they said we'll do it anyway, he made it difficult for them to do that, later he starts blogging again under his real name and they do a hit piece to get even?
That does seem to be an accurate summary of the situation. The NYT is nothing but a rag these days. I literally value BuzzfeedNews and Vice above the NYT's "journalism", which is honestly just sad. I grew up reading NYT from the time I was maybe 8 or 9. It's pathetic how far they've fallen.
[Charles Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that’s mine too.
.. in SSC becomes ...
In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
..in the NYT article. That was spicing it up a little much. Looks like a hit piece.
The last few years they have been overly focused on their agenda and many times haven't even made a visible effort to investigate fairly. NYT employees have been fired for disagreeing with the prevailing opinion in the newsroom.
Pushing Democratic rhetoric. They drank their own kool-aid by thinking they were responsible for the 2016 election. Perhaps they were but moving to overtly biased reporting was not the correct solution to that.
The most hilarious part of the New York Times decline was the "public editor". Every public editor piece was carefully selected and prepared to admit the least amount of negligence possible, to frame even blatant lies in a mere "he said, she said" or a confusion of the moment.
Eventually, it dawned on them that having an obviously incompetent, incapable public editor is worse than having none at all, so they unceremoniously canned the position.
I am wondering, what are the legal perspectives of suing NYT for libel at this point. If Scott started a crowdsourcing campaign to fund legal defense, I would gladly throw in a couple of grand. Given the support Scott received when the situation with NYT's plans got public in the first place, this could set a very interesting precedent.
Given that his explicitly stated goal is to move on from this, probably a bad idea. Right or wrong, a lawsuit would invite the Streisand effect.
As for whether there's any legal basis to sue, it's doubtful. There isn't a whole lot that's factually inaccurate in the NYT piece. It's innuendo and words taken out of context. California has a "False Light" claim that might apply, but I doubt any court would take that up. At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.
>At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.
I think, doing it with an explicit goal of misleading your audience in order to cause damage to a specific person should not be OK. I'm not saying censor it, but making NYT liable for any actual damage (like losing a job) + punitive damages would make sense.
The thing is, the woke mob is employing the same silencing tactics as Putin's Russia. You don't have resources to shut everyone up, so you semi-arbitrarily target random people and make sure the consequences are extremely harsh. A high-profile person like Scott can just walk away from it. An average rank-and-file person with a mortgage and at best couple of months in saving will keep their mouth shut and pretend to agree with whatever the party line is. Like literally, that's Russia now. Everyone is poor and miserable, but Putin's approval ratings are >70% because, well, losing everything you have is just not worth a random act of dissent.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it's extremely difficult to successfully sue someone for libel in the US, mainly due to all the First Amendment issues that come with letting the courts adjudicate what can and can't be said.
Professionally-trained journalists are very aware of libel concerns and are taught to stay within the law. The NYT's journalistic standards may have taken a nosedive in recent years but I'm sure they can still afford good enough lawyers to avoid getting sued over a hit piece, even one as sloppy as this.
I'm pretty sure that nothing they printed is technically libel. They should at least know by now how to write a good hit piece without technically committing libel.
I'm afraid there's not going to be a solution for what the American Media has become in the legal system.
I don't understand why the NYT would do something like this. I will continue to read the NYT but with a different feeling, it eroded my trust. More missteps and I will loose my trust. This is just unacceptable, especially in the times of fake news.
I think the piece just does not have any arguments, it's just based on held beliefs that some things are wrong. It's just connects dots and quotes sentences that offend a certain readership.
EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with.
EDIT 2: I don't share the beliefs of the blog, but this piece is just written to please a certain readership. This is not journalism!
>EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with.
I recommend you read the NYT peice then, because it points out that if they publish his name as Scott Alexander (as he was going by) people would find out who he was simply by Googling that name. How exactly is the NYT meant to guarantee that? And what was the result of Siskind's actions? He stirred up a mob against the NYT writer exactly in the same way he feared he would've been subject to.
I've read the article. There's a difference in having your full name in the news vs. the name he writes his blog under. Even if it is easy to find out, that does make a difference. People can associate and recognise hime just by reading the article.
He's not a public figure, I don't see a reason to so strongly feature his name. The lack of discussion and empathy on the side of the NYT is really concerning, repeating my words before: This is not just an article, it's the life of an ordinary person we are dealing with. He may be unequipped to handle or very afraid of the spotlight he is now in. There's already an article in the New Yorker about the article in the NYT.
I was not defending the person, his actions may be flawed. But the NYT is a journalistic institution that should have high ethical and journalistic standards.
I don't see anything the NYT could have done to give this author the level of anonymity he wanted. He wasn't anonymous to start with, and the standard of "I don't mind being known, I just don't want to be mentioned in the NYT" isn't a reasonable standard.
>I recommend you read the NYT peice then, because it points out that if they publish his name as Scott Alexander (as he was going by) people would find out who he was simply by Googling that name.
If the NY Times published the article that links his pen name to his real name, that would be a stronger link than anything that previously existed. You can dox most people on the Internet if you put in enough effort, but the NY Times bears responsibility in lowering the effort required when there's no real reason to unmask him.
Scott has addressed this at least a few times. He didn't care so much that people could go from Scott Alexander the blogger to Scott Siskind the psychiatrist. That was trivial to do before the NYT got involved. He was more worried about people (ie his patients) googling Scott Siskind the psychiatrist and finding Scott Alexander the blogger, because of how that would impact his relationship with his patients. An article from the NYT plainly stating "Scott Alexander is Scott Siskind" would quickly become the top result for either search.
Maybe he was being ironic, or not even ironic but using the word sophisticated in it's narrow meaning of complex. In the same way one might describe flat earthers as having a sophisticated world view.
If you believe in a sophisticated explanation where a simple explanation exists, you're probably a believer of nonsense. Occam's razor, basically.
You say you have found an ally in someone who is known for his controversial take on intelligence and heritability and who maintains that it is this inherited difference in intelligence that is responsible for social division within the US. You call his ideas on class and culture sophisticated. Then you say that you agree with him only on a certain specific claim about teaching truckers to code. (You = Scott Alexander)
Who is being intellectually dishonest here? NYT or Scott Alexander?
The Times and many other supposed gold-standard papers have shown themselves to be unforgivably biased and politically compromised over and over and over. It's a sad thing that the entire communications apparatus of the West seems to be gaslighting the population all the time, and they're all united around the same few permitted/canonized political positions.
I didn't perceive the NYT article as negative at all. As for naming him, that's their choice as journalists, and a risk he took with recording his thoughts online just as all of us do.
I wish folks would rid themselves of the notion that the internet is anonymous or deletable. We'd all be much healthier by acknowledging the possibility that whatever you write here may be etched in stone. And if you become well known people may try to identify you. This isn't an OSC book it's the real world.
It’s interesting, though, that the NYT has been willing to respect the pseudonymity of other public figures in circumstances that I would consider comparable. One example is Virgil Texas, a cohost of the perennially controversial leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Virgil Texas is not his real name—and his real name can be found with a bit of searching, as in the case of Alexander/Siskind—but the Times has stuck with the pseudonym.[0] What principle is being followed here?
News outlets can make their own calls on who to name. If naming brings more readers and one outlet won't do it then that's an opportunity for another outlet, provided everything else in the article is legal.
I don't expect NYT or any outlet to be free from bias and that doesn't mean I want any of them to disappear. I want them all to thrive.
You've moved the goalposts. DDoS is against the law. Connecting an anonymous account to a name after confirming it is them is not. It may be libelous if the connection is not factual, but if it is a fact then that's legal to print.
This is also moving the goalpost, just because something is legal (and rightly so in this case) does not mean it is moral.
My point is that doing risky activities does not mean you cannot complain when things go wrong; you can both take responsability for your decision to partecipate in that risk and criticise the system for exposing partecipants to excessive risk.
In this case the criticism wasn't "the internet police should stop bad actors, but (hyperbole warning) "the most respected newspaper in the US should have higher standards than internet trolls"
> Some of the savvy people giving me advice suggested I fight back against this. [...] Say why it was necessary for my career to publish those papers under my real name.
> Why didn't I do this? Partly because it wasn't true. I don't think I had particularly strong arguments on any of these points. [...]
> But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.
> No! There's no dignified way to answer any of these questions except "fuck you". Just don't kick me in the balls! It isn't rocket science! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
Folks have covered a lot of great territory in the comment section, so I guess I'll just spit out my question about the elephant in the room: who makes up the "shadowy" cabal of NYT editors and execs who pushed this piece? It does seem like for all intents and purposes they wanted to make an example. And of course, the journalist who had to put his name on the piece is not necessarily the one who drove the whole gambit.
The gambit is quite risky. As another commentator wrote, it's not necessarily out of character for the NYT as a prominent vassal of American politics; they lambasted MLK and later on got somewhat of a black eye for it. But in the age of the internet, I can't help but think all of their opponents will seize on their indiscretion and that any moderates will be a little alienated. For so many people who didn't know what SSC is beforehand, won't they take a read and won't some of them conclude that they see more of themselves in his writing than the hit-piece? Is the NYT aware of the Streisand effect and just doesn't care or even wants to push people further into a "with us or against us" polarization? My sad fear is that the latter is true.
I am surprised just about no one on this thread finds his effort to hide his identity online flimsy. If you are a psychiatrist with a popular blog with hot wire topic discussions and cares a lot about patient relationships, shouldn't you be taking a lot more precautions in concealing your identity than just dropping your last name? I mean, come on.
I dunno. I mean, it's a little flimsy. But he said he started the blog in college - I know people who wrote online by removing their last name in college. And I doubt his patients know his middle name or spend a lot of time searching for his blog, when it doesn't appear in the NYT. I think if a single patient goes out of their way to research you, you stop seeing them and refer them to another doctor, but if half your patients read about you in the NYT, you have a real problem.
Do you find it implausible or merely flimsy? I certainly don't find it implausible.
Intentional political anxiety - a tactic of the Cultural Revolution that was discussed on the excellent In Our Time podcast from the BBC this last week. Never knowing exactly where the next offense may come from, intentionally keeping the population on edge about committing a politically incorrect infraction that will result in consequences to you or your family. Really resonates with the trajectory of institutional rhetoric in the US these days.
I also think the following take is interesting, and hasn't been mentioned in any of the comments so far (to the extent that I've been able to keep up with them):
> Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension.
More specifically:
> The NYT has 7.5 million subscribers, mostly progressives in the 90-99% range. These people feel very smart, and they are in fact smarter than 90% of the population. So there’s no point bemoaning the fact that the NYT is not about to tell it’s readers that, “Actually, we provide middlebrow news analysis, and if you want brilliant inspired analysis you need to read blogs like SlateStarCodex.”
> I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them. ... Predictably, the NYT piece came out soon after, and predictably, it was very negative
Not sure if we all read the same piece, but I wouldn't call it very negative. Pointing out the neoreactionary affiliations of the Rationalist community is neither something new nor "hit piece"-like. But apparently criticism of Silicon Valley's favorite darling cannot be tolerated here.
NYT is not a friend of anyone who does not speak exclusively through them. Their tech columns are showcases of irrelevance and will probably get dumped sooner or later
The New York Times is no longer a thought leader in society who helps people consider important ideas. Speech and thought are both heavily regulated there. I refused to believe that it was committing acts of "fake news" for all these years, but now realize that it is a hollowed out institution advancing identity politics at the cost of unbiased truth.
Newspapers are in a weak position today: basically they are under perfusion of oligarchs and ads. So when they attack, they do so on: 1/ what is clearly identified as the enemy and 2/ weaker entities after labeling them as enemies. It is important to note neither provide ad incomes.
Ignore the politics, foreign affairs and opinion sections of the NYT. They basically peddle outright lies and exaggerations with ridiculous levels of bias.
Stick to the non-environment science pieces. Admittedly, not much of the paper left, but whats left is rather good. Until those writers get fired.
There's a saying (of unconfirmed origin), but I'll use Jay-Z's version: 'A wise man told me don't argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.'
I think the NYT piece was, like most 'journalism' these days, poorly researched, biased, and unfair. It omitted quotes from insightful passages of SA's, instead picking out those instances of 'impure' thoughts.
But I also think SA does some things that are perhaps signaling to racists/sexists that he's an ally of theirs, or at least intentionally providing a forum for them. Quoting Charles Murray to tell us about the time you agreed with him is much like Congresswoman Mary Miller quoting Hitler when she said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future'. You are giving credibility to these people. Even the quote SA cites (of himself) seems to agree with this:
> But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either.
The part he left out is that Murray thinks the inability of this trucker to learn is largely because of his genetics. Sure, maybe a poor choice of words. I'll withhold judgment as I haven't read too much of Scott's blog.
I have rarely seen Slate Star Codex articles being discussed heavily on HN until recently. Find it hard to believe that it is a silicon valley subculture if it's not being discussed here.
Not a super fan of NYT or anything but I’m a subscriber. That NYT article didn’t sound like a hit piece or too negative as portrayed at all.
For people who call themselves The Rationalists and advocate for absolute free speech, it’s bit ironic they turn touchy and eager to get out their pitchforks if the topic being discussed is about them instead of the thousands of areas they think they have the absolute authority to talk and dissect about. Not that NYT is blameless on the later part of the previous sentence as well.
I used to read Alexander's essays now and then. I tried to read this one, but the site complained that I had javascript turned off (why do I need that to read an article?) and, even with scripting turned off, used a lot of CPU while the tab was open. I get the impression that substack is doing something shady, and I think I’ll avoid them in the future.
I would file a lawsuit (I'm sure there are more than one legal claim that can be brought against NYT in this situation), and the "settlement" should be a public retraction and apology from NYT (and the author and chain of editors) plus significant financial damage to attempt to make up for the job and professional cost to the claimant.
> The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray’s offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
In the quote in question, he literally says that Murray "has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture". While I'm not familiar with Murray's writing, it's hard to believe that his theories on class and culture are completely disconnected from his theories on race.
———
On point 2:
> This is true only in the sense that in 2014, I applied this comparison to a specific group of feminists who I accused of bullying and taunting people in a way that made them traumatized and suicidal. I describe my specific concern in the linked post. Lots of other feminists are great, and I continue to support gender equality.
Calling it a "specific group" is downplaying things. In the same 2014 article he wrote:
> We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man. And then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, and then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists. And then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing…
He has expressed similar sentiments elsewhere; it is safe to say he sees the attitude he criticizes as representative of at least a significant chunk of modern feminist activism. Meanwhile, all the New York Times said is that he described "some feminists as something close to Voldemort". Where is the discrepancy?
> Also, this became a weird go-to thing for people who wanted to do hatchet jobs to hit me with, so much so that sometime before 2017 I edited the post involved telling people not to do that.
His argument is that people who quoted him took his statement "out of context". I am not so sure. The immediate context suggests an element of hyperbole, which slightly takes the edge off the comparison. But add the context of the rest of the post? The New York Times article says he described people as "something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books". And… it's no exaggeration to say he was accusing people of being (or at least behaving) truly evil, whatever that means. I mean, he literally writes: "some feminists are evil raving loonies and some manospherites are evil raving loonies". He later mentions "the evil fringes of both movements", which lack "basic human decency". And even setting wording aside, the post does indeed accuse people of being responsible for others being traumatized, which seems pretty evil. (How valid the accusation is is another matter.)
In short, the Voldemort quote is, to a reasonable degree, representative of the post as a whole.
———
Point 3 is highly diffuse; he raises valid points in defense, but they don't really prove the article wrong.
———
On point 4:
> They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel.
Not six, two. Scott described Eliezer Yudkowsky as "the guy who taught me most of what I know about rationality". Eliezer Yudkowsky, as the article mentions, is friends with Peter Thiel.
More importantly, the main argument the article makes about Silicon Valley is that Scott's views are influential there (while allegedly providing a "safe space" for prejudice). And to demonstrate that, it mentions several notable people who follow his blog, including quoting Sam Altman praising it at length. Whether those people know him personally is beside the point.
The basic issue is: the Times article isn't really very good (possibly repurposed to focus on Slate Star Codex after all the controversy pre-publication?) and relies largely on sort of gesturing vaguely at small snippets of his writing around controversial topics.
This makes it pretty simple for Scott to parry the specific allegations or implications in his response here. But I feel like anybody who takes an honest look at his writing would have to admit:
He believes in IQ and intelligence heritability, specifically with at least a significant genetic component.
He doesn't like feminists (not all but a much broader swath than his response implies). Maybe you could say he's moderated on this over the years.
His response heavily implies that these things are not true. It strikes me as "technically true" in roughly the same way he's criticizing the Times piece for being.
Narrowly because it's actually unfair point by point, as you say.
And slightly dishonest, because Scott does in fact entertain ideas that are scandalous to an expected arrival from the NYT. (Though not, I would say, for the reasons they might assume.)
But also more broadly, it doesn't take the opportunity to make intelligible to that arrival his insider's view of these related-but-distinct phenomena (his blog, the Rationalists, "Grey Tribe", the counter-techlash). Which the article predictably muddles.
Perhaps saddest to me, by responding defensively (however understandably!), he reinforces the emphasis in the piece on this sort of culture war stuff. Rather than perhaps channeling this new interest towards the meta-science and history and psychiatry and the like.
Here’s my take on NYT: they’re desperately trying to stay relevant in modern era where news happens real-time on social media. They’re an institution and have an incredible reach in steering narratives still but that’s fading fast.
NYT is a rag. The power play they‘d attempted on Scott was for ideological reasons, and shows what culture this organisation has. And what kind of people seek to be part of this.
The sad part is, despite so many bad takes, ideology pushing, and hatchet jobs The NYT overall still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content out there.
The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be.
I know this has been true for me many times.
Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.
I'm aware of Gell-Mann Amnesia and read from a variety of sources.
This was really a comment on how most journalism is even worse. The NYT does occasionally have pieces where I know about the topic and their representation goes into details that others aren't likely to. Those are, however, not a large percentage of their output.
I've known about Gell-Mann amnesia for years but never experienced the feeling of 'this coverage of a thing I know is terrible', even in this piece. Maybe I don't know much about anything, or maybe I'm a conflict theorist, not a mistake theorist, so when I see them get things wrong like this, I assume it was on purpose.
It's pretty hard to find high quality alternatives. There is the wall street journal, maybe a few others, but not many. I personally read a few high quality news sources and science journals.
Inexplicably many here seem to think that random blog posts are somehow remotely equivalent. I value opinion at zero, and trust a random person to do quality research at about zero too. Trust is earned.
When random internet opinion becomes "news" I suppose we really are in a post truth world.
I've come to respect The Economist and The Financial Times. Their articles don't go viral as much--I suspect because they aren't as optimized for virality ;-)
Ironically Scott Alexander has a couple of good posts about this topic
a discussion on how big institutions that are telling you the truth are competing both to keep their position and tell you the truth with a focus on medicine
Washington Post? It's long been essentially the biggest rival to the NYT in terms of national political coverage, and my opinion is that as of late, it's been higher quality than the NYT.
So does the NYT. The bias of the times just happens to be really well aligned with mainstream liberals in the US so it’s much harder to notice if you’re in that camp.
> The WSJ has a ton of dubious articles. The Opinion pieces are garbage compared to the average one in the Times although of course both have misses
I agree with you on that. I subscribed to both for awhile, but dropped the WSJ because it had less international content, its articles tended to lack background (great if you're following a story closely, not so great if you haven't), and its opinion section was utterly boring and predictable.
If you don't think the journal has rag hit pieces I don't know what to say other than you obviously haven't read many articles or practically any opinion pieces from them.
The clever playground bully doesn't say "let's beat up Scott", at least not where teachers can hear - he knows he can say something like "Scott annoyed me a bit yesterday" and his followers/admirers will know that beating up Scott might just earn them popularity points.
The clever mafia boss, at least in the movies, doesn't leave a paper trail showing they've ordered a hit job on someone, they say something like wouldn't it be convenient if Scott weren't seen around here for a while?
(Even Trump had the sense not to say directly on camera, let's break into the capitol and smash things up.)
The NYT piece has an ugly taste of "I'm not going to say I endorse direct action against Scott, BUT" when it lists how he could be seen as "associated" with sexists, racists and so on. Let's not pretend otherwise: Cade Metz knows exactly that lesser accusations have brought people down in the past.
The infamous internet argument that is "calling out negative things is a negative itself". "You just have to go meta, and you will see it's all the same." "Everything is relative/subjective"
These type of generic arguments bring nothing valuable to the discussion table. These arguments are used to shut down conversation in a very self-aggrandizing manner.
I think it's very unlikely that a SSC reader will commit any kind of crime against a NYT reporter or their friends and families - they're much more the kind of people [in favour of niceness, community and civilisation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...)
To quote Scott:
> Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not "Death to the unbelievers!" but "If you’re nice, you can join our cuddle pile!"
While "nameclashes" are a problem, I don't see any evidence that they have been created or promoted by any nation-state. Actually it seems to me that sjw was rather adopted as a more precise term than leftist, to reduce confusion. To refer to people who mainly talk about race and gender that rather than say raising taxes for the rich.
> I want to respond to four main negative claims in the article
> 1. The article tries to connect me to Charles Murray and The Bell Curve
> 2. In their litany of reasons I am bad, the Times says I compared some feminists to Voldemort.
> 3. The Times also presented a more general case that I was a bad ally to women in tech.
> 4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true -
So if I'm understanding correctly, Dershowitz asked Pinker for a linguistic opinion vis a vis laws against sex with underage girls, and Pinker wasn't the least bit curious over what this was all about?
I think it's now worth considering The New York Times as a hostile actor, in the same category as Google and Facebook. (Of course this is a gross generalization, but the beneficent- or neutral-actor model no longer seems appropriate.)
I am not sure I understand what you mean by these "models" of corporations. You believe that some corporations organize their actions to try to help... everyone? And others organize their actions to try to hurt... everyone? And you decide what category to put what corporation in?
Of course it is reductive, but I do think some businesses pursue mostly non-zero sum games. Their gain does not come at my expense.
There are yet others which have "mined out" all the non-zero sum games in their industry (or choose not to pursue them), and so instead play zero-sum games. In these games, their gains come at the expense of their customers, the public or the environment. These tend to be monopolies because there is no recourse.
In categorizing some of these businesses as hostile actors, I am suggesting that they are predominantly playing zero-sum games. To cite some examples of businesses not playing zero-sum games, I need not look further than the small businesses in my local town.
Hopefully this provides a more nuanced answer you were rightfully asking about.
Very often when I read a NYT article, I get a paranoid Neo-marxist feeling that NYT doesn’t really care for equality of opportunity, minority rights, women’s rights or any particular oppressed group. They just hate the successful and the rich.
Mark Thompson, CEO of NYT has an estimated net worth of about 10-30 million USD according to a few sites on the Internet. That's not "did a unicorn IPO"-rich but it certainly doesn't align with "NYT hates the rich".
Time to quit mainstream media. All outlets have an agenda. I quit NYT since they've predicted an 80-20% win for Hillary, and the day after the results I've read their main column. They didn't take any responsibility at all.
This gets at part of what I find irritating about the self-described Rationalist community: they talk about "free speech" when what they really want is unrestricted, consequence-less speech that allows them to guiltlessly harm certain people in the name of innovation.
If you believe that's the case, perhaps you could provide an example of Scott's writing that shouldn't be allowed, and what you think the consequences should be?
I don't think that comment implies he disagrees with free speech - my interpretation was that he's talking about how some of Scott's supporters seem to think the NYT piece shouldn't have been allowed.
I’m attempting to find a charitable way to engage with those tweets, since on first read they seem a) deliberately false about the content of SSC, b) invoke a sneering tone common amongst folks who subscribe to certain segments of “woke” progressivism (especially in tech), and c) attribute maximum malice of forethought by the targeted party to all of it.
The arguments are also just bad. “Why don’t these free speech people take into account existing power structures?” But this is of course exactly what they are doing when they advocate for absolute free speech. How else do you account and adjust for the different levels of cultural power different groups, companies, whatever have in society?
Scott literally calls a study that links IQ and race "sophisticated" and calls Murray an "ally" in the study of the connection and the antecedent impact on social welfare.
It's only when the NYT times points out the connection does it suddenly become much more narrow: a specific and borderline non-sequitur claim about teaching truckers to code.
I find the whole "I'm just asking questions!" routine to be so, so tiresome and disingenuous. This whole thing reads to me that he wants to be seen as iconoclastic and he wants to associate with contrarians but doesn't want any of the blowback for doing so. He may argue that a lack of refuting the more offensive implications and conclusions of an opinion while agreeing with a portion of it (only after the fact, mind you!) does not imply wholescale endorsement, but that's naive at best and wanting it both ways and crying about it at worst.
> literally calls a study that links IQ and race "sophisticated"
I did not read the quote that way. Looking at the original:
> Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture.
He seems to be saying the opposite: that Murray has theories to explain IQ beyond just heredity (i.e. [social?] class and culture). It seems to me that Scott is drawing attention to Murray's non IQ/Race theories here, then using that common ground to jump into universal basic income.
If he were to call the IQ studies sophisticated, here's how I would have worded it:
(Abridged quote of evil twin Scott) Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, [however he] has some very sophisticated theories about [hereditary genetics].
It’s almost unbelievable how far the NYT has fallen, how ideologically corrupt it has become. I can only hope that more and more people become aware of their corruption, and stop relying on them as a trustworthy source of reporting. Articles like this one are a step in the right direction, revealing the rot. I really admire the author’s bravery and honesty despite all that has happened to him.
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.
Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:
"WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
"List of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryp...