Silicon Valley’s Safe Space
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But no, kudos to them, they found a third way: Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association, and carefully ignore anything inconvenient.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
It feels weird even writing this argument down. If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
What a depressing waste of everyone's time.
Bluntly: Which prominent member of the neoreactionary movement was allowed to guest blog at SSC?
Because if the answer is "none", then I think it's clear he did not do any such thing.
Note how far removed this is from Scott Alexander himself.
It is true that Scott linked to Nick Land (and also Charles Murray but that is a different discussion) in his blogroll.
Which is kind of core to Scott's "Grey Tribe" ideas about free speech, but is very much against the "Blue Tribe" ideas of "no platforming nazis" etc.
Can't wait till we move past this infantile reframing of "showing people something you read" as "platforming".
We used to read the works of our enemies to understand them and read the works of kooks and crazies to avoid following their path (but also to see what truths, when followed too zealously, lead to ruin).
Now we have to read things, figure out the social credit of the things we read, and then decide whether or not to tell anyone we actually read it and thought about it.
I will never understand the pearl clutching that goes on when things like this happen.
As a person you are judged constantly by others, as a public figure this increases exponentially. You are judged on everything: the clothing you wear, the way you speak, and yes, the company you keep. In the age of social media influencing, each of us has a platform built upon the platform we choose. Each of us via that platform can spread influence, be it marketing, ideas, or (dis)information.
If you utilize your platform upon a platform (or just your platform) to spread bad ideas, purported by bad people, it is a perfectly rational reaction by your audience to reclaim the social capital they have given you. This is not wrong. This is not censorship. This is how social networks have worked since long before any of us had a smart phone, or indeed, when the social network was a fire in a cave, we have operated this way.
And reading this summation, yeah that sounds about right. It sounds as if he is embroiled in a social space that is spreading bad ideas. He has denounced one person who was in that social space, but he is still in contact with two others spreading similar ideas. This calls into question the sincerity of his denouncement.
I.e. if you say you're done drinking, and resolve to quit, and refuse to spend time with your alcoholic friend, but still spend time around two others who drink regularly, people would be right to question your sincerity in that resolve.
> If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
This impulse to boil this activity into a set of always absurd sounding "rules" is probably comforting to those who would call themselves Rationalist, the sorts who fetishize facts and logic, while usually having a dearth of both in the things they say. But ultimately this isn't hard to understand: If you associate with people known to believe and spread bad things, you will in turn be viewed as possibly endorsing those things.
And all of this comes up against the simple and obvious truth that all someone in this position has to do is speak what so many would like to hear; that they didn't understand what this person was doing, that it isn't what they believe, and to create distance. But they won't. I wonder why?
Probably because you aren't in a position of social influence, and/or your friends aren't propagating dangerous ideas? That's all the more reason to skewer those that do and are, precisely because of the platforming effects they have.
The idea that the "Gray Tribe" is anything but a well-written propaganda effort targeting midwits to keep them supporting the Blue Tribe (and most importantly, to keep the Blue Tribe in power) as the problems mount and the failures become harder and harder to excuse.
“Listen to your culture’s leaders and tastemakers, vigorously punish any heretics” is a terrible algorithm for that. It’s exactly why so many bad ideas have such power for so long.
Part of the idea of presenting bad ideas in such a sympathetic light is to then whack the reader with, “Do you realize what you were just nodding at?” To show that you too are capable of believing terrible things under the right circumstances, to encourage humility and skepticism.
I mean, they tried that approach with Roko's Basilisk... Let's just say it didn't work very well.
Roko's Basilisk is just Pascal's Wager restated for AI.
It falls to the same counterarguments, e.g. what if a superintelligent AI already exists somewhere in the universe and currently doesn't care about you but deigns to punish you for any attempt to create a competitor?
I find that idea pretty gross, to be honest with you.
Also, who says what ideas are dangerous? This is a ridiculously pro status-quo stance to take.
Not everyone is a rich socialite looking to be viewed well at the finest private dinner parties. In fact, I dare say that anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers are the opposite of that.
Maybe you should go try judging someone with actual responsibility and a real role in public life. You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
These social morays have applied to everyone, everywhere, forever. One does not need to be rich to have social capital.
> You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
This just in: two things can be bad at the same time. Perhaps more than two! Details at 11.
Any claim that any particular social more is eternal or universal is ahistorical. This is the clearest finding of the fields of anthropology and history. Everything about human life varies throughout time and space.
Sexism has also been applied forever, doesn't make it right.
The thing is we have lots of perfectly good examples of people associating with conservative people with a few noxious views. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, for example, were well known as family friends of Kanye West but they managed to go years asserting they were personal friends and disagreed with his political views and hoped he would come around. Eventually Kanye went a little overboard and they started distancing themselves further, but pointedly that was Kanye’s fault and not the Teigan-Legend family’s.
It really is not that hard to adopt a “love the sinner, hate the sin” position. But when people adopt this position of hemming-and-hawing any time someone asks “do you really hate the sin though?” it understandably raises some questions. People have blogs where they engage with bad ideas all the time. There’s a style in how they present and engage with the ideas that doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
I also don’t think advocates for “places to debate” these things really understand the purpose of debate. These arguments for scientific racism are well known and understood and mostly debunked by actual well-regarded experts in the associated fields. There is no value in debating bad ideas ad nauseum with randos online. You’re not learning anything from that, you’re just engaged in a sort of rhetorical sparring match. Is society well served by you trading bad faith arguments with strangers? Maybe. At the expense of exposing impressionable spectators to arguments with poor empirical grounding that are nonetheless seductive for taking advantage of common misconception and flattering peoples egos? Not so sure about that.
> “It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints.
Yes, David just said that, thanks for the repetition. Where were the editors on this?
I conjecture that they just felt like they had to publish something after all this time and they went with what they had.
It’s also strange that it doesn’t link to the NYT magazine article on rationalist retreats from a few years ago, nor the New Yorker article about this dispute, nor the New Yorker article about HN, all of which fill in the picture.
Maybe the good editors at the NYT are too busy getting fired.
Recently a NYT freelance editor Lauren Wolfe, who mostly worked on the "live updates" team, was fired, but this firing caused some controversy due to the timing of some tweets and who knows what else. It's not completley clear why she was fired, as the NYT responded to requests for comment by the WaPo by saying [1]: "There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter. For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved we don’t plan to comment further. (To clarify something that has been incorrectly reported, Ms. Wolfe was not a full-time employee, nor did she have a contract.)"
Quite a few leftists initially blamed the NYT for caving to conservative pressure, apparently by making the claim there was a relation between the tweets she made and her firing, which she confirmed in another WaPo interview [3] by saying "...that an editor at the paper contacted her after she published the “chills” tweet. The Times couldn’t be associated with such a tweet, said the manager, and that her gig with the paper would be ending."
Some leftists also seemed to blame Glenn Greenwald for his involvement in the matter; a single tweet in response to hers that he later called "light mockery"[2]. Glenn Greenwald, previously strongly supported by the left and many others, has recently been victim to a series of character assassination attempts due to his unconformity to the mainstream leftists viewpoints, so it rather seems the twitter left mob just used him as a lightening rod without having all the facts in this case.
The tweets in question?
LW: "The pettiness of the Trump admin not sending a military plane to bring him to D.C. as is tradition is mortifying. Childish
LW: “Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills”
GG: "If you're in the national press and will be on TV at any point today and being to feel the need to weep joyously, just hold it in until you find a private place. Nobody is expecting any adversarial coverage over the next 4 years, but it's just a matter of personal dignity."
2. https://youtu.be/uL-e6XfWppo?t=293
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/25/lauren-wo...
The difference is now they're coming after Silicon Valley, because they realize they've lost their attention and advertising monopoly. It's all very predicable and boring.
It's the same deal with Balaji. The only reason he cares is because the reporting might hurt a company he's invested in.
Follow the money. Always follow the money.
> NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing”
Where's the lie though? Incredible indeed…
Plenty of people that deeply respect NYT reporting (and I'm a WaPo person) think NYT editorial is, like that of the WSJ, a total clownfire.
If you’re going to bring in contrarian views on things like race, that some view as racist - okay. But I would recommend expanding that to bring in views that are also contrarian but perhaps not so controversial but nevertheless worth discussing.
My impression is SSC readers get caught up in a sort of intellectual exoticism rather than any rigorous analysis of what the landscape actually looks like; the non-conventional but ultimately boring takes are left unexamined.
Not just non-college Republicans, huge swaths of non-liberal Democrats (mostly people of color). Are the majority of Black Democrats, who believe you can’t be a moral person without believing in God, represented? Are there any Muslims who hold social positions their religion tells them to be true? When it comes to immigrants, anyone who actually believes what your typical Indian or Bangladeshi believes? (Or is it just the elite who deliberately left those countries and assimilated into white American culture? And even among the latter, is it the first generation parents hoping their kids will integrate to a degree, but hold on to traditional social morals, or is it the second generation ones who picked up western social morals despite their parents’ efforts?)
Again, none of these assumptions are wrong or bad or right or good. My point is just these are the assumptions you'll see across nearly every commenter on the blog because of its narrow, Western-educated audience. There are many popular, interesting, and dynamic political discussions happening elsewhere in the world (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
And I can't find the anti-neoreactionary & in-defense-of-democracy post that goes through these problems, and tries to justify the assumptions.
> (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
If you could point these out I think SSC/LessWrong folks would love to ponder over them!
I want to read that, but Google failed me. Do you have a link or a clue to help me find a link?
Grouping of people by other people will forever be a "thing"
The second best thing is, should any reporters be reading this, to take the opportunity to write a better article.
Does anyone? I’m not sure credible people do and no one I respect has referenced a Times article for other than crossword, Sunday magazine, fluff stuff.
Contra to the insinuation that Cade Metz smears Siskind by unfairly associating him with Nick Land, Metz's article lays the evidence and allows readers to infer what that evidence may or may not mean.
For me, the concluding 3 paragraphs of the article sum up what Slate Star Codex (now "Astral Codex Ten") may be
> I assured [Kelsey Piper] my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.
This is ad absurdum at its finest. Proving whether an idea is correct using statistical analysis makes sense for many empirical matters. But proving whether proponents of extreme views (e.g. in the article, the idea that women are biologically not as capable as men to work as programmers) by using statistical analysis is a moral failure driven by scientificism. (I'm going to decline rehearsing the debates about whether women are biologically or culturally inhibited from programming.)
> When I asked Mr. Altman, of OpenAI, if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”
This really sounds unfortunately like John Matze's position on Parler. Slate Star Codex is not the same kind of gathering ground Parler was, but given the next paragraph, the comparison is not inapt.
> In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.
If Slate Star Codex is somewhere self-described "Rationalists" can civilly and safely debate whether intelligence is statistically correlated to race and gender and these are "[t]he People Inventing the Future", then it's not surprising Horowitz would seek to protect that forum under the shelter of Substack.
However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
Failing to object to immorality and immoral arguments cannot be corrected only by rationalism and statistics because Nature, at its core, is amoral.
Many dumb people are moral. Many dumb people are immoral. By the same token many smart people are immoral, too.
The real problem is when you realize that many smart people are, in fact, both immoral and dumb.
The article's last paragraph gives the lie to the controversy that has raged in tech circles surrounding publishing Siskind's name.
> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
Did you actually read the post where Scott explains why? Because at that point it was impossible to keep it private. He was also forced to quit his job. The fact that he landed on his feet doesn't mean there wasn't a cost paid.
What was happening in this story was that Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable. That's a reasonable request to make in a community of peers (it's why I'll keep using "Alexander" on HN, for instance). It is not remotely a reasonable demand to make of strangers, let alone journalists.
This is another instance of message board thought seeping into the real world, and it's always alarming to me to see that, because while message board thought is fun, it's also deeply weird and dysfunctional.
This isn’t what he asked for. As you note there’s pages of comments and Alexander’s own account on Substack now. Maybe you’re claiming he isn’t being honest about his requests from NYT.
>...using an identity so trivially connectable to those patients.
As others have pointed out, the connection was mapped as A to B and not B to A.
>...it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Times.
And the Times is what would've changed how his identities were mapped. How The Times' operates in this new tech-enabled media environment is absolutely relevant.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Horton_(blogger)
I prefer to live in a world where professionals act responsibly. He could have stopped writing as Scott Alexander and started writing with a new pseudonym. He just didn't want to rebuild his audience.
Those who tried to find Scott Alexander's real name could find it.
But those who tried to find information about their doctor or colleague Scott Siskind most likely wouldn't find out that he writes a popular blog.
There existed a trivial mapping of A -> B. There did not exist a trivial mapping of B -> A. Scott was trying to prevent his patients, who had information B, from being bombarded with the link to A. It is not a hard concept to grasp.
What a facile justification. By that metric there was nothing wrong with Gawker's antics. The question is always whether the things a journalist is publicizing in the public interest, and the fact that publications (especially prestigious ones) have an obligation to consider the impact of what they expose of citizens who often don't have an equal platform from which to defend themselves.
The very fact that you can find his real name from his pseudonym means that the NYT wasn't actually "exposing" anything of value. At the same time, they've made it considerably harder (if not impossible) for him to practice normal psychiatric medicine.
Also, does this article even cover what it was originally supposed to be about - i.e. a bunch of people online who saw COVID coming long before the authorities? I haven't gone all the way through, but my understanding is no. Instead there's no so subtle implication that the guy who wrote the "Anti Neoreactionary FAQ" may in fact a secret nazi or something.
But, as Scott has said numerous times, he simply wanted to make it hard for his patients to google his name and find his blog, so that he could continue practicing psychiatry. That's a perfectly reasonable request to ask of anyone, including journalists.
These arguments about why we're all obligated to cooperate with Alexander's attempt to walk his identity back always seem to be inventing new norms, like the norm of "if a doctor slips up and writes political essays under their real name, then, for the sake of the doctor's career, every other person in the world should pretend that real name was never disclosed". It's a reasonable thing to want, but not to expect.
Not really. The NYT was perfectly willing to protect the anonymity of a different psychiatrist blogger. Yes, this person did a better job of keeping their identity a secret, but the justification was largely the same.
And let's not pretend that journalism is only about sharing information. There's a great deal that journalists don't share (or even try to actively suppress) for many different reasons. Partly because there are a lot of ethical considerations when publicizing information.
Worth noting that part of the issue is that, with psychiatry and counseling in particular, it really doesn't matter what he was writing about or what his politics are. Any such publicity compromises the blank slate that counselors are supposed to present to their clients. While this does mean that mental health professionals have an obligation to take care with their public image, it's not unreasonable to ask others (including journalists) to respect the particular cost they face with any kind of exposure.
Is there a real argument for why the NYT _should_ publish Scott's name? Other than "it doesn't care whether that hurts the subject, and it expects to get more clicks this way".
It's not a requirement to offer this protection, but declining when it's asked for by the subject of a story is certainly a weighty ethical decision that respectable journalists don't take lightly.
Outing someone in a vulnerable position simply because the journalist disagrees with their ideas and wants to harm them (vs. deciding it's in the public interest) would be a very clear breach of ethics.
It doesn't matter if someone could just Google it. The NYT shouldn't make it easier unless there's journalistic value in doing so. Spite doesn't count.
Would you feel the same if this was a story about a sexual assault victim instead of a blogger?
He's a blogger, not an assault victim, but his concerns are similar. Avoiding harassment and physical violence against himself and his family. Avoiding negative consequences on his career.
Why are his concerns less valid than anyone else's? "Because I disagree with him" or "because he talks about ideas I don't think should have a platform" aren't good answers. There's no allegation he hurt anyone, did anything illegal, abused his influence, or acted in bad faith. So what's the journalistic purpose of exposing him?
Should his identity have been withheld because it would hurt his career, or he might be harassed?
It's not like he was trying to hide from the NSA or anything. The goal was "I don't want my patients to see my blog on the first page of Google results when they search for my real name". The NYT completely obliterated that.
Additionally, the fact that the NYT chose to smear him means that now many potential patients may google his name, see the hit piece and nothing else, and decide "yikes, better not go there".
The article wasn't flattering. It wasn't a smear or a hit piece.
Based on his behaviour in this and other[1] situations, I have no doubt that if Metz thought he could get away with something more unsavoury, he would have tried to.
[1] https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-c...
This would be reminiscent of the South Park planet Marklar where all people, places and things are named Marklar. It's fun for a bit but likely impractical. It's also not clear how using someone's name is 'spiteful' given the vast majority of readers would have never heard of Scott Alexander, pseudonymous or otherwise.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technological_Singu...
You seem to be under the impression that journalists are under no obligation with regard to how their reporting impacts their subjects, even when that subject is not a public figure per se. I'm pretty sure that's something that even most journalists (at least those working at relatively prestigious institutions) would disagree with.
Again, you are justifying Gawker-style journalism, which is pretty atrocious and doesn't serve to create a better informed public.
"Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable."
Absolutely false. Scott admits many times that it's trivial for his real identity to be known if you search around for Scott Alexander.
Scott Alexander -> Scott Sisnick (trivial)
What Scott was concerned about what his searching his real name being resoundingly brought to Scott Alexander, a major issue for his psychiatrist-patient relationships, as he demonstrates that psychiatrists need to maintain a blank slate for their patients to project onto, so that the patients don't hide or alter the behavior knowing something about their psychiatrist. That's very mainstream psychiatry. And there were concerns about current psychiatric patients he was seeing possibly being affected by this.
Before: Scott Sisnick -> "psychiatrist, bay area, studied at X, etc."
After: Scott Sisnick -> "Scott Alexander, rationalist, providing a platform for white nationalists, racism, etc."
By way of example, a friend just told me on Twitter that it's super important that patients not be able to look up their therapists on the Internet and learn more about their personal lives. But that's definitely not a norm! I checked with several therapists I know personally.
I feel like people are scrambling to invent Internet rules that allow Alexander to coerce journalists, and I don't find that effort especially persuasive.
I mean, they don't bind like a physical law or something. Ignoring people's requests for anonymity and getting them harassed or fired is certainly physically possible, it just makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about the effect on speech and discourse.
It's sort of similar to not wearing a mask out, it's certainly not illegal or impossible to go out without a mask and cough on people who would prefer you didn't, but it still makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about you putting others' lives at risk.
But even if it was an accurate representation, the media has to ask "is it our job as a powerful outlet to literally punish this much less powerful person because they have opinions we disagree with".
If it wasn't "opinions we disagree with" but like "has killed 3 people" sure appoint yourself judge, jury, and executioner. But in other cases yes it makes you an asshole to think that you should enforce your will by punishing someone who disagrees with you.
Scott Alexander on the one hand is a practicing clinician, and on the other writes prolifically about culture war topics. This is majorly out of balance, and it's on Scott to fit these areas of his life and income together. Why would the responsibility be on the NYT to help him?
His preferences bind on the NYT in that as Scott can take actions which are adverse to the NYT in order to maintain his preferences. Such as deleting the blog and having his fans sign a petition and cancel their subscriptions. None of those actions are unreasonable: he is free to delete his blog for any reason or no reason, and anyone can make in a petition. What is the problem here?
My name is not secret. It is, however, private.
At the start of the post but there's more further in.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive
There's s also this from The NYT initially contacted him with his reasoning for protecting his job (which didn't work out)
>I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left to far-right – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
It seems like he's pretty clear that he chose to quit. He says his job was "tentatively willing to try to make it work". It appears to me that he's shown a consistent pattern of overstating the effects of his name being revealed, so I don't put a lot of stock in "tentatively".
I am quite convinced he simply didn't want his name in the paper because he knows he's said some edgy stuff (ie, explicitly comparing himself to Charles Murray).
The sources he provides as supporting the importance of therapeutic anonymity appear to be debates, as opposed to, say, APA guidelines emphasizing its importance. And that's a one sided picture, where Scott is digging for evidence to support his claim.
Part of his argument is that he has already faced threats and harassment. Okay, and he still didn't take basic steps to anonymize himself, so apparently this didn't concern him so much in the past. His argument is that he has a lot of crazy, nutso enemies. But those people could already easily find him.
He's been pretty clear about his dislike for SJWs and distrust for the news media (I mean this in the most value-neutral way possible). That's fine, but I think it's silly to make up a bunch of reasons your name shouldn't be in the paper.
He even comes out and says that it's simply his preference for anonymity:
>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. The amount I dislike death threats is basically the average amount that the average person would dislike them. The amount I would dislike losing my job...and et cetera. Realistically, my anonymity let me feel safe and comfortable. But it probably wasn't literally necessary to keep me alive. I feel bad admitting this, like I conscripted you all into a crusade on false pretenses. Am I an entitled jerk for causing such a stir just so I can feel safe and comfortable? I'm sure the New York Times customer service representatives who had to deal with all your phone calls thought so.
Again, he did not lose his job. They were willing to keep him, and he quit anyways.
>In the New York Times' worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I'm the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me. I admit I am not the perfect victim. The death threats against me are all by losers who probably don't know which side of a gun you shoot someone with. If anything happened at work, it would probably inconvenience me and my patients, but probably wouldn't literally kill either of us. Still! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
Replace "dox" with "include my name, which was found on my blog, in a news story about my blog", and yes, that's a default-allow unless you have some really extraordinary circumstances.
"Well crap now I'm a public figure because of this, I don't really have a choice if I want to do my job well in the future."
Using "forced" may be a little clumsy, but it's certainly directionally correct.
If he doesn't think he can do psychotherapy very while while he's a "public figure" (his name being in the paper a single time), why is he opening up his own practice?
I have already posted his own quotes in this comment chain, where he admits his case is weak and that anonymity is merely his preference.
He is opening his practice only to patients that are comfortable with him and he is comfortable with. That's a different situation than working with who the hospital assigns him. Also he does say they were 'tentatively' willing to still keep him but it sounds like there was friction nonetheless.
I would be curious to know what other articles you consider well written.
To me, this comes across as a hack job to elevate the writers status before the release of his upcoming book.
It’s a classic tactic that writers use to drive book sales.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
The fact that you think this after reading the article shows just how misleading it is. He shared his real name after quitting his job because of it. The NYT leaving that detail out is completely bonkers. It's a little bit like saying "what was the point of WW2, Hitler just ended up killing himself after all that trouble anyway."
And there, indeed, lies the problem. What should society do when an an argument is factually correct but leads to an immoral result?
Choose a moral alternative. Humans aren't bound by (or even capable of) pure logic or animal instinct, that's why we invented abstractions like "morality."
>Choose a moral alternative.
Are you saying that facts should be suppressed/set aside when they lead to immoral results? I can't assign any other meaning to your words.
I'm saying facts have no moral or immoral dimension - "immoral results" come from choices made in the interpretation of fact, choices which are relative and mutable because morality is an abstraction. There is no case where an immoral choice is made where a moral choice could not also be made.
This approach conflicts with the notions of "natural law" and much of Christian morality. It's a rather alien concept to most people. This leads to pressure to try to alter facts to fit a moral scenario.
Suppose you have 1000 applicants and 900 slots. 900 of the applicants are white, 100 are black.
In traditional racism you give all 900 slots to the 900 white applicants.
Using a woke quota system you would have to arrange for it to be exactly proportional, i.e. 810 white and 90 black, even if that required taking race directly into account in order to force the numbers.
Using some kind of merit-based evaluation, you might have 830 slots go to white applicants and 70 to black applicants.
The first system is clearly morally wrong, but it's also misaligned with the optimal allocation. The second system has the same issue as the first; it's basing the decision directly on race even when it doesn't align with merit.
The biggest criticism of the third system is that maybe your metric for evaluating merit is imperfect, but it might still be pretty good. And other than that it's clearly the one with the moral high ground. So where is the moral question? The moral system and the optimal system are the same one. All that's left is the technical question of how to implement a more accurate measurement of merit, if possible.
hint-it's to treat people not as individuals at all, the genetic basic of intelligence is generally brought up to justify discrimination.
It's the same problem as arguing no free will; if the ultimate end is the same as if we had it, why are you bringing it up? But usually people want to order society around that truth, not just score points in a debate.
This is important because the claim that racial gaps are solely due to racism is used to advocate for far-reaching reforms, which have huge risks and which won't actually close the gap if racism is not the cause or at least in the way as is claimed.
So when people say that rationalists and libertarians haven’t thought through the consequences this is what they mean.
Why would you not want to debate that? If it's not true, or there's no evidence for it, then you have an actual argument for fighting people who believe in it. If it's true, then you have a new societal issue to discuss. Either way, you win.
You seem to be making a case against scientific inquiry and intellectual discussion.
> However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
This is anti-intellectualism. What possible reason would there be to not debate ideas, of any kind? Bad ideas get analyzed, exposed, and proponents of such are forced to either change their position or be exposed as dogmatic.
Can you unpack this a bit further?
Are you saying that {a select group of people} should be allowed to discuss a controversial question, but {a wider group of people} cannot be trusted to have such discussion?
I can almost guarantee this is Cade misrepresenting what Kelsey Piper said.
> allows people to decide for themselves what the intentions of Scott Siskind may be.
Except that he clearly throughout misrepresents or misunderstands things like above. I can only assume it seems accurate because you haven't looked into the relevant quotes or peope.
I hope that when the mob comes for me or someone I care about, I'll be brave enough to tell them exactly what to do with their pitchforks.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something…?
Nowhere in the paragraph you quoted does it allege Scott supported Curtis Yarvin personally. What it implies is that Nick Land is one of the "neoreactionaries", which, according to Wikipedia [1], he is.
The "embraced by white nationalists" part is a bit more tricky. It does imply that Land's writings are bad because white nationalists like them (more than others do). In the abstract, of course, this is not necessarily true.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence that white nationalists like him, or he's just a symbol; one can like country music without liking conservatism. (But it's unlikely he's merely a symbol when he literally writes about race.)
Perhaps his writings are relevant but they're misinterpreting him; Social Darwinism does not implicate Darwin.
But a third possibility is that his writings are just racist – though perhaps cloaked, perhaps the motte in the metaphorical motte and bailey – and as such provide an intellectual foundation for white supremacy.
Personally, I'm not sure what the answer is, because I don't know much about these people. But my priors point to the third option as most likely, given how intellectual movements tend to be organized. Which means that the fact of his being embraced by white nationalists was informative, which means it was appropriate for the reporter to include it. Sure, if the reporter is omitting some critical evidence or context that would lead to an opposite conclusion, that would be unethical. But the reporter is not obliged to include every argument that could possibly be made in his defense, either.
If only a world-famous newspaper could look into this and find out, so that you would not have to guess.
The article author could have simply labeled his writings as "racist" or "not racist", but newspaper articles traditionally stick to reporting sourced facts and quoted opinions and let the reader draw their own conclusion.
Alternately, the author could have provided context about Land in the form of additional facts and opinions. This would undoubtedly make the article more informative, but it would also make it longer. There are plenty of other things the article could have added context about, but ultimately the format demands a certain length.
I do think the article is suggesting that he's racist. Newspaper articles have to choose which facts and quotes to include and how to integrate them into a narrative, and those choices inevitably betray the author's opinions. In general, I think this phenomenon of hidden opinions is harmful. It's a downside of the traditional practice of separating factual articles from opinion, since it gives readers a false sense of having learned the objective truth when in fact what they've absorbed is partially someone's opinion. When newer media platforms choose to eschew the distinction between fact and opinion in favor of presenting an authentic but opinionated voice, there's merit in that. But I think there is also merit in the traditional approach of trying to preserve that distinction, even if the results are inevitably imperfect. I wouldn't want the New York Times to give up on it.
For fucks sake, just read something Nick Land has written in recent years and let him smear himself. He literally argues for "hyper racism", composed of scientific racism and eugenics. He also has promoted Atomwaffen affiliated Order of Nine Angles. A literal neonazi terrorist network.
A pathetic hit piece.
A and B sharing core beliefs does not mean A == B.
The largest sects, The Church of Satan (athiest) and the Satanic Temple (non-theist) don't have a belief in Satan as a deity.
There is a subset that actually does though but they are a minority of a minority.
Osama bin Laden cited Noam Chomsky in some of his anti-America diatribes, does this mean Noam Chomsky should be blamed in any way (even slightly) for the actions of Al Qaeda?
Land's history is... very interesting. His earlier works (such as "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest") shows his materialist roots, but over time he began to be influenced heavily by the CCRU (which cyberfeminist Sadie Plant created) and Deleuze and Guatarri's works on schizoanalysis, along with a heavy doze of amphetamines(!). In his most productive, drug-fueled form he wrote what he called "theory-fiction", Deleuzian theory combined with fiction (cyberpunk, horror), leading to writings such as "Circitries" and "Meltdown". Land might have been overappreciated in the creation of accelerationist philosophy, but I still think he was an incredible poet. Sadly, his overreliance on drugs literally "broke" him, and after some physical/mental health issues he moved to Shanghai and after that became the neo-reactionary we know today. I think it's a quite lame ending to his philosophy career, many of his collegues tried to persuade him to budge towards the left and failed, and Land himself says that he wants to leave behind his amphetamine-fueled past self.
> > It is also ridiculous to smear Nick Land because he is "ebraced by white nationalists".
Edit, with:
> this 'person X is bad because nasty person Y likes him' smear tactic has got to die.
What seem to me to be the key quotes [1]:
> The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of assortative mating. [...] It is assortative mating on the basis of [socio-economic status] that has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the implications of its happening are extreme.
> Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence.
> The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status.
> That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.
Whilst it is clumsily reinventing ideas that have been done better a million times already in science fiction, it doesn't seem very neonazi.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternativ...
> But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.
> As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I suppose the link is there because Scott Alexander thinks that he's written some stuff which is worth reading, and that readers of the blog will be able to distinguish that from the rubbish. Needless to say, this is completely outside a present-day NYT journalist's model of the world.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/...
The whole guilt-by-association thing that's going on these days is one of the most worrying cancelation techniques, because it can be done even through a very remote link. I like person A, who likes person B, who likes person C, who happens to also be liked by White Supremacists. therefore I am a White Supremacist (and person A, B, and C, too). How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?
1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Journalists, anthropologists, and plenty of others strive towards rhetorical neutrality intentionally, and just as someone can be a citizen scientist, someone could also be a citizen journalist or anthropologist.
And furthermore it just isn't any of your business anyhow. What you are talking about is the equivalent of worrying about thoughtcrime. No objective harm was done but you worry that someone secretly holds an opposing viewpoint.
And no, it’s not “thoughtcrime” to form an opinion about a person based on things they’ve written.
I shouldn't be surprised if people react in a paranoid or irrational manner, no. But I would hope that they would hold themselves to a higher standard.
In this case we are talking about a very humane and nuanced thinker, and under normal circumstances we should in fact withhold insinuation of malice unless evidence exists. It is called the principle of charity.
But again, there’s nothing abnormal or “paranoid” about inferring someone’s intentions from their writing. You’ve done it yourself, which is why you described him as “humane”. Why shouldn't others be able to arrive at different conclusions?
Because the entire point of attempting to force one to take a stance is to further whatever the narrative may be, or to cancel counter narratives. There is no other point. There’s nothing wrong with arriving at your own conclusion but stop there if you don’t agree. Don’t cancel, dox, or otherwise force their opinion to match yours.
What people want from you when they ask you to openly condemn something is to make a broad societal change that normalizes that condemnation.
There’s nothing wrong with not doing it. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that some issue isn’t worth getting involved with, or you don’t think an issue is a big enough problem, or you don’t like how activists are going about it. Plenty of valid reasons but the crucial thing that you have to recognize that you’re making a choice, own it, and realize that it might have consequences.
If, say, large subgroups of white nationalists LOOOOOVE you, and are doing things to try and provide you support... passive acceptance of that support is questionable. There comes a point where if you continue to accept the support and not condemn that group that you're willingly associating yourself with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99-yicMhjGo
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...
The class action suit, brought by a Berkeley law firm, claims that the Irvine-based fast food chain with the cute paper hats "recruits, hires and maintains a work force that is predominantly under the age of 40 and/or non-African American." Out of 210 locations and thousands of employees, "very few" are older than 40 years old or black. The suit is also calling for a payout in the form of back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages on behalf of everyone over 40 and/or not white that In-N-Out has wronged with their allegedly unlawful hiring practices.
https://sfist.com/2012/09/06/new_lawsuit_accuses_in-n-out_bu...
I suppose that, by implication, it would be par for the course for their corporate culture to be accused of supporting white nationalism by anyone looking to nail them on something.
Unless a company is aggressively promoting itself as anti-racist in a very public way, it's very open to this sort of criticism (regardless of whether-or-not there's any actual merit in it).
It looks like even the beloved In-N-Out can be associated with the r-word if you dig deep enough. I'm starting to be convinced that for any company or individual you name, no matter how benign or harmless they are, you will be able to go out and find dots to connect some kind of tenuous link to racism.
I think your comment also exposes an ambiguity in the phrase "support the status quo."
One meaning is to affirm the status quo as generally acceptable.
Another meaning is to (implicitly) decide that one particular aspect of the status quo falls below the cutoff line of what you have the time or energy to deal with in the moment.
I don't know if conflating the two intentionally is a common occurrence, but I can see how doing so could be used to incite outrage amongst uncritical thinkers.
If you don't decide to "support the status quo" at some point, you'll wind up in the deep end.
See! Easy! ;)
Careful there, now you just made the "both sides are bad" argument showing you support the bad guys!
So you’re right and you’re wrong. The people in this example don’t care about racist activities of people they support, which in itself is indirect support to mainstreaming these issues.
Not understanding Estonian burglary law is understandable and forgivable, not understanding the negative impacts of racism is not. It would take willful determination to avoid learning even the basics of recent world history or current events and why it’s been such a problem.
It’s not that hard to say “I find some of the ideas by X interesting and useful, but also I don’t support racism in any way.” I get that they don’t want to do it, but that’s the level support that enables the problematic culture to be pervasive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/dictionary...
From the linked article: Merriam-Webster captures this as well, noting that racism can mean “a political or social system founded on racism.”
So by denouncing racism I am literally denouncing the entirety of civilization I guess.
If we just eliminated the government, eliminated all hierarchies larger than 100 people, eliminated all nations and laws and institutions… well, most of us would probably die very quickly. But that doesn't mean that what we have now is even in the top 20% of possible ways that civilisation could be.
This sort of an unmeasurable goal. I think we’re certainly in the top 20% of civilization from any time in history. Or top 20% ever attempted.
It’s hard to tell how good all possible civilizations can be.
Considering the "denouncings" have included the US Constitution, Magna Carta, Greek philosophers, and math+science in general, this is more correct and scarier than almost anyone has thought through.
Exciting times ahead!
That doesn't matter, because we all agree that burglary is bad. The question isn't "is burglary or racism bad," the question is "do I know enough about this person or topic to be sure that it deserves to be denounced based on my beliefs about racism or burglary?"
And the answer is no, as per their post. We can agree burglary is bad but if you’ve never been burgled then how can you know? You see this a lot with gun control advocates telling victims of violence they don’t need a gun to protect themselves. How can someone know another’s perspective on life without titling at windmills daily from wrong assumptions as you attempt to figure out their point.
It's like a math problem without enough information. You don't get a result, you get "cannot compute from information given".
Making an affirmative or disavowing statement without all the pertinent information is irresponsible. Now we can argue the definition of 'pertinent' til the cows come home, and we do, every day. Real, meaningful, unambiguous communication with 100% accurate replication of surface and deep contextual meaning is hard, and at the very crux of humanity's difficulties putting up with one another.
It's why not having a view on something is perfectly okay. However, nowadays it is increasingly getting villified by a very vocal group who insists that everyone's viewpoint on the matter should be on record or inferred from their digital or social footprint. Which is a very dangerous position to take, because that viewpoint axiomatically requires an us/them divide. This is also a reason I reject this kind of cultural push out the gate. My, wouldn't it be nice to draw a circle around only the people willing to agree with us, and share our cognitive blindspots one and all, that does not a civilization or liberty loving people make. The true love of Liberty requires the love of all the ills it brings with it from those who will exercise it. We can argue endlessly around where the limits are, as long as we're all debating,and we're willing to revisit things to reevaluate the status quo over time, and maintain an agreed upon realistic representation of the progress we make over time moving forward.
Example:
Those that complain that what foundational/structural echoes remain of the very real institutional walls that used to exist are as bad as having the whole hog full in force are fools. Those that would tear down or dismantle material reminders of how far we've progressed, are also fools as well, because they are trying to break down the common record we measure our own progress as a civilization as a whole against. You see things like the 1619 project trying to completely rewrite history not in a "Hey, lets record what happened, and let people form an opinion of their own," sense but in the "all your narrative is belong to us, now" sense. People notice, can, and do read between the lines. Most just won't bring up that they do in public out of an abundance of concern for not subjecting everyone around them to a contentious atmosphere.
Long story short: There's more to life than being for/against a list of hot topics over time, and the people who care about those hot topics owe a bit of deferrence to those who have other more highly prioritized things to worry and devote. brain cycles to, just as those with other more pressing matters recognize and give due time to those who prioritize most highly things they are ambivalent about. The end result is an overall average whereby only the most pressing things capable of having consensus achieved are acted upon, or those so inconsequential that no need for resistance is recognized.
The entire practice of politics is concerned with shifting people between those buckets, and trying to push a social system to mandate picking a side is a Bad Idea (TM).
Also I don't want to have to be attacked or have to defend my position if I don't word things perfectly (more commonly don't show enough outrage, because I don't have as strong of opinions as a lot of people on social media), which seems to be a common occurrence nowadays.
2. There are soldiers (metaphor for politicians) and their job is to fight, so that civilians (citizens) could live free from violence.
3. The idea to put citizens to fight and to tell them to target the neutrals and opponents has to face this criticism: you are applying a huge multiplier to the sum of all violence in the world. You better do the multiplication and run the actual numbers to be sure that in the long run you'll come good.
4. If it turns out a group intimidated 100k people to free from intimidation 90k other people, they turn out not only horrible morally, but also crude simpletons.
5. The more opinions become weapons, the less opinions will be judged objectively by these citizens in future. Circumstances can change quickly and, in democracy, the only way to cope is to have masses of voters honestly predict the real life results of their choices. They need to clear their heads, not to wield opinions as weapons. (They have politicians for that after all.)
This makes the word “support” meaningless because you can no longer distinguish between 99 percent of the population of the world that doesn’t have time and the 0.01% actively supporting the regime.
Edit: to clarify, by fringe stuff, I mean that some believe that the election was stolen from Trump. I don't and have convinced others that it was not, but I guess I can't do that anymore.
If your best friend growing up is now a white supremacist, and for various reasons you want to keep being friends with them - maybe you're trying to talk them out of it, maybe you know they've got some deep personal trauma that you can help with and you want to be compassionate about that, whatever - I think there's a pretty good argument that that's your business. (To be clear, I think there's also a pretty good argument that you should ensure you're not effectively making them think that you support their positions or actions, though, but that's beside the immediate point.) There's good reasons to choose to be friends with them and that's your judgment.
If you link to their white supremacist writings, though, you're giving a platform and publicity to white supremacist writings. You're not amplifying or supporting them as a person: you're amplifying the messages they're communicating. And so the moral weight of that is in fact on you.
I think the article does do a pretty good job of talking mostly about views and not people, though it is obviously easiest to refer to views by the people who espouse them (especially in the case of personal blogs, which is what most of these are). The article is not trying to say that it's newsworthy that Sam Altman is best buddies with Elon Musk who married to Grimes who hangs out on a discord with Scott Alexander. The article is not trying to say that the NYT of the future will create simulations of Grimes just to cancel her.
The article is trying to say that, for instance, it's newsworthy that OpenAI is heavily influenced by Rationalist rhetoric about the urgency of building a friendly AI that implements your worldview, and that the worldview of this Rationalist community happens to be a worldview that gets an uncomfortable amount of support from white supremacists (and not just in the "We like this" sense, in the "This argument supports our argument" sense).
It's not clear whether SSC is being denounced for associating with cross-burners, or just with those who believe merit exists. In elite discourse, both of those positions are now white supremacy.
This isn’t Berkeley California. It’s a historically Republican county that went for Bush against Gore and only narrowly went for Kerry four years later.
Even for SF, this is extreme.
Side note, for years I used to see the name "rayiner" and roll my eyes at the "reactionary libertarian" opinions expressed. In the past year though, I myself have come much closer to where you've consistently been. Part of it is the rapid leftward drift of major institutions -- media, workplace, education -- during the Trump years, and the distinct absence of any kind of critical discussion of this phenomenon. The other part is probably that I'm now at the point of having children soon. Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. In this case, it should matter a lot less that the school board is composed of lunatics, or that the NYT is trending towards naked culture war propagandism.
I agree with this too! Which is why I think it's important the article calls out the institutional power of YC and the risk of it being captured by extremists!
Frankly, leave the question of connection to white supremacy (under whatever definition) aside - as someone who was a regular Less Wrong reader, seeing Y Combinator and the other agents of Silicon Valley power go "All right, we will invest heavily in building a friendly AI under our definition of friendly," just by itself, is kind of a worst-case scenario. I don't think the interests of Valley investors are quite fully aligned the interests of humanity at large, but it's Valley investors that have the most ability to make AGI happen, and they've decided to start work. The only reason I don't find it terrifying is that I don't really agree with the Rationalists' arguments about it. But they do, and they're smart people.
You’ve got it exactly backward.
“Historically” “white people” didn’t need to use standardized tests to exclude non-whites. They just did it. Standardized testing was used to distinguish among white people (just as it’s been used in China since 650 CE to distinguish among Chinese people).
In fact, the opposite is true. Standardized testing is pretty much the only thing that has allowed non-white groups to advance in white societies. There’s only a handful of societies where ethnic minorities have come to out-earn the majority population. Almost without exception it’s been the result of standardized testing creating level playing fields for people who lack the social capital that would otherwise be necessary for advancement.
Random lotteries don’t level the playing field, they eliminate opportunities for people to distinguish themselves. Societies that eschew objective metrics don’t just have radically flat mobility, they have rigid social frameworks based on non-objective indicators. Imagine the “holistic admissions” factors colleges use to exclude Asians (“leadership personality” or whatever) applied on a wider scale.
I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science. My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome. And this was decades ago. It is much worse today.
My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.
Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).
The problems with TJ also extend beyond admissions. 8th period is dead. History education at the school was always awful and tied to the AP curriculum but it has further slipped against STEM. Colleges seem to be taking note, with admissions to what were previously backup schools like UVA now becoming much more difficult for TJ grads.
In the absence of objective criteria holistic evaluation (and worse) is what you’ll get. Not necessarily at TJ, but at the next steps, and if these ideas are applied generally.
> This eliminates the need to "distinguish themselves" among everybody with increasingly ridiculous prep processes.
I have never understood this demonization of the prep process. Yes, kids start prepping for TJ admissions in middle school. So what? Asians do the same thing to prepare for high stakes testing in their home countries too. Test prep isn’t free, but the average family income in Fairfax County is over six figures for every racial group. (Asians actually have significantly lower average income than whites in the county.) Test prep is not an unaffordable expense for most families in the county.
Given that test prep is mostly affordable for the families in question (and given that studies show it doesn’t help much) it seems to me that people are really complaining about cultural changes brought about by an immigrant group. They don’t like asian culture where childhood is single-mindedly dedicated to education (ideally an education in a narrow range of acceptable fields like STEM). Now I don’t consider that “racist” or “xenophobic” (I think natives have a right to protect their culture) but that’s what it is.
> I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science.
So?
> My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome.
This is a conversation my wife and I have about our kids. (Though we decided private rather than magnet school.) They’re 8, 2, and the third is due in June.
> My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.
That’s a good change.
> Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).
In Kendi’s formulation of “racism,” the lottery approach is racist against Asians. It will exclude half to two thirds or so of the Asians who would otherwise have gotten in under a test-based model.
I think Asra is too quick to cry racism. I think the activists are just idealistic and misguided. That said, it’s not like the sentiment of white people not wanting to have to “compete with super study Asians” doesn’t exist. E.g. back in the day Wall Street would hire white guys from Ivy League crew teams, and today classes are overwhelmed by Asians with STEM degrees. As to colleges, they’ve been leftist since long before decades ago...
And, in turn, the article is making a specific claim that Nick Land's writings are embraced by white supremacists. We can figure out whether that claim is true or not, and under what definition of "white supremacists," directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land says: "Land has promoted the Atomwaffen-affiliated Order of Nine Angles that adheres to the ideology of neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing O9A's works as "highly-recommended"."
If someone in this thread actually disputes that Nick Land's writings are inspirational to cross-burning white supremacists, which is what I read the NYT article to be saying, let's debate that.
It’s the same definition being used by both: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html. It’s probably only a minority of people with graduate degrees who use the terminology this way, but this group is highly represented both among people who read and write for the NYT and on school boards in wealthy, highly educated suburbs like the one I’m talking about.
It’s directly relevant to the discussion up thread. The post I was responding to pointed out that this expansive definition of “white supremacy” makes it hard to have these discussions. It’s impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land to figure out which kind of “white supremacy” people are talking about. I don’t take the poster up-thread above to be arguing Nick Land isn’t a “white supremacist” in the narrow sense of the word. He’s just observing that the confusing created by the terminology (confusing that is, as far as I can tell, a deliberate consequence of the word choice) makes these sorts of discussions difficult.
What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well - you haven't argued that the NYT is wrong (either in this subthread or anywhere else in this comment section), you're arguing that the NYT cannot possibly make arguments worth listening to. Elsewhere you're mocking the NYT Editorial Board. Maybe they're worth mocking, but it has nothing to do with the merits of this article!
It's beneath you, and it's beneath this site. Maybe it works. But it only works because it's ruining reasoned discourse and scoring cheap points about those people at the NYT and how we don't like them. The debate is - ironically - no longer about the ideas the NYT is claiming and instead about the people and their proximity to other people we don't like.
No, it’s difficult because the New York Times has chosen to adopt a phrase that has a well-understood usage with respect to violent extremists, and use it to refer to literally all other white people. If you don’t want people to complain you’re being confusing then don’t do that.
> Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask?
Imagine if the New York Times had chosen to call all traditionalist/conservative Muslims “jihadists.” That’s exactly what the Times is doing with “white supremacy.” Should we all just play along, and Google to see if someone actually wants to kill non-believers, or whether they just support the tradition of gender-segregated prayer?
> What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well
Poisoning the well is a form of ad hominem where you invoke an unrelated fact to detail a discussion. In discussing a newspaper article about white supremacy, it’s not poisoning the well to point out that the newspaper’s deliberate editorial choices have made it impossible to understand what’s being discussed without doing your own research. It’s totally relevant.
The sheer number of hoops you had to jump through to be a NYT apologist is just mind numbing. No, OpenAI isn't influenced by Grimes' chat messages on discord to mind-control us.
Are you claiming it is not??
There is no limit really. If you're targeted for cancellation, they'll dig up and use anything as evidence. Thankfully people seem to be wising up to these tactics and they're losing power as a result.
Ah yes, the old Conservative trope: eventually they'll go too far, and then you'll see.
How's that working out? Conservatives have lost on every issue since I was born.
But yeah, don't fight back. Power-hungry people will "defeat themselves"…eventually. Trust me.
Trust the plan.
Also you’re being hyperbolic or are a very well spoken 4 year old.
I was friends with a guy who was really into InfoWars in the early 2000s. I'm no longer in contact with him for unrelated reasons but I have to think that keeping friends who weren't in that world helps people from falling deeper into it.
Isolating people from good ideas doesn't seem like a great way to change minds.
That person who can easily be influenced to be a white supremacist doesn’t feel accepted. I don’t really mind accepting people and opening up to them about my own flaws and ideological inconsistencies. Some people are going to fall into the wrong crowds - you can’t win everyone over, but blocking someone out because they’re superficially racist or they have “regressive” views or whatever else is a great way to get a confused person to be very sure about those views.
Additionally, I find the thought process of the person that wants to shut down those "dangerous" ideas pretty repulsive. It seems implicit to me that they are trying to protect those that are lesser than them. There's an implicit superiority there.
Not to say I think Biden should get flack for that. But the guilt by association thing is an especially easy kudgel to wield in an uneven way.
So no, it's not only republicans and Trump that get "cancelled".
Part of Republicans’ apparent extremism is a response to the strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions, in view of the very conservative nature of American society. In the area of religion, for example, America is far more religious than Germany (and comparable to Poland or Turkey). But American liberals, through the Supreme Court, have effectively pushed religion out of the public sphere (especially schools) much more completely than in Germany.
That's the difference.
>strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions
America's cultural institutions are certainly strong and center-left, but not extremely left wing. You don't see Hollywood promoting kibbutzim or the abolition of commodities. The truth is way more boring: Rich people on the coasts are general pro-gay marriage or what have you, but don't try to build dense housing near them or raise their taxes.
no one can be safe from the mob if mob behavior is a normalized practice of the society. It doesn't matter that a given mob at a specific moment in time is directed in the "good" direction. Mob is just a tool, it doesn't have any way to distinguish "bad" from "good" (by it is nature the mob forms when its members let go their own moral independence for the sake of unity, mutual validation and resulting safety and drunk high feeling), and thus it can be turned in any direction by the tool handler.
* The "one drop of African blood" theory of the Democrats' Old South * "Jewish heritage", pretty much anywhere * "Class history" in the Marxist Socialist circles * "Intellectualism" in Khmer Rouge Cambodia
This is just another instance, from the same people who would have belonged to any one of these or similar groups. They all come from the same root intellectual history.
The thing called cancel culture isn't rooted in a proud intellectual tradition, because intellectualism relies on knowing what the opposition's argument is to dismiss it (ie, the opposite of cancelling). It is group-forming action of identifying and attacking an enemy.
Although groups sometimes superficially seem to be using evidence, it is rarely important. The most secure kind of tribe is one that rallies around ideas that make no sense - because then if someone espouses the idea that proves they are in the tribe. If the idea makes sense then people who agree might have just arrived at it on their own.
Extreme guilt-by-association is a great cultural marker, because the only way that attitude makes sense is if the espouses is an adherent to cancel-culture ideas and is signalling support of the group. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. It isn't really being important in the mobs decision making, the only important thing is identifying an enemy and it doesn't matter how.
^ I know, I know, 6 is supposed to be an average.
And then, after a little more thought, you'd realize SSC's blog roll entry would direct the reader to the more recent neoreactionary stuff, not the "fascinating left-leaning stuff."
It's definitely a bad look to have present-day Nick Land on your blogroll. If you think some of his older stuff was interesting, it's a better idea to link to that directly rather than his home page.
https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-c...
That is an extremely accurate summary of American politics over the last 5 years.
The NYT is apparently run by Glenn Beck now. Dude, just connect the dots. It all fits.
I always like to remember that poorly argued points are a click goldmine.
We're all adults here, you can say "Hitler".
So, unless you completely denounce vegetarianism, you are literally supporting Nazis.
(For people who don't get it, Hitler was a vegetarian.)
> 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.”
And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray. The paragraph makes Scott sound like a flaming racist. It's just totally dishonest writing. It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.
The anonymity thing seems to have been well and truly discarded – flung in his face, more like. What did he do to them to deserve such treatment, such contempt?
I did get one laugh, out of:
> “[Rationalists] are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-o...
When was it a "solved" finding that poverty is a result of exploitation? Or that culture and/or genetics don't also play a role, perhaps a big one?
That's how science works, by making hypothesis, examining things, and coming to conclusions, popular or not.
And a scientist/thinker is allowed to have different conclusions than others, if they can point to specific theories and numbers that support their thesis.
You sure he didn't say that poverty is part-hereditary rather than what you are saying?
First, most if not all of the left believe it is hereditary - rich people's kids staying richer and vice versa. Second, he definitely never says exploitation or culture do not come into it.
Maybe I should have said "insinuations" rather than "accusations" to be fair to them.
Well there's some more in that paragraph you quote. He then goes on to say "Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and [Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture." (Emphasis kept from the original.) Which I think the NYT writer reads as being at least a partial endorsement of Murray's belief that some class differences reduce to heredity. I do too, since this seems roughly in line with what I understand from Scott's writing. It is also true that Murray takes that idea farther and goes in some directions I find to be both scientifically unsupported and inflammatory.
You can agree or disagree with the NYT here, I don't care. But I think you should quote more from that paragraph before you characterize it.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” - Michael Crichton
I was first mentioned at a very young age in a newspaper when Der Spiegel reported on my dad. What it mentioned was that he had two children, my sister and myself. It then stated our ages, and got both of them completely wrong. This is not hard. It's also not important, but if it's not important enough to get right, maybe it's not important enough to simply make up?
And later, I discovered the effect Michael mentions: every time they reported on anything I knew even a little about, they got it comically wrong. Except I don't suffer from amnesia.
UPDATE: the only news source that I've found the be reasonably reliable over time is The Economist, if you ignore them on executive compensation ("our valued readers and sponsors: everything is fine with your outrageous salaries") and GMOs.
I find this sort of callumny appalling.
But I look forward to a day when people feel the need to be far more cautious in general than they have been with Murray about making accusations of racism and other forms of bigotry.
The same attributes applies to most of current "hollier than thou" cancel articles. The principle of charity is totally lost, anything that an idiot can misread as offensive is labeled as so, and offensiveness itself is potrtrayed as the biggest crime.
The NYT is worse a rag than the National Enquirer, because at least the second is not perceived as some objective and quality source (and doesn't influence politics, or help setup trillion dollar wars and mass carnage).
This nonsense is now the reigning ideology among humanities departments at our elite schools and outlets like the NYT are increasingly staffed by young graduates who have been indoctrinated into this cult; is it any wonder that the NYT has gone off the fucking deep end?
I mean, what is Donald Trump if not postmodernism personified?
(And to be clear, I'm certainly not saying that anything the NYT puts out is remotely as bad as the QAnon nutcases)
But i think that the typical current-day NYT journalist would say that there is objectivity and truth, and what they write is objective and truthful. I haven't noticed anything coming from the NYT, or that whole 'progressive' side of politics that suggests they've adopted that stereotypical pomo rejection of master narratives etc.
The activist part of what you described comes from a 1965 paper by Herbert Marcuse called "Repressive Tolerance."[0]
The ideas from Marcuse's paper are widely mis-attributed to Karl Popper in that infographic everyone's seen floating around.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance
[1] https://www.libertarianism.org/sites/libertarianism.org/file...
Lindsay defends the old-academy classical liberalism. The sort of gentlemanly debate that arises from such values is good, but only possible between people with a collegial relationship who both prefer truth over power. They cannot be used against enemies. When dealing with enemies, one must bring weapons, and the postmodernist weapons can be made to work in anyone's hands.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the... (An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power.)
I think it's as good of an explanation as any for why old-academy classical liberalism is losing (and will continue to lose): truth is not dominant, and least on the timescales the game is played.
100% agreed that post-modernists are still worth reading, and that many of the critiques are relevant. Disagree that doing so will change anything—because truth isn't dominant in the short-term.
>... In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
What article (as of right now, there is no link)? What is up with journalists not bothering to cite claims like these?
He’s using him as an example to make another point - he could have just as easily used Hitler there or anyone else. Quite a stretch to call this an endorsement of any kind.
Reminds me of pg's recent tweet: "'The New York Times says...' doesn't have anything like the force it did 20 years ago." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1359879895736852482?s=20
A few weeks ago I gave up and cancelled my subscription. They do have some good-seeming original reporting, but I think about Gell-Mann Amnesia for too many articles.
I also pay for the digital newspaper. Just as I subscribe to certain local papers only for a particular investigative reporter or basketball beat writer, there are parts of the NYT I find valuable and others that make me want to cancel. It'd be nice if I could 'tip' part of my subscription to the writers of the articles that I really liked.
Well, Hanlon's Razor suggests they're just incompentent, but that seems like more of a "98% confidence has been refuted at General Relativity" kind of thing.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Stop giving malicious actors the benefit of the doubt.
Btw, I'm not trying to draw a simple equivalency here. "Thinking for yourself" isn't as easy as saying "both sides distort" and plotting a naive midpoint between extremes. You have to read everything critically.
HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.
If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity".
Is that where we're getting mixed up?
That leads to grass roots competition from voices in local communities, and (in this case) some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
>some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
Why would anyone trust them? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Some of that mistrust comes from the centralized ownership and control of a lot of "local" stations.
Wikipedia/wikinews with all its faults gets a lot closer than the NYT. Because it's not static, it's not maddening fluff and drivel (when every fucking "article" is a story, "Abigale stood in the doorway in a chilly afternoon, disoriented by the bad news that her application by the Local State Office of Nobody Ever Heard of Ever was denied ..." and seven paragraphs later we will finally find out some new nugget of information, maybe even at the end of every such amazing certified five-times-Pulitzer piece there will be some hard data "statistic").
There's simply not enough demand for such an outlet with rigor, standards, etc. (Or maybe there is and it's a market niche, or it's an outright market failure that this need is not satisfied.)
Log on as a moderate and you will rage that the "paper of record" can spin such lies and obvious bias.
Log on as a progressive and you will rage because of the lies confirming our biases.
Outrage sells. The root cause lies in the reason why people need to seek entertainment and outrage from news, rather than from other areas in their lives.
I think it sustains itself because they are incentivized to go after left-wing outrage clicks to make money, but then there is always the fall-back of left-wing conviction: "I wrote this piece that wasn't accurate and may damage the paper's reputation because I need to make a stand for left-wing values and get pats on the back from my peers".
I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
> Outrage sells
Yes, exactly. It's just the usual "things are bad" porn. Winter? Things are bad. Summer? Things are bad. Sure, it's their "job", but at this rate why even check it? The problems are clear, even the solutions are pretty well characterized. (From small scale local zoning, policy and voting reforms through more of the same stricter EPA/cap-n-trade/carbon-tax stuff to big structural energy/healthcare/education/copyright/tax reforms to a few constitutional amendments and new free trade agreements [that incentivize free movement of people, goods, services and information]. Arrogance lvl 100.) For everything else you'll hear about it eventually.
> I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
Wow, that's ... damning. But doesn't seem particularly false either :|
> My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.
What leads to that isn't "mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting", it's the presence of any error at all in the mass media. Unless the mass media is inhumanly perfect (which it can never be, being a human endeavor), there will be scores of people who will use "Gell-Mann amnesia" as an excuse to descend into a cocoon of reassuring group-think.
Invocations of "Gell-Mann amnesia" are invitations to generalize single errors into general skepticism of media. However, people are biased, so general skepticism almost always means acceptance of things that support one's biases and rejection of anything that challenges them.
Do you think in retrospect this was a reasonable things for experts to predict?
That was the central tenet of the 2002 speech laying out the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (some prior discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 )
I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.
Peculiar choice not to justify with source material when the topic is a public blog with public comments.
Which is hilarious since automod doesn't check if it was used as a verb or adjective.
That the people outraged over words are illiterate isn't a big surprise.
Fuck the nyt. That entire dumpster fire can hopefully fizzle out shortly.
Slatestar codex was some of the most interesting content I've read in my life. In comparison, I've never read anything in the nyt that compares to "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" or "Meditations on Moloch" or "The Toxoplasma of Rage" so in my mind the single most consequential thing that publication has done is to silence something of higher quality than itself out of fear.
> The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
This is exactly the sort of thing you manage to convince yourself of when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys, but also don't want to throw in with the sorts of people comfortable with being called the bad guys. Everybody in the Blue Tribe is going to precisely see the toxic nature of this statement. Women aren't interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. Reversing the order of the causation is making excuses for sexism and is itself sexist.
The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
Now, this is Hacker News, this community is very close to the SSC one, so I know a lot of people aren't going to take this well. But the Grey Tribe really isn't a nice place to be, and the sooner you can realize this, the sooner you can find actual political heft in the world.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities. When you state a contrarian opinion like it's fact, like it should be considered because you're the one saying it, and the reason you're stating it is none other than you don't like all those nasty SJWs, you're denying the lived experience of all the people out there who spent their lives being one of those oppressed minorities. All of those girls who hide their gender from their gaming pals. All those Black Americans who discover that the tech landscape doesn't reward knowledge and talent as much as it does the right race and skin color.
It may be a little better in the tech industry than it might be, say, in the construction industry, but to pretend these things don't exist or aren't as important as what your mind sees as bigger is, well, toxic. And it's the cornerstone of the Grey Tribe mindset.
This is not a fair summary of the argument. There's nothing "simple" about the pipeline problem, and what 'grey tribe' folks object to is not the rather generic claim that "the industry is sexist" (since there are in fact plenty of problematic practices in the tech industry that may adversely impact women) but the rather more specific argument that discrimination in hiring practices/educational admissions/etc. is to blame for the imbalance. Clearly, there's quite a bit of evidence against that proposed mechanism.
I'm not entirely sure how much effort I want to put into trying to convince people who obviously don't want to be convinced, but here goes, since my above comment has been received well enough.
The industry is sexist. That's the answer. No more, and no less than other industries. This is very very very very very basic intersectionism. I can get a little deeper on this but someone well-versed in this can get a lot deeper.
Industry leaders do not want to listen to these experts. Because it threatens them. I'm lucky enough to work for a company big enough to realize they need to take it seriously. There's employee resource groups and the leadership talks about it, not in every town hall, but in enough of them. But Silicon Valley is run by a tribe of mavericks. They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution. They don't, because sexism.
If it's not more sexist than other industries, then that can't be the reason why there are fewer women.
They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution.
Please enlighten us with the solution that will produce an equal ratio of men and women when 80% of CS graduates are men.
> Please enlighten us with the solution that will produce an equal ratio of men and women when 80% of CS graduates are men.
It's very simple. Exceedingly simple. So simple you'll wish you'd have thought of it, and if you think hard about it after I explain it you'll see your own sexism in why you didn't.
Here it is. The solution is to drop the ridiculous credentialism that's infected the field. You do not need a CS degree to contribute usefully and advance a career in this field. You can have a CS degree and still be largely useless compared to someone without. I do not have a CS degree. I do not have ANY degree. Yet I make more money than many of my peers in my job market. Guess which race and gender I am, no prizes for getting it right the first time.
Systemized racism and sexism are why companies won't usefully invest in the careers of minorities, and why they invested in mine even without the proper 'stuff'. It's elitism, pure and simple. Go ahead and come up with all your reasons. Those reasons support and continue elitism. They're excuses.
And that's my last reply on this topic, I hope more HNers start picking up the torch. Because talking about this shit to people who aren't really interested in the topic more than they just want it to go away makes me unreasonably mad and that's no way to contribute usefully to the discussion.
Someone in this thread asked how it's not a pipeline problem if 80% of graduating CS students are male, and your response is to just stop caring about CS degrees. But how does that make sense unless you think that there is an equally disproportionate ratio of uncredentialed yet qualified women programmers? And frankly the rhetorical techniques you're using here feel dishonest, implying that if I don't accept your argument then either I didn't think hard enough about it or I'm sexist. Or the "this is my last reply on this topic". If people have genuine questions why not answer them?
And after seeing this kind of discourse so many times there is such a sense of relief when someone is willing to say "let's look at the truth even if it's an inconvenient one" because to come up with a good solution you have to start with what's actually true right? For a lot of people that's what SSC represents and that's why they feel so strongly about defending it.
Basically comes down to personal computer games marketed to boys in the 80s.
> Advertisers sold games to boys because boys were the ones buying them
https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
So there we have it. Girls didn't have access to computers so they were less skilled when coming to college, and the intro courses prioritized prior coding skills, and they didn't have them, lost confidence, abandoned industry.
So its actually rationale explanation, and really not sexism (shock!).
What did girls do while boys were gaming? If a girl had a brother in a household with a computer, why didn't they use it? Was it sexist parents / gender stereotyping?
If women want to code, all they have to do is...code. It really doesn't make sense to blame men here.
But what you said here is exactly what irks the 'rationalist' community. Giving "sexism" as the root reason fo something is a terrible position to start from if you actually want to fix it. For those that have seen and experienced sexism in the industry it is blatantly obvious but for all others we need something to help them understand.
The areas I would point to are:
why do women drop out of the industry at greater rates than men?
what causes women to be attracted to CS? Is it something different than what attracts men?
It IS a pipeline problem right now, how do we try and remove barriers and make it a more welcoming place for the women who are interested?
All of these can be investigated and addressed. "Sexism" can not be unless we want to wait generations for our social culture to evolve, but by then something will certainly replace sexism.
I'd be curious how many people subscribe to both intersectionalism and rationalism, I suspect it's very hard to do.
I recently read an interesting take on this from Philip Telock in Superforecasting (unrelated book): Belief systems are like jenga blocks, we arrive at conclusions from myriad assumptions all stacked upon each other. It's hard to change core beliefs once they're tied to a bunch of other downstream beliefs (like blocks lower in the tower), especially if those blocks involve group identity.
All this to say I suspect this thread will consist of people talking past one another because everyone's belief frameworks are very different, and language means slightly different things. E.g. the word "sexist" could refer to either the behaviors, both explicit or implicit (micro-aggressions), or the entire system as measured by outcome, depending on who you ask.
Though neither of those two frameworks are precisely core to my being, I do like reason and rationality a lot, and it also makes sense to me how there can exist intersections of attributes that all add up to a person being more or less oppressed versus privileged.
However: I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between systemic sexism and actual sexism.
The tech industry suffers from systemic sexism. That doesn't mean that HR departments and senior leadership are all staffed with cartoon villains eagerly waiting for the opportunity to sexually harass a subordinate or assault someone at an office party (aka, plain vanilla sexism), although I think we can all name a couple companies that, it turns out, fit this mold pretty well. It doesn't even mean that senior leadership is full of misogynists who will systematically underpay women and undervalue their contributions and talk over them in meetings (again, it does happen, it's just not the main issue here).
Rather, it means that the entire structure of the industry is one that yields unequal outcomes. There are a lot of different factors here: Things like policies on working from home or flexible hours, expectations about overtime or vacations, the practical impact of the dreaded "culture fit" evaluation or implicit assumptions about what a good engineer "looks like". But also, absolutely, the "pipeline" problem.
My company - like yours, I assume - is eager to hire diverse candidates, but we can't hire candidates that don't exist, and our demand, alone, isn't going to fill up high school, boot camps, or college classes with the missing candidates. But when the graduating classes are overwhelmingly male, your junior devs will be too. And so will the intermediates, seniors, tech leads, principle engineers, etc. And when everyone is mostly male, it becomes self-reinforcing. When everyone at the table discussing policies is male (or even all but 1-2), it's very hard to figure out whether a policy seems sensible to you because you've got twenty years in the industry and know what works for successful teams, or because you're a guy, and knows what works for successful teams of men.
> They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution.
I think you're seriously underselling the scope of the issue. Taking it seriously and being willing to solve it does zip point nothing. We cannot hire engineers that opted to a different career path and are not only not really qualified to apply now but also aren't even applying because they have no interest in tech and haven't even considered it as an option.
In a later comment you say:
> The solution is to drop the ridiculous credentialism that's infected the field. You do not need a CS degree to contribute usefully and advance a career in this field.
Sure, absolutely, one of our better recent hires we made is a woman who took a break from her (non-tech) career after having kids, decided she wanted to give tech a try, attended a bootcamp, and then applied to us. We hired her, she's been great. Which is fine; really that's the bare minimum any tech company should do.
...but systemic sexism is still a thing. One company (or fifty) being eager to solve it doesn't actually do anything. Hiring one good engineer with a non-traditional background is fine, but we're trying to double the size of the engineering team this year, and if we hired every woman who applied without a CS degree in the last year that would go exactly 0% of the way to meeting our hiring goals, because they're not applying.
Your condescending "oh, the solution is so simple, you people just aren't thinking of it because you don't care" is nonsense. The issue isn't that 100% of companies are sexist and won't hire women and/or women from non-traditional backgrounds, the issue is systemic sexism which means the (very large) number of companies that are not sexist and are eager to hire those women cannot do so.
In short: You seem to think that talking about the pipeline problem is way of minimising or avoiding grappling with the hard problems. I think your attempts to minimise the pipeline problem is a way of you avoiding the hard problems. :)
(If I mis-understood what you're referring to please correct me).
Why is there never outrage the other way around with fields dominated by women, e.g., psychology?
The less simple response is that cis white men haven't been systematically kept from participating in the full economy, unlike women and people of color until about a generation ago. Systemic sexism and racism were built up over centuries and have not been evacuated from society yet. When engaging in discussion about it it's impossible to look at the entire scope and walk away with concrete actions to reduce its impact, which is why productive discussion needs to hone in on specific issues or else we get in meaningless argument over semantics like "#women < #men == sexist" when it should be obvious that something is wrong there
They're also deeply underrepresented in college, and the gap between men and women going to college is growing. Among young people, especially in cities, women actually out earn men.
Figuring out who's "better off" seems to be entirely dependent on what ruler you're using to measure "better", and which subgroup you're using to do the measurement.
This is Cade Metz deliberately stating positions in an inflammatory way and getting you to fall for it. Reading the article you see the careful position of trying to tease out correlation from causation.
You can replace Grey Tribe with any tribal affiliation which short-circuits your critical thinking and leads to agreeing to whatever your in-group believes.
Blind obedience to any tribe is toxic.
In a lot of cases the response should be “I’m not sure, I’m not educated on this topic so I can’t offer an opinion”
> when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys
Everyone calls themselves the "good guys". How haven't you noticed that yet? People with different opinions than you aren't mustache-twirling cartoon villains, contemplating the evil things they'll do today. Identifying with a group who thinks of themselves as "the good guys" gives zero evidence that your opinions are any more correct than those of other groups.
> The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
This is just an appeal to popularity [1], not a factual argument. At least the "grey tribe" – as far as it can be considered a consistent group at all – tries to find proper arguments for its positions, and isn't content with their version of "all my friend agree with me, so I must be right".
We all live in one bubble or another. We'd do well to keep that in mind.
It seems to me that your move to the Blue Tribe could have less to do with the "toxicity" of the Grey Tribe and more to do with your eagerness to hurl unfounded moral accusations at those who hold positions you disagree with. That is quite the popular pastime within the Blue Tribe (even if some of its members may themselves be disgusted by it).
What's potentially toxic about this "opinion" is that, until it cites evidence, it entirely confuses what is social science and what is armchair philosophy.
One can either state: "Study X suggests that the gender gap is roughly due to Y% of A and Z% of B", or they can say "Anecdotally speaking, I have experienced the following, which suggests to me that $REASON may be at play here".
When one carelessly mixes the two together, they drape an assertion in the unearned aesthetics of quantitative reasoning. Which, in my experience, is sadly where a lot of these rationalist arguments end up.
The OP linked https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-..., but https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... would be the later / more rigorous one.
> "This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
My point was at the meta level that we should be using facts and evidence when we talk about this rather than saying “we just know we are right.” as the original commenter did.
Worth noting though that your theory doesn’t actually have enough explanatory power to explain the interesting part of the data; one of the points in Grant’s original article (which Scott is arguing against) was this juicy graph: https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQGEJuKqIh95Ng/a...
Note that female participation in CS increases along with other fields in the 70s, then something happens in 84/85 and participation plummets. Your theory would support a graph where CS never tracked with those other fields. But this is as clear an exogenous event as you are going to see in social science data.
What happened in 84? Maybe there is an explanation in the affirmative action caseload? I didn’t look at that dimension but your theory (fleshed out with data) might shed some light on that. (Also note that this graph looks worse than it really is; total CS enrollment also plummeted in 84 due to a recession and so there is a confounding effect there.)
Again, this is why data is so important in these discussions. The reality is way more complex than the “we know we are right” crowd appreciate; if you get this wrong then you won’t be able to fix the problem (or even identify the real problem).
If you are interested in this area then I would recommend reading the book Why Aren't More Women in Science?. It has 15 essays by experts debating the issue.
rayiner, a HN lawyer, also has some good posts that discuss affirmative action in law (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775576) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875443).
I still disagree, but my reply above was a bad argument.
Do you have any support for that claim, because AFAIK your claim has as much substance as saying that they're simply not interested, which is not much.
> The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know.
And Trump doesn't have to explain to his followers how the election was stolen, they know it was. That's how dogmatic ideologies work.
I don’t know what your past/experience is, but I was a geek way before IT industry was even a thing. And I can guarantee you, they 100% were not interested in joining. They being everyone (including 99% of men), not just women, of course. Everybody could do geeky stuff. Instead, boys were playing sports (computer games weren’t yet a thing), and girls were doing ... who knows what, we (boys) weren’t interested in them back then.
In addition, there was a lot of discouragement from all sides - parents, peers, teachers, bullies - this was of course before CS was big money, and honestly I suspect if things turned out differently (programming wasn’t paid well), noone would even notice the sex imbalance (like they don’t for truckers).
Kathleen Booth invented assembly language. In 1947.
1. From Clive Thompson's "Coders" chapter 2.
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
The claim that women aren't interested in tech isn't toxic sexism, it's obvious everyday common sense everywhere except the most extreme "blue" communities in America. All you have to do to know this is spend time around women in a social context and try to talk to them about technology. The vast majority will happily admit they don't care, don't want to care and are much happier when someone else is dealing with technology for them. This is true of girls who are 8 and grandparents of 80. None of this is any more radical a statement than saying men are less interesting in clothes and handbags than women.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities.
Logic isn't racist. People are racist.
I love the diffusion of responsibility via the passive voice. Oh it "just disappeared."
I hope big tech buries the NYT.
I do however not, in any way, hope that "big tech" buries a news house. Even for a, not very good written and mean spirited, article. Especially one trying to bring public light on where a lot of very influential people get a lot of their ideological beliefs from. That would be a horrible precedent.
The NYT publishing threat was gratuitous
I'm by no way a fan of big tech but NYT has diverged quite sensibly from being a "news house" in the last few years.
I see it today as a bunch of independent contractors loosely publishing under the same banner. Article quality varies heavily depending upon author. News pieces are increasingly opinionated.
I've been a reader for over a decade and have probably cancelled and renewed my subscription a dozen times.
This NYT has never been perfect: I'm still sore how uncritical it was over the Iraq War. But my memory is that its voice and quality used to be a lot more consistent.
Note: I am addressing only the news part of the org. The opinion section is a whole other ball of wax, but they bleed into each other.
The claim that the NYT is a news house is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Can you provide any?
That said, The Times’s treatment of Alexander is pretty shabby, I don’t see how naming him substantively alters anything you might have to say about either his ideas or the ideas of those who move with him in “rationalist” circles.
[edited to fix a typo]
Yeah, that also made me throw up in my mouth a little.
"And suddenly, all this cash was handed to me"
"What happened before?"
"I threatened everyone at gunpoint to hand over their cash"
How, by disinterring it from the shallow grave where it was left by its own "journalists"?
I don't. I do wish Cade Metz hadn't made a mess of this story though, because it's a story worth pursuing. As the impact of Silicon Valley's policies on society continues to grow, it would be good to understand where decision-makers are getting their ideas.
It's quite funny how in this very thread the thin-skinned, childish attitude of tech personalities is on full display. The article is fairly balanced and even bland, yet the howling is enormous. As the article itself points out, people like Balaji Srinivasan were treatening to harass reporters involved in this story, but compared to the 'doxxing' of Scott Alexander, this didn't seem to draw a lot of attention. I'm pretty sure most journalists would be delighted if simply publishing their full name was the only thing they'd be threatened with on a daily basis, which wouldn't be much of a threat, because in general they put them right at the top of the article.
> I hope big tech buries the NYT.
Interesting that the people rallying so much against cancelling that they believe you can never even publish names want a tech cartel to form and drive a publication out of business for being vaguely critical of a movement popular with Silicon Valley people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-gall...
To me that's 1000 times more offensive and hideous than using the n-word by yourself, and the scum of the earth that wrote and posted that article (and those that expelled the girl), should be ousted from society.
- Cancel NYT subscriptions
- Subscribe to independent journalists and writers on Substack or via other means
- Flag NYT articles
Confused why you think the article was "news" worth printing, or sympathetic.
Confused with the use of the term "withdrawn" (like the euphemism of someone"quiting for "personal reasons" when they are in fact pressured to resign).
I'm also confused about what you think my comment was supposed to "prove" or not. It was meant as a case in point of the kind of bad, pearl-clutching-style sensenationalist stories increasingly peddled by the NYT.
>Confused why you think the article was "news" worth printing
The article is about a girl having her life upended by an internet mob with interviews with the principal players. (Again, to be abundantly clear, this article is post hoc.) Is that not newsworthy? You certainly think the event is worth bringing up months later which points to it being at least a little noteworthy.
> or sympathetic
They quote the girl, painting her as having just made an innocent mistake. "At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young". “It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth”. Hell the main thrust of the article is a racial revenge narrative where she's the arbitrary victim of a mixed-race kid living in a racist town trying to settle the score with whatever he can.
Would you prefer the press just didn’t inform you of such going’s on?
"Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public."
"Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling."
like it has anything to do with the girl.
The NYT just wrote it up after the fact.
Said write up was awful and the extent to which it made the asshole seem like a hero made me want to stab things, but it's worth blaming the NYT for all the things they did get wrong here and not the one thing they didn't :)
The article was published in December 2020 and these events happened in June 2020:
> The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
The mere act of reporting - documenting an event that happened for its readers - does not make the author “scum of the earth”.
You find it offensive and hideous that the journalist did things that they did not in fact do, while yourself presenting a false accounting of the facts.
I see. I haven't read the article itself (it was/is behind a paywall), but a report on it, that read like the article publicized this story ahead of the events.
Still, from the snippets I read posted here, what's with the "slave auctions" and the BS innuendo about her city?
The fact that the article does not go into this is very dishonest as I’m sure Scott made this argument to the reporter.
Scott was dishonest to himself as well. When you get quoted by writers in the NYT and your concepts become part of the lexicon of a rather wealthy intellectual movement, its a bit too late to wonder about if you can keep the day job.
> He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.
> In his first post, Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
This is an age-old refrain and I am honestly surprised that people keep viewing it as a reasonable position. It's exactly the same line that Parler tried to peddle, along with every online community that eventually - shock horror - turns out to be a platform for hate rather than 'rational' thought.
Free speech is important, and should be defended. When your version of 'free speech' is only extended to alt-right ideals, you're not arguing in good faith for free speech.
It is both practical and -- one might dare hope -- instructive for the left to have to struggle for a little free speech, as the empathy upon which they pride themselves is quite selective; finally, they might understand what it is like to have their voices systematically erased.
Learn something new every day.
https://www.metafilter.com/190454/The-New-York-Times-vs-Slat...
The difference is that the usual tactics that would earn some social justice advocates the title "warrior" were not tolerated. E.g. empty accusations of someone being racist, sexist, etc.
And the above did not only apply to social justice folks, it applied as well to others. Scott handed out permanent and temporary bans to those all across the political spectrum based (at least in my view) mainly on how mean they were being.
AFAIK we do this because "free speech" has particular historical and legal meaning, even if the explanations as to why it's a good thing are mostly about free discussion.
Parler was open to left-wing as well. And the fact that SJWs have trouble to be heard when they want to restrict what other people say makes perfect sense. Join the conversation, but don't try to shut it down.
Its funny how there seems to be this tug-o-war in definitions of "free speech and "racist".
"Free speech" seems to be this kind of good that everyone wants to not oppose.
"Racist" seems to be this kind of evil that everyone wants to avoid being called.
Mr. Srinivasan said they could not let that kind of story gain traction.
“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times
I don't think so. The right to free speech is a right the government to say what you want without consequences from the government beyond certain limited criteria. The right to be forgotten is a personal right where a person can decide they want certain information removed after a period of time. I consider this more a personal protection in a world where people have issues realizing that felons have paid for their crimes, that peoples views can change over time, etc...
Most people who support free speech, would probably also agree that it is good to give people tools to protect themselves from harassment.
However we also have the problem that is the "Daily Mail" which is a truly vile publication - which I read because it keeps me informed on what a significant chunk of the population of my country thinks.
We don't really have any truly decent news sources left or right wing, they've all moved to click bait nonsense and "reaction pieces" to something someone said on Twitter - I suspect because it's cheap.
The best of the bunch in terms of what I consider classical journalism is probably The Guardian (which is biased) and as long as you avoid it's opinion section (bleh) is a reasonably decent paper.
Honestly the best you can do to remain an informed citizen is read a bunch of them and look at what is not been said by each.
The FT is the only one left. All the others are weird poisoned wells where the factual reporting is mixed with opinion slurry, and beholden to the prejudices of the owners.
Here's Peter Oborne resigning from the Telegraph over their standards: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31510152
Here's the Guardian US published in the Guardian complaining about the UK Guardian falling for the transphobia that has recently infected UK public life: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/02/guardi...
The landscape is not diverse: https://www.mediareform.org.uk/media-ownership/who-owns-the-...
We do not need a BLOCKCHAIN to figure out what is newsworthy... this is a human problem, not a decentralized-immutable-trustless-system problem
Twitter, if you carefully follow the right people.
NYC is a rag with a stick up its arse while foaming at the mouth over its hatred of technology and nerds because we threaten their power base.
1. Venezuela going down hill because of bad decisions, WSJ editorial pointed it out. 2. Minimum Wages’s effects and should be eliminated, the NYT’s editorial board agreed up until its radical conversion and fearful state.
Go through the archives and see how much of their editorial articles line up with what actually happens, then go through the NYT editorials and see how far wrong they are on policy proscriptions and misunderstandings or more often blindsiding of second order effects.
I was about to say I don't think WP is as bad yet, then I remembered everything they had to ought to retract because they were rushing to sell a narrative with only anonymous sources to back it up.
Part of journalism is to document not just events as they happen but also the Zeitgeist of various communities.
...
On that topic, I find it mildly funny that the NY Times goes out of its way to grace Jill Biden [0] with the honorific "Dr" despite her bottom-of-the-barrel EdD, while a practicing clinician is "Mr. Siskind".
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/politics/jill-biden-fi...
- All papers are biased in favor of their stake holders.
- Some are better at hiding it.
- Business sections are obfuscated with business-speak, but are way more factual because business people expect to be able to make business decisions.
- The best cross-section of news is a selection of newspapers with stakeholders who are not aligned or even clearly at odds.
- Papers from different countries often have different stakeholders.
- Having friends in the middle of the action is a great source of facts. Only works well if you have lots of such friends (e.g. if your name is Noam Chomsky).
Edit: here's an example, that's pretty instructive.
From NYT: >That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else — a memo he was later fired over. [Emphasis added]
But that isn't what Damore said, and you can go google and read the memo yourself, which NYT doesn't link for you, because it would directly contradict their framing.
> https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting
Am I reading that right? It complains the article didn't actually quote SSC, then contradicts itself by listing ten actual quotes from SSC that are in the article, and then lists ten other quotes that he happens to particularly like (one of which is a dreamlike thing that appears to be from some fiction).
I kinda get the impression the author of that blog post would have been satisfied with nothing less than something that read like it was written by an enthusiastic fan.
Hum, your definition of quote is very generous to the NYT, given than most of the 10 list items you mention are four words long or less.
A quote that is not a blockquote is still a quote.
A quote that is not a complete sentence is still a quote.
> Every quote need not be a complete sentence or paragraph, but including almost none strikes me as poor journalism. A good writer would include a bit more information and give Alexander's statements a chance to speak for themselves.
The kind of journalism that has lots of long quotes like that is called an interview. This article was not an interview, nor could it have possibly been, because Scott Alexander refused to be interviewed.
It's incredibly weak to criticize something for not happening to be the random thing you decided it should be instead. You might as well criticize the NYT for publishing this article as a newspaper story and not as a thick book.
> Reading this article, some will say that they told me so, or even that I was played for a fool. And yet I confess that, even with hindsight, I have no idea what I should have done differently, how it would’ve improved the outcome, or what I will do differently the next time. 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.
It does seem characteristic of NYT to think that “people discussing things on the internet” is something Very Serious People should be Concerned With.
Absolutely incredible way to end this article, as if him "sharing" his full name had nothing to do with the whole fiasco:
> I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees.
> Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was taken down by its author on June 23, 2020, due to fears of having his full name published in an upcoming piece by the New York Times.
I’m assuming this article is the delayed result from the NYTimes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Controversy_o...
Like other commenters here, I hope now that Trump’s out of office, it becomes less taboo on the left to talk about how poor a job mainstream media does.
The article as a whole is meh, but that quote made skimming it worthwhile.
I've never been impressed by the "rationalist" community around SSC, LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, etc., but I've really struggled to put my finger on it. This gets pretty damn close.
The whole sphere struck me from the beginning (way before present controversies) as a big circle jerk of smart people trying to impress each other. The standard issue rationalist flex is to pick a contrarian point of view and invent an extremely novel argument for it. Bonus points if it skirts close to something controversial or taboo, but doesn't quite cross the line. Then an endless thread of discussion can ensue where all the participants have an opportunity to flex by either agreeing or taking apart the argument.
Problem is: I never got the sense that anything was being accomplished, nor that the ideas coming out of these places stood up when dragged out of their bubbles and examined in the context of the wider world and the wider sphere of human experience.
The first thing that really put me off was the whole idea of runaway super-intelligent AI. Please, please, please for the love of g-d study some biology. Dunning-Krueger is a worn out meme but I think the idea of it applies well to CS people talking about intelligence (as opposed to glorified statistical regression) without knowing anything about biology, which is the only existing example of an intelligent system.
The neo-racist ("human biodiversity") and neoreactionary stuff just put me off further. When it emerged it didn't surprise me one bit that it came from those circles. Contrarian? Check. Controversial? Check. Elitist? Check.
In the end I started thinking of it as an online cult, sort of a really high-brow companion to the 'chans. I guess the hierarchy goes: rationalist sphere > 'chan culture > Qanon.
I don't think they are trying to impress each other, or are contrarian for the sake of it. I think it's a fair amount of legitimately smart people who don't have much in the way of life experience, may be in part on the autism spectrum, and tend to be engineer/rational types who think systematically more than intuitively. I mean they construct and deal with systems.
This leads to sort of a naivety that tends to look for elegant explanations of a sort and is vulnerable to them. The all-explaining system of thought that in general intellectuals tend to get ensnared by, but is self-contained and self-perpetuating. The idea of the messiness or stickiness or even corrosiveness of life on these systems tends to not be entertained much, as it reduces the power of rationality.
So the rationalists get really vulnerable to these kind of left-field ideas like AI risk, or neo-reaction. These ideas are often rationally elegant in the way many negative systems are; they are a novel way of explaining things. The red pill/manosphere stuff was similar; as a system of thought it's a lot more elegant and explanatory to its audience than the alternatives, and even criticized actual things as well as its own untrue things.
I guess I'm saying is that it's more the rationalists are vulnerable to getting captured by those contrarian ideas you describe than they are malicious or doing it to flex. It's not really unique to them, academia goes through it, philosophers go through it, artists go through it, etc.
As for the cultish stuff, its apparent to me that a lot of rationalists are kind of adrift in real life due to the great unpersoning of religion and its replacement with woke or trumpian politics. Thats part of why the grey tribe was coined, neither left nor right. They need meaning as well as anyone.
Interesting point. It's a collectivist religion for people who despise "religion" and "collectivism"
Unrelatedly, i think your description also applies to modern Continental philosophy / critical theory - it's far more a game to prove who has the biggest brain than it is a real attempt to do anything useful.
One of my litmus tests is usefulness or potential usefulness. I define this broadly to include social and aesthetic stuff as well as utilitarian concerns. Even with a broad definition a lot of this brain wank just strikes me as useless and not really applicable to anything.
There were social and professional consequences for prejudice before "cancel culture" was full-throated wailed from atop privilege mountain. Rebranding the combination of 'reverse racism', 'dangerous time for men', & 'free speech' as a form of McCarthyism is so ludicrously transparent. Maybe it doesn't feel obvious in anti-intellectual edgy enclaves, but it's farcical to the majority of people that are too polite to remind that consequences for antisocial behavior has always existed.
“ The allure of the ideas within Silicon Valley is what made Scott Alexander, who had also written under his given name, *** ***, and his blog essential reading.”
Was it worth it NYT?
Best way to respond to this is to ignore it.
https://www.metafilter.com/190454/The-New-York-Times-vs-Slat...
https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...
This isn't surprising because The Verge very regularly takes cheap shots at anyone who does not align with their progressive bias - that includes Silicon Valley rationalists.
Thanks, that's a good article, but doesn't seem to support your claim of a double standard:
> Some will no doubt describe this double standard as an example of political bias, but it's probably better described as garden-variety sloppiness. It seems more likely that the Times does not have consistent standards here, and editors alternate between fostering over-reliance on anonymous sources and forbidding the practice.
i.e. not a "double standard", but no standard.
And then of course try and discredit it as heretical since some people we think are racist or their ideas may drop into the discussion from time to time.
> He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books.
This isn't very informative because feminism has become such a generic broad brush label. Feminists of different eras believe different things because the people identifying as feminist changes, and people change their opinions. "Feminism" now basically means you're talking about sex/gender issues and you think some of those issues are hurting women. Both the trans-exclusionary and trans-inclusive communities will identify as "feminist" because they are both discussing sex/gender issues, and they both think the other side is hurting women in particular. Your opinion about the various sides depend heavily on the specifics of what those sides are advocating for.
With that said, now let's look at what Alexander's article says:
> 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”~~ EDIT: ARE TOTALLY GREAT, NO NEED TO TAKE THIS ONE SENTENCE OUT OF CONTEXT AND TRY TO SPREAD IT ALL OVER THE INTERNET.
Yeah, calling people "Voldemort" is a super minor aspect of the article he wrote. Let's examine the context, which is his analysis of the "Nice Guy" label. This is my summary of his article (which he has conveniently divided into 7 sections):
1) He describes one guy who's poor as setup for his complaints about the "Nice Guy" label. He says the worst response to someone complaining they're poor is as follows:
> You keep whining about how “unfair” it is that you can’t get a good job. “But I’m such a hard worker.” No, actual hard workers don’t feel like they’re entitled to other people’s money just because they ask nicely.
2) He describes a terrible guy with 5 ex-wives whom he abused, beat, and cheated on. He asserts that people complaining about not having a girlfriend despite being a "Nice Guy" are mystified because they're nicer than this terrible guy who's had lots of sex.
3) He quotes 5 articles talking about "Nice Guys". He asserts that the "Nice Guy" label unfairly maligns many men who are legit nice guys. (I believe the harassment he's discussing is mostly the mocking on the "Nice Guys of OKCupid" blog, but it seems like there's a bunch of subtext about other instances which he doesn't link to or discuss.)
4) Alexander quotes "Barry" (IDK who this is) who says "I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists." Alexander says that the "Nice Guy" label predates the "manosphere", so it can't be a response to bad behavior by men. In reality, feminists are acting like people in the manosphere because:
> People were coming up with reasons to mock and despise men who were sad about not being in relationships years before the manosphere even existed.
5) Alexander says the manosphere exists because women are being mean, and the "Nice Guy" label is one instance of women abusing men. He says that shitty male behavior is radicalization caused by feminists verbally abusing genuinely nice guys.
6) He states that "Nice Guys" aren't trying to date for just sex because otherwise they'd just hire a prostitute. Everybody deserves companionship and pair-bonding, and feminists complaining about "Nice Guys" are denying these dudes needs which friendship can't fulfill.
7) He concludes his article by saying that virtuous people can have trouble dating, and unvirtuous people can do a great job dating. That seems unfair, and the manosphere is doing right by saying "yes that's unfair" but feminists are doing wrong by saying "Nice Guys are a problem".
I hope you find this summary accurate. It should give enough context for people who would agree with this article to follow along with why I think this is a shitty take. Alexander isn't doing a enlightened analysis of the "Nice Guy" label because he never acknowledges that the articles are complaining about the men who say they are "Nice Guys" because they are in fact not nice. One of the articles he cites (Feministe) addresses this very criticism:
> As discussions like this happen, inevitably someone gets defensive about the idea that “Nice Guys” are really assholes in disguise, because there are plenty of guys (and girls) who are actually very decent and respectful, just perhaps too shy to make the first move, and so on, and that they may appear to be “Nice Guys” even when they’re not. … I dated a “Nice Guy” for a while. It was suffocating. I never felt like I could relax and just be myself around him, because he had constructed some kind of idealized version of me, and that was who he was dating. He was also damned hard to get rid of.
He just blunders through a 7-section article complaining about dating without once addressing whether the "Nice Guys" the women are complaining about are actually being nice.
1. Starts with a thought experiment based on statistics from various sources.
2. Has a parenthetical paragraph about gay male harassment, also with statistics.
3. Makes a speculative conclusion inside the parenthetical, never mentioning the famous metoo case of Terry Crews, the media coverage of which argues against said conclusion.
Can someone tell me if the other articles follow this pattern of building from first principles without having first done due diligence on a given topic?
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/04/against-overgendering-...
Edit: clarification
Thanks. With that in mind-- and with a proud and explicit rejection of the idiotic repostings of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect here on HN-- I'll do my due diligence and read some of the other postings, too.
As far as this article I stumbled upon wrt metoo-- I think it stands as a good example of how not to write an even-handed analysis for a general audience. Relying on a thought experiment without mentioning that there's an extant well-known case leads the astute reader to believe the author hasn't devoted adequate study to the subject.
Same with free speech. You'd think the W.H. Auden branch of free speech defenders were an endangered species, when they're really not - they're just not reading alt-right blogs and screaming about being canceled.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
Take a look at Slate Star Codex (SSC) in The Wayback Machine on January 1, 2020 - https://web.archive.org/web/20200101140213/https://slatestar...
The Blog Roll is on the left side. It's a long list of weirdly categorized links without any additional annotation. Nick Land's is "Xenosystems" (which now appears to be defunct). I think calling this an "endorsement" is really stretching things here.
Scott wrote about the neoreactionary movement on SSC more than once, and it's quite clear he _does not_ endorse those viewpoints (which to be fair, the article does say). But given that he wrote about the topic repeatedly, it's no surprise he linked to a prominent neoreactionary blog. Presumably, he trusted his readers to come to their own conclusions about the content on the linked blogs. And he also probably assumed that readers would realize this _wasn't_ an endorsement, given his own writing on the neoreactionary movement.
If I told you that you should read Marx's Communist Manifesto after telling you at length that I think Communism is terrible, am I endorsing Communism? Or am I telling you to read this because I think you should learn more about Communism, and not just from me?
> I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.
This is one of the sketchiest things in the article. Scott made it clear that his primary concern was that his patients and potential employers might associate him with his blog. So if you're a patient googling your new psychiatrist, would you google their first and middle name (a middle name you might not even know)? Or would you google "Scott Siskind"? Of course you'd do the latter! So the question is whether googling "Scott Siskind" would get you to SSC. I'd love to go back in time and check this. I'd also love to know if Cade Metz tried this and what result he got.
I would note that if I google "Scott Siskind" right now, I do get results related to SSC, but that's because Scott after Scott gave up his pseudonymity on Astral Codex Ten, the Wikipedia page for SSC was updated to include Scott's full name.
I'm sure there are more similarly sketchy parts of the article that others will note.
He needed links to categorise as 'those belonging to the Emperor' so I guess linking to the neo-monarchists was too good an opportunity to pass up.
For me to consider a link an endorsement it would need to have more context than just being in a long list of links.
Note that the author did the courtesy of not mentioning Roko's Basilisk. Clearly they do understand that some things shouldn't be talked about. But they don't think that any of the writers mentioned here deserve to avoid public scrutiny.
Specifically, Newcomb's Paradox is incompatible with a feature of quantum mechanics, Bell's Inequality [0][1][2] which makes it impossible for predictors to fully control how a person will actually choose to act. We could even imagine special "Conway's Coins" which can be flipped like normal coins [3] whenever a person wants a little randomness and wants to be confident that they are not being controlled by a Predictor or Basilisk.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochen%E2%80%93Specker_theorem
When I was a child, I was afraid that there were monsters in my closet. My parents were understanding at first, but when I requested that we leave on my bedroom light, they gently refused. I wanted all of the lights left on all night throughout the house, and they not only told me no, but stayed in my room with the lights turned off and explored all of the corners and showed me that there were no monsters.
Letting people believe in the Basilisk is just like letting them have any other harmful religious delusion: They're wrong, they're injuring themselves and others, and they cling to the belief because it validates part of their worldview.
Edit: Single-sentence consideration: Newcomb's Paradox requires that the player can't simply flip a coin and reduce the predictor's accuracy from superhuman 99+% to a more typical 50%, right?
As long as we're suspending enough disbelief to take seriously the prospect of a deity that wants to punish us, it seems like a pretty small jump to believe that we can't predict how that punishment is going to get decided. So, rather conveniently, we can just live without thinking too hard about the Basilisk/God.
But because the argument sounds so silly, the trolls come out of the woodwork and bring it up all the time, in attempt to attack people for something that nobody actually believes anyway.
What? This isn't a slogan, it's a basic statement of comprehension about how the American system is designed.
Admittedly it's a very pedantic distinction that doesn't matter in casual conversation but it's still a fact
EDIT: This comment is heavily down voted, I would appreciate a reply as to what's wrong with it. Do people disagree that a republic is a form of democracy?
It is no longer a popular design, and one that we've been slowly walking back over the history of the union, through general adoption of popular vote to choose electors, direct election of senators, &c.. Nevertheless, the design's legacy persists in all corners of the federal government, so the principle actually does have a lot of explanatory power when trying to make sense of it, even if for no other reason than trying to figure out which parts you want to demolish.
First, because no polity implements a pure form of any political or economic system. There is no "capitalist economy", "socialist economy", "social democracy", "democracy", "monarchy", etc., just various mixtures of the above. When arguing about what mixture we have, people will often advocate for moving toward (or away) from one of those pure, platonic ideals.
When the US was founded, there was a deep suspicion of unfettered democracy. Political theorists looked for a third way between absolute monarchy and the mob rule of democracy. Athens was a byword for political failure; they were "too" democratic, but Sparta, the Dutch Republic, and the Roman Republic were seen as more useful models, all of whom had strong limits on democracy, and spread power carefully across numerous different competing groups, many of which were chosen via methods other than direct democracy (eg, heredity, lifetime appointments, geographic distribution, wealth, etc.).
So when people say "the US was founded as a republic, not a democracy", what they're referencing is that old debate. They're saying "remember, we're meant to be looking to Sparta not Athens as our model", which is true. The fact that Athens and Sparta also had many similarities, and that you could also claim (correctly) that Athens and Sparta were examples of the same political system is irrelevant, because they're still not identical. The distinction has meaning.
Second, because you said:
> What those that push the slogan dont tell you is that they don't want a republic either, what they really want is a theocracy or some kind of corporate dictatorship.
That is not true. Hell, you can agree (as I do) with the observation that the founders carefully worked many anti-democratic ideas and systems into the US constitution (no direct election of senators, no direct election of the president, strong weighting of political power to rural areas, etc.), and then also think that this no longer makes sense, and we should continue undoing them. A perfectly valid response to "the founders wanted us to be like Sparta not Athens!" is "true, but Sparta was a horrifyingly violent slave state that ruled via terror, then collapsed into irrelevancy when they could not adapt to new technologies and geopolitical forces; the founders were wrong".
So no, not only does everyone who push that slogan not want to install a theocracy(!), some merely want to roll back a few recent reforms, others want to maintain the status quo, and some actually want to continue the push towards greater direct democracy, but just have no interest in pretending there's if you use a secret decoder ring it turns out Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton and Adams secretly agreed with the exact policies that progressive reformers are pushing in 2021.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26124135.
I did not read TFA because I know I'd just be ticked off - the hoopla and sloppy reporting around GME trying to fit it all into a simplistic narrative really was quite annoying and has caused me to revise my understanding of modern day journalism.
My opinion is that "the journalist" in a lot of cases wrote things up in a simplistic way so that they could understand it for themselves - or they just slapped something together in an ad hoc fashion following all the other lemmings - or the intent was to spew more propaganda about whatever they think is important.
All this has convinced me the "Right" do have a bit of a good point about the MSM being sloppy, unfair, and trying to control the public's interpretation of reality (not that the "Right" are correct about much of anything...) But whatever happened to trying to really comprehend all the different angles to a story? Or understanding the worldview of the subject? That takes a lot of work aka empathy and the economics of the MSM nowadays precludes that, I guess. Louis Theroux and Adam Curtis are the antithesis of this sort of journalist.
Geez... the implied connotation of this lede makes it quite obvious the angle taken on this topic was predetermined just like Scott feared. It all fits in with the general fad going on now about how Big Tech is so evil now and out to enslave everyone. I've been in this industry for 30 years and yes there are problems, but just like with any other technology or shift in society. A mutant version of capitalism is the real problem now but you'll never see the MSM writing articles about that.
I'm not even a Rationalist or part of that community; I read SSC occasionally when a topic came up that I am interested in. In general, I think they are a bit short sighted and blinkered in a lot of respect - though the angle taken is useful. To really grok something, you have to look at all of the angles and to believe only 'this angle' is the real Truth is stupid. The idea that SSC was the coffeehouse for "many tech leaders" is really .... I want to say ludicrous but that is perhaps too strong of a word. Not all engineers are autistic robots.
Counterpoint: Zuckerberg has a degree in psychology so he can't automatically be lumped in the Rationalist community; he certainly knew from the beginning he was building a digital Skinner box and how people would behave given the right stimuli.
There’s definitely a relationship between rationalism, objectivism and libertarianism. It seems to afflict the captains of industry. And in this case it’s Silicon Valley’s turn.
Yep definitely something there, probably a book too. After all It’s a marketplace of ideas.
Hopefully this will be what we remember as the legacy of the NYT. Pointlessly destroying things out a shear inability to create it themselves.
This is a disingenuous take but it does fit the current NYT narrative of opposing speech (and venues) the editors disapprove of.
This is my core criticism of those who call themselves rationalists. You don't have to call yourself that, you can just be rationalist. But when you adopt the cult-like mentality of rationalism it becomes very ironic indeed.
Step 2: find the individual in that group of movement who says something crazy
Step 3: make them the defacto face of the group, make the group about them, take everything out of context.
Step 4: ignore everything else.
Step 5: threaten individuals with doxxing them unless they stop talking about things you don't want them to talk about [1]
Step 6: promotion to editor
They say this is an important and unusual place, but really what they mean is that it’s a different place than what’s allowed.
Even their use of language like “neo-fascist” is telling. As if labeling people a regular fascist doesn’t inflict the same type of cultural damage it used to have...