Statement on New York Times Article
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.
Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:
"WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
"List of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryp...
I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.
Q. What if I take too much?
A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.
This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.
However it wouldn't surprise me if the NHS took on that task itself. Unlike WebMD, the NHS is also responsible for prescribing medications and would need to give their doctors and pharmacists up-to-date information, software and guidance for prescribing. Their scale and scope would allow them to take on this task in a way that makes less sense in the US system, where insurance providers, doctors, pharmacies and online health information are all separate entities with separate budgets/funding.
Most important perhaps is that new media like Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the NYT. Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the Firm, 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing, paper distribution, subscriber and advertiser management. Essentially all of this is gone. What modern newspaper scale on is branding, and and selling influence, but this is in direct contradiction with strong journalists' interest (who do not like to be told by their editors what to write and how). Until recently, top journalists could not go alone, since they lacked the expertise to handle monetisation of their writing. This changed with the likes of Substack, which centralises (automates) subscriber management, and technical infrastructure, but without editorship. Hence, top writers are increasingly moving away from traditional newspapers to something like Substack, with Greenwald and Scott Siskind being two high-profile examples. They won't be the last.
Newspapers see the writing on the wall and fight back.
This seems like a good idea.
The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_as...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A100495710953...
> Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy.
I guess the only criticism could be, won't you end up with a bunch of half-built bridges eventually?
*oops* hadn't realized it was by the same author!
How I laughed out loud... Gold
A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.
Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.
This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.
[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally
What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
3. He now has a new blog.
Cool story, NYT.
This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".
The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.
We are there again. The difference is that in the communist witch hunts at least there was a plausible external enemy.
This time it is all based on delusions, corporate global agendas and the need to stay relevant in one's bullshit job by "fighting" for some cause.
Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.
>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?
If you want to remove that right you need to argue why it shouldn't exist
If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.
It makes sense to me that they have a default policy/norm against it, and weren't able to justify overriding it in this particular case, especially given that the name was already public information.
To be clear, I agree that there was no need to use his name to tell the story they were telling, and I think the world would have been a better place if they were able to. But I don't think it's only attributable to malice that they did.
NYT was happy to write about Virgil Texas of Chapo Trap House without revealing his real name [0].
Implying that their actual rule is: yes to pseudonymity for people with whom we politically sympathise, no to pseudonymity for people with whom we don't.
That kind of inconsistency isn't worthy of respect.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...
It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for actual things you said years ago, now that’s not enough, they will go out of their way to form a narrative around you, whether the cap fits or not, in order to ostracise, they aren’t afraid to stretch the truth or outright lie. This is not unique to the NYT but it’s a concerning trend.
Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization playing politics, just as it has been since 1851. I still mostly respect them because they tend to report facts accurately and mostly follow the ideal of journalistic integrity better than many other media outlets. But there are certain topics now, just as always, where their prevailing politics shines through loud and clear.
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/04/14/archives/dr-king-and-the-...
With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible just 10 years ago.
In the case of NYT, their political tilt is very clear (that's ok) but their journalistic integrity is being called into question more and more (that's problematic).
There is always "a side that benefits politically" from literally every statement. What is clear, irrespective of the side that benefits politically from stating it: the NYT is willing to use its influence to distort the political opinions of its readers, using innuendo and cherrypicked facts.
Those who look to the NYT (and The Washington Post) for accurate facts are literally (mis)guided into holding a specific political opinion, and defending that opinion even against facts that would rationally moderate that opinion.
I am as certain as stone that most people who read the NYT will forever associate Scott Alexander Siskind with white supremacy, conservatism, and anti-woke ideology because of that hit piece; for these people, this will be a fact. For them "Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from calling that article a 'hit piece'" is a statement that actually has meaning, and they will operate on that assumption. His Wikipedia page will be inundated with editors who insist that the NYT interpretation is "true" while Scott's blog is "opinion", and will dutifully and duly note these interpretations as facts onto his Wikipedia entry. For these people, reading and discussing Scott Alexander will be tantamount to supporting white supremacy, and so a whole encyclopedia of delightful, thoughtful inquiry will be foreclosed.
It is reprehensible, and I cannot in future take anyone who cites the NYT without caution as a serious person who actually understands their world.
There was a time when that culture was not just dominant among elite circles but often revered by everyday people as something to live up to. As much as the 80s, 90s and on were seemingly about the decline of that power nexus, the institutions retained a lot of mystique and fascination.
That ideal of American life is in a tailspin. Norman Rockwell is more a punchline than a comfort to people. The nation's opinions aren't filtered through New York TV personalities any more.
The paper has weakend and that has allowed the social agreement about it to change. Before if you expressed a negative opinion about such a paper it was mostly washed away in a consistent wave of accolade. If disagreement always meets reproach it is hard for it to spread. Agreement is an innoculatiom against criticism.
https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-rising-clamor-hadley/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
"The Agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers" v(._. )v
I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.
Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.
Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.
This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.
There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.
That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.
They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.
I want facts and information goddammit. Not a tearjerking drama to fill my inbox. I was already annoyed with the NYT before this incident. This just broke the camel's back. I unsubscribed.
It'd say towards the end of it. And yes, it is a very bad and concerning trend.
The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirecting the tension between people and corporations into tension between artificially created identity groups. So far they are very successful at it. Plenty of people are so busy trying to ruin someone else's life, they completely don't notice the decline of their own long-term perspectives.
This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.
Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
No, this is not "typical" of most cases, it is typical of millennials living in a small subset of property markets (DC, LA, SF, NYC) who have low earnings relative to their educational attainment + age but also a vastly disproportionate media influence. The delusion that the Ivy grad journo living in Brooklyn whose Twitter follower count is larger than their salary somehow reflects the voice of their generation is a huge problem.
That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there?
In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will personally find you a wife if you don't have one, and will give you a raise if you have kids.
I am afraid things will get worse before they get better. I expect the trumpism/fascism wave will provoke unhealthy reaction and further chain-reaction. My personal lacmus paper is the use of "white male" label as an argument, which is not totally uncommon even here on HN.
I completely disagree. That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly. I think it was the wrong decision to publish his name, but it shouldn't be illegal. Like it or not, Scott has become a fairly important intellectual given who his readers are (and may I say, completely deservedly so).
As the saying goes, journalism means printing things that certain people don't want published, and everything else is PR. Journalists are supposed to reveal things against the subject's wishes.
As the
I can recall in the early 80s, going to ACT UP meetings in NYC, we'd have random people come in and raise crazy issues about "racism" like "the word 'gay' is racist! You need to say 'queer'!"
Often these people who came to throw a monkey-wrench into meetings weren't gay men; they were just old-school Greenwich Village agitators. Their tactics work and have been mainstreamed.
Hit pieces latch on current topics. In the 1950s, the NYT would have had invented ties to communists. Or, if possible, hit pieces often imply corruption or paedophilia. That doesn't necessarily mean that corruption or paedophilia are topics that are "contentious" or related to "pure thinking".
This sort of stuff seems to be their modus operandi now.
One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
Now, I can certainly understand, and consider valid, the arguments both for and against capitalizing Black. However, the decision to capitalize Black, but not White, is completely non-sensical to me, as is NYT's bizarre 1 sentence explanation in that article: "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups." What? They don't even try to give any argument behind "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does", which reads like a poorly researched high school English paper. And the fact that some bad people have decided to capitalize White is their rationale that it must be lower-cased?
If anything, the top comments in response to that article make a hell of a lot more sense than the NYT's decision itself. I'll also note that many other news organizations, like the Washington Post and CNN, have decided to capitalize both Black and White, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post...
To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."
The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.
Interesting also that the overwhelming majority of the readers who commented on the article itself seem to find it pure nonsense. It's somewhat telling when a newspaper stubbornly keeps serving its readers one specific opinion which they keep refusing to subscribe to. You would expect a news outlet to publish a diversity of opinions centered around their readership's average- roughly half of the readers will be challenged every time. But what's the point in consistently presenting an opinion all your readership rejects? Who are you serving exactly?
It’s a good article, and largely innocuous, and it uses “Black” to describe a (fictional) French man in France.
white Black
There! Now everyone knows I am actively fighting discrimination and it costs me zero.
In fairness I'm not sure the New York Times really has the authority to do that.
I have always found such statements to be... Observationally stunted. Without referencing my own beliefs at all, I go to Reddit and on the front page is see posts from /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/WhitePeopleTwitter. If there is no such thing as white culture, what do people post in the second subreddit?
Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott deleting the blog, and this is still the piece they decided to go with. It's a bit hard to trust the NYT's integrity..
I guess it's a product of actual-journalism not paying the bills.
It became obvious with the literal journalist purge going on there. You can't be a moderate and work there anymore, you have to subscribe to a certain thought framework, if you question it, you're deemed "offensive" and you're out.
I know it's a meme to bring up Gell-mann amnesia here, but I will raise it as a basic test for quality in journalism.
When NYT writes about something I know about, I almost always have serious problems with it. Jetbrains in particular. And honestly some of the writing is so bad that even without knowing about the subject, I can tell it is crap, like the article about the SlateStarCodex. I had never read it before that post, but had heard it mentioned in passing. Also, NYT Opinion is Hannity/Shapiro level crap and should be dumped. Stick to the facts please.
On the other hand, The Economist has consistently impressed me; I read/listen with a critical ear and they do a wonderful job even with very niche topics. I've worked on some AR tech and they had a special report that just really nailed it and got into the weeds. Every time I thought "but they didn't mention..." they would mention or clarify a paragraph later.
Economist has a liberal viewpoint and they're not shy about it. I prefer that approach and accept that I disagree with the conclusions/advice from time to time, but the facts are right and error corrections are almost always very minor in nature.
There is good journalism out there, just maybe not from NYT. Please don't give up hope.
More to the point this should never have happened.
Calling it a "Russian" company would be totally inaccurate. The hack that I saw cited, though I believe it was an unidentified source, was one that was injected at compile time. That would be very difficult to notice for any programmer.
So, here's my question:
Why did you refer to them as "Russian" when it's obviously not true?
Or something like that.
Maybe have them answer some other questions about the articles other than just accuracy, such as quality of writing, in order to be less likely to cause them to re-consider how they are estimating accuracy?
And I suppose by “accuracy” I mean to also include “not misleading”, in addition to just “not false”.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.
But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.
WSJ and Economist are hardly unbiased. (IMO The Economist is essentially a straightforward neoliberal pro-Gilded Age propaganda outlet, and always has been.)
The NYT has always been 'dodgy' as we say in the UK. I remember finding their op-eds clownishly stupid when I first started encountered them back in the 00s, and they don't seem to have improved since then.
But there's been a shift to woke since then. And the problem with woke is that so often it operates on the level of personal witch hunts and straightforward public bullying - which makes it depressingly close to its equivalent on the far right, but without the insane weapon fetish.
You can argue that sometimes this is justified. And sometimes - as with Weinstein, etc - it is. But it's harder to support it when it becomes an exercise in tokenism and tribal identity.
It's interesting how often woke goes after individuals deemed guilty of alleged bad-think and how rarely it goes after egregious corporate behaviour. Or even how rarely it mobilises to destroy the careers of politicians who act in unconscionable ways.
http://Ground.news is a startup that's attempting to falsify that hypothesis. I hope they succeed.
The main takeaway from the NYT article is that there is a group of people in whose writings/blog comment sections/etc racists/sexists have found a home, and his is one of them. He does not address this assertion, or what the root cause may be if it is true, or if it is not true, why not. This is the whole point of 1, 3 and 4 in his statement but he does not address it.
As to the only concrete point he addresses (point 2), he does something that is dishonest. He wrote (pre-edit):
> "blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort“"
and then claimed it's taken out of context. I read the whole article, especially the surroundings carefully to see if there was any context as to which could change the meaning of what he wrote here, but there is none. This simply states that there is a thin line between feminism and evil. If you believe that, then don't delete it. But if you don't, don't tell the reader it's taken out of context, just admit you made a mistake in writing this, or you have changed your mind despite this was what you believed when you wrote the article.
So there are 4 points in the rebuttal, 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best. I am not impressed.
The thing is, it's not wrong to say that pedophiles and such use reddit. They do, in the same way they use phones, TVs, and cars. It's not an apt description though, if someone asks you what reddit is, to talk about the racism and hate and what not. The reason being is that the bad stuff isn't the typical reddit experience and doesn't describe the whole thing well.
In Scott's post he gives the example of the Wizard of Oz review (girl goes to a surreal landscape, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again). Maybe it's technically true, but it's not an apt description. It doesn't really capture what the movie is like.
Where I'm going with this is: maybe you can find neo-reactionary or pro-eugenics or racist comments on the blog. I don't recall any examples of horrible comments from the NYT but maybe they are there. Maybe you can find a line or two, like the "feminists are Voldemort" that seem bad and worse outside of context. That's not really what the blog is about though and in a newspaper article describing it probably shouldn't zero in on minor blemishes or debatable flaws and use them as the main focus. Wasn't this supposed to be about Silicon Valley's Safe Space, or getting into the zeitgeist of the "rationalists"? How did the NYT article even attempt to do that? To my reading the NYT was just focused on complaining about the "problematic" aspects and nothing else.
I think it's fair to talk about problematic comments on a blog but it's not fair to act like problematic comments or loose associations to objectionable figured are the main thing when they really aren't.
Regarding your point about the feminists and Voldemort, if memory serves Scott was referring to a specific group of feminists and not likening all feminists to Voldemort. That's not really the impression I got from the NYT though.
The quote is explicitly only about "people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them". (https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...)
This leads to several keys questions: Are all feminist such people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them?
The second question is, are all people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them feminist?
The third question is if this definition of "nice guy" is the informal term or the sarcastic meaning, and how useful either are to describe a psychology profile or human male stereotype?
The fourth question is if a discussion around "nice guy" stereotype of either profile is of strategist benefit to goals of some feminist theory, and then which ones?
He refers to the "already rather thin line between 'feminism' and literally 'Voldermort'", so it's clear that he's talking about feminism more broadly. Elsewhere in his writings there are statements that are completely consistent with this. For example, here he is alluding in passing to the supposed fact that only 30% of feminists are "sane": https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f... At some point you've just got to accept that he's been broadly critical of the feminist movement, and said disparaging things about large numbers of feminists (in aggregate).
My personal take away from this is that editors are good. Scott's ended up writing a long series of unedited blog posts, and as a consequence has made some comments over the years that are flippant, exaggerated, in poor taste, or just plain wrong. Such are the perils of blogging. That's his responsibility. The NYT has no obligation to shield him from it.
If the New York Times Article had accused the author of being critical to parts of feminist movement it would likely been more true, and it would likely also be less of a news item to include. A lot of people are critical to parts of the feminist movement. If one wanted to gain outrage then the "sane" quote might have been useful, and at least it would then be a true quote rather than an interpretation. I doubt however it too would sounds enough outrageously, which is why they did not use it.
I am not saying this is the case (as I have no connection with the blog), but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great (which is the main takeaway I got from the article), that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there, and Mr. Siskind does not do that. If the claim is bogus, then the claim is bogus, but Mr. Siskind does not refute that they are attracted to his blog.
As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
You write "if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great" - but this isn't even the kind of thing that could be true. Imagine how you would prove this claim, do you go to the National Association of Racists and ask for their stance on SSC? Is there a poll of racists and their opinion on niche blogs somewhere?
"Racists" is ill defined by itself. People aren't racist or not the way they are right or left handed. Racism is a spectrum and much of it is debatable and nuanced and affected by context and all that. This is like saying "Some number of an undefined group like something. Prove me wrong." That's not a legitimate claim and there is no need to try and rebut it.
I have no doubt that some racists like the blog and other racists don't like it. Do more racists (proportionally) like and read SSC or the NYT? I don't think you can answer that.
Regarding the feminist issue I'll have to go back and read that post before writing more.
If the blog has sexist/racist content that attracts sexists and racists, sure, that's a problem, but if the blog had such content, the NYT article wouldn't have resorted to pointing out the commenters, they would have linked the content.
> As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
Specifically, in context, he said "People who go out of their way to be horrifically mean to other people who are pretty unfortunate and unhappy and don't understand why, just for asking why, are pretty much pure evil", it wasn't an attack on all feminists ever, it was an attack on people who he specifically thinks are doing something extremely terrible. That's the context.
I'll try to put this as objectively as I can. There is now a cultural overlap between those that support varying degrees of "censorship" and progressives, and between those that support "free speech" and, let's say, anti-progressives. This makes sense because now racism/sexism is more likely to be censored than extreme progressivism. Probably if it were the other way around (if extreme progressivism were more likely to be censored) then those same progressives would become staunch free-speech advocates and anti-progressives would be fighting for more "content moderation".
So if you are generally for the toleration of ideas, perhaps holding some unpopular opinions yourself, and against censorious tactics, you tend to attract extreme anti-progressives as well. For the most part, racists and sexist do not see themselves as racists and sexists, they see themselves as holding true but unpopular beliefs. Another interesting example of this is Sam Harris somehow having a fair amount of Trump-supporting listeners even though he spends a lot of time ranting about how incompetent and morally-bankrupt he thinks Trump is.
This is the highest rated top level post that presents any degree of skepticism at all in Scott's rebuttal, below pages of anger against the NYT "hit." So much for that quality, rationalist examination of the facts. As somebody who read both his blog and HN throughout its run, I find the NYT article on the money.
Scott's own cowardice about revealing his real name is incredibly telling, too. So long as he remained anonymous the NYT actually respected his wishes and buried the story, while this champion of free speech refused to stand behind his own words publicly and lamented the abuse of the MSM coming to dox him. Now that the checks are coming in, he seems to have no problem, though.
My advice to you, dear HN, is to take a look in the mirror. This isn't a hit piece and Scott isn't a saint. If you believe his long winded rants have merit, you should also believe they stand on their own, and you should welcome the scrutiny.
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
I don't understand why you would say it is dishonest to dissect that paragraph and point out that Scott agreed with Murray on something non-racist, and quoted a racist statement without agreeing with it. Scott is not agreeing with "The Bell Curve" and Scott has not said that he believes that black people are "genetically less intelligent than white people.” Before defending yourself against such accusations it would be wise to point out that they are baseless, and of course it's much wiser to leave it at that.
> 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best
I meant counts of points, i.e., three of them not addressing the issue (points 1,3,4) and one dishonest (point 2) - reasons above. So dishonesty was not related to point 1, sorry if it reads like that.
To further elaborate for 1,3, and 4; I don't contend with his explanations - but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.
Whether or not that is something you can and should address is of course one of the main issues here. The NYT would like if you only quote, welcome, converse, engage with people who are 100% correct and approved in all their views. If you disagree with that then there is also not much to explain. Sometimes unpleasant people like to read good blogs, and sometimes unpleasant people say insightful things that you might want to incorporate in your blogpost. Such is life.
Lots of blogs praise one another while also including disagreements and disclaimers that they don't fully believe their own writing, much less the writing of others. But they consider the articles to be worth reading anyway.
Some of my opinions are unpopular and may even make people uncomfortable. So I admit with trepidation that I still like the NYT and will continue to subscribe.
I laughed out loud at this paragraph, and it's such a perfect example of why I love Scott's writing.
At the end of the day, whatever slimey hatchet jobs the NYT chooses to run, Scott's still an enormously influential, successful and respected figure, and most of the hacks who write these terrible hit pieces or support them can only dream of gaining 1% of the admiration Scott's earned. Envy's a cruel mistress, and if the price to pay for success is that bitter haters take misjudged pot shots at you which achieve little except to reveal their own securities... well, I haven't achieved enough success myself to know for certain that the price is worth paying, but I'd pick Scott's life over Cade Metz's any day of the week.
Keep up the good work, Scott. You're doing great things, you matter, and you're winning - three things that can't be said for Cade Metz.
https://ew.com/article/2012/10/26/wizard-of-oz-movie-descrip...
I think many people are aware of it, or were in 2012.
Isn't this obviously the case? The "Grey Tribe" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...) and its "Dark Enlightenment" fellow travelers associated with SV is commonly targeted activist media orgs. The goal is to hobble the grey tribe's narratives by allowing woke mobs to say that they're based in cryptofascism and white supremacy. This has already been partially successful and probably just needs a few more big pushes to get to the point that we can start firing people from tech jobs for publicly saying that they like Scott's posts.
This is a great summation.
To me it reads like the best attempt the journalist could pull off at writing a hit piece against some guy who just started a low cost medical practice, and has never actually done anything bad in his life. A whole lot of vague insinuations and guilt by association.
If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this was Metz's way to tell himself that he is a better person than this guy trying to make psychiatric care more accessible, just because he might disagree on some political issues.
They lost literally hundreds of subscriptions (at least $20k worth). Yet they remained so stubborn... so closed to dialogue, and put out their little shitpiece. Can somebody reasonable explain why they would do such a thing? I don't care much for the 'liberal MSM' theories, I just wanna know what was in it for them. It makes no sense. Does it reflect on the entire newspaper to the point where I should stop reading it?
I don't know if this is true for you, but I've found it to be true for me. It took a good deal of time researching and revisiting to realize.
Every NYT article should be read extremely critically. The story selection should be viewed critically. People will say this was always true, and sure, in an ideal sense, but I mean that you will very, very often find paragraphs that consists of five factual sentences chained together and cleverly worded in such a way as persuade you of something absolutely untrue or for which is there is no evidence. You'll find NYT repeating "facts" they reported early on, and then themselves debunked. And of course, the plague of "anonymous" sources (sometimes these anonymous sources are just, literally, the PR department saying 'report this anonymously so it seems like a leak) that have their own agendas and which tell the NYT BS over and over, but somehow still get an airing.
I feel the entire US has "gone mad". I'm a Canuck, and US and Canadian politics don't 'mesh'. So whenever I've spoken to Americans over the decades, often their politics make little sense, don't align, seem cogent to me. This, of course, I consider normal for a non-local such as myself.
However over the last decade or so, I've noticed that the "two sides" in the US now each turn into gibbering mad lunatics when you discuss certain topics. Prior, I could at least discuss topics, without enraged foaming-at-the-mouth type of responses.
IMO both sides have gone entirely, and completely mad. Politics in the US now seems to have lost all capability to talk to "the other side", and instead transitioned into immutable lines drawn in the sand, adopted with the logic often employed with religion, taken as gospel and truth merely for tribal sake.
It's almost like the death of religion, has transition that same unyielding faith-only, non-empirically backed up logic into politics. On both sides. As if the US psyche requires some faith based belief system as the central core of its existence.
Alternatively, it just could be endless whispers from external, hostile nations... designed to create endless turmoil and the eventual downfall of the US empire. Which, to me, is quite sad.
edit:
To highlight what I mean here... "talking points". In the past, I could have real, meaningful discussions with Americans about political topics.
I'd "say things", and they'd say things back, and we'd have a conversation about a specific political stance. Now, this has devolved into almost everyone, whether left or right, having "talking points". Most often, these talking points have not even been examined by those I'm talking to.
They are simply repeated, without the speaker even having thought of what it means, or even able to debate that position with any clarity.
And again, this is "both sides".
It's like each is merely repeating words from a "holy book", and heresy is the result if one diverges. It's like each side has a Pope, which issues edicts, and even if it doesn't make sense, the duty is to repeat, obey, and try to find wisdom in the words one must follow.
No longer politics. Religion.
Hence my take -- madness.
In one group of former co-workers I've quit speaking to almost all of them because of the above.
> Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.
"Republicans" and "Democrats" and "college students" and "Californians" all work, etc.
I wonder if it was Metz who had the idea for the original more positive-angled story re SSC's COVID info.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
Then in the 2016 election the NYT had a front page spread implying major scandal regarding Clinton’s emails. This probably cost Clinton the election.
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/7/16747712/study-media-2016-elec...
I could come up with more examples but the times have a very clear slant, much more marked than say the washington post. The NYT produces good reporting too but they can produce some real garbage.
I could have sworn the times wrote a really bad article about islam in London but can’t find it.
Some of it is featured in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
"The film presents and illustrates Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model thesis that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination of the history of The New York Times' coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky says exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticize an ally of the elite."
I didn't realize James Comey worked at the Times.
You probably have heard of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" but in case not, it really explains a lot:
"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. ... Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect... you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page ... and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read"
That's just happened to you - you read a story you happened to already know the ground truth on and it struck you as obviously wrong. If you had an equivalent background in other stories, you'd be seeing this kind of falseness everywhere.
I have examples too numerous to cite of matters I knew well (eg: companies/industries I worked in, wealthy people I happened to know, countries/cultures/conflicts I studied or experienced first hand) that were covered completely backwards in the Times and other media.
Like: good employers characterized as horrible. Military conflict response characterized as provocation. Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.
A century ago, Times had whitewashed Stalin in a way that anyone who knew Russia would have instantly recognized as false. So I doubt the times was ever not "Fake News" it's just that it was so much harder to see it back then when your newspaper was how you knew anything.
BTW, if you're interested in the facts, this report should help:
2018 - 035 - PK-LQP Final Report http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/ntsc_aviation/baru/2018%20-%20...
If you want to argue with me, I'll just cite that report :-)
I actually want to explain what I meant here and what opened my eyes to this big-time.
Background: I am a dual (EU/US) citizen and care about both a lot. In 2016 I voted for Clinton and had the typical attitude towards Trump that you'd expect from a liberal New Yorker.
In early 2017, Trump was in the news for having said offensive/alienating things to our European allies. I was outraged and worried because this fit the narrative of him selling us out to Russia.
Until I chanced to watch the actual speech - what I heard was affirming and comforting for someone who cares about NATO and totally opposite of how it was presented.
The subsequent 4 years, this pattern repeated over and over - I'd watch the administration consistently make geopolitical moves against Russia and its allies (Iran being the crystalizing example) while the news kept telling me he was Putin's bitch.
I came out of this experience with a complete lack of belief in how things are presented in the media, which is a radical departure from my stance as a literate liberal New Yorker just 4 years prior.
Scott's thermonuclear reaction seems justified now. But back then, some comments here convinced me that "They probably weren't going to write a hitpiece. Why would they do that?"
But we were wrong. So I'm wondering why we thought they'd do anything else.
For example, almost every group likes to find a reason to think of itself as somehow better and more evolved than the outsiders, which is essentially exactly what you see with the people who frequent these groups. The rationalists think they're better than the NYT, largely because they look down on examining the world as it is, rather than inventing the world from first principles (in my view a key to the IQ debate between Harris & Klein).
There are genuine critiques to be made of the "rationalists" (let's just accept the label as a term for the group of people having discussions in and around Scott's blog). I don't think the NYT is particularly making any. It is quite clear to me however, that the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism and is entirely unwilling to actually debate the value of their approach with people who aren't already bought in to the appraoch. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone either from the Red tribe or the Blue tribe to say to the Grey tribe - "Sorry, but you can't be indifferent on the topics that you claim to be indifferent on". And the argument that the liberal end of the spectrum uses mob tactics seems rather... bizarre when made by an author who quite literally brags about the mob he stirred up against the NYT.
I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it - especially with anyone they've decided who isn't part of their Tribe.
Do you think Scott actually disagrees with this? Regardless of whether it's a hit piece on Scott or rationalists more broadly, he realizes that if he gets cancelled or otherwise has his livelihood impacted then it impacts the rationalist community as well. I mean, maybe someone with better anonymity would step up to fill his intellectual niche, but it would still representment a blow to the movement.
>The rationalists think they're better than the NYT, largely because they look down on examining the world as it is
Weird complaint, and one that I don't think you'd find many rationalists ascribing to. I'm not sure what the non-strawman version of this claim is supposed to be here though. That rationalists don't bother to check their theories against reality enough? According to whom?
>I don't think it's unreasonable for someone either from the Red tribe or the Blue tribe to say to the Grey tribe - "Sorry, but you can't be indifferent on the topics that you claim to be indifferent on".
You can say that, it's how you attack the other tribe that matters. Hence the Wizard of Oz analogy in Scott's post. Attempts at showing that they Grey Tribe really is the Red Tribe or is somehow empowering them against shared Grey/Blue values need to rely on more than observing that the Grey Tribe is less enthusiastic about cancelling the Red Tribe.
This is "blue tribe member discovers existence of grays, and denounces them as not true blues".
Blue tribe be wary, the grays are among us and can be hard to tell apart. At first glance they often look like us, believe many of the "right" things. But something is... off?
How can we spot grays? Well, grays (as almost the definition of their in-group) are supposed to value the substance of an argument more than appearances so if you say something nonsensical about, for example, race, you can smoke them out if they don't uncritically agree with you like a proper blue should. They can't help themselves! These optically challenged idiots will try to do _math_ on what you said, or something equally silly. It's perfect.
A side benefit of this identification process is that you get to call them racist.
Since gray tribe is vastly overrepresented here compared to general NYT readership I think this also explains the reaction of many commenters.
Disclaimer: not a blue or red, probably a gray.
I'd be willing to entertain that hypothesis—but for how they knowingly and defiantly chose to unmask/dox a practising psychiatrist. Not printing names of sources is standard practice in media and to suggest that exceptions must be made in a case like this is dishonest.
By your lights, Scott's name added zero value to the story; printing it demonstrated that the piece was most definitely about Scott.
> the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism
Misrepresentation isn't criticism. Lumping a diverse group under one label and then using individual traits to infer criticism upon the whole—isn't criticism. You appear to be overly enthralled by group narratives rather than talking about individuals.
> I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it
An interesting assertion which smells a bit like mind-reading to me. Can you point to any instances where honest, civilised debate of "rationalist" ideas was refused? You can criticise the "rationalists" of many things, but given the proliferation of unedited and undigested conversations they churn out, being unwilling to debate isn't one of them.
(And yes, I realise that prior paragraph offers you plenty of rope: I haven't head the term "rationalist" used much and so I have no idea who you think a "rationalist" is. I have no idea what examples you might unearth. To be clear, I am not asking rhetorically, I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious what source data you used to form this unwillingness to debate hypothesis.)
https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate...
hn discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128579
(seriously, don't miss on reading some of Scott's posts -- you will be disappointed by almost every piece of nonfiction you read afterwards)
It's definitely one of those cases of "If everyone thought a little more like X, Earth would be a much better place.", (let X=Scott Alexander) -- and notably it becomes quite clear how to think like he does (he just tells you!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
[1]: I also give you that, if this position weren't radical, then SSC might seem not so special -- a good psychiatry blog with interesting philosophical and rational thought.
If you speculated this might be the cause of the current calamity, I believe you're right. I don't think it's because we've suddenly changed and suddenly people have become polarized and dogmatic. I think culturally, and instinctively, we've been generally dogmatic for a really long time, with few individual exceptions. Most people want to quickly associate with a tribe, or dogmatic system, and blindly defend it without questioning its assumptions. It is extremely difficult to get an average person to change his mind on say his favored political party -- much more than you would expect from factual and philosophical basis alone (if you frame it as an abstract philosophical discussion, e.g. a trolley problem, I think it's easier to get people engaged and open to change their minds; an engineer that measures a poor performance of a system won't usually die on the hill of defending the system at all costs).
It's really counterintutive: by being shown a new point of view, by changing your view of how the world works (in description or aspiration), you are gaining, you are learning, it should be a good thing (for everyone) -- and yet we frequently over-attach to beliefs. I don't want to speculate too much, but it sometimes does make sense to defend yourself not to be convinced by anyone of anything (potentially with selfish or malicious intent), so this may be an over-correction (cultural and or evolutionary) trait. See the post "Epistemic Learned Helplessness"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
I am wondering if these 'hit pieces' are more like sermons of The Church of the NYT. Deriding sinners and their evil ways. They are not meant to reflect an objective reality, but hyperbole to act as a cautionary tale with enough plausible sounding details to allow the prefrontal cortex to accept them. A modern This way there be dragons Or Reefer Madness. The NYT has found it's tithing flock and they are pandering all the way to the bank.
Even Macron felt the need to tell them they fucked up.
That one was Reuters, mind you, but does the same thing. The actual story being a Syrian man died from a bomb he was planning on using in a terror attack.
That was so bizarre. As a minority, I am afraid to openly discuss about the racism I face. I don't want to participate in oppression olympics or let other people use my suffering as their own political agenda. I want to be treated as a human being. I want neither discrimination nor preferential treatment. I want my work to speak for myself, not my skin color. It just saddens me the amount of identity politics out there and lack of any nuanced discussion.
In the country I live in, it is usual (I believe voluntarily mandatory) for a newspapers to publish a response by the subject of an article.
[Charles Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that’s mine too.
In 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.”
Can you elaborate on this? What is their agenda?
Eventually, it dawned on them that having an obviously incompetent, incapable public editor is worse than having none at all, so they unceremoniously canned the position.
As for whether there's any legal basis to sue, it's doubtful. There isn't a whole lot that's factually inaccurate in the NYT piece. It's innuendo and words taken out of context. California has a "False Light" claim that might apply, but I doubt any court would take that up. At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.
That could be fairly good effect for a Substack writer who now strives to be independent.
Unless, of course, the end result is that Visa and MasterCard deplatform Substack.
I think, doing it with an explicit goal of misleading your audience in order to cause damage to a specific person should not be OK. I'm not saying censor it, but making NYT liable for any actual damage (like losing a job) + punitive damages would make sense.
The thing is, the woke mob is employing the same silencing tactics as Putin's Russia. You don't have resources to shut everyone up, so you semi-arbitrarily target random people and make sure the consequences are extremely harsh. A high-profile person like Scott can just walk away from it. An average rank-and-file person with a mortgage and at best couple of months in saving will keep their mouth shut and pretend to agree with whatever the party line is. Like literally, that's Russia now. Everyone is poor and miserable, but Putin's approval ratings are >70% because, well, losing everything you have is just not worth a random act of dissent.
Professionally-trained journalists are very aware of libel concerns and are taught to stay within the law. The NYT's journalistic standards may have taken a nosedive in recent years but I'm sure they can still afford good enough lawyers to avoid getting sued over a hit piece, even one as sloppy as this.
None at all.
I'm afraid there's not going to be a solution for what the American Media has become in the legal system.
I think the piece just does not have any arguments, it's just based on held beliefs that some things are wrong. It's just connects dots and quotes sentences that offend a certain readership.
EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with.
EDIT 2: I don't share the beliefs of the blog, but this piece is just written to please a certain readership. This is not journalism!
EDIT 3: the newyorkers article is so much better: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-st...
I recommend you read the NYT peice then, because it points out that if they publish his name as Scott Alexander (as he was going by) people would find out who he was simply by Googling that name. How exactly is the NYT meant to guarantee that? And what was the result of Siskind's actions? He stirred up a mob against the NYT writer exactly in the same way he feared he would've been subject to.
He's not a public figure, I don't see a reason to so strongly feature his name. The lack of discussion and empathy on the side of the NYT is really concerning, repeating my words before: This is not just an article, it's the life of an ordinary person we are dealing with. He may be unequipped to handle or very afraid of the spotlight he is now in. There's already an article in the New Yorker about the article in the NYT.
I was not defending the person, his actions may be flawed. But the NYT is a journalistic institution that should have high ethical and journalistic standards.
If the NY Times published the article that links his pen name to his real name, that would be a stronger link than anything that previously existed. You can dox most people on the Internet if you put in enough effort, but the NY Times bears responsibility in lowering the effort required when there's no real reason to unmask him.
To dive deeper look at the criticisms of Murray and draw your on conclusion about the degree of sophistication of his assumptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Criticism_of_as...
If you believe in a sophisticated explanation where a simple explanation exists, you're probably a believer of nonsense. Occam's razor, basically.
Who is being intellectually dishonest here? NYT or Scott Alexander?
I wish folks would rid themselves of the notion that the internet is anonymous or deletable. We'd all be much healthier by acknowledging the possibility that whatever you write here may be etched in stone. And if you become well known people may try to identify you. This isn't an OSC book it's the real world.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...
I don't expect NYT or any outlet to be free from bias and that doesn't mean I want any of them to disappear. I want them all to thrive.
The gambit is quite risky. As another commentator wrote, it's not necessarily out of character for the NYT as a prominent vassal of American politics; they lambasted MLK and later on got somewhat of a black eye for it. But in the age of the internet, I can't help but think all of their opponents will seize on their indiscretion and that any moderates will be a little alienated. For so many people who didn't know what SSC is beforehand, won't they take a read and won't some of them conclude that they see more of themselves in his writing than the hit-piece? Is the NYT aware of the Streisand effect and just doesn't care or even wants to push people further into a "with us or against us" polarization? My sad fear is that the latter is true.
Do you find it implausible or merely flimsy? I certainly don't find it implausible.
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/understanding-middlebrow/
The gist of it is:
> Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension.
More specifically:
> The NYT has 7.5 million subscribers, mostly progressives in the 90-99% range. These people feel very smart, and they are in fact smarter than 90% of the population. So there’s no point bemoaning the fact that the NYT is not about to tell it’s readers that, “Actually, we provide middlebrow news analysis, and if you want brilliant inspired analysis you need to read blogs like SlateStarCodex.”
Not sure if we all read the same piece, but I wouldn't call it very negative. Pointing out the neoreactionary affiliations of the Rationalist community is neither something new nor "hit piece"-like. But apparently criticism of Silicon Valley's favorite darling cannot be tolerated here.
https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trum...
ht: https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1361067590135726093...
Stick to the non-environment science pieces. Admittedly, not much of the paper left, but whats left is rather good. Until those writers get fired.
I think the NYT piece was, like most 'journalism' these days, poorly researched, biased, and unfair. It omitted quotes from insightful passages of SA's, instead picking out those instances of 'impure' thoughts.
But I also think SA does some things that are perhaps signaling to racists/sexists that he's an ally of theirs, or at least intentionally providing a forum for them. Quoting Charles Murray to tell us about the time you agreed with him is much like Congresswoman Mary Miller quoting Hitler when she said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future'. You are giving credibility to these people. Even the quote SA cites (of himself) seems to agree with this:
> But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either.
The part he left out is that Murray thinks the inability of this trucker to learn is largely because of his genetics. Sure, maybe a poor choice of words. I'll withhold judgment as I haven't read too much of Scott's blog.
For people who call themselves The Rationalists and advocate for absolute free speech, it’s bit ironic they turn touchy and eager to get out their pitchforks if the topic being discussed is about them instead of the thousands of areas they think they have the absolute authority to talk and dissect about. Not that NYT is blameless on the later part of the previous sentence as well.
> The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray’s offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
In the quote in question, he literally says that Murray "has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture". While I'm not familiar with Murray's writing, it's hard to believe that his theories on class and culture are completely disconnected from his theories on race.
———
On point 2:
> This is true only in the sense that in 2014, I applied this comparison to a specific group of feminists who I accused of bullying and taunting people in a way that made them traumatized and suicidal. I describe my specific concern in the linked post. Lots of other feminists are great, and I continue to support gender equality.
Calling it a "specific group" is downplaying things. In the same 2014 article he wrote:
> We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man. And then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, and then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists. And then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing…
He has expressed similar sentiments elsewhere; it is safe to say he sees the attitude he criticizes as representative of at least a significant chunk of modern feminist activism. Meanwhile, all the New York Times said is that he described "some feminists as something close to Voldemort". Where is the discrepancy?
> Also, this became a weird go-to thing for people who wanted to do hatchet jobs to hit me with, so much so that sometime before 2017 I edited the post involved telling people not to do that.
His argument is that people who quoted him took his statement "out of context". I am not so sure. The immediate context suggests an element of hyperbole, which slightly takes the edge off the comparison. But add the context of the rest of the post? The New York Times article says he described people as "something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books". And… it's no exaggeration to say he was accusing people of being (or at least behaving) truly evil, whatever that means. I mean, he literally writes: "some feminists are evil raving loonies and some manospherites are evil raving loonies". He later mentions "the evil fringes of both movements", which lack "basic human decency". And even setting wording aside, the post does indeed accuse people of being responsible for others being traumatized, which seems pretty evil. (How valid the accusation is is another matter.)
In short, the Voldemort quote is, to a reasonable degree, representative of the post as a whole.
———
Point 3 is highly diffuse; he raises valid points in defense, but they don't really prove the article wrong.
———
On point 4:
> They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel.
Not six, two. Scott described Eliezer Yudkowsky as "the guy who taught me most of what I know about rationality". Eliezer Yudkowsky, as the article mentions, is friends with Peter Thiel.
More importantly, the main argument the article makes about Silicon Valley is that Scott's views are influential there (while allegedly providing a "safe space" for prejudice). And to demonstrate that, it mentions several notable people who follow his blog, including quoting Sam Altman praising it at length. Whether those people know him personally is beside the point.
This makes it pretty simple for Scott to parry the specific allegations or implications in his response here. But I feel like anybody who takes an honest look at his writing would have to admit:
He believes in IQ and intelligence heritability, specifically with at least a significant genetic component.
He doesn't like feminists (not all but a much broader swath than his response implies). Maybe you could say he's moderated on this over the years.
His response heavily implies that these things are not true. It strikes me as "technically true" in roughly the same way he's criticizing the Times piece for being.
Narrowly because it's actually unfair point by point, as you say.
And slightly dishonest, because Scott does in fact entertain ideas that are scandalous to an expected arrival from the NYT. (Though not, I would say, for the reasons they might assume.)
But also more broadly, it doesn't take the opportunity to make intelligible to that arrival his insider's view of these related-but-distinct phenomena (his blog, the Rationalists, "Grey Tribe", the counter-techlash). Which the article predictably muddles.
Perhaps saddest to me, by responding defensively (however understandably!), he reinforces the emphasis in the piece on this sort of culture war stuff. Rather than perhaps channeling this new interest towards the meta-science and history and psychiatry and the like.
I would like to know what newspapers he is reading that makes this seem brazen or even out of the ordinary.
The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be.
I know this has been true for me many times.
Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.
This was really a comment on how most journalism is even worse. The NYT does occasionally have pieces where I know about the topic and their representation goes into details that others aren't likely to. Those are, however, not a large percentage of their output.
Inexplicably many here seem to think that random blog posts are somehow remotely equivalent. I value opinion at zero, and trust a random person to do quality research at about zero too. Trust is earned.
When random internet opinion becomes "news" I suppose we really are in a post truth world.
The clever mafia boss, at least in the movies, doesn't leave a paper trail showing they've ordered a hit job on someone, they say something like wouldn't it be convenient if Scott weren't seen around here for a while?
(Even Trump had the sense not to say directly on camera, let's break into the capitol and smash things up.)
The NYT piece has an ugly taste of "I'm not going to say I endorse direct action against Scott, BUT" when it lists how he could be seen as "associated" with sexists, racists and so on. Let's not pretend otherwise: Cade Metz knows exactly that lesser accusations have brought people down in the past.
These type of generic arguments bring nothing valuable to the discussion table. These arguments are used to shut down conversation in a very self-aggrandizing manner.
To quote Scott:
> Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not "Death to the unbelievers!" but "If you’re nice, you can join our cuddle pile!"
> 1. The article tries to connect me to Charles Murray and The Bell Curve
> 2. In their litany of reasons I am bad, the Times says I compared some feminists to Voldemort.
> 3. The Times also presented a more general case that I was a bad ally to women in tech.
> 4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true -
There are yet others which have "mined out" all the non-zero sum games in their industry (or choose not to pursue them), and so instead play zero-sum games. In these games, their gains come at the expense of their customers, the public or the environment. These tend to be monopolies because there is no recourse.
In categorizing some of these businesses as hostile actors, I am suggesting that they are predominantly playing zero-sum games. To cite some examples of businesses not playing zero-sum games, I need not look further than the small businesses in my local town.
Hopefully this provides a more nuanced answer you were rightfully asking about.
This gets at part of what I find irritating about the self-described Rationalist community: they talk about "free speech" when what they really want is unrestricted, consequence-less speech that allows them to guiltlessly harm certain people in the name of innovation.
Source: https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1360793868816556033
The arguments are also just bad. “Why don’t these free speech people take into account existing power structures?” But this is of course exactly what they are doing when they advocate for absolute free speech. How else do you account and adjust for the different levels of cultural power different groups, companies, whatever have in society?
Scott literally calls a study that links IQ and race "sophisticated" and calls Murray an "ally" in the study of the connection and the antecedent impact on social welfare.
It's only when the NYT times points out the connection does it suddenly become much more narrow: a specific and borderline non-sequitur claim about teaching truckers to code.
I find the whole "I'm just asking questions!" routine to be so, so tiresome and disingenuous. This whole thing reads to me that he wants to be seen as iconoclastic and he wants to associate with contrarians but doesn't want any of the blowback for doing so. He may argue that a lack of refuting the more offensive implications and conclusions of an opinion while agreeing with a portion of it (only after the fact, mind you!) does not imply wholescale endorsement, but that's naive at best and wanting it both ways and crying about it at worst.
I did not read the quote that way. Looking at the original:
> Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture.
He seems to be saying the opposite: that Murray has theories to explain IQ beyond just heredity (i.e. [social?] class and culture). It seems to me that Scott is drawing attention to Murray's non IQ/Race theories here, then using that common ground to jump into universal basic income.
If he were to call the IQ studies sophisticated, here's how I would have worded it:
(Abridged quote of evil twin Scott) Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, [however he] has some very sophisticated theories about [hereditary genetics].