Slate Star Clusterfuck
mynewbandis.substack.com
mynewbandis.substack.com
And it's hard to think there's not some bias going on in the "Silicon Valley's Safe Space" article.
The article took 14 pages to say three things:
• the NY Times wanted to reveal Scott's full name, and Scott took down SSC because of it
• a lot of Silicon Valley are fans of SSC
• Scott knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who is a racist
Over the course of 14 pages are some very conspicuous omissions:
• any mention of why Scott wanted his full name to be private (or that he's a psychiatrist at all; the article uses "Mr. Alexander" rather than the usual "Dr. Alexander" other articles on SSC have used)
• more than a single sentence about what SSC the blog is actually about [1]
• that SSC (and other rationalists) was warning about a COVID pandemic before everyone else, and had good advice on what to do about it before everyone else (which the author explicitly told sources that the article was to be about that)
There are a lot of other omissions I can believe are nonmalicious. I could even believe it was all in good faith if for some reason Metz had just never interviewed anyone who knew anything about SSC. But he spent hours interviewing Scott Aaronson [2] and many other people who loved and hated the blog, and Alexander spent days explaining why he wanted his name to be private. And those three omissions are difficult to explain.
If the article had maintained a veneer of neutrality by covering both sides to an extent and just focused on the negative side a lot more, I could believe that maybe it's just me.
But the article conspicuously doesn't cover anything very much at all (the SSC haters I know also noticed a lack of any coverage of specific incidents people usually hate rationalists for). Metz interviewed a lot of lovers and a lot of haters and didn't write about any of it except the vague connections.
It's difficult to believe _nothing_ weird was going on.
(And really, 10k words to generate a lot more heat than light is kinda what I expect from SSC, actually, so the NYT article is on point in that respect!)
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lk2ve9/a_fo...
You can also just look elsewhere in this thread for links to journalists talking about their experiences writing hit pieces for the New York Times.
The post tried to explain how journalism works. They used examples. But they also pointed out that a lot of people like yourself are demanding something from journalism which is not your right to demand. Journalism is often critical. So what?
> It's difficult to believe _nothing_ weird was going on.
It is totally believable that the life of a NYT author doesn't resolve around some unknown internet personality like Scott Alexander. This isn't a conspiracy.
> Only in a bubble as insular and tiny as the SSC community would this theory be even remotely plausible. To put this in context: SSC is influential in a small but powerful corner of the tech industry. It is not, however, a site that most people, even at the New York Times, are aware exists--and certainly, the Times and its journalists are not threatened by its existence. They are not out to destroy the site, or “get” Scott, or punish him. At the risk of puncturing egos: they are not thinking about Scott or the site at all. Even the reporter working on the story has no especial investment in its subject. That reporter is also probably working on six other stories at the same time, thinking about their friends, family, what their kid needs to do in Zoom school tomorrow, the book they want to read, whether Donald Trump will get arrested, whether rats dream of boredom. They do not sit around thinking about how they’re going to “get” people they write about, and when subjects think they do, it’s more a reflection of the subject’s self-perception (or self-importance) and, sometimes, a sprinkling of unadulterated narcissism.
I find it pretty plausible that no one gives a shit. It's just another article.
I can't imagine how this could be true. Gawker was extremely open about their intention to publish negative journalism.
> When I was the editor-in-chief of the New York Observer, my boss Jared Kushner tried a couple of times to talk me into doing “hit pieces” in the paper, and I refused. He even suggested I do one on someone who had bashed me publicly and I had to explain to him that real journalists do not do “hit pieces”; they follow the reporting wherever it goes. Jared thought they did because he conflated negative portrayals with malicious portrayals, much like some people are doing here, albeit in a less obviously stupid way.
> Jared’s father, a convicted felon who once tried to blackmail his own brother, was covered negatively by the New Jersey newspapers. In Jared’s view, they were “out to get” his father. In Jared’s mind, because this is the narrative that makes sense to him and is also the most self-serving, his father did nothing wrong. He was railroaded by Chris Christie and the media, the latter of whom wanted to take him down.
Of course, negative coverage is a hit piece. That's the whole point. Discretion and judgment are hallmarks of adulthood. You don't blurt out every thought that pops into your head. Journalists are adults. They don't just publish whatever they find, the positive and the negative, merely because they found it or because "it's a fact."
In that way, journalists are like expert players of the deepest game invented by humanity -- hold 'em poker. They choose what claims to present, in what context and in what order, to reinforce specific beliefs in the minds of their opponents in the service of particular personal goals.
Pretending otherwise is either hopelessly naive or pretending to be hopelessly naive.
Your defensiveness for the subject in question is incredibly obvious, and ironically, deeply irrational.
That's negative journalism. What do they think they're doing?
I think most of us would define a hit piece as an article intended to give a falsely negative impression by misleading the reader. This is a critical point, because some of the NYT article is negative but fair, while some of it is taking extraordinary liberties with the truth through omission and guilt-by-association, and it's the latter that makes it a hit piece. To say that Scott allowed white supremacists in his comments provided they didn't do anything too awful is a criticism based in fact, and the reader can decide how bad it is, but to imply Scott himself is a racist because he agreed with Charles Murray on a UBI is what makes it a hit piece.
> pay careful attention to what you’re afraid they’re going to write, and why you wouldn’t want it to be public. Then apply some rational thinking.
This is precisely the ideal I try to aim for. Sure, I get defensive when I feel attacked; that appears to be part of human nature. But the key to improvement is finding error and trying to correct it. It can be incredibly helpful to have an outside point of view.
She should do LessWrong next.
> “But tech journalism is overwhelmingly negative!” I hear
> a self-described empiricist whining somewhere on Twitter.
> No it is not, my friends. You just don’t notice it when
> it isn’t. This is a cognitive bias: your brain is wired
> to perceive threats in a way that it does not perceive
> neutral or positive information.
Everyone is power gets bad press sometimes. Best to handle it with grace, not like this.
Money is not the only motivator, it’s not a durable motivator, and even if it’s motivating to the business owners of the NYT, the reporter is not getting paid per click. (Or maybe they are! I’d be very surprised. Prove me wrong.)
Do we have a systemic problem regarding what sort of headlines attract attention? I believe so, yes. Does that mean that everything—-or even just the things we dislike—-produced on a for-profit site is inherently biased? I doubt it. Such a position strikes me as profoundly naïve; in fact, it’s the same sort of naïvety that this article is talking about.
At Bloomberg it’s no secret that their journalists are paid bonuses when their stories “move markets”.
Quality journalism still exists and is invaluable, but is done as long form articles in select publications by people established enough to do it.
A snippet of conversation from the All In podcast:
> Jason C.: Having been a journalist...if you look at trust among republicans.. all time low in the press. And just all americans don't trust the press right now, they think there are hidden agendas...
> What happened was, the internet caused the revenue streams of the press to get violently compressed or eliminated. You had craigslist take the classified business google and facebook took the ad business in subscriptions netflix spotify et cetera... so you have all that revenue gone.
> They didn't have the resources to do fact checking and then ... because of blogging which i was involved in required that people file two three four times a day just to keep up... and so when you're filing even just twice a day there is no time to get quotes from the subjects. So we have all as people who are subjects had quotes attributed to us that were like: "where did you pull that quote from?" like oh "three years ago you said this" or whatever.
> And you don't even know you're going to be in the story. Like the hit piece they did on you, Chamath. Some sports writer [from] sf gate did some hit piece on Chamath. Did they ever call you did they ever say "would you like to respond?". That's how it used to work... when you get a degree in journalism.
> David Sacks: You said something really really important it's the craziest thing where these guys will not even call you and say "here's what we're running" or "here's what we're going to say do you want to work through this with us? Do you want to tell us are there any inaccuracies? We're really seeking the truth." Nobody's really seeking the truth they're seeking clicks ... and so here's what happens: your salary is now determined by your number of followers on twitter.
Agreed. That's an outright showstopper. It's hard to believe any newly launched product would pull that crap in modern times, while still claiming to not be malicious.
I’m a regular reader of SSC, but also an SJW. It’s not mutually exclusive. I liked HPMoR and it taught me a lot about losing... but it also marginalized the female characters.
When you are called out, even when you are clearly in the wrong, your first reaction is defensiveness. I know, I've been there. It's tough addressing one's own issues, but it's the right thing to do, and do it in the most emotionless manner possible.
You are right it comes with the job; but I think the first time it happens at a scale one is not used to is a very hard inflection point that can make or break how one grows (or doesn't!) from that point forward. "Fail fast" shouldn't be a mantra simply for startups.
> There’s a specific kind of misunderstanding that’s pervasive in tech, and it falls in this taxonomy of fallacies somewhere between the commentary/reporting confusion, and Uncle Chico.
This obviously cuts both ways - isn't it just as easy for journalists to misunderstand other industries? Why is it the responsibility of the ~victim~ subject to know how they are being reported on?
> The malicious journalist thesis is the one that was the hardest on my ocular muscles yesterday. Scott Alexander—the figure at the center of the piece—believes this, and has advanced this theory that the journalist who wrote the piece, and perhaps The New York Times institutionally, were out to smear him.
If you read his writing, Scott Alexander was actually incredibly gracious about the journalist in question, even going so far to say it was probably not their fault. Ironically enough, if the writer was familiar with SSC, she would know that she is looking for a lot of words to describe "Mistake Theory": https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
But again, it seems like nobody actually cares that the argument isn't that whether the coverage was good or bad. It's a bad characterization of the content! The reporting was inaccurate, and the subject didn't want to be interviewed!
> And another structural reality is that organizations--companies, say, startups--are terrible at policing themselves. What journalism seeks to do is illuminate the areas where destructive means are being utilized to achieve ends that might actually be virtuous or worthy in some other way.
What if the journalists are the ones doing something destructive??!!!! You don't get to magically absolve yourself of your sins because your pursuit is noble! How do you get off criticizing the tech industry when you engage in the same crime of thinking you are on the side of righteousness?
> It makes a lot of people uncomfortable when they can’t control their self-presentation, and this extends to journalistic portrayals.
With good right! If anything I learned from this article it's that journalists are too busy to care about making sure they characterize the content correctly.