6 ms·

It didn't strike me as ugly as all.

by ajkjk 6y ago

zozbot234 6y ago
It's definitely a bit ugly (perhaps most clearly so wrt. SA's broadly sensible defense of Scott Aaronson being described as an angry "screed" against feminism) but overall, it's as fair a treatment of SSC as could appear in the elite media at this point.
whatshisface 6y ago
Reading the Scott Aaronson affair described as being about the trouble of male nerds on the "dating market," was awfully ugly. Of course, this doesn't mean that the New Yorker has it out for "rationalists," it's just an example of the callous and not-exactly right coverage that subcultures usually get from the mainstream. The truth is that the Aaronson affair was that he had crippling anxiety when he was young, got mixed up with Judith Butler literature, and it didn't really help him. He never had any trouble finding a partner once his anxiety had resolved, so you really have to do some free word association to get from the reality to the description.
- baddox 6y ago
  It seems to me that simplifying the entire Scott Aaronson affair was necessary, since it was just a brief part of this article. I thought their choice of simplification was reasonable and in good faith, but of course others might disagree (and unfortunately, whether we agree or disagree is likely to be effected by our overall level of agreement with the article).
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    You can simplify, and then you can say Scott wrote an angry "screed" that misrepresents 99% of feminists and ignores the plight of vulnerable women in its bourgeois defense of the privileged, nerdy intellectual class. (The article doesn't actually say "bourgeois", but the dogwhistles are crystal-clear.)
    - mst 6y ago
      I confess that any description of anything that uses the word "screed" will tend to seem to me to be in bad faith. Largely because every time I've dug into the origins of such a description, it has indeed been in bad faith.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    There's simplifying, and then there's misrepresenting. Simplifying it would be calling it "crippling anxiety exacerbated by uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature."
    - adamsea 6y ago
      The article isn’t about Scott Aaronsen. Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird. “Childhood exposure to radical literature”? “radical literature” almost sound like a disease.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        Just because he wasn't the subject doesn't mean it's okay to make materially false statements about him... >Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird. Well, I'm not qualified to write for the New Yorker, but surely they could have written a sentence that wasn't false. Maybe you could read a more detailed account on The Atlantic, and decide for yourself how it could be summarized. (Seriously, the "dating market," does not come up even once.) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blog-comment-that-achieved-an-internet-miracle/384539/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blo...
        adamsea 6y ago
        That's a great article! FYI it mentions Andrea Dworkin though -- not Judith Butler, who you mentioned earlier. Not an expert but think they're fairly different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin I dunno, just seems like emotions are running high. To be fair, mine included. Sigh ...
        whatshisface 6y ago
        I think the association with Butler came from somewhere else* . The Dworkin reference was a positive one in Aaronson's original post. If you're really interested in digging through all the details, the original post by Aaronson that sparked the whole thing was called "comment 171." You may come away from it with different ideas than I, but you'll definitely come away from it with different ideas than the New Yorker. ;) * I admit that the "somewhere else" could have been my imagination.
greenshackle2 6y ago
It could have been much worse, but it's certainly not charitable.
- ajkjk 6y ago
  I really disagree. I thought it was a balanced take, for the most part, and represented the SSC extended community in a way that did much better than naively misunderstanding it, and much better than the community understands _itself_. I think that a lot of commenters on here have the exact self-righteous tone that this article criticizes (well, discusses with a bit of an air of judgment, but let's just agree that it's criticism): to these commenters, it is inconceivable that the NYT's behavior could be acceptable and not... what, profit-motivated, desperate for clicks, a salvo in a media war? But that's mostly absurd. Not impossible, per se, but unfounded. This is one of those things where the Internet At Large seems to think that everyone has to agree on who's right here (it's Scott and friends?), and anyone who disagrees is Evil, and it's just a matter of figuring out _how_ they Are Evil. But in reality people can actually coexist, and be allowed to coexist, with _different_ opinions of what is right or reasonable, and the NYT / persons who are removed from the SSC/Silicon Valley/HN bubble have very different opinions there. The commenters here act like it is not okay for these differences of opinion to continue to exist, and so they must be crushed. It really, really doesn't look great to the community that when commenters encounter this difference of opinion, they... launch into uninhibited tirades against it at every opportunity. To an external observer, the commenters seem ridiculously worked up, and this article (among other takes) seems very mature and charitable in contrast.
  - greenshackle2 6y ago
    It's "balanced" in so far as some parts are charitable, sure, but then it's also peppered with insinuations: > This plea conformed with the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement. I just can't see that being written in good faith.
eqvinox 6y ago
It does strike me as ugly because there's just one "off" piece after the other. The thing about hiding posts from reporters while they know there's an ebook. Saying the NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning. Arguing that "de-anonymizing" Scott shouldn't be a problem because it was easy for them to do. Arguing that Scott should've expected unruly people to contact the NYT while drawing a complete blank that that's exactly what Scott would've been facing, except with possible physical violence rather than angry e-mails... There's more but I'm lazy. My "wat?s per minute" were significantly above average. It went far enough for me to call it "ugly."
- paulgb 6y ago
  > NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning. No need to generalize from the state of the media as an industry; NYT is a public company so their balance sheet is public. Here's their latest 10-Q, doesn't look like drowning to me. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169120000009/nyt329202010-qdocument.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169...
  - eqvinox 6y ago
    I said I was lazy, didn't I? :) Feel free to ignore that item. … But actually… that sheet also says that $51 million of their revenue is from digital advertising, down from $55.5 million a year ago. It's 11.5% of their total revenue, down from 12.7%. Not a huge problem but… it's still a business consideration. And let's not forget zest and sensationalism can sell subscriptions and print media too. (Publishing the full name would at least have counted as "zest" IMHO, if not full-on sensationalism.)
    - paulgb 6y ago
      Ad revenue is down but subscriptions and total revenue are up -- so doesn't that go counter to the "did it for clicks" narrative? My (admittedly simple) model of the media industry is that clickbait drives ad revenue, quality journalism drives subscriptions.
Pils 6y ago
Funnily enough, the slatestarcodex thread on this article agrees with you. I found this one comment extremely illustrative of the dynamics in this current thread: >Overall, I’m pretty impressed by this article. It’s the sort of thing I could see myself aspiring to write. It spends ample time presenting SSC in its own terms, touches on enough of the major touchstones and obscurities of the blog to indicate a serious examination of it, and is precise and restricted in its criticisms. I appreciated in particular the attention it paid to the specific quirks of rationalist subculture rather than trying to lump it in as part of something it isn’t, and the way it (accurately) called out the people who were looking more for a war with the media and were willing rovers use Scott as a convenient casus belli.[0] [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slate_star_codex_and_silicon_valleys_war_against/fxfwbb3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slat...
Sessions 6y ago
Agreed. A handful of sentences were completely unfair, and they've been rightly criticized in other comments. But it's a very long piece, and the majority of it came off as reserved and even-handed. I've seen hit pieces, this is not one of them.

It didn't strike me as ugly as all.

by ajkjk 6y ago

It didn't strike me as ugly as all.

It's definitely a bit ugly (perhaps most clearly so wrt. SA's broadly sensible defense of Scott Aaronson being described as an angry "screed" against feminism) but overall, it's as fair a treatment of SSC as could appear in the elite media at this point.

whatshisface 6y ago

Reading the Scott Aaronson affair described as being about the trouble of male nerds on the "dating market," was awfully ugly. Of course, this doesn't mean that the New Yorker has it out for "rationalists," it's just an example of the callous and not-exactly right coverage that subcultures usually get from the mainstream. The truth is that the Aaronson affair was that he had crippling anxiety when he was young, got mixed up with Judith Butler literature, and it didn't really help him. He never had any trouble finding a partner once his anxiety had resolved, so you really have to do some free word association to get from the reality to the description.

baddox 6y ago
It seems to me that simplifying the entire Scott Aaronson affair was necessary, since it was just a brief part of this article. I thought their choice of simplification was reasonable and in good faith, but of course others might disagree (and unfortunately, whether we agree or disagree is likely to be effected by our overall level of agreement with the article).
- zozbot234 6y ago
  You can simplify, and then you can say Scott wrote an angry "screed" that misrepresents 99% of feminists and ignores the plight of vulnerable women in its bourgeois defense of the privileged, nerdy intellectual class. (The article doesn't actually say "bourgeois", but the dogwhistles are crystal-clear.)
  - mst 6y ago
    I confess that any description of anything that uses the word "screed" will tend to seem to me to be in bad faith. Largely because every time I've dug into the origins of such a description, it has indeed been in bad faith.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- whatshisface 6y ago
  There's simplifying, and then there's misrepresenting. Simplifying it would be calling it "crippling anxiety exacerbated by uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature."
  - adamsea 6y ago
    The article isn’t about Scott Aaronsen. Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird. “Childhood exposure to radical literature”? “radical literature” almost sound like a disease.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      Just because he wasn't the subject doesn't mean it's okay to make materially false statements about him... >Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird. Well, I'm not qualified to write for the New Yorker, but surely they could have written a sentence that wasn't false. Maybe you could read a more detailed account on The Atlantic, and decide for yourself how it could be summarized. (Seriously, the "dating market," does not come up even once.) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blog-comment-that-achieved-an-internet-miracle/384539/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blo...
      - adamsea 6y ago
        That's a great article! FYI it mentions Andrea Dworkin though -- not Judith Butler, who you mentioned earlier. Not an expert but think they're fairly different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin I dunno, just seems like emotions are running high. To be fair, mine included. Sigh ...
        whatshisface 6y ago
        I think the association with Butler came from somewhere else* . The Dworkin reference was a positive one in Aaronson's original post. If you're really interested in digging through all the details, the original post by Aaronson that sparked the whole thing was called "comment 171." You may come away from it with different ideas than I, but you'll definitely come away from it with different ideas than the New Yorker. ;) * I admit that the "somewhere else" could have been my imagination.

greenshackle2 6y ago

It could have been much worse, but it's certainly not charitable.

ajkjk 6y ago
I really disagree. I thought it was a balanced take, for the most part, and represented the SSC extended community in a way that did much better than naively misunderstanding it, and much better than the community understands _itself_. I think that a lot of commenters on here have the exact self-righteous tone that this article criticizes (well, discusses with a bit of an air of judgment, but let's just agree that it's criticism): to these commenters, it is inconceivable that the NYT's behavior could be acceptable and not... what, profit-motivated, desperate for clicks, a salvo in a media war? But that's mostly absurd. Not impossible, per se, but unfounded. This is one of those things where the Internet At Large seems to think that everyone has to agree on who's right here (it's Scott and friends?), and anyone who disagrees is Evil, and it's just a matter of figuring out _how_ they Are Evil. But in reality people can actually coexist, and be allowed to coexist, with _different_ opinions of what is right or reasonable, and the NYT / persons who are removed from the SSC/Silicon Valley/HN bubble have very different opinions there. The commenters here act like it is not okay for these differences of opinion to continue to exist, and so they must be crushed. It really, really doesn't look great to the community that when commenters encounter this difference of opinion, they... launch into uninhibited tirades against it at every opportunity. To an external observer, the commenters seem ridiculously worked up, and this article (among other takes) seems very mature and charitable in contrast.
- greenshackle2 6y ago
  It's "balanced" in so far as some parts are charitable, sure, but then it's also peppered with insinuations: > This plea conformed with the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement. I just can't see that being written in good faith.

eqvinox 6y ago

It does strike me as ugly because there's just one "off" piece after the other. The thing about hiding posts from reporters while they know there's an ebook. Saying the NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning. Arguing that "de-anonymizing" Scott shouldn't be a problem because it was easy for them to do. Arguing that Scott should've expected unruly people to contact the NYT while drawing a complete blank that that's exactly what Scott would've been facing, except with possible physical violence rather than angry e-mails... There's more but I'm lazy. My "wat?s per minute" were significantly above average. It went far enough for me to call it "ugly."

paulgb 6y ago
> NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning. No need to generalize from the state of the media as an industry; NYT is a public company so their balance sheet is public. Here's their latest 10-Q, doesn't look like drowning to me. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169120000009/nyt329202010-qdocument.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169...
- eqvinox 6y ago
  I said I was lazy, didn't I? :) Feel free to ignore that item. … But actually… that sheet also says that $51 million of their revenue is from digital advertising, down from $55.5 million a year ago. It's 11.5% of their total revenue, down from 12.7%. Not a huge problem but… it's still a business consideration. And let's not forget zest and sensationalism can sell subscriptions and print media too. (Publishing the full name would at least have counted as "zest" IMHO, if not full-on sensationalism.)
  - paulgb 6y ago
    Ad revenue is down but subscriptions and total revenue are up -- so doesn't that go counter to the "did it for clicks" narrative? My (admittedly simple) model of the media industry is that clickbait drives ad revenue, quality journalism drives subscriptions.

Pils 6y ago

Funnily enough, the slatestarcodex thread on this article agrees with you. I found this one comment extremely illustrative of the dynamics in this current thread: >Overall, I’m pretty impressed by this article. It’s the sort of thing I could see myself aspiring to write. It spends ample time presenting SSC in its own terms, touches on enough of the major touchstones and obscurities of the blog to indicate a serious examination of it, and is precise and restricted in its criticisms. I appreciated in particular the attention it paid to the specific quirks of rationalist subculture rather than trying to lump it in as part of something it isn’t, and the way it (accurately) called out the people who were looking more for a war with the media and were willing rovers use Scott as a convenient casus belli.[0] [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slate_star_codex_and_silicon_valleys_war_against/fxfwbb3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slat...

Sessions 6y ago

Agreed. A handful of sentences were completely unfair, and they've been rightly criticized in other comments. But it's a very long piece, and the majority of it came off as reserved and even-handed. I've seen hit pieces, this is not one of them.