I think folks who feel like this is a hit piece need to watch out for the biases that Scott himself described in https://web.archive.org/web/20200619200544/http

I think folks who feel like this is a hit piece need to watch out for the biases that Scott himself described in https://web.archive.org/web/20200619200544/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments https://web.archive.org/web/20200619200544/https://slatestar.... I don't want to assume that no one has done that accounting, but I want to highlight that it's important. Some scattered observations: > Alexander, in another widely circulated essay, published in 2018, has popularized an alternative heuristic—a partition between what he calls “mistake theorists” and “conflict theorists.” I think it speaks well of the piece that the author spent so much time on mistake theory vs conflict theory. To someone who isn't already an SSC reader, that's probably a pretty boring topic. But it's a big piece of context for what regular readers consider important and interesting. If I were writing a hit piece, or a clickbait piece, I don't think I would've made space for this. > By their own logic of gamesmanship, some of the positions they tolerate actually have to be extreme, because only a tolerance of a truly extreme position is costly—that is, something for which they might have to pay a price. This is an interesting take. I don't know if I fully agree with it, but at the same time I don't think it's shallow. > “Feels like tech pieces would benefit from pre- or at least post-publication peer review by experts in the field, namely the investors and engineers and founders”—in other words, the subjects of stories should be allowed to edit them. A case of one group misunderstanding the fundamental, traditional values of another group. I haven't thought before about how the "Gell-Mann amnesia problem" might be fundamentally at odds with journalistic objectivity. It's not just that journalists don't have the time or the background to understand technical topics -- it might be that sometimes one must not have that background in order to write about a subject objectively. Or maybe that's one way to be objective, which can work in cooperation with other ways. Who knows. Again, not sure if I totally agree, but it's an interesting observation.