5 ms·
As others have noted, this is a good time to think about Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Here's some points in the article that I think are particularly sketchy that
by autarch 6y ago
As others have noted, this is a good time to think about Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Here's some points in the article that I think are particularly sketchy that others haven't yet noted ...
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
Take a look at Slate Star Codex (SSC) in The Wayback Machine on January 1, 2020 - https://web.archive.org/web/20200101140213/https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200101140213/https://slatestar...
The Blog Roll is on the left side. It's a long list of weirdly categorized links without any additional annotation. Nick Land's is "Xenosystems" (which now appears to be defunct). I think calling this an "endorsement" is really stretching things here.
Scott wrote about the neoreactionary movement on SSC more than once, and it's quite clear he _does not_ endorse those viewpoints (which to be fair, the article does say). But given that he wrote about the topic repeatedly, it's no surprise he linked to a prominent neoreactionary blog. Presumably, he trusted his readers to come to their own conclusions about the content on the linked blogs. And he also probably assumed that readers would realize this _wasn't_ an endorsement, given his own writing on the neoreactionary movement.
If I told you that you should read Marx's Communist Manifesto after telling you at length that I think Communism is terrible, am I endorsing Communism? Or am I telling you to read this because I think you should learn more about Communism, and not just from me?
> I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.
This is one of the sketchiest things in the article. Scott made it clear that his primary concern was that his patients and potential employers might associate him with his blog. So if you're a patient googling your new psychiatrist, would you google their first and middle name (a middle name you might not even know)? Or would you google "Scott Siskind"? Of course you'd do the latter! So the question is whether googling "Scott Siskind" would get you to SSC. I'd love to go back in time and check this. I'd also love to know if Cade Metz tried this and what result he got.
I would note that if I google "Scott Siskind" right now, I do get results related to SSC, but that's because Scott after Scott gave up his pseudonymity on Astral Codex Ten, the Wikipedia page for SSC was updated to include Scott's full name.
I'm sure there are more similarly sketchy parts of the article that others will note.
- kgin 6y agoIt’s true. I’ve never read an article about something I had first-hand knowledge of that didn’t get at minimum one major part of the story completely wrong. And then I go ahead and wholly accept everything in every article about things I don’t have first-hand knowledge of.
- rabulah 6y agoThe blogroll is all wordplay based on Borges' Celestial Emporium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...). He needed links to categorise as 'those belonging to the Emperor' so I guess linking to the neo-monarchists was too good an opportunity to pass up.
- thisiszilff 6y agoThis actually sums up my feeling when read the NYT article: reporter wades into a sub-culture only kind of understands what is going on but sees words and reports on them for the "general" audience. The article feels very... surface level, like the reporter didn't really read much of the blog or didn't think it was worth engaging with. The meat of the story is linking to prominent tech figures and the blog is this curiosity side piece that links the two.
- davidgerard 6y agoIf you include something in your blogroll, that is, literally, an endorsement of it. I don't see how it isn't. It's part of the framing you're putting around every article you write. It's the context that you directly provide.
- autarch 6y agoMaybe we're using two different definitions of "endorse". I think of it as saying "I approve of this thing", not "this thing exists and is worth reading, even if I do not approve of it". For me to consider a link an endorsement it would need to have more context than just being in a long list of links.