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Statement on New York Times Article

• sradman 6y ago
  > I want to respond to four main negative claims in the article > 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 -
  • fakename11 6y ago
    Is this really a useful post?
• twicetwice 6y ago
  A great response, in my opinion. Succinctly and effectively points out what was wrong with the NYT article, then tries to move on. Somewhat more of a sober tone than Scott's typical writing, but still with a dash of his typical wit: > 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-of-legible 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-cryptocurrencies https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryp...
  • nanna 6y ago
    > WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"] 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.
    • sanxiyn 6y ago
      Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example, 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.
      • plake 6y ago
        Or perhaps that the pressures against legible expertise are worse in the US?
      • curun1r 6y ago
        Even as large as WebMD is, it would surprise me if they weren't using a third-party drug database to drive their public database. When I worked at a similar site, we used First DataBank [0], but there may be others too. The world of pharmaceuticals changes so rapidly that you need a small army of pharmacists and doctors scouring medical journals and materials from big pharma companies to keep your information up-to-date and it's just a lot easier to pay one of the dedicated companies that focus on that to do that work for you. 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. [0] https://www.fdbhealth.com/ https://www.fdbhealth.com/
• mimikatz 6y ago
  The piece was bad. After all the time they had to work on it, it was a lazy hack job that normally wouldn't make the cut at the NYT. It is a sign of the days we live in when a Mean Girls style burn book page makes it into what used to be the paper of record.
  • SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
    You’re not kidding. It’s surprising how bad it is, and that’s after reading all these comments saying how bad it is. It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.
    • julianmarq 6y ago
      > It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis. 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.
  • listless 6y ago
    This is well said. The article is so weak and poorly laid out its like listening to a bad pop song through cheap speakers. It doesn’t even have a proper closing. Just ends abruptly.
    • notmarkus 6y ago
      I think the closing was effective in what it was going for: implying that this has all been a "grift." The abruptness is intended to leave the reader with a reverberating final note in their mind. "$250,000... $250,000..."
  • unityByFreedom 6y ago
• jacob2484 6y ago
  My respect for the NY Times is out the window at this point.
  • aetherane 6y ago
    The last few years they have been overly focused on their agenda and many times haven't even made a visible effort to investigate fairly. NYT employees have been fired for disagreeing with the prevailing opinion in the newsroom.
    • jherdman 6y ago
      > ...they have been overly focused on their agenda... Can you elaborate on this? What is their agenda?
      • jimbob45 6y ago
        Pushing Democratic rhetoric. They drank their own kool-aid by thinking they were responsible for the 2016 election. Perhaps they were but moving to overtly biased reporting was not the correct solution to that. Edit: ombudsmen are the solution.
• musicbizsucks 6y ago
  You can play a fun game with this snippet from the NYT article. You can replace the word "Rationalists" with the name of any group at all and the resulting statement seems vaguely true due to the imprecise nature of the language. > 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.
  • cobraetor 6y ago
    I wonder if there is an online course that educates people on journalism-based rhetoric like this.
  • ThankYouBernard 6y ago
    you can play any number of "fun games" to validate whatever pre-conceived notion you have about NYT
  • colinmhayes 6y ago
    That's also a pretty bad definition of effective altruism. For how much they spout "do the most good" you'd think the author could just use that?
    • bobcostas55 6y ago
      The whole thing is bizarre. The author has been working on this piece for something like 10 months now, and he can't get a basic definition of EA right? I saw a hot take on twitter that Metz deliberately did a bad job because he didn't actually want to write a hit piece and his superiors forced him into it.
      • hundreddaysoff 6y ago
        This is an interesting theory. It also seems somewhat testable, because if true and Metz's superiors are not tone-deaf they we'd expect they will fire him, no? I wonder if it was Metz who had the idea for the original more positive-angled story re SSC's COVID info.
• roenxi 6y ago
  It is a testament to the times that someone can be subject to a NYT hit job and be able to defend themselves so easily.
  • unityByFreedom 6y ago
    How was it a hit piece? Certainly it is great he can respond.
    • roenxi 6y ago
      [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 SSC becomes ... 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.” ..in the NYT article. That was spicing it up a little much. Looks like a hit piece.
      • Zeratoss 6y ago
        Sounds fair to me. He agrees with a bunch of points and calls Murray's ideas sophisticated. Isn't that aligning oneself?
  • mafuy 6y ago
    I kind of disagree. His reaction will reach only a tiny fraction of the readers of the piece, and mostly those who are already in doubt. 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.
• wwww4all 6y ago
  NY times is worse than fake news. It’s intentional fake news propaganda to instill establishment thought control on their audience. They are now part of the fascist cabal establishment in US, hunting down any wrong thinkers. It doesn’t matter is you’re left or right. The only thing that matters to NY times fascist establishment regime is keeping the lower classes in line to help make the establishment people retain control and get richer every second.
  • Huwyt_Nashi020 6y ago
    Just don't pay too much attention to their surnames or you might notice a pattern.
• Tenoke 6y ago
  The sad part is, despite so many bad takes, ideology pushing, and hatchet jobs The NYT overall still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content out there.
  • throwmtlsPhD 6y ago
    Can I suggest an alternative? 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.
    • Tenoke 6y ago
      I'm aware of Gell-Mann Amnesia and read from a variety of sources. 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.
      • outlace 6y ago
        thanks for referencing Gell-Mann Amnesia. Never heard of it before but after looking it up it is quite compelling.
        • Noumenon72 6y ago
          I've known about Gell-Mann amnesia for years but never experienced the feeling of 'this coverage of a thing I know is terrible', even in this piece. Maybe I don't know much about anything, or maybe I'm a conflict theorist, not a mistake theorist, so when I see them get things wrong like this, I assume it was on purpose.
    • tensor 6y ago
      It's pretty hard to find high quality alternatives. There is the wall street journal, maybe a few others, but not many. I personally read a few high quality news sources and science journals. 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.
• NhanH 6y ago
  This is shameful, and the second time this month NYT puts out such a shameful piece (the first time was the JetBrains/ Solarwinds article). I guess this should be enough to disregard everything NYT will write, and stop reading them. 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..
  • grapehut 6y ago
    Third time if you include the bizarre Ayaan Hirsi Ali hit piece too. I guess it's a product of actual-journalism not paying the bills.
    • throw_m239339 6y ago
      No, it's a product of the ideological drivel the NYT chose to embrace, identity politics. Not all news outlets are like that. 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.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • sfblah 6y ago
      What about spiking the Bret Stephens piece about the controversy over the science reporter who was fired? That was this month as well.
  • colinmhayes 6y ago
    The times is very pessimistic on tech, largely I believe because they're upset about being run over by google/facebook. It's definitely unfortunate, but the future of journalism is really not bright at all. No one is willing to pay for unbiased news, so you need to find a niche to attract people or churn out clickbait. The times has found their niche as technocrat skeptics.
• outoftheabyss 6y ago
  This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-trouble-with-the-new-york-times https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-... 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.
  • remarkEon 6y ago
    >It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. 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.
    • pm90 6y ago
      > 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. They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.
    • thisiszilff 6y ago
      https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-... is a great article about changes at NYTimes in the past few years.
• donthitme 6y ago
  Reading the NYT piece was mortifying.[1] They were my primary source of all things news and then published this strange hit that's just... off base. They were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive. How can a reliable news source write an article like that? Why throw your reputation down the toilet for what seems like a grudge? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
  • zarkov99 6y ago
    I suggest that perhaps you just have not had as much knowledge about previous hit pieces as you had about this one. The NYT did this to Jordan Peterson and no doubt others. They are completely morally bankrupt and do not deserve anyone's trust.
  • graeme 6y ago
    The Times has a long history. There was the WMD scandal where Judith Miller credulously wrote about the Bush administration’s lies on Iraq. 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-election-clintons-emails 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.
    • jumelles 6y ago
      > 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. I didn't realize James Comey worked at the Times.
    • yesenadam 6y ago
      > The Times has a long history. 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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent_(film)
• jancsika 6y ago
  I want to hijack this thread to lend further credence to my conspiracy theory about an ongoing nation-state attempt to create nameclashes for maximum disruption in the U.S.: The author quotes a NYT articles which quotes the author's piece on "Radicalizing the Romanceless." In it, the author writes this: > And I made the horrible mistake of asking this question out loud, and that was how I learned about social justice. Notice it's not "social justice warrior" or "SJW", the derisive terms for someone who speaks the lingo of widely-known, widely-respected collective grass-roots movements from history (or the present) for mere self-serving purposes: superficial fashion, personal advancement, petty vindictiveness, etc. No reasonable adult would read "SJW" and accidentally think the writer is talking about, say, Harriet Tubman. Instead, the term used is social justice-- the original term-- as a nickname for the newer derisive term. (The author mentions "social justice movements" elsewhere in the same article.) I still won't confuse the author for referring to Harriet Tubman. But what about the Civil Rights movement from the 60s? The 1984 Nicaraguan Election? BLM? Looks like we got ourselves an old-fashioned nameclashin'. Yeehaw! Given a) social media in its current form has a greater incentive for derisive terms like SJW than its non-derisive referent, b) the derisive term includes the referent so that the referent can become a shorthand for the derision, and c) Americans have a shit understanding of history, the derision slowly but surely overtakes public consciousness of the original meaning on social media. All that's needed is for a nation-state to find some nameclashin' efforts where the original term is included in the burgeoning derisive term... a little boost here and there... and voila, SJW will become a kind of "Bulverizing force" against the very idea of the efficacy of social movements from history. :) What's so ironic here is that the author is both unwittingly nameclashin' while at the same time complaining about another case of nameclashin': "nice guy." Let's go through the steps: 1. Original term "nice guy" to mean "actually decent fellow who acts in good faith" for a given generation of speakers. 2. New term "nice guy" to mean a bad faith actor who claims by fiat they are decent as a means to manipulate others. Used by a newer generation of speakers. 3. boost of definition 2 by some entity/entities 4. Unnecessary disruption among these two generations who would otherwise understand each other just fine. Nameclashin', baby! Look for it at any participating locations where upvotes can be bought. Edit: clarification
  • im3w1l 6y ago
• sjg007 6y ago
  The Charles Murray thing seems to be about his use of the word "sophisticated"... that was probably a bad choice. 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_assumptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Criticism_of_as...
  • random_ind_dude 6y ago
    You say you have found an ally in someone who is known for his controversial take on intelligence and heritability and who maintains that it is this inherited difference in intelligence that is responsible for social division within the US. You call his ideas on class and culture sophisticated. Then you say that you agree with him only on a certain specific claim about teaching truckers to code. (You = Scott Alexander) Who is being intellectually dishonest here? NYT or Scott Alexander?
  • morsch 6y ago
    Maybe he was being ironic, or not even ironic but using the word sophisticated in it's narrow meaning of complex. In the same way one might describe flat earthers as having a sophisticated world view. If you believe in a sophisticated explanation where a simple explanation exists, you're probably a believer of nonsense. Occam's razor, basically.
• alexpetralia 6y ago
  I think it's now worth considering The New York Times as a hostile actor, in the same category as Google and Facebook. (Of course this is a gross generalization, but the beneficent- or neutral-actor model no longer seems appropriate.)
  • jrochkind1 6y ago
    I am not sure I understand what you mean by these "models" of corporations. You believe that some corporations organize their actions to try to help... everyone? And others organize their actions to try to hurt... everyone? And you decide what category to put what corporation in?
    • alexpetralia 6y ago
      Of course it is reductive, but I do think some businesses pursue mostly non-zero sum games. Their gain does not come at my expense. 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.
• donohoe 6y ago
  As someone else said (and I agree): 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 https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1360793868816556033
  • seieste 6y ago
    If you believe that's the case, perhaps you could provide an example of Scott's writing that shouldn't be allowed, and what you think the consequences should be?
    • lazyasciiart 6y ago
      I don't think that comment implies he disagrees with free speech - my interpretation was that he's talking about how some of Scott's supporters seem to think the NYT piece shouldn't have been allowed.
  • remarkEon 6y ago
    I’m attempting to find a charitable way to engage with those tweets, since on first read they seem a) deliberately false about the content of SSC, b) invoke a sneering tone common amongst folks who subscribe to certain segments of “woke” progressivism (especially in tech), and c) attribute maximum malice of forethought by the targeted party to all of it. 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?
• themgt 6y ago
  Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts: 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. https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1360787817459253251 https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1360787817459253251
  • AmericanChopper 6y ago
    The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.
  • TrispusAttucks 6y ago
    Jealousy is a dreadful and bitter motivator.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • astrange 6y ago
    > 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. 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
    • wskinner 6y ago
      Can you point to any examples that you found particularly annoying?
• gnramires 6y ago
  For anyone interested, seems like a good overview: https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate... hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128579 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!).
  • lazyasciiart 6y ago
    Your taste may vary - I certainly haven't noticed "almost every piece of nonfiction" suffering since I first read his work.
  • smsm42 6y ago
    Didn't spoil the nonfiction in general for me, but definitely did make me ask "why more people on the left can't be like Scott?" I'm not a leftist myself, and this makes me disagree with Scott - who is definitely on the left - from time to time, but even when I disagree I feel like I learned something and maybe improved my knowledge, understanding and appreciation for opposing points. I wonder if more people were like that, maybe we could have proper political discussions instead of the catastrophic calamity we are witnessing now.
    • gnramires 6y ago
      Definitely, he is definitely not always right, and you should avoid taking any person's word as gospel. Scott's point isn't "I'm always correct/You should always agree with me", it is "We should be charitable and examine things without prejudice, and look into everything with as much depth and reason as possible". I've read a few of his articles where he was out of his depth (some related to math and statistics), but they have been generally well researched and open to criticism. I guess what I wrote about other non-fiction is how well he embraces not being right; it's almost a point of celebration -- to have learned something new (and approaching the truth), not a point of defense of ego. It's a radical[1] (at least in current culture) position of collaboration. Some of his posts remind me of the Polymath Project (see Tao, and others): the point is to get to the truth, together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project 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-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
• john_moscow 6y ago
  I am wondering, what are the legal perspectives of suing NYT for libel at this point. If Scott started a crowdsourcing campaign to fund legal defense, I would gladly throw in a couple of grand. Given the support Scott received when the situation with NYT's plans got public in the first place, this could set a very interesting precedent.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • andrewfong 6y ago
    Given that his explicitly stated goal is to move on from this, probably a bad idea. Right or wrong, a lawsuit would invite the Streisand effect. 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.
    • john_moscow 6y ago
      >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. 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.
• stefan_ 6y ago
  The most hilarious part of the New York Times decline was the "public editor". Every public editor piece was carefully selected and prepared to admit the least amount of negligence possible, to frame even blatant lies in a mere "he said, she said" or a confusion of the moment. 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.
• jhpriestley 6y ago
  For reference of the many people who apparently have no clue, this is an example of a "hatchet job": https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/10/the-fanatic-fraudulent-mother-teresa.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/10/the-fanatic-frau...
• lenkite 6y ago
  Ignore the politics, foreign affairs and opinion sections of the NYT. They basically peddle outright lies and exaggerations with ridiculous levels of bias. 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.
• unityByFreedom 6y ago
  I didn't perceive the NYT article as negative at all. As for naming him, that's their choice as journalists, and a risk he took with recording his thoughts online just as all of us do. 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.
  • afiori 6y ago
    It Is also impossible not to get DDoS on the internet, you still would want people not to DDoS you.
    • unityByFreedom 6y ago
      You've moved the goalposts. DDoS is against the law. Connecting an anonymous account to a name after confirming it is them is not. It may be libelous if the connection is not factual, but if it is a fact then that's legal to print.
      • afiori 6y ago
        This is also moving the goalpost, just because something is legal (and rightly so in this case) does not mean it is moral. My point is that doing risky activities does not mean you cannot complain when things go wrong; you can both take responsability for your decision to partecipate in that risk and criticise the system for exposing partecipants to excessive risk. In this case the criticism wasn't "the internet police should stop bad actors, but (hyperbole warning) "the most respected newspaper in the US should have higher standards than internet trolls"
        • afiori 6y ago
          For context this is Scott's answer to this argument: [from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive] > Some of the savvy people giving me advice suggested I fight back against this. [...] Say why it was necessary for my career to publish those papers under my real name. > Why didn't I do this? Partly because it wasn't true. I don't think I had particularly strong arguments on any of these points. [...] > But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing. > No! There's no dignified way to answer any of these questions except "fuck you". Just don't kick me in the balls! It isn't rocket science! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
• chmod775 6y ago
  The NYT article[1] can hardly be called a hit piece at all, considering how little 'dirt' it actually contains. 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. [1]: https://archive.is/b1tyQ https://archive.is/b1tyQ
  • notmarkus 6y ago
    Thanks for including this link. I read the response before I read the NYT article. And while it was a pretty uninteresting article, the tactics used to obfuscate who holds what beliefs are laid bare. It's illuminating to see.
  • linspace 6y ago
    Thank you for the link to the NYT article. I completely agree with your reading. 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.
    • konjin 6y ago
      Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again: >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-user-trump-tweet/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
• mgamache 6y ago
  Hypotheses: 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.
  • dohnuts1919 6y ago
    Much of this behavior becomes a lot easier to understand when you realise that "wokeism" is a religion. I don't mean that ironically. John McWhorter is currently serialising a book on this topic on his own Substack, and he's far from the only person to make the observation.
    • deathlight 6y ago
      Serendipitously relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...
• sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Several months ago, people were saying that the Times was probably going to write a sympathetic piece. But they wrote a hitpiece. So, one wonders: Did the NYT write a hitpiece because of Scott's reaction -- deleting his blog, calling on his readers to send angry emails to NYT, etc -- or was it going to be a hitpiece from the beginning? 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.
  • bondarchuk 6y ago
    Well here is an intelligent guy who writes long-form pieces that are fairly influential within a sector of society that is small, but also relatively powerful. But he's not aligned to the NYT ideological agenda. Of course it was gonna be a hit piece, no question about it IMHO.
• comex 6y ago
  On point 1: > 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.
• nexthash 6y ago
  Wow, the NYT's actions on this one really made my blood boil. I don't even know how to process this... they typically put out reasonably high quality journalism that I read and enjoy on a regular basis. And then... this. They completely went beserk, like little children, with their heads firmly up their rears despite everything everyone begging them to keep Scott Alexander anonymous to preserve his profession and blog. 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?
  • notmarkus 6y ago
    Consider that you know a lot about this topic and are disgusted by their handing of it. Consider that this might not be an outlier, and you may not be outraged by their handling of other topics simply because you know a bit less about them. 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.
    • Amezarak 6y ago
      Yeah, the NYT was never perfect, but in the past few years it has declined sharply. There are still few other organizations as credible, but that's more of an indictment of the news media than it is praise of the New York Times. 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.
• hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Seriously, WTF is going on with NYT. I think something has seriously gone off the deep end with their newsroom, but I feel like it must be so culturally ingrained in their newsroom now that even questioning some basic assumptions will get one vilified as a racist or sexist. 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.html 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-announces-writing-style-changes-racial-ethnic-identifiers/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post...
  • ALittleLight 6y ago
    It seems very and crudely racist to assume all black people have a shared culture, in the same way assuming two black people must be related, would be.
    • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      It’s just obviously untrue too.
    • dohnuts1919 6y ago
      I'm stealing this point from Twitter, but Africa is the most diverse continent on Earth - culturally, linguistically, even genetically. There are 250 ethnic groups within Nigeria alone, most of which have little in the way of shared language or culture, and had even less before colonists drew a circle around them and insisted they were a single nation. How on Earth does it make sense to say that all black people have a shared culture, especially if you simultaneously insist that white people don't?
• throwaway81523 6y ago
  Scott Aaronson also has an analysis of the NYT piece: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310
• speedgoose 6y ago
  I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police". Even Macron felt the need to tell them they fucked up.
  • HideousKojima 6y ago
    "Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast" 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.
  • jpxw 6y ago
    It wasn’t just the NYT calling it a “knife attack” as a euphemism. I remember seeing many media outlets doing that
  • johncena33 6y ago
    > I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police". 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.
  • dandare 6y ago
    I am shocked. Why am I shocked? I shouldn't be, but I am. I personally use the reporting on Julian Assange as a litmus paper test on media.
• blntechie 6y ago
  Not a super fan of NYT or anything but I’m a subscriber. That NYT article didn’t sound like a hit piece or too negative as portrayed at all. 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.
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  The motivations of the hit piece seem extremely petty to me - they wanted to do an article about how he was an early proponent of mask wearing which I guess everyone agrees now is a good thing (is it like being prematurely anti-fascist or something) and they wanted to use his real name and he didn't want that, instead of saying ok, they said we'll do it anyway, he made it difficult for them to do that, later he starts blogging again under his real name and they do a hit piece to get even?
  • rjbwork 6y ago
    That does seem to be an accurate summary of the situation. The NYT is nothing but a rag these days. I literally value BuzzfeedNews and Vice above the NYT's "journalism", which is honestly just sad. I grew up reading NYT from the time I was maybe 8 or 9. It's pathetic how far they've fallen.
• etc-hosts 6y ago
  I can't read the sapinker tweet since he blocks anyone who sends him that photo of him with Jeffrey Epstein.
  • dohnuts1919 6y ago
    It's worth noting that this Pinker-Epstein connection is about as meaningful as the anti-Scott NYT article's own guilt-by-assocation attempts. Here's Pinker's statement on the matter: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2019/07/12/tarring-steve-pinker-and-others-with-jeffrey-epstein/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2019/07/12/tarring-steve-pink...
    • optimalsolver 6y ago
      So if I'm understanding correctly, Dershowitz asked Pinker for a linguistic opinion vis a vis laws against sex with underage girls, and Pinker wasn't the least bit curious over what this was all about?
• exogeny 6y ago
  I must be missing something. 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.
  • chillacy 6y ago
    > literally calls a study that links IQ and race "sophisticated" 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].
• dexter89_kp3 6y ago
  I would like to thank NYT for introducing me to Scott and his wonderful blog.
• samdung 6y ago
  This is less about 'actual news' and more about the ongoing war between traditional media (like New York Times) and new age media (like Sub Stack).
• eatplayrove 6y ago
  I have never read the blog, or have any positive or negative association with it, but after all the attention this story has garnered, I just read both the NYT article and Mr. Siskind's response. 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.
  • ALittleLight 6y ago
    A while back I mentioned to my mother that I had been to a "reddit meet up" and my mother, predictably, had never heard of reddit. Later, reddit made the news, I forget exactly what for, but in was the category of harboring child pornographers, racists, or nude celebrity photos. What I did remember is hoping my mother didn't see this news article and conclude that I was out meeting with racist pedophiles. 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.
• camdenlock 6y ago
  It’s almost unbelievable how far the NYT has fallen, how ideologically corrupt it has become. I can only hope that more and more people become aware of their corruption, and stop relying on them as a trustworthy source of reporting. Articles like this one are a step in the right direction, revealing the rot. I really admire the author’s bravery and honesty despite all that has happened to him.
• blueblisters 6y ago
  I have rarely seen Slate Star Codex articles being discussed heavily on HN until recently. Find it hard to believe that it is a silicon valley subculture if it's not being discussed here.
• dohnuts1919 6y ago
  > 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 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.
  • MrMan 6y ago
    The wizard of Oz humorous reference is from https://ew.com/article/2012/10/26/wizard-of-oz-movie-description/ https://ew.com/article/2012/10/26/wizard-of-oz-movie-descrip... I think many people are aware of it, or were in 2012.
  • optimalsolver 6y ago
    Scott didn't come up with that joke.
  • inglor_cz 6y ago
    I wonder whether the intended endpoint of this tactics is widespread deplatforming - e.g. support for vaporizing anyone who can be guilted-by-association in the same way that Scott Alexander is in this article. If Scott's reputation is groomed to be cancelable, anyone's is.
    • yanderekko 6y ago
      >I wonder whether the intended endpoint of this tactics is widespread deplatforming Isn't this obviously the case? The "Grey Tribe" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ 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.
• Rainymood 6y ago
  What a wild ride. Made me lose a lot of respect for the NYT and gained much respect for Scott for handling it like this.
• Quanttek 6y ago
  > I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them. ... Predictably, the NYT piece came out soon after, and predictably, it was very negative 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.
• raspasov 6y ago
  Very often when I read a NYT article, I get a paranoid Neo-marxist feeling that NYT doesn’t really care for equality of opportunity, minority rights, women’s rights or any particular oppressed group. They just hate the successful and the rich.
  • jasonvorhe 6y ago
    Mark Thompson, CEO of NYT has an estimated net worth of about 10-30 million USD according to a few sites on the Internet. That's not "did a unicorn IPO"-rich but it certainly doesn't align with "NYT hates the rich".
    • raspasov 6y ago
      Oh, they for sure monetize their Neo-Marxist activism decently well. I doubt Stalin was eating stale white bread three times a day either.
• drtillberg 6y ago
  Maybe the NYT is jealous that Scott is so obviously a better and more thoughtful writer?
• csbartus 6y ago
  Time to quit mainstream media. All outlets have an agenda. I quit NYT since they've predicted an 80-20% win for Hillary, and the day after the results I've read their main column. They didn't take any responsibility at all.
• systemvoltage 6y ago
  Why do we have so much drama? Can we all just get along and be kind to each other?
• say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  The New York Times is no longer a thought leader in society who helps people consider important ideas. Speech and thought are both heavily regulated there. I refused to believe that it was committing acts of "fake news" for all these years, but now realize that it is a hollowed out institution advancing identity politics at the cost of unbiased truth.
• blunte 6y ago
  I would file a lawsuit (I'm sure there are more than one legal claim that can be brought against NYT in this situation), and the "settlement" should be a public retraction and apology from NYT (and the author and chain of editors) plus significant financial damage to attempt to make up for the job and professional cost to the claimant.
• Traster 6y ago
  So I may have come at this backwards- I read Scott's rebuttal and then read the NYT peice. No offence to Scott but I think he's got this all wrong. The NYT piece isn't about Scott, it's just a writing gimmick. The article is about the self-styled rationalists, Scott is just an entry point to open the discussion around these group of people. It's not trying to tie Scott to Thiel, it's describing the pantheon of people who move in this world, and it is a world, these people don't all agree on one thing, although they do fall into a sort of groupthink on some topics. 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.
  • xyzzy123 6y ago
    I think you have the right lens. 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.
• dandare 6y ago
  What I find noteworthy about this story is how contentious and weaponized have gender and race become. Out of the four negative claims, one accused Scott of racism and two accused him of of some variant of misogyny. The fourth associated him with some other form of non-pure thinking. 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.
  • Aqua 6y ago
    The whole story background story is extremely alarming. NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered. This whole situation gives even more credence to the idea that decentralisation is the only way forward for mankind if we intend to preserve the liberties our ancestors enjoyed for the past 300 years.
    • CPLX 6y ago
      Can you articulate a coherent framework for how and why an American news publication should be prohibited from revealing legally obtained true information about the leader of a large, popular, or otherwise noteworthy community?
      • bnj 6y ago
        I haven’t thought up a framework, but one thing I’m wondering is why the identity of the person alone is newsworthy. I’m probably missing part of the background here, I’m new to the controversy. Did some kind of mystery arise around the true identity of the author? Your comment implies that NYT obtained the true identity of the author through legal means — how exactly did they do that? I don’t think finding out the identity of someone who wishes to remain anonymous is, in itself, sufficiently newsworthy to overcome the privacy interests of the individual. I also wonder if this story has a more interesting angle buried in it about the complexities of identity in the internet age: the author of the blog achieved notoriety, but in some ways that character is distinct from the physical person living their life and doing their job. The NYT wanted to publish a link between those two personas over their objection. Why should they be able to if the story can be written in a way that doesn’t? Consider someone like... Satoshi, of bitcoin. The character has achieved this powerful notoriety and managed to remain anonymous. Do people want to know which person on the planet created that persona? Sure; do they need to know, is the identity alone newsworthy without some reason to need to publish it? Honestly I tend to say no. That’s just... gossip, isn’t it? How is knowing a different name to associate with the character going to enrich and inform me in any way? Examples where I think revealing the identity might be of substance: - suppose someone committed crimes to keep their identity secret - suppose government officials intervened to help them remain anonymous - suppose the person turns out to BE a powerful government official [edit: to add last example]
• LeanderK 6y ago
  I don't understand why the NYT would do something like this. I will continue to read the NYT but with a different feeling, it eroded my trust. More missteps and I will loose my trust. This is just unacceptable, especially in the times of fake news. 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-star-codex-and-silicon-valleys-war-against-the-media https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-st...
  • Traster 6y ago
    >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. 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.
    • mtlynch 6y ago
      >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. 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.
    • LeanderK 6y ago
• random5634 6y ago
  I went from avid reader of the times a decade ago to cancelled subscription. Any recommendations for other sources?
  • random5634 6y ago
    OK, the writer here mentions substack. May be worth signing up for this author or others with NY Times subscription money. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ https://astralcodexten.substack.com/
• jeffrallen 6y ago
  The grey lady turns out to be a vengeful bitch. Power corrupts. Media centralisation is not a good plan for a free society.
• jerome-jh 6y ago
  Newspapers are in a weak position today: basically they are under perfusion of oligarchs and ads. So when they attack, they do so on: 1/ what is clearly identified as the enemy and 2/ weaker entities after labeling them as enemies. It is important to note neither provide ad incomes.
• leephillips 6y ago
  I used to read Alexander's essays now and then. I tried to read this one, but the site complained that I had javascript turned off (why do I need that to read an article?) and, even with scripting turned off, used a lot of CPU while the tab was open. I get the impression that substack is doing something shady, and I think I’ll avoid them in the future.
• rufusroflpunch 6y ago
  > This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper. I would like to know what newspapers he is reading that makes this seem brazen or even out of the ordinary.
• hahahahe 6y ago
  Here’s my take on NYT: they’re desperately trying to stay relevant in modern era where news happens real-time on social media. They’re an institution and have an incredible reach in steering narratives still but that’s fading fast.
• rainworld 6y ago
  Header picture (only visible on the home page) is Walter Duranty, who got a Pulitzer for lying about the Soviet famine in the New York Times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
• hshshs2 6y ago
  I don’t have a stake in either side here but there are a lot of racist comments in this guy’s blog to the point that the lack of moderation makes me wonder if he supports them. Honestly if I had “fans” like this I’d reconsider the impact of my blogging entirely and maybe consider taking up a hobby that doesn’t serve as a racist lightning rod.
• red_admiral 6y ago
  The clever playground bully doesn't say "let's beat up Scott", at least not where teachers can hear - he knows he can say something like "Scott annoyed me a bit yesterday" and his followers/admirers will know that beating up Scott might just earn them popularity points. 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.
  • qz_ 6y ago
    You could make the same point about this article.
    • red_admiral 6y ago
      I think it's very unlikely that a SSC reader will commit any kind of crime against a NYT reporter or their friends and families - they're much more the kind of people [in favour of niceness, community and civilisation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...) 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!"
    • ulucs 6y ago
      Yeah, the paper which lead to war in Iraq vs some blogger with at most 10,000 reach. That's clearly a fair comparison
    • johncena33 6y ago
      The infamous internet argument that is "calling out negative things is a negative itself". "You just have to go meta, and you will see it's all the same." "Everything is relative/subjective" 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.
• yowlingcat 6y ago
  Folks have covered a lot of great territory in the comment section, so I guess I'll just spit out my question about the elephant in the room: who makes up the "shadowy" cabal of NYT editors and execs who pushed this piece? It does seem like for all intents and purposes they wanted to make an example. And of course, the journalist who had to put his name on the piece is not necessarily the one who drove the whole gambit. 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.
• idownvoted 6y ago
  NYT is a rag. The power play they‘d attempted on Scott was for ideological reasons, and shows what culture this organisation has. And what kind of people seek to be part of this.
• grumple 6y ago
  There's a saying (of unconfirmed origin), but I'll use Jay-Z's version: 'A wise man told me don't argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.' 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.
• fortran77 6y ago
  It's astounding that merely noting that Charles Murray said something is enough to have the NY Times paint you as a racist.
• wilsocr88 6y ago
  The Times and many other supposed gold-standard papers have shown themselves to be unforgivably biased and politically compromised over and over and over. It's a sad thing that the entire communications apparatus of the West seems to be gaslighting the population all the time, and they're all united around the same few permitted/canonized political positions.
• asdfrmrf 6y ago
  I am surprised just about no one on this thread finds his effort to hide his identity online flimsy. If you are a psychiatrist with a popular blog with hot wire topic discussions and cares a lot about patient relationships, shouldn't you be taking a lot more precautions in concealing your identity than just dropping your last name? I mean, come on.
  • will4274 6y ago
    I dunno. I mean, it's a little flimsy. But he said he started the blog in college - I know people who wrote online by removing their last name in college. And I doubt his patients know his middle name or spend a lot of time searching for his blog, when it doesn't appear in the NYT. I think if a single patient goes out of their way to research you, you stop seeing them and refer them to another doctor, but if half your patients read about you in the NYT, you have a real problem. Do you find it implausible or merely flimsy? I certainly don't find it implausible.
• dwighttk 6y ago
  Am I having deja vu? Didn’t this happen like 6 months or so ago? I didn’t keep reading because I was convinced I read this before.
• phtrivier 6y ago
  Assuming you want to pause a NYT subscription, what's a good general alternative info source about the US (for a European reader ?)
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  NYT is not a friend of anyone who does not speak exclusively through them. Their tech columns are showcases of irrelevance and will probably get dumped sooner or later
• 4cao 6y ago
  I also think the following take is interesting, and hasn't been mentioned in any of the comments so far (to the extent that I've been able to keep up with them): https://www.themoneyillusion.com/understanding-middlebrow/ 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.”
• rootsudo 6y ago
  My opinion of the NYT has dwindled in the past year. WSJ has been much more accurate and moderate.
• aksss 6y ago
  Intentional political anxiety - a tactic of the Cultural Revolution that was discussed on the excellent In Our Time podcast from the BBC this last week. Never knowing exactly where the next offense may come from, intentionally keeping the population on edge about committing a politically incorrect infraction that will result in consequences to you or your family. Really resonates with the trajectory of institutional rhetoric in the US these days.
• adolph 6y ago
  Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power. It is about bringing important people to heel, on behalf of the public. https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trump-power.php https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trum... ht: https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1361067590135726093?s=20 https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1361067590135726093...
• ultra_nick 6y ago
  Why is a large American newspaper bullying some random blogger?