Journalists may not literally think they're going to write a hit piece, and they may try their best to be unbiased, but that does not make them fully unbiased,

Journalists may not literally think they're going to write a hit piece, and they may try their best to be unbiased, but that does not make them fully unbiased, either. And it's hard to think there's not some bias going on in the "Silicon Valley's Safe Space" article. The article took 14 pages to say three things: • the NY Times wanted to reveal Scott's full name, and Scott took down SSC because of it • a lot of Silicon Valley are fans of SSC • Scott knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who is a racist Over the course of 14 pages are some very conspicuous omissions: • any mention of why Scott wanted his full name to be private (or that he's a psychiatrist at all; the article uses "Mr. Alexander" rather than the usual "Dr. Alexander" other articles on SSC have used) • more than a single sentence about what SSC the blog is actually about [1] • that SSC (and other rationalists) was warning about a COVID pandemic before everyone else, and had good advice on what to do about it before everyone else (which the author explicitly told sources that the article was to be about that) There are a lot of other omissions I can believe are nonmalicious. I could even believe it was all in good faith if for some reason Metz had just never interviewed anyone who knew anything about SSC. But he spent hours interviewing Scott Aaronson [2] and many other people who loved and hated the blog, and Alexander spent days explaining why he wanted his name to be private. And those three omissions are difficult to explain. If the article had maintained a veneer of neutrality by covering both sides to an extent and just focused on the negative side a lot more, I could believe that maybe it's just me. But the article conspicuously doesn't cover anything very much at all (the SSC haters I know also noticed a lack of any coverage of specific incidents people usually hate rationalists for). Metz interviewed a lot of lovers and a lot of haters and didn't write about any of it except the vague connections. It's difficult to believe _nothing_ weird was going on. [1] https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting [2] https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310