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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

It didn't strike me as ugly as all.

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

It seems to me that simplifying the entire Scott Aaronson affair was necessary, since it was just a brief part of this article. I thought their choice of simplification was reasonable and in good faith, but of course others might disagree (and unfortunately, whether we agree or disagree is likely to be effected by our overall level of agreement with the article).

You can simplify, and then you can say Scott wrote an angry "screed" that misrepresents 99% of feminists and ignores the plight of vulnerable women in its bourgeois defense of the privileged, nerdy intellectual class. (The article doesn't actually say "bourgeois", but the dogwhistles are crystal-clear.)

I confess that any description of anything that uses the word "screed" will tend to seem to me to be in bad faith. Largely because every time I've dug into the origins of such a description, it has indeed been in bad faith.

There's simplifying, and then there's misrepresenting. Simplifying it would be calling it "crippling anxiety exacerbated by uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature."

The article isn’t about Scott Aaronsen.

Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird.

“Childhood exposure to radical literature”?

“radical literature” almost sound like a disease.

Just because he wasn't the subject doesn't mean it's okay to make materially false statements about him...

>Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird.

Well, I'm not qualified to write for the New Yorker, but surely they could have written a sentence that wasn't false.

Maybe you could read a more detailed account on The Atlantic, and decide for yourself how it could be summarized. (Seriously, the "dating market," does not come up even once.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blo...

That's a great article!

FYI it mentions Andrea Dworkin though -- not Judith Butler, who you mentioned earlier. Not an expert but think they're fairly different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin

I dunno, just seems like emotions are running high. To be fair, mine included. Sigh ...

I think the association with Butler came from somewhere else* . The Dworkin reference was a positive one in Aaronson's original post. If you're really interested in digging through all the details, the original post by Aaronson that sparked the whole thing was called "comment 171." You may come away from it with different ideas than I, but you'll definitely come away from it with different ideas than the New Yorker. ;)

* I admit that the "somewhere else" could have been my imagination.

I think we have to make a variety of assumptions to draw any conclusions about what the author of the New Yorker article intended. There’s too little info in the article to go on.

It does strike me as ugly because there's just one "off" piece after the other.

The thing about hiding posts from reporters while they know there's an ebook.

Saying the NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning.

Arguing that "de-anonymizing" Scott shouldn't be a problem because it was easy for them to do.

Arguing that Scott should've expected unruly people to contact the NYT while drawing a complete blank that that's exactly what Scott would've been facing, except with possible physical violence rather than angry e-mails...

There's more but I'm lazy. My "wat?s per minute" were significantly above average. It went far enough for me to call it "ugly."

> NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning.

No need to generalize from the state of the media as an industry; NYT is a public company so their balance sheet is public. Here's their latest 10-Q, doesn't look like drowning to me.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169...

I said I was lazy, didn't I? :)

Feel free to ignore that item.

…

But actually… that sheet also says that $51 million of their revenue is from digital advertising, down from $55.5 million a year ago. It's 11.5% of their total revenue, down from 12.7%. Not a huge problem but… it's still a business consideration.

And let's not forget zest and sensationalism can sell subscriptions and print media too. (Publishing the full name would at least have counted as "zest" IMHO, if not full-on sensationalism.)

Ad revenue is down but subscriptions and total revenue are up -- so doesn't that go counter to the "did it for clicks" narrative? My (admittedly simple) model of the media industry is that clickbait drives ad revenue, quality journalism drives subscriptions.

I totally agree your logic makes sense too. My model was going along the lines of, "hey, our digital ads are down a few million" -> manager telling the assembled team "hey let's try and get the ad revenue back up, all please set the dial just a little bit higher!"

Not even suggesting malice there, just my imagination :)

[Ed. add:]

It's also that I don't even think Metz was necessarily aware the name would be such a big deal. It's very much normal practice to name people, and even if they saw that Scott was privacy conscious it might not have registered properly and just seemed like a "little bit of extra zest." However, IMHO they just should have backed off after it became apparent to them.

But then they still get a factor of 8.8 more revenue from digital advertising than digital subscriptions.

edit: Compare digital advertising to digital subscriptions, not overall subscriptions

Are we looking at the same numbers? See page 3, subscription revenue is ~2.7x ad revenue.

Oops, I see what I did. I was comparing digital subscription revenue to overall ad revenue. Comparing digital subscription revenue to digital ad revenue is "only" a factor of 8.8 rather than 18 (because just over half the ad revenue is print).

Note that newspapers make little if any profit from print subscriptions in themselves, because they're little better than breakeven with the cost of printing and delivery. The real profit has always come from the advertising. Digital subscriptions are something new in that they're actually making money from subscription revenues instead of just using them to cover unit costs, but they're currently still tiny.

> quality journalism drives subscriptions.

A more effective paywall drives subscriptions. Once you have a paywall, subscriptions are as much about clicks as ads.

I don't have a subscription myself, but I have considered paying for one because acquaintances with a low bar for quality occasionally want to share and discuss something behind the paywall and I can't rely on all of them to know how to print a pdf and share that with me.

As subscribers witness the quality decline, they'll cancel their subscriptions.

The NY Times today is not the NY Times of A.M. Rosenthal.

> But actually… that sheet also says that $51 million of their revenue is from digital advertising, down from $55.5 million a year ago. It's 11.5% of their total revenue, down from 12.7%. Not a huge problem but… it's still a business consideration.

But it's a business consideration that exactly supports the claim that NYT isn't about clicks and, in fact, that dependence on click-driven ad revenue is a declining focus of NYT and similar media outlets.

You can’t make that conclusion from the evidence presented.

The fact that ad revenue is declining doesn’t tell us that they intentionally moved focus away from clicks.

As another matter, all those subscriptions grant access to their website content. More clicks on their site probably lead to more new subscriptions, and better retention of existing subscribers. To the extent that clicks lead to subscriptions, they are undoubtably all about the clicks.

That isn't a refutation - the NYT is doing well whilst most of the news industry is drowning.

In fact there has even been an article in the New York Times arguing that the New York Times financial strength and power may be bad for news:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/media/ben-smith-...

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

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

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

I really disagree. I thought it was a balanced take, for the most part, and represented the SSC extended community in a way that did much better than naively misunderstanding it, and much better than the community understands _itself_.

I think that a lot of commenters on here have the exact self-righteous tone that this article criticizes (well, discusses with a bit of an air of judgment, but let's just agree that it's criticism): to these commenters, it is inconceivable that the NYT's behavior could be acceptable and not... what, profit-motivated, desperate for clicks, a salvo in a media war? But that's mostly absurd. Not impossible, per se, but unfounded.

This is one of those things where the Internet At Large seems to think that everyone has to agree on who's right here (it's Scott and friends?), and anyone who disagrees is Evil, and it's just a matter of figuring out _how_ they Are Evil. But in reality people can actually coexist, and be allowed to coexist, with _different_ opinions of what is right or reasonable, and the NYT / persons who are removed from the SSC/Silicon Valley/HN bubble have very different opinions there.

The commenters here act like it is not okay for these differences of opinion to continue to exist, and so they must be crushed. It really, really doesn't look great to the community that when commenters encounter this difference of opinion, they... launch into uninhibited tirades against it at every opportunity. To an external observer, the commenters seem ridiculously worked up, and this article (among other takes) seems very mature and charitable in contrast.

It's "balanced" in so far as some parts are charitable, sure, but then it's also peppered with insinuations:

> This plea conformed with the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement.

I just can't see that being written in good faith.

Why not? imo it's not an implausible take, even if you don't agree with it.

Funnily enough, the slatestarcodex thread on this article agrees with you. I found this one comment extremely illustrative of the dynamics in this current thread:

>Overall, I’m pretty impressed by this article. It’s the sort of thing I could see myself aspiring to write. It spends ample time presenting SSC in its own terms, touches on enough of the major touchstones and obscurities of the blog to indicate a serious examination of it, and is precise and restricted in its criticisms. I appreciated in particular the attention it paid to the specific quirks of rationalist subculture rather than trying to lump it in as part of something it isn’t, and the way it (accurately) called out the people who were looking more for a war with the media and were willing rovers use Scott as a convenient casus belli.[0]

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slat...

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