Silicon Valley’s Safe Space
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But no, kudos to them, they found a third way: Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association, and carefully ignore anything inconvenient.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
It feels weird even writing this argument down. If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
What a depressing waste of everyone's time.
The whole guilt-by-association thing that's going on these days is one of the most worrying cancelation techniques, because it can be done even through a very remote link. I like person A, who likes person B, who likes person C, who happens to also be liked by White Supremacists. therefore I am a White Supremacist (and person A, B, and C, too). How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?
The thing called cancel culture isn't rooted in a proud intellectual tradition, because intellectualism relies on knowing what the opposition's argument is to dismiss it (ie, the opposite of cancelling). It is group-forming action of identifying and attacking an enemy.
Although groups sometimes superficially seem to be using evidence, it is rarely important. The most secure kind of tribe is one that rallies around ideas that make no sense - because then if someone espouses the idea that proves they are in the tribe. If the idea makes sense then people who agree might have just arrived at it on their own.
Extreme guilt-by-association is a great cultural marker, because the only way that attitude makes sense is if the espouses is an adherent to cancel-culture ideas and is signalling support of the group. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. It isn't really being important in the mobs decision making, the only important thing is identifying an enemy and it doesn't matter how.
^ I know, I know, 6 is supposed to be an average.
There is no limit really. If you're targeted for cancellation, they'll dig up and use anything as evidence. Thankfully people seem to be wising up to these tactics and they're losing power as a result.
Ah yes, the old Conservative trope: eventually they'll go too far, and then you'll see.
How's that working out? Conservatives have lost on every issue since I was born.
But yeah, don't fight back. Power-hungry people will "defeat themselves"…eventually. Trust me.
Trust the plan.
I was friends with a guy who was really into InfoWars in the early 2000s. I'm no longer in contact with him for unrelated reasons but I have to think that keeping friends who weren't in that world helps people from falling deeper into it.
Isolating people from good ideas doesn't seem like a great way to change minds.
If your best friend growing up is now a white supremacist, and for various reasons you want to keep being friends with them - maybe you're trying to talk them out of it, maybe you know they've got some deep personal trauma that you can help with and you want to be compassionate about that, whatever - I think there's a pretty good argument that that's your business. (To be clear, I think there's also a pretty good argument that you should ensure you're not effectively making them think that you support their positions or actions, though, but that's beside the immediate point.) There's good reasons to choose to be friends with them and that's your judgment.
If you link to their white supremacist writings, though, you're giving a platform and publicity to white supremacist writings. You're not amplifying or supporting them as a person: you're amplifying the messages they're communicating. And so the moral weight of that is in fact on you.
I think the article does do a pretty good job of talking mostly about views and not people, though it is obviously easiest to refer to views by the people who espouse them (especially in the case of personal blogs, which is what most of these are). The article is not trying to say that it's newsworthy that Sam Altman is best buddies with Elon Musk who married to Grimes who hangs out on a discord with Scott Alexander. The article is not trying to say that the NYT of the future will create simulations of Grimes just to cancel her.
The article is trying to say that, for instance, it's newsworthy that OpenAI is heavily influenced by Rationalist rhetoric about the urgency of building a friendly AI that implements your worldview, and that the worldview of this Rationalist community happens to be a worldview that gets an uncomfortable amount of support from white supremacists (and not just in the "We like this" sense, in the "This argument supports our argument" sense).
It's not clear whether SSC is being denounced for associating with cross-burners, or just with those who believe merit exists. In elite discourse, both of those positions are now white supremacy.
The sheer number of hoops you had to jump through to be a NYT apologist is just mind numbing. No, OpenAI isn't influenced by Grimes' chat messages on discord to mind-control us.
no one can be safe from the mob if mob behavior is a normalized practice of the society. It doesn't matter that a given mob at a specific moment in time is directed in the "good" direction. Mob is just a tool, it doesn't have any way to distinguish "bad" from "good" (by it is nature the mob forms when its members let go their own moral independence for the sake of unity, mutual validation and resulting safety and drunk high feeling), and thus it can be turned in any direction by the tool handler.
What people want from you when they ask you to openly condemn something is to make a broad societal change that normalizes that condemnation.
There’s nothing wrong with not doing it. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that some issue isn’t worth getting involved with, or you don’t think an issue is a big enough problem, or you don’t like how activists are going about it. Plenty of valid reasons but the crucial thing that you have to recognize that you’re making a choice, own it, and realize that it might have consequences.
1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Not to say I think Biden should get flack for that. But the guilt by association thing is an especially easy kudgel to wield in an uneven way.
So no, it's not only republicans and Trump that get "cancelled".
Edit: to clarify, by fringe stuff, I mean that some believe that the election was stolen from Trump. I don't and have convinced others that it was not, but I guess I can't do that anymore.
* The "one drop of African blood" theory of the Democrats' Old South * "Jewish heritage", pretty much anywhere * "Class history" in the Marxist Socialist circles * "Intellectualism" in Khmer Rouge Cambodia
This is just another instance, from the same people who would have belonged to any one of these or similar groups. They all come from the same root intellectual history.
> “It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints.
Yes, David just said that, thanks for the repetition. Where were the editors on this?
I conjecture that they just felt like they had to publish something after all this time and they went with what they had.
It’s also strange that it doesn’t link to the NYT magazine article on rationalist retreats from a few years ago, nor the New Yorker article about this dispute, nor the New Yorker article about HN, all of which fill in the picture.
Maybe the good editors at the NYT are too busy getting fired.
Recently a NYT freelance editor Lauren Wolfe, who mostly worked on the "live updates" team, was fired, but this firing caused some controversy due to the timing of some tweets and who knows what else. It's not completley clear why she was fired, as the NYT responded to requests for comment by the WaPo by saying [1]: "There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter. For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved we don’t plan to comment further. (To clarify something that has been incorrectly reported, Ms. Wolfe was not a full-time employee, nor did she have a contract.)"
Quite a few leftists initially blamed the NYT for caving to conservative pressure, apparently by making the claim there was a relation between the tweets she made and her firing, which she confirmed in another WaPo interview [3] by saying "...that an editor at the paper contacted her after she published the “chills” tweet. The Times couldn’t be associated with such a tweet, said the manager, and that her gig with the paper would be ending."
Some leftists also seemed to blame Glenn Greenwald for his involvement in the matter; a single tweet in response to hers that he later called "light mockery"[2]. Glenn Greenwald, previously strongly supported by the left and many others, has recently been victim to a series of character assassination attempts due to his unconformity to the mainstream leftists viewpoints, so it rather seems the twitter left mob just used him as a lightening rod without having all the facts in this case.
The tweets in question?
LW: "The pettiness of the Trump admin not sending a military plane to bring him to D.C. as is tradition is mortifying. Childish
LW: “Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills”
GG: "If you're in the national press and will be on TV at any point today and being to feel the need to weep joyously, just hold it in until you find a private place. Nobody is expecting any adversarial coverage over the next 4 years, but it's just a matter of personal dignity."
2. https://youtu.be/uL-e6XfWppo?t=293
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/25/lauren-wo...
I want to read that, but Google failed me. Do you have a link or a clue to help me find a link?
And then, after a little more thought, you'd realize SSC's blog roll entry would direct the reader to the more recent neoreactionary stuff, not the "fascinating left-leaning stuff."
It's definitely a bad look to have present-day Nick Land on your blogroll. If you think some of his older stuff was interesting, it's a better idea to link to that directly rather than his home page.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something…?
Nowhere in the paragraph you quoted does it allege Scott supported Curtis Yarvin personally. What it implies is that Nick Land is one of the "neoreactionaries", which, according to Wikipedia [1], he is.
The "embraced by white nationalists" part is a bit more tricky. It does imply that Land's writings are bad because white nationalists like them (more than others do). In the abstract, of course, this is not necessarily true.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence that white nationalists like him, or he's just a symbol; one can like country music without liking conservatism. (But it's unlikely he's merely a symbol when he literally writes about race.)
Perhaps his writings are relevant but they're misinterpreting him; Social Darwinism does not implicate Darwin.
But a third possibility is that his writings are just racist – though perhaps cloaked, perhaps the motte in the metaphorical motte and bailey – and as such provide an intellectual foundation for white supremacy.
Personally, I'm not sure what the answer is, because I don't know much about these people. But my priors point to the third option as most likely, given how intellectual movements tend to be organized. Which means that the fact of his being embraced by white nationalists was informative, which means it was appropriate for the reporter to include it. Sure, if the reporter is omitting some critical evidence or context that would lead to an opposite conclusion, that would be unethical. But the reporter is not obliged to include every argument that could possibly be made in his defense, either.
For fucks sake, just read something Nick Land has written in recent years and let him smear himself. He literally argues for "hyper racism", composed of scientific racism and eugenics. He also has promoted Atomwaffen affiliated Order of Nine Angles. A literal neonazi terrorist network.
A pathetic hit piece.
Osama bin Laden cited Noam Chomsky in some of his anti-America diatribes, does this mean Noam Chomsky should be blamed in any way (even slightly) for the actions of Al Qaeda?
What seem to me to be the key quotes [1]:
> The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of assortative mating. [...] It is assortative mating on the basis of [socio-economic status] that has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the implications of its happening are extreme.
> Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence.
> The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status.
> That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.
Whilst it is clumsily reinventing ideas that have been done better a million times already in science fiction, it doesn't seem very neonazi.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternativ...
> But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.
> As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I suppose the link is there because Scott Alexander thinks that he's written some stuff which is worth reading, and that readers of the blog will be able to distinguish that from the rubbish. Needless to say, this is completely outside a present-day NYT journalist's model of the world.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/...
If only a world-famous newspaper could look into this and find out, so that you would not have to guess.
The article author could have simply labeled his writings as "racist" or "not racist", but newspaper articles traditionally stick to reporting sourced facts and quoted opinions and let the reader draw their own conclusion.
Alternately, the author could have provided context about Land in the form of additional facts and opinions. This would undoubtedly make the article more informative, but it would also make it longer. There are plenty of other things the article could have added context about, but ultimately the format demands a certain length.
I do think the article is suggesting that he's racist. Newspaper articles have to choose which facts and quotes to include and how to integrate them into a narrative, and those choices inevitably betray the author's opinions. In general, I think this phenomenon of hidden opinions is harmful. It's a downside of the traditional practice of separating factual articles from opinion, since it gives readers a false sense of having learned the objective truth when in fact what they've absorbed is partially someone's opinion. When newer media platforms choose to eschew the distinction between fact and opinion in favor of presenting an authentic but opinionated voice, there's merit in that. But I think there is also merit in the traditional approach of trying to preserve that distinction, even if the results are inevitably imperfect. I wouldn't want the New York Times to give up on it.
The NYT is apparently run by Glenn Beck now. Dude, just connect the dots. It all fits.
I hope that when the mob comes for me or someone I care about, I'll be brave enough to tell them exactly what to do with their pitchforks.
The second best thing is, should any reporters be reading this, to take the opportunity to write a better article.
Bluntly: Which prominent member of the neoreactionary movement was allowed to guest blog at SSC?
Because if the answer is "none", then I think it's clear he did not do any such thing.
Can't wait till we move past this infantile reframing of "showing people something you read" as "platforming".
We used to read the works of our enemies to understand them and read the works of kooks and crazies to avoid following their path (but also to see what truths, when followed too zealously, lead to ruin).
Now we have to read things, figure out the social credit of the things we read, and then decide whether or not to tell anyone we actually read it and thought about it.
https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-c...
Contra to the insinuation that Cade Metz smears Siskind by unfairly associating him with Nick Land, Metz's article lays the evidence and allows readers to infer what that evidence may or may not mean.
For me, the concluding 3 paragraphs of the article sum up what Slate Star Codex (now "Astral Codex Ten") may be
> I assured [Kelsey Piper] my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.
This is ad absurdum at its finest. Proving whether an idea is correct using statistical analysis makes sense for many empirical matters. But proving whether proponents of extreme views (e.g. in the article, the idea that women are biologically not as capable as men to work as programmers) by using statistical analysis is a moral failure driven by scientificism. (I'm going to decline rehearsing the debates about whether women are biologically or culturally inhibited from programming.)
> When I asked Mr. Altman, of OpenAI, if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”
This really sounds unfortunately like John Matze's position on Parler. Slate Star Codex is not the same kind of gathering ground Parler was, but given the next paragraph, the comparison is not inapt.
> In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.
If Slate Star Codex is somewhere self-described "Rationalists" can civilly and safely debate whether intelligence is statistically correlated to race and gender and these are "[t]he People Inventing the Future", then it's not surprising Horowitz would seek to protect that forum under the shelter of Substack.
However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
Failing to object to immorality and immoral arguments cannot be corrected only by rationalism and statistics because Nature, at its core, is amoral.
Many dumb people are moral. Many dumb people are immoral. By the same token many smart people are immoral, too.
The real problem is when you realize that many smart people are, in fact, both immoral and dumb.
The article's last paragraph gives the lie to the controversy that has raged in tech circles surrounding publishing Siskind's name.
> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
Did you actually read the post where Scott explains why? Because at that point it was impossible to keep it private. He was also forced to quit his job. The fact that he landed on his feet doesn't mean there wasn't a cost paid.
What was happening in this story was that Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable. That's a reasonable request to make in a community of peers (it's why I'll keep using "Alexander" on HN, for instance). It is not remotely a reasonable demand to make of strangers, let alone journalists.
This is another instance of message board thought seeping into the real world, and it's always alarming to me to see that, because while message board thought is fun, it's also deeply weird and dysfunctional.
I would be curious to know what other articles you consider well written.
To me, this comes across as a hack job to elevate the writers status before the release of his upcoming book.
It’s a classic tactic that writers use to drive book sales.
And there, indeed, lies the problem. What should society do when an an argument is factually correct but leads to an immoral result?
Choose a moral alternative. Humans aren't bound by (or even capable of) pure logic or animal instinct, that's why we invented abstractions like "morality."
Can you unpack this a bit further?
Are you saying that {a select group of people} should be allowed to discuss a controversial question, but {a wider group of people} cannot be trusted to have such discussion?
I can almost guarantee this is Cade misrepresenting what Kelsey Piper said.
> allows people to decide for themselves what the intentions of Scott Siskind may be.
Except that he clearly throughout misrepresents or misunderstands things like above. I can only assume it seems accurate because you haven't looked into the relevant quotes or peope.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
The fact that you think this after reading the article shows just how misleading it is. He shared his real name after quitting his job because of it. The NYT leaving that detail out is completely bonkers. It's a little bit like saying "what was the point of WW2, Hitler just ended up killing himself after all that trouble anyway."
Why would you not want to debate that? If it's not true, or there's no evidence for it, then you have an actual argument for fighting people who believe in it. If it's true, then you have a new societal issue to discuss. Either way, you win.
You seem to be making a case against scientific inquiry and intellectual discussion.
> However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
This is anti-intellectualism. What possible reason would there be to not debate ideas, of any kind? Bad ideas get analyzed, exposed, and proponents of such are forced to either change their position or be exposed as dogmatic.
So when people say that rationalists and libertarians haven’t thought through the consequences this is what they mean.
I always like to remember that poorly argued points are a click goldmine.
We're all adults here, you can say "Hitler".
So, unless you completely denounce vegetarianism, you are literally supporting Nazis.
(For people who don't get it, Hitler was a vegetarian.)
That is an extremely accurate summary of American politics over the last 5 years.
I will never understand the pearl clutching that goes on when things like this happen.
As a person you are judged constantly by others, as a public figure this increases exponentially. You are judged on everything: the clothing you wear, the way you speak, and yes, the company you keep. In the age of social media influencing, each of us has a platform built upon the platform we choose. Each of us via that platform can spread influence, be it marketing, ideas, or (dis)information.
If you utilize your platform upon a platform (or just your platform) to spread bad ideas, purported by bad people, it is a perfectly rational reaction by your audience to reclaim the social capital they have given you. This is not wrong. This is not censorship. This is how social networks have worked since long before any of us had a smart phone, or indeed, when the social network was a fire in a cave, we have operated this way.
And reading this summation, yeah that sounds about right. It sounds as if he is embroiled in a social space that is spreading bad ideas. He has denounced one person who was in that social space, but he is still in contact with two others spreading similar ideas. This calls into question the sincerity of his denouncement.
I.e. if you say you're done drinking, and resolve to quit, and refuse to spend time with your alcoholic friend, but still spend time around two others who drink regularly, people would be right to question your sincerity in that resolve.
> If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
This impulse to boil this activity into a set of always absurd sounding "rules" is probably comforting to those who would call themselves Rationalist, the sorts who fetishize facts and logic, while usually having a dearth of both in the things they say. But ultimately this isn't hard to understand: If you associate with people known to believe and spread bad things, you will in turn be viewed as possibly endorsing those things.
And all of this comes up against the simple and obvious truth that all someone in this position has to do is speak what so many would like to hear; that they didn't understand what this person was doing, that it isn't what they believe, and to create distance. But they won't. I wonder why?
The thing is we have lots of perfectly good examples of people associating with conservative people with a few noxious views. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, for example, were well known as family friends of Kanye West but they managed to go years asserting they were personal friends and disagreed with his political views and hoped he would come around. Eventually Kanye went a little overboard and they started distancing themselves further, but pointedly that was Kanye’s fault and not the Teigan-Legend family’s.
It really is not that hard to adopt a “love the sinner, hate the sin” position. But when people adopt this position of hemming-and-hawing any time someone asks “do you really hate the sin though?” it understandably raises some questions. People have blogs where they engage with bad ideas all the time. There’s a style in how they present and engage with the ideas that doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
I also don’t think advocates for “places to debate” these things really understand the purpose of debate. These arguments for scientific racism are well known and understood and mostly debunked by actual well-regarded experts in the associated fields. There is no value in debating bad ideas ad nauseum with randos online. You’re not learning anything from that, you’re just engaged in a sort of rhetorical sparring match. Is society well served by you trading bad faith arguments with strangers? Maybe. At the expense of exposing impressionable spectators to arguments with poor empirical grounding that are nonetheless seductive for taking advantage of common misconception and flattering peoples egos? Not so sure about that.
Not everyone is a rich socialite looking to be viewed well at the finest private dinner parties. In fact, I dare say that anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers are the opposite of that.
Maybe you should go try judging someone with actual responsibility and a real role in public life. You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
These social morays have applied to everyone, everywhere, forever. One does not need to be rich to have social capital.
> You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
This just in: two things can be bad at the same time. Perhaps more than two! Details at 11.
Probably because you aren't in a position of social influence, and/or your friends aren't propagating dangerous ideas? That's all the more reason to skewer those that do and are, precisely because of the platforming effects they have.
Grouping of people by other people will forever be a "thing"
> 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.”
And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray. The paragraph makes Scott sound like a flaming racist. It's just totally dishonest writing. It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.
The anonymity thing seems to have been well and truly discarded – flung in his face, more like. What did he do to them to deserve such treatment, such contempt?
I did get one laugh, out of:
> “[Rationalists] are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-o...
Well there's some more in that paragraph you quote. He then goes on to say "Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and [Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture." (Emphasis kept from the original.) Which I think the NYT writer reads as being at least a partial endorsement of Murray's belief that some class differences reduce to heredity. I do too, since this seems roughly in line with what I understand from Scott's writing. It is also true that Murray takes that idea farther and goes in some directions I find to be both scientifically unsupported and inflammatory.
You can agree or disagree with the NYT here, I don't care. But I think you should quote more from that paragraph before you characterize it.
The same attributes applies to most of current "hollier than thou" cancel articles. The principle of charity is totally lost, anything that an idiot can misread as offensive is labeled as so, and offensiveness itself is potrtrayed as the biggest crime.
The NYT is worse a rag than the National Enquirer, because at least the second is not perceived as some objective and quality source (and doesn't influence politics, or help setup trillion dollar wars and mass carnage).
Reminds me of pg's recent tweet: "'The New York Times says...' doesn't have anything like the force it did 20 years ago." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1359879895736852482?s=20
A few weeks ago I gave up and cancelled my subscription. They do have some good-seeming original reporting, but I think about Gell-Mann Amnesia for too many articles.
>... In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
What article (as of right now, there is no link)? What is up with journalists not bothering to cite claims like these?
Well, Hanlon's Razor suggests they're just incompentent, but that seems like more of a "98% confidence has been refuted at General Relativity" kind of thing.
I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.
Do you think in retrospect this was a reasonable things for experts to predict?
That was the central tenet of the 2002 speech laying out the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (some prior discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 )
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Stop giving malicious actors the benefit of the doubt.
Peculiar choice not to justify with source material when the topic is a public blog with public comments.
Which is hilarious since automod doesn't check if it was used as a verb or adjective.
Fuck the nyt. That entire dumpster fire can hopefully fizzle out shortly.
Slatestar codex was some of the most interesting content I've read in my life. In comparison, I've never read anything in the nyt that compares to "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" or "Meditations on Moloch" or "The Toxoplasma of Rage" so in my mind the single most consequential thing that publication has done is to silence something of higher quality than itself out of fear.
> The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
This is exactly the sort of thing you manage to convince yourself of when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys, but also don't want to throw in with the sorts of people comfortable with being called the bad guys. Everybody in the Blue Tribe is going to precisely see the toxic nature of this statement. Women aren't interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. Reversing the order of the causation is making excuses for sexism and is itself sexist.
The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
Now, this is Hacker News, this community is very close to the SSC one, so I know a lot of people aren't going to take this well. But the Grey Tribe really isn't a nice place to be, and the sooner you can realize this, the sooner you can find actual political heft in the world.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities. When you state a contrarian opinion like it's fact, like it should be considered because you're the one saying it, and the reason you're stating it is none other than you don't like all those nasty SJWs, you're denying the lived experience of all the people out there who spent their lives being one of those oppressed minorities. All of those girls who hide their gender from their gaming pals. All those Black Americans who discover that the tech landscape doesn't reward knowledge and talent as much as it does the right race and skin color.
It may be a little better in the tech industry than it might be, say, in the construction industry, but to pretend these things don't exist or aren't as important as what your mind sees as bigger is, well, toxic. And it's the cornerstone of the Grey Tribe mindset.
This is not a fair summary of the argument. There's nothing "simple" about the pipeline problem, and what 'grey tribe' folks object to is not the rather generic claim that "the industry is sexist" (since there are in fact plenty of problematic practices in the tech industry that may adversely impact women) but the rather more specific argument that discrimination in hiring practices/educational admissions/etc. is to blame for the imbalance. Clearly, there's quite a bit of evidence against that proposed mechanism.
I'm not entirely sure how much effort I want to put into trying to convince people who obviously don't want to be convinced, but here goes, since my above comment has been received well enough.
The industry is sexist. That's the answer. No more, and no less than other industries. This is very very very very very basic intersectionism. I can get a little deeper on this but someone well-versed in this can get a lot deeper.
Industry leaders do not want to listen to these experts. Because it threatens them. I'm lucky enough to work for a company big enough to realize they need to take it seriously. There's employee resource groups and the leadership talks about it, not in every town hall, but in enough of them. But Silicon Valley is run by a tribe of mavericks. They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution. They don't, because sexism.
It seems to me that your move to the Blue Tribe could have less to do with the "toxicity" of the Grey Tribe and more to do with your eagerness to hurl unfounded moral accusations at those who hold positions you disagree with. That is quite the popular pastime within the Blue Tribe (even if some of its members may themselves be disgusted by it).
What's potentially toxic about this "opinion" is that, until it cites evidence, it entirely confuses what is social science and what is armchair philosophy.
One can either state: "Study X suggests that the gender gap is roughly due to Y% of A and Z% of B", or they can say "Anecdotally speaking, I have experienced the following, which suggests to me that $REASON may be at play here".
When one carelessly mixes the two together, they drape an assertion in the unearned aesthetics of quantitative reasoning. Which, in my experience, is sadly where a lot of these rationalist arguments end up.
> when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys
Everyone calls themselves the "good guys". How haven't you noticed that yet? People with different opinions than you aren't mustache-twirling cartoon villains, contemplating the evil things they'll do today. Identifying with a group who thinks of themselves as "the good guys" gives zero evidence that your opinions are any more correct than those of other groups.
> The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
This is just an appeal to popularity [1], not a factual argument. At least the "grey tribe" – as far as it can be considered a consistent group at all – tries to find proper arguments for its positions, and isn't content with their version of "all my friend agree with me, so I must be right".
We all live in one bubble or another. We'd do well to keep that in mind.
This is Cade Metz deliberately stating positions in an inflammatory way and getting you to fall for it. Reading the article you see the careful position of trying to tease out correlation from causation.
I don’t know what your past/experience is, but I was a geek way before IT industry was even a thing. And I can guarantee you, they 100% were not interested in joining. They being everyone (including 99% of men), not just women, of course. Everybody could do geeky stuff. Instead, boys were playing sports (computer games weren’t yet a thing), and girls were doing ... who knows what, we (boys) weren’t interested in them back then.
In addition, there was a lot of discouragement from all sides - parents, peers, teachers, bullies - this was of course before CS was big money, and honestly I suspect if things turned out differently (programming wasn’t paid well), noone would even notice the sex imbalance (like they don’t for truckers).
Kathleen Booth invented assembly language. In 1947.
You can replace Grey Tribe with any tribal affiliation which short-circuits your critical thinking and leads to agreeing to whatever your in-group believes.
Blind obedience to any tribe is toxic.
Why is there never outrage the other way around with fields dominated by women, e.g., psychology?
Do you have any support for that claim, because AFAIK your claim has as much substance as saying that they're simply not interested, which is not much.
> The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know.
And Trump doesn't have to explain to his followers how the election was stolen, they know it was. That's how dogmatic ideologies work.
The claim that women aren't interested in tech isn't toxic sexism, it's obvious everyday common sense everywhere except the most extreme "blue" communities in America. All you have to do to know this is spend time around women in a social context and try to talk to them about technology. The vast majority will happily admit they don't care, don't want to care and are much happier when someone else is dealing with technology for them. This is true of girls who are 8 and grandparents of 80. None of this is any more radical a statement than saying men are less interesting in clothes and handbags than women.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities.
Logic isn't racist. People are racist.
I love the diffusion of responsibility via the passive voice. Oh it "just disappeared."
I hope big tech buries the NYT.
I do however not, in any way, hope that "big tech" buries a news house. Even for a, not very good written and mean spirited, article. Especially one trying to bring public light on where a lot of very influential people get a lot of their ideological beliefs from. That would be a horrible precedent.
I'm by no way a fan of big tech but NYT has diverged quite sensibly from being a "news house" in the last few years.
The NYT publishing threat was gratuitous
That said, The Times’s treatment of Alexander is pretty shabby, I don’t see how naming him substantively alters anything you might have to say about either his ideas or the ideas of those who move with him in “rationalist” circles.
[edited to fix a typo]
The claim that the NYT is a news house is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Can you provide any?
> I hope big tech buries the NYT.
Interesting that the people rallying so much against cancelling that they believe you can never even publish names want a tech cartel to form and drive a publication out of business for being vaguely critical of a movement popular with Silicon Valley people.
I don't. I do wish Cade Metz hadn't made a mess of this story though, because it's a story worth pursuing. As the impact of Silicon Valley's policies on society continues to grow, it would be good to understand where decision-makers are getting their ideas.
It's quite funny how in this very thread the thin-skinned, childish attitude of tech personalities is on full display. The article is fairly balanced and even bland, yet the howling is enormous. As the article itself points out, people like Balaji Srinivasan were treatening to harass reporters involved in this story, but compared to the 'doxxing' of Scott Alexander, this didn't seem to draw a lot of attention. I'm pretty sure most journalists would be delighted if simply publishing their full name was the only thing they'd be threatened with on a daily basis, which wouldn't be much of a threat, because in general they put them right at the top of the article.
How, by disinterring it from the shallow grave where it was left by its own "journalists"?
Yeah, that also made me throw up in my mouth a little.
"And suddenly, all this cash was handed to me"
"What happened before?"
"I threatened everyone at gunpoint to hand over their cash"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-gall...
To me that's 1000 times more offensive and hideous than using the n-word by yourself, and the scum of the earth that wrote and posted that article (and those that expelled the girl), should be ousted from society.
The article was published in December 2020 and these events happened in June 2020:
> The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
The mere act of reporting - documenting an event that happened for its readers - does not make the author “scum of the earth”.
You find it offensive and hideous that the journalist did things that they did not in fact do, while yourself presenting a false accounting of the facts.
I see. I haven't read the article itself (it was/is behind a paywall), but a report on it, that read like the article publicized this story ahead of the events.
Still, from the snippets I read posted here, what's with the "slave auctions" and the BS innuendo about her city?
"Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling."
like it has anything to do with the girl.
The NYT just wrote it up after the fact.
Said write up was awful and the extent to which it made the asshole seem like a hero made me want to stab things, but it's worth blaming the NYT for all the things they did get wrong here and not the one thing they didn't :)
"Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public."
Confused why you think the article was "news" worth printing, or sympathetic.
Confused with the use of the term "withdrawn" (like the euphemism of someone"quiting for "personal reasons" when they are in fact pressured to resign).
I'm also confused about what you think my comment was supposed to "prove" or not. It was meant as a case in point of the kind of bad, pearl-clutching-style sensenationalist stories increasingly peddled by the NYT.
- Cancel NYT subscriptions
- Subscribe to independent journalists and writers on Substack or via other means
- Flag NYT articles
The fact that the article does not go into this is very dishonest as I’m sure Scott made this argument to the reporter.
Scott was dishonest to himself as well. When you get quoted by writers in the NYT and your concepts become part of the lexicon of a rather wealthy intellectual movement, its a bit too late to wonder about if you can keep the day job.
> He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.
> In his first post, Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
This is an age-old refrain and I am honestly surprised that people keep viewing it as a reasonable position. It's exactly the same line that Parler tried to peddle, along with every online community that eventually - shock horror - turns out to be a platform for hate rather than 'rational' thought.
Free speech is important, and should be defended. When your version of 'free speech' is only extended to alt-right ideals, you're not arguing in good faith for free speech.
The difference is that the usual tactics that would earn some social justice advocates the title "warrior" were not tolerated. E.g. empty accusations of someone being racist, sexist, etc.
And the above did not only apply to social justice folks, it applied as well to others. Scott handed out permanent and temporary bans to those all across the political spectrum based (at least in my view) mainly on how mean they were being.
AFAIK we do this because "free speech" has particular historical and legal meaning, even if the explanations as to why it's a good thing are mostly about free discussion.
It is both practical and -- one might dare hope -- instructive for the left to have to struggle for a little free speech, as the empathy upon which they pride themselves is quite selective; finally, they might understand what it is like to have their voices systematically erased.
Learn something new every day.
Parler was open to left-wing as well. And the fact that SJWs have trouble to be heard when they want to restrict what other people say makes perfect sense. Join the conversation, but don't try to shut it down.
Its funny how there seems to be this tug-o-war in definitions of "free speech and "racist".
"Free speech" seems to be this kind of good that everyone wants to not oppose.
"Racist" seems to be this kind of evil that everyone wants to avoid being called.
Mr. Srinivasan said they could not let that kind of story gain traction.
“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times
Most people who support free speech, would probably also agree that it is good to give people tools to protect themselves from harassment.
I don't think so. The right to free speech is a right the government to say what you want without consequences from the government beyond certain limited criteria. The right to be forgotten is a personal right where a person can decide they want certain information removed after a period of time. I consider this more a personal protection in a world where people have issues realizing that felons have paid for their crimes, that peoples views can change over time, etc...
- All papers are biased in favor of their stake holders.
- Some are better at hiding it.
- Business sections are obfuscated with business-speak, but are way more factual because business people expect to be able to make business decisions.
- The best cross-section of news is a selection of newspapers with stakeholders who are not aligned or even clearly at odds.
- Papers from different countries often have different stakeholders.
- Having friends in the middle of the action is a great source of facts. Only works well if you have lots of such friends (e.g. if your name is Noam Chomsky).
...
On that topic, I find it mildly funny that the NY Times goes out of its way to grace Jill Biden [0] with the honorific "Dr" despite her bottom-of-the-barrel EdD, while a practicing clinician is "Mr. Siskind".
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/politics/jill-biden-fi...
Twitter, if you carefully follow the right people.
NYC is a rag with a stick up its arse while foaming at the mouth over its hatred of technology and nerds because we threaten their power base.
> https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting
Am I reading that right? It complains the article didn't actually quote SSC, then contradicts itself by listing ten actual quotes from SSC that are in the article, and then lists ten other quotes that he happens to particularly like (one of which is a dreamlike thing that appears to be from some fiction).
I kinda get the impression the author of that blog post would have been satisfied with nothing less than something that read like it was written by an enthusiastic fan.
> Reading this article, some will say that they told me so, or even that I was played for a fool. And yet I confess that, even with hindsight, I have no idea what I should have done differently, how it would’ve improved the outcome, or what I will do differently the next time. Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.
Absolutely incredible way to end this article, as if him "sharing" his full name had nothing to do with the whole fiasco:
> I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees.
> Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was taken down by its author on June 23, 2020, due to fears of having his full name published in an upcoming piece by the New York Times.
I’m assuming this article is the delayed result from the NYTimes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Controversy_o...
Like other commenters here, I hope now that Trump’s out of office, it becomes less taboo on the left to talk about how poor a job mainstream media does.
The article as a whole is meh, but that quote made skimming it worthwhile.
I've never been impressed by the "rationalist" community around SSC, LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, etc., but I've really struggled to put my finger on it. This gets pretty damn close.
The whole sphere struck me from the beginning (way before present controversies) as a big circle jerk of smart people trying to impress each other. The standard issue rationalist flex is to pick a contrarian point of view and invent an extremely novel argument for it. Bonus points if it skirts close to something controversial or taboo, but doesn't quite cross the line. Then an endless thread of discussion can ensue where all the participants have an opportunity to flex by either agreeing or taking apart the argument.
Problem is: I never got the sense that anything was being accomplished, nor that the ideas coming out of these places stood up when dragged out of their bubbles and examined in the context of the wider world and the wider sphere of human experience.
The first thing that really put me off was the whole idea of runaway super-intelligent AI. Please, please, please for the love of g-d study some biology. Dunning-Krueger is a worn out meme but I think the idea of it applies well to CS people talking about intelligence (as opposed to glorified statistical regression) without knowing anything about biology, which is the only existing example of an intelligent system.
The neo-racist ("human biodiversity") and neoreactionary stuff just put me off further. When it emerged it didn't surprise me one bit that it came from those circles. Contrarian? Check. Controversial? Check. Elitist? Check.
In the end I started thinking of it as an online cult, sort of a really high-brow companion to the 'chans. I guess the hierarchy goes: rationalist sphere > 'chan culture > Qanon.
I don't think they are trying to impress each other, or are contrarian for the sake of it. I think it's a fair amount of legitimately smart people who don't have much in the way of life experience, may be in part on the autism spectrum, and tend to be engineer/rational types who think systematically more than intuitively. I mean they construct and deal with systems.
This leads to sort of a naivety that tends to look for elegant explanations of a sort and is vulnerable to them. The all-explaining system of thought that in general intellectuals tend to get ensnared by, but is self-contained and self-perpetuating. The idea of the messiness or stickiness or even corrosiveness of life on these systems tends to not be entertained much, as it reduces the power of rationality.
So the rationalists get really vulnerable to these kind of left-field ideas like AI risk, or neo-reaction. These ideas are often rationally elegant in the way many negative systems are; they are a novel way of explaining things. The red pill/manosphere stuff was similar; as a system of thought it's a lot more elegant and explanatory to its audience than the alternatives, and even criticized actual things as well as its own untrue things.
I guess I'm saying is that it's more the rationalists are vulnerable to getting captured by those contrarian ideas you describe than they are malicious or doing it to flex. It's not really unique to them, academia goes through it, philosophers go through it, artists go through it, etc.
As for the cultish stuff, its apparent to me that a lot of rationalists are kind of adrift in real life due to the great unpersoning of religion and its replacement with woke or trumpian politics. Thats part of why the grey tribe was coined, neither left nor right. They need meaning as well as anyone.
Unrelatedly, i think your description also applies to modern Continental philosophy / critical theory - it's far more a game to prove who has the biggest brain than it is a real attempt to do anything useful.
There were social and professional consequences for prejudice before "cancel culture" was full-throated wailed from atop privilege mountain. Rebranding the combination of 'reverse racism', 'dangerous time for men', & 'free speech' as a form of McCarthyism is so ludicrously transparent. Maybe it doesn't feel obvious in anti-intellectual edgy enclaves, but it's farcical to the majority of people that are too polite to remind that consequences for antisocial behavior has always existed.
“ The allure of the ideas within Silicon Valley is what made Scott Alexander, who had also written under his given name, *** ***, and his blog essential reading.”
Was it worth it NYT?
Best way to respond to this is to ignore it.
https://www.metafilter.com/190454/The-New-York-Times-vs-Slat...
https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...
This isn't surprising because The Verge very regularly takes cheap shots at anyone who does not align with their progressive bias - that includes Silicon Valley rationalists.
Thanks, that's a good article, but doesn't seem to support your claim of a double standard:
> Some will no doubt describe this double standard as an example of political bias, but it's probably better described as garden-variety sloppiness. It seems more likely that the Times does not have consistent standards here, and editors alternate between fostering over-reliance on anonymous sources and forbidding the practice.
i.e. not a "double standard", but no standard.
And then of course try and discredit it as heretical since some people we think are racist or their ideas may drop into the discussion from time to time.
> He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books.
This isn't very informative because feminism has become such a generic broad brush label. Feminists of different eras believe different things because the people identifying as feminist changes, and people change their opinions. "Feminism" now basically means you're talking about sex/gender issues and you think some of those issues are hurting women. Both the trans-exclusionary and trans-inclusive communities will identify as "feminist" because they are both discussing sex/gender issues, and they both think the other side is hurting women in particular. Your opinion about the various sides depend heavily on the specifics of what those sides are advocating for.
With that said, now let's look at what Alexander's article says:
> And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – ~~are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”~~ EDIT: ARE TOTALLY GREAT, NO NEED TO TAKE THIS ONE SENTENCE OUT OF CONTEXT AND TRY TO SPREAD IT ALL OVER THE INTERNET.
Yeah, calling people "Voldemort" is a super minor aspect of the article he wrote. Let's examine the context, which is his analysis of the "Nice Guy" label. This is my summary of his article (which he has conveniently divided into 7 sections):
1) He describes one guy who's poor as setup for his complaints about the "Nice Guy" label. He says the worst response to someone complaining they're poor is as follows:
> You keep whining about how “unfair” it is that you can’t get a good job. “But I’m such a hard worker.” No, actual hard workers don’t feel like they’re entitled to other people’s money just because they ask nicely.
2) He describes a terrible guy with 5 ex-wives whom he abused, beat, and cheated on. He asserts that people complaining about not having a girlfriend despite being a "Nice Guy" are mystified because they're nicer than this terrible guy who's had lots of sex.
3) He quotes 5 articles talking about "Nice Guys". He asserts that the "Nice Guy" label unfairly maligns many men who are legit nice guys. (I believe the harassment he's discussing is mostly the mocking on the "Nice Guys of OKCupid" blog, but it seems like there's a bunch of subtext about other instances which he doesn't link to or discuss.)
4) Alexander quotes "Barry" (IDK who this is) who says "I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists." Alexander says that the "Nice Guy" label predates the "manosphere", so it can't be a response to bad behavior by men. In reality, feminists are acting like people in the manosphere because:
> People were coming up with reasons to mock and despise men who were sad about not being in relationships years before the manosphere even existed.
5) Alexander says the manosphere exists because women are being mean, and the "Nice Guy" label is one instance of women abusing men. He says that shitty male behavior is radicalization caused by feminists verbally abusing genuinely nice guys.
6) He states that "Nice Guys" aren't trying to date for just sex because otherwise they'd just hire a prostitute. Everybody deserves companionship and pair-bonding, and feminists complaining about "Nice Guys" are denying these dudes needs which friendship can't fulfill.
7) He concludes his article by saying that virtuous people can have trouble dating, and unvirtuous people can do a great job dating. That seems unfair, and the manosphere is doing right by saying "yes that's unfair" but feminists are doing wrong by saying "Nice Guys are a problem".
I hope you find this summary accurate. It should give enough context for people who would agree with this article to follow along with why I think this is a shitty take. Alexander isn't doing a enlightened analysis of the "Nice Guy" label because he never acknowledges that the articles are complaining about the men who say they are "Nice Guys" because they are in fact not nice. One of the articles he cites (Feministe) addresses this very criticism:
> As discussions like this happen, inevitably someone gets defensive about the idea that “Nice Guys” are really assholes in disguise, because there are plenty of guys (and girls) who are actually very decent and respectful, just perhaps too shy to make the first move, and so on, and that they may appear to be “Nice Guys” even when they’re not. … I dated a “Nice Guy” for a while. It was suffocating. I never felt like I could relax and just be myself around him, because he had constructed some kind of idealized version of me, and that was who he was dating. He was also damned hard to get rid of.
He just blunders through a 7-section article complaining about dating without once addressing whether the "Nice Guys" the women are complaining about are actually being nice.
1. Starts with a thought experiment based on statistics from various sources.
2. Has a parenthetical paragraph about gay male harassment, also with statistics.
3. Makes a speculative conclusion inside the parenthetical, never mentioning the famous metoo case of Terry Crews, the media coverage of which argues against said conclusion.
Can someone tell me if the other articles follow this pattern of building from first principles without having first done due diligence on a given topic?
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/04/against-overgendering-...
Edit: clarification
Same with free speech. You'd think the W.H. Auden branch of free speech defenders were an endangered species, when they're really not - they're just not reading alt-right blogs and screaming about being canceled.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
Take a look at Slate Star Codex (SSC) in The Wayback Machine on January 1, 2020 - https://web.archive.org/web/20200101140213/https://slatestar...
The Blog Roll is on the left side. It's a long list of weirdly categorized links without any additional annotation. Nick Land's is "Xenosystems" (which now appears to be defunct). I think calling this an "endorsement" is really stretching things here.
Scott wrote about the neoreactionary movement on SSC more than once, and it's quite clear he _does not_ endorse those viewpoints (which to be fair, the article does say). But given that he wrote about the topic repeatedly, it's no surprise he linked to a prominent neoreactionary blog. Presumably, he trusted his readers to come to their own conclusions about the content on the linked blogs. And he also probably assumed that readers would realize this _wasn't_ an endorsement, given his own writing on the neoreactionary movement.
If I told you that you should read Marx's Communist Manifesto after telling you at length that I think Communism is terrible, am I endorsing Communism? Or am I telling you to read this because I think you should learn more about Communism, and not just from me?
> I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.
This is one of the sketchiest things in the article. Scott made it clear that his primary concern was that his patients and potential employers might associate him with his blog. So if you're a patient googling your new psychiatrist, would you google their first and middle name (a middle name you might not even know)? Or would you google "Scott Siskind"? Of course you'd do the latter! So the question is whether googling "Scott Siskind" would get you to SSC. I'd love to go back in time and check this. I'd also love to know if Cade Metz tried this and what result he got.
I would note that if I google "Scott Siskind" right now, I do get results related to SSC, but that's because Scott after Scott gave up his pseudonymity on Astral Codex Ten, the Wikipedia page for SSC was updated to include Scott's full name.
I'm sure there are more similarly sketchy parts of the article that others will note.
He needed links to categorise as 'those belonging to the Emperor' so I guess linking to the neo-monarchists was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Note that the author did the courtesy of not mentioning Roko's Basilisk. Clearly they do understand that some things shouldn't be talked about. But they don't think that any of the writers mentioned here deserve to avoid public scrutiny.
As long as we're suspending enough disbelief to take seriously the prospect of a deity that wants to punish us, it seems like a pretty small jump to believe that we can't predict how that punishment is going to get decided. So, rather conveniently, we can just live without thinking too hard about the Basilisk/God.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26124135.
What? This isn't a slogan, it's a basic statement of comprehension about how the American system is designed.
Admittedly it's a very pedantic distinction that doesn't matter in casual conversation but it's still a fact
I did not read TFA because I know I'd just be ticked off - the hoopla and sloppy reporting around GME trying to fit it all into a simplistic narrative really was quite annoying and has caused me to revise my understanding of modern day journalism.
My opinion is that "the journalist" in a lot of cases wrote things up in a simplistic way so that they could understand it for themselves - or they just slapped something together in an ad hoc fashion following all the other lemmings - or the intent was to spew more propaganda about whatever they think is important.
All this has convinced me the "Right" do have a bit of a good point about the MSM being sloppy, unfair, and trying to control the public's interpretation of reality (not that the "Right" are correct about much of anything...) But whatever happened to trying to really comprehend all the different angles to a story? Or understanding the worldview of the subject? That takes a lot of work aka empathy and the economics of the MSM nowadays precludes that, I guess. Louis Theroux and Adam Curtis are the antithesis of this sort of journalist.
Geez... the implied connotation of this lede makes it quite obvious the angle taken on this topic was predetermined just like Scott feared. It all fits in with the general fad going on now about how Big Tech is so evil now and out to enslave everyone. I've been in this industry for 30 years and yes there are problems, but just like with any other technology or shift in society. A mutant version of capitalism is the real problem now but you'll never see the MSM writing articles about that.
I'm not even a Rationalist or part of that community; I read SSC occasionally when a topic came up that I am interested in. In general, I think they are a bit short sighted and blinkered in a lot of respect - though the angle taken is useful. To really grok something, you have to look at all of the angles and to believe only 'this angle' is the real Truth is stupid. The idea that SSC was the coffeehouse for "many tech leaders" is really .... I want to say ludicrous but that is perhaps too strong of a word. Not all engineers are autistic robots.
Counterpoint: Zuckerberg has a degree in psychology so he can't automatically be lumped in the Rationalist community; he certainly knew from the beginning he was building a digital Skinner box and how people would behave given the right stimuli.
There’s definitely a relationship between rationalism, objectivism and libertarianism. It seems to afflict the captains of industry. And in this case it’s Silicon Valley’s turn.
Yep definitely something there, probably a book too. After all It’s a marketplace of ideas.
Hopefully this will be what we remember as the legacy of the NYT. Pointlessly destroying things out a shear inability to create it themselves.
This is a disingenuous take but it does fit the current NYT narrative of opposing speech (and venues) the editors disapprove of.
This is my core criticism of those who call themselves rationalists. You don't have to call yourself that, you can just be rationalist. But when you adopt the cult-like mentality of rationalism it becomes very ironic indeed.
Step 2: find the individual in that group of movement who says something crazy
Step 3: make them the defacto face of the group, make the group about them, take everything out of context.
Step 4: ignore everything else.
Step 5: threaten individuals with doxxing them unless they stop talking about things you don't want them to talk about [1]
Step 6: promotion to editor
They say this is an important and unusual place, but really what they mean is that it’s a different place than what’s allowed.
Even their use of language like “neo-fascist” is telling. As if labeling people a regular fascist doesn’t inflict the same type of cultural damage it used to have...