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> 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.

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.

He also aligns himself with dozen of other thinkers he agree with and mentions them. Why isolate some particular name, if not to imply "here's a racist"?

Because if the Proud Boys believe in gravity, evolution, and fascism, only one of these three is newsworthy.

The source article is pretty explicit about its goal: it's trying to inform readers on how a specific group of people think, which is important because many powerful people are in that group. Describing only the parts of their ideology that are "newsworthy", the parts that are strange or shocking to a typical NYT reader, is going to present a picture so distorted that it ends up being simply false. It would be like a human interest story that studiously refused to mention anything normal about the subject.

Yes. But that's how reporting (sadly) generally works.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” - Michael Crichton

I was first mentioned at a very young age in a newspaper when Der Spiegel reported on my dad. What it mentioned was that he had two children, my sister and myself. It then stated our ages, and got both of them completely wrong. This is not hard. It's also not important, but if it's not important enough to get right, maybe it's not important enough to simply make up?

And later, I discovered the effect Michael mentions: every time they reported on anything I knew even a little about, they got it comically wrong. Except I don't suffer from amnesia.

UPDATE: the only news source that I've found the be reasonably reliable over time is The Economist, if you ignore them on executive compensation ("our valued readers and sponsors: everything is fine with your outrageous salaries") and GMOs.

I’ve been “quoted” in a couple press releases over the years. I never spoke nor wrote any of the quotes attributed to me. The comms team sends me a draft and says “looks good?” And I respond “yeah, whatever, don’t care”. The first time I was really surprised as I had taken the time to actually write something they could quote, but they didn’t want it.

Corporate communications is not journalism, so what's your point?

Journalists quote corporate communications in their journalism all the time, so what’s your point?

You were complaining about being inaccurately quoted in press releases. Press releases are written by comms dept within a business, so if you have a complaint with how they're written, that's something to take up with your internal teams, not with external journalists.

It should probably read corporate journalists are not journalists. To be one a journalist one must serve the truth but to remain employed by corporation means you have to accept some truths that aren't and reject others thar are.

Because Murray is an important and pernicious force in American thought, a policy entrepreneur with wide-ranging influence in American politics. It's not about what Murray says about Alexander, but what Alexander is effectively saying about Murray. Legitimizing Murray, who is sort of a figure of fun among a lot of people who do serious social science work but influential in conservative policy circles, is probably more alarming than legitimizing clowns like Yarvin.

See, I've read some of Murray's works, and he is both much closer to the consensus (especially on issues related to IQ) than you claim, and he specifically goes out of his way to counter the more abominable conclusions people tend to attribute to him.

I find this sort of callumny appalling.

I stand by what I wrote. And it's "calumny".

I accept the spelling correction.

But I look forward to a day when people feel the need to be far more cautious in general than they have been with Murray about making accusations of racism and other forms of bigotry.

I didn't say Murray was a racist or a bigot. But, in fairness to you: I do believe he is one.

Ok, thank you, much appreciated.

>Such a badly-written, mean-spirited article.

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).

Not to get too Jordan Peterson-ey but I really think this is the result of postmodern, social-constructionist ideology spreading through the humanities. If there's no such thing as objectivity and all truth claims are just manifestations of who has power then there's no need for journalists to strive for objectivity and everything you publish is just another salvo in the war against dominant power structures. If social constructionism is true then you're no longer a neutral conduit for facts, you're a culture warrior shaping reality with your words. There's no debate, no 'marketplace of ideas', only dominant discourses and power differentials, and your moral duty as a journalist is not to debate bad ideas, expose them, or allow the reader to make up their own minds, for that only gives oxygen to harmful discourses; instead you must destroy bad ideas through any means necessary, no matter how dishonest (and dishonesty isn't a real thing anyway because there's no such thing as true and false, only that which advances the power of a given group and that which weakens it.)

This nonsense is now the reigning ideology among humanities departments at our elite schools and outlets like the NYT are increasingly staffed by young graduates who have been indoctrinated into this cult; is it any wonder that the NYT has gone off the fucking deep end?

The ironic and surprising development lately is just how thoroughly this "postmodern, social-constructionist ideology" is being adopted by the socially-conservative right. It's hard to describe the Qanon cult with its surprising and outlandish "claims" about liberal Democrats, Hollywood etc. etc. as anything other than a concious parody of the view that "there's no such thing as objectivity and all truth claims are just manifestations of who has power" in the "war against dominant power structures". The "culture war" does not obviously favor one side!

True. Extremism always begets more extremism; if your opponents aren't going to play by the rules then why should you?

I mean, what is Donald Trump if not postmodernism personified?

(And to be clear, I'm certainly not saying that anything the NYT puts out is remotely as bad as the QAnon nutcases)

> If there's no such thing as objectivity and all truth claims are just manifestations of who has power then there's no need for journalists to strive for objectivity and everything you publish is just another salvo in the war against dominant power structures.

But i think that the typical current-day NYT journalist would say that there is objectivity and truth, and what they write is objective and truthful. I haven't noticed anything coming from the NYT, or that whole 'progressive' side of politics that suggests they've adopted that stereotypical pomo rejection of master narratives etc.

> this is the result of postmodern, social-constructionist ideology

The activist part of what you described comes from a 1965 paper by Herbert Marcuse called "Repressive Tolerance."[0]

The ideas from Marcuse's paper are widely mis-attributed to Karl Popper in that infographic everyone's seen floating around.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance

[1] https://www.libertarianism.org/sites/libertarianism.org/file...

Yep, I'm familiar with Marcuse, and I recommend the book Cynical Theories for a critical introduction to this ideology that's spreading through our once-cherished institutions like a malignant tumor.

The funny thing is, the critiques of Marcuse, Foucault and the like are 100% applicable to these status and sinecure seekers in the academy. They are worth reading for this reason alone.

Lindsay defends the old-academy classical liberalism. The sort of gentlemanly debate that arises from such values is good, but only possible between people with a collegial relationship who both prefer truth over power. They cannot be used against enemies. When dealing with enemies, one must bring weapons, and the postmodernist weapons can be made to work in anyone's hands.

Curtis Yarvin has new, much-more-concise explanation of the "cathedral" and domininant power ideas up on his Substack that's worth a quick read:

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the... (An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power.)

I think it's as good of an explanation as any for why old-academy classical liberalism is losing (and will continue to lose): truth is not dominant, and least on the timescales the game is played.

100% agreed that post-modernists are still worth reading, and that many of the critiques are relevant. Disagree that doing so will change anything—because truth isn't dominant in the short-term.

It's just totally dishonest writing. It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.

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.

The crossword puzzle also remains pretty good, with only a smattering of social justice themed clues once every few days.

The cooking section, I think, is the biggest winner for them these days.

Both of those have subscriptions independent of the paper, and I gladly pay them. (Though if you like spices, at least double the amounts in the Asian recipes.)

I also pay for the digital newspaper. Just as I subscribe to certain local papers only for a particular investigative reporter or basketball beat writer, there are parts of the NYT I find valuable and others that make me want to cancel. It'd be nice if I could 'tip' part of my subscription to the writers of the articles that I really liked.

Exactly, the whole piece seems designed to allege nebulous, nefarious indirect ties that somehow lead magically from Silicon Valley to bad things

I certainly wouldn’t describe regular email correspondence (including messages about strategy) as a nebulous, indirect tie

I’m not sure what you a referring to. I’ve been reading the blog for years, I have never seen anything “bad” on it, I’ve seen ideas that can be debated.

The source article describes an incident where Balaji Srinivasan was emailing Curtis Yarvin about how to stop the media from reporting on the links between Yarvin's ideology and prominent tech figures such as Srinivasan. I'm unhappy about the guilt by association, because that really doesn't have much to do with Scott Alexander, but a prominent VC trying to kill news stories which might embarrass him is pretty noteworthy.

If a guy named Balaji Srinivasan has to defend himself against accusations of white supremacy.. maybe he has a point and is right to push back?

You are the first person to use the phrase "white supremacy" in this entire thread.

The article uses it.

Maybe I should have said "insinuations" rather than "accusations" to be fair to them.

It’s so many steps of association too. A blog is in a community that another writer was writing about when a prominent investor who is powerful yet notoriously controversial in a particular industry said bad things, therefore that industry and the blog are... well you know ;)

As to that second part...

>... 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?

It’s this one https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

He’s using him as an example to make another point - he could have just as easily used Hitler there or anyone else. Quite a stretch to call this an endorsement of any kind.

The first link is the endorsement, the second suggests he knew what he was endorsing.

> It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.

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.

Uh Scott also says he believes poverty is not a result of exploitation but culture or genetics soooooo

His arguments are always interesting to read, even when I disagree with them -- in that spirit, could you link to the essay where he says this?

Uh, he can believe whatever he wants on the matter, that doesn't make him a racist, sooooo....

When was it a "solved" finding that poverty is a result of exploitation? Or that culture and/or genetics don't also play a role, perhaps a big one?

That's how science works, by making hypothesis, examining things, and coming to conclusions, popular or not.

And a scientist/thinker is allowed to have different conclusions than others, if they can point to specific theories and numbers that support their thesis.

>Uh Scott also says he believes poverty is not a result of exploitation but culture or genetics soooooo

You sure he didn't say that poverty is part-hereditary rather than what you are saying?

First, most if not all of the left believe it is hereditary - rich people's kids staying richer and vice versa. Second, he definitely never says exploitation or culture do not come into it.