Statement on New York Times Article | Hacker News Reader

Statement on New York Times Article

astralcodexten.substack.com

866 pointsjger15411 comments

A great response, in my opinion. Succinctly and effectively points out what was wrong with the NYT article, then tries to move on. Somewhat more of a sober tone than Scott's typical writing, but still with a dash of his typical wit:

> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”

I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.

Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:

"WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

"List of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryp...

> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"]

I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.

Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example,

Q. What if I take too much?

A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.

This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.

Even as large as WebMD is, it would surprise me if they weren't using a third-party drug database to drive their public database. When I worked at a similar site, we used First DataBank [0], but there may be others too. The world of pharmaceuticals changes so rapidly that you need a small army of pharmacists and doctors scouring medical journals and materials from big pharma companies to keep your information up-to-date and it's just a lot easier to pay one of the dedicated companies that focus on that to do that work for you.

However it wouldn't surprise me if the NHS took on that task itself. Unlike WebMD, the NHS is also responsible for prescribing medications and would need to give their doctors and pharmacists up-to-date information, software and guidance for prescribing. Their scale and scope would allow them to take on this task in a way that makes less sense in the US system, where insurance providers, doctors, pharmacies and online health information are all separate entities with separate budgets/funding.

[0] https://www.fdbhealth.com/

The legal and financial situations are quite different. WebMD is a US publishing company and Americans sue for everything so it has to be careful. The UK legal system makes it much harder to sue for dumb stuff and the NHS isn't going to be bankrupted being government owned.

Or perhaps that the pressures against legible expertise are worse in the US?

I don't have any specifics handy, but over the years I've found a lot of information on webmd that is plainly false. Maybe it's better now, but I have been ignoring it for years and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Even Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a better source of medical information.

(To clarify, I'm not suggesting Wikipedia is a good source of medical information -- it's not. Often I find articles say one thing and the citation says the opposite. But in spite of that, it's a much better starting point than webmd, in my non-expert opinion).

They just have the best SEO.

Mayo Clinic can be a good resource, too.

I don't get it. Scott's response very clearly lays out the ways in which the NYT article was misleading--so clearly that it seems obvious that it was intentionally misleading. But to what end? What are the motivations driving NYT to try and create these poor associations with Scott and his writing? It seems a poor and short-sighted motivation for them to do this out of "revenge" for the bad press they got from the situation, it feels like there has to be something else going on here.

Rage clicks pay, shallow dismissals are easy to produce -- no time-consuming investigative journalism necessary.

Most important perhaps is that new media like Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the NYT. Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the Firm, 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing, paper distribution, subscriber and advertiser management. Essentially all of this is gone. What modern newspaper scale on is branding, and and selling influence, but this is in direct contradiction with strong journalists' interest (who do not like to be told by their editors what to write and how). Until recently, top journalists could not go alone, since they lacked the expertise to handle monetisation of their writing. This changed with the likes of Substack, which centralises (automates) subscriber management, and technical infrastructure, but without editorship. Hence, top writers are increasingly moving away from traditional newspapers to something like Substack, with Greenwald and Scott Siskind being two high-profile examples. They won't be the last.

Newspapers see the writing on the wall and fight back.

>What modern newspaper scale on is branding

Things like integrity and trust matter more than ever, so the idea that newspapers would jeopardize that to get back at a somewhat meaningless scoop is pathetic.

The time will soon come when we cannot trust anything we don't see with our own eyes, and we will then need to have a web of trust with reliable sources.

Newspapers can still capitalize on being a source of trust and truth, if they don't fuck it up.

Of course, the NYT is still pretty reliable on citations of fact, even if their slant is worse than it should be.

I don't know, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. I wonder if we can apply Hanlon's Razor[1] and say it was just a poorly researched article. If the author did some brief googling for things people have said about Scott and his blog, they'll find other people who have quoted him out of context. For the example of "feminists are voldemort", Scott did mention that he's been quoted out of context lots of times on that line so it should show up lots of time on the internet. It might have been a sloppy re-quote instead of original research. Maybe it wasn't so much a hit-piece as a reflection of the easy-to-find popular trends of discussion about Scott's writing. In that case the NYT piece was very irresponsible, but not really malicious.

Part of the reason I'm leading this way is because and the end of the day, Scott just doesn't seem important enough to the NYT to focus on for a hit piece. And even then it reads more like a condemnation of SV tech culture than it does as a condemnation of Scott (however unfair it was to him).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I take your point with regard to the economic incentives at play. But at the end of the day, it seems likely that the net effect of this article will be to drive more readers to the new Subspace blog? (A sort of Streisand effect.)

I have concluded that there's a fundamental conflict of interest between "mainstream" media like the New York Times and tech companies and people related to them. The former and the latter are competitors in the attention economy, and this manifests in substantial negative bias. I have observed this since the mid 2010s at least.

“Look at the evil ideas that people in the tech community are flirting with” is one more argument towards NYT’s overarching thesis that Tech is too powerful, doesn’t deserve its power, and must be smacked down.

It was misleading and unfair. But to understand it, you have to imagine yourself as a young, woke, sheltered person who went to a top private high school, a top college, and then got an internship and a job writing at the NY Times. To these people, there's only one correct world-view and anyone who even questions it, or thinks some truths are nuanced, is evil.

The only way to resolve the dissonance is to read Scott's work and the NYTimes article and see if they are talking about the same thing. Looks for things taken out of context, look for discussion at different levels etc...

Any potential community nexus that encourages sub-group-solidarity and class-unity is a threat to TPTB who maintain their power by encouraging us to view each other as potential threats to our various cultural/ethnic/gender/sexual/etc identities. It's Playstation-vs-Xbox playground mindset on a global scale. Ordo ab Chao.

> ConTracked: A proposed replacement for government contracting. For example, the state might issue a billion ConTracked tokens which have a base value of zero unless a decentralized court agrees that a bridge meeting certain specifications has been built over a certain river, in which case their value goes to $1 each. The state auctions its tokens to the highest bidder, presumably a bridge-building company. If the company builds the bridge, their tokens are worth $1 billion and they probably make a nice profit; if not, they might resell the tokens (at a heavily discounted price) to some other bridge-building company. If nobody builds the bridge, the government makes a tidy profit off the token sale and tries again. The goal is that instead of the government having to decide on a contractor (and probably get ripped off), it can let the market decide and put the risk entirely on the buyer.

This seems like a good idea.

The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.

Reminds me of a concept called dominant assurance contracts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_as...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A100495710953...

> Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy.

I'm glad that I wasn't the only one who thought so too, even though it was meant to be a bunch of joke alt-coin ideas.

I guess the only criticism could be, won't you end up with a bunch of half-built bridges eventually?

*oops* hadn't realized it was by the same author!

>This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn't. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated."

How I laughed out loud... Gold

Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts:

A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.

Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.

https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1360787817459253251

The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.

Jealousy is a dreadful and bitter motivator.

> Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience.

This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.

[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally

Can you point to any examples that you found particularly annoying?

"Against murderism" was the last time it came up, I think? In context I believe it was supposed to be anti-anti-Trumpism, or at least that you should talk to Trumpists more rather than deplatform them.

The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.

The NYT article[1] can hardly be called a hit piece at all, considering how little 'dirt' it actually contains.

What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.

Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!

The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.

Like... really?

I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.

It's essentially:

1. He deleted his blog.

2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.

3. He now has a new blog.

Cool story, NYT.

[1]: https://archive.is/b1tyQ

>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.”

This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".

The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.

In the McCarthy age guilt by association was "established" by calling someone a fellow traveler.

We are there again. The difference is that in the communist witch hunts at least there was a plausible external enemy.

This time it is all based on delusions, corporate global agendas and the need to stay relevant in one's bullshit job by "fighting" for some cause.

Thank you for the link to the NYT article. I completely agree with your reading.

Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.

Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again:

>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...

Thanks for including this link. I read the response before I read the NYT article. And while it was a pretty uninteresting article, the tactics used to obfuscate who holds what beliefs are laid bare. It's illuminating to see.

Part of the problem with journalism is they're expected to publish regularly, even when they have nothing to say.

The underlying point of the article is that a large number of tech leaders are rationalists, what is rationalism, what are they reading (the blog), and what does that mean for society.

My reading of the article was that it wasn't about Scott at all. It was about the comment sections on Slate Star Codex, the Rationalist community (which the general public knows very little about), and its connection to the centers of power in Silicon Valley.

If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.

The problem with reading it as a story not about Scott is that there's no reason to use his professional name except to cause him problems.

This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-...

It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for actual things you said years ago, now that’s not enough, they will go out of their way to form a narrative around you, whether the cap fits or not, in order to ostracise, they aren’t afraid to stretch the truth or outright lie. This is not unique to the NYT but it’s a concerning trend.

This is nothing new from them. The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.

Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization playing politics, just as it has been since 1851. I still mostly respect them because they tend to report facts accurately and mostly follow the ideal of journalistic integrity better than many other media outlets. But there are certain topics now, just as always, where their prevailing politics shines through loud and clear.

https://www.nytimes.com/1967/04/14/archives/dr-king-and-the-...

A publication can be politically titled to one side and still be factually accurate and stay true to journalistic integrity principles (or at least that's what I want).

With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible just 10 years ago.

In the case of NYT, their political tilt is very clear (that's ok) but their journalistic integrity is being called into question more and more (that's problematic).

Not sure tilted would be the correct way to describe it, more lopsided.

This seems to be contradictory. It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias? The NYT and others like it go out of their way to pretend they have no political bias, using the passive voice to give authority to slanted reporting which favours one "team" over another.

Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of its supporters repeatedly and falsely claim) that items described in the paper are more objective and carries greater weight than those in your average political party's weekly newsletter.

> Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians"

There is always "a side that benefits politically" from literally every statement. What is clear, irrespective of the side that benefits politically from stating it: the NYT is willing to use its influence to distort the political opinions of its readers, using innuendo and cherrypicked facts.

Those who look to the NYT (and The Washington Post) for accurate facts are literally (mis)guided into holding a specific political opinion, and defending that opinion even against facts that would rationally moderate that opinion.

I am as certain as stone that most people who read the NYT will forever associate Scott Alexander Siskind with white supremacy, conservatism, and anti-woke ideology because of that hit piece; for these people, this will be a fact. For them "Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from calling that article a 'hit piece'" is a statement that actually has meaning, and they will operate on that assumption. His Wikipedia page will be inundated with editors who insist that the NYT interpretation is "true" while Scott's blog is "opinion", and will dutifully and duly note these interpretations as facts onto his Wikipedia entry. For these people, reading and discussing Scott Alexander will be tantamount to supporting white supremacy, and so a whole encyclopedia of delightful, thoughtful inquiry will be foreclosed.

It is reprehensible, and I cannot in future take anyone who cites the NYT without caution as a serious person who actually understands their world.

This is similar to arguments I frequently make about the paper. The reason it has such standing as it does is because it was a mast of Northeast elite hedgemony. I mean this more in a sociological sense than in a true dynastic political sense. The Northeast had been thought for very long to have the best schools, culture, technology, leadership and values.

There was a time when that culture was not just dominant among elite circles but often revered by everyday people as something to live up to. As much as the 80s, 90s and on were seemingly about the decline of that power nexus, the institutions retained a lot of mystique and fascination.

That ideal of American life is in a tailspin. Norman Rockwell is more a punchline than a comfort to people. The nation's opinions aren't filtered through New York TV personalities any more.

The paper has weakend and that has allowed the social agreement about it to change. Before if you expressed a negative opinion about such a paper it was mostly washed away in a consistent wave of accolade. If disagreement always meets reproach it is hard for it to spread. Agreement is an innoculatiom against criticism.

I can see this. I'd like to read up more on it, any good sources?

> Northeast elite hedgemony

This. Housing associations in the Northeast are getting completely out of control. Whatever happened to people trimming their own hedges in the style they see fit?

> The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.

https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-rising-clamor-hadley/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

"The Agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers" v(._. )v

>It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians.

I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.

Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.

As someone who majored in journalism and who graduated in 2009, what most people consider traditional journalism has been slowly dying since at least the 07/08 crisis. They were already struggling due to not knowing how to properly handle the internet. Giving away content for free was a mistake made in the 90s that was proving impossible to claw back, and online ads were nowhere close to making up for the lost revenue from print ads (because, in a bit of news surprising no one, there's no real proof that online ads work).

Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.

Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-... is a great article about changes at NYTimes in the past few years.

> I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands.

This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.

There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.

One quite possible scenario is that this is the dying process of the "legacy media", as it gets replaced by... whatever comes next.

That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.

> Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.

They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.

I lost count of the number of times the NYT used the same numbers and switched from praising to blaming and back the Swedish corona startegy.

I want facts and information goddammit. Not a tearjerking drama to fill my inbox. I was already annoyed with the NYT before this incident. This just broke the camel's back. I unsubscribed.

> It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians

It'd say towards the end of it. And yes, it is a very bad and concerning trend.

There's a huge tension in the society caused by the wealth shift from individuals to corporations. As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.

The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirecting the tension between people and corporations into tension between artificially created identity groups. So far they are very successful at it. Plenty of people are so busy trying to ruin someone else's life, they completely don't notice the decline of their own long-term perspectives.

> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership

This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.

The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.

Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.

>The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.

It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.

>Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.

There's enough space in the U.S. to build new housing. Like nice 2000+ sqft houses with lots, owned by the people living there. If only a huge chunk of the economy wasn't tied to a few megacorporations located in a handful of cities. So instead, we keep fighting for a right to live in a rented 500sqft box with barely enough space to sleep.

>As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.

No, this is not "typical" of most cases, it is typical of millennials living in a small subset of property markets (DC, LA, SF, NYC) who have low earnings relative to their educational attainment + age but also a vastly disproportionate media influence. The delusion that the Ivy grad journo living in Brooklyn whose Twitter follower count is larger than their salary somehow reflects the voice of their generation is a huge problem.

> As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.

That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there?

In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will personally find you a wife if you don't have one, and will give you a raise if you have kids.

>That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist.

Except, with globalization, it's cheaper to import people from 3rd-world countries and then pay them just enough so that the current generation will keep doing its duties.

I'm a first-generation immigrant myself and I'm quite baffled at how unaffordable it is to raise 2+ kids and make sure their life quality will be similar to mine. It's almost like the expectation is that I won't do that because they will instead import those who were raised at a fraction of the cost elsewhere.

What I find noteworthy about this story is how contentious and weaponized have gender and race become. Out of the four negative claims, one accused Scott of racism and two accused him of of some variant of misogyny. The fourth associated him with some other form of non-pure thinking.

I am afraid things will get worse before they get better. I expect the trumpism/fascism wave will provoke unhealthy reaction and further chain-reaction. My personal lacmus paper is the use of "white male" label as an argument, which is not totally uncommon even here on HN.

The whole story background story is extremely alarming. NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered. This whole situation gives even more credence to the idea that decentralisation is the only way forward for mankind if we intend to preserve the liberties our ancestors enjoyed for the past 300 years.

> NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered.

I completely disagree. That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly. I think it was the wrong decision to publish his name, but it shouldn't be illegal. Like it or not, Scott has become a fairly important intellectual given who his readers are (and may I say, completely deservedly so).

> That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly

Not really. Doxxing someone mostly leads to harm. Anyone that was on the internet in the early days knows this, these days it's worse because the mobs that attack you aren't just doing mindless trolling, they're seeking something more intrinsic.

I look at it as in defense of free speech. That said, I don't generally believe in total anonymity. I believe in PGP style pseudo anonymity. With someone's real name you can attack their friends, family, and the place they live. With an online identity you can attack their ideas and if you're one of these people that enjoys grey areas you can attack their platform. That, to me, seems more fair.

While I don't think the NYT had a strong reason to reveal Scott's real name, it's absurd to say that newspapers shouldn't "reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes" in the general case.

As the saying goes, journalism means printing things that certain people don't want published, and everything else is PR. Journalists are supposed to reveal things against the subject's wishes.

As the

Can you articulate a coherent framework for how and why an American news publication should be prohibited from revealing legally obtained true information about the leader of a large, popular, or otherwise noteworthy community?

I haven’t thought up a framework, but one thing I’m wondering is why the identity of the person alone is newsworthy.

I’m probably missing part of the background here, I’m new to the controversy. Did some kind of mystery arise around the true identity of the author? Your comment implies that NYT obtained the true identity of the author through legal means — how exactly did they do that?

I don’t think finding out the identity of someone who wishes to remain anonymous is, in itself, sufficiently newsworthy to overcome the privacy interests of the individual. I also wonder if this story has a more interesting angle buried in it about the complexities of identity in the internet age: the author of the blog achieved notoriety, but in some ways that character is distinct from the physical person living their life and doing their job. The NYT wanted to publish a link between those two personas over their objection. Why should they be able to if the story can be written in a way that doesn’t?

Consider someone like... Satoshi, of bitcoin. The character has achieved this powerful notoriety and managed to remain anonymous. Do people want to know which person on the planet created that persona? Sure; do they need to know, is the identity alone newsworthy without some reason to need to publish it?

Honestly I tend to say no. That’s just... gossip, isn’t it? How is knowing a different name to associate with the character going to enrich and inform me in any way?

Examples where I think revealing the identity might be of substance: - suppose someone committed crimes to keep their identity secret - suppose government officials intervened to help them remain anonymous - suppose the person turns out to BE a powerful government official

[edit: to add last example]

Prohibited? They shouldn't be, any more than they should be prohibited from replacing their logo to a swastika. We have freedom of speech, and that's important. If the government tried to go after NYT for a swastika logo, I'd be 100% on the side of the NYT; free speech should be legal even if I disagree with it.

On the other hand, I'd never visit NYT again, and I think most of the population would do likewise.

This isn't as extreme, but events like this should cause the general public to adjust their views of NYT. This shouldn't be a cancel-culture style slander, but simply starting to treat NYT as a random tabloid which makes stuff up for clicks.

NYT ran a hit piece on Larry Lessig too.

I won't because I'm neither American nor a lawyer, but I will answer your question.

The person in question wanted to remain anonymous for good reasons, they didn't consent to have their true identity revealed and yet a powerful news corp decided to do that anyway, clearly in bad faith and for their own gain, violating that person's and their relatives' privacy. It's obvious the aim was to incite verbal violence against and "cancel" that man because he committed the heinous crime of wrongthink.

They should absolutely be allowed to reveal legally obtained true information about people's identities, but the vital 'legally' part of the process should encompass said people's consent.

If I start a blog that sees some success, and avoid using my full name in order to protect my privacy, then I obviously don't want my full name linked to my blog and I don't see why random businesses should be allowed to doxx me for the sake of some ad revenue.

Just imagine the zoom conversations the NYT had to have had with each other to publish this article, and it was approved.

Couldn't agree more. If there's one thing the last 5 or so years should teach us is that newspeak isn't a language, it's the entire technological communications apparatus of the West.

Weaponized is the correct word. The word "racist" is morphing into a racial slur. It's now just a bludgeon to shut up someone with the wrong views. I believe this comes from the idea that the only possible way to be moral is to wield power by any means necessary because you're right and "they" are evil.

This has been used for years, but only recently became weaponized.

I can recall in the early 80s, going to ACT UP meetings in NYC, we'd have random people come in and raise crazy issues about "racism" like "the word 'gay' is racist! You need to say 'queer'!"

Often these people who came to throw a monkey-wrench into meetings weren't gay men; they were just old-school Greenwich Village agitators. Their tactics work and have been mainstreamed.

And, additionally, the same tactics were called "mostly peaceful" by the news media (until the other side followed suit, of course).

As an Indian, I'd say this kind of "SJW" rhetoric serves no purpose other than causing a reactionary change -- of more normal people favoring extreme right wing instead, and leaving a bad impression about the total social justice thing.

The other alternative is to be independent. No tribe. Or you can be in a tribe, but as a critic and reformer. (Well, some tribes allow you to criticize them. Not the modern GOP.)

Do you think the NYT tribe allows criticism or non-orthodoxy to exist? They encourage certain “criticism” exist to be sure, but only so far as it reënforces their prestige, to be reflexively believed and turned to as authoritative.

Not an option anymore: you're either with us or against us.

This article is actually an excellent example of this in action: by any objective standard SSC was a pretty liberal blog, but the NYT cherrypicked 4 quotes from 1700+ articles where he dared to deviate from dogma and used them to paint him a Nazi.

How about joining the American tribe? Wouldn't that be something?

It sure will happen in Europe because people here are not really ashamed to admit they are sick and tired of that American 'justice' bullying. The only hope for America is when slightly more intelligent character than Trump suppress their political gains to put end to this madness.

As a white person from a poor post communist country with no colonial history (99.999% white) I cringe when some local SJW parrots the "white privilege" agenda. It just makes no sense in large parts of the world other than US.

The NYT abusing these kinds of allegations in a hit piece doesn't say anything about whether such claims can are "contentious and weaponized".

Hit pieces latch on current topics. In the 1950s, the NYT would have had invented ties to communists. Or, if possible, hit pieces often imply corruption or paedophilia. That doesn't necessarily mean that corruption or paedophilia are topics that are "contentious" or related to "pure thinking".

I feel like the NYT used to be more credible and run fewer hit pieces. I'm not trying to argue zero, by any means, but I feel like in a very short time -- basically the past 4-8 years -- they've gone from one of the most credible source of media to where I trust them as much as I do Fox News (and I read both, as well as a number of international news sources, to have a complete picture).

This sort of stuff seems to be their modus operandi now.

The NYT lost credibility for me when they endorsed the Iraq War in 2003. I have been very vocal about their credibility ever since, even though I agree with some of their journalism.

Your heroes will disappoint you. Even the NYT have traded their credibility for clicks, I mean “engagement.”

I avoid both NYT and Fox, because it's too much effort to fact check every detail of every article I read. Both have too high an error-to-fact ratio IMO. That sort of thing has a way of affecting one's thought.

To be fair, in the U.S., gender and race have been weaponized against women and minorities for a long time.

True more or less everywhere in the world, and does not make attempts to apply it in a different direction any better.

Seriously, WTF is going on with NYT. I think something has seriously gone off the deep end with their newsroom, but I feel like it must be so culturally ingrained in their newsroom now that even questioning some basic assumptions will get one vilified as a racist or sexist.

One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...

Now, I can certainly understand, and consider valid, the arguments both for and against capitalizing Black. However, the decision to capitalize Black, but not White, is completely non-sensical to me, as is NYT's bizarre 1 sentence explanation in that article: "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups." What? They don't even try to give any argument behind "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does", which reads like a poorly researched high school English paper. And the fact that some bad people have decided to capitalize White is their rationale that it must be lower-cased?

If anything, the top comments in response to that article make a hell of a lot more sense than the NYT's decision itself. I'll also note that many other news organizations, like the Washington Post and CNN, have decided to capitalize both Black and White, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post...

It seems very and crudely racist to assume all black people have a shared culture, in the same way assuming two black people must be related, would be.

I'm stealing this point from Twitter, but Africa is the most diverse continent on Earth - culturally, linguistically, even genetically. There are 250 ethnic groups within Nigeria alone, most of which have little in the way of shared language or culture, and had even less before colonists drew a circle around them and insisted they were a single nation. How on Earth does it make sense to say that all black people have a shared culture, especially if you simultaneously insist that white people don't?

It’s just obviously untrue too.

You may find this philosophy bizarre, and I agree, but it's important to understand that it doesn't come from nowhere; it's been brewing in academia for decades and is spreading into the mainstream at alarming speed. I highly recommend learning more about "critical race theory" if you want to understand why what many now call "neoracism" is gaining so much traction within our elite institutions.

> "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does"

To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."

The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.

A stereotype is a negative amplification of facets of a group's culture. You can find stereotypes of white Americans everywhere, from /r/whitepeopletwitter to the movie Undercover Brother(great movie btw). The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.

> One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper

Interesting also that the overwhelming majority of the readers who commented on the article itself seem to find it pure nonsense. It's somewhat telling when a newspaper stubbornly keeps serving its readers one specific opinion which they keep refusing to subscribe to. You would expect a news outlet to publish a diversity of opinions centered around their readership's average- roughly half of the readers will be challenged every time. But what's the point in consistently presenting an opinion all your readership rejects? Who are you serving exactly?

Normalizing it for future generations. Once you grow up in a world where you only ever see Black capitalized but white not, it will feel natural to you, just like capitalizing the President is. (Not done in some languages like mine.)

In terms of Black/white, the tipping point from “good faith” to “performative” was this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/arts/television/lupin-net...

It’s a good article, and largely innocuous, and it uses “Black” to describe a (fictional) French man in France.

As a non-native English speaker and European, I find these "minor language tweaks" pure distraction. I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone -- like many European countries already do. One could also enforce more wage transparency to fight systematic salary discrimination. But it's so much cheaper to capitalize one letter.

white Black

There! Now everyone knows I am actively fighting discrimination and it costs me zero.

> I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone

In fairness I'm not sure the New York Times really has the authority to do that.

> white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does

I have always found such statements to be... Observationally stunted. Without referencing my own beliefs at all, I go to Reddit and on the front page is see posts from /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/WhitePeopleTwitter. If there is no such thing as white culture, what do people post in the second subreddit?

This is shameful, and the second time this month NYT puts out such a shameful piece (the first time was the JetBrains/ Solarwinds article). I guess this should be enough to disregard everything NYT will write, and stop reading them.

Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott deleting the blog, and this is still the piece they decided to go with. It's a bit hard to trust the NYT's integrity..

Third time if you include the bizarre Ayaan Hirsi Ali hit piece too.

I guess it's a product of actual-journalism not paying the bills.

No, it's a product of the ideological drivel the NYT chose to embrace, identity politics. Not all news outlets are like that.

It became obvious with the literal journalist purge going on there. You can't be a moderate and work there anymore, you have to subscribe to a certain thought framework, if you question it, you're deemed "offensive" and you're out.

What about spiking the Bret Stephens piece about the controversy over the science reporter who was fired? That was this month as well.

I recently dropped my NYT sub; jetbrains nonsense was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I know it's a meme to bring up Gell-mann amnesia here, but I will raise it as a basic test for quality in journalism.

When NYT writes about something I know about, I almost always have serious problems with it. Jetbrains in particular. And honestly some of the writing is so bad that even without knowing about the subject, I can tell it is crap, like the article about the SlateStarCodex. I had never read it before that post, but had heard it mentioned in passing. Also, NYT Opinion is Hannity/Shapiro level crap and should be dumped. Stick to the facts please.

On the other hand, The Economist has consistently impressed me; I read/listen with a critical ear and they do a wonderful job even with very niche topics. I've worked on some AR tech and they had a special report that just really nailed it and got into the weeds. Every time I thought "but they didn't mention..." they would mention or clarify a paragraph later.

Economist has a liberal viewpoint and they're not shy about it. I prefer that approach and accept that I disagree with the conclusions/advice from time to time, but the facts are right and error corrections are almost always very minor in nature.

There is good journalism out there, just maybe not from NYT. Please don't give up hope.

Yeah, the Jetbrains article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-...) was just too over-the-top conspiracy fluff. It’s sad to see some liberals critiquing QAnon and then immediately eating any kind of Russian conspiracy shit without any doubt.

It's not really. SolarWind uses a JetBrains component as a critical piece of infrastructure in the government which may have basically been built by Russia. Now maybe everything is above board but JetBrains does employ developers in Russia and was originally a Russian company. We don't run Kaspersky in the government either.

More to the point this should never have happened.

I wonder if anyone has done a kind of scientific/statistical study of the whole gell-man amnesia idea?

Could you discuss in a bit more detail what you might want from such a study? My first guess was simply that you want a newspaper to be fact-checked from beginning to end.

The times is very pessimistic on tech, largely I believe because they're upset about being run over by google/facebook. It's definitely unfortunate, but the future of journalism is really not bright at all. No one is willing to pay for unbiased news, so you need to find a niche to attract people or churn out clickbait. The times has found their niche as technocrat skeptics.

> No one is willing to pay for unbiased news

I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.

But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.

Nikkei = FT. The FT has... interesting politics, and seems far more progressive than anyone would expect, although considering the cost of a subscription it's also a fairly exclusive crowd.

WSJ and Economist are hardly unbiased. (IMO The Economist is essentially a straightforward neoliberal pro-Gilded Age propaganda outlet, and always has been.)

The NYT has always been 'dodgy' as we say in the UK. I remember finding their op-eds clownishly stupid when I first started encountered them back in the 00s, and they don't seem to have improved since then.

But there's been a shift to woke since then. And the problem with woke is that so often it operates on the level of personal witch hunts and straightforward public bullying - which makes it depressingly close to its equivalent on the far right, but without the insane weapon fetish.

You can argue that sometimes this is justified. And sometimes - as with Weinstein, etc - it is. But it's harder to support it when it becomes an exercise in tokenism and tribal identity.

It's interesting how often woke goes after individuals deemed guilty of alleged bad-think and how rarely it goes after egregious corporate behaviour. Or even how rarely it mobilises to destroy the careers of politicians who act in unconscionable ways.

> No one is willing to pay for unbiased news

http://Ground.news is a startup that's attempting to falsify that hypothesis. I hope they succeed.

I don't trust any mainstream news other than local because it all seems like either propaganda or theater. In my opinion, NYT and The Washington Post are the two most despicable out there.

They also outed a Chinese Twitter maker a few years ago. Or maybe that was vice and the reporter now works at nyt. I don't remember except that nyt these days is lame.

That was vice, and it involved outed details about the makers family members, her relationship status, and her sexual orientation.

Yes but at some point the nytimes was also involved I thought.

That was Naomi "SexyCyborg" Wu, and it was Vice, not the NYT: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3100274...

I have never read the blog, or have any positive or negative association with it, but after all the attention this story has garnered, I just read both the NYT article and Mr. Siskind's response.

The main takeaway from the NYT article is that there is a group of people in whose writings/blog comment sections/etc racists/sexists have found a home, and his is one of them. He does not address this assertion, or what the root cause may be if it is true, or if it is not true, why not. This is the whole point of 1, 3 and 4 in his statement but he does not address it.

As to the only concrete point he addresses (point 2), he does something that is dishonest. He wrote (pre-edit):

> "blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort“"

and then claimed it's taken out of context. I read the whole article, especially the surroundings carefully to see if there was any context as to which could change the meaning of what he wrote here, but there is none. This simply states that there is a thin line between feminism and evil. If you believe that, then don't delete it. But if you don't, don't tell the reader it's taken out of context, just admit you made a mistake in writing this, or you have changed your mind despite this was what you believed when you wrote the article.

So there are 4 points in the rebuttal, 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best. I am not impressed.

A while back I mentioned to my mother that I had been to a "reddit meet up" and my mother, predictably, had never heard of reddit. Later, reddit made the news, I forget exactly what for, but in was the category of harboring child pornographers, racists, or nude celebrity photos. What I did remember is hoping my mother didn't see this news article and conclude that I was out meeting with racist pedophiles.

The thing is, it's not wrong to say that pedophiles and such use reddit. They do, in the same way they use phones, TVs, and cars. It's not an apt description though, if someone asks you what reddit is, to talk about the racism and hate and what not. The reason being is that the bad stuff isn't the typical reddit experience and doesn't describe the whole thing well.

In Scott's post he gives the example of the Wizard of Oz review (girl goes to a surreal landscape, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again). Maybe it's technically true, but it's not an apt description. It doesn't really capture what the movie is like.

Where I'm going with this is: maybe you can find neo-reactionary or pro-eugenics or racist comments on the blog. I don't recall any examples of horrible comments from the NYT but maybe they are there. Maybe you can find a line or two, like the "feminists are Voldemort" that seem bad and worse outside of context. That's not really what the blog is about though and in a newspaper article describing it probably shouldn't zero in on minor blemishes or debatable flaws and use them as the main focus. Wasn't this supposed to be about Silicon Valley's Safe Space, or getting into the zeitgeist of the "rationalists"? How did the NYT article even attempt to do that? To my reading the NYT was just focused on complaining about the "problematic" aspects and nothing else.

I think it's fair to talk about problematic comments on a blog but it's not fair to act like problematic comments or loose associations to objectionable figured are the main thing when they really aren't.

Regarding your point about the feminists and Voldemort, if memory serves Scott was referring to a specific group of feminists and not likening all feminists to Voldemort. That's not really the impression I got from the NYT though.

Specifically about the feminist point:

The quote is explicitly only about "people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them". (https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...)

This leads to several keys questions: Are all feminist such people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them?

The second question is, are all people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them feminist?

The third question is if this definition of "nice guy" is the informal term or the sarcastic meaning, and how useful either are to describe a psychology profile or human male stereotype?

The fourth question is if a discussion around "nice guy" stereotype of either profile is of strategist benefit to goals of some feminist theory, and then which ones?

I fully understand your point re reddit, but I think a single person's blog is different than that. A blog is like a book and reddit is like a bookstore if you will, if you go to a bookstore selling a book that racists read that is not concerning to me (wrongly concerning to your mom as you said), but if you bought the book in question (even if non/anti-racists read it too) I would be concerned if I were your mother - just to make sure you are not aligned with them.

I am not saying this is the case (as I have no connection with the blog), but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great (which is the main takeaway I got from the article), that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there, and Mr. Siskind does not do that. If the claim is bogus, then the claim is bogus, but Mr. Siskind does not refute that they are attracted to his blog.

As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.

It's amusing to watch HN lose its collective shit over the NYT article, which I believe you succinctly and correctly summarize.

This is the highest rated top level post that presents any degree of skepticism at all in Scott's rebuttal, below pages of anger against the NYT "hit." So much for that quality, rationalist examination of the facts. As somebody who read both his blog and HN throughout its run, I find the NYT article on the money.

Scott's own cowardice about revealing his real name is incredibly telling, too. So long as he remained anonymous the NYT actually respected his wishes and buried the story, while this champion of free speech refused to stand behind his own words publicly and lamented the abuse of the MSM coming to dox him. Now that the checks are coming in, he seems to have no problem, though.

My advice to you, dear HN, is to take a look in the mirror. This isn't a hit piece and Scott isn't a saint. If you believe his long winded rants have merit, you should also believe they stand on their own, and you should welcome the scrutiny.

Your characterization of point 1, at least, makes no sense to me. All the NYT article says on that point is:

I don't understand why you would say it is dishonest to dissect that paragraph and point out that Scott agreed with Murray on something non-racist, and quoted a racist statement without agreeing with it. Scott is not agreeing with "The Bell Curve" and Scott has not said that he believes that black people are "genetically less intelligent than white people.” Before defending yourself against such accusations it would be wise to point out that they are baseless, and of course it's much wiser to leave it at that.

Just to clarify, when I said

> 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best

I meant counts of points, i.e., three of them not addressing the issue (points 1,3,4) and one dishonest (point 2) - reasons above. So dishonesty was not related to point 1, sorry if it reads like that.

To further elaborate for 1,3, and 4; I don't contend with his explanations - but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.

Had I not been prepped by reading about the controversy here on HN, I wouldn't have guessed that the NYT article was a hit piece. On the other hand, had I not noticed that the article came from the NYT, I wouldn't have guessed that it wasn't just another blog.

Lots of blogs praise one another while also including disagreements and disclaimers that they don't fully believe their own writing, much less the writing of others. But they consider the articles to be worth reading anyway.

Some of my opinions are unpopular and may even make people uncomfortable. So I admit with trepidation that I still like the NYT and will continue to subscribe.

I laughed out loud at this paragraph, and it's such a perfect example of why I love Scott's writing.

At the end of the day, whatever slimey hatchet jobs the NYT chooses to run, Scott's still an enormously influential, successful and respected figure, and most of the hacks who write these terrible hit pieces or support them can only dream of gaining 1% of the admiration Scott's earned. Envy's a cruel mistress, and if the price to pay for success is that bitter haters take misjudged pot shots at you which achieve little except to reveal their own securities... well, I haven't achieved enough success myself to know for certain that the price is worth paying, but I'd pick Scott's life over Cade Metz's any day of the week.

Keep up the good work, Scott. You're doing great things, you matter, and you're winning - three things that can't be said for Cade Metz.

The wizard of Oz humorous reference is from

https://ew.com/article/2012/10/26/wizard-of-oz-movie-descrip...

I think many people are aware of it, or were in 2012.

I wonder whether the intended endpoint of this tactics is widespread deplatforming - e.g. support for vaporizing anyone who can be guilted-by-association in the same way that Scott Alexander is in this article. If Scott's reputation is groomed to be cancelable, anyone's is.

>I wonder whether the intended endpoint of this tactics is widespread deplatforming

Isn't this obviously the case? The "Grey Tribe" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...) and its "Dark Enlightenment" fellow travelers associated with SV is commonly targeted activist media orgs. The goal is to hobble the grey tribe's narratives by allowing woke mobs to say that they're based in cryptofascism and white supremacy. This has already been partially successful and probably just needs a few more big pushes to get to the point that we can start firing people from tech jobs for publicly saying that they like Scott's posts.

Scott didn't come up with that joke.

The piece was bad. After all the time they had to work on it, it was a lazy hack job that normally wouldn't make the cut at the NYT. It is a sign of the days we live in when a Mean Girls style burn book page makes it into what used to be the paper of record.

You’re not kidding. It’s surprising how bad it is, and that’s after reading all these comments saying how bad it is. It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.

> It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.

This is a great summation.

To me it reads like the best attempt the journalist could pull off at writing a hit piece against some guy who just started a low cost medical practice, and has never actually done anything bad in his life. A whole lot of vague insinuations and guilt by association.

If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this was Metz's way to tell himself that he is a better person than this guy trying to make psychiatric care more accessible, just because he might disagree on some political issues.

This is well said. The article is so weak and poorly laid out its like listening to a bad pop song through cheap speakers. It doesn’t even have a proper closing. Just ends abruptly.

I think the closing was effective in what it was going for: implying that this has all been a "grift." The abruptness is intended to leave the reader with a reverberating final note in their mind. "$250,000... $250,000..."

Seemed fine to me, not negative in the slightest. Today's internet is not the same as Ender's Game. You don't get to become popular while remaining anonymous. Only the politburo can do that.

Wow, the NYT's actions on this one really made my blood boil. I don't even know how to process this... they typically put out reasonably high quality journalism that I read and enjoy on a regular basis. And then... this. They completely went beserk, like little children, with their heads firmly up their rears despite everything everyone begging them to keep Scott Alexander anonymous to preserve his profession and blog.

They lost literally hundreds of subscriptions (at least $20k worth). Yet they remained so stubborn... so closed to dialogue, and put out their little shitpiece. Can somebody reasonable explain why they would do such a thing? I don't care much for the 'liberal MSM' theories, I just wanna know what was in it for them. It makes no sense. Does it reflect on the entire newspaper to the point where I should stop reading it?

Consider that you know a lot about this topic and are disgusted by their handing of it. Consider that this might not be an outlier, and you may not be outraged by their handling of other topics simply because you know a bit less about them.

I don't know if this is true for you, but I've found it to be true for me. It took a good deal of time researching and revisiting to realize.

Yeah, the NYT was never perfect, but in the past few years it has declined sharply. There are still few other organizations as credible, but that's more of an indictment of the news media than it is praise of the New York Times.

Every NYT article should be read extremely critically. The story selection should be viewed critically. People will say this was always true, and sure, in an ideal sense, but I mean that you will very, very often find paragraphs that consists of five factual sentences chained together and cleverly worded in such a way as persuade you of something absolutely untrue or for which is there is no evidence. You'll find NYT repeating "facts" they reported early on, and then themselves debunked. And of course, the plague of "anonymous" sources (sometimes these anonymous sources are just, literally, the PR department saying 'report this anonymously so it seems like a leak) that have their own agendas and which tell the NYT BS over and over, but somehow still get an airing.

This has increasingly happened with topics I know about over the past five years at accelerating rate. [If you want to be uncomfortable, consider noticing this repeatedly is part of what has driven half of the US mad.]

An interjection here. Not directly related to the NYT article, just your comment.

I feel the entire US has "gone mad". I'm a Canuck, and US and Canadian politics don't 'mesh'. So whenever I've spoken to Americans over the decades, often their politics make little sense, don't align, seem cogent to me. This, of course, I consider normal for a non-local such as myself.

However over the last decade or so, I've noticed that the "two sides" in the US now each turn into gibbering mad lunatics when you discuss certain topics. Prior, I could at least discuss topics, without enraged foaming-at-the-mouth type of responses.

IMO both sides have gone entirely, and completely mad. Politics in the US now seems to have lost all capability to talk to "the other side", and instead transitioned into immutable lines drawn in the sand, adopted with the logic often employed with religion, taken as gospel and truth merely for tribal sake.

It's almost like the death of religion, has transition that same unyielding faith-only, non-empirically backed up logic into politics. On both sides. As if the US psyche requires some faith based belief system as the central core of its existence.

Alternatively, it just could be endless whispers from external, hostile nations... designed to create endless turmoil and the eventual downfall of the US empire. Which, to me, is quite sad.

edit:

To highlight what I mean here... "talking points". In the past, I could have real, meaningful discussions with Americans about political topics.

I'd "say things", and they'd say things back, and we'd have a conversation about a specific political stance. Now, this has devolved into almost everyone, whether left or right, having "talking points". Most often, these talking points have not even been examined by those I'm talking to.

They are simply repeated, without the speaker even having thought of what it means, or even able to debate that position with any clarity.

And again, this is "both sides".

It's like each is merely repeating words from a "holy book", and heresy is the result if one diverges. It's like each side has a Pope, which issues edicts, and even if it doesn't make sense, the duty is to repeat, obey, and try to find wisdom in the words one must follow.

No longer politics. Religion.

Hence my take -- madness.

I pretty much fully agree. I started noticing about five years ago that some people I knew for years were sometimes writing and talking in a way that was essentially gibberish to me. Now it has spread and become sort of what you describe even with old friends. I sometimes cannot even just state what I see with my own eyes without triggering the madness. It's like a decentralized psychological breakdown which I am witnessing from abroad. My phrase "half of the US" was a bit tongue and cheek. Pick your half. [Edit: just to engage the point about religion. It now seems to me that national politics in America is a religion. And maybe this was always and must be the case---if you read the founding documents and follow the early development. What is happening now looks like a potential schism. Staring at the other person and not understanding the words is what a schism looks like. No longer in communion.]

Babylon 5, season 2, episode Geometry of Shadows. The Drazi civil war between green and purple factions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxds-Co7G1Q

Interestingly, politics in Poland, a rapidly de-religionizing country, seem to follow the same trend, even though it is a very homogeneous country otherwise.

The simplest answer might be that the people running NYT have big egos and can make stubborn emotional decisions when their egos are threatened. I think it’s a point to consider when evaluating what’s published but not necessarily a reason to write off the paper entirely and as you said, not a political media conspiracy.

You can play a fun game with this snippet from the NYT article. You can replace the word "Rationalists" with the name of any group at all and the resulting statement seems vaguely true due to the imprecise nature of the language.

> Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.

"Republicans" and "Democrats" and "college students" and "Californians" all work, etc.

That's also a pretty bad definition of effective altruism. For how much they spout "do the most good" you'd think the author could just use that?

The whole thing is bizarre. The author has been working on this piece for something like 10 months now, and he can't get a basic definition of EA right? I saw a hot take on twitter that Metz deliberately did a bad job because he didn't actually want to write a hit piece and his superiors forced him into it.

Reading the NYT piece was mortifying.[1] They were my primary source of all things news and then published this strange hit that's just... off base. They were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive. How can a reliable news source write an article like that? Why throw your reputation down the toilet for what seems like a grudge?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...

The Times has a long history. There was the WMD scandal where Judith Miller credulously wrote about the Bush administration’s lies on Iraq.

Then in the 2016 election the NYT had a front page spread implying major scandal regarding Clinton’s emails. This probably cost Clinton the election.

https://www.vox.com/2017/12/7/16747712/study-media-2016-elec...

I could come up with more examples but the times have a very clear slant, much more marked than say the washington post. The NYT produces good reporting too but they can produce some real garbage.

I could have sworn the times wrote a really bad article about islam in London but can’t find it.

> The Times has a long history.

Some of it is featured in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)

"The film presents and illustrates Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model thesis that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination of the history of The New York Times' coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky says exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticize an ally of the elite."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent_(film)

> Then in the 2016 election the NYT had a front page spread implying major scandal regarding Clinton’s emails. This probably cost Clinton the election.

I didn't realize James Comey worked at the Times.

// hey were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive.

You probably have heard of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" but in case not, it really explains a lot:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. ... Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect... you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page ... and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read"

That's just happened to you - you read a story you happened to already know the ground truth on and it struck you as obviously wrong. If you had an equivalent background in other stories, you'd be seeing this kind of falseness everywhere.

I have examples too numerous to cite of matters I knew well (eg: companies/industries I worked in, wealthy people I happened to know, countries/cultures/conflicts I studied or experienced first hand) that were covered completely backwards in the Times and other media.

Like: good employers characterized as horrible. Military conflict response characterized as provocation. Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.

A century ago, Times had whitewashed Stalin in a way that anyone who knew Russia would have instantly recognized as false. So I doubt the times was ever not "Fake News" it's just that it was so much harder to see it back then when your newspaper was how you knew anything.

Hence my frustration with the relentlessy inept articles across the MSM about the 737MAX crisis. Aviation Week's coverage was the only one that was even remotely credible.

BTW, if you're interested in the facts, this report should help:

2018 - 035 - PK-LQP Final Report http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/ntsc_aviation/baru/2018%20-%20...

If you want to argue with me, I'll just cite that report :-)

Social-media is to main-stream-media as printing-press was to crown-church preachings a few 100 years ago.

// Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.

I actually want to explain what I meant here and what opened my eyes to this big-time.

Background: I am a dual (EU/US) citizen and care about both a lot. In 2016 I voted for Clinton and had the typical attitude towards Trump that you'd expect from a liberal New Yorker.

In early 2017, Trump was in the news for having said offensive/alienating things to our European allies. I was outraged and worried because this fit the narrative of him selling us out to Russia.

Until I chanced to watch the actual speech - what I heard was affirming and comforting for someone who cares about NATO and totally opposite of how it was presented.

The subsequent 4 years, this pattern repeated over and over - I'd watch the administration consistently make geopolitical moves against Russia and its allies (Iran being the crystalizing example) while the news kept telling me he was Putin's bitch.

I came out of this experience with a complete lack of belief in how things are presented in the media, which is a radical departure from my stance as a literate liberal New Yorker just 4 years prior.

If the clock strikes thirteen times, you don't just question the last strike, you must doubt the previous twelve too, even if they sounded reasonable before.

I suggest that perhaps you just have not had as much knowledge about previous hit pieces as you had about this one. The NYT did this to Jordan Peterson and no doubt others. They are completely morally bankrupt and do not deserve anyone's trust.

Several months ago, people were saying that the Times was probably going to write a sympathetic piece. But they wrote a hitpiece. So, one wonders: Did the NYT write a hitpiece because of Scott's reaction -- deleting his blog, calling on his readers to send angry emails to NYT, etc -- or was it going to be a hitpiece from the beginning?

Scott's thermonuclear reaction seems justified now. But back then, some comments here convinced me that "They probably weren't going to write a hitpiece. Why would they do that?"

But we were wrong. So I'm wondering why we thought they'd do anything else.

Well here is an intelligent guy who writes long-form pieces that are fairly influential within a sector of society that is small, but also relatively powerful. But he's not aligned to the NYT ideological agenda. Of course it was gonna be a hit piece, no question about it IMHO.

So I may have come at this backwards- I read Scott's rebuttal and then read the NYT peice. No offence to Scott but I think he's got this all wrong. The NYT piece isn't about Scott, it's just a writing gimmick. The article is about the self-styled rationalists, Scott is just an entry point to open the discussion around these group of people. It's not trying to tie Scott to Thiel, it's describing the pantheon of people who move in this world, and it is a world, these people don't all agree on one thing, although they do fall into a sort of groupthink on some topics.

For example, almost every group likes to find a reason to think of itself as somehow better and more evolved than the outsiders, which is essentially exactly what you see with the people who frequent these groups. The rationalists think they're better than the NYT, largely because they look down on examining the world as it is, rather than inventing the world from first principles (in my view a key to the IQ debate between Harris & Klein).

There are genuine critiques to be made of the "rationalists" (let's just accept the label as a term for the group of people having discussions in and around Scott's blog). I don't think the NYT is particularly making any. It is quite clear to me however, that the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism and is entirely unwilling to actually debate the value of their approach with people who aren't already bought in to the appraoch. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone either from the Red tribe or the Blue tribe to say to the Grey tribe - "Sorry, but you can't be indifferent on the topics that you claim to be indifferent on". And the argument that the liberal end of the spectrum uses mob tactics seems rather... bizarre when made by an author who quite literally brags about the mob he stirred up against the NYT.

I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it - especially with anyone they've decided who isn't part of their Tribe.

>The NYT piece isn't about Scott, it's just a writing gimmick. The article is about the self-styled rationalists, Scott is just an entry point to open the discussion around these group of people.

Do you think Scott actually disagrees with this? Regardless of whether it's a hit piece on Scott or rationalists more broadly, he realizes that if he gets cancelled or otherwise has his livelihood impacted then it impacts the rationalist community as well. I mean, maybe someone with better anonymity would step up to fill his intellectual niche, but it would still representment a blow to the movement.

>The rationalists think they're better than the NYT, largely because they look down on examining the world as it is

Weird complaint, and one that I don't think you'd find many rationalists ascribing to. I'm not sure what the non-strawman version of this claim is supposed to be here though. That rationalists don't bother to check their theories against reality enough? According to whom?

>I don't think it's unreasonable for someone either from the Red tribe or the Blue tribe to say to the Grey tribe - "Sorry, but you can't be indifferent on the topics that you claim to be indifferent on".

You can say that, it's how you attack the other tribe that matters. Hence the Wizard of Oz analogy in Scott's post. Attempts at showing that they Grey Tribe really is the Red Tribe or is somehow empowering them against shared Grey/Blue values need to rely on more than observing that the Grey Tribe is less enthusiastic about cancelling the Red Tribe.

I think you have the right lens.

This is "blue tribe member discovers existence of grays, and denounces them as not true blues".

Blue tribe be wary, the grays are among us and can be hard to tell apart. At first glance they often look like us, believe many of the "right" things. But something is... off?

How can we spot grays? Well, grays (as almost the definition of their in-group) are supposed to value the substance of an argument more than appearances so if you say something nonsensical about, for example, race, you can smoke them out if they don't uncritically agree with you like a proper blue should. They can't help themselves! These optically challenged idiots will try to do _math_ on what you said, or something equally silly. It's perfect.

A side benefit of this identification process is that you get to call them racist.

Since gray tribe is vastly overrepresented here compared to general NYT readership I think this also explains the reaction of many commenters.

Disclaimer: not a blue or red, probably a gray.

> No offence to Scott but I think he's got this all wrong. The NYT piece isn't about Scott

I'd be willing to entertain that hypothesis—but for how they knowingly and defiantly chose to unmask/dox a practising psychiatrist. Not printing names of sources is standard practice in media and to suggest that exceptions must be made in a case like this is dishonest.

By your lights, Scott's name added zero value to the story; printing it demonstrated that the piece was most definitely about Scott.

> the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism

Misrepresentation isn't criticism. Lumping a diverse group under one label and then using individual traits to infer criticism upon the whole—isn't criticism. You appear to be overly enthralled by group narratives rather than talking about individuals.

> I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it

An interesting assertion which smells a bit like mind-reading to me. Can you point to any instances where honest, civilised debate of "rationalist" ideas was refused? You can criticise the "rationalists" of many things, but given the proliferation of unedited and undigested conversations they churn out, being unwilling to debate isn't one of them.

(And yes, I realise that prior paragraph offers you plenty of rope: I haven't head the term "rationalist" used much and so I have no idea who you think a "rationalist" is. I have no idea what examples you might unearth. To be clear, I am not asking rhetorically, I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious what source data you used to form this unwillingness to debate hypothesis.)

Christians like to think of ourselves as less degraded than our neighbors, rather than less evolved. It amounts to the same thing in the end - a false superiority.

For anyone interested, seems like a good overview:

https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate...

hn discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128579

(seriously, don't miss on reading some of Scott's posts -- you will be disappointed by almost every piece of nonfiction you read afterwards)

It's definitely one of those cases of "If everyone thought a little more like X, Earth would be a much better place.", (let X=Scott Alexander) -- and notably it becomes quite clear how to think like he does (he just tells you!).

Didn't spoil the nonfiction in general for me, but definitely did make me ask "why more people on the left can't be like Scott?" I'm not a leftist myself, and this makes me disagree with Scott - who is definitely on the left - from time to time, but even when I disagree I feel like I learned something and maybe improved my knowledge, understanding and appreciation for opposing points. I wonder if more people were like that, maybe we could have proper political discussions instead of the catastrophic calamity we are witnessing now.

Definitely, he is definitely not always right, and you should avoid taking any person's word as gospel. Scott's point isn't "I'm always correct/You should always agree with me", it is "We should be charitable and examine things without prejudice, and look into everything with as much depth and reason as possible". I've read a few of his articles where he was out of his depth (some related to math and statistics), but they have been generally well researched and open to criticism. I guess what I wrote about other non-fiction is how well he embraces not being right; it's almost a point of celebration -- to have learned something new (and approaching the truth), not a point of defense of ego. It's a radical[1] (at least in current culture) position of collaboration. Some of his posts remind me of the Polymath Project (see Tao, and others): the point is to get to the truth, together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project

[1]: I also give you that, if this position weren't radical, then SSC might seem not so special -- a good psychiatry blog with interesting philosophical and rational thought.

If you speculated this might be the cause of the current calamity, I believe you're right. I don't think it's because we've suddenly changed and suddenly people have become polarized and dogmatic. I think culturally, and instinctively, we've been generally dogmatic for a really long time, with few individual exceptions. Most people want to quickly associate with a tribe, or dogmatic system, and blindly defend it without questioning its assumptions. It is extremely difficult to get an average person to change his mind on say his favored political party -- much more than you would expect from factual and philosophical basis alone (if you frame it as an abstract philosophical discussion, e.g. a trolley problem, I think it's easier to get people engaged and open to change their minds; an engineer that measures a poor performance of a system won't usually die on the hill of defending the system at all costs).

It's really counterintutive: by being shown a new point of view, by changing your view of how the world works (in description or aspiration), you are gaining, you are learning, it should be a good thing (for everyone) -- and yet we frequently over-attach to beliefs. I don't want to speculate too much, but it sometimes does make sense to defend yourself not to be convinced by anyone of anything (potentially with selfish or malicious intent), so this may be an over-correction (cultural and or evolutionary) trait. See the post "Epistemic Learned Helplessness"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

Your taste may vary - I certainly haven't noticed "almost every piece of nonfiction" suffering since I first read his work.

Hypotheses:

I am wondering if these 'hit pieces' are more like sermons of The Church of the NYT. Deriding sinners and their evil ways. They are not meant to reflect an objective reality, but hyperbole to act as a cautionary tale with enough plausible sounding details to allow the prefrontal cortex to accept them. A modern This way there be dragons Or Reefer Madness. The NYT has found it's tithing flock and they are pandering all the way to the bank.

Much of this behavior becomes a lot easier to understand when you realise that "wokeism" is a religion. I don't mean that ironically. John McWhorter is currently serialising a book on this topic on his own Substack, and he's far from the only person to make the observation.

Serendipitously relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...

I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police".

Even Macron felt the need to tell them they fucked up.

"Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast"

That one was Reuters, mind you, but does the same thing. The actual story being a Syrian man died from a bomb he was planning on using in a terror attack.

I am shocked. Why am I shocked? I shouldn't be, but I am. I personally use the reporting on Julian Assange as a litmus paper test on media.

It wasn’t just the NYT calling it a “knife attack” as a euphemism. I remember seeing many media outlets doing that

> I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police".

That was so bizarre. As a minority, I am afraid to openly discuss about the racism I face. I don't want to participate in oppression olympics or let other people use my suffering as their own political agenda. I want to be treated as a human being. I want neither discrimination nor preferential treatment. I want my work to speak for myself, not my skin color. It just saddens me the amount of identity politics out there and lack of any nuanced discussion.

The motivations of the hit piece seem extremely petty to me - they wanted to do an article about how he was an early proponent of mask wearing which I guess everyone agrees now is a good thing (is it like being prematurely anti-fascist or something) and they wanted to use his real name and he didn't want that, instead of saying ok, they said we'll do it anyway, he made it difficult for them to do that, later he starts blogging again under his real name and they do a hit piece to get even?

That does seem to be an accurate summary of the situation. The NYT is nothing but a rag these days. I literally value BuzzfeedNews and Vice above the NYT's "journalism", which is honestly just sad. I grew up reading NYT from the time I was maybe 8 or 9. It's pathetic how far they've fallen.

It is a testament to the times that someone can be subject to a NYT hit job and be able to defend themselves so easily.

I kind of disagree. His reaction will reach only a tiny fraction of the readers of the piece, and mostly those who are already in doubt.

In the country I live in, it is usual (I believe voluntarily mandatory) for a newspapers to publish a response by the subject of an article.

How was it a hit piece? Certainly it is great he can respond.

  [Charles Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that’s mine too.

.. in SSC becomes ...

  In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”

..in the NYT article. That was spicing it up a little much. Looks like a hit piece.

My respect for the NY Times is out the window at this point.

The last few years they have been overly focused on their agenda and many times haven't even made a visible effort to investigate fairly. NYT employees have been fired for disagreeing with the prevailing opinion in the newsroom.

> ...they have been overly focused on their agenda...

Can you elaborate on this? What is their agenda?

The most hilarious part of the New York Times decline was the "public editor". Every public editor piece was carefully selected and prepared to admit the least amount of negligence possible, to frame even blatant lies in a mere "he said, she said" or a confusion of the moment.

Eventually, it dawned on them that having an obviously incompetent, incapable public editor is worse than having none at all, so they unceremoniously canned the position.

I am wondering, what are the legal perspectives of suing NYT for libel at this point. If Scott started a crowdsourcing campaign to fund legal defense, I would gladly throw in a couple of grand. Given the support Scott received when the situation with NYT's plans got public in the first place, this could set a very interesting precedent.

Given that his explicitly stated goal is to move on from this, probably a bad idea. Right or wrong, a lawsuit would invite the Streisand effect.

As for whether there's any legal basis to sue, it's doubtful. There isn't a whole lot that's factually inaccurate in the NYT piece. It's innuendo and words taken out of context. California has a "False Light" claim that might apply, but I doubt any court would take that up. At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.

"lawsuit would invite the Streisand effect."

That could be fairly good effect for a Substack writer who now strives to be independent.

Unless, of course, the end result is that Visa and MasterCard deplatform Substack.

>At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.

I think, doing it with an explicit goal of misleading your audience in order to cause damage to a specific person should not be OK. I'm not saying censor it, but making NYT liable for any actual damage (like losing a job) + punitive damages would make sense.

The thing is, the woke mob is employing the same silencing tactics as Putin's Russia. You don't have resources to shut everyone up, so you semi-arbitrarily target random people and make sure the consequences are extremely harsh. A high-profile person like Scott can just walk away from it. An average rank-and-file person with a mortgage and at best couple of months in saving will keep their mouth shut and pretend to agree with whatever the party line is. Like literally, that's Russia now. Everyone is poor and miserable, but Putin's approval ratings are >70% because, well, losing everything you have is just not worth a random act of dissent.

IANAL, but my understanding is that it's extremely difficult to successfully sue someone for libel in the US, mainly due to all the First Amendment issues that come with letting the courts adjudicate what can and can't be said.

Professionally-trained journalists are very aware of libel concerns and are taught to stay within the law. The NYT's journalistic standards may have taken a nosedive in recent years but I'm sure they can still afford good enough lawyers to avoid getting sued over a hit piece, even one as sloppy as this.

> I am wondering, what are the legal perspectives of suing NYT for libel at this point.

None at all.

I'm pretty sure that nothing they printed is technically libel. They should at least know by now how to write a good hit piece without technically committing libel.

I'm afraid there's not going to be a solution for what the American Media has become in the legal system.

What part of the article did you find libelous or untruthful?

I don't understand why the NYT would do something like this. I will continue to read the NYT but with a different feeling, it eroded my trust. More missteps and I will loose my trust. This is just unacceptable, especially in the times of fake news.

I think the piece just does not have any arguments, it's just based on held beliefs that some things are wrong. It's just connects dots and quotes sentences that offend a certain readership.

EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with.

EDIT 2: I don't share the beliefs of the blog, but this piece is just written to please a certain readership. This is not journalism!

EDIT 3: the newyorkers article is so much better: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-st...

>EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with.

I recommend you read the NYT peice then, because it points out that if they publish his name as Scott Alexander (as he was going by) people would find out who he was simply by Googling that name. How exactly is the NYT meant to guarantee that? And what was the result of Siskind's actions? He stirred up a mob against the NYT writer exactly in the same way he feared he would've been subject to.

I've read the article. There's a difference in having your full name in the news vs. the name he writes his blog under. Even if it is easy to find out, that does make a difference. People can associate and recognise hime just by reading the article.

He's not a public figure, I don't see a reason to so strongly feature his name. The lack of discussion and empathy on the side of the NYT is really concerning, repeating my words before: This is not just an article, it's the life of an ordinary person we are dealing with. He may be unequipped to handle or very afraid of the spotlight he is now in. There's already an article in the New Yorker about the article in the NYT.

I was not defending the person, his actions may be flawed. But the NYT is a journalistic institution that should have high ethical and journalistic standards.

>I recommend you read the NYT peice then, because it points out that if they publish his name as Scott Alexander (as he was going by) people would find out who he was simply by Googling that name.

If the NY Times published the article that links his pen name to his real name, that would be a stronger link than anything that previously existed. You can dox most people on the Internet if you put in enough effort, but the NY Times bears responsibility in lowering the effort required when there's no real reason to unmask him.

Scott has addressed this at least a few times. He didn't care so much that people could go from Scott Alexander the blogger to Scott Siskind the psychiatrist. That was trivial to do before the NYT got involved. He was more worried about people (ie his patients) googling Scott Siskind the psychiatrist and finding Scott Alexander the blogger, because of how that would impact his relationship with his patients. An article from the NYT plainly stating "Scott Alexander is Scott Siskind" would quickly become the top result for either search.

Scott Aaronson also has an analysis of the NYT piece:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310

Header picture (only visible on the home page) is Walter Duranty, who got a Pulitzer for lying about the Soviet famine in the New York Times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

The Charles Murray thing seems to be about his use of the word "sophisticated"... that was probably a bad choice.

To dive deeper look at the criticisms of Murray and draw your on conclusion about the degree of sophistication of his assumptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Criticism_of_as...

Maybe he was being ironic, or not even ironic but using the word sophisticated in it's narrow meaning of complex. In the same way one might describe flat earthers as having a sophisticated world view.

If you believe in a sophisticated explanation where a simple explanation exists, you're probably a believer of nonsense. Occam's razor, basically.

You say you have found an ally in someone who is known for his controversial take on intelligence and heritability and who maintains that it is this inherited difference in intelligence that is responsible for social division within the US. You call his ideas on class and culture sophisticated. Then you say that you agree with him only on a certain specific claim about teaching truckers to code. (You = Scott Alexander)

Who is being intellectually dishonest here? NYT or Scott Alexander?

The Times and many other supposed gold-standard papers have shown themselves to be unforgivably biased and politically compromised over and over and over. It's a sad thing that the entire communications apparatus of the West seems to be gaslighting the population all the time, and they're all united around the same few permitted/canonized political positions.

This is less about 'actual news' and more about the ongoing war between traditional media (like New York Times) and new age media (like Sub Stack).

I didn't perceive the NYT article as negative at all. As for naming him, that's their choice as journalists, and a risk he took with recording his thoughts online just as all of us do.

I wish folks would rid themselves of the notion that the internet is anonymous or deletable. We'd all be much healthier by acknowledging the possibility that whatever you write here may be etched in stone. And if you become well known people may try to identify you. This isn't an OSC book it's the real world.

It’s interesting, though, that the NYT has been willing to respect the pseudonymity of other public figures in circumstances that I would consider comparable. One example is Virgil Texas, a cohost of the perennially controversial leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Virgil Texas is not his real name—and his real name can be found with a bit of searching, as in the case of Alexander/Siskind—but the Times has stuck with the pseudonym.[0] What principle is being followed here?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...

News outlets can make their own calls on who to name. If naming brings more readers and one outlet won't do it then that's an opportunity for another outlet, provided everything else in the article is legal.

I don't expect NYT or any outlet to be free from bias and that doesn't mean I want any of them to disappear. I want them all to thrive.

It Is also impossible not to get DDoS on the internet, you still would want people not to DDoS you.

You've moved the goalposts. DDoS is against the law. Connecting an anonymous account to a name after confirming it is them is not. It may be libelous if the connection is not factual, but if it is a fact then that's legal to print.

Folks have covered a lot of great territory in the comment section, so I guess I'll just spit out my question about the elephant in the room: who makes up the "shadowy" cabal of NYT editors and execs who pushed this piece? It does seem like for all intents and purposes they wanted to make an example. And of course, the journalist who had to put his name on the piece is not necessarily the one who drove the whole gambit.

The gambit is quite risky. As another commentator wrote, it's not necessarily out of character for the NYT as a prominent vassal of American politics; they lambasted MLK and later on got somewhat of a black eye for it. But in the age of the internet, I can't help but think all of their opponents will seize on their indiscretion and that any moderates will be a little alienated. For so many people who didn't know what SSC is beforehand, won't they take a read and won't some of them conclude that they see more of themselves in his writing than the hit-piece? Is the NYT aware of the Streisand effect and just doesn't care or even wants to push people further into a "with us or against us" polarization? My sad fear is that the latter is true.

What a wild ride. Made me lose a lot of respect for the NYT and gained much respect for Scott for handling it like this.

I would like to thank NYT for introducing me to Scott and his wonderful blog.

I am surprised just about no one on this thread finds his effort to hide his identity online flimsy. If you are a psychiatrist with a popular blog with hot wire topic discussions and cares a lot about patient relationships, shouldn't you be taking a lot more precautions in concealing your identity than just dropping your last name? I mean, come on.

I dunno. I mean, it's a little flimsy. But he said he started the blog in college - I know people who wrote online by removing their last name in college. And I doubt his patients know his middle name or spend a lot of time searching for his blog, when it doesn't appear in the NYT. I think if a single patient goes out of their way to research you, you stop seeing them and refer them to another doctor, but if half your patients read about you in the NYT, you have a real problem.

Do you find it implausible or merely flimsy? I certainly don't find it implausible.

Intentional political anxiety - a tactic of the Cultural Revolution that was discussed on the excellent In Our Time podcast from the BBC this last week. Never knowing exactly where the next offense may come from, intentionally keeping the population on edge about committing a politically incorrect infraction that will result in consequences to you or your family. Really resonates with the trajectory of institutional rhetoric in the US these days.

I also think the following take is interesting, and hasn't been mentioned in any of the comments so far (to the extent that I've been able to keep up with them):

https://www.themoneyillusion.com/understanding-middlebrow/

The gist of it is:

> Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension.

More specifically:

> The NYT has 7.5 million subscribers, mostly progressives in the 90-99% range. These people feel very smart, and they are in fact smarter than 90% of the population. So there’s no point bemoaning the fact that the NYT is not about to tell it’s readers that, “Actually, we provide middlebrow news analysis, and if you want brilliant inspired analysis you need to read blogs like SlateStarCodex.”

I went from avid reader of the times a decade ago to cancelled subscription. Any recommendations for other sources?

OK, the writer here mentions substack. May be worth signing up for this author or others with NY Times subscription money.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/

> I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them. ... Predictably, the NYT piece came out soon after, and predictably, it was very negative

Not sure if we all read the same piece, but I wouldn't call it very negative. Pointing out the neoreactionary affiliations of the Rationalist community is neither something new nor "hit piece"-like. But apparently criticism of Silicon Valley's favorite darling cannot be tolerated here.

Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power. It is about bringing important people to heel, on behalf of the public.

https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trum...

ht: https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1361067590135726093...

NYT is not a friend of anyone who does not speak exclusively through them. Their tech columns are showcases of irrelevance and will probably get dumped sooner or later

The New York Times is no longer a thought leader in society who helps people consider important ideas. Speech and thought are both heavily regulated there. I refused to believe that it was committing acts of "fake news" for all these years, but now realize that it is a hollowed out institution advancing identity politics at the cost of unbiased truth.

It's astounding that merely noting that Charles Murray said something is enough to have the NY Times paint you as a racist.

Newspapers are in a weak position today: basically they are under perfusion of oligarchs and ads. So when they attack, they do so on: 1/ what is clearly identified as the enemy and 2/ weaker entities after labeling them as enemies. It is important to note neither provide ad incomes.

Ignore the politics, foreign affairs and opinion sections of the NYT. They basically peddle outright lies and exaggerations with ridiculous levels of bias.

Stick to the non-environment science pieces. Admittedly, not much of the paper left, but whats left is rather good. Until those writers get fired.

There's a saying (of unconfirmed origin), but I'll use Jay-Z's version: 'A wise man told me don't argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.'

I think the NYT piece was, like most 'journalism' these days, poorly researched, biased, and unfair. It omitted quotes from insightful passages of SA's, instead picking out those instances of 'impure' thoughts.

But I also think SA does some things that are perhaps signaling to racists/sexists that he's an ally of theirs, or at least intentionally providing a forum for them. Quoting Charles Murray to tell us about the time you agreed with him is much like Congresswoman Mary Miller quoting Hitler when she said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future'. You are giving credibility to these people. Even the quote SA cites (of himself) seems to agree with this:

> But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either.

The part he left out is that Murray thinks the inability of this trucker to learn is largely because of his genetics. Sure, maybe a poor choice of words. I'll withhold judgment as I haven't read too much of Scott's blog.

Why do we have so much drama? Can we all just get along and be kind to each other?

I have rarely seen Slate Star Codex articles being discussed heavily on HN until recently. Find it hard to believe that it is a silicon valley subculture if it's not being discussed here.

Assuming you want to pause a NYT subscription, what's a good general alternative info source about the US (for a European reader ?)

Not a super fan of NYT or anything but I’m a subscriber. That NYT article didn’t sound like a hit piece or too negative as portrayed at all.

For people who call themselves The Rationalists and advocate for absolute free speech, it’s bit ironic they turn touchy and eager to get out their pitchforks if the topic being discussed is about them instead of the thousands of areas they think they have the absolute authority to talk and dissect about. Not that NYT is blameless on the later part of the previous sentence as well.

The grey lady turns out to be a vengeful bitch. Power corrupts. Media centralisation is not a good plan for a free society.

My opinion of the NYT has dwindled in the past year. WSJ has been much more accurate and moderate.

I used to read Alexander's essays now and then. I tried to read this one, but the site complained that I had javascript turned off (why do I need that to read an article?) and, even with scripting turned off, used a lot of CPU while the tab was open. I get the impression that substack is doing something shady, and I think I’ll avoid them in the future.

I would file a lawsuit (I'm sure there are more than one legal claim that can be brought against NYT in this situation), and the "settlement" should be a public retraction and apology from NYT (and the author and chain of editors) plus significant financial damage to attempt to make up for the job and professional cost to the claimant.

Maybe the NYT is jealous that Scott is so obviously a better and more thoughtful writer?

On point 1:

> The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray’s offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.

In the quote in question, he literally says that Murray "has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture". While I'm not familiar with Murray's writing, it's hard to believe that his theories on class and culture are completely disconnected from his theories on race.

———

On point 2:

> This is true only in the sense that in 2014, I applied this comparison to a specific group of feminists who I accused of bullying and taunting people in a way that made them traumatized and suicidal. I describe my specific concern in the linked post. Lots of other feminists are great, and I continue to support gender equality.

Calling it a "specific group" is downplaying things. In the same 2014 article he wrote:

> We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man. And then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, and then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists. And then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing…

He has expressed similar sentiments elsewhere; it is safe to say he sees the attitude he criticizes as representative of at least a significant chunk of modern feminist activism. Meanwhile, all the New York Times said is that he described "some feminists as something close to Voldemort". Where is the discrepancy?

> Also, this became a weird go-to thing for people who wanted to do hatchet jobs to hit me with, so much so that sometime before 2017 I edited the post involved telling people not to do that.

His argument is that people who quoted him took his statement "out of context". I am not so sure. The immediate context suggests an element of hyperbole, which slightly takes the edge off the comparison. But add the context of the rest of the post? The New York Times article says he described people as "something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books". And… it's no exaggeration to say he was accusing people of being (or at least behaving) truly evil, whatever that means. I mean, he literally writes: "some feminists are evil raving loonies and some manospherites are evil raving loonies". He later mentions "the evil fringes of both movements", which lack "basic human decency". And even setting wording aside, the post does indeed accuse people of being responsible for others being traumatized, which seems pretty evil. (How valid the accusation is is another matter.)

In short, the Voldemort quote is, to a reasonable degree, representative of the post as a whole.

———

Point 3 is highly diffuse; he raises valid points in defense, but they don't really prove the article wrong.

———

On point 4:

> They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel.

Not six, two. Scott described Eliezer Yudkowsky as "the guy who taught me most of what I know about rationality". Eliezer Yudkowsky, as the article mentions, is friends with Peter Thiel.

More importantly, the main argument the article makes about Silicon Valley is that Scott's views are influential there (while allegedly providing a "safe space" for prejudice). And to demonstrate that, it mentions several notable people who follow his blog, including quoting Sam Altman praising it at length. Whether those people know him personally is beside the point.

The basic issue is: the Times article isn't really very good (possibly repurposed to focus on Slate Star Codex after all the controversy pre-publication?) and relies largely on sort of gesturing vaguely at small snippets of his writing around controversial topics.

This makes it pretty simple for Scott to parry the specific allegations or implications in his response here. But I feel like anybody who takes an honest look at his writing would have to admit:

He believes in IQ and intelligence heritability, specifically with at least a significant genetic component.

He doesn't like feminists (not all but a much broader swath than his response implies). Maybe you could say he's moderated on this over the years.

His response heavily implies that these things are not true. It strikes me as "technically true" in roughly the same way he's criticizing the Times piece for being.

It's a bad reply!

Narrowly because it's actually unfair point by point, as you say.

And slightly dishonest, because Scott does in fact entertain ideas that are scandalous to an expected arrival from the NYT. (Though not, I would say, for the reasons they might assume.)

But also more broadly, it doesn't take the opportunity to make intelligible to that arrival his insider's view of these related-but-distinct phenomena (his blog, the Rationalists, "Grey Tribe", the counter-techlash). Which the article predictably muddles.

Perhaps saddest to me, by responding defensively (however understandably!), he reinforces the emphasis in the piece on this sort of culture war stuff. Rather than perhaps channeling this new interest towards the meta-science and history and psychiatry and the like.

Why is a large American newspaper bullying some random blogger?

Here’s my take on NYT: they’re desperately trying to stay relevant in modern era where news happens real-time on social media. They’re an institution and have an incredible reach in steering narratives still but that’s fading fast.

NYT is a rag. The power play they‘d attempted on Scott was for ideological reasons, and shows what culture this organisation has. And what kind of people seek to be part of this.

> This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.

I would like to know what newspapers he is reading that makes this seem brazen or even out of the ordinary.

The sad part is, despite so many bad takes, ideology pushing, and hatchet jobs The NYT overall still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content out there.

Can I suggest an alternative?

The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be.

I know this has been true for me many times.

Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.

I'm aware of Gell-Mann Amnesia and read from a variety of sources.

This was really a comment on how most journalism is even worse. The NYT does occasionally have pieces where I know about the topic and their representation goes into details that others aren't likely to. Those are, however, not a large percentage of their output.

It's pretty hard to find high quality alternatives. There is the wall street journal, maybe a few others, but not many. I personally read a few high quality news sources and science journals.

Inexplicably many here seem to think that random blog posts are somehow remotely equivalent. I value opinion at zero, and trust a random person to do quality research at about zero too. Trust is earned.

When random internet opinion becomes "news" I suppose we really are in a post truth world.

The WSJ produces just as much good content, and you can subscribe there without inadvertently funding rag hit pieces like this.

The WSJ has a ton of dubious articles. The Opinion pieces are garbage compared to the average one in the Times although of course both have misses

If you don't think the journal has rag hit pieces I don't know what to say other than you obviously haven't read many articles or practically any opinion pieces from them.

Am I having deja vu? Didn’t this happen like 6 months or so ago? I didn’t keep reading because I was convinced I read this before.

The clever playground bully doesn't say "let's beat up Scott", at least not where teachers can hear - he knows he can say something like "Scott annoyed me a bit yesterday" and his followers/admirers will know that beating up Scott might just earn them popularity points.

The clever mafia boss, at least in the movies, doesn't leave a paper trail showing they've ordered a hit job on someone, they say something like wouldn't it be convenient if Scott weren't seen around here for a while?

(Even Trump had the sense not to say directly on camera, let's break into the capitol and smash things up.)

The NYT piece has an ugly taste of "I'm not going to say I endorse direct action against Scott, BUT" when it lists how he could be seen as "associated" with sexists, racists and so on. Let's not pretend otherwise: Cade Metz knows exactly that lesser accusations have brought people down in the past.

You could make the same point about this article.

The infamous internet argument that is "calling out negative things is a negative itself". "You just have to go meta, and you will see it's all the same." "Everything is relative/subjective"

These type of generic arguments bring nothing valuable to the discussion table. These arguments are used to shut down conversation in a very self-aggrandizing manner.

Yeah, the paper which lead to war in Iraq vs some blogger with at most 10,000 reach. That's clearly a fair comparison

I think it's very unlikely that a SSC reader will commit any kind of crime against a NYT reporter or their friends and families - they're much more the kind of people [in favour of niceness, community and civilisation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...)

To quote Scott:

> Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not "Death to the unbelievers!" but "If you’re nice, you can join our cuddle pile!"

> I want to respond to four main negative claims in the article

> 1. The article tries to connect me to Charles Murray and The Bell Curve

> 2. In their litany of reasons I am bad, the Times says I compared some feminists to Voldemort.

> 3. The Times also presented a more general case that I was a bad ally to women in tech.

> 4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true -

Is this really a useful post?

I think it's now worth considering The New York Times as a hostile actor, in the same category as Google and Facebook. (Of course this is a gross generalization, but the beneficent- or neutral-actor model no longer seems appropriate.)

I am not sure I understand what you mean by these "models" of corporations. You believe that some corporations organize their actions to try to help... everyone? And others organize their actions to try to hurt... everyone? And you decide what category to put what corporation in?

Of course it is reductive, but I do think some businesses pursue mostly non-zero sum games. Their gain does not come at my expense.

There are yet others which have "mined out" all the non-zero sum games in their industry (or choose not to pursue them), and so instead play zero-sum games. In these games, their gains come at the expense of their customers, the public or the environment. These tend to be monopolies because there is no recourse.

In categorizing some of these businesses as hostile actors, I am suggesting that they are predominantly playing zero-sum games. To cite some examples of businesses not playing zero-sum games, I need not look further than the small businesses in my local town.

Hopefully this provides a more nuanced answer you were rightfully asking about.

For reference of the many people who apparently have no clue, this is an example of a "hatchet job": https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/10/the-fanatic-frau...

Very often when I read a NYT article, I get a paranoid Neo-marxist feeling that NYT doesn’t really care for equality of opportunity, minority rights, women’s rights or any particular oppressed group. They just hate the successful and the rich.

Mark Thompson, CEO of NYT has an estimated net worth of about 10-30 million USD according to a few sites on the Internet. That's not "did a unicorn IPO"-rich but it certainly doesn't align with "NYT hates the rich".

Oh, they for sure monetize their Neo-Marxist activism decently well. I doubt Stalin was eating stale white bread three times a day either.

Time to quit mainstream media. All outlets have an agenda. I quit NYT since they've predicted an 80-20% win for Hillary, and the day after the results I've read their main column. They didn't take any responsibility at all.

As someone else said (and I agree):

This gets at part of what I find irritating about the self-described Rationalist community: they talk about "free speech" when what they really want is unrestricted, consequence-less speech that allows them to guiltlessly harm certain people in the name of innovation.

Source: https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1360793868816556033

If you believe that's the case, perhaps you could provide an example of Scott's writing that shouldn't be allowed, and what you think the consequences should be?

I don't think that comment implies he disagrees with free speech - my interpretation was that he's talking about how some of Scott's supporters seem to think the NYT piece shouldn't have been allowed.

I’m attempting to find a charitable way to engage with those tweets, since on first read they seem a) deliberately false about the content of SSC, b) invoke a sneering tone common amongst folks who subscribe to certain segments of “woke” progressivism (especially in tech), and c) attribute maximum malice of forethought by the targeted party to all of it.

The arguments are also just bad. “Why don’t these free speech people take into account existing power structures?” But this is of course exactly what they are doing when they advocate for absolute free speech. How else do you account and adjust for the different levels of cultural power different groups, companies, whatever have in society?

I must be missing something.

Scott literally calls a study that links IQ and race "sophisticated" and calls Murray an "ally" in the study of the connection and the antecedent impact on social welfare.

It's only when the NYT times points out the connection does it suddenly become much more narrow: a specific and borderline non-sequitur claim about teaching truckers to code.

I find the whole "I'm just asking questions!" routine to be so, so tiresome and disingenuous. This whole thing reads to me that he wants to be seen as iconoclastic and he wants to associate with contrarians but doesn't want any of the blowback for doing so. He may argue that a lack of refuting the more offensive implications and conclusions of an opinion while agreeing with a portion of it (only after the fact, mind you!) does not imply wholescale endorsement, but that's naive at best and wanting it both ways and crying about it at worst.

> literally calls a study that links IQ and race "sophisticated"

I did not read the quote that way. Looking at the original:

> Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture.

He seems to be saying the opposite: that Murray has theories to explain IQ beyond just heredity (i.e. [social?] class and culture). It seems to me that Scott is drawing attention to Murray's non IQ/Race theories here, then using that common ground to jump into universal basic income.

If he were to call the IQ studies sophisticated, here's how I would have worded it:

(Abridged quote of evil twin Scott) Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, [however he] has some very sophisticated theories about [hereditary genetics].

It’s almost unbelievable how far the NYT has fallen, how ideologically corrupt it has become. I can only hope that more and more people become aware of their corruption, and stop relying on them as a trustworthy source of reporting. Articles like this one are a step in the right direction, revealing the rot. I really admire the author’s bravery and honesty despite all that has happened to him.

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