Comment by twicetwice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twicetwice | Hacker News Reader

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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/

Maybe WebMD uses a third-party database for some drugs, but they probably don’t for aspirin, and if they do they shouldn’t.

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

Unfortunately, we know for sure that it was not just a poorly researched article. From Scott Aaronson[0]:

> I spent many hours with Cade, taking his calls and emails morning or night, at the playground with my kids or wherever else I was, answering his questions, giving context for his other interviews, suggesting people in the rationalist community for him to talk to…

and

> Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.

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

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.)

That is likely to be the case. However the performance metrics that the authors are being evaluated on (like clicks, retweets, word-count) are unlikely to include hard-to-measure long-term effects like Streisand.

I think we are seeing a wounded animal's fight for survival ....

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

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