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Comment by cocacola1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm hoping someone can succinctly explain the hate for the NYT. Didn't get it before, don't get it now. It seems perfectly adequate. Same goes for WSJ, FT, the Economist, WaPo, etc.

>I see it now. I see that information and truth and freedom have been oppressed. I had been silenced. We had all been bound and gagged and silenced, not directly, but indirectly, by a strange, complex, invisible, sinister force. But I see it now. I see it so clearly. There was a "guild of truth" telling us that there was a central narrative of mankind. Truth was branded. We are all being controlled and oppressed and enslaved by the evil octopus of the New York Times.

This I especially don't get. No one has declared themselves the "guild of truth", and there's no paper or institution I can think of that the people have declared to be the "guild of truth". And if someone has, saying so doesn't make it true. But people not liking you, or your writing, isn't a crime.

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Because everything they publish is propaganda, you can feel their agenda behind every article and every paragraph.

There is no diversity in their ranks, just conformity and uniformity.

There is no debate of ideas, storms of conflicting concepts, just reaffirmation of the same things they all believe in, the single universal truth they subscribe to with no doubt or consideration to the possibility they may be mistaken.

They do not dispassionately present facts letting the reader make up his mind. They already know what they want the reader to think and they just feed him selected facts to influence him into thinking that way.

They do not write for the world, for the opposition in its diversity. They just write for their own eco chamber, reinforcing preexisting ideas and inflaming the spirits agains the "non-believers".

They are a religion: the FoxNews of the Left.

> They are a religion: the FoxNews of the Left.

If you hang out with actual leftists, they've probably hated the NYT longer than you have.

Googling [why does rob rhinehart hate the new york times] yielded https://www.vice.com/en/article/epd4je/soylent-founders-unhi...

Unhinged sounds about right, the blog post started out normal but it became increasingly disconnected and unsubstantiated. It read like something someone on adderall would churn out

Frankly, if the Vice article is true (and it seems plausible given the rambling style of this one) he sounds pretty unhinged. Is this the effect of feeding only on Soylent?

It's possible, is there lead content in soylent? Like lots of lead?

The guy sounds dis-associated from reality. A lot of the "everything is fake news" crowd is disjointed...I'm not sure of Soylent is the cause or not, or if they have investors/advisors if so, I'd be having a conversation about moving him out of the company and maybe into a psych ward for observation.

He has always been divorced from reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/op-ed-how-i-gave-up-...

To me, this shows radical leadership, and that he is very unattached to societal norms. Radical leadership meaning that this is kind of the antithesis of a follower mentality. I think it's a kind of genius, but also a personal failing. I really appreciate people who are willing to "question everything", because there are a lot of things we take for granted without thinking about why.

The failures I think this comes from are a form of ignorance and arrogance, and possibly a lack of empathy about how they're perceived. I personally know someone like this that is very intelligent, and thinks that they have all the right answers. There seems to be a mentality of, I have this information facts, given these facts, and that as a goal, *this* is the solution.

With the person I know, a significant problem with their reasoning is that they have important gaps in their knowledge (ignorance). They believe other people just aren't as enlightened as they are (arrogance), and if they were, they would have come to the same conclusion.

For my acquaintance, I believe that the mentality comes from a history of often being right, but also a prolonged social isolation that allowed them to build a myth in their head that they are always right.

My favorite portmanteau for this was "errorgance": "errorgant means to be twice as certain as someone who is merely arrogant while possessing only one-tenth the requisite facts."

The main failing he has, which is clearly on display in the article, is that he utterly ignores all externalities. It is almost as if things don't happen or don't matter if he isn't personally observing them, perhaps it is a type of solipsism or extreme egocentrism.

In his mind, he's not wasting water because he never does laundry, while he totally ignores the environmental impact of having his clothes producing in China and shipped to him.

He refuses to cook and is genuinely offended when the apartment he is looking at has a kitchen, because why would they assume he would want to cook? He finds cooking horrible, bordering on torture, so surely that must be the Correct and Rational way to be.

He seems to think he can just figure out everything from first principles by doing a few web searches and reading through a bit of literature and extrapolating from there.

Every article from (and by) him is an absolutely fascinating and genuinely horrifying look into a mind that is just fundamentally out of whack, but has never faced enough adversity in life to properly recognize that.

Because quite frankly they are not in the business of reporting things but in the business of changing the world in a way they see fit and somehow try to paint it as some sort of scientific way of seeing life while it's far away from it.

> No one has declared themselves the "guild of truth"

Get back to me on this in a couple of years, when "fighting misinformation" reaches its peak. All social media already have "guild of truth", and you can be very effectively silenced if you run afoul of this guild. The formal institutionalization of this de-facto arrangement is still in the works, but there's no doubt there is a wide demand for it and wide agreement - at least among politicians, academia, news media, entertainers and big tech companies - that having a "guild of truth", tightly controlling masses' information intake, is a good and vital project.

> It seems perfectly adequate

Adequate for what? It is a partisan propaganda organ including some infotainment content along the way. For people that see the task of the press to be something else, it is abhorrent. For people seeing nothing wrong with a correct-minded propaganda, especially coupled with a bit of fun infotainment, it's perfectly fine.

> I'm hoping someone can succinctly explain the hate for the NYT.

In the past week these were enough for me to consider the NYT is done, it's rotten to the core (150 staff signed a letter against Donald McNeil) -

Taylor Lorenz

Donald McNeil

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128752

This article/rant is wrong about what the issues are. I assume the upvotes are the Soylent connection, the headline and an attempt at a solution (ghost.org)

Don't forget this, also within the last week:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-...

And that's just recent events, without getting into the disgrace that was the 1619 Project.

Another comment below answers your question perfectly IMO:

> He feels he has no voice, no power politically and seems to want to lash out at an entity that appears to have both. I don't understand it, but it's not an uncommon story, especially recently.

Because they print over a 100 articles a day and a couple of them might peeve someone off who then decides the NYT sucks forever.

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