Such a badly-written, mean-spirited article. A typical paragraph has a few ominous claims, which, when you read the links, aren't supported at all, nor connected in the way they're suggested to. Such as :
> In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray. The paragraph makes Scott sound like a flaming racist. It's just totally dishonest writing. It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.
The anonymity thing seems to have been well and truly discarded – flung in his face, more like. What did he do to them to deserve such treatment, such contempt?
I did get one laugh, out of:
> “[Rationalists] are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson
Uh, he can believe whatever he wants on the matter, that doesn't make him a racist, sooooo....
When was it a "solved" finding that poverty is a result of exploitation? Or that culture and/or genetics don't also play a role, perhaps a big one?
That's how science works, by making hypothesis, examining things, and coming to conclusions, popular or not.
And a scientist/thinker is allowed to have different conclusions than others, if they can point to specific theories and numbers that support their thesis.
> Uh Scott also says he believes poverty is not a result of exploitation but culture or genetics soooooo
Regardless of whether he said this, what gives you the impression that it isn't true?
There are several studies showing a link between genetics and intelligence. This absolutely does not imply that all black people are less intelligent than all white people. It tends to imply that Ashkenazi Jews have some statistical genetic advantage over other "white people" and that if you then average them into the group "white people" the correlation persists against other arbitrarily defined groups. This is obviously about as far from the argument that Nazis want to make as you can imagine.
Meanwhile, how could culture not affect outcomes in the aggregate? Would you really expect that all of the same outcomes would obtain for people who make different choices?
Science shouldn't be politicized like that. It bothers me how no one has an issue accepting the fact that different ethnic groups have different average heights, blood types, propensity for diseases, etc. But if someone dares suggest that not every group in the world has exactly equal average IQ scores, their career is over.(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-geneti...).
It's not about picking a master race. It's about objectively observing the world as it is, not how you might want it to be.
Watson in that article seems to be doing more than merely suggesting "that not every group in the world has exactly equal average IQ scores":
> In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”
> Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Your first point is not that far from claiming not every group in the world has exactly equal average IQ scores. Different growth prospects are an inevitable consequence of that.
> Without wading in too far here, I want to point out that picking a slightly different "master race" is no better.
Except that there's nothing there to imply that we should ever do anything the Nazis did, even if you substitute one group for another, because racism is still stupid even if you can find a statistical correlation between some set of phenotypes and some arbitrarily defined racial group.
Remember "the differences within a race are larger than the differences between races"? Still true.
All it does is provide a possible explanation for aggregate statistical measurements. It tells you nothing about any individual of any race and it justifies no policy of taking race into account when evaluating merit.
Just because a thing correlates with another thing doesn't mean the first thing is the second thing. The real problem was that if you measure "race" instead of intelligence, and consequently did not hire a black person who was just as intelligent, that's not fair. It's racism. If you're measuring intelligence directly and not using race for anything at all, that's completely different. It doesn't discriminate against all of the black people who are intelligent, which was the original problem with using race.
So, purely in the intention of understanding your comment, would you agree that this belief you say seems implied by the data, can be rephrased as: the idea that the group "white people" has a genetical predisposition for intelligence compared to "other arbitrarily defined groups"?
Assuming that the data did show this is the case, and referring to the (perhaps older) definition of racism as the belief of "superiority of one race over another", you can probably see where I'm going with this, so here's my question:
Can you explain how this belief is not the dictionnary definition of racism?
Follow-up question: Considering what you see in the data, would you call yourself a racist?
>Uh Scott also says he believes poverty is not a result of exploitation but culture or genetics soooooo
You sure he didn't say that poverty is part-hereditary rather than what you are saying?
First, most if not all of the left believe it is hereditary - rich people's kids staying richer and vice versa. Second, he definitely never says exploitation or culture do not come into it.
According to far right pro-white publication Wikipedia, intelligence is highly heritable - now it says “above 80%” but a recent version of this article said 80-84%.
I’m not sure what you a referring to. I’ve been reading the blog for years, I have never seen anything “bad” on it, I’ve seen ideas that can be debated.
The source article describes an incident where Balaji Srinivasan was emailing Curtis Yarvin about how to stop the media from reporting on the links between Yarvin's ideology and prominent tech figures such as Srinivasan. I'm unhappy about the guilt by association, because that really doesn't have much to do with Scott Alexander, but a prominent VC trying to kill news stories which might embarrass him is pretty noteworthy.
It’s so many steps of association too. A blog is in a community that another writer was writing about when a prominent investor who is powerful yet notoriously controversial in a particular industry said bad things, therefore that industry and the blog are... well you know ;)
> And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray.
Well there's some more in that paragraph you quote. He then goes on to say "Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and [Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture." (Emphasis kept from the original.) Which I think the NYT writer reads as being at least a partial endorsement of Murray's belief that some class differences reduce to heredity. I do too, since this seems roughly in line with what I understand from Scott's writing. It is also true that Murray takes that idea farther and goes in some directions I find to be both scientifically unsupported and inflammatory.
You can agree or disagree with the NYT here, I don't care. But I think you should quote more from that paragraph before you characterize it.
He also aligns himself with dozen of other thinkers he agree with and mentions them. Why isolate some particular name, if not to imply "here's a racist"?
The source article is pretty explicit about its goal: it's trying to inform readers on how a specific group of people think, which is important because many powerful people are in that group. Describing only the parts of their ideology that are "newsworthy", the parts that are strange or shocking to a typical NYT reader, is going to present a picture so distorted that it ends up being simply false. It would be like a human interest story that studiously refused to mention anything normal about the subject.
Yes. But that's how reporting (sadly) generally works.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” - Michael Crichton
I was first mentioned at a very young age in a newspaper when Der Spiegel reported on my dad. What it mentioned was that he had two children, my sister and myself. It then stated our ages, and got both of them completely wrong. This is not hard. It's also not important, but if it's not important enough to get right, maybe it's not important enough to simply make up?
And later, I discovered the effect Michael mentions: every time they reported on anything I knew even a little about, they got it comically wrong. Except I don't suffer from amnesia.
UPDATE: the only news source that I've found the be reasonably reliable over time is The Economist, if you ignore them on executive compensation ("our valued readers and sponsors: everything is fine with your outrageous salaries") and GMOs.
I’ve been “quoted” in a couple press releases over the years. I never spoke nor wrote any of the quotes attributed to me. The comms team sends me a draft and says “looks good?” And I respond “yeah, whatever, don’t care”. The first time I was really surprised as I had taken the time to actually write something they could quote, but they didn’t want it.
You were complaining about being inaccurately quoted in press releases. Press releases are written by comms dept within a business, so if you have a complaint with how they're written, that's something to take up with your internal teams, not with external journalists.
It should probably read corporate journalists are not journalists. To be one a journalist one must serve the truth but to remain employed by corporation means you have to accept some truths that aren't and reject others thar are.
> The source article is pretty explicit about its goal
That's your projected goal about the author's intention, which cannot be known. Maybe focus on the content?
In the context, the reference was fair. The mainstreaming of truly extremist and dangerous ideas has gone too far, calling them out where ever they are is step one of making fascism bad again.
What does "align himself with" even mean? If I publicly agree with Hitler on vegetarianism, while denouncing his beliefs that I disagree with, have I "aligned myself" with Hitler?
Obviously this is absurd. But the reporter would not have achieved his desired effect if he had just said "partially agreed with Murray on a specific issue". So he used the tribal language of alignment to fuel his politics of knee-jerk outrage. As the media so often does.
I don't think this is at all a reasonable analogy. Scott does not just agree with Murray on some unrelated topic like vegetarianism. He appears to agree with Murray that some class differences reduce to heredity.
Murray himself takes that set of beliefs and follows it in a direction that quite explicitly replaces "heredity" with "race", and associates a great deal of our nation's class differences to it. It's not really clear to me whether Scott's beliefs lead him in that direction too, or maybe if they do so to a lesser extent. I do know that many people on rationalist-adjacent boards like The Motte (used to be part of the SSC subreddit) have drawn some pretty unpleasant and unjustified opinions on this matter, which is one of the reasons that people asked Scott to remove that discussion group from the subreddit. (He did so, but only under duress and while denouncing the people who asked him to.)
It is very common for nasty people to have some kernel of reasonable belief that they take to an extreme. Agreeing with that reasonable piece does not "align" you with the extremist. That's just tribalist rhetoric.
Find me an honest person who is knowledgeable about IQ and denies that IQ is somewhat heritable, and there is some meaningful (not completely determinative!) causal relationship between intelligence and class indicators such as income. That's all Scott has ever "aligned" himself with from Murray.
>He appears to agree with Murray that some class differences reduce to heredity.
Yes, and the way to attack this is not to insist that there are zero heritable differences in people's talents for various economically renumerable activities. There are lots of heritable differences. There are also lots of environmental effects.
The way to attack it is to do the thing the NYT cannot do, and attack meritocracy as the basis of our political economy. For instance, plainly the Trump children got where they are due to heredity! Their whole damn family is coasting off Donald's father, who made the money. But as we all saw, their "very good genes" made them, well, terrifically incompetent, feckless morons.
It isn't illegal. But Murray's work is both bad science and has been used to justify all sorts of policy and social systems that harm certain groups (black people in particular). If somebody shows up at a party talking about this great book they read called "The Bell Curve" it is a reasonable bayesian prior to be leery of them.
Sometimes we fear and fight reality. If the Bell Curve has information / facts that upsets your worldview don't be so fearfull. Embrace new ideas and change your worldview. You can run but you can't hide from the truth.
It's never the facts people have contentions with, it's the conclusions. Facts can support conclusions, but it is far too easy to manipulate facts (see: lies of omission) to present misleading conclusions. So while I agree with your sentiment, I completely disagree that one should embrace challenging conclusions because they are challenging.
This sort of thing is so frustrating. Scientists aren't afraid of Murray's work. It is just poor science. The defense that people who resist a piece of writing are simply too frightened of what is inside is a cheat. It assumes that the work is worthwhile in the first place.
Murray's ideas aren't "new". Not even a little. And they aren't "truth".
These ideas are not completely new. Can you backup they aren't "truth" or they don't offer a peek into a reality that maybe taboo? Personal opinions are great do you have more to comtribute?
> Can you backup they aren't "truth" or they don't offer a peek into a reality that maybe taboo?
Your local university can do it if you really care. A ton of material has been written about Murray's work. Taboo? Humanity has been using science to break the backs of minorities for centuries. People aren't hiding the corner quivering and afraid to touch Murray's work.
You called it not "truth". Have you been to your local university to research this? Did someone give you an opinion you are repeating? What informs your strong opinion?
> Have you been to your local university to research this?
I attended grad school with people who studied sociology and history, who were able to synthesize the state of the fields for me. I'm married to a professor and good friends with other professors who study topics in this space. None of them have good things to say about Murray's work.
I thought that the research that Murray interpreted had been done by other people.
Coming at this from the left, I feel it might be better to suggest alternative interpretations of those results than to just avoid any discussion on the whole area.
Another thing that correlates really strongly with black people in the US is their ancestors having lived in slavery. Those ancestors were restricted in their freedom to pick a partner compared with the white population of the US at the time. This could result in genetic differences between the two groups.
> Coming at this from the left, I feel it might be better to suggest alternative interpretations of those results than to just avoid any discussion on the whole area.
A lot of people have done this. The Bell Curve is full of problems, both in the sourced research being completely false (for example, straight up lies about populations being tested) as well as Murray's conclusions drawn from research. Papers and books have been published. What else do you want from the community?
>> He appears to agree with Murray that some class differences reduce to heredity.
> So? When did that became illegal? Or news?
What does illegality have to do with anything in this context?
I mean holding an idea can be both legal and abhorrent/wrong at the same time.
And isn't bringing up legality here kind of a Motte & Bailey fallacy? (I'm genuinely asking, I only learned about that the other day.) People condemn Murray's ideas because they're distasteful and wrong, but it's certainly far easier to defend their legality.
Abhorrent facts are still truthful. If you feel it's distasteful and wrong that men can be attracted to other men how far should the world go to defend your worldview
> I mean holding an idea can be both legal and abhorrent/wrong at the same time.
Then rephrase the above question: since when did that become abhorrent or wrong?
We know that IQ is hereditary. This is a simple statistical fact: there is positive correlation between the IQ of children and their parents. And if cognitive ability translates into higher incomes, this would mean income is hereditary
I think what people find abhorrent are the perceived implication rather than the message itself. I'm going to hazard the guess that you're perceiving the implication that saying class differences are hereditary is implying that inequality isn't a problem, or some social groups won't ever have high incomes, or something else.
In reality saying these differences are hereditary is saying nothing about that. Saying IQ is hereditary isn't saying some people will never be smart. Obesity is hereditary, too. That doesn't mean the children of obese parents can never be a healthy weight. Nobody's body cheats thermodynamics. Likewise people's IQ can be improved by exercising mental tasks.
> I think what people find abhorrent are the perceived implication rather than the message itself. I'm going to hazard the guess that you're perceiving the implication that saying class differences are hereditary is implying that inequality isn't a problem, or some social groups won't ever have high incomes, or something else.
I think there's something there. I'd add to that the kinds of ideologies that latch on to the idea that IQ is heritable are another reason to treat the idea as abhorrent. It would be one thing if the question was just one of intellectual curiosity, but it's very much not that. The idea has a looong history of being used to justify racial prejudices.
Irrespective of the correctness or incorrectness of the idea, it's totally legitimate to make it taboo for the above reason alone. Sort of like it's legitimate to make garden-variety political flamebait taboo. Everyone knows where it leads.
That is, everyone except sometimes people who imagine themselves to be "above it all" due to their identification with "reason," or "intelligence," etc.
No I don't believe it is just to make it taboo. It's not only unjust it's counterproductive. To do this is to build an argument with it's foundation laid in falsehood. And that makes for a very weak argument, as well as making others doubt your integrity as they see you try and deny sometimes you know is true. At it's most benign this just results in people making fools of themselves as they try and deny reality. At it's worst this results in the likes of Lysenkoism - false beliefs that become entrenched and have real negative impact on society.
If some people take a true fact and abuse it to push unjust claims, the focus on addressing the abuse of facts. Not the facts themselves. And Slate Star Codex has done a good job of this. His explorations of these controversial ideas almost invariably entail refutations of abusive use of those ideas.
As far as in know, murray claims that the hereditary nature is [primarily] due to genetics, which is certainly more controversial than observing that it is hereditary.
We also know that obesity is in part due to genetics. That doesn't mean people are doomed to be obese. It's a fact that anyone can lose weight if they expend more calories than they consume.
My point is that people are perceiving a very different implication than what Murray or SSC are actually saying. E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome. In reality, IQ is far more malleable and can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it.
> E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome
This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
Taking a step back though, I'll trust you on obesity, but we do t have hard evidence that I'm aware of that intelligence is genetic. For example, cognitive ability and IQ aren't the same, and even if they were, there are all kinds of things (like language) that are clearly heritable but obviously not genetically so.
Cognitive ability is an abstract thing, IQ is a form of measuring it. It's like using 10k running time, amount of weight lifted in a deadlift, bench press, and squat as a measurement of athleticism.
Regardless,
> This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
This statement seriously makes me doubt whether you've read Murray . The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. The notion that less intelligent people are inferior is the complete opposite of what he actually wrote.
> Cognitive ability is an abstract thing, IQ is a form of measuring it. It's like using 10k running time, amount of weight lifted in a deadlift, bench press, and squat as a measurement of athleticism.
No, it's like picking one of those and using it as the measure. If you pick 10k running time, you'll be biased towards mid-length endurance athletes. If you pick deadlift, you'll be biased towards raw strength athletes. The question of if Usain Bolt or Hafthor Bjornsson is more athletic is malformed, it requires us to ask which athletic talents we value more highly (not to mention comparing to someone like Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady, where social interaction is a component of the athletic achievement).
Similarly, most measures of IQ contain implicit assumptions about what intelligence means, and those assumptions are based on western cultural norms. Even tests designed to be less culturally biased, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, aren't free of this issue. And this ignores cultures where decision making is often a team sport, so being forced to take a test without aid is an unusual environment, and may be, culturally, a malformed question.
> The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives.
Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines). That they are genetically inferior and society needs to cater better to their inferiority: "we should be more willing to help the cognitively disabled". Not that they may be just as well equipped as everyone else, and we should address the biases in society that mismeasure their intelligence, such as biased IQ tests and other cultural assumptions about what intelligence is.
The Bell curve doesn't engage with any of this criticism (it predates some of, but by no means all of it). It assumes that the measure is objective and valid. I've read enough of Murray, and enough criticism of him, to understand how he's wrong.
> Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines
Not even remotely true. The intra-race differences are much larger than the inter-race difference. The difference along racial lines is a fraction of a standard deviation. They almost entirely overlap. Murray emphasized, repeatedly, that the IQ distributions between race almost entirely overlaps. "Highly correlated along racial lines" is the total opposite of what was actually written in the book.
I'm sorry but this just about confirms my suspicion that you are not familiar with what Murray actually wrote. I'm sure the version Murray's message you have in your mind is highly racist. But that is a very different message than the one that exists in reality.
The book makes multiple claims in multiple directions, such that you can cite somewhat contradictory statements. I choose to criticize the least measured ones, You choose to ignore them.
> I'm sure the version Murray's message you have in your mind is highly racist. But that is a very different message than the one that exists in reality.
I haven't yet claimed he's racist. I've claimed he's wrong about measurement of cognitive ability.
That said, since you bring it up, I do think he's racist. The book itself isn't about race, per say, it's a Social Darwinist policy-paper aimed at reducing welfare on the argument that welfare for childcare encourages low-income (and, as the book suggests, presumably cognitively-lesser) women to have more children.
It also, plainly a succinctly states that immigration is bad, and that modern immigrants are "less able":
> The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves.
This is blamed on the low cognitive ability of modern immigrant populations compared to previous ones, and not structural and systemic factors that make it more difficult for immigrants to be high-achieving.
So I find it highly suspicious that the book lays out policy suggestions that will predominantly harm low income black women, and prevent immigration, and that he complains in particular about the harms of nonwhite immigration when he says "Latin and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence.", and then proceeds to suggest that we should reduce immigration from Africa and Latin America to address this.
Tell me how that isn't racist. I mean in a sense you're right: whether or not one believes that these policy proposals are based on a genetic or environmental understanding of cognitive heritability isn't really relevant. They're still pretty racist. And they get even more racist when you recognize that there are flaws in how Murray chooses to measure cognitive ability, flaws that systematically favor those with significant exposure to Euro-American culture.
Choosing to measure people's athleticism solely on their powerlifting ability, and then proposing to ban anyone who doesn't perform well enough is fairly prejudiced against long distance runners.
Yes, choosing to measure athleticism solely on powerlifting ability is foolish. Did you miss the part where I listed lifting ability and 10k times together? Any good measurement of athleticism would include cardio endurance, too. Likewise, an IQ test that exclusively tests mathematics would be far too narrow. That's why any good IQ test - like the ones used in the studies Murray draws from - test a mix of verbal, visuospatial, and numerical thinking ability.
Anyway, this has gone far enough and is going deeper into the reply chain than I think is productive. All I really care about is highlighting several key incorrect claims you've made about Murray's work:
> As far as in know, murray claims that the hereditary nature is [primarily] due to genetics, which is certainly more controversial than observing that it is hereditary.
No. Murray repeatedly emphasizes the role of environmental factors like schooling and parenting. He does so explicitly, "In any case, you are not going to learn tomorrow that all the cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, because the scientific state of knowledge, unfinished as it is, already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story."
> claiming that it [IQ/cognitive ability] can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability". Furthermore, much of the book explores how parenting, education, and other factors affect cognitive ability. This is not at all something Murray is claiming.
> Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines).
Again, this runs entirely contrary to what is written in the book. Even before adjusting for different socio-economic contexts, mostly overlap. And after adjusting for socio-economic factors the differences are much smaller. "Highly correlated along racial lines" is far from the truth.
There's definitely valid criticisms to be made. Especially on the influence of IQ on divorce rates, and other observations that go outside of Murray's area of expertise. But please make those criticisms on what was actually written. The reality is that Murray's claims about IQ are not nearly as controversial or inflammatory than people make them out to be. Relating back to my original comment, people criticize Murray more out of perceived implication than about concrete claims.
> That's why any good IQ test - like the ones used in the studies Murray draws from - test a mix of verbal, visuospatial, and numerical thinking ability.
This is, as I've repeatedly noted, not really true. There's some great criticism of the kinds of IQ tests he uses in the book, in fact, some of them weren't even IQ tests, which makes any conclusions drawn from them about academic achievement really quite silly. If you're asking trigonometry questions (as one test he uses does!), well you aren't testing innate knowledge, but academic progression.
Murray's response to this type of criticism is wholly unsatisfactory.
> No. Murray repeatedly emphasizes the role of environmental factors like schooling and parenting
Saying that he claims environmental factors have some effect, does not contradict that he claims that genetic factors are the majority. Those are, in fact, both true statements!
It's also a bit self contradictory: if he says that socio-economic factors have an impact on measured IQ, then what's the point of IQ as distinct from socio-economic factors? If improving educational access and such improves the measured values, it clearly isn't any sort of innate measure, and is obviously culturally influenced, which is precisely the point I'm making. I'm glad he agrees with me ;)
> The reality is that Murray's claims about IQ are not nearly as controversial or inflammatory than people make them out to be.
I agree! They're just scientifically inaccurate.
The odious things are the policy suggestions he pushes for based on the bunk science! And when one uses bad science to push racist policies, listeners (rightly) start to wonder if perhaps the science is being done to push the policies, and not vice versa. He starts from the conclusion and works backwards, and does so to justify inequalities that exist today. That is racist.
> people criticize Murray more out of perceived implication than about concrete claims.
Another way to put what I'm getting at here is that the scientific claims Murray makes are broadly not false, but they are often vague and underspecified. The policy proposals he suggests only make sense under a particular interpretation of his scientific claims, a particular interpretation he never explicitly states. That interpretation isn't supported by his data, and contradicts much of the softening he places in the book.
It doesn't make sense to advocate for removal of the social safety net as a "solution" to the problem of low IQ individuals reproducing too much[0] if you believe that IQ can be raised through policy that improves socio-economic outcomes. It is logically inconsistent to both believe that childhood economic status improves IQ, and that we should reduce government assistance to those with the lowest IQs. In fact, you'd want to do the opposite: stabilize them with additional income such that their economic status, and with it, IQ, increases.
His policy proposals only make sense if he believes that IQ is primarily genetic and that things like schools and socio-economic environment don't have a significant impact.
[0]: Let's ignore the giant question being begged here.
> can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it.
There's a personal upper limit that can be improved only when one is a child from what I've read. Whilst at the same time, damaging one's cognitive intelligence is doable at any age, yes. And to some extent, undoing the damage
You wrote elsewhere:
> The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability"
No. Spoken language, and religion are generally hereditary. They're not genetic. Such traits are socially heritable. Lots of other things (wealth, approximate birth location, etc. are also heritable, though perhaps not as strongly. This are also clearly not genetic.)
Ah, you're correct. I made a mistake (that I make far too often), conflating the words "heritability" and "hereditary". Such factors are socially heritable. But manfredo was incorrect to say that "We know that IQ is hereditary.", we don't, really. We observe that it is heritable, but the extent to which that is social, genetic, or epigenetic is not clear. Apologies.
That said, there's also epigenetics, which hurts my brain.
> In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes?
Broadly speaking, no (like obviously, in some sense it is, right?), but most common attempts to measure intelligence don't really do a good job of deciding what intelligence is. This can be fine if you're trying to draw conclusions about individuals that are generally culturally homogenous (if you're comparing solely amongst a group of pro basketball players, the one with the best bench press is probably above average, even if it isn't really a great judge of basketball skill), but not when trying to compare athleticism between a group made up of basketball players and powerlifters.
Not any more. We literally have a predictive function that takes DNA sequence as input and returns intelligence-correlate as output. It is public and you can run it with a couple of lines of Python.
I too can take as input a set of genetic markers and predict educational attainment.
That does not mean that those genes affect my cognitive ability. It may mean they affect my eye color and people are biased against dark eyes, so I can't get into college.
Yes, that's gene x environment interaction, and it isn't ruled out. By taking DNA as input, it DOES rule out environment. People DID argue it's environment, and they should retract that.
This doesn't follow. The output is still socially influenced. If you look at my DNA, and my DNA makes me brown-eyed, and people discriminate against brown-eyed people, such that I perform worse, my DNA will predict worse performance. But this is entirely due to environmental factors.
In fact, from my reading of the paper, their major conclusion was only for those of European ethnicity (and even then only accounted for a small percentage of the overall difference in attainment), so they didn't try to address questions about racial influence, for example.
Specifically, for people of European descent, their method is about as predictive as a socio-economic predictor. For a multi-ethnic group, their method is 3-5x less predictive than a socio-economic predictor. Saying that people should retract claims of environmental heritability is ridiculous: those methods are still far more predictive.
Yes, language and religion are heritable. Environmental biases can have an effect. No kidding, Sherlock. The researchers are aware of this that's why they look for correlations across different environments.
To use your example, if a gene still has the same correlation even among non-brown eyed people or the same correlation appears even in societies that don't discriminate against people with brown eyes that's a different story.
Thats what these researchers are doing. These observations aren't made in one environment. They happen across different cultures, different classes, different societies, etc. Factors like parental educational attainment can be adjusted for.
We know height is hereditary too. But our attitude about it is that it's generally irrelevant to most people's lives, and not something people should judge on, give advantages for, or discriminate against. If you are at the extremes, well, yes sometimes you get advantages and disadvantages in certain circumstances, but apart from basketball teams and horse jockeys, no one is ordering society over it.
The problem is the IQ fetishists go past this into kind of speaking about it as a virtue or lack.
It gets a little closer to someone who really really thinks height is important and short people are holding things back. They put way too much societal importance on height as a measure of success, when people of all sizes can lead fulfilling, comfortable lives. There's always something off when they discuss it, which is why I kind of got tired of those people in rationalism. It's like caring that you are only 5'7" instead of 6 foot tall.
Height is important for some things and IQ is important for others. You probably don't want a four foot center on your basketball team, or a 75 IQ surgeon operating on you.
He appears to agree with Murray that some class differences reduce to heredity.
Is this now a forbidden hypothesis? If IQ has a large effect on life outcomes (it does) and is significantly heritable (it is), then it would be surprising if that were not the case.
In some unpleasant circles, yes, this is forbidden. It's strange to me, because people in those circles seem to be defending a sort of metaphysical equality that is obviously false.
Presumably, it is possible to believe both that IQ is highly heritable and that it is very important for success in the modern world, while also concluding, "this is why we need full communism now," but you rarely encounter those people at all, at least outside of SSC-adjacent places.
The thing is, there are millions of people who are vegetarians and also have not committed genocide. So why compare yourself to Hitler as opposed to Gandhi, Jane Goodall, etc?
Obviously, saying “I agree with Hitler on vegetarianism” does not mean also supporting Nazism or the Holocaust or whatever. But it does invite pretty reasonable suspicion as to why, out of all the vegetarians in the world, you decided to compare yourself to that particular one.
Why did Scott write an enormous FAQ critiquing the neo-fascist NRx ideology in a nuanced way, detailing its reasonable and unreasonable aspects even-handedly? Because he knows people who are drawn to that and is trying to help them, obviously.
Even the NYT, in an article on Thanksgiving arguments, has acknowledged that it's much more persuasive to point out where you agree before getting into where you disagree.
Some folks seem to think it virtuous to shun their opponents and ignore, or performatively disagree with, 100% of what they say. It isn't - it's just a way to signal tribal loyalty.
I’m not familiar with the source material you’re alluding to. Maybe it’s more nuanced than your analogy suggests. If that’s the case, you basically set up a straw man for your own argument.
The point I’m making is that the way in which one makes an argument can reveal more than a strictly logical reading of its premises and conclusion. So it’s possible that even if Scott wrote his whole FAQ and came out against whatever it is, people are still justified in thinking he’s more sympathetic to it than he lets on.
It's possible, but it's misrepresentation to take what people may possibly be justified in believing and externalize it into an action Scott took, of "aligning" himself with Murray. That's dishonest.
Like, to use your analogy, if I were writing an article on someone and they threw references to Hitler into otherwise innocuous topics like vegetarianism? Maybe I wouldn’t describe it as “aligning themselves”, but I’d probably find it suspicious enough to include.
Fine, but would you say the author had aligned himself with Hitler? Because that would be dishonest. The reporter didn't just mention the material, he imposed his own opinion on it without informing his audience.
It doesn't matter if you think yourself justified to read between the lines. Reporting should be factual, otherwise it's just your opinion, people can't trust you to help form their opinion, and they have to go to the source material themselves to see what it really says.
Yes, you'll be shunned by polite society for praising his vegetarianism, economic policies, watercolors, or anything else he did or said. And indeed, he's a bizarre choice to cite. There are plenty of non-holocaust-causing people you could cite instead.
The NYT's criticism of SSC isn't that he expressed an idea that Murray also had, but that he name-checked Murray. (I haven't read his books so I don't have my own opinion, but I gather he's considered Problematic by some.)
It's said that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. When you're writing for the public, you'll have all 3 kinds of readers. Journalists are very aware of this, and make sure their stories work on all 3 levels. Actually, mostly just the last 2. A journalist who has trained himself to think this way might read SSC as "blah blah agree Douglas Murray blah blah blah".
It is lame of the NYT to try to hold other publications, that are trying to discuss pure ideas, to the same constraint? Yes.
Because Murray is an important and pernicious force in American thought, a policy entrepreneur with wide-ranging influence in American politics. It's not about what Murray says about Alexander, but what Alexander is effectively saying about Murray. Legitimizing Murray, who is sort of a figure of fun among a lot of people who do serious social science work but influential in conservative policy circles, is probably more alarming than legitimizing clowns like Yarvin.
See, I've read some of Murray's works, and he is both much closer to the consensus (especially on issues related to IQ) than you claim, and he specifically goes out of his way to counter the more abominable conclusions people tend to attribute to him.
But I look forward to a day when people feel the need to be far more cautious in general than they have been with Murray about making accusations of racism and other forms of bigotry.
The same attributes applies to most of current "hollier than thou" cancel articles. The principle of charity is totally lost, anything that an idiot can misread as offensive is labeled as so, and offensiveness itself is potrtrayed as the biggest crime.
The NYT is worse a rag than the National Enquirer, because at least the second is not perceived as some objective and quality source (and doesn't influence politics, or help setup trillion dollar wars and mass carnage).
Not to get too Jordan Peterson-ey but I really think this is the result of postmodern, social-constructionist ideology spreading through the humanities. If there's no such thing as objectivity and all truth claims are just manifestations of who has power then there's no need for journalists to strive for objectivity and everything you publish is just another salvo in the war against dominant power structures. If social constructionism is true then you're no longer a neutral conduit for facts, you're a culture warrior shaping reality with your words. There's no debate, no 'marketplace of ideas', only dominant discourses and power differentials, and your moral duty as a journalist is not to debate bad ideas, expose them, or allow the reader to make up their own minds, for that only gives oxygen to harmful discourses; instead you must destroy bad ideas through any means necessary, no matter how dishonest (and dishonesty isn't a real thing anyway because there's no such thing as true and false, only that which advances the power of a given group and that which weakens it.)
This nonsense is now the reigning ideology among humanities departments at our elite schools and outlets like the NYT are increasingly staffed by young graduates who have been indoctrinated into this cult; is it any wonder that the NYT has gone off the fucking deep end?
The ironic and surprising development lately is just how thoroughly this "postmodern, social-constructionist ideology" is being adopted by the socially-conservative right. It's hard to describe the Qanon cult with its surprising and outlandish "claims" about liberal Democrats, Hollywood etc. etc. as anything other than a concious parody of the view that "there's no such thing as objectivity and all truth claims are just manifestations of who has power" in the "war against dominant power structures". The "culture war" does not obviously favor one side!
> If there's no such thing as objectivity and all truth claims are just manifestations of who has power then there's no need for journalists to strive for objectivity and everything you publish is just another salvo in the war against dominant power structures.
But i think that the typical current-day NYT journalist would say that there is objectivity and truth, and what they write is objective and truthful. I haven't noticed anything coming from the NYT, or that whole 'progressive' side of politics that suggests they've adopted that stereotypical pomo rejection of master narratives etc.
Yep, I'm familiar with Marcuse, and I recommend the book Cynical Theories for a critical introduction to this ideology that's spreading through our once-cherished institutions like a malignant tumor.
The funny thing is, the critiques of Marcuse, Foucault and the like are 100% applicable to these status and sinecure seekers in the academy. They are worth reading for this reason alone.
Lindsay defends the old-academy classical liberalism. The sort of gentlemanly debate that arises from such values is good, but only possible between people with a collegial relationship who both prefer truth over power. They cannot be used against enemies. When dealing with enemies, one must bring weapons, and the postmodernist weapons can be made to work in anyone's hands.
I think it's as good of an explanation as any for why old-academy classical liberalism is losing (and will continue to lose): truth is not dominant, and least on the timescales the game is played.
100% agreed that post-modernists are still worth reading, and that many of the critiques are relevant. Disagree that doing so will change anything—because truth isn't dominant in the short-term.
He’s using him as an example to make another point - he could have just as easily used Hitler there or anyone else. Quite a stretch to call this an endorsement of any kind.
> It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.
Well, Hanlon's Razor suggests they're just incompentent, but that seems like more of a "98% confidence has been refuted at General Relativity" kind of thing.
Maybe I'm bitter and biased because I like SSC, but based on the author's social media profiles and his new book description, he's purely jealous that he wasn't allowed to be the man to "expose" SSC and how LessWrong and SSC played role in some events in his upcoming AI book "Genius Makers" (jeez what a name...).
> They also seem to exercise a double standard in this regard:
Thanks, that's a good article, but doesn't seem to support your claim of a double standard:
> Some will no doubt describe this double standard as an example of political bias, but it's probably better described as garden-variety sloppiness. It seems more likely that the Times does not have consistent standards here, and editors alternate between fostering over-reliance on anonymous sources and forbidding the practice.
Yes I’m aware the article offers that opinion towards the end, but that’s just their opinion. I linked the article primarily because it describes the two incidents (the facts without the opinionated judgment). To me it is still a double standard, a result of the NYT’s left leaning bias (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings).
I agree it’s gone downhill, I’m finding it really bizarre and somewhat sad to watch. It seems to me the pillars of legacy media like the NYT realized in the past decade they’re going to be outdone by newer internet-native ways of obtaining information (Substack, Twitter, etc. which do have their own issues), and their recent wave of SV tech industry bashing reeks of desperation. I’m not sure what’s going to rise to replace the idea of a “Paper of record”. Balaji is big on the idea of a “ledger of record” on some blockchain, but implementation difficulties aside, I’m skeptical that such a system would really solve the problem here.
Does there need to be a replacement? It's my understanding that it's always been this way in for example the UK; they have well-regarded newspapers pushing out strong reporting (as the NYT continues to do), but there's no expectation that the papers won't be biased. In many ways, it could be healthier for a society to not have outlets that everyone uncritically trusts.
In some ways that is certainly true, I don't unconditionally trust any newspaper published here.
However we also have the problem that is the "Daily Mail" which is a truly vile publication - which I read because it keeps me informed on what a significant chunk of the population of my country thinks.
We don't really have any truly decent news sources left or right wing, they've all moved to click bait nonsense and "reaction pieces" to something someone said on Twitter - I suspect because it's cheap.
The best of the bunch in terms of what I consider classical journalism is probably The Guardian (which is biased) and as long as you avoid it's opinion section (bleh) is a reasonably decent paper.
Honestly the best you can do to remain an informed citizen is read a bunch of them and look at what is not been said by each.
> well-regarded newspapers pushing out strong reporting
The FT is the only one left. All the others are weird poisoned wells where the factual reporting is mixed with opinion slurry, and beholden to the prejudices of the owners.
I'm sorry but just because someone disagrees with your views on whether trans women are equal to biological women does not make him transphobic. You can tolerate someone/something without having to agree with it.
Was OK. It became highly political and biased in the last 10 years. Most people in finance I know rarely even read it anymore. They became Bloomberg News and too full of themselves.
Have always had a soft spot for The Economist. I don’t always agree with their analyses but I like their generally pragmatic and humanistic style, and their global scope.
WSJ has the best straight news IMO. Their editorial section is nonsense though. The editorial section of NYT is a bit better, but just because it has a really broad stable, so most days there are both good and bad articles. I like The Atlantic for opinion on the left, and The Dispatch on the right. I also think Economist is good, but I'm not sure where to categorize it (which is one reason it is good).
The WSJ editorial is correct time and time again. The board is steadfast in principles and it comes to pass how correct they are on a consistent basis.
1. Venezuela going down hill because of bad decisions, WSJ editorial pointed it out.
2. Minimum Wages’s effects and should be eliminated, the NYT’s editorial board agreed up until its radical conversion and fearful state.
Go through the archives and see how much of their editorial articles line up with what actually happens, then go through the NYT editorials and see how far wrong they are on policy proscriptions and misunderstandings or more often blindsiding of second order effects.
The Economist is good because they are a centrist publication with a liberal economics bent and they don't hide it. It's refreshing because their "bias" ends up feeling more like "here is a centrist perspective" unlike some other publications where you're left questioning their agenda.
The Atlantic is not even close to a leftist magazine! They had a cover story from david frum on why immigration is bad and another one fearmongering about trans kids.
I don't think of constructions like "on the left" or "from the left" as equivalent to "leftist". On the continuum of US politics, The Atlantic is clearly center-left or perhaps a bit to the left of that, though of course that doesn't mean that their articles are universally of that variety.
ZeroHedge, it’s crazy but in a balanced way (as long as it’s “anti-???”). And in contrast to NYT and other “reputable media” it doesn’t mislead you into thinking it’s not mostly fake news. Then I make my own opinions...
"Zero Hedge is a far-right libertarian financial blog, presenting staff-written articles and aggregating news and opinions from external sources. Zero Hedge, per its motto, is bearish in its investment outlook and analysis, often deriving from its adherence to the Austrian School of economics and credit cycles" - wikipedia
Funny, I used to worship The Economist. But eventually, reading one too many big articles about topics I actually knew about, I realized it was complete nonsense written by really good storytellers and very naive, to say the least.
Maybe viewing print news outlets as group-think hive-minds is part of the problem? Stories are written and edited by individuals with different views, styles of writing, agendas, ethics, etc.
I think recent events at the NYT demonstrate pretty well that news outlets can indeed develop an intense monoculture, with all the consequences of a group-think hive mind.
I was about to say I don't think WP is as bad yet, then I remembered everything they had to ought to retract because they were rushing to sell a narrative with only anonymous sources to back it up.
WaPo is owned by the (second?) richest person on planet earth. To think it’s not used to advance his goals would be foolish. It’s not like Jeff is some kind of altruist.
That's kinda ad hominem though. What specific problems with Washington Post's reporting do you have? Just saying, "Its owned by X therefore it must be biased," is another form of guilt by association.
How in the world is it "guilt by association" if the man
not only OWNS the newspaper but the newspaper is financially dependent on his discretion to survive.
The times is anti-tech but their other sections are the best I have found. Opinion obviously isn't for everyone but they have a wide enough range of ideas that most can find a columnist they like. The journal has good news too, but if you accidentally read the opinion section you'll want to vomit. The post I've found isn't as good outside of politics.
It's been a propaganda sheet for decades. The WP is worse.
...
On that topic, I find it mildly funny that the NY Times goes out of its way to grace Jill Biden [0] with the honorific "Dr" despite her bottom-of-the-barrel EdD, while a practicing clinician is "Mr. Siskind".
Noam Chomsky covered this problem extensively in Understanding Power. You will do well to read it in whole, but here's a few helpful hints:
- All papers are biased in favor of their stake holders.
- Some are better at hiding it.
- Business sections are obfuscated with business-speak, but are way more factual because business people expect to be able to make business decisions.
- The best cross-section of news is a selection of newspapers with stakeholders who are not aligned or even clearly at odds.
- Papers from different countries often have different stakeholders.
- Having friends in the middle of the action is a great source of facts. Only works well if you have lots of such friends (e.g. if your name is Noam Chomsky).
"Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared"
I did not read TFA because I know I'd just be ticked off - the hoopla and sloppy reporting around GME trying to fit it all into a simplistic narrative really was quite annoying and has caused me to revise my understanding of modern day journalism.
My opinion is that "the journalist" in a lot of cases wrote things up in a simplistic way so that they could understand it for themselves - or they just slapped something together in an ad hoc fashion following all the other lemmings - or the intent was to spew more propaganda about whatever they think is important.
All this has convinced me the "Right" do have a bit of a good point about the MSM being sloppy, unfair, and trying to control the public's interpretation of reality (not that the "Right" are correct about much of anything...) But whatever happened to trying to really comprehend all the different angles to a story? Or understanding the worldview of the subject? That takes a lot of work aka empathy and the economics of the MSM nowadays precludes that, I guess. Louis Theroux and Adam Curtis are the antithesis of this sort of journalist.
Geez... the implied connotation of this lede makes it quite obvious the angle taken on this topic was predetermined just like Scott feared. It all fits in with the general fad going on now about how Big Tech is so evil now and out to enslave everyone. I've been in this industry for 30 years and yes there are problems, but just like with any other technology or shift in society. A mutant version of capitalism is the real problem now but you'll never see the MSM writing articles about that.
I'm not even a Rationalist or part of that community; I read SSC occasionally when a topic came up that I am interested in. In general, I think they are a bit short sighted and blinkered in a lot of respect - though the angle taken is useful. To really grok something, you have to look at all of the angles and to believe only 'this angle' is the real Truth is stupid. The idea that SSC was the coffeehouse for "many tech leaders" is really .... I want to say ludicrous but that is perhaps too strong of a word. Not all engineers are autistic robots.
Counterpoint: Zuckerberg has a degree in psychology so he can't automatically be lumped in the Rationalist community; he certainly knew from the beginning he was building a digital Skinner box and how people would behave given the right stimuli.
And then you look at the GME hoopla on HN and realize that no one here actually knows anything about the financial sector... If you don't know what a clearinghouse is or what Regulation SHO covers, YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO SPECULATE ON STORIES ABOUT FINANCIAL PLUMBING. And yet here we are, a couple weeks into everyone on HN showing that they are big dummies who are way too confident about things they know nothing about. Gell-Mann amnesia applies just as much to internet comments and communities as to anything else
If you read this article and know the types of things that Scott writes, remember this experience and try to imagine how many other nytimes outrage articles are similarly full of lies.
In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary.
My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.
Personally I think I've arrived at a place where I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia both with the established sources, and with the conspiracy rabbit holes. I've seen both NYT and "alt" news say things that are straight-up incorrect about facts that I know from my own experience, in my own domains of knowledge, so I'm not going to trust either blindly. I'm left trying to piece together from various sources of different slants, at different points on the established/fringe spectrum. This is harder than taking a side, but I want to believe it's worth it.
Btw, I'm not trying to draw a simple equivalency here. "Thinking for yourself" isn't as easy as saying "both sides distort" and plotting a naive midpoint between extremes. You have to read everything critically.
Isn’t that exactly what Gell-Mann would lead you to conclude you should do? Realize that many (most?) sources are riddled with errors? (I agree with your overall stance; I don’t get you wariness of Gell-Mann.)
HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.
Ah. I think I was being so pedantic it was confusing.
If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity".
And then you read HN, and you realize no one here knows anything about economics or finance, despite how confident they are! Gell-Mann amnesia is everywhere, and not just in authoritative sources. The people on the internet who you chat with and know a lot about computers... might not know that much about other topics.
The solution is to reinstate the media ownership laws that Regan and W Bush eliminated: no foreign ownership of the press, strict limits on the percentage of the audience any one outlet can control nationally and locally.
That leads to grass roots competition from voices in local communities, and (in this case) some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
How would any of that lead to an increase in accuracy or decrease in bias in reporting? There are already plenty of local news stations no one trusts, and social media has plenty of voices in local communities no one should trust.
>some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
Why would anyone trust them? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
But most of it is just blanket mistrust of "the media." That's not going to change with more local ownership, they'll just assume local politics controls the media rather than national.
The solution is History, as in the data/evidence-driven profession. It's perfectly well applicable to contemporary events too.
Wikipedia/wikinews with all its faults gets a lot closer than the NYT. Because it's not static, it's not maddening fluff and drivel (when every fucking "article" is a story, "Abigale stood in the doorway in a chilly afternoon, disoriented by the bad news that her application by the Local State Office of Nobody Ever Heard of Ever was denied ..." and seven paragraphs later we will finally find out some new nugget of information, maybe even at the end of every such amazing certified five-times-Pulitzer piece there will be some hard data "statistic").
There's simply not enough demand for such an outlet with rigor, standards, etc. (Or maybe there is and it's a market niche, or it's an outright market failure that this need is not satisfied.)
NYT is addictive as hell though. You can't look away, whether you are liberal or moderate.
Log on as a moderate and you will rage that the "paper of record" can spin such lies and obvious bias.
Log on as a progressive and you will rage because of the lies confirming our biases.
Outrage sells. The root cause lies in the reason why people need to seek entertainment and outrage from news, rather than from other areas in their lives.
I think it sustains itself because they are incentivized to go after left-wing outrage clicks to make money, but then there is always the fall-back of left-wing conviction: "I wrote this piece that wasn't accurate and may damage the paper's reputation because I need to make a stand for left-wing values and get pats on the back from my peers".
I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
Maybe I spent too much time lurking on economics/policy related online places, but nowadays fewer and fewer articles can lull me into the usual Gell-Mann amnesia. (Arrogance lvl 99.)
> Outrage sells
Yes, exactly. It's just the usual "things are bad" porn. Winter? Things are bad. Summer? Things are bad. Sure, it's their "job", but at this rate why even check it? The problems are clear, even the solutions are pretty well characterized. (From small scale local zoning, policy and voting reforms through more of the same stricter EPA/cap-n-trade/carbon-tax stuff to big structural energy/healthcare/education/copyright/tax reforms to a few constitutional amendments and new free trade agreements [that incentivize free movement of people, goods, services and information]. Arrogance lvl 100.) For everything else you'll hear about it eventually.
> I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
Wow, that's ... damning. But doesn't seem particularly false either :|
>> In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary.
> My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.
What leads to that isn't "mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting", it's the presence of any error at all in the mass media. Unless the mass media is inhumanly perfect (which it can never be, being a human endeavor), there will be scores of people who will use "Gell-Mann amnesia" as an excuse to descend into a cocoon of reassuring group-think.
Invocations of "Gell-Mann amnesia" are invitations to generalize single errors into general skepticism of media. However, people are biased, so general skepticism almost always means acceptance of things that support one's biases and rejection of anything that challenges them.
I think they know how deeply engrained their position is but I hope they underestimate how much deeper the connections people have to truly inspriring sources like SSC are.
I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.
s/But in late June of last year, when I approached Mr. Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished./But in late June of last year, when I doxxed Mr. Siskind, it vanished./ FTFY
I love the diffusion of responsibility via the passive voice. Oh it "just disappeared."
While I read SSC and agree that this article is lacking to say the least I think NYT has every right to publish it.
Rationalist movements, other areas for though and discussion, I welcome main stream media to talk even more about it. Maybe they will see that there is a huge opportunity on the table.
I do however not, in any way, hope that "big tech" buries a news house. Even for a, not very good written and mean spirited, article. Especially one trying to bring public light on where a lot of very influential people get a lot of their ideological beliefs from. That would be a horrible precedent.
To be clear, I didn't mean bury in a reactionary way to this piece, or do anything to actively inhibit NYT's ability to publish what they want. I meant provide alternative means to publish/access information that strip these news houses of their power, as they are just as full of it as anyone else.
I think that if you're not a public figure and/or have a reason to not be anonymous (accused of a crime, etc) then you should be allowed to remain anonymous.
NYT hasn't changed but the extreme amplification of any mistakes that organization makes definitely has. If you compare NYT to clown shows like Breitbart or Fox News it is extremely well run. I'm not a fan of NYT in many cases but the extreme propaganda against it these days makes me ask, in who's interest is it to destroy another one of our established institutions?
The NYT is a mess and it's gotten worse since it laid off a bunch of its editors and notably got rid of its public editor.
I see it today as a bunch of independent contractors loosely publishing under the same banner. Article quality varies heavily depending upon author. News pieces are increasingly opinionated.
I've been a reader for over a decade and have probably cancelled and renewed my subscription a dozen times.
This NYT has never been perfect: I'm still sore how uncritical it was over the Iraq War. But my memory is that its voice and quality used to be a lot more consistent.
Note: I am addressing only the news part of the org. The opinion section is a whole other ball of wax, but they bleed into each other.
Agree. It’s amazing how hostile people seem to get about unfavourable articles in the mainstream press. There’s legitimate public interest in this stuff and the problem here is not that the New York Times shouldn’t publish articles about the intellectual climate around Silicon Valley/ big tech/ VC ETC. but that they should do a better job of it. “Sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something“.
That said, The Times’s treatment of Alexander is pretty shabby, I don’t see how naming him substantively alters anything you might have to say about either his ideas or the ideas of those who move with him in “rationalist” circles.
Big Tech has shown itself to be no better standard bearer of truth and good journalism. Shifting to the current biggest power center only magnifies this kind of problem. You need independence from power, not subjection to it.
I don't. I do wish Cade Metz hadn't made a mess of this story though, because it's a story worth pursuing. As the impact of Silicon Valley's policies on society continues to grow, it would be good to understand where decision-makers are getting their ideas.
If diffusion of responsibility is your criterion for burying something I'd suggest we start with big tech first and then move on to other industries.
It's quite funny how in this very thread the thin-skinned, childish attitude of tech personalities is on full display. The article is fairly balanced and even bland, yet the howling is enormous. As the article itself points out, people like Balaji Srinivasan were treatening to harass reporters involved in this story, but compared to the 'doxxing' of Scott Alexander, this didn't seem to draw a lot of attention. I'm pretty sure most journalists would be delighted if simply publishing their full name was the only thing they'd be threatened with on a daily basis, which wouldn't be much of a threat, because in general they put them right at the top of the article.
Mr. Siskind's name was already very public beforehand (literally a Google search suggestion). Also, the right to free speech does not include the right to be freed from criticism and stay anonymous. Scott took his blog down voluntarily. The fact that his name didn't matter much is clear, when you consider he didn't mind publishing it openly on his new Substack blog.
> I hope big tech buries the NYT.
Interesting that the people rallying so much against cancelling that they believe you can never even publish names want a tech cartel to form and drive a publication out of business for being vaguely critical of a movement popular with Silicon Valley people.
I for one look forward to the erosion of the unholy axis of massive tech monopolies and hall monitor journalists that we've seen rise in the past few years as the latter begin to overreach and demand the cancellation of Silicon Valley darlings like Scott. With Trump out of the picture tech figures will realize that the burden (both financial and psychological) of complying to ever-ratcheting demands of performative wokeness is not worth bearing.
The NYTimes precipitated the Slate Star Codex controversy [1]:
> Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was taken down by its author on June 23, 2020, due to fears of having his full name published in an upcoming piece by the New York Times.
I’m assuming this article is the delayed result from the NYTimes.
For some reason, Rationalistas thought they could intimidate the NYT, the very same outfit that took down Weinstein, into backing down by sending mean tweets. Maybe these guys aren't as galaxy-brained as they imagine.
The "very same outfit that jumped on the Weinstein affair that got national interest and attracked lots of ad impressions" would be a better description.
It's easy to "take down" a rapist film producer everybody and their dog were already piling up against and the whole nation hated. His money/connections/lawyers/threats were as good as dead by that time.
It's easy to be the catalyst for the firing and arrest of a rapist. Did the NYT manage to sell this as some "heroic" Watergate-level journalism on their part?
* For explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators, including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, bringing them to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women.*
NYT does a great job of publishing one or two "big" things like this a year, in order to maintain their status as award winning journalism. They then use this reputation to incite distrust, fear, and potential violence among the populace, by inserting (or changing) embellishment words and opinion to unethically modify how factual evidence is presented [0]. And yes, I do recognize my hypocrisy in adding the word "unethically" there. Take a look for yourself at the link.
Judging from your other comment here it's clear that you have a major axe to grind against the NYT. Your case would be a lot more compelling if you could do the research (that you ironically accuse them of being so bad at) yourself first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26124200
Given the rather enormous of time and attention spent on it, not to mention the vast amounts of heated debate it had already spawned, I'd sort of assumed the NYT would either publish a really, really solid article or (more likely) just spike it and try and forget the entire thing had ever happened. After all, given that the NYT was now so much a part of the story, writing anything good would be pretty hard.
But no, kudos to them, they found a third way: Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association, and carefully ignore anything inconvenient.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
It feels weird even writing this argument down. If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
So how did he platform them? All the article offers is that he linked to the blog of a person that neoreactionaries also like. If that person has said or done anything controversial, the Times should say so. Instead, they just try to tar by the fact that bad people like him (something he has no control over).
Note how far removed this is from Scott Alexander himself.
It doesn't say he linked to the blog of a person that neoreactionaries also like. What the wording implies is that he linked to the blog of a person who is himself a neoreactionary and whom white supremacists also like. At least based on Wikipedia's narrative [1], it seems like Nick Land is in fact associated with the neoreactionary movement.
>platforming other prominent members of the neoreactionary movement.
Can't wait till we move past this infantile reframing of "showing people something you read" as "platforming".
We used to read the works of our enemies to understand them and read the works of kooks and crazies to avoid following their path (but also to see what truths, when followed too zealously, lead to ruin).
Now we have to read things, figure out the social credit of the things we read, and then decide whether or not to tell anyone we actually read it and thought about it.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
I will never understand the pearl clutching that goes on when things like this happen.
As a person you are judged constantly by others, as a public figure this increases exponentially. You are judged on everything: the clothing you wear, the way you speak, and yes, the company you keep. In the age of social media influencing, each of us has a platform built upon the platform we choose. Each of us via that platform can spread influence, be it marketing, ideas, or (dis)information.
If you utilize your platform upon a platform (or just your platform) to spread bad ideas, purported by bad people, it is a perfectly rational reaction by your audience to reclaim the social capital they have given you. This is not wrong. This is not censorship. This is how social networks have worked since long before any of us had a smart phone, or indeed, when the social network was a fire in a cave, we have operated this way.
And reading this summation, yeah that sounds about right. It sounds as if he is embroiled in a social space that is spreading bad ideas. He has denounced one person who was in that social space, but he is still in contact with two others spreading similar ideas. This calls into question the sincerity of his denouncement.
I.e. if you say you're done drinking, and resolve to quit, and refuse to spend time with your alcoholic friend, but still spend time around two others who drink regularly, people would be right to question your sincerity in that resolve.
> If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
This impulse to boil this activity into a set of always absurd sounding "rules" is probably comforting to those who would call themselves Rationalist, the sorts who fetishize facts and logic, while usually having a dearth of both in the things they say. But ultimately this isn't hard to understand: If you associate with people known to believe and spread bad things, you will in turn be viewed as possibly endorsing those things.
And all of this comes up against the simple and obvious truth that all someone in this position has to do is speak what so many would like to hear; that they didn't understand what this person was doing, that it isn't what they believe, and to create distance. But they won't. I wonder why?
The culture you're describing is just utterly foreign to many people. It's certainly not how my social networks work; nobody's ever asked me to denounce my friends for believing bad things, nor would I ever ask someone else to do so. What you're reading as "fetishizing fact and logic" is an earnest attempt to understand what your unfamiliar cultural standards are.
> nobody's ever asked me to denounce my friends for believing bad things
Probably because you aren't in a position of social influence, and/or your friends aren't propagating dangerous ideas? That's all the more reason to skewer those that do and are, precisely because of the platforming effects they have.
> What dangerous ideas would you say Scott Alexander has propagated?
The idea that the "Gray Tribe" is anything but a well-written propaganda effort targeting midwits to keep them supporting the Blue Tribe (and most importantly, to keep the Blue Tribe in power) as the problems mount and the failures become harder and harder to excuse.
Again, you're assuming a lot of cultural context here that isn't universally shared. I truly, honestly don't know what people mean when they say "dangerous ideas". My intuitive interpretation is "ideas which tell people to go be violent", but the term is very frequently used to refer to ideas which don't call for violence, so that can't be right.
SSC and the space around it fundamentally disagrees with you that the thing to do about dangerous ideas is block their propagation. It wants to know about them, understand them, turn them inside out, figure out why people believe them, understand what it’s like in their heads, and learn how not to make similar errors.
“Listen to your culture’s leaders and tastemakers, vigorously punish any heretics” is a terrible algorithm for that. It’s exactly why so many bad ideas have such power for so long.
Part of the idea of presenting bad ideas in such a sympathetic light is to then whack the reader with, “Do you realize what you were just nodding at?” To show that you too are capable of believing terrible things under the right circumstances, to encourage humility and skepticism.
> I mean, they tried that approach with Roko's Basilisk... Let's just say it didn't work very well.
Roko's Basilisk is just Pascal's Wager restated for AI.
It falls to the same counterarguments, e.g. what if a superintelligent AI already exists somewhere in the universe and currently doesn't care about you but deigns to punish you for any attempt to create a competitor?
This whole "dangerous ideas" concept is ridiculous. The obvious connotation is that the peons can't be trusted with these ideas, so the intelligentsia needs to shield us from them; I find this to be more abhorrent than most bad ideas.
>As a person you are judged constantly by others, as a public figure this increases exponentially. You are judged on everything: the clothing you wear, the way you speak, and yes, the company you keep.
Not everyone is a rich socialite looking to be viewed well at the finest private dinner parties. In fact, I dare say that anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers are the opposite of that.
Maybe you should go try judging someone with actual responsibility and a real role in public life. You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
>These social morays have applied to everyone, everywhere, forever.
Any claim that any particular social more is eternal or universal is ahistorical. This is the clearest finding of the fields of anthropology and history. Everything about human life varies throughout time and space.
By the way, I thought "social morays" was absolutely brilliant and I will certainly be using it myself, but it's spelt "mores". It's a direct import from Latin.
> And all of this comes up against the simple and obvious truth that all someone in this position has to do is speak what so many would like to hear; that they didn't understand what this person was doing, that it isn't what they believe, and to create distance. But they won't. I wonder why?
The thing is we have lots of perfectly good examples of people associating with conservative people with a few noxious views. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, for example, were well known as family friends of Kanye West but they managed to go years asserting they were personal friends and disagreed with his political views and hoped he would come around. Eventually Kanye went a little overboard and they started distancing themselves further, but pointedly that was Kanye’s fault and not the Teigan-Legend family’s.
It really is not that hard to adopt a “love the sinner, hate the sin” position. But when people adopt this position of hemming-and-hawing any time someone asks “do you really hate the sin though?” it understandably raises some questions. People have blogs where they engage with bad ideas all the time. There’s a style in how they present and engage with the ideas that doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
I also don’t think advocates for “places to debate” these things really understand the purpose of debate. These arguments for scientific racism are well known and understood and mostly debunked by actual well-regarded experts in the associated fields. There is no value in debating bad ideas ad nauseum with randos online. You’re not learning anything from that, you’re just engaged in a sort of rhetorical sparring match. Is society well served by you trading bad faith arguments with strangers? Maybe. At the expense of exposing impressionable spectators to arguments with poor empirical grounding that are nonetheless seductive for taking advantage of common misconception and flattering peoples egos? Not so sure about that.
> “It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints.
Yes, David just said that, thanks for the repetition. Where were the editors on this?
I conjecture that they just felt like they had to publish something after all this time and they went with what they had.
It’s also strange that it doesn’t link to the NYT magazine article on rationalist retreats from a few years ago, nor the New Yorker article about this dispute, nor the New Yorker article about HN, all of which fill in the picture.
For those of you unaware, let me summarize what this is referencing.
Recently a NYT freelance editor Lauren Wolfe, who mostly worked on the "live updates" team, was fired, but this firing caused some controversy due to the timing of some tweets and who knows what else. It's not completley clear why she was fired, as the NYT responded to requests for comment by the WaPo by saying [1]: "There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter. For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved we don’t plan to comment further. (To clarify something that has been incorrectly reported, Ms. Wolfe was not a full-time employee, nor did she have a contract.)"
Quite a few leftists initially blamed the NYT for caving to conservative pressure, apparently by making the claim there was a relation between the tweets she made and her firing, which she confirmed in another WaPo interview [3] by saying "...that an editor at the paper contacted her after she published the “chills” tweet. The Times couldn’t be associated with such a tweet, said the manager, and that her gig with the paper would be ending."
Some leftists also seemed to blame Glenn Greenwald for his involvement in the matter; a single tweet in response to hers that he later called "light mockery"[2]. Glenn Greenwald, previously strongly supported by the left and many others, has recently been victim to a series of character assassination attempts due to his unconformity to the mainstream leftists viewpoints, so it rather seems the twitter left mob just used him as a lightening rod without having all the facts in this case.
The tweets in question?
LW: "The pettiness of the Trump admin not sending a military plane to bring him to D.C. as is tradition is mortifying. Childish
She later deleted the above tweet when it was revealed that Biden and his team chose to take his own plane, despite many mainstream media talking heads parroting the same narrative.
LW: “Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills”
GG: "If you're in the national press and will be on TV at any point today and being to feel the need to weep joyously, just hold it in until you find a private place. Nobody is expecting any adversarial coverage over the next 4 years, but it's just a matter of personal dignity."
Not sure Wolfe would qualify as one of the "good" editors fired at the times. Maybe OP is referring to Bennet? I'm any case the power dynamics at the NYT have been shifting to the detriment of solid reporting for a while now. It's sad but the NYT and WaPo are now the Fox News of the repressive left and state power (so long as it's Blue).
James Bennet edited the opinion section, so his resignation wouldn’t have anything to do with the shift away from “solid reporting” you’re talking about.
The NYT and WaPo editorials and analysis are the most milquetoast center-left opinions you can find. That's always been their position.
The difference is now they're coming after Silicon Valley, because they realize they've lost their attention and advertising monopoly. It's all very predicable and boring.
It's the same deal with Balaji. The only reason he cares is because the reporting might hurt a company he's invested in.
> MSNBC’s Brian Williams reads a tweet: "Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. U.S. Population, 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million"
> NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing”
I think it is indeed becoming an echo chamber. Everyone is holing up in their own little everyone-else-is-wrong silos including MSM, it's not just the fringe. There are a group of academics across the aisle from one another trying to fight it but I think it's a battle they can't win. Talks at universities cancelled because someone, who wouldn't even be going is "triggered", stories like this from the NYT, deplatforming people forever, etc.
I laughed because that “wide range of views” is actually quite narrow in the grand scheme of things. Wide by the standards of the intelligentsia perhaps.
One thing left out of these discussions tends to be the views of just about every non-college Republican or independent. It’s just mainstream liberalism against elite Republican views, thirdway-ism, or some niche contrarian take from the right or the left.
If you’re going to bring in contrarian views on things like race, that some view as racist - okay. But I would recommend expanding that to bring in views that are also contrarian but perhaps not so controversial but nevertheless worth discussing.
My impression is SSC readers get caught up in a sort of intellectual exoticism rather than any rigorous analysis of what the landscape actually looks like; the non-conventional but ultimately boring takes are left unexamined.
> One thing left out of these discussions tends to be the views of just about every non-college Republican or independent. It’s just mainstream liberalism against elite Republican views, thirdway-ism, or some niche contrarian take from the right or the left.
Not just non-college Republicans, huge swaths of non-liberal Democrats (mostly people of color). Are the majority of Black Democrats, who believe you can’t be a moral person without believing in God, represented? Are there any Muslims who hold social positions their religion tells them to be true? When it comes to immigrants, anyone who actually believes what your typical Indian or Bangladeshi believes? (Or is it just the elite who deliberately left those countries and assimilated into white American culture? And even among the latter, is it the first generation parents hoping their kids will integrate to a degree, but hold on to traditional social morals, or is it the second generation ones who picked up western social morals despite their parents’ efforts?)
Correct. It’s weird how goofy race science stuff gets a platform and taken serious because it’s secular but tons of stuff from religious societies is beneath discussion
Yeah, as the original commenter mentioned, all these commenters take various assumptions as facts (it's okay, all political views do this, they must or they would be too vague to be useful): that politics functions best as the executed will of the majority, that democracy and voting is the best way to gauge public support for proposals they arguably don't understand the impact of, that authoritarianism is prone to abuse and thus inevitably abused, a skeptical / secular default way of looking at things and discussing them even among the religious.
Again, none of these assumptions are wrong or bad or right or good. My point is just these are the assumptions you'll see across nearly every commenter on the blog because of its narrow, Western-educated audience. There are many popular, interesting, and dynamic political discussions happening elsewhere in the world (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
And I can't find the anti-neoreactionary & in-defense-of-democracy post that goes through these problems, and tries to justify the assumptions.
> (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
If you could point these out I think SSC/LessWrong folks would love to ponder over them!
This was indeed it! Much more interesting read IMO. I remember being struck in it, though, by the reference to Eliezer Yudkowsky as being known for espousing polyamory, As if to tell readers, watch out, sexually deviant person here! A lot of articles about rationalists seem designed to reinforce Scott’s broader point about the distance between the blue and grey tribes
The best thing to do is for everyone to ignore this article and don't let it get traction via Streisand. It's clearly not written in good faith. The reporter had to be biased against siskind after the saga and conflict they went through.
The second best thing is, should any reporters be reading this, to take the opportunity to write a better article.
Really, why does anyone take the NYT seriously anymore? It seems that barely a week goes by these days without some new way in which they discredit themselves. If you were a conservative "anti-woke" mole who'd infiltrated the NYT and wanted to publish fake content in a deliberate attempt to destroy the organisation's credibility you couldn't have done much better than the self-inflicted wounds the NYT has been pouring out again and again and again lately.
Does anyone? I’m not sure credible people do and no one I respect has referenced a Times article for other than crossword, Sunday magazine, fluff stuff.
The article is plainly written and well written and allows people to decide for themselves what the intentions of Scott Siskind may be.
Contra to the insinuation that Cade Metz smears Siskind by unfairly associating him with Nick Land, Metz's article lays the evidence and allows readers to infer what that evidence may or may not mean.
For me, the concluding 3 paragraphs of the article sum up what Slate Star Codex (now "Astral Codex Ten") may be
> I assured [Kelsey Piper] my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.
This is ad absurdum at its finest. Proving whether an idea is correct using statistical analysis makes sense for many empirical matters. But proving whether proponents of extreme views (e.g. in the article, the idea that women are biologically not as capable as men to work as programmers) by using statistical analysis is a moral failure driven by scientificism. (I'm going to decline rehearsing the debates about whether women are biologically or culturally inhibited from programming.)
> When I asked Mr. Altman, of OpenAI, if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”
This really sounds unfortunately like John Matze's position on Parler. Slate Star Codex is not the same kind of gathering ground Parler was, but given the next paragraph, the comparison is not inapt.
> In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.
If Slate Star Codex is somewhere self-described "Rationalists" can civilly and safely debate whether intelligence is statistically correlated to race and gender and these are "[t]he People Inventing the Future", then it's not surprising Horowitz would seek to protect that forum under the shelter of Substack.
However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
Failing to object to immorality and immoral arguments cannot be corrected only by rationalism and statistics because Nature, at its core, is amoral.
Many dumb people are moral. Many dumb people are immoral. By the same token many smart people are immoral, too.
The real problem is when you realize that many smart people are, in fact, both immoral and dumb.
The article's last paragraph gives the lie to the controversy that has raged in tech circles surrounding publishing Siskind's name.
> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
It's written pretty deceptively. Yeah, it's not flat out wrong for the most part, but every part is presented in a way meant for you to take away that it has bad ties and questionable beliefs and to minimize why that might not be the right reading.
> The article's last paragraph gives the lie to the controversy that has raged in tech circles surrounding publishing Siskind's name.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
Did you actually read the post where Scott explains why? Because at that point it was impossible to keep it private. He was also forced to quit his job. The fact that he landed on his feet doesn't mean there wasn't a cost paid.
His name wasn't private to begin with. There are huge threads on HN about this from the time it happened and numerous ways to have easily stumbled across his real name, including the fact that he wrote some of his better known pieces first under his real name. Repeating over and over again that Scott Alexander's name was private using different words each time won't change that fact.
What was happening in this story was that Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable. That's a reasonable request to make in a community of peers (it's why I'll keep using "Alexander" on HN, for instance). It is not remotely a reasonable demand to make of strangers, let alone journalists.
This is another instance of message board thought seeping into the real world, and it's always alarming to me to see that, because while message board thought is fun, it's also deeply weird and dysfunctional.
Taking things from obscurity to publicity is literally part of the premise of journalism. Alexander cannot demand that journalists pretend that his identity is secret when it's not, not remotely, not even plausibly.
Scott is perfectly justified being upset when the NYT tries to parade his name around in a hit piece knowing (probably even hoping) their cancel-happy readers will run with it.
> Alexander cannot demand that journalists pretend that his identity is secret when it's not, not remotely, not even plausibly.
This isn’t what he asked for. As you note there’s pages of comments and Alexander’s own account on Substack now. Maybe you’re claiming he isn’t being honest about his requests from NYT.
That Alexander started the substack under his real name only after leaving his job is a pretty big hint that it wasn’t about “demand[ing] that journalists pretend that his identity is secret”.
I don't want to guess at how this connects to the question I asked, so can you be more specific about what you think it was Alexander was asking of the New York Times? I think he was asking them not to disclose his identity. Do you think he was asking for something else?
You're moving the goal posts here, pretty significantly. He didn't want them to disclose his identity, because he didn't want his patients to see his name blasted out in major media as that could potentially impact their care. This seems entirely reasonable, and well within the range of requests that NYT grants to many subjects of their articles. You can think it's unreasonable, because if you are trying to connect SSC to an IRL name you could find it, and that's fine. I don't, because I think Alexander should've been given the exact same deference NYT offers others.
I think we're going around in circles. Because Alexander's identity was not in fact private, I don't care why Alexander wanted the NYT to keep it out of the story, nor do I think there is any real-world norm obligating them to do so.
Sure, you're free to ignore that one (of several) motivations was protecting his patients (which there absolutely is a real-world norm around). "My Doctor is the guy who writes SSC?" isn't a question he wanted asked. You're also free to ignore that NYT journalists do, quite often and as a norm, protect the identities of their sources and subjects of stories, and in this specific instance choose not to do so.
The whole idea that the NYT is somehow obliged to protect Alexander's patients is deeply weird. If protecting Alexander's patients was so important, Alexander shouldn't have been running this hugely popular blog using an identity so trivially connectable to those patients. Either way: it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Times.
I didn't claim they were obligated like it's a law to do this, but I do think it's a little strange you wouldn't expect a powerful media org like NYT to care about the second order effects of their reporting at all. To reduce this to it's simplest form: I am claiming that the NYT shouldn't have been an asshole about it. What is so puzzling to me is that you are a) intentionally not getting this, or saying "meh don't care" and b) are giving enormous deference to a very powerful organization that can negatively (or positively!) impact someone's livelihood.
>...using an identity so trivially connectable to those patients.
As others have pointed out, the connection was mapped as A to B and not B to A.
>...it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Times.
And the Times is what would've changed how his identities were mapped. How The Times' operates in this new tech-enabled media environment is absolutely relevant.
Sure, and there's an argument to be made that Alexander was taking some professional risk in that it was always possible one of his patients would wide up in the SSC subreddit and see his real surname.
Just searching the web for his real name would find those discussions. Someone can argue the NYT shouldn't make the connection more prominent. But it was mapped both ways already.
Why do you prefer to live in a world where professionals are afraid to blog? Scott himself shared [1] an example of a police officer facing disciplinary action and being forced to shut down his blog under similar circumstances (worse, his identity was uncovered through hacking by the reporter) [2]. I think the entire society loses, except for the newspaper that gets a few clicks. Good for them I guess.
The other case is completely different. The police officer hid his identity more carefully and the journalist broke the law.
I prefer to live in a world where professionals act responsibly. He could have stopped writing as Scott Alexander and started writing with a new pseudonym. He just didn't want to rebuild his audience.
The energy spent trying to miss the point here is kind of breathtaking.
There existed a trivial mapping of A -> B. There did not exist a trivial mapping of B -> A. Scott was trying to prevent his patients, who had information B, from being bombarded with the link to A. It is not a hard concept to grasp.
I cannot understand the point of you switching back and forth between "he was already doxxed" and "well ok but actually the NYT should doxx him" in 25 separate threads on the topic.
> Taking things from obscurity to publicity is literally part of the premise of journalism
What a facile justification. By that metric there was nothing wrong with Gawker's antics. The question is always whether the things a journalist is publicizing in the public interest, and the fact that publications (especially prestigious ones) have an obligation to consider the impact of what they expose of citizens who often don't have an equal platform from which to defend themselves.
The very fact that you can find his real name from his pseudonym means that the NYT wasn't actually "exposing" anything of value. At the same time, they've made it considerably harder (if not impossible) for him to practice normal psychiatric medicine.
Also, does this article even cover what it was originally supposed to be about - i.e. a bunch of people online who saw COVID coming long before the authorities? I haven't gone all the way through, but my understanding is no. Instead there's no so subtle implication that the guy who wrote the "Anti Neoreactionary FAQ" may in fact a secret nazi or something.
Well, that was the justification Cade Maetz provided when he was asking around about Scott initially. Are you saying we shouldn't take the author at his word?
Yeah, his name wasn't private. That is partly because of a decision to publish under his real name when he was much younger, and partly because people have been working to keep his name public despite his attempts to scrub his name.
But, as Scott has said numerous times, he simply wanted to make it hard for his patients to google his name and find his blog, so that he could continue practicing psychiatry. That's a perfectly reasonable request to ask of anyone, including journalists.
Alexander can certainly want his identity to be obscure, and has legitimate reasons to want that. That preference doesn't bind on strangers. He can't force the world to un-know things it already knows, and so no, that is not a reasonable request, especially not to a journalist.
These arguments about why we're all obligated to cooperate with Alexander's attempt to walk his identity back always seem to be inventing new norms, like the norm of "if a doctor slips up and writes political essays under their real name, then, for the sake of the doctor's career, every other person in the world should pretend that real name was never disclosed". It's a reasonable thing to want, but not to expect.
> These arguments about why we're all obligated to cooperate with Alexander's attempt to walk his identity back always seem to be inventing new norms
Not really. The NYT was perfectly willing to protect the anonymity of a different psychiatrist blogger. Yes, this person did a better job of keeping their identity a secret, but the justification was largely the same.
And let's not pretend that journalism is only about sharing information. There's a great deal that journalists don't share (or even try to actively suppress) for many different reasons. Partly because there are a lot of ethical considerations when publicizing information.
Worth noting that part of the issue is that, with psychiatry and counseling in particular, it really doesn't matter what he was writing about or what his politics are. Any such publicity compromises the blank slate that counselors are supposed to present to their clients. While this does mean that mental health professionals have an obligation to take care with their public image, it's not unreasonable to ask others (including journalists) to respect the particular cost they face with any kind of exposure.
I've lost track of the rationale you're trying to give me for why the NYT is obligated to pretend Alexander's identity wasn't public, or why the NYT is somehow a party to Alexander's professional practice.
It's not _obligated_ to, no one says it's illegal. NYT can decide to be an asshole and reveal it despite the request not to. Which it has.
Is there a real argument for why the NYT _should_ publish Scott's name? Other than "it doesn't care whether that hurts the subject, and it expects to get more clicks this way".
Journalists routinely protect people's identities when they think outing them could threaten their safety in some way. They do this regardless of whether a dedicated investigator might be able to piece together someone's identity from existing public information.
It's not a requirement to offer this protection, but declining when it's asked for by the subject of a story is certainly a weighty ethical decision that respectable journalists don't take lightly.
Outing someone in a vulnerable position simply because the journalist disagrees with their ideas and wants to harm them (vs. deciding it's in the public interest) would be a very clear breach of ethics.
If the NYT went digging and found a friend of Alexander's who revealed his name, this would have maybe some weight (but probably not: journalists write stories about people who would prefer, for economic reasons, not to be identified all of the time; that is often the point), but in this case, all they did was Google. I'm sorry, I still can't see the real-world rule that requires the New York Times to pretend that you can't just Google a pseudonym to unmask it.
They don't have to pretend that. But they also don't have to include someone's name when it's not pertinent to the story and could conceivably cause the person harm.
It doesn't matter if someone could just Google it. The NYT shouldn't make it easier unless there's journalistic value in doing so. Spite doesn't count.
Would you feel the same if this was a story about a sexual assault victim instead of a blogger?
Scott Alexander is not a victim of sexual assault; he's the author of a blog that he would rather not have connected to his name. The norms about sexual assault victims in journalism are specific (and they're contentious! Google CJR for examples) and you can't generalize from them.
He's a blogger, not an assault victim, but his concerns are similar. Avoiding harassment and physical violence against himself and his family. Avoiding negative consequences on his career.
Why are his concerns less valid than anyone else's? "Because I disagree with him" or "because he talks about ideas I don't think should have a platform" aren't good answers. There's no allegation he hurt anyone, did anything illegal, abused his influence, or acted in bad faith. So what's the journalistic purpose of exposing him?
Are you really incapable of seeing the distinction between being able to find a real name from the pseudonym, and being able to find the pseudonym from the real name?
It's not like he was trying to hide from the NSA or anything. The goal was "I don't want my patients to see my blog on the first page of Google results when they search for my real name". The NYT completely obliterated that.
Additionally, the fact that the NYT chose to smear him means that now many potential patients may google his name, see the hit piece and nothing else, and decide "yikes, better not go there".
The first page of Google results had pages that linked to his blog. And I think patients would be more likely to click on pages containing his name than an obscurely named blog.
The article wasn't flattering. It wasn't a smear or a hit piece.
You're ignoring the main issue here: Metz has no legitimate reason for publishing Scott's name. It's a purely spiteful move that provides no benefit to his readers.
Based on his behaviour in this and other[1] situations, I have no doubt that if Metz thought he could get away with something more unsavoury, he would have tried to.
You're ignoring the main issue here: Metz has no legitimate reason for publishing Scott's name.
This would be reminiscent of the South Park planet Marklar where all people, places and things are named Marklar. It's fun for a bit but likely impractical. It's also not clear how using someone's name is 'spiteful' given the vast majority of readers would have never heard of Scott Alexander, pseudonymous or otherwise.
Do you realize that when covering chapo trap house the NYT referred to Virgil Texas by his pseudonym rather than revealing his real name, which he prefers to keep private? It's just as easy to find his name online and it's often mentioned on message boards. Why provide anonymity to one but not the other?
It matters because either the NYT is inconsistent, or worse they are consistently biased, in how they respect the anonymity of their subject. But ultimately any justification they provide for publishing his real name rings hollow and comes across as a petty act of power.
I guess I just don't care how consistent the NYT is in offering people control of their portrayal in stories, because I don't believe the NYT has any obligation to offer anyone that control.
You don't think journalists should follow some sort of publicly stated code of conduct or held to a higher standard than an anonymous poster on 4chan when it comes to revealing an individual's personal info?
I think the norms of message boards and the norms of journalism have literally nothing to do with each other, and you can't learn anything about one by analyzing the other.
It's not about offering subjects control, it's about weighing the impact to the individual against the public interest of the reporting.
You seem to be under the impression that journalists are under no obligation with regard to how their reporting impacts their subjects, even when that subject is not a public figure per se. I'm pretty sure that's something that even most journalists (at least those working at relatively prestigious institutions) would disagree with.
Again, you are justifying Gawker-style journalism, which is pretty atrocious and doesn't serve to create a better informed public.
If you read any of those "huge threads on HN" you would easily know the crux of why Scott wanted to remain pseudonymous.
"Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable."
Absolutely false. Scott admits many times that it's trivial for his real identity to be known if you search around for Scott Alexander.
Scott Alexander -> Scott Sisnick (trivial)
What Scott was concerned about what his searching his real name being resoundingly brought to Scott Alexander, a major issue for his psychiatrist-patient relationships, as he demonstrates that psychiatrists need to maintain a blank slate for their patients to project onto, so that the patients don't hide or alter the behavior knowing something about their psychiatrist. That's very mainstream psychiatry. And there were concerns about current psychiatric patients he was seeing possibly being affected by this.
Before:
Scott Sisnick -> "psychiatrist, bay area, studied at X, etc."
After:
Scott Sisnick -> "Scott Alexander, rationalist, providing a platform for white nationalists, racism, etc."
People keep explaining to me why Alexander wants his identity not to appear in a newspaper. I understand that. I just don't understand why his preferences bind on anyone else.
By way of example, a friend just told me on Twitter that it's super important that patients not be able to look up their therapists on the Internet and learn more about their personal lives. But that's definitely not a norm! I checked with several therapists I know personally.
I feel like people are scrambling to invent Internet rules that allow Alexander to coerce journalists, and I don't find that effort especially persuasive.
I guess it's just a matter of decency. You certainly don't need to abide by that but don't be surprised when others don't agree with or want to be around you.
> . I just don't understand why his preferences bind on anyone else.
I mean, they don't bind like a physical law or something. Ignoring people's requests for anonymity and getting them harassed or fired is certainly physically possible, it just makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about the effect on speech and discourse.
It's sort of similar to not wearing a mask out, it's certainly not illegal or impossible to go out without a mask and cough on people who would prefer you didn't, but it still makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about you putting others' lives at risk.
It's not a reporter's job to protect people from their own conflicting interests. They can choose to withhold parts of a story after processing the ethical considerations, but "associating my name with the thousands of pages of opinion I've published on controversial subjects would damage my reputation" isn't a clear cut issue. It's a judgement call, he could have done it either way, but that Metz went ahead and attributed the works to their actual author doesn't make him an asshole.
It's especially egregious here in a hit piece that deliberately makes the things he said horrible.
But even if it was an accurate representation, the media has to ask "is it our job as a powerful outlet to literally punish this much less powerful person because they have opinions we disagree with".
If it wasn't "opinions we disagree with" but like "has killed 3 people" sure appoint yourself judge, jury, and executioner. But in other cases yes it makes you an asshole to think that you should enforce your will by punishing someone who disagrees with you.
It sounds like the big issue for you and others is that this was a hit piece. Okay -- but it's not in general wrong to report the name of someone who has written a large body of influential work, especially when it wasn't unknown in the first place. You're exaggerating grossly.
Scott Alexander on the one hand is a practicing clinician, and on the other writes prolifically about culture war topics. This is majorly out of balance, and it's on Scott to fit these areas of his life and income together. Why would the responsibility be on the NYT to help him?
It's not on the NYT to help him, he's already managing fine on his own, it's on the NYT to not try to punish him by breaking the anonymity that's allowed him to both continue his job and practice his free speech without affecting that.
Yes, why ever would leftists consider preference on names or things related to names binding on others? Can you imagine such a thing, just forcing people to address others in a certain way? Surely the left would never get into huge fights about something as trivial as that.
> I just don't understand why his preferences bind on anyone else.
His preferences bind on the NYT in that as Scott can take actions which are adverse to the NYT in order to maintain his preferences. Such as deleting the blog and having his fans sign a petition and cancel their subscriptions. None of those actions are unreasonable: he is free to delete his blog for any reason or no reason, and anyone can make in a petition. What is the problem here?
FYI tptacek has gone dozens of comments deep on this topic every time it has come up. I don't know why he picked this hill (although I believe he has said he dislikes Scott) but I do know he ain't budging.
People in the rationalist community used his real name when discussing his pseudonymous writing. Searching for his real name identified him as Scott Alexander before too.
>No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees.
At the start of the post but there's more further in.
There's s also this from The NYT initially contacted him with his reasoning for protecting his job (which didn't work out)
>I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left to far-right – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.
It seems like he's pretty clear that he chose to quit. He says his job was "tentatively willing to try to make it work". It appears to me that he's shown a consistent pattern of overstating the effects of his name being revealed, so I don't put a lot of stock in "tentatively".
I am quite convinced he simply didn't want his name in the paper because he knows he's said some edgy stuff (ie, explicitly comparing himself to Charles Murray).
The sources he provides as supporting the importance of therapeutic anonymity appear to be debates, as opposed to, say, APA guidelines emphasizing its importance. And that's a one sided picture, where Scott is digging for evidence to support his claim.
Part of his argument is that he has already faced threats and harassment. Okay, and he still didn't take basic steps to anonymize himself, so apparently this didn't concern him so much in the past. His argument is that he has a lot of crazy, nutso enemies. But those people could already easily find him.
He's been pretty clear about his dislike for SJWs and distrust for the news media (I mean this in the most value-neutral way possible). That's fine, but I think it's silly to make up a bunch of reasons your name shouldn't be in the paper.
He even comes out and says that it's simply his preference for anonymity:
>Why didn't I do this? Partly because it wasn't true. I don't think I had particularly strong arguments on any of these points. The amount I dislike death threats is basically the average amount that the average person would dislike them. The amount I would dislike losing my job...and et cetera. Realistically, my anonymity let me feel safe and comfortable. But it probably wasn't literally necessary to keep me alive. I feel bad admitting this, like I conscripted you all into a crusade on false pretenses. Am I an entitled jerk for causing such a stir just so I can feel safe and comfortable? I'm sure the New York Times customer service representatives who had to deal with all your phone calls thought so.
Again, he did not lose his job. They were willing to keep him, and he quit anyways.
>In the New York Times' worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I'm the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me. I admit I am not the perfect victim. The death threats against me are all by losers who probably don't know which side of a gun you shoot someone with. If anything happened at work, it would probably inconvenience me and my patients, but probably wouldn't literally kill either of us. Still! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
Replace "dox" with "include my name, which was found on my blog, in a news story about my blog", and yes, that's a default-allow unless you have some really extraordinary circumstances.
He chose to quit which makes it less of an issue for him to reveal his name. The NYT article ignores that and just says he reveled it in his first post, somewhat implying it wasn't even an issue for him.
>And I left my job. They were very nice about it, they were tentatively willing to try to make it work. But I just don't think I can do psychotherapy very well while I'm also a public figure, plus people were already calling them trying to get me fired and I didn't want to make them deal with more of that.
"Well crap now I'm a public figure because of this, I don't really have a choice if I want to do my job well in the future."
Using "forced" may be a little clumsy, but it's certainly directionally correct.
It's not directionally correct. It's not correct in any sense.
If he doesn't think he can do psychotherapy very while while he's a "public figure" (his name being in the paper a single time), why is he opening up his own practice?
I have already posted his own quotes in this comment chain, where he admits his case is weak and that anonymity is merely his preference.
He is opening his practice only to patients that are comfortable with him and he is comfortable with. That's a different situation than working with who the hospital assigns him. Also he does say they were 'tentatively' willing to still keep him but it sounds like there was friction nonetheless.
I would submit there's a pretty big difference between his long term preference for pseudo-anonymity and the question of what to do, right now, with his patients. He made a decision to leave his practice and transfer the patients to someone else, and start his own where everyone is coming into the relationship eyes wide open. Given the circumstances, he certainly had a choice, yes. And given how he evaluated the costs and benefits for his patients and his career, he felt his only real choice was the latter. Like I said, "forced" is probably a clumsy adjective to use for something requiring a more nuanced explanation.
> The article's last paragraph gives the lie to the controversy that has raged in tech circles surrounding publishing Siskind's name.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
The fact that you think this after reading the article shows just how misleading it is. He shared his real name after quitting his job because of it. The NYT leaving that detail out is completely bonkers. It's a little bit like saying "what was the point of WW2, Hitler just ended up killing himself after all that trouble anyway."
>What should society do when an an argument is factually correct but leads to an immoral result?
Choose a moral alternative. Humans aren't bound by (or even capable of) pure logic or animal instinct, that's why we invented abstractions like "morality."
>Are you saying that facts should be suppressed/set aside when they lead to immoral results?
I'm saying facts have no moral or immoral dimension - "immoral results" come from choices made in the interpretation of fact, choices which are relative and mutable because morality is an abstraction. There is no case where an immoral choice is made where a moral choice could not also be made.
But the moral alternative to the fact that “intelligence is mostly genetic” isn’t to ignore and/or deny the fact (which many people on the left, and most of mainstream media try to do), it’s “treat people as individuals” (exactly what was the moral alternative before knowing this fact).
This is a classic problem in philosophy, called the "is-ought problem, or "Hume's law". Hume argues that you can't get to a moral conclusion from facts alone. This is the sort of thing discussed in graduate courses in philosophy. Yet it causes us no end of political trouble when "what's morally right" and "what's reality" come into conflict.
This approach conflicts with the notions of "natural law" and much of Christian morality. It's a rather alien concept to most people. This leads to pressure to try to alter facts to fit a moral scenario.
Suppose you have 1000 applicants and 900 slots. 900 of the applicants are white, 100 are black.
In traditional racism you give all 900 slots to the 900 white applicants.
Using a woke quota system you would have to arrange for it to be exactly proportional, i.e. 810 white and 90 black, even if that required taking race directly into account in order to force the numbers.
Using some kind of merit-based evaluation, you might have 830 slots go to white applicants and 70 to black applicants.
The first system is clearly morally wrong, but it's also misaligned with the optimal allocation. The second system has the same issue as the first; it's basing the decision directly on race even when it doesn't align with merit.
The biggest criticism of the third system is that maybe your metric for evaluating merit is imperfect, but it might still be pretty good. And other than that it's clearly the one with the moral high ground. So where is the moral question? The moral system and the optimal system are the same one. All that's left is the technical question of how to implement a more accurate measurement of merit, if possible.
Sure you can. Morality is hard wired into our brains by evolution. We’re not yet capable to understand all the details of how brain works, but it’s all there in theory. It’s understandable that this line of thinking would not be possible in Hume’s time, but we know quite a bit more to move past some of these ideas.
The problem is if the alternative is the same as the prior condition, why are they bringing it up?
hint-it's to treat people not as individuals at all, the genetic basic of intelligence is generally brought up to justify discrimination.
It's the same problem as arguing no free will; if the ultimate end is the same as if we had it, why are you bringing it up? But usually people want to order society around that truth, not just score points in a debate.
I'm a matematician, so from my perspective, figuring stuff out without having a clear idea how/if it will be useful doesn't sound weird at all. In fact, it's where most of the fun is!
This possibility is nearly always discussed in the context of whether racial differences in outcomes are solely due to discrimination or whether there are other factors in play. Other explanations than genetic differences and racism are also often discussed.
This is important because the claim that racial gaps are solely due to racism is used to advocate for far-reaching reforms, which have huge risks and which won't actually close the gap if racism is not the cause or at least in the way as is claimed.
I’ve seen the libertarian wave in HN. It was more prominent a few years ago. Posters here have seemed to evolve into the idea that basic income and a living wage aren’t just socialist ideas after all. I think there is growing recognition that current level of income inequality is not sustainable. It’s possible the pandemic has softened these beliefs as well. Which is to be expected. Major calamities tend to unify the people. It’s clear that the role of government is to protect us from existential risks. That actually fits with libertarian philosophy but they’d be hard pressed to admit it.
So when people say that rationalists and libertarians haven’t thought through the consequences this is what they mean.
> can civilly and safely debate whether intelligence is statistically correlated to race and gender
Why would you not want to debate that? If it's not true, or there's no evidence for it, then you have an actual argument for fighting people who believe in it. If it's true, then you have a new societal issue to discuss. Either way, you win.
You seem to be making a case against scientific inquiry and intellectual discussion.
> However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
This is anti-intellectualism. What possible reason would there be to not debate ideas, of any kind? Bad ideas get analyzed, exposed, and proponents of such are forced to either change their position or be exposed as dogmatic.
Again, they are not bringing racial and gender disparties up for idle conversation; usually what comes after is what they want society to do about it. All you have to do is say "okay, for the sake of argument what you say is true. What happens next?" and then you see intentions. A lot aren't good.
> it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
Can you unpack this a bit further?
Are you saying that {a select group of people} should be allowed to discuss a controversial question, but {a wider group of people} cannot be trusted to have such discussion?
I don't understand how you could arrive at that reading. It seems clear to me that GP is worried about the erosion of free speech norms on HN, and isn't claiming anything like what you suggest.
> his is ad absurdum at its finest. Proving whether an idea is correct using statistical analysis makes sense for many empirical matters. But proving whether proponents of extreme views (e.g. in the article, the idea that women are biologically not as capable as men to work as programmers) by using statistical analysis is a moral failure driven by scientificism. (I'm going to decline rehearsing the debates about whether women are biologically or culturally inhibited from programming.)
I can almost guarantee this is Cade misrepresenting what Kelsey Piper said.
> allows people to decide for themselves what the intentions of Scott Siskind may be.
Except that he clearly throughout misrepresents or misunderstands things like above. I can only assume it seems accurate because you haven't looked into the relevant quotes or peope.
Indeed. The way society regulates behaviors these days is to pressure people to cut ties with someone labeled "bad" or be labeled "bad" along with that person (and jeopardize your own ties). You might be forced to denounce a good friend or your own spouse in order to keep a job.
I hope that when the mob comes for me or someone I care about, I'll be brave enough to tell them exactly what to do with their pitchforks.
> The way society regulates behaviors these days is to pressure people to cut ties with someone labeled "bad" or be labeled "bad" along with that person (and jeopardize your own ties).
Ah, that explains all of the people in the comments here criticizing the author of this piece.
> > He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something…?
Nowhere in the paragraph you quoted does it allege Scott supported Curtis Yarvin personally. What it implies is that Nick Land is one of the "neoreactionaries", which, according to Wikipedia [1], he is.
The "embraced by white nationalists" part is a bit more tricky. It does imply that Land's writings are bad because white nationalists like them (more than others do). In the abstract, of course, this is not necessarily true.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence that white nationalists like him, or he's just a symbol; one can like country music without liking conservatism. (But it's unlikely he's merely a symbol when he literally writes about race.)
Perhaps his writings are relevant but they're misinterpreting him; Social Darwinism does not implicate Darwin.
But a third possibility is that his writings are just racist – though perhaps cloaked, perhaps the motte in the metaphorical motte and bailey – and as such provide an intellectual foundation for white supremacy.
Personally, I'm not sure what the answer is, because I don't know much about these people. But my priors point to the third option as most likely, given how intellectual movements tend to be organized. Which means that the fact of his being embraced by white nationalists was informative, which means it was appropriate for the reporter to include it. Sure, if the reporter is omitting some critical evidence or context that would lead to an opposite conclusion, that would be unethical. But the reporter is not obliged to include every argument that could possibly be made in his defense, either.
The problem is that the answer is largely a matter of opinion.
The article author could have simply labeled his writings as "racist" or "not racist", but newspaper articles traditionally stick to reporting sourced facts and quoted opinions and let the reader draw their own conclusion.
Alternately, the author could have provided context about Land in the form of additional facts and opinions. This would undoubtedly make the article more informative, but it would also make it longer. There are plenty of other things the article could have added context about, but ultimately the format demands a certain length.
I do think the article is suggesting that he's racist. Newspaper articles have to choose which facts and quotes to include and how to integrate them into a narrative, and those choices inevitably betray the author's opinions. In general, I think this phenomenon of hidden opinions is harmful. It's a downside of the traditional practice of separating factual articles from opinion, since it gives readers a false sense of having learned the objective truth when in fact what they've absorbed is partially someone's opinion. When newer media platforms choose to eschew the distinction between fact and opinion in favor of presenting an authentic but opinionated voice, there's merit in that. But I think there is also merit in the traditional approach of trying to preserve that distinction, even if the results are inevitably imperfect. I wouldn't want the New York Times to give up on it.
It is also ridiculous to smear Nick Land because he is "ebraced by white nationalists".
For fucks sake, just read something Nick Land has written in recent years and let him smear himself. He literally argues for "hyper racism", composed of scientific racism and eugenics. He also has promoted Atomwaffen affiliated Order of Nine Angles. A literal neonazi terrorist network.
citation? land has racist and extreme social-darwinist views but afaik he holds identitarian political movements in contempt, he is more of a nietzschean anti-human trying to usher in a machine god than anything like nazi politics
Violent revolution and utopianism were core beliefs of both Nazism and Bolshevism. Individual rights are a core belief of both social democratic liberalism and anarcho-capitalism. The existence of Satan is a core belief of both Christians and Satanists.
A and B sharing core beliefs does not mean A == B.
white nationalism is the core of contemporary nazism; land has no sentimental attachment to the white race or even people in general, but rather sees intelligence (abstractly) acting via darwinian selection as the agent of history. this is not limited to human intelligence; he sees capitalism as an intelligent process, and inextricable from AI, which he expects to subsume humans.
I've never heard of Nick Land but this 'person X is bad because nasty person Y likes him' smear tactic has got to die.
Osama bin Laden cited Noam Chomsky in some of his anti-America diatribes, does this mean Noam Chomsky should be blamed in any way (even slightly) for the actions of Al Qaeda?
Yeah, I've got to know Nick Land from Mark Fisher, who was a student of his and jointly participated in the CCRU (Cybernetics Culture Research Unit). Mark Fisher was the one who later wrote his most well-known book "Capitalist Realism", which was my first thorough introduction to leftist politics. Fisher would later decry Land's neo-reactionary turn (perhaps most explicitly in his post "Terminator vs Avator: notes on accelerationism", https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/termina...), but he still acknowledged Land's accelerationist influence on him in the earlier years.
Land's history is... very interesting. His earlier works (such as "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest") shows his materialist roots, but over time he began to be influenced heavily by the CCRU (which cyberfeminist Sadie Plant created) and Deleuze and Guatarri's works on schizoanalysis, along with a heavy doze of amphetamines(!). In his most productive, drug-fueled form he wrote what he called "theory-fiction", Deleuzian theory combined with fiction (cyberpunk, horror), leading to writings such as "Circitries" and "Meltdown". Land might have been overappreciated in the creation of accelerationist philosophy, but I still think he was an incredible poet. Sadly, his overreliance on drugs literally "broke" him, and after some physical/mental health issues he moved to Shanghai and after that became the neo-reactionary we know today. I think it's a quite lame ending to his philosophy career, many of his collegues tried to persuade him to budge towards the left and failed, and Land himself says that he wants to leave behind his amphetamine-fueled past self.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but taken at face value, hyper-racism is the idea that humanity will evolve into eloi and morlocks, and is explicitly not about "black people are inferior" or anything like that.
What seem to me to be the key quotes [1]:
> The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of assortative mating. [...] It is assortative mating on the basis of [socio-economic status] that has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the implications of its happening are extreme.
> Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence.
> The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status.
> That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.
Whilst it is clumsily reinventing ideas that have been done better a million times already in science fiction, it doesn't seem very neonazi.
Nick Land's probably the one of the most fascinating outliers among philosophers though. His philosophy career is very sharply divided in two parts: the first part involves leftist materialism + Deleuze-Guattarian schizoanalysis + cyberpunk + gothic/Lovecraftian horror + a whole lot of drugs. But his heavy amphetamine usage kinda "broke" him, and after that the second part involves dealing with drug withdrawal along with a heavy doze of right-wing libertarianism and hyperfascism. I really don't like the latter half for obvious reasons (but critiquing him more fundamentally, he seems to have an incredibly warped view on evolution which is making him fall back into outdated eugenics, and also he has a habit of viewing technological progress and capitalist progress as the same thing). I still read some of his earlier works though.
What I understand from his writings is that Scott feels that Nick land has made interesting observations and had novel new thoughts, and has then followed them off a cliff. For example, from Meditations on Moloch: [0]
> But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.
> As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.
This is key. Nick Land is not fungible here, not either an interchangeable racist or an interchangeable cipher who some racists like. He's someone who started off as an interesting and creative thinker who had a lot of influence on the blob of lefty internet-flavoured critical theory philosophy stuff which still drives the online intellectual left [1], but then veered off into unproductive nastiness.
I suppose the link is there because Scott Alexander thinks that he's written some stuff which is worth reading, and that readers of the blog will be able to distinguish that from the rubbish. Needless to say, this is completely outside a present-day NYT journalist's model of the world.
Wikipedia has long been unreliable when it comes to politically tangential articles, especially ones that cast characterizations. Wikipedia Cofounder Larry Sanger said so on his blog:
Also, "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" for a look at the "pro" side. It turns out that giving neoreaction a "platform" is not at all incompatible with also offering a rather robust critique of it, that many people might even see as "denouncing" the ideology and its proponents. (But clearly, this level of intellectual subtlety is rather beyond the understanding of NYTimes journalists or editors!)
> Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association
The whole guilt-by-association thing that's going on these days is one of the most worrying cancelation techniques, because it can be done even through a very remote link. I like person A, who likes person B, who likes person C, who happens to also be liked by White Supremacists. therefore I am a White Supremacist (and person A, B, and C, too). How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?
Not only that, it's also if you don't vocally condemn along with others (no matter the reason) you are also suspect. You support "the status quo" even if you try to stay away from mob behavior, etc.
That's part of the necessary practice of being "conspicuously upset"[1] about things, that SSC points out. It's not enough that I am upset by White Supremacists (I am). I must conspicuously post over and over how upset I am about things, lest someone confuses a brief period of silence with acceptance of something awful.
Okay, but it’s not like people expect Scott to denounce these things apropos of nothing. He publicly discusses them. It’s fine to have a nuanced take — but if you leave room for interpretation, don’t be surprised when people side-eye you for not taking a clear stance.
Ironically, there was a recent astral codex article about how much writings sucks and becomes useless when you have to appeal to too many stakeholders by constantly re-stating the obvious to keep everyone happy.
I think the disconnect here is that if your schtick is doing deep, ostensibly neutral investigations into controversial topics, a lot of people actually don’t find your true position obvious.
Im of the opinion that the “true position” of the writer behind writing is irrelevant. Teachers are supposed to grade essays anonymously to avoid biases against students but here we are preoccupied not only with the writer, but his “true position”.
Well, this article is about the writer. But maybe I was unclear — by “true position” I don’t necessarily mean the feelings of the writer, but the thrust of their argument. You said that there is pressure to continuously restate the obvious; my point is that to a lot of people, it’s not actually obvious at all.
Why is it important that peoples' intentions are obvious in every piece of writing?
Journalists, anthropologists, and plenty of others strive towards rhetorical neutrality intentionally, and just as someone can be a citizen scientist, someone could also be a citizen journalist or anthropologist.
And furthermore it just isn't any of your business anyhow. What you are talking about is the equivalent of worrying about thoughtcrime. No objective harm was done but you worry that someone secretly holds an opposing viewpoint.
You can write however you want to. But don’t be surprised if you write something that could be construed as sympathetic to race science, and people go “hey, this person might support race science”. You seem to be saying that you can be as ambiguous as you want and that people shouldn’t try to fill in the gaps, which is ridiculous.
And no, it’s not “thoughtcrime” to form an opinion about a person based on things they’ve written.
The only reason your statement here doesn't seem completely absurd is because you are invoking an issue which people have an acute emotional reaction on, to the point where even something which would be viewed as paranoid in another setting seems acceptable.
I shouldn't be surprised if people react in a paranoid or irrational manner, no. But I would hope that they would hold themselves to a higher standard.
In this case we are talking about a very humane and nuanced thinker, and under normal circumstances we should in fact withhold insinuation of malice unless evidence exists. It is called the principle of charity.
Well, no. Scott invoked the issue here, not me. And obviously, people see evidence of malice, which is why we’re having this whole debate.
But again, there’s nothing abnormal or “paranoid” about inferring someone’s intentions from their writing. You’ve done it yourself, which is why you described him as “humane”. Why shouldn't others be able to arrive at different conclusions?
> And obviously, people see evidence of malice, which is why we’re having this whole debate.
Because the entire point of attempting to force one to take a stance is to further whatever the narrative may be, or to cancel counter narratives. There is no other point. There’s nothing wrong with arriving at your own conclusion but stop there if you don’t agree. Don’t cancel, dox, or otherwise force their opinion to match yours.
Yes, clearly. Come out from under your rock. Or try to view things from the alternate perspective. If this is not the intent, this is full well the idea has been implanted over the last 4 years. As a somewhat related source of evidence, see what they did with the Trump trial? It's mostly about what he did NOT say. This is one example, there are many many more from the last 4 years.
He's taken a clear stance on pretty much everything I've heard people complaining about him not taking a clear stance on – including some things this article implies he supports (or condemns).
It's not just being upset. It's, "Post the black square!" It's the guy who got accosted by BLM protesters demanding that he repeat their slogan. Havel's greengrocer provides a good characterization of this problem that has existed for a great deal of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...
But that’s true! You are supporting the status quo. Every action in the trolly problem is a decision. Once someone shows you the lever you have no choice but to make a decision even if it’s inaction.
What people want from you when they ask you to openly condemn something is to make a broad societal change that normalizes that condemnation.
There’s nothing wrong with not doing it. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that some issue isn’t worth getting involved with, or you don’t think an issue is a big enough problem, or you don’t like how activists are going about it. Plenty of valid reasons but the crucial thing that you have to recognize that you’re making a choice, own it, and realize that it might have consequences.
All right, I'll own it. I have failed to denounce people who are N degrees separated from me who believe terrible things, because I believe that guilt-by-N-degrees-of-asscociation-unless-denounced is both nonsense and deeply damaging to our society. I am not taking part in that kind of performance theater.
If, say, large subgroups of white nationalists LOOOOOVE you, and are doing things to try and provide you support... passive acceptance of that support is questionable. There comes a point where if you continue to accept the support and not condemn that group that you're willingly associating yourself with them.
Despite being perhaps the most benign example anybody could come up with off the top of their head, In-N-Out has actually already been targeted as having racist and ageist hiring practices:
The class action suit, brought by a Berkeley law firm, claims that the Irvine-based fast food chain with the cute paper hats "recruits, hires and maintains a work force that is predominantly under the age of 40 and/or non-African American." Out of 210 locations and thousands of employees, "very few" are older than 40 years old or black. The suit is also calling for a payout in the form of back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages on behalf of everyone over 40 and/or not white that In-N-Out has wronged with their allegedly unlawful hiring practices.
I suppose that, by implication, it would be par for the course for their corporate culture to be accused of supporting white nationalism by anyone looking to nail them on something.
Unless a company is aggressively promoting itself as anti-racist in a very public way, it's very open to this sort of criticism (regardless of whether-or-not there's any actual merit in it).
Thankfully, this out of control thread I inadvertently started is finally dead but I wanted to point out your comment reminds me of that scene from the original Ghostbusters, where whatever thing the guys thought of would appear to try to kill them. So they tried to think of the most harmless thing they could, and it still appeared and tried to kill them.
It looks like even the beloved In-N-Out can be associated with the r-word if you dig deep enough. I'm starting to be convinced that for any company or individual you name, no matter how benign or harmless they are, you will be able to go out and find dots to connect some kind of tenuous link to racism.
I think your comment also exposes an ambiguity in the phrase "support the status quo."
One meaning is to affirm the status quo as generally acceptable.
Another meaning is to (implicitly) decide that one particular aspect of the status quo falls below the cutoff line of what you have the time or energy to deal with in the moment.
I don't know if conflating the two intentionally is a common occurrence, but I can see how doing so could be used to incite outrage amongst uncritical thinkers.
Yes, and it goes further: activists will sort into tiers of extremism and each tier will frame the less extreme actions of the tiers below them as supporting the status quo. It's the active ingredient in their recruiting pipeline. High tier extremism can't recruit directly from the general population but it can recruit from the tier below by guilt-tripping them for not doing enough.
If you don't decide to "support the status quo" at some point, you'll wind up in the deep end.
This mindset just seems impossible to implement in general. If someone came to me and said "you should denounce suchandsuch Estonian law because it's terribly unfair to burglary victims", I would have to decline - not because I think burglary victims don't matter, and not because I support the Estonian justice system, but simply because I have no idea what they're talking about and there's no easy way for me to find out.
It's got to be absolutely exhausting! Even when I have the context to understand, I have trouble keeping up with the ever growing list of things I'm expected to be upset about, let alone have time to visibly denounce each of them.
But it’s not Estonian burglary law. It’s about racism. Your dancing around hypotheticals hides the core issues.
So you’re right and you’re wrong. The people in this example don’t care about racist activities of people they support, which in itself is indirect support to mainstreaming these issues.
Not understanding Estonian burglary law is understandable and forgivable, not understanding the negative impacts of racism is not. It would take willful determination to avoid learning even the basics of recent world history or current events and why it’s been such a problem.
It’s not that hard to say “I find some of the ideas by X interesting and useful, but also I don’t support racism in any way.” I get that they don’t want to do it, but that’s the level support that enables the problematic culture to be pervasive.
The word racism is meaningless to many people now. the definition is too encompassing and by denouncing it, particularly in conversation with a political activist, you have no clue what you are signing up for.
To be honest… civilisation – at least, the parts the can be described as “a political or social system founded on racism” – isn't that great.
If we just eliminated the government, eliminated all hierarchies larger than 100 people, eliminated all nations and laws and institutions… well, most of us would probably die very quickly. But that doesn't mean that what we have now is even in the top 20% of possible ways that civilisation could be.
Yeah; what I wrote was absurd. Most civilisations can trivially be improved; we're definitely pretty high up the possibilities. I meant we're not in the top 20% of feasible possible civilisations anybody currently alive would want to put into place (which is a qualitative claim, not a quantitative one).
> So by denouncing racism I am literally denouncing the entirety of civilization I guess.
Considering the "denouncings" have included the US Constitution, Magna Carta, Greek philosophers, and math+science in general, this is more correct and scarier than almost anyone has thought through.
Is the entirety of civilization truly founded on racism or is just a part of it founded on racism? If it's only a part then what is wrong with denouncing the racist portion of civilization? How important is that portion?
That doesn't matter, because we all agree that burglary is bad. The question isn't "is burglary or racism bad," the question is "do I know enough about this person or topic to be sure that it deserves to be denounced based on my beliefs about racism or burglary?"
> the question is "do I know enough about this person or topic to be sure that it deserves to be denounced based on my beliefs about racism or burglary?"
And the answer is no, as per their post. We can agree burglary is bad but if you’ve never been burgled then how can you know? You see this a lot with gun control advocates telling victims of violence they don’t need a gun to protect themselves. How can someone know another’s perspective on life without titling at windmills daily from wrong assumptions as you attempt to figure out their point.
Spicy isn't dancing around anything. In his hypothetical there was no mention of it, and info that could illustrate to them that Estonian burglary laws had anything to do with racism had not propagated to be able to make heads or tails of it.
It's like a math problem without enough information. You don't get a result, you get "cannot compute from information given".
Making an affirmative or disavowing statement without all the pertinent information is irresponsible. Now we can argue the definition of 'pertinent' til the cows come home, and we do, every day. Real, meaningful, unambiguous communication with 100% accurate replication of surface and deep contextual meaning is hard, and at the very crux of humanity's difficulties putting up with one another.
It's why not having a view on something is perfectly okay. However, nowadays it is increasingly getting villified by a very vocal group who insists that everyone's viewpoint on the matter should be on record or inferred from their digital or social footprint. Which is a very dangerous position to take, because that viewpoint axiomatically requires an us/them divide. This is also a reason I reject this kind of cultural push out the gate. My, wouldn't it be nice to draw a circle around only the people willing to agree with us, and share our cognitive blindspots one and all, that does not a civilization or liberty loving people make. The true love of Liberty requires the love of all the ills it brings with it from those who will exercise it. We can argue endlessly around where the limits are, as long as we're all debating,and we're willing to revisit things to reevaluate the status quo over time, and maintain an agreed upon realistic representation of the progress we make over time moving forward.
Example:
Those that complain that what foundational/structural echoes remain of the very real institutional walls that used to exist are as bad as having the whole hog full in force are fools. Those that would tear down or dismantle material reminders of how far we've progressed, are also fools as well, because they are trying to break down the common record we measure our own progress as a civilization as a whole against. You see things like the 1619 project trying to completely rewrite history not in a "Hey, lets record what happened, and let people form an opinion of their own," sense but in the "all your narrative is belong to us, now" sense. People notice, can, and do read between the lines. Most just won't bring up that they do in public out of an abundance of concern for not subjecting everyone around them to a contentious atmosphere.
Long story short:
There's more to life than being for/against a list of hot topics over time, and the people who care about those hot topics owe a bit of deferrence to those who have other more highly prioritized things to worry and devote. brain cycles to, just as those with other more pressing matters recognize and give due time to those who prioritize most highly things they are ambivalent about. The end result is an overall average whereby only the most pressing things capable of having consensus achieved are acted upon, or those so inconsequential that no need for resistance is recognized.
The entire practice of politics is concerned with shifting people between those buckets, and trying to push a social system to mandate picking a side is a Bad Idea (TM).
Or I could be in favor of whatever it is, but don't want my news feed to be filled with my commentary about whatever social issue du jour it is like everyone else who engages in this, and would rather it just be more personal.
Also I don't want to have to be attacked or have to defend my position if I don't word things perfectly (more commonly don't show enough outrage, because I don't have as strong of opinions as a lot of people on social media), which seems to be a common occurrence nowadays.
1. I see it akin to a small war. We are talking here about acts of mild aggression here (if only verbal).
2. There are soldiers (metaphor for politicians) and their job is to fight, so that civilians (citizens) could live free from violence.
3. The idea to put citizens to fight and to tell them to target the neutrals and opponents has to face this criticism: you are applying a huge multiplier to the sum of all violence in the world. You better do the multiplication and run the actual numbers to be sure that in the long run you'll come good.
4. If it turns out a group intimidated 100k people to free from intimidation 90k other people, they turn out not only horrible morally, but also crude simpletons.
5. The more opinions become weapons, the less opinions will be judged objectively by these citizens in future. Circumstances can change quickly and, in democracy, the only way to cope is to have masses of voters honestly predict the real life results of their choices. They need to clear their heads, not to wield opinions as weapons. (They have politicians for that after all.)
You're describing collectivism thought. Everyone shares an identity and as such everyone needs to participate. This only can happen on one side, the other side believes in individual choices that aggregate to a greater good so long as everyone is responsible in their own choices. So yeah that is how the extremes go about it, and it seems to have been successful to some extent in social media (apparently by who the current big platforms are).
Ignoring the status quo is not “supporting it”. You’ve created a false dichotomy here. Do you support the current regime of North Korea because you don’t take time to condemn China for supporting it? By your definition, everyone not speaking out about this is supporting the regime.
This makes the word “support” meaningless because you can no longer distinguish between 99 percent of the population of the world that doesn’t have time and the 0.01% actively supporting the regime.
Guilt by association to one degree is completely valid. The further out you go the more attenuated it gets, but if person C is liked by white supremacists and doesn't openly denounce that fact, it would be accurate to call person C a white supremacist.
Abominable as it is, my views are not just based on the Bell Curve's race-IQ discussion.
* In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be restricted because Black people are having too many kids. His book had a great deal of influence on the "welfare reform" instituted in the mid-1990s in the US.
* In In Our Hands, Murray proposes replacing all government assistance with "an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older". Not only is this eugenics because everyone, abled or not, with medical needs or not, must be able to survive on $10,000 a year; but note the absence of a UBI for kids: the proposal would punish poorer people--who are disproportionately Black for historical reasons rooted in racist institutions like slavery, redlining and the War on Drugs--for having too many kids.
All of this is pretty textbook social Darwinist white supremacism--all of these views are regularly espoused at Stormfront and other such places.
Charles Murray is quite clearly a white supremacist, and the race-IQ stuff is only a small part of the case for it.
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Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: I didn't know about Nathan Cofnas so I googled him and he appears to be standard-issue IDW: writes for Quillette, defends bigots like Kathleen Stock, etc. Any blowback they got is well-deserved.
> Stock argues that, for example, it is okay for cis women to object to a lesbian with a penis—what in ye olden days of 2014 was known as a heterosexual man
This is of course a complete lie: trans people have been recognized and understood across many cultures for thousands of years, sometimes as a third gender but usually not as the gender they were assigned at birth. This is both ignorant and hateful. Cofnas deserves to be "cancelled", as does anyone else who writes for Quillette to be frank (for the same guilt-by-association reason, which remains just as valid for Quillette as it is for Murray).
I like and support UBI (for complex reasons some of which are related to the arguments in Seeing Like a State). However, some implementations of UBI are white supremacist and eugenicist, and Murray's version is one such implementation.
This does not mean that UBI is inherently eugenicist or white supremacist. A UBI which did not replace literally all government assistance, which took into account the fact that some people will always need and should get more assistance than others, and which started from birth rather than adulthood, would not be eugenicist.
Race-IQ stuff as you call it is still a debated issue. The recent blowback over Nathan Cofnas’s work [1], for example, show there’s a culture where anyone not in line with the view there’s no connection is a target for cancellation. I don’t agree with the science from my layman reading of it, but I have much bigger issues with this attempt at silencing people by associating them with white supremacy.
In The Bell Curve, they report that Asian Americans have a higher mean IQ than European Americans, who have a higher mean IQ then African Americans. Wouldn't that make him an Asian supremacist, if anything?
White supremacists are happy to co-opt East Asian (not Asian in general, only East Asian) populations for their purposes when convenient.
Your response doesn't engage with the rest of my post either, which I think is the primary evidence that he's a white supremacist. I'm not going to rehash race-IQ arguments because I find them tiring and not very consequential.
It seems your response doesn't really engage with any part of that comment. What is the meaning of "co-opt East Asian populations"? You claim Murray is a white supremacist because he thinks whites have higher IQs than blacks, but when dealing with the point that Murray thinks Asians have higher IQs than whites, you dismiss it with this language about "co-opting"?
The reaction to my posts is rather remarkable. I've lost 30 karma so far just for stating a bunch of facts and opinions that challenge the hegemonic narrative on "Hacker News".
Oh no, I'm being cancelled. I should go write about it on Quillette. /s
I think you're getting downvoted because you are stating highly disputed things as if they were facts. When people question you, you refuse to engage with their arguments. You're also slandering a person (calling Charles Murray a white supremacist) on the basis that he supports welfare reform and you disagree with him on some edge cases of UBI. Downvotes are well deserved in my opinion.
"Supports welfare reform" and "edge cases of UBI" are doing a lot of work there.
I, too, support modernizing our governmental assistance programs, but not in a way that's white supremacist and eugenicist. There are welfare reform ideas I disagree with that I don't think are white supremacist either. Murray's ideas and policies, however, are beyond the pale.
See: here is an interesting case where you think I'm summarizing you unfairly or incorrectly. Do you think Charles Murray would feel you were summarizing and characterizing his arguments fairly?
No, I don't, because I'm sure he's constructed post hoc rationalizations in his head about how he's not actually as bad as it seems.
I evaluate him like I do any other public figure: based on his writing and the impact he's had on public policy debates. His internal state of mind does not matter at all.
Well, for his accurate beliefs, let's look to another excerpt from In Our Hands:
"The libertarian solution is to prevent the government from redistributing money in the first place. Imagine for a moment that the $2 trillion that the US government spends on transfer payments were left instead in the hands of the people who started with it. If I could wave a magic wand, that would be my solution. It is a case I have made elsewhere."
His eugenicist UBI is an alternative to his ideal proposal.
As a public figure with extensive writings, his internal state of mind does not matter.
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edit to respond because I'm "posting too fast":
> So as long as you don't write anything down or have yourself recorded as having said racist things, you can't be racist?
What? A logical statement does not imply it's converse. I'm talking about public figures like Murray here, not average private individuals. Besides, structural racism of the sort Murray advocates for has a much greater impact on material conditions than what some rando believes in their heart.
You seem to be equating libertarians with racists here. Is that what you intend to do? i.e. You mean that anyone who thinks there shouldn't be taxes is racist?
Not all libertarians, but many right-libertarians, certainly. (I have some wonderful left-libertarian friends.)
Anyone who ignores structural racism and espouses the policy positions that Murray does is either ignorant or racist. Murray, being a public figure whose ideas have had real impact on the material conditions of marginalized people, does not have the excuse of ignorance.
I'm speaking from personal experience here. I used to be on the right-libertarian train myself before I realized that oppression was primarily structural and that a laissez-faire approach always perpetuates it. I genuinely do not believe one can be non-racist and espouse Murray's policy positions once one understands this basic fact.
If you want to learn more about how welfare reform in the 1990s—something Murray influenced a great deal—affected millions of lives, I'd recommend the first season of a podcast called The Uncertain Hour.
I usually try to take advice on "learning more" from people who demonstrate a good understanding of a subject, or who seem well informed, people I want to be or think like. I'm not really interested in learning how to declare broad swathes of the political spectrum racist or in presenting the style of argument that you are here.
I haven’t been following this massive side-thread, but maybe you are getting downvoted because you are using white supremacy to describe anything that structurally favors white people. Policies that merely favor white people are not necessarily “white supremacist”, unless those policies are also motivated by a belief that white people are better than other people. Maybe “structurally racist” might be a better way to describe the things you are describing? But what do I know, I’m not a sociologist.
> Guilt by association to one degree is completely valid. The further out you go the more attenuated it gets, but if person C is liked by white supremacists and doesn't openly denounce that fact, it would be accurate to call person C a white supremacist.
No:
- Nobody is obligated to engage in "openly denouncing" anybody.
- The US has a population of 325 million people - who knows what their beliefs are? How often do they change?
- And I'm sure leftists have a daily-changing definition of what "white supremacist" means.
(For those unfamiliar with the OP's illogical argument, that is what the left used to tar Trump as a racist - in reality, Trump never said anything racist. But he didn't denounce some groups to the satisfaction of the left, who would have just kept adding one more group.)
Add on one more lemma - which is that you get to unilaterally decide who is a white supremacist, even over their objections, and you've got a recipe for cancelling anyone you like.
No, you have not laid your case for why. You have losely described some of his policy positions, followed by the words "is white supremacist" and "is racist".
The "why" is entirely missing. This comes off as "it's so self evident I don't have to bother explaining it" to others, and is the main reason why you are getting downvoted.
Just the other day, I decided not to go to a small event for exactly this reason, because I knew that one or two people there believed some fringe stuff. I don't, but being somewhere where they aren't kicked out is professional suicide for someone in my position. One never knows these days who might be recording and has to live his life as though it were being constantly observed.
Edit: to clarify, by fringe stuff, I mean that some believe that the election was stolen from Trump. I don't and have convinced others that it was not, but I guess I can't do that anymore.
I'm reading it as a criticism of views, not a criticism of people, which seems like an important difference.
If your best friend growing up is now a white supremacist, and for various reasons you want to keep being friends with them - maybe you're trying to talk them out of it, maybe you know they've got some deep personal trauma that you can help with and you want to be compassionate about that, whatever - I think there's a pretty good argument that that's your business. (To be clear, I think there's also a pretty good argument that you should ensure you're not effectively making them think that you support their positions or actions, though, but that's beside the immediate point.) There's good reasons to choose to be friends with them and that's your judgment.
If you link to their white supremacist writings, though, you're giving a platform and publicity to white supremacist writings. You're not amplifying or supporting them as a person: you're amplifying the messages they're communicating. And so the moral weight of that is in fact on you.
I think the article does do a pretty good job of talking mostly about views and not people, though it is obviously easiest to refer to views by the people who espouse them (especially in the case of personal blogs, which is what most of these are). The article is not trying to say that it's newsworthy that Sam Altman is best buddies with Elon Musk who married to Grimes who hangs out on a discord with Scott Alexander. The article is not trying to say that the NYT of the future will create simulations of Grimes just to cancel her.
The article is trying to say that, for instance, it's newsworthy that OpenAI is heavily influenced by Rationalist rhetoric about the urgency of building a friendly AI that implements your worldview, and that the worldview of this Rationalist community happens to be a worldview that gets an uncomfortable amount of support from white supremacists (and not just in the "We like this" sense, in the "This argument supports our argument" sense).
This discussion is incomplete unless it also comprehends that the definition of white supremacy (or x-phobia, patriarchy, misogyny) in elite and academic circles has expanded incredibly, to the point where it bears no relation to any reasonable person's understanding of these terms. Despite this, apparently well-intentioned people try to have conversations about these concepts, but the terms no longer have shared meaning.
It's not clear whether SSC is being denounced for associating with cross-burners, or just with those who believe merit exists. In elite discourse, both of those positions are now white supremacy.
And for people who think it’s just some wackadoos who use “white supremacy” in this way, behold FCPS (the school board in the Virginia county where I grew up). https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/anti-racist-teacher-haras.... People railing against the “white supremacy” of a high school (the one I went to) that’s overwhelmingly Asian.
This isn’t Berkeley California. It’s a historically Republican county that went for Bush against Gore and only narrowly went for Kerry four years later.
Side note, for years I used to see the name "rayiner" and roll my eyes at the "reactionary libertarian" opinions expressed. In the past year though, I myself have come much closer to where you've consistently been. Part of it is the rapid leftward drift of major institutions -- media, workplace, education -- during the Trump years, and the distinct absence of any kind of critical discussion of this phenomenon. The other part is probably that I'm now at the point of having children soon. Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. In this case, it should matter a lot less that the school board is composed of lunatics, or that the NYT is trending towards naked culture war propagandism.
> Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists.
I agree with this too! Which is why I think it's important the article calls out the institutional power of YC and the risk of it being captured by extremists!
Frankly, leave the question of connection to white supremacy (under whatever definition) aside - as someone who was a regular Less Wrong reader, seeing Y Combinator and the other agents of Silicon Valley power go "All right, we will invest heavily in building a friendly AI under our definition of friendly," just by itself, is kind of a worst-case scenario. I don't think the interests of Valley investors are quite fully aligned the interests of humanity at large, but it's Valley investors that have the most ability to make AGI happen, and they've decided to start work. The only reason I don't find it terrifying is that I don't really agree with the Rationalists' arguments about it. But they do, and they're smart people.
I think it's clearly better for our incompetent leaders to have less power than more, but better still would be to have competent leaders with adequate and no more power.
I went to TJ too. Asra loves to make this argument but it is BS. TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students. The article you linked is gruesomely biased.
> TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students
You’ve got it exactly backward.
“Historically” “white people” didn’t need to use standardized tests to exclude non-whites. They just did it. Standardized testing was used to distinguish among white people (just as it’s been used in China since 650 CE to distinguish among Chinese people).
In fact, the opposite is true. Standardized testing is pretty much the only thing that has allowed non-white groups to advance in white societies. There’s only a handful of societies where ethnic minorities have come to out-earn the majority population. Almost without exception it’s been the result of standardized testing creating level playing fields for people who lack the social capital that would otherwise be necessary for advancement.
The proposals that Asra and friends decry as racist are random lotteries. How can a standardized test level the playing field more than that? The proposals further eliminate features that are either largely unrelated to academic capability or are tightly bound to access to wealth or attending the right gifted programs.
Performance in standardized tests is not “tightly bound to wealth.” Most of the Asians at the NYC test-based schools, for example, are lower income: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/stuyve.... It’s true most people at TJ are solidly upper middle class, but so are most families in Fairfax County (the median family income of the whole county is $150,000). It’s not like families at TJ are richer than those at McLean, Great Falls, Langley, etc.
Random lotteries don’t level the playing field, they eliminate opportunities for people to distinguish themselves. Societies that eschew objective metrics don’t just have radically flat mobility, they have rigid social frameworks based on non-objective indicators. Imagine the “holistic admissions” factors colleges use to exclude Asians (“leadership personality” or whatever) applied on a wider scale.
The "holistic application" is not what activists wanted. I agree that these fuzzy factors cause all sorts of trouble. What the activists wanted was randomness beyond some cutoff where students would be likely to succeed at TJ. This eliminates the need to "distinguish themselves" among everybody with increasingly ridiculous prep processes.
I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science. My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome. And this was decades ago. It is much worse today.
My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.
Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).
The problems with TJ also extend beyond admissions. 8th period is dead. History education at the school was always awful and tied to the AP curriculum but it has further slipped against STEM. Colleges seem to be taking note, with admissions to what were previously backup schools like UVA now becoming much more difficult for TJ grads.
> The "holistic application" is not what activists wanted.
In the absence of objective criteria holistic evaluation (and worse) is what you’ll get. Not necessarily at TJ, but at the next steps, and if these ideas are applied generally.
> This eliminates the need to "distinguish themselves" among everybody with increasingly ridiculous prep processes.
I have never understood this demonization of the prep process. Yes, kids start prepping for TJ admissions in middle school. So what? Asians do the same thing to prepare for high stakes testing in their home countries too. Test prep isn’t free, but the average family income in Fairfax County is over six figures for every racial group. (Asians actually have significantly lower average income than whites in the county.) Test prep is not an unaffordable expense for most families in the county.
Given that test prep is mostly affordable for the families in question (and given that studies show it doesn’t help much) it seems to me that people are really complaining about cultural changes brought about by an immigrant group. They don’t like asian culture where childhood is single-mindedly dedicated to education (ideally an education in a narrow range of acceptable fields like STEM). Now I don’t consider that “racist” or “xenophobic” (I think natives have a right to protect their culture) but that’s what it is.
> I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science.
So?
> My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome.
This is a conversation my wife and I have about our kids. (Though we decided private rather than magnet school.) They’re 8, 2, and the third is due in June.
> My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.
That’s a good change.
> Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).
In Kendi’s formulation of “racism,” the lottery approach is racist against Asians. It will exclude half to two thirds or so of the Asians who would otherwise have gotten in under a test-based model.
I think Asra is too quick to cry racism. I think the activists are just idealistic and misguided. That said, it’s not like the sentiment of white people not wanting to have to “compete with super study Asians” doesn’t exist. E.g. back in the day Wall Street would hire white guys from Ivy League crew teams, and today classes are overwhelmed by Asians with STEM degrees. As to colleges, they’ve been leftist since long before decades ago...
If there was a merit lottery, you'd still see a disproportionate number of south and east asian admits at TJ. That definitely doesn't fall under Kendi's formulation of racism (nor is he the God of activism).
I've seen you post this same debate about a certain high school's entrance exams before in these sorts of threads, and it continues to be as much of off-topic flamebait as it was last time. Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy."
And, in turn, the article is making a specific claim that Nick Land's writings are embraced by white supremacists. We can figure out whether that claim is true or not, and under what definition of "white supremacists," directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land says: "Land has promoted the Atomwaffen-affiliated Order of Nine Angles that adheres to the ideology of neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing O9A's works as "highly-recommended"."
If someone in this thread actually disputes that Nick Land's writings are inspirational to cross-burning white supremacists, which is what I read the NYT article to be saying, let's debate that.
> Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy."
It’s the same definition being used by both: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html. It’s probably only a minority of people with graduate degrees who use the terminology this way, but this group is highly represented both among people who read and write for the NYT and on school boards in wealthy, highly educated suburbs like the one I’m talking about.
It’s directly relevant to the discussion up thread. The post I was responding to pointed out that this expansive definition of “white supremacy” makes it hard to have these discussions. It’s impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land to figure out which kind of “white supremacy” people are talking about. I don’t take the poster up-thread above to be arguing Nick Land isn’t a “white supremacist” in the narrow sense of the word. He’s just observing that the confusing created by the terminology (confusing that is, as far as I can tell, a deliberate consequence of the word choice) makes these sorts of discussions difficult.
It's difficult because the two of you are choosing to make it difficult! Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask?
What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well - you haven't argued that the NYT is wrong (either in this subthread or anywhere else in this comment section), you're arguing that the NYT cannot possibly make arguments worth listening to. Elsewhere you're mocking the NYT Editorial Board. Maybe they're worth mocking, but it has nothing to do with the merits of this article!
It's beneath you, and it's beneath this site. Maybe it works. But it only works because it's ruining reasoned discourse and scoring cheap points about those people at the NYT and how we don't like them. The debate is - ironically - no longer about the ideas the NYT is claiming and instead about the people and their proximity to other people we don't like.
> It's difficult because the two of you are choosing to make it difficult!
No, it’s difficult because the New York Times has chosen to adopt a phrase that has a well-understood usage with respect to violent extremists, and use it to refer to literally all other white people. If you don’t want people to complain you’re being confusing then don’t do that.
> Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask?
Imagine if the New York Times had chosen to call all traditionalist/conservative Muslims “jihadists.” That’s exactly what the Times is doing with “white supremacy.” Should we all just play along, and Google to see if someone actually wants to kill non-believers, or whether they just support the tradition of gender-segregated prayer?
> What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well
Poisoning the well is a form of ad hominem where you invoke an unrelated fact to detail a discussion. In discussing a newspaper article about white supremacy, it’s not poisoning the well to point out that the newspaper’s deliberate editorial choices have made it impossible to understand what’s being discussed without doing your own research. It’s totally relevant.
> OpenAI is heavily influenced by Rationalist rhetoric
The sheer number of hoops you had to jump through to be a NYT apologist is just mind numbing. No, OpenAI isn't influenced by Grimes' chat messages on discord to mind-control us.
I specifically said the Grimes connection isn't the point being made. OpenAI is in fact influenced by, if not rooted in, Rationalist rhetoric about AGI and alignment: https://openai.com/charter/
> How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?
There is no limit really. If you're targeted for cancellation, they'll dig up and use anything as evidence. Thankfully people seem to be wising up to these tactics and they're losing power as a result.
Some amount of shaming can be a good thing in society but the idea of not associating with anyone who may even remotely be connected with a bad idea is a terrible concept. It feels very cult like.
I was friends with a guy who was really into InfoWars in the early 2000s. I'm no longer in contact with him for unrelated reasons but I have to think that keeping friends who weren't in that world helps people from falling deeper into it.
Isolating people from good ideas doesn't seem like a great way to change minds.
Especially in a friendly context (and of course depending on your relationship) you can rag on them when they say something way out of line. It’s partially friendly banter, but also social pressure to consider infowars entertainment and not something to be taken as a serious news source.
Doesn't this go both ways though? I'd be willing to bet there are plenty of people that get dragged into white supremacy because they make friends with a few at the bar. Just normal chat at first with occasional "facts" about a group thrown in.
Sure it goes both ways. That’s why a culture of taking offense to minor transgressions rather than giving people the benefit of the doubt is so detrimental. It goes back to that comic where someone asks about racism and the anti-racist tells them it’s emotional labor and to google it, then the white supremacist pulls out all his “research” and talks about white supremacy at length.
That person who can easily be influenced to be a white supremacist doesn’t feel accepted. I don’t really mind accepting people and opening up to them about my own flaws and ideological inconsistencies. Some people are going to fall into the wrong crowds - you can’t win everyone over, but blocking someone out because they’re superficially racist or they have “regressive” views or whatever else is a great way to get a confused person to be very sure about those views.
It definitely goes both ways but I think it's important to recognize that _most_ people don't fall for those fringe beliefs. Keeping ties to the people that do fall into them gives them a lifeline to pull themselves out.
Additionally, I find the thought process of the person that wants to shut down those "dangerous" ideas pretty repulsive. It seems implicit to me that they are trying to protect those that are lesser than them. There's an implicit superiority there.
If you’re a liberal, you need no degrees of separation. You read about what Trump said about the Central Park Five decades ago as a privatize citizen, but rarely about Biden’s outreach to the segregationist wing of his party. E.g. eulogizing Robert Byrd a former KKK member. (Back in the 1970s-1990s, Trump was almost certainly to the left of Biden on social issues but you’d never know it.)
Not to say I think Biden should get flack for that. But the guilt by association thing is an especially easy kudgel to wield in an uneven way.
Looking at US politics as a european, it seems like the republicans are far right and the democrats are center left. The problem is how these two parties have a duopoly. I'm pretty sure that Sanders supporters and other more progressive leftists heavily critisize Biden and the democrats.
So no, it's not only republicans and Trump that get "cancelled".
Which European country? I’m most familiar with Germany, because my wife lived there. I think American Republicans, and many moderates, would actually be happy with the German CDU. Not cruel to immigrants and refugees, but Merkel can say that she doesn’t believe in “multiculturalism” and it’s accepted as a mainstream opinion. Abortion is available, upon counseling and waiting periods, but only up to 12 weeks absent a special case. Bavaria can require government buildings to display crosses on government property. Schools are required by the basic law to offer religious instruction (so Christian and Muslim parents can ensure their children are socialized in their religion’s morals, and not a secular moral framework created for schools). Etc.
Part of Republicans’ apparent extremism is a response to the strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions, in view of the very conservative nature of American society. In the area of religion, for example, America is far more religious than Germany (and comparable to Poland or Turkey). But American liberals, through the Supreme Court, have effectively pushed religion out of the public sphere (especially schools) much more completely than in Germany.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
That's the difference.
>strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions
America's cultural institutions are certainly strong and center-left, but not extremely left wing. You don't see Hollywood promoting kibbutzim or the abolition of commodities. The truth is way more boring: Rich people on the coasts are general pro-gay marriage or what have you, but don't try to build dense housing near them or raise their taxes.
The democratic left were not very enthusiastic about Biden. Also, I think it's fair to allow people to change over time. Maybe Biden was right of Trump 30 years ago, but the recent actions by Trump and Biden make it very clear that they have swapped places.
>How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?
no one can be safe from the mob if mob behavior is a normalized practice of the society. It doesn't matter that a given mob at a specific moment in time is directed in the "good" direction. Mob is just a tool, it doesn't have any way to distinguish "bad" from "good" (by it is nature the mob forms when its members let go their own moral independence for the sake of unity, mutual validation and resulting safety and drunk high feeling), and thus it can be turned in any direction by the tool handler.
It's easier to understand the origin of this thinking if you put it in some of its more recent historical contexts:
* The "one drop of African blood" theory of the Democrats' Old South
* "Jewish heritage", pretty much anywhere
* "Class history" in the Marxist Socialist circles
* "Intellectualism" in Khmer Rouge Cambodia
This is just another instance, from the same people who would have belonged to any one of these or similar groups. They all come from the same root intellectual history.
Poetically, if we assume 6 degrees of separation then you need 7 to be safe^.
The thing called cancel culture isn't rooted in a proud intellectual tradition, because intellectualism relies on knowing what the opposition's argument is to dismiss it (ie, the opposite of cancelling). It is group-forming action of identifying and attacking an enemy.
Although groups sometimes superficially seem to be using evidence, it is rarely important. The most secure kind of tribe is one that rallies around ideas that make no sense - because then if someone espouses the idea that proves they are in the tribe. If the idea makes sense then people who agree might have just arrived at it on their own.
Extreme guilt-by-association is a great cultural marker, because the only way that attitude makes sense is if the espouses is an adherent to cancel-culture ideas and is signalling support of the group. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. It isn't really being important in the mobs decision making, the only important thing is identifying an enemy and it doesn't matter how.
Incidentally, the "excommunication by implication" technique is used by none other than ISIS and their ilk. Quite the irony to see that the extremes on both sides are not really that different after all.
The slightest bit of research before commenting would reveal that Nick Land is a prominent neo-reactionary with awful views on race and genetics. He’s not embraced by white nationalists for the cyberpunk aesthetic.
And then a slight bit more research would demonstrate that he wrote some fascinating left-leaning stuff before he jumped off that particular cliff, and that that's the stuff Scott thought was interesting.
> And then a slight bit more research would demonstrate that he wrote some fascinating left-leaning stuff before he jumped off that particular cliff, and that that's the stuff Scott thought was interesting.
And then, after a little more thought, you'd realize SSC's blog roll entry would direct the reader to the more recent neoreactionary stuff, not the "fascinating left-leaning stuff."
It's definitely a bad look to have present-day Nick Land on your blogroll. If you think some of his older stuff was interesting, it's a better idea to link to that directly rather than his home page.
But this "guilty by association" has been going on just about forever. Even Jesus was socially condemned for being a friend of tax-collectors and sinners.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
The NYT is apparently run by Glenn Beck now. Dude, just connect the dots. It all fits.
NYT is the same rag that published as "news" and helped expel a girl from college, because when she was 15, after passing her driving exam, she was caught on video bragging "I can drive, n..." (addressed to no-one, meant as a boast).
To me that's 1000 times more offensive and hideous than using the n-word by yourself, and the scum of the earth that wrote and posted that article (and those that expelled the girl), should be ousted from society.
I subscribed to Glenn Greenwald the day he left The Intercept. I don’t really read his writings nor do I necessarily agree with what he say to say all the time. But, I really like the idea of supporting individual journalists with $. Hopefully others can see Glenn’s success in this model and try it out themselves.
You're supporting someone whose writings you don't read after he left in a big hissy fit because his editors tried to edit him. Got it.
A lot of folks might soon be discovering why editors are actually important. There's value in having another party check your work, challenge your assumptions, and question your claims. This process is not blanket censorship, but Glenn would have you think so.
I think the public should be challenging assumptions and questioning claims.
Advocating for an “editor” aka “gatekeeper” is a form of elitism in that it assumes an editor will be “better” at challenging assumptions than the public at large.
While you may find many instances where that is true, it’s not good for public discourse to be boxed into a frame of discourse decided by the ivory tower types.
My current financial support for Glenn has nothing to do with him. It has to do with the funding model of journalism. He’s just the first one I came across to try it, so I’m supportive.
He had a contractual agreement that editors couldn't edit for content at The Intercept, a news outfit he literally founded in order to not have content based editorial oversight.
Confused why you think the article was "news" worth printing, or sympathetic.
Confused with the use of the term "withdrawn" (like the euphemism of someone"quiting for "personal reasons" when they are in fact pressured to resign).
I'm also confused about what you think my comment was supposed to "prove" or not. It was meant as a case in point of the kind of bad, pearl-clutching-style sensenationalist stories increasingly peddled by the NYT.
You said that the NYT "helped expel a girl from college". The article did no such thing, euphemism aside, for the simple reason that time travel is impossible. I am begging you to read the article or at least the date of publication because it is clear you haven't.
>Confused why you think the article was "news" worth printing
The article is about a girl having her life upended by an internet mob with interviews with the principal players. (Again, to be abundantly clear, this article is post hoc.) Is that not newsworthy? You certainly think the event is worth bringing up months later which points to it being at least a little noteworthy.
> or sympathetic
They quote the girl, painting her as having just made an innocent mistake. "At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young". “It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth”. Hell the main thrust of the article is a racial revenge narrative where she's the arbitrary victim of a mixed-race kid living in a racist town trying to settle the score with whatever he can.
The very article you linked to contradicts your telling of the events here. She voluntarily withdrew from her high school and the college rescinded her acceptance months before the article was published.
Sounds like you are getting angry about something that didn’t happen. The NYT simply reported on something that happened and did a good job framing her as a human- not a horribly racist monster or whatever.
Would you prefer the press just didn’t inform you of such going’s on?
"Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public."
Media seems to be increasingly part of the enforcement arm of the monoculture. For those that are in the “club” there’s cover, for those that find themselves on the other side there’s smear.
I can't get over that either. The girl was not some redneck racist, she was an active BLM protester, but they still framed her hometown as
"Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling."
The damage to her was done by the asshole classmate, though.
The NYT just wrote it up after the fact.
Said write up was awful and the extent to which it made the asshole seem like a hero made me want to stab things, but it's worth blaming the NYT for all the things they did get wrong here and not the one thing they didn't :)
There are some people who just need to get roughed up a few times before they get a clue. A couple guys should just knock some sense into that guy for ruining this girl's life. This seems to no longer be the norm, though, so I guess people need some better way to exact retribution.
Ironic that the people outraged by a mob destroying someone wish for their own mob justice. As soon as the balance of power changes it will be unsafe for a whole different demographic.
Don't take my rash words as a representation of others; they are not. The above was a resentful comment I made the mistake of posting, and I wouldn't endorse violence either irl.
It bothers me because the apparent neutral tone is actually very sympathetic towards the psychopath that held on to the video to release it for maximum damage. It's an endorsement for mob rule and cancel culture. They managed to cancel the future of a high-schooler and it's presented like an achievement and warning for others (one word can ruin your life), what country are we living in?
The timeline you present here is all wrong. The article itself says that her college acceptance was rescinded, meaning it came before this article.
The article was published in December 2020 and these events happened in June 2020:
> The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
The mere act of reporting - documenting an event that happened for its readers - does not make the author “scum of the earth”.
You find it offensive and hideous that the journalist did things that they did not in fact do, while yourself presenting a false accounting of the facts.
>The article was published in December 2020 and these events happened in June 2020:
I see. I haven't read the article itself (it was/is behind a paywall), but a report on it, that read like the article publicized this story ahead of the events.
Still, from the snippets I read posted here, what's with the "slave auctions" and the BS innuendo about her city?
As others have noted, this is a good time to think about Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Here's some points in the article that I think are particularly sketchy that others haven't yet noted ...
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
The Blog Roll is on the left side. It's a long list of weirdly categorized links without any additional annotation. Nick Land's is "Xenosystems" (which now appears to be defunct). I think calling this an "endorsement" is really stretching things here.
Scott wrote about the neoreactionary movement on SSC more than once, and it's quite clear he _does not_ endorse those viewpoints (which to be fair, the article does say). But given that he wrote about the topic repeatedly, it's no surprise he linked to a prominent neoreactionary blog. Presumably, he trusted his readers to come to their own conclusions about the content on the linked blogs. And he also probably assumed that readers would realize this _wasn't_ an endorsement, given his own writing on the neoreactionary movement.
If I told you that you should read Marx's Communist Manifesto after telling you at length that I think Communism is terrible, am I endorsing Communism? Or am I telling you to read this because I think you should learn more about Communism, and not just from me?
> I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.
This is one of the sketchiest things in the article. Scott made it clear that his primary concern was that his patients and potential employers might associate him with his blog. So if you're a patient googling your new psychiatrist, would you google their first and middle name (a middle name you might not even know)? Or would you google "Scott Siskind"? Of course you'd do the latter! So the question is whether googling "Scott Siskind" would get you to SSC. I'd love to go back in time and check this. I'd also love to know if Cade Metz tried this and what result he got.
I would note that if I google "Scott Siskind" right now, I do get results related to SSC, but that's because Scott after Scott gave up his pseudonymity on Astral Codex Ten, the Wikipedia page for SSC was updated to include Scott's full name.
I'm sure there are more similarly sketchy parts of the article that others will note.
It’s true. I’ve never read an article about something I had first-hand knowledge of that didn’t get at minimum one major part of the story completely wrong. And then I go ahead and wholly accept everything in every article about things I don’t have first-hand knowledge of.
This actually sums up my feeling when read the NYT article: reporter wades into a sub-culture only kind of understands what is going on but sees words and reports on them for the "general" audience. The article feels very... surface level, like the reporter didn't really read much of the blog or didn't think it was worth engaging with. The meat of the story is linking to prominent tech figures and the blog is this curiosity side piece that links the two.
If you include something in your blogroll, that is, literally, an endorsement of it. I don't see how it isn't. It's part of the framing you're putting around every article you write. It's the context that you directly provide.
Maybe we're using two different definitions of "endorse". I think of it as saying "I approve of this thing", not "this thing exists and is worth reading, even if I do not approve of it".
For me to consider a link an endorsement it would need to have more context than just being in a long list of links.
Never read Slate Star Codex before. Took the link to an entry on metoo[1]:
1. Starts with a thought experiment based on statistics from various sources.
2. Has a parenthetical paragraph about gay male harassment, also with statistics.
3. Makes a speculative conclusion inside the parenthetical, never mentioning the famous metoo case of Terry Crews, the media coverage of which argues against said conclusion.
Can someone tell me if the other articles follow this pattern of building from first principles without having first done due diligence on a given topic?
I would say it is not uncommon for his articles to build from first principles, but also not uncommon for them to be based on due diligence. One general problem with this NYT article is that SSC is ... a lot of words, and is not easily categorizable, so pretty much any treatment of it in an article like this is going to be superficial and unable to find some cohesive narrative that captures truth. Instead it chooses one cohesive narrative, which is inevitably incredibly incomplete.
> I would say it is not uncommon for his articles to build from first principles, but also not uncommon for them to be based on due diligence.
Thanks. With that in mind-- and with a proud and explicit rejection of the idiotic repostings of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect here on HN-- I'll do my due diligence and read some of the other postings, too.
As far as this article I stumbled upon wrt metoo-- I think it stands as a good example of how not to write an even-handed analysis for a general audience. Relying on a thought experiment without mentioning that there's an extant well-known case leads the astute reader to believe the author hasn't devoted adequate study to the subject.
Your #3 is only one of a bunch of things wrong with that paragraph :(. This seems much worse than his earlier posts that I read, mostly a couple of years earlier IIRC. Not sure if that is typical of his more recent writing or not. But yes, I would say that is exactly the pattern, long arguments from first principles leaving out obvious counterarguments or mentioning them but dismissing them without understanding the argument. Obviously when discussing complex topics it is impossible to mention everything, but he seems to often fail to understand the most common objections against what he is arguing.
It's interesting how many of the article's claims, often quite vague, are unsupported by any quotes or citations. For example, Metz claims that social justice "voices who might push back were kept at bay" on SSC, but provides no clarification of what he means by this or how it was accomplished.
Peculiar choice not to justify with source material when the topic is a public blog with public comments.
On the "doxxing" controversy, it’s odd to see people who are supposedly in favor of free speech advocate for what is essentially the "right" to be publicly forgotten (since Scott’s real name was already public knowledge due to some of his past writings that were under his real name). Free speech and the right to be forgotten are in direct conflict.
While I largely agree with you, the motivations of doxxing is almost always to threaten someone into silence, and to chill others who might be considering opening their own mouths.
Well, it's not the right to be forgotten. It's the right not to have a major news outlet trumpet your name. There's still a conflict between "the NYT has the right to identify me" and "I have the right to say what I want pseudonymously", but the conflict is more nuanced than the one between between "the NYT has the right to identify me" and "I have the right to be forgotten".
> Free speech and the right to be forgotten are in direct conflict.
I don't think so. The right to free speech is a right the government to say what you want without consequences from the government beyond certain limited criteria. The right to be forgotten is a personal right where a person can decide they want certain information removed after a period of time. I consider this more a personal protection in a world where people have issues realizing that felons have paid for their crimes, that peoples views can change over time, etc...
I haven’t seen anyone frame the issue as a right. I’ve seen people argue that there was no public interest in publishing Siskind’s legal name and that it was unethical.
Alas, that doesn’t respond to the point that I haven’t seen people framing this as an entitlement on the part of Scott, rather the framing has been that this is an example of powerful institutions pursing self-interested goals to the detriment of the rest of us.
I do not think that fighting against against harassment, death threats, ect, is really the gotcha argument that free speech proponents would say is a huge contradiction with their beliefs.
Most people who support free speech, would probably also agree that it is good to give people tools to protect themselves from harassment.
One can simultaneously support a journalist's right to free speech and believe that he should not have published this. Just because I don't want to use state violence to prevent the publication of this article doesn't mean I endorse it. It's like saying that anyone who dislikes a product doesn't support the free market.
Yes, those are great, and makes you realize that NYT not quoting SSC was intentional, because it would nuke the narrative they're trying to build.
Edit: here's an example, that's pretty instructive.
From NYT:
>That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else — a memo he was later fired over. [Emphasis added]
But that isn't what Damore said, and you can go google and read the memo yourself, which NYT doesn't link for you, because it would directly contradict their framing.
Am I reading that right? It complains the article didn't actually quote SSC, then contradicts itself by listing ten actual quotes from SSC that are in the article, and then lists ten other quotes that he happens to particularly like (one of which is a dreamlike thing that appears to be from some fiction).
I kinda get the impression the author of that blog post would have been satisfied with nothing less than something that read like it was written by an enthusiastic fan.
Eight of those ten are not even complete sentences, let alone "not blockquotes". Every quote need not be a complete sentence or paragraph, but including almost none strikes me as poor journalism. A good writer would include a bit more information and give Alexander's statements a chance to speak for themselves.
> Eight of those ten are not even complete sentences, let alone "not blockquotes".
A quote that is not a complete sentence is still a quote.
> Every quote need not be a complete sentence or paragraph, but including almost none strikes me as poor journalism. A good writer would include a bit more information and give Alexander's statements a chance to speak for themselves.
The kind of journalism that has lots of long quotes like that is called an interview. This article was not an interview, nor could it have possibly been, because Scott Alexander refused to be interviewed.
It's incredibly weak to criticize something for not happening to be the random thing you decided it should be instead. You might as well criticize the NYT for publishing this article as a newspaper story and not as a thick book.
Seems like if you're going to write about something a lot of people find a lot of value in, you at least owe it to your readership to explain why they find it valuable.
FTA: “ The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” ”
This is a disingenuous take but it does fit the current NYT narrative of opposing speech (and venues) the editors disapprove of.
790 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] thread> In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray. The paragraph makes Scott sound like a flaming racist. It's just totally dishonest writing. It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.
The anonymity thing seems to have been well and truly discarded – flung in his face, more like. What did he do to them to deserve such treatment, such contempt?
I did get one laugh, out of:
> “[Rationalists] are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-o...
When was it a "solved" finding that poverty is a result of exploitation? Or that culture and/or genetics don't also play a role, perhaps a big one?
That's how science works, by making hypothesis, examining things, and coming to conclusions, popular or not.
And a scientist/thinker is allowed to have different conclusions than others, if they can point to specific theories and numbers that support their thesis.
Regardless of whether he said this, what gives you the impression that it isn't true?
There are several studies showing a link between genetics and intelligence. This absolutely does not imply that all black people are less intelligent than all white people. It tends to imply that Ashkenazi Jews have some statistical genetic advantage over other "white people" and that if you then average them into the group "white people" the correlation persists against other arbitrarily defined groups. This is obviously about as far from the argument that Nazis want to make as you can imagine.
Meanwhile, how could culture not affect outcomes in the aggregate? Would you really expect that all of the same outcomes would obtain for people who make different choices?
Without wading in too far here, I want to point out that picking a slightly different "master race" is no better.
> In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”
> Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Except that there's nothing there to imply that we should ever do anything the Nazis did, even if you substitute one group for another, because racism is still stupid even if you can find a statistical correlation between some set of phenotypes and some arbitrarily defined racial group.
Remember "the differences within a race are larger than the differences between races"? Still true.
All it does is provide a possible explanation for aggregate statistical measurements. It tells you nothing about any individual of any race and it justifies no policy of taking race into account when evaluating merit.
Just because a thing correlates with another thing doesn't mean the first thing is the second thing. The real problem was that if you measure "race" instead of intelligence, and consequently did not hire a black person who was just as intelligent, that's not fair. It's racism. If you're measuring intelligence directly and not using race for anything at all, that's completely different. It doesn't discriminate against all of the black people who are intelligent, which was the original problem with using race.
So, purely in the intention of understanding your comment, would you agree that this belief you say seems implied by the data, can be rephrased as: the idea that the group "white people" has a genetical predisposition for intelligence compared to "other arbitrarily defined groups"?
Assuming that the data did show this is the case, and referring to the (perhaps older) definition of racism as the belief of "superiority of one race over another", you can probably see where I'm going with this, so here's my question:
Can you explain how this belief is not the dictionnary definition of racism?
Follow-up question: Considering what you see in the data, would you call yourself a racist?
You sure he didn't say that poverty is part-hereditary rather than what you are saying?
First, most if not all of the left believe it is hereditary - rich people's kids staying richer and vice versa. Second, he definitely never says exploitation or culture do not come into it.
A so called hate fact
Maybe I should have said "insinuations" rather than "accusations" to be fair to them.
Well there's some more in that paragraph you quote. He then goes on to say "Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and [Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture." (Emphasis kept from the original.) Which I think the NYT writer reads as being at least a partial endorsement of Murray's belief that some class differences reduce to heredity. I do too, since this seems roughly in line with what I understand from Scott's writing. It is also true that Murray takes that idea farther and goes in some directions I find to be both scientifically unsupported and inflammatory.
You can agree or disagree with the NYT here, I don't care. But I think you should quote more from that paragraph before you characterize it.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” - Michael Crichton
I was first mentioned at a very young age in a newspaper when Der Spiegel reported on my dad. What it mentioned was that he had two children, my sister and myself. It then stated our ages, and got both of them completely wrong. This is not hard. It's also not important, but if it's not important enough to get right, maybe it's not important enough to simply make up?
And later, I discovered the effect Michael mentions: every time they reported on anything I knew even a little about, they got it comically wrong. Except I don't suffer from amnesia.
UPDATE: the only news source that I've found the be reasonably reliable over time is The Economist, if you ignore them on executive compensation ("our valued readers and sponsors: everything is fine with your outrageous salaries") and GMOs.
That's your projected goal about the author's intention, which cannot be known. Maybe focus on the content?
In the context, the reference was fair. The mainstreaming of truly extremist and dangerous ideas has gone too far, calling them out where ever they are is step one of making fascism bad again.
Obviously this is absurd. But the reporter would not have achieved his desired effect if he had just said "partially agreed with Murray on a specific issue". So he used the tribal language of alignment to fuel his politics of knee-jerk outrage. As the media so often does.
Murray himself takes that set of beliefs and follows it in a direction that quite explicitly replaces "heredity" with "race", and associates a great deal of our nation's class differences to it. It's not really clear to me whether Scott's beliefs lead him in that direction too, or maybe if they do so to a lesser extent. I do know that many people on rationalist-adjacent boards like The Motte (used to be part of the SSC subreddit) have drawn some pretty unpleasant and unjustified opinions on this matter, which is one of the reasons that people asked Scott to remove that discussion group from the subreddit. (He did so, but only under duress and while denouncing the people who asked him to.)
Find me an honest person who is knowledgeable about IQ and denies that IQ is somewhat heritable, and there is some meaningful (not completely determinative!) causal relationship between intelligence and class indicators such as income. That's all Scott has ever "aligned" himself with from Murray.
Yes, and the way to attack this is not to insist that there are zero heritable differences in people's talents for various economically renumerable activities. There are lots of heritable differences. There are also lots of environmental effects.
The way to attack it is to do the thing the NYT cannot do, and attack meritocracy as the basis of our political economy. For instance, plainly the Trump children got where they are due to heredity! Their whole damn family is coasting off Donald's father, who made the money. But as we all saw, their "very good genes" made them, well, terrifically incompetent, feckless morons.
So? When did that became illegal? Or news?
Murray's ideas aren't "new". Not even a little. And they aren't "truth".
Your local university can do it if you really care. A ton of material has been written about Murray's work. Taboo? Humanity has been using science to break the backs of minorities for centuries. People aren't hiding the corner quivering and afraid to touch Murray's work.
I attended grad school with people who studied sociology and history, who were able to synthesize the state of the fields for me. I'm married to a professor and good friends with other professors who study topics in this space. None of them have good things to say about Murray's work.
Coming at this from the left, I feel it might be better to suggest alternative interpretations of those results than to just avoid any discussion on the whole area.
Another thing that correlates really strongly with black people in the US is their ancestors having lived in slavery. Those ancestors were restricted in their freedom to pick a partner compared with the white population of the US at the time. This could result in genetic differences between the two groups.
A lot of people have done this. The Bell Curve is full of problems, both in the sourced research being completely false (for example, straight up lies about populations being tested) as well as Murray's conclusions drawn from research. Papers and books have been published. What else do you want from the community?
> So? When did that became illegal? Or news?
What does illegality have to do with anything in this context?
I mean holding an idea can be both legal and abhorrent/wrong at the same time.
And isn't bringing up legality here kind of a Motte & Bailey fallacy? (I'm genuinely asking, I only learned about that the other day.) People condemn Murray's ideas because they're distasteful and wrong, but it's certainly far easier to defend their legality.
Then rephrase the above question: since when did that become abhorrent or wrong?
We know that IQ is hereditary. This is a simple statistical fact: there is positive correlation between the IQ of children and their parents. And if cognitive ability translates into higher incomes, this would mean income is hereditary
I think what people find abhorrent are the perceived implication rather than the message itself. I'm going to hazard the guess that you're perceiving the implication that saying class differences are hereditary is implying that inequality isn't a problem, or some social groups won't ever have high incomes, or something else.
In reality saying these differences are hereditary is saying nothing about that. Saying IQ is hereditary isn't saying some people will never be smart. Obesity is hereditary, too. That doesn't mean the children of obese parents can never be a healthy weight. Nobody's body cheats thermodynamics. Likewise people's IQ can be improved by exercising mental tasks.
I think there's something there. I'd add to that the kinds of ideologies that latch on to the idea that IQ is heritable are another reason to treat the idea as abhorrent. It would be one thing if the question was just one of intellectual curiosity, but it's very much not that. The idea has a looong history of being used to justify racial prejudices.
Irrespective of the correctness or incorrectness of the idea, it's totally legitimate to make it taboo for the above reason alone. Sort of like it's legitimate to make garden-variety political flamebait taboo. Everyone knows where it leads.
That is, everyone except sometimes people who imagine themselves to be "above it all" due to their identification with "reason," or "intelligence," etc.
If some people take a true fact and abuse it to push unjust claims, the focus on addressing the abuse of facts. Not the facts themselves. And Slate Star Codex has done a good job of this. His explorations of these controversial ideas almost invariably entail refutations of abusive use of those ideas.
This is not a good thing for egalitarianism!
My point is that people are perceiving a very different implication than what Murray or SSC are actually saying. E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome. In reality, IQ is far more malleable and can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it.
This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
Taking a step back though, I'll trust you on obesity, but we do t have hard evidence that I'm aware of that intelligence is genetic. For example, cognitive ability and IQ aren't the same, and even if they were, there are all kinds of things (like language) that are clearly heritable but obviously not genetically so.
Regardless,
> This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
This statement seriously makes me doubt whether you've read Murray . The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. The notion that less intelligent people are inferior is the complete opposite of what he actually wrote.
No, it's like picking one of those and using it as the measure. If you pick 10k running time, you'll be biased towards mid-length endurance athletes. If you pick deadlift, you'll be biased towards raw strength athletes. The question of if Usain Bolt or Hafthor Bjornsson is more athletic is malformed, it requires us to ask which athletic talents we value more highly (not to mention comparing to someone like Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady, where social interaction is a component of the athletic achievement).
Similarly, most measures of IQ contain implicit assumptions about what intelligence means, and those assumptions are based on western cultural norms. Even tests designed to be less culturally biased, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, aren't free of this issue. And this ignores cultures where decision making is often a team sport, so being forced to take a test without aid is an unusual environment, and may be, culturally, a malformed question.
> The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives.
Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines). That they are genetically inferior and society needs to cater better to their inferiority: "we should be more willing to help the cognitively disabled". Not that they may be just as well equipped as everyone else, and we should address the biases in society that mismeasure their intelligence, such as biased IQ tests and other cultural assumptions about what intelligence is.
The Bell curve doesn't engage with any of this criticism (it predates some of, but by no means all of it). It assumes that the measure is objective and valid. I've read enough of Murray, and enough criticism of him, to understand how he's wrong.
Not even remotely true. The intra-race differences are much larger than the inter-race difference. The difference along racial lines is a fraction of a standard deviation. They almost entirely overlap. Murray emphasized, repeatedly, that the IQ distributions between race almost entirely overlaps. "Highly correlated along racial lines" is the total opposite of what was actually written in the book.
I'm sorry but this just about confirms my suspicion that you are not familiar with what Murray actually wrote. I'm sure the version Murray's message you have in your mind is highly racist. But that is a very different message than the one that exists in reality.
> I'm sure the version Murray's message you have in your mind is highly racist. But that is a very different message than the one that exists in reality.
I haven't yet claimed he's racist. I've claimed he's wrong about measurement of cognitive ability.
That said, since you bring it up, I do think he's racist. The book itself isn't about race, per say, it's a Social Darwinist policy-paper aimed at reducing welfare on the argument that welfare for childcare encourages low-income (and, as the book suggests, presumably cognitively-lesser) women to have more children.
It also, plainly a succinctly states that immigration is bad, and that modern immigrants are "less able":
> The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves.
This is blamed on the low cognitive ability of modern immigrant populations compared to previous ones, and not structural and systemic factors that make it more difficult for immigrants to be high-achieving.
So I find it highly suspicious that the book lays out policy suggestions that will predominantly harm low income black women, and prevent immigration, and that he complains in particular about the harms of nonwhite immigration when he says "Latin and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence.", and then proceeds to suggest that we should reduce immigration from Africa and Latin America to address this.
Tell me how that isn't racist. I mean in a sense you're right: whether or not one believes that these policy proposals are based on a genetic or environmental understanding of cognitive heritability isn't really relevant. They're still pretty racist. And they get even more racist when you recognize that there are flaws in how Murray chooses to measure cognitive ability, flaws that systematically favor those with significant exposure to Euro-American culture.
Choosing to measure people's athleticism solely on their powerlifting ability, and then proposing to ban anyone who doesn't perform well enough is fairly prejudiced against long distance runners.
Anyway, this has gone far enough and is going deeper into the reply chain than I think is productive. All I really care about is highlighting several key incorrect claims you've made about Murray's work:
> As far as in know, murray claims that the hereditary nature is [primarily] due to genetics, which is certainly more controversial than observing that it is hereditary.
No. Murray repeatedly emphasizes the role of environmental factors like schooling and parenting. He does so explicitly, "In any case, you are not going to learn tomorrow that all the cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, because the scientific state of knowledge, unfinished as it is, already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story."
> claiming that it [IQ/cognitive ability] can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability". Furthermore, much of the book explores how parenting, education, and other factors affect cognitive ability. This is not at all something Murray is claiming.
> Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines).
Again, this runs entirely contrary to what is written in the book. Even before adjusting for different socio-economic contexts, mostly overlap. And after adjusting for socio-economic factors the differences are much smaller. "Highly correlated along racial lines" is far from the truth.
There's definitely valid criticisms to be made. Especially on the influence of IQ on divorce rates, and other observations that go outside of Murray's area of expertise. But please make those criticisms on what was actually written. The reality is that Murray's claims about IQ are not nearly as controversial or inflammatory than people make them out to be. Relating back to my original comment, people criticize Murray more out of perceived implication than about concrete claims.
This is, as I've repeatedly noted, not really true. There's some great criticism of the kinds of IQ tests he uses in the book, in fact, some of them weren't even IQ tests, which makes any conclusions drawn from them about academic achievement really quite silly. If you're asking trigonometry questions (as one test he uses does!), well you aren't testing innate knowledge, but academic progression.
See for example https://bolesblogs.com/1998/03/23/a-review-of-the-bell-curve..., which discusses the multitude of both logical and psychological errors in the book's analysis of IQ and intelligence.
Murray's response to this type of criticism is wholly unsatisfactory.
> No. Murray repeatedly emphasizes the role of environmental factors like schooling and parenting
Saying that he claims environmental factors have some effect, does not contradict that he claims that genetic factors are the majority. Those are, in fact, both true statements!
It's also a bit self contradictory: if he says that socio-economic factors have an impact on measured IQ, then what's the point of IQ as distinct from socio-economic factors? If improving educational access and such improves the measured values, it clearly isn't any sort of innate measure, and is obviously culturally influenced, which is precisely the point I'm making. I'm glad he agrees with me ;)
> The reality is that Murray's claims about IQ are not nearly as controversial or inflammatory than people make them out to be.
I agree! They're just scientifically inaccurate.
The odious things are the policy suggestions he pushes for based on the bunk science! And when one uses bad science to push racist policies, listeners (rightly) start to wonder if perhaps the science is being done to push the policies, and not vice versa. He starts from the conclusion and works backwards, and does so to justify inequalities that exist today. That is racist.
> people criticize Murray more out of perceived implication than about concrete claims.
Another way to put what I'm getting at here is that the scientific claims Murray makes are broadly not false, but they are often vague and underspecified. The policy proposals he suggests only make sense under a particular interpretation of his scientific claims, a particular interpretation he never explicitly states. That interpretation isn't supported by his data, and contradicts much of the softening he places in the book.
It doesn't make sense to advocate for removal of the social safety net as a "solution" to the problem of low IQ individuals reproducing too much[0] if you believe that IQ can be raised through policy that improves socio-economic outcomes. It is logically inconsistent to both believe that childhood economic status improves IQ, and that we should reduce government assistance to those with the lowest IQs. In fact, you'd want to do the opposite: stabilize them with additional income such that their economic status, and with it, IQ, increases.
His policy proposals only make sense if he believes that IQ is primarily genetic and that things like schools and socio-economic environment don't have a significant impact.
[0]: Let's ignore the giant question being begged here.
There's a personal upper limit that can be improved only when one is a child from what I've read. Whilst at the same time, damaging one's cognitive intelligence is doable at any age, yes. And to some extent, undoing the damage
You wrote elsewhere:
> The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability"
Makes me interested in reading the book :-)
Including religion and language as part of the definition seems to be overloading it.
In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes?
That said, there's also epigenetics, which hurts my brain.
> In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes?
Broadly speaking, no (like obviously, in some sense it is, right?), but most common attempts to measure intelligence don't really do a good job of deciding what intelligence is. This can be fine if you're trying to draw conclusions about individuals that are generally culturally homogenous (if you're comparing solely amongst a group of pro basketball players, the one with the best bench press is probably above average, even if it isn't really a great judge of basketball skill), but not when trying to compare athleticism between a group made up of basketball players and powerlifters.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3
That does not mean that those genes affect my cognitive ability. It may mean they affect my eye color and people are biased against dark eyes, so I can't get into college.
In fact, from my reading of the paper, their major conclusion was only for those of European ethnicity (and even then only accounted for a small percentage of the overall difference in attainment), so they didn't try to address questions about racial influence, for example.
Specifically, for people of European descent, their method is about as predictive as a socio-economic predictor. For a multi-ethnic group, their method is 3-5x less predictive than a socio-economic predictor. Saying that people should retract claims of environmental heritability is ridiculous: those methods are still far more predictive.
To use your example, if a gene still has the same correlation even among non-brown eyed people or the same correlation appears even in societies that don't discriminate against people with brown eyes that's a different story.
Thats what these researchers are doing. These observations aren't made in one environment. They happen across different cultures, different classes, different societies, etc. Factors like parental educational attainment can be adjusted for.
The problem is the IQ fetishists go past this into kind of speaking about it as a virtue or lack.
It gets a little closer to someone who really really thinks height is important and short people are holding things back. They put way too much societal importance on height as a measure of success, when people of all sizes can lead fulfilling, comfortable lives. There's always something off when they discuss it, which is why I kind of got tired of those people in rationalism. It's like caring that you are only 5'7" instead of 6 foot tall.
Is this now a forbidden hypothesis? If IQ has a large effect on life outcomes (it does) and is significantly heritable (it is), then it would be surprising if that were not the case.
Presumably, it is possible to believe both that IQ is highly heritable and that it is very important for success in the modern world, while also concluding, "this is why we need full communism now," but you rarely encounter those people at all, at least outside of SSC-adjacent places.
Obviously, saying “I agree with Hitler on vegetarianism” does not mean also supporting Nazism or the Holocaust or whatever. But it does invite pretty reasonable suspicion as to why, out of all the vegetarians in the world, you decided to compare yourself to that particular one.
Even the NYT, in an article on Thanksgiving arguments, has acknowledged that it's much more persuasive to point out where you agree before getting into where you disagree.
Some folks seem to think it virtuous to shun their opponents and ignore, or performatively disagree with, 100% of what they say. It isn't - it's just a way to signal tribal loyalty.
The point I’m making is that the way in which one makes an argument can reveal more than a strictly logical reading of its premises and conclusion. So it’s possible that even if Scott wrote his whole FAQ and came out against whatever it is, people are still justified in thinking he’s more sympathetic to it than he lets on.
Like, to use your analogy, if I were writing an article on someone and they threw references to Hitler into otherwise innocuous topics like vegetarianism? Maybe I wouldn’t describe it as “aligning themselves”, but I’d probably find it suspicious enough to include.
It doesn't matter if you think yourself justified to read between the lines. Reporting should be factual, otherwise it's just your opinion, people can't trust you to help form their opinion, and they have to go to the source material themselves to see what it really says.
The NYT's criticism of SSC isn't that he expressed an idea that Murray also had, but that he name-checked Murray. (I haven't read his books so I don't have my own opinion, but I gather he's considered Problematic by some.)
It's said that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. When you're writing for the public, you'll have all 3 kinds of readers. Journalists are very aware of this, and make sure their stories work on all 3 levels. Actually, mostly just the last 2. A journalist who has trained himself to think this way might read SSC as "blah blah agree Douglas Murray blah blah blah".
It is lame of the NYT to try to hold other publications, that are trying to discuss pure ideas, to the same constraint? Yes.
I find this sort of callumny appalling.
But I look forward to a day when people feel the need to be far more cautious in general than they have been with Murray about making accusations of racism and other forms of bigotry.
A.) he staked out a wildly controversial position; contrast with ASSes who only advance milquetoast leftist points of view.
B.) subsequent decades have done scarce little to refute that position; contrast with ASSes who have been humiliated by the replication crisis.
C.) the position has proved very influential; contrast with so many ASSes whose papers fail to collect even a single citation.
D.) Murray has defended his position with grace; contrast with the histrionics and classlessness of his ASS detractors.
The same attributes applies to most of current "hollier than thou" cancel articles. The principle of charity is totally lost, anything that an idiot can misread as offensive is labeled as so, and offensiveness itself is potrtrayed as the biggest crime.
The NYT is worse a rag than the National Enquirer, because at least the second is not perceived as some objective and quality source (and doesn't influence politics, or help setup trillion dollar wars and mass carnage).
This nonsense is now the reigning ideology among humanities departments at our elite schools and outlets like the NYT are increasingly staffed by young graduates who have been indoctrinated into this cult; is it any wonder that the NYT has gone off the fucking deep end?
I mean, what is Donald Trump if not postmodernism personified?
(And to be clear, I'm certainly not saying that anything the NYT puts out is remotely as bad as the QAnon nutcases)
But i think that the typical current-day NYT journalist would say that there is objectivity and truth, and what they write is objective and truthful. I haven't noticed anything coming from the NYT, or that whole 'progressive' side of politics that suggests they've adopted that stereotypical pomo rejection of master narratives etc.
The activist part of what you described comes from a 1965 paper by Herbert Marcuse called "Repressive Tolerance."[0]
The ideas from Marcuse's paper are widely mis-attributed to Karl Popper in that infographic everyone's seen floating around.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance
[1] https://www.libertarianism.org/sites/libertarianism.org/file...
Lindsay defends the old-academy classical liberalism. The sort of gentlemanly debate that arises from such values is good, but only possible between people with a collegial relationship who both prefer truth over power. They cannot be used against enemies. When dealing with enemies, one must bring weapons, and the postmodernist weapons can be made to work in anyone's hands.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the... (An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power.)
I think it's as good of an explanation as any for why old-academy classical liberalism is losing (and will continue to lose): truth is not dominant, and least on the timescales the game is played.
100% agreed that post-modernists are still worth reading, and that many of the critiques are relevant. Disagree that doing so will change anything—because truth isn't dominant in the short-term.
>... In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
What article (as of right now, there is no link)? What is up with journalists not bothering to cite claims like these?
He’s using him as an example to make another point - he could have just as easily used Hitler there or anyone else. Quite a stretch to call this an endorsement of any kind.
Well, Hanlon's Razor suggests they're just incompentent, but that seems like more of a "98% confidence has been refuted at General Relativity" kind of thing.
Trying to drum up weak, tacked-on “sources” to compare Slate Star Codex with a forum inviting fringe hate groups is absolutely pathetic.
Thanks, that's a good article, but doesn't seem to support your claim of a double standard:
> Some will no doubt describe this double standard as an example of political bias, but it's probably better described as garden-variety sloppiness. It seems more likely that the Times does not have consistent standards here, and editors alternate between fostering over-reliance on anonymous sources and forbidding the practice.
i.e. not a "double standard", but no standard.
However we also have the problem that is the "Daily Mail" which is a truly vile publication - which I read because it keeps me informed on what a significant chunk of the population of my country thinks.
We don't really have any truly decent news sources left or right wing, they've all moved to click bait nonsense and "reaction pieces" to something someone said on Twitter - I suspect because it's cheap.
The best of the bunch in terms of what I consider classical journalism is probably The Guardian (which is biased) and as long as you avoid it's opinion section (bleh) is a reasonably decent paper.
Honestly the best you can do to remain an informed citizen is read a bunch of them and look at what is not been said by each.
The FT is the only one left. All the others are weird poisoned wells where the factual reporting is mixed with opinion slurry, and beholden to the prejudices of the owners.
Here's Peter Oborne resigning from the Telegraph over their standards: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31510152
Here's the Guardian US published in the Guardian complaining about the UK Guardian falling for the transphobia that has recently infected UK public life: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/02/guardi...
The landscape is not diverse: https://www.mediareform.org.uk/media-ownership/who-owns-the-...
We do not need a BLOCKCHAIN to figure out what is newsworthy... this is a human problem, not a decentralized-immutable-trustless-system problem
Twitter, if you carefully follow the right people.
NYC is a rag with a stick up its arse while foaming at the mouth over its hatred of technology and nerds because we threaten their power base.
1. Venezuela going down hill because of bad decisions, WSJ editorial pointed it out. 2. Minimum Wages’s effects and should be eliminated, the NYT’s editorial board agreed up until its radical conversion and fearful state.
Go through the archives and see how much of their editorial articles line up with what actually happens, then go through the NYT editorials and see how far wrong they are on policy proscriptions and misunderstandings or more often blindsiding of second order effects.
I was about to say I don't think WP is as bad yet, then I remembered everything they had to ought to retract because they were rushing to sell a narrative with only anonymous sources to back it up.
Part of journalism is to document not just events as they happen but also the Zeitgeist of various communities.
...
On that topic, I find it mildly funny that the NY Times goes out of its way to grace Jill Biden [0] with the honorific "Dr" despite her bottom-of-the-barrel EdD, while a practicing clinician is "Mr. Siskind".
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/politics/jill-biden-fi...
- All papers are biased in favor of their stake holders.
- Some are better at hiding it.
- Business sections are obfuscated with business-speak, but are way more factual because business people expect to be able to make business decisions.
- The best cross-section of news is a selection of newspapers with stakeholders who are not aligned or even clearly at odds.
- Papers from different countries often have different stakeholders.
- Having friends in the middle of the action is a great source of facts. Only works well if you have lots of such friends (e.g. if your name is Noam Chomsky).
I did not read TFA because I know I'd just be ticked off - the hoopla and sloppy reporting around GME trying to fit it all into a simplistic narrative really was quite annoying and has caused me to revise my understanding of modern day journalism.
My opinion is that "the journalist" in a lot of cases wrote things up in a simplistic way so that they could understand it for themselves - or they just slapped something together in an ad hoc fashion following all the other lemmings - or the intent was to spew more propaganda about whatever they think is important.
All this has convinced me the "Right" do have a bit of a good point about the MSM being sloppy, unfair, and trying to control the public's interpretation of reality (not that the "Right" are correct about much of anything...) But whatever happened to trying to really comprehend all the different angles to a story? Or understanding the worldview of the subject? That takes a lot of work aka empathy and the economics of the MSM nowadays precludes that, I guess. Louis Theroux and Adam Curtis are the antithesis of this sort of journalist.
Geez... the implied connotation of this lede makes it quite obvious the angle taken on this topic was predetermined just like Scott feared. It all fits in with the general fad going on now about how Big Tech is so evil now and out to enslave everyone. I've been in this industry for 30 years and yes there are problems, but just like with any other technology or shift in society. A mutant version of capitalism is the real problem now but you'll never see the MSM writing articles about that.
I'm not even a Rationalist or part of that community; I read SSC occasionally when a topic came up that I am interested in. In general, I think they are a bit short sighted and blinkered in a lot of respect - though the angle taken is useful. To really grok something, you have to look at all of the angles and to believe only 'this angle' is the real Truth is stupid. The idea that SSC was the coffeehouse for "many tech leaders" is really .... I want to say ludicrous but that is perhaps too strong of a word. Not all engineers are autistic robots.
Counterpoint: Zuckerberg has a degree in psychology so he can't automatically be lumped in the Rationalist community; he certainly knew from the beginning he was building a digital Skinner box and how people would behave given the right stimuli.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Stop giving malicious actors the benefit of the doubt.
Btw, I'm not trying to draw a simple equivalency here. "Thinking for yourself" isn't as easy as saying "both sides distort" and plotting a naive midpoint between extremes. You have to read everything critically.
HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.
If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity".
Is that where we're getting mixed up?
That leads to grass roots competition from voices in local communities, and (in this case) some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
>some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
Why would anyone trust them? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Some of that mistrust comes from the centralized ownership and control of a lot of "local" stations.
Wikipedia/wikinews with all its faults gets a lot closer than the NYT. Because it's not static, it's not maddening fluff and drivel (when every fucking "article" is a story, "Abigale stood in the doorway in a chilly afternoon, disoriented by the bad news that her application by the Local State Office of Nobody Ever Heard of Ever was denied ..." and seven paragraphs later we will finally find out some new nugget of information, maybe even at the end of every such amazing certified five-times-Pulitzer piece there will be some hard data "statistic").
There's simply not enough demand for such an outlet with rigor, standards, etc. (Or maybe there is and it's a market niche, or it's an outright market failure that this need is not satisfied.)
Log on as a moderate and you will rage that the "paper of record" can spin such lies and obvious bias.
Log on as a progressive and you will rage because of the lies confirming our biases.
Outrage sells. The root cause lies in the reason why people need to seek entertainment and outrage from news, rather than from other areas in their lives.
I think it sustains itself because they are incentivized to go after left-wing outrage clicks to make money, but then there is always the fall-back of left-wing conviction: "I wrote this piece that wasn't accurate and may damage the paper's reputation because I need to make a stand for left-wing values and get pats on the back from my peers".
I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
> Outrage sells
Yes, exactly. It's just the usual "things are bad" porn. Winter? Things are bad. Summer? Things are bad. Sure, it's their "job", but at this rate why even check it? The problems are clear, even the solutions are pretty well characterized. (From small scale local zoning, policy and voting reforms through more of the same stricter EPA/cap-n-trade/carbon-tax stuff to big structural energy/healthcare/education/copyright/tax reforms to a few constitutional amendments and new free trade agreements [that incentivize free movement of people, goods, services and information]. Arrogance lvl 100.) For everything else you'll hear about it eventually.
> I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
Wow, that's ... damning. But doesn't seem particularly false either :|
> My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.
What leads to that isn't "mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting", it's the presence of any error at all in the mass media. Unless the mass media is inhumanly perfect (which it can never be, being a human endeavor), there will be scores of people who will use "Gell-Mann amnesia" as an excuse to descend into a cocoon of reassuring group-think.
Invocations of "Gell-Mann amnesia" are invitations to generalize single errors into general skepticism of media. However, people are biased, so general skepticism almost always means acceptance of things that support one's biases and rejection of anything that challenges them.
Do you think in retrospect this was a reasonable things for experts to predict?
That was the central tenet of the 2002 speech laying out the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (some prior discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 )
I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.
I love the diffusion of responsibility via the passive voice. Oh it "just disappeared."
I hope big tech buries the NYT.
I do however not, in any way, hope that "big tech" buries a news house. Even for a, not very good written and mean spirited, article. Especially one trying to bring public light on where a lot of very influential people get a lot of their ideological beliefs from. That would be a horrible precedent.
The NYT publishing threat was gratuitous
I'm by no way a fan of big tech but NYT has diverged quite sensibly from being a "news house" in the last few years.
I see it today as a bunch of independent contractors loosely publishing under the same banner. Article quality varies heavily depending upon author. News pieces are increasingly opinionated.
I've been a reader for over a decade and have probably cancelled and renewed my subscription a dozen times.
This NYT has never been perfect: I'm still sore how uncritical it was over the Iraq War. But my memory is that its voice and quality used to be a lot more consistent.
Note: I am addressing only the news part of the org. The opinion section is a whole other ball of wax, but they bleed into each other.
The claim that the NYT is a news house is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Can you provide any?
That said, The Times’s treatment of Alexander is pretty shabby, I don’t see how naming him substantively alters anything you might have to say about either his ideas or the ideas of those who move with him in “rationalist” circles.
[edited to fix a typo]
Yeah, that also made me throw up in my mouth a little.
"And suddenly, all this cash was handed to me"
"What happened before?"
"I threatened everyone at gunpoint to hand over their cash"
How, by disinterring it from the shallow grave where it was left by its own "journalists"?
I don't. I do wish Cade Metz hadn't made a mess of this story though, because it's a story worth pursuing. As the impact of Silicon Valley's policies on society continues to grow, it would be good to understand where decision-makers are getting their ideas.
It's quite funny how in this very thread the thin-skinned, childish attitude of tech personalities is on full display. The article is fairly balanced and even bland, yet the howling is enormous. As the article itself points out, people like Balaji Srinivasan were treatening to harass reporters involved in this story, but compared to the 'doxxing' of Scott Alexander, this didn't seem to draw a lot of attention. I'm pretty sure most journalists would be delighted if simply publishing their full name was the only thing they'd be threatened with on a daily basis, which wouldn't be much of a threat, because in general they put them right at the top of the article.
> I hope big tech buries the NYT.
Interesting that the people rallying so much against cancelling that they believe you can never even publish names want a tech cartel to form and drive a publication out of business for being vaguely critical of a movement popular with Silicon Valley people.
> Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was taken down by its author on June 23, 2020, due to fears of having his full name published in an upcoming piece by the New York Times.
I’m assuming this article is the delayed result from the NYTimes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#Controversy_o...
You make it sound like a heroic effort.
The "very same outfit that jumped on the Weinstein affair that got national interest and attracked lots of ad impressions" would be a better description.
It's easy to "take down" a rapist film producer everybody and their dog were already piling up against and the whole nation hated. His money/connections/lawyers/threats were as good as dead by that time.
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/new-york-times-reporting-le...
* For explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators, including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, bringing them to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women.*
https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2018
The idea that it was “easy” to report these stories is hard to believe when he was able to abuse women for decades without publicity.
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/nyt_diff
But no, kudos to them, they found a third way: Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association, and carefully ignore anything inconvenient.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
It feels weird even writing this argument down. If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
What a depressing waste of everyone's time.
Bluntly: Which prominent member of the neoreactionary movement was allowed to guest blog at SSC?
Because if the answer is "none", then I think it's clear he did not do any such thing.
Note how far removed this is from Scott Alexander himself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
It is true that Scott linked to Nick Land (and also Charles Murray but that is a different discussion) in his blogroll.
Which is kind of core to Scott's "Grey Tribe" ideas about free speech, but is very much against the "Blue Tribe" ideas of "no platforming nazis" etc.
Can't wait till we move past this infantile reframing of "showing people something you read" as "platforming".
We used to read the works of our enemies to understand them and read the works of kooks and crazies to avoid following their path (but also to see what truths, when followed too zealously, lead to ruin).
Now we have to read things, figure out the social credit of the things we read, and then decide whether or not to tell anyone we actually read it and thought about it.
I will never understand the pearl clutching that goes on when things like this happen.
As a person you are judged constantly by others, as a public figure this increases exponentially. You are judged on everything: the clothing you wear, the way you speak, and yes, the company you keep. In the age of social media influencing, each of us has a platform built upon the platform we choose. Each of us via that platform can spread influence, be it marketing, ideas, or (dis)information.
If you utilize your platform upon a platform (or just your platform) to spread bad ideas, purported by bad people, it is a perfectly rational reaction by your audience to reclaim the social capital they have given you. This is not wrong. This is not censorship. This is how social networks have worked since long before any of us had a smart phone, or indeed, when the social network was a fire in a cave, we have operated this way.
And reading this summation, yeah that sounds about right. It sounds as if he is embroiled in a social space that is spreading bad ideas. He has denounced one person who was in that social space, but he is still in contact with two others spreading similar ideas. This calls into question the sincerity of his denouncement.
I.e. if you say you're done drinking, and resolve to quit, and refuse to spend time with your alcoholic friend, but still spend time around two others who drink regularly, people would be right to question your sincerity in that resolve.
> If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
This impulse to boil this activity into a set of always absurd sounding "rules" is probably comforting to those who would call themselves Rationalist, the sorts who fetishize facts and logic, while usually having a dearth of both in the things they say. But ultimately this isn't hard to understand: If you associate with people known to believe and spread bad things, you will in turn be viewed as possibly endorsing those things.
And all of this comes up against the simple and obvious truth that all someone in this position has to do is speak what so many would like to hear; that they didn't understand what this person was doing, that it isn't what they believe, and to create distance. But they won't. I wonder why?
Probably because you aren't in a position of social influence, and/or your friends aren't propagating dangerous ideas? That's all the more reason to skewer those that do and are, precisely because of the platforming effects they have.
The idea that the "Gray Tribe" is anything but a well-written propaganda effort targeting midwits to keep them supporting the Blue Tribe (and most importantly, to keep the Blue Tribe in power) as the problems mount and the failures become harder and harder to excuse.
“Listen to your culture’s leaders and tastemakers, vigorously punish any heretics” is a terrible algorithm for that. It’s exactly why so many bad ideas have such power for so long.
Part of the idea of presenting bad ideas in such a sympathetic light is to then whack the reader with, “Do you realize what you were just nodding at?” To show that you too are capable of believing terrible things under the right circumstances, to encourage humility and skepticism.
I mean, they tried that approach with Roko's Basilisk... Let's just say it didn't work very well.
Roko's Basilisk is just Pascal's Wager restated for AI.
It falls to the same counterarguments, e.g. what if a superintelligent AI already exists somewhere in the universe and currently doesn't care about you but deigns to punish you for any attempt to create a competitor?
I find that idea pretty gross, to be honest with you.
Also, who says what ideas are dangerous? This is a ridiculously pro status-quo stance to take.
Not everyone is a rich socialite looking to be viewed well at the finest private dinner parties. In fact, I dare say that anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers are the opposite of that.
Maybe you should go try judging someone with actual responsibility and a real role in public life. You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
These social morays have applied to everyone, everywhere, forever. One does not need to be rich to have social capital.
> You know the Senate will vote to acquit Trump today, right?
This just in: two things can be bad at the same time. Perhaps more than two! Details at 11.
Any claim that any particular social more is eternal or universal is ahistorical. This is the clearest finding of the fields of anthropology and history. Everything about human life varies throughout time and space.
Sexism has also been applied forever, doesn't make it right.
The thing is we have lots of perfectly good examples of people associating with conservative people with a few noxious views. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, for example, were well known as family friends of Kanye West but they managed to go years asserting they were personal friends and disagreed with his political views and hoped he would come around. Eventually Kanye went a little overboard and they started distancing themselves further, but pointedly that was Kanye’s fault and not the Teigan-Legend family’s.
It really is not that hard to adopt a “love the sinner, hate the sin” position. But when people adopt this position of hemming-and-hawing any time someone asks “do you really hate the sin though?” it understandably raises some questions. People have blogs where they engage with bad ideas all the time. There’s a style in how they present and engage with the ideas that doesn’t leave much room for doubt.
I also don’t think advocates for “places to debate” these things really understand the purpose of debate. These arguments for scientific racism are well known and understood and mostly debunked by actual well-regarded experts in the associated fields. There is no value in debating bad ideas ad nauseum with randos online. You’re not learning anything from that, you’re just engaged in a sort of rhetorical sparring match. Is society well served by you trading bad faith arguments with strangers? Maybe. At the expense of exposing impressionable spectators to arguments with poor empirical grounding that are nonetheless seductive for taking advantage of common misconception and flattering peoples egos? Not so sure about that.
> “It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints.
Yes, David just said that, thanks for the repetition. Where were the editors on this?
I conjecture that they just felt like they had to publish something after all this time and they went with what they had.
It’s also strange that it doesn’t link to the NYT magazine article on rationalist retreats from a few years ago, nor the New Yorker article about this dispute, nor the New Yorker article about HN, all of which fill in the picture.
Maybe the good editors at the NYT are too busy getting fired.
Recently a NYT freelance editor Lauren Wolfe, who mostly worked on the "live updates" team, was fired, but this firing caused some controversy due to the timing of some tweets and who knows what else. It's not completley clear why she was fired, as the NYT responded to requests for comment by the WaPo by saying [1]: "There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter. For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved we don’t plan to comment further. (To clarify something that has been incorrectly reported, Ms. Wolfe was not a full-time employee, nor did she have a contract.)"
Quite a few leftists initially blamed the NYT for caving to conservative pressure, apparently by making the claim there was a relation between the tweets she made and her firing, which she confirmed in another WaPo interview [3] by saying "...that an editor at the paper contacted her after she published the “chills” tweet. The Times couldn’t be associated with such a tweet, said the manager, and that her gig with the paper would be ending."
Some leftists also seemed to blame Glenn Greenwald for his involvement in the matter; a single tweet in response to hers that he later called "light mockery"[2]. Glenn Greenwald, previously strongly supported by the left and many others, has recently been victim to a series of character assassination attempts due to his unconformity to the mainstream leftists viewpoints, so it rather seems the twitter left mob just used him as a lightening rod without having all the facts in this case.
The tweets in question?
She later deleted the above tweet when it was revealed that Biden and his team chose to take his own plane, despite many mainstream media talking heads parroting the same narrative. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/01/24/lauren-wolfe...2. https://youtu.be/uL-e6XfWppo?t=293
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/25/lauren-wo...
The difference is now they're coming after Silicon Valley, because they realize they've lost their attention and advertising monopoly. It's all very predicable and boring.
It's the same deal with Balaji. The only reason he cares is because the reporting might hurt a company he's invested in.
Follow the money. Always follow the money.
https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1235802419734269952
> NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing”
Where's the lie though? Incredible indeed…
Plenty of people that deeply respect NYT reporting (and I'm a WaPo person) think NYT editorial is, like that of the WSJ, a total clownfire.
If you’re going to bring in contrarian views on things like race, that some view as racist - okay. But I would recommend expanding that to bring in views that are also contrarian but perhaps not so controversial but nevertheless worth discussing.
My impression is SSC readers get caught up in a sort of intellectual exoticism rather than any rigorous analysis of what the landscape actually looks like; the non-conventional but ultimately boring takes are left unexamined.
Not just non-college Republicans, huge swaths of non-liberal Democrats (mostly people of color). Are the majority of Black Democrats, who believe you can’t be a moral person without believing in God, represented? Are there any Muslims who hold social positions their religion tells them to be true? When it comes to immigrants, anyone who actually believes what your typical Indian or Bangladeshi believes? (Or is it just the elite who deliberately left those countries and assimilated into white American culture? And even among the latter, is it the first generation parents hoping their kids will integrate to a degree, but hold on to traditional social morals, or is it the second generation ones who picked up western social morals despite their parents’ efforts?)
Again, none of these assumptions are wrong or bad or right or good. My point is just these are the assumptions you'll see across nearly every commenter on the blog because of its narrow, Western-educated audience. There are many popular, interesting, and dynamic political discussions happening elsewhere in the world (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
And I can't find the anti-neoreactionary & in-defense-of-democracy post that goes through these problems, and tries to justify the assumptions.
> (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
If you could point these out I think SSC/LessWrong folks would love to ponder over them!
I want to read that, but Google failed me. Do you have a link or a clue to help me find a link?
Grouping of people by other people will forever be a "thing"
The second best thing is, should any reporters be reading this, to take the opportunity to write a better article.
Does anyone? I’m not sure credible people do and no one I respect has referenced a Times article for other than crossword, Sunday magazine, fluff stuff.
Contra to the insinuation that Cade Metz smears Siskind by unfairly associating him with Nick Land, Metz's article lays the evidence and allows readers to infer what that evidence may or may not mean.
For me, the concluding 3 paragraphs of the article sum up what Slate Star Codex (now "Astral Codex Ten") may be
> I assured [Kelsey Piper] my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.
This is ad absurdum at its finest. Proving whether an idea is correct using statistical analysis makes sense for many empirical matters. But proving whether proponents of extreme views (e.g. in the article, the idea that women are biologically not as capable as men to work as programmers) by using statistical analysis is a moral failure driven by scientificism. (I'm going to decline rehearsing the debates about whether women are biologically or culturally inhibited from programming.)
> When I asked Mr. Altman, of OpenAI, if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”
This really sounds unfortunately like John Matze's position on Parler. Slate Star Codex is not the same kind of gathering ground Parler was, but given the next paragraph, the comparison is not inapt.
> In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.
If Slate Star Codex is somewhere self-described "Rationalists" can civilly and safely debate whether intelligence is statistically correlated to race and gender and these are "[t]he People Inventing the Future", then it's not surprising Horowitz would seek to protect that forum under the shelter of Substack.
However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
Failing to object to immorality and immoral arguments cannot be corrected only by rationalism and statistics because Nature, at its core, is amoral.
Many dumb people are moral. Many dumb people are immoral. By the same token many smart people are immoral, too.
The real problem is when you realize that many smart people are, in fact, both immoral and dumb.
The article's last paragraph gives the lie to the controversy that has raged in tech circles surrounding publishing Siskind's name.
> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
Did you actually read the post where Scott explains why? Because at that point it was impossible to keep it private. He was also forced to quit his job. The fact that he landed on his feet doesn't mean there wasn't a cost paid.
What was happening in this story was that Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable. That's a reasonable request to make in a community of peers (it's why I'll keep using "Alexander" on HN, for instance). It is not remotely a reasonable demand to make of strangers, let alone journalists.
This is another instance of message board thought seeping into the real world, and it's always alarming to me to see that, because while message board thought is fun, it's also deeply weird and dysfunctional.
This isn’t what he asked for. As you note there’s pages of comments and Alexander’s own account on Substack now. Maybe you’re claiming he isn’t being honest about his requests from NYT.
>...using an identity so trivially connectable to those patients.
As others have pointed out, the connection was mapped as A to B and not B to A.
>...it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Times.
And the Times is what would've changed how his identities were mapped. How The Times' operates in this new tech-enabled media environment is absolutely relevant.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Horton_(blogger)
I prefer to live in a world where professionals act responsibly. He could have stopped writing as Scott Alexander and started writing with a new pseudonym. He just didn't want to rebuild his audience.
Those who tried to find Scott Alexander's real name could find it.
But those who tried to find information about their doctor or colleague Scott Siskind most likely wouldn't find out that he writes a popular blog.
There existed a trivial mapping of A -> B. There did not exist a trivial mapping of B -> A. Scott was trying to prevent his patients, who had information B, from being bombarded with the link to A. It is not a hard concept to grasp.
What a facile justification. By that metric there was nothing wrong with Gawker's antics. The question is always whether the things a journalist is publicizing in the public interest, and the fact that publications (especially prestigious ones) have an obligation to consider the impact of what they expose of citizens who often don't have an equal platform from which to defend themselves.
The very fact that you can find his real name from his pseudonym means that the NYT wasn't actually "exposing" anything of value. At the same time, they've made it considerably harder (if not impossible) for him to practice normal psychiatric medicine.
Also, does this article even cover what it was originally supposed to be about - i.e. a bunch of people online who saw COVID coming long before the authorities? I haven't gone all the way through, but my understanding is no. Instead there's no so subtle implication that the guy who wrote the "Anti Neoreactionary FAQ" may in fact a secret nazi or something.
But, as Scott has said numerous times, he simply wanted to make it hard for his patients to google his name and find his blog, so that he could continue practicing psychiatry. That's a perfectly reasonable request to ask of anyone, including journalists.
These arguments about why we're all obligated to cooperate with Alexander's attempt to walk his identity back always seem to be inventing new norms, like the norm of "if a doctor slips up and writes political essays under their real name, then, for the sake of the doctor's career, every other person in the world should pretend that real name was never disclosed". It's a reasonable thing to want, but not to expect.
Not really. The NYT was perfectly willing to protect the anonymity of a different psychiatrist blogger. Yes, this person did a better job of keeping their identity a secret, but the justification was largely the same.
And let's not pretend that journalism is only about sharing information. There's a great deal that journalists don't share (or even try to actively suppress) for many different reasons. Partly because there are a lot of ethical considerations when publicizing information.
Worth noting that part of the issue is that, with psychiatry and counseling in particular, it really doesn't matter what he was writing about or what his politics are. Any such publicity compromises the blank slate that counselors are supposed to present to their clients. While this does mean that mental health professionals have an obligation to take care with their public image, it's not unreasonable to ask others (including journalists) to respect the particular cost they face with any kind of exposure.
Is there a real argument for why the NYT _should_ publish Scott's name? Other than "it doesn't care whether that hurts the subject, and it expects to get more clicks this way".
It's not a requirement to offer this protection, but declining when it's asked for by the subject of a story is certainly a weighty ethical decision that respectable journalists don't take lightly.
Outing someone in a vulnerable position simply because the journalist disagrees with their ideas and wants to harm them (vs. deciding it's in the public interest) would be a very clear breach of ethics.
It doesn't matter if someone could just Google it. The NYT shouldn't make it easier unless there's journalistic value in doing so. Spite doesn't count.
Would you feel the same if this was a story about a sexual assault victim instead of a blogger?
He's a blogger, not an assault victim, but his concerns are similar. Avoiding harassment and physical violence against himself and his family. Avoiding negative consequences on his career.
Why are his concerns less valid than anyone else's? "Because I disagree with him" or "because he talks about ideas I don't think should have a platform" aren't good answers. There's no allegation he hurt anyone, did anything illegal, abused his influence, or acted in bad faith. So what's the journalistic purpose of exposing him?
Should his identity have been withheld because it would hurt his career, or he might be harassed?
It's not like he was trying to hide from the NSA or anything. The goal was "I don't want my patients to see my blog on the first page of Google results when they search for my real name". The NYT completely obliterated that.
Additionally, the fact that the NYT chose to smear him means that now many potential patients may google his name, see the hit piece and nothing else, and decide "yikes, better not go there".
The article wasn't flattering. It wasn't a smear or a hit piece.
Based on his behaviour in this and other[1] situations, I have no doubt that if Metz thought he could get away with something more unsavoury, he would have tried to.
[1] https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-c...
This would be reminiscent of the South Park planet Marklar where all people, places and things are named Marklar. It's fun for a bit but likely impractical. It's also not clear how using someone's name is 'spiteful' given the vast majority of readers would have never heard of Scott Alexander, pseudonymous or otherwise.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technological_Singu...
You seem to be under the impression that journalists are under no obligation with regard to how their reporting impacts their subjects, even when that subject is not a public figure per se. I'm pretty sure that's something that even most journalists (at least those working at relatively prestigious institutions) would disagree with.
Again, you are justifying Gawker-style journalism, which is pretty atrocious and doesn't serve to create a better informed public.
"Scott Alexander was demanding everyone else's assistance in maintaining his pseudonym and pretending the real identity behind it was unknowable."
Absolutely false. Scott admits many times that it's trivial for his real identity to be known if you search around for Scott Alexander.
Scott Alexander -> Scott Sisnick (trivial)
What Scott was concerned about what his searching his real name being resoundingly brought to Scott Alexander, a major issue for his psychiatrist-patient relationships, as he demonstrates that psychiatrists need to maintain a blank slate for their patients to project onto, so that the patients don't hide or alter the behavior knowing something about their psychiatrist. That's very mainstream psychiatry. And there were concerns about current psychiatric patients he was seeing possibly being affected by this.
Before: Scott Sisnick -> "psychiatrist, bay area, studied at X, etc."
After: Scott Sisnick -> "Scott Alexander, rationalist, providing a platform for white nationalists, racism, etc."
By way of example, a friend just told me on Twitter that it's super important that patients not be able to look up their therapists on the Internet and learn more about their personal lives. But that's definitely not a norm! I checked with several therapists I know personally.
I feel like people are scrambling to invent Internet rules that allow Alexander to coerce journalists, and I don't find that effort especially persuasive.
I mean, they don't bind like a physical law or something. Ignoring people's requests for anonymity and getting them harassed or fired is certainly physically possible, it just makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about the effect on speech and discourse.
It's sort of similar to not wearing a mask out, it's certainly not illegal or impossible to go out without a mask and cough on people who would prefer you didn't, but it still makes you an asshole and there are ethical considerations about you putting others' lives at risk.
But even if it was an accurate representation, the media has to ask "is it our job as a powerful outlet to literally punish this much less powerful person because they have opinions we disagree with".
If it wasn't "opinions we disagree with" but like "has killed 3 people" sure appoint yourself judge, jury, and executioner. But in other cases yes it makes you an asshole to think that you should enforce your will by punishing someone who disagrees with you.
Scott Alexander on the one hand is a practicing clinician, and on the other writes prolifically about culture war topics. This is majorly out of balance, and it's on Scott to fit these areas of his life and income together. Why would the responsibility be on the NYT to help him?
His preferences bind on the NYT in that as Scott can take actions which are adverse to the NYT in order to maintain his preferences. Such as deleting the blog and having his fans sign a petition and cancel their subscriptions. None of those actions are unreasonable: he is free to delete his blog for any reason or no reason, and anyone can make in a petition. What is the problem here?
My name is not secret. It is, however, private.
At the start of the post but there's more further in.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive
There's s also this from The NYT initially contacted him with his reasoning for protecting his job (which didn't work out)
>I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left to far-right – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
It seems like he's pretty clear that he chose to quit. He says his job was "tentatively willing to try to make it work". It appears to me that he's shown a consistent pattern of overstating the effects of his name being revealed, so I don't put a lot of stock in "tentatively".
I am quite convinced he simply didn't want his name in the paper because he knows he's said some edgy stuff (ie, explicitly comparing himself to Charles Murray).
The sources he provides as supporting the importance of therapeutic anonymity appear to be debates, as opposed to, say, APA guidelines emphasizing its importance. And that's a one sided picture, where Scott is digging for evidence to support his claim.
Part of his argument is that he has already faced threats and harassment. Okay, and he still didn't take basic steps to anonymize himself, so apparently this didn't concern him so much in the past. His argument is that he has a lot of crazy, nutso enemies. But those people could already easily find him.
He's been pretty clear about his dislike for SJWs and distrust for the news media (I mean this in the most value-neutral way possible). That's fine, but I think it's silly to make up a bunch of reasons your name shouldn't be in the paper.
He even comes out and says that it's simply his preference for anonymity:
>Why didn't I do this? Partly because it wasn't true. I don't think I had particularly strong arguments on any of these points. The amount I dislike death threats is basically the average amount that the average person would dislike them. The amount I would dislike losing my job...and et cetera. Realistically, my anonymity let me feel safe and comfortable. But it probably wasn't literally necessary to keep me alive. I feel bad admitting this, like I conscripted you all into a crusade on false pretenses. Am I an entitled jerk for causing such a stir just so I can feel safe and comfortable? I'm sure the New York Times customer service representatives who had to deal with all your phone calls thought so.
Again, he did not lose his job. They were willing to keep him, and he quit anyways.
>In the New York Times' worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I'm the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me. I admit I am not the perfect victim. The death threats against me are all by losers who probably don't know which side of a gun you shoot someone with. If anything happened at work, it would probably inconvenience me and my patients, but probably wouldn't literally kill either of us. Still! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
Replace "dox" with "include my name, which was found on my blog, in a news story about my blog", and yes, that's a default-allow unless you have some really extraordinary circumstances.
"Well crap now I'm a public figure because of this, I don't really have a choice if I want to do my job well in the future."
Using "forced" may be a little clumsy, but it's certainly directionally correct.
If he doesn't think he can do psychotherapy very while while he's a "public figure" (his name being in the paper a single time), why is he opening up his own practice?
I have already posted his own quotes in this comment chain, where he admits his case is weak and that anonymity is merely his preference.
He is opening his practice only to patients that are comfortable with him and he is comfortable with. That's a different situation than working with who the hospital assigns him. Also he does say they were 'tentatively' willing to still keep him but it sounds like there was friction nonetheless.
I would be curious to know what other articles you consider well written.
To me, this comes across as a hack job to elevate the writers status before the release of his upcoming book.
It’s a classic tactic that writers use to drive book sales.
>> In his first post [on Astral Codex Ten], Mr. Siskind shared his full name.
The fact that you think this after reading the article shows just how misleading it is. He shared his real name after quitting his job because of it. The NYT leaving that detail out is completely bonkers. It's a little bit like saying "what was the point of WW2, Hitler just ended up killing himself after all that trouble anyway."
And there, indeed, lies the problem. What should society do when an an argument is factually correct but leads to an immoral result?
Choose a moral alternative. Humans aren't bound by (or even capable of) pure logic or animal instinct, that's why we invented abstractions like "morality."
>Choose a moral alternative.
Are you saying that facts should be suppressed/set aside when they lead to immoral results? I can't assign any other meaning to your words.
I'm saying facts have no moral or immoral dimension - "immoral results" come from choices made in the interpretation of fact, choices which are relative and mutable because morality is an abstraction. There is no case where an immoral choice is made where a moral choice could not also be made.
This approach conflicts with the notions of "natural law" and much of Christian morality. It's a rather alien concept to most people. This leads to pressure to try to alter facts to fit a moral scenario.
Suppose you have 1000 applicants and 900 slots. 900 of the applicants are white, 100 are black.
In traditional racism you give all 900 slots to the 900 white applicants.
Using a woke quota system you would have to arrange for it to be exactly proportional, i.e. 810 white and 90 black, even if that required taking race directly into account in order to force the numbers.
Using some kind of merit-based evaluation, you might have 830 slots go to white applicants and 70 to black applicants.
The first system is clearly morally wrong, but it's also misaligned with the optimal allocation. The second system has the same issue as the first; it's basing the decision directly on race even when it doesn't align with merit.
The biggest criticism of the third system is that maybe your metric for evaluating merit is imperfect, but it might still be pretty good. And other than that it's clearly the one with the moral high ground. So where is the moral question? The moral system and the optimal system are the same one. All that's left is the technical question of how to implement a more accurate measurement of merit, if possible.
hint-it's to treat people not as individuals at all, the genetic basic of intelligence is generally brought up to justify discrimination.
It's the same problem as arguing no free will; if the ultimate end is the same as if we had it, why are you bringing it up? But usually people want to order society around that truth, not just score points in a debate.
This is important because the claim that racial gaps are solely due to racism is used to advocate for far-reaching reforms, which have huge risks and which won't actually close the gap if racism is not the cause or at least in the way as is claimed.
So when people say that rationalists and libertarians haven’t thought through the consequences this is what they mean.
Why would you not want to debate that? If it's not true, or there's no evidence for it, then you have an actual argument for fighting people who believe in it. If it's true, then you have a new societal issue to discuss. Either way, you win.
You seem to be making a case against scientific inquiry and intellectual discussion.
> However, it's slightly alarming to hear that Altman defends the promulgation of such ideas because "people need a forum to debate ideas". Too many of these ideas seep into the discussions even here on Hacker News.
This is anti-intellectualism. What possible reason would there be to not debate ideas, of any kind? Bad ideas get analyzed, exposed, and proponents of such are forced to either change their position or be exposed as dogmatic.
Can you unpack this a bit further?
Are you saying that {a select group of people} should be allowed to discuss a controversial question, but {a wider group of people} cannot be trusted to have such discussion?
I can almost guarantee this is Cade misrepresenting what Kelsey Piper said.
> allows people to decide for themselves what the intentions of Scott Siskind may be.
Except that he clearly throughout misrepresents or misunderstands things like above. I can only assume it seems accurate because you haven't looked into the relevant quotes or peope.
I hope that when the mob comes for me or someone I care about, I'll be brave enough to tell them exactly what to do with their pitchforks.
Ah, that explains all of the people in the comments here criticizing the author of this piece.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something…?
Nowhere in the paragraph you quoted does it allege Scott supported Curtis Yarvin personally. What it implies is that Nick Land is one of the "neoreactionaries", which, according to Wikipedia [1], he is.
The "embraced by white nationalists" part is a bit more tricky. It does imply that Land's writings are bad because white nationalists like them (more than others do). In the abstract, of course, this is not necessarily true.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence that white nationalists like him, or he's just a symbol; one can like country music without liking conservatism. (But it's unlikely he's merely a symbol when he literally writes about race.)
Perhaps his writings are relevant but they're misinterpreting him; Social Darwinism does not implicate Darwin.
But a third possibility is that his writings are just racist – though perhaps cloaked, perhaps the motte in the metaphorical motte and bailey – and as such provide an intellectual foundation for white supremacy.
Personally, I'm not sure what the answer is, because I don't know much about these people. But my priors point to the third option as most likely, given how intellectual movements tend to be organized. Which means that the fact of his being embraced by white nationalists was informative, which means it was appropriate for the reporter to include it. Sure, if the reporter is omitting some critical evidence or context that would lead to an opposite conclusion, that would be unethical. But the reporter is not obliged to include every argument that could possibly be made in his defense, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
If only a world-famous newspaper could look into this and find out, so that you would not have to guess.
The article author could have simply labeled his writings as "racist" or "not racist", but newspaper articles traditionally stick to reporting sourced facts and quoted opinions and let the reader draw their own conclusion.
Alternately, the author could have provided context about Land in the form of additional facts and opinions. This would undoubtedly make the article more informative, but it would also make it longer. There are plenty of other things the article could have added context about, but ultimately the format demands a certain length.
I do think the article is suggesting that he's racist. Newspaper articles have to choose which facts and quotes to include and how to integrate them into a narrative, and those choices inevitably betray the author's opinions. In general, I think this phenomenon of hidden opinions is harmful. It's a downside of the traditional practice of separating factual articles from opinion, since it gives readers a false sense of having learned the objective truth when in fact what they've absorbed is partially someone's opinion. When newer media platforms choose to eschew the distinction between fact and opinion in favor of presenting an authentic but opinionated voice, there's merit in that. But I think there is also merit in the traditional approach of trying to preserve that distinction, even if the results are inevitably imperfect. I wouldn't want the New York Times to give up on it.
For fucks sake, just read something Nick Land has written in recent years and let him smear himself. He literally argues for "hyper racism", composed of scientific racism and eugenics. He also has promoted Atomwaffen affiliated Order of Nine Angles. A literal neonazi terrorist network.
A pathetic hit piece.
A and B sharing core beliefs does not mean A == B.
The largest sects, The Church of Satan (athiest) and the Satanic Temple (non-theist) don't have a belief in Satan as a deity.
There is a subset that actually does though but they are a minority of a minority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_Satanism
Osama bin Laden cited Noam Chomsky in some of his anti-America diatribes, does this mean Noam Chomsky should be blamed in any way (even slightly) for the actions of Al Qaeda?
Land's history is... very interesting. His earlier works (such as "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest") shows his materialist roots, but over time he began to be influenced heavily by the CCRU (which cyberfeminist Sadie Plant created) and Deleuze and Guatarri's works on schizoanalysis, along with a heavy doze of amphetamines(!). In his most productive, drug-fueled form he wrote what he called "theory-fiction", Deleuzian theory combined with fiction (cyberpunk, horror), leading to writings such as "Circitries" and "Meltdown". Land might have been overappreciated in the creation of accelerationist philosophy, but I still think he was an incredible poet. Sadly, his overreliance on drugs literally "broke" him, and after some physical/mental health issues he moved to Shanghai and after that became the neo-reactionary we know today. I think it's a quite lame ending to his philosophy career, many of his collegues tried to persuade him to budge towards the left and failed, and Land himself says that he wants to leave behind his amphetamine-fueled past self.
> > It is also ridiculous to smear Nick Land because he is "ebraced by white nationalists".
Edit, with:
> this 'person X is bad because nasty person Y likes him' smear tactic has got to die.
What seem to me to be the key quotes [1]:
> The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of assortative mating. [...] It is assortative mating on the basis of [socio-economic status] that has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the implications of its happening are extreme.
> Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence.
> The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status.
> That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.
Whilst it is clumsily reinventing ideas that have been done better a million times already in science fiction, it doesn't seem very neonazi.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternativ...
> But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.
> As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I suppose the link is there because Scott Alexander thinks that he's written some stuff which is worth reading, and that readers of the blog will be able to distinguish that from the rubbish. Needless to say, this is completely outside a present-day NYT journalist's model of the world.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/...
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
The whole guilt-by-association thing that's going on these days is one of the most worrying cancelation techniques, because it can be done even through a very remote link. I like person A, who likes person B, who likes person C, who happens to also be liked by White Supremacists. therefore I am a White Supremacist (and person A, B, and C, too). How many degrees of separation do you need in order to be safe from the mob?
1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Journalists, anthropologists, and plenty of others strive towards rhetorical neutrality intentionally, and just as someone can be a citizen scientist, someone could also be a citizen journalist or anthropologist.
And furthermore it just isn't any of your business anyhow. What you are talking about is the equivalent of worrying about thoughtcrime. No objective harm was done but you worry that someone secretly holds an opposing viewpoint.
And no, it’s not “thoughtcrime” to form an opinion about a person based on things they’ve written.
I shouldn't be surprised if people react in a paranoid or irrational manner, no. But I would hope that they would hold themselves to a higher standard.
In this case we are talking about a very humane and nuanced thinker, and under normal circumstances we should in fact withhold insinuation of malice unless evidence exists. It is called the principle of charity.
But again, there’s nothing abnormal or “paranoid” about inferring someone’s intentions from their writing. You’ve done it yourself, which is why you described him as “humane”. Why shouldn't others be able to arrive at different conclusions?
Because the entire point of attempting to force one to take a stance is to further whatever the narrative may be, or to cancel counter narratives. There is no other point. There’s nothing wrong with arriving at your own conclusion but stop there if you don’t agree. Don’t cancel, dox, or otherwise force their opinion to match yours.
What people want from you when they ask you to openly condemn something is to make a broad societal change that normalizes that condemnation.
There’s nothing wrong with not doing it. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that some issue isn’t worth getting involved with, or you don’t think an issue is a big enough problem, or you don’t like how activists are going about it. Plenty of valid reasons but the crucial thing that you have to recognize that you’re making a choice, own it, and realize that it might have consequences.
If, say, large subgroups of white nationalists LOOOOOVE you, and are doing things to try and provide you support... passive acceptance of that support is questionable. There comes a point where if you continue to accept the support and not condemn that group that you're willingly associating yourself with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99-yicMhjGo
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...
The class action suit, brought by a Berkeley law firm, claims that the Irvine-based fast food chain with the cute paper hats "recruits, hires and maintains a work force that is predominantly under the age of 40 and/or non-African American." Out of 210 locations and thousands of employees, "very few" are older than 40 years old or black. The suit is also calling for a payout in the form of back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages on behalf of everyone over 40 and/or not white that In-N-Out has wronged with their allegedly unlawful hiring practices.
https://sfist.com/2012/09/06/new_lawsuit_accuses_in-n-out_bu...
I suppose that, by implication, it would be par for the course for their corporate culture to be accused of supporting white nationalism by anyone looking to nail them on something.
Unless a company is aggressively promoting itself as anti-racist in a very public way, it's very open to this sort of criticism (regardless of whether-or-not there's any actual merit in it).
It looks like even the beloved In-N-Out can be associated with the r-word if you dig deep enough. I'm starting to be convinced that for any company or individual you name, no matter how benign or harmless they are, you will be able to go out and find dots to connect some kind of tenuous link to racism.
I think your comment also exposes an ambiguity in the phrase "support the status quo."
One meaning is to affirm the status quo as generally acceptable.
Another meaning is to (implicitly) decide that one particular aspect of the status quo falls below the cutoff line of what you have the time or energy to deal with in the moment.
I don't know if conflating the two intentionally is a common occurrence, but I can see how doing so could be used to incite outrage amongst uncritical thinkers.
If you don't decide to "support the status quo" at some point, you'll wind up in the deep end.
See! Easy! ;)
Careful there, now you just made the "both sides are bad" argument showing you support the bad guys!
So you’re right and you’re wrong. The people in this example don’t care about racist activities of people they support, which in itself is indirect support to mainstreaming these issues.
Not understanding Estonian burglary law is understandable and forgivable, not understanding the negative impacts of racism is not. It would take willful determination to avoid learning even the basics of recent world history or current events and why it’s been such a problem.
It’s not that hard to say “I find some of the ideas by X interesting and useful, but also I don’t support racism in any way.” I get that they don’t want to do it, but that’s the level support that enables the problematic culture to be pervasive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/dictionary...
From the linked article: Merriam-Webster captures this as well, noting that racism can mean “a political or social system founded on racism.”
So by denouncing racism I am literally denouncing the entirety of civilization I guess.
If we just eliminated the government, eliminated all hierarchies larger than 100 people, eliminated all nations and laws and institutions… well, most of us would probably die very quickly. But that doesn't mean that what we have now is even in the top 20% of possible ways that civilisation could be.
This sort of an unmeasurable goal. I think we’re certainly in the top 20% of civilization from any time in history. Or top 20% ever attempted.
It’s hard to tell how good all possible civilizations can be.
Considering the "denouncings" have included the US Constitution, Magna Carta, Greek philosophers, and math+science in general, this is more correct and scarier than almost anyone has thought through.
Exciting times ahead!
That doesn't matter, because we all agree that burglary is bad. The question isn't "is burglary or racism bad," the question is "do I know enough about this person or topic to be sure that it deserves to be denounced based on my beliefs about racism or burglary?"
And the answer is no, as per their post. We can agree burglary is bad but if you’ve never been burgled then how can you know? You see this a lot with gun control advocates telling victims of violence they don’t need a gun to protect themselves. How can someone know another’s perspective on life without titling at windmills daily from wrong assumptions as you attempt to figure out their point.
It's like a math problem without enough information. You don't get a result, you get "cannot compute from information given".
Making an affirmative or disavowing statement without all the pertinent information is irresponsible. Now we can argue the definition of 'pertinent' til the cows come home, and we do, every day. Real, meaningful, unambiguous communication with 100% accurate replication of surface and deep contextual meaning is hard, and at the very crux of humanity's difficulties putting up with one another.
It's why not having a view on something is perfectly okay. However, nowadays it is increasingly getting villified by a very vocal group who insists that everyone's viewpoint on the matter should be on record or inferred from their digital or social footprint. Which is a very dangerous position to take, because that viewpoint axiomatically requires an us/them divide. This is also a reason I reject this kind of cultural push out the gate. My, wouldn't it be nice to draw a circle around only the people willing to agree with us, and share our cognitive blindspots one and all, that does not a civilization or liberty loving people make. The true love of Liberty requires the love of all the ills it brings with it from those who will exercise it. We can argue endlessly around where the limits are, as long as we're all debating,and we're willing to revisit things to reevaluate the status quo over time, and maintain an agreed upon realistic representation of the progress we make over time moving forward.
Example:
Those that complain that what foundational/structural echoes remain of the very real institutional walls that used to exist are as bad as having the whole hog full in force are fools. Those that would tear down or dismantle material reminders of how far we've progressed, are also fools as well, because they are trying to break down the common record we measure our own progress as a civilization as a whole against. You see things like the 1619 project trying to completely rewrite history not in a "Hey, lets record what happened, and let people form an opinion of their own," sense but in the "all your narrative is belong to us, now" sense. People notice, can, and do read between the lines. Most just won't bring up that they do in public out of an abundance of concern for not subjecting everyone around them to a contentious atmosphere.
Long story short: There's more to life than being for/against a list of hot topics over time, and the people who care about those hot topics owe a bit of deferrence to those who have other more highly prioritized things to worry and devote. brain cycles to, just as those with other more pressing matters recognize and give due time to those who prioritize most highly things they are ambivalent about. The end result is an overall average whereby only the most pressing things capable of having consensus achieved are acted upon, or those so inconsequential that no need for resistance is recognized.
The entire practice of politics is concerned with shifting people between those buckets, and trying to push a social system to mandate picking a side is a Bad Idea (TM).
Also I don't want to have to be attacked or have to defend my position if I don't word things perfectly (more commonly don't show enough outrage, because I don't have as strong of opinions as a lot of people on social media), which seems to be a common occurrence nowadays.
2. There are soldiers (metaphor for politicians) and their job is to fight, so that civilians (citizens) could live free from violence.
3. The idea to put citizens to fight and to tell them to target the neutrals and opponents has to face this criticism: you are applying a huge multiplier to the sum of all violence in the world. You better do the multiplication and run the actual numbers to be sure that in the long run you'll come good.
4. If it turns out a group intimidated 100k people to free from intimidation 90k other people, they turn out not only horrible morally, but also crude simpletons.
5. The more opinions become weapons, the less opinions will be judged objectively by these citizens in future. Circumstances can change quickly and, in democracy, the only way to cope is to have masses of voters honestly predict the real life results of their choices. They need to clear their heads, not to wield opinions as weapons. (They have politicians for that after all.)
This makes the word “support” meaningless because you can no longer distinguish between 99 percent of the population of the world that doesn’t have time and the 0.01% actively supporting the regime.
You should be able to recommend a good article that you agree with from someone, even if you disagree with that person on other topics.
I’m not sure you’re using that word correctly. Do you think Murray is actually a white supremist? Or just made some bad science?
* In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be restricted because Black people are having too many kids. His book had a great deal of influence on the "welfare reform" instituted in the mid-1990s in the US.
* In In Our Hands, Murray proposes replacing all government assistance with "an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older". Not only is this eugenics because everyone, abled or not, with medical needs or not, must be able to survive on $10,000 a year; but note the absence of a UBI for kids: the proposal would punish poorer people--who are disproportionately Black for historical reasons rooted in racist institutions like slavery, redlining and the War on Drugs--for having too many kids.
All of this is pretty textbook social Darwinist white supremacism--all of these views are regularly espoused at Stormfront and other such places.
Charles Murray is quite clearly a white supremacist, and the race-IQ stuff is only a small part of the case for it.
---
Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: I didn't know about Nathan Cofnas so I googled him and he appears to be standard-issue IDW: writes for Quillette, defends bigots like Kathleen Stock, etc. Any blowback they got is well-deserved.
From https://quillette.com/2021/01/14/philosophers-smear-one-of-t...:
> Stock argues that, for example, it is okay for cis women to object to a lesbian with a penis—what in ye olden days of 2014 was known as a heterosexual man
This is of course a complete lie: trans people have been recognized and understood across many cultures for thousands of years, sometimes as a third gender but usually not as the gender they were assigned at birth. This is both ignorant and hateful. Cofnas deserves to be "cancelled", as does anyone else who writes for Quillette to be frank (for the same guilt-by-association reason, which remains just as valid for Quillette as it is for Murray).
This is the first time I've heard it described as white supremacy and eugenics although I'm sure it won't be the last.
This does not mean that UBI is inherently eugenicist or white supremacist. A UBI which did not replace literally all government assistance, which took into account the fact that some people will always need and should get more assistance than others, and which started from birth rather than adulthood, would not be eugenicist.
1 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2019.1...
Your response doesn't engage with the rest of my post either, which I think is the primary evidence that he's a white supremacist. I'm not going to rehash race-IQ arguments because I find them tiring and not very consequential.
Oh no, I'm being cancelled. I should go write about it on Quillette. /s
I, too, support modernizing our governmental assistance programs, but not in a way that's white supremacist and eugenicist. There are welfare reform ideas I disagree with that I don't think are white supremacist either. Murray's ideas and policies, however, are beyond the pale.
I evaluate him like I do any other public figure: based on his writing and the impact he's had on public policy debates. His internal state of mind does not matter at all.
"The libertarian solution is to prevent the government from redistributing money in the first place. Imagine for a moment that the $2 trillion that the US government spends on transfer payments were left instead in the hands of the people who started with it. If I could wave a magic wand, that would be my solution. It is a case I have made elsewhere."
His eugenicist UBI is an alternative to his ideal proposal.
As a public figure with extensive writings, his internal state of mind does not matter.
---
edit to respond because I'm "posting too fast":
> So as long as you don't write anything down or have yourself recorded as having said racist things, you can't be racist?
What? A logical statement does not imply it's converse. I'm talking about public figures like Murray here, not average private individuals. Besides, structural racism of the sort Murray advocates for has a much greater impact on material conditions than what some rando believes in their heart.
So as long as you don't write anything down or have yourself recorded as having said racist things, you can't be racist?
I find you're making leaps reality can't cash here. I don't mind letting people's actions speak for themselves, but I'd caution against .
Anyone who ignores structural racism and espouses the policy positions that Murray does is either ignorant or racist. Murray, being a public figure whose ideas have had real impact on the material conditions of marginalized people, does not have the excuse of ignorance.
I'm speaking from personal experience here. I used to be on the right-libertarian train myself before I realized that oppression was primarily structural and that a laissez-faire approach always perpetuates it. I genuinely do not believe one can be non-racist and espouse Murray's policy positions once one understands this basic fact.
If you want to learn more about how welfare reform in the 1990s—something Murray influenced a great deal—affected millions of lives, I'd recommend the first season of a podcast called The Uncertain Hour.
No:
- Nobody is obligated to engage in "openly denouncing" anybody.
- The US has a population of 325 million people - who knows what their beliefs are? How often do they change?
- And I'm sure leftists have a daily-changing definition of what "white supremacist" means.
(For those unfamiliar with the OP's illogical argument, that is what the left used to tar Trump as a racist - in reality, Trump never said anything racist. But he didn't denounce some groups to the satisfaction of the left, who would have just kept adding one more group.)
The "why" is entirely missing. This comes off as "it's so self evident I don't have to bother explaining it" to others, and is the main reason why you are getting downvoted.
Edit: to clarify, by fringe stuff, I mean that some believe that the election was stolen from Trump. I don't and have convinced others that it was not, but I guess I can't do that anymore.
If your best friend growing up is now a white supremacist, and for various reasons you want to keep being friends with them - maybe you're trying to talk them out of it, maybe you know they've got some deep personal trauma that you can help with and you want to be compassionate about that, whatever - I think there's a pretty good argument that that's your business. (To be clear, I think there's also a pretty good argument that you should ensure you're not effectively making them think that you support their positions or actions, though, but that's beside the immediate point.) There's good reasons to choose to be friends with them and that's your judgment.
If you link to their white supremacist writings, though, you're giving a platform and publicity to white supremacist writings. You're not amplifying or supporting them as a person: you're amplifying the messages they're communicating. And so the moral weight of that is in fact on you.
I think the article does do a pretty good job of talking mostly about views and not people, though it is obviously easiest to refer to views by the people who espouse them (especially in the case of personal blogs, which is what most of these are). The article is not trying to say that it's newsworthy that Sam Altman is best buddies with Elon Musk who married to Grimes who hangs out on a discord with Scott Alexander. The article is not trying to say that the NYT of the future will create simulations of Grimes just to cancel her.
The article is trying to say that, for instance, it's newsworthy that OpenAI is heavily influenced by Rationalist rhetoric about the urgency of building a friendly AI that implements your worldview, and that the worldview of this Rationalist community happens to be a worldview that gets an uncomfortable amount of support from white supremacists (and not just in the "We like this" sense, in the "This argument supports our argument" sense).
It's not clear whether SSC is being denounced for associating with cross-burners, or just with those who believe merit exists. In elite discourse, both of those positions are now white supremacy.
This isn’t Berkeley California. It’s a historically Republican county that went for Bush against Gore and only narrowly went for Kerry four years later.
Even for SF, this is extreme.
Side note, for years I used to see the name "rayiner" and roll my eyes at the "reactionary libertarian" opinions expressed. In the past year though, I myself have come much closer to where you've consistently been. Part of it is the rapid leftward drift of major institutions -- media, workplace, education -- during the Trump years, and the distinct absence of any kind of critical discussion of this phenomenon. The other part is probably that I'm now at the point of having children soon. Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. In this case, it should matter a lot less that the school board is composed of lunatics, or that the NYT is trending towards naked culture war propagandism.
I agree with this too! Which is why I think it's important the article calls out the institutional power of YC and the risk of it being captured by extremists!
Frankly, leave the question of connection to white supremacy (under whatever definition) aside - as someone who was a regular Less Wrong reader, seeing Y Combinator and the other agents of Silicon Valley power go "All right, we will invest heavily in building a friendly AI under our definition of friendly," just by itself, is kind of a worst-case scenario. I don't think the interests of Valley investors are quite fully aligned the interests of humanity at large, but it's Valley investors that have the most ability to make AGI happen, and they've decided to start work. The only reason I don't find it terrifying is that I don't really agree with the Rationalists' arguments about it. But they do, and they're smart people.
You’ve got it exactly backward.
“Historically” “white people” didn’t need to use standardized tests to exclude non-whites. They just did it. Standardized testing was used to distinguish among white people (just as it’s been used in China since 650 CE to distinguish among Chinese people).
In fact, the opposite is true. Standardized testing is pretty much the only thing that has allowed non-white groups to advance in white societies. There’s only a handful of societies where ethnic minorities have come to out-earn the majority population. Almost without exception it’s been the result of standardized testing creating level playing fields for people who lack the social capital that would otherwise be necessary for advancement.
Random lotteries don’t level the playing field, they eliminate opportunities for people to distinguish themselves. Societies that eschew objective metrics don’t just have radically flat mobility, they have rigid social frameworks based on non-objective indicators. Imagine the “holistic admissions” factors colleges use to exclude Asians (“leadership personality” or whatever) applied on a wider scale.
I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science. My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome. And this was decades ago. It is much worse today.
My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.
Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).
The problems with TJ also extend beyond admissions. 8th period is dead. History education at the school was always awful and tied to the AP curriculum but it has further slipped against STEM. Colleges seem to be taking note, with admissions to what were previously backup schools like UVA now becoming much more difficult for TJ grads.
In the absence of objective criteria holistic evaluation (and worse) is what you’ll get. Not necessarily at TJ, but at the next steps, and if these ideas are applied generally.
> This eliminates the need to "distinguish themselves" among everybody with increasingly ridiculous prep processes.
I have never understood this demonization of the prep process. Yes, kids start prepping for TJ admissions in middle school. So what? Asians do the same thing to prepare for high stakes testing in their home countries too. Test prep isn’t free, but the average family income in Fairfax County is over six figures for every racial group. (Asians actually have significantly lower average income than whites in the county.) Test prep is not an unaffordable expense for most families in the county.
Given that test prep is mostly affordable for the families in question (and given that studies show it doesn’t help much) it seems to me that people are really complaining about cultural changes brought about by an immigrant group. They don’t like asian culture where childhood is single-mindedly dedicated to education (ideally an education in a narrow range of acceptable fields like STEM). Now I don’t consider that “racist” or “xenophobic” (I think natives have a right to protect their culture) but that’s what it is.
> I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science.
So?
> My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome.
This is a conversation my wife and I have about our kids. (Though we decided private rather than magnet school.) They’re 8, 2, and the third is due in June.
> My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.
That’s a good change.
> Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).
In Kendi’s formulation of “racism,” the lottery approach is racist against Asians. It will exclude half to two thirds or so of the Asians who would otherwise have gotten in under a test-based model.
I think Asra is too quick to cry racism. I think the activists are just idealistic and misguided. That said, it’s not like the sentiment of white people not wanting to have to “compete with super study Asians” doesn’t exist. E.g. back in the day Wall Street would hire white guys from Ivy League crew teams, and today classes are overwhelmed by Asians with STEM degrees. As to colleges, they’ve been leftist since long before decades ago...
And, in turn, the article is making a specific claim that Nick Land's writings are embraced by white supremacists. We can figure out whether that claim is true or not, and under what definition of "white supremacists," directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land says: "Land has promoted the Atomwaffen-affiliated Order of Nine Angles that adheres to the ideology of neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing O9A's works as "highly-recommended"."
If someone in this thread actually disputes that Nick Land's writings are inspirational to cross-burning white supremacists, which is what I read the NYT article to be saying, let's debate that.
It’s the same definition being used by both: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html. It’s probably only a minority of people with graduate degrees who use the terminology this way, but this group is highly represented both among people who read and write for the NYT and on school boards in wealthy, highly educated suburbs like the one I’m talking about.
It’s directly relevant to the discussion up thread. The post I was responding to pointed out that this expansive definition of “white supremacy” makes it hard to have these discussions. It’s impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land to figure out which kind of “white supremacy” people are talking about. I don’t take the poster up-thread above to be arguing Nick Land isn’t a “white supremacist” in the narrow sense of the word. He’s just observing that the confusing created by the terminology (confusing that is, as far as I can tell, a deliberate consequence of the word choice) makes these sorts of discussions difficult.
What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well - you haven't argued that the NYT is wrong (either in this subthread or anywhere else in this comment section), you're arguing that the NYT cannot possibly make arguments worth listening to. Elsewhere you're mocking the NYT Editorial Board. Maybe they're worth mocking, but it has nothing to do with the merits of this article!
It's beneath you, and it's beneath this site. Maybe it works. But it only works because it's ruining reasoned discourse and scoring cheap points about those people at the NYT and how we don't like them. The debate is - ironically - no longer about the ideas the NYT is claiming and instead about the people and their proximity to other people we don't like.
No, it’s difficult because the New York Times has chosen to adopt a phrase that has a well-understood usage with respect to violent extremists, and use it to refer to literally all other white people. If you don’t want people to complain you’re being confusing then don’t do that.
> Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask?
Imagine if the New York Times had chosen to call all traditionalist/conservative Muslims “jihadists.” That’s exactly what the Times is doing with “white supremacy.” Should we all just play along, and Google to see if someone actually wants to kill non-believers, or whether they just support the tradition of gender-segregated prayer?
> What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well
Poisoning the well is a form of ad hominem where you invoke an unrelated fact to detail a discussion. In discussing a newspaper article about white supremacy, it’s not poisoning the well to point out that the newspaper’s deliberate editorial choices have made it impossible to understand what’s being discussed without doing your own research. It’s totally relevant.
The sheer number of hoops you had to jump through to be a NYT apologist is just mind numbing. No, OpenAI isn't influenced by Grimes' chat messages on discord to mind-control us.
Are you claiming it is not??
There is no limit really. If you're targeted for cancellation, they'll dig up and use anything as evidence. Thankfully people seem to be wising up to these tactics and they're losing power as a result.
Ah yes, the old Conservative trope: eventually they'll go too far, and then you'll see.
How's that working out? Conservatives have lost on every issue since I was born.
But yeah, don't fight back. Power-hungry people will "defeat themselves"…eventually. Trust me.
Trust the plan.
Also you’re being hyperbolic or are a very well spoken 4 year old.
I was friends with a guy who was really into InfoWars in the early 2000s. I'm no longer in contact with him for unrelated reasons but I have to think that keeping friends who weren't in that world helps people from falling deeper into it.
Isolating people from good ideas doesn't seem like a great way to change minds.
That person who can easily be influenced to be a white supremacist doesn’t feel accepted. I don’t really mind accepting people and opening up to them about my own flaws and ideological inconsistencies. Some people are going to fall into the wrong crowds - you can’t win everyone over, but blocking someone out because they’re superficially racist or they have “regressive” views or whatever else is a great way to get a confused person to be very sure about those views.
Additionally, I find the thought process of the person that wants to shut down those "dangerous" ideas pretty repulsive. It seems implicit to me that they are trying to protect those that are lesser than them. There's an implicit superiority there.
Not to say I think Biden should get flack for that. But the guilt by association thing is an especially easy kudgel to wield in an uneven way.
So no, it's not only republicans and Trump that get "cancelled".
Part of Republicans’ apparent extremism is a response to the strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions, in view of the very conservative nature of American society. In the area of religion, for example, America is far more religious than Germany (and comparable to Poland or Turkey). But American liberals, through the Supreme Court, have effectively pushed religion out of the public sphere (especially schools) much more completely than in Germany.
That's the difference.
>strongly left-wing nature of America’s cultural institutions
America's cultural institutions are certainly strong and center-left, but not extremely left wing. You don't see Hollywood promoting kibbutzim or the abolition of commodities. The truth is way more boring: Rich people on the coasts are general pro-gay marriage or what have you, but don't try to build dense housing near them or raise their taxes.
no one can be safe from the mob if mob behavior is a normalized practice of the society. It doesn't matter that a given mob at a specific moment in time is directed in the "good" direction. Mob is just a tool, it doesn't have any way to distinguish "bad" from "good" (by it is nature the mob forms when its members let go their own moral independence for the sake of unity, mutual validation and resulting safety and drunk high feeling), and thus it can be turned in any direction by the tool handler.
* The "one drop of African blood" theory of the Democrats' Old South * "Jewish heritage", pretty much anywhere * "Class history" in the Marxist Socialist circles * "Intellectualism" in Khmer Rouge Cambodia
This is just another instance, from the same people who would have belonged to any one of these or similar groups. They all come from the same root intellectual history.
The thing called cancel culture isn't rooted in a proud intellectual tradition, because intellectualism relies on knowing what the opposition's argument is to dismiss it (ie, the opposite of cancelling). It is group-forming action of identifying and attacking an enemy.
Although groups sometimes superficially seem to be using evidence, it is rarely important. The most secure kind of tribe is one that rallies around ideas that make no sense - because then if someone espouses the idea that proves they are in the tribe. If the idea makes sense then people who agree might have just arrived at it on their own.
Extreme guilt-by-association is a great cultural marker, because the only way that attitude makes sense is if the espouses is an adherent to cancel-culture ideas and is signalling support of the group. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. It isn't really being important in the mobs decision making, the only important thing is identifying an enemy and it doesn't matter how.
^ I know, I know, 6 is supposed to be an average.
And then, after a little more thought, you'd realize SSC's blog roll entry would direct the reader to the more recent neoreactionary stuff, not the "fascinating left-leaning stuff."
It's definitely a bad look to have present-day Nick Land on your blogroll. If you think some of his older stuff was interesting, it's a better idea to link to that directly rather than his home page.
https://medium.com/@garyweiss_86200/cade-metz-pulls-a-deep-c...
That is an extremely accurate summary of American politics over the last 5 years.
The NYT is apparently run by Glenn Beck now. Dude, just connect the dots. It all fits.
I always like to remember that poorly argued points are a click goldmine.
We're all adults here, you can say "Hitler".
So, unless you completely denounce vegetarianism, you are literally supporting Nazis.
(For people who don't get it, Hitler was a vegetarian.)
Hopefully this will be what we remember as the legacy of the NYT. Pointlessly destroying things out a shear inability to create it themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-gall...
To me that's 1000 times more offensive and hideous than using the n-word by yourself, and the scum of the earth that wrote and posted that article (and those that expelled the girl), should be ousted from society.
- Cancel NYT subscriptions
- Subscribe to independent journalists and writers on Substack or via other means
- Flag NYT articles
A lot of folks might soon be discovering why editors are actually important. There's value in having another party check your work, challenge your assumptions, and question your claims. This process is not blanket censorship, but Glenn would have you think so.
Advocating for an “editor” aka “gatekeeper” is a form of elitism in that it assumes an editor will be “better” at challenging assumptions than the public at large.
While you may find many instances where that is true, it’s not good for public discourse to be boxed into a frame of discourse decided by the ivory tower types.
My current financial support for Glenn has nothing to do with him. It has to do with the funding model of journalism. He’s just the first one I came across to try it, so I’m supportive.
Describing that as a "hissy fit" is disingenuous.
Confused why you think the article was "news" worth printing, or sympathetic.
Confused with the use of the term "withdrawn" (like the euphemism of someone"quiting for "personal reasons" when they are in fact pressured to resign).
I'm also confused about what you think my comment was supposed to "prove" or not. It was meant as a case in point of the kind of bad, pearl-clutching-style sensenationalist stories increasingly peddled by the NYT.
>Confused why you think the article was "news" worth printing
The article is about a girl having her life upended by an internet mob with interviews with the principal players. (Again, to be abundantly clear, this article is post hoc.) Is that not newsworthy? You certainly think the event is worth bringing up months later which points to it being at least a little noteworthy.
> or sympathetic
They quote the girl, painting her as having just made an innocent mistake. "At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young". “It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth”. Hell the main thrust of the article is a racial revenge narrative where she's the arbitrary victim of a mixed-race kid living in a racist town trying to settle the score with whatever he can.
Would you prefer the press just didn’t inform you of such going’s on?
"Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public."
"Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling."
like it has anything to do with the girl.
The NYT just wrote it up after the fact.
Said write up was awful and the extent to which it made the asshole seem like a hero made me want to stab things, but it's worth blaming the NYT for all the things they did get wrong here and not the one thing they didn't :)
The article was published in December 2020 and these events happened in June 2020:
> The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
The mere act of reporting - documenting an event that happened for its readers - does not make the author “scum of the earth”.
You find it offensive and hideous that the journalist did things that they did not in fact do, while yourself presenting a false accounting of the facts.
I see. I haven't read the article itself (it was/is behind a paywall), but a report on it, that read like the article publicized this story ahead of the events.
Still, from the snippets I read posted here, what's with the "slave auctions" and the BS innuendo about her city?
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
Take a look at Slate Star Codex (SSC) in The Wayback Machine on January 1, 2020 - https://web.archive.org/web/20200101140213/https://slatestar...
The Blog Roll is on the left side. It's a long list of weirdly categorized links without any additional annotation. Nick Land's is "Xenosystems" (which now appears to be defunct). I think calling this an "endorsement" is really stretching things here.
Scott wrote about the neoreactionary movement on SSC more than once, and it's quite clear he _does not_ endorse those viewpoints (which to be fair, the article does say). But given that he wrote about the topic repeatedly, it's no surprise he linked to a prominent neoreactionary blog. Presumably, he trusted his readers to come to their own conclusions about the content on the linked blogs. And he also probably assumed that readers would realize this _wasn't_ an endorsement, given his own writing on the neoreactionary movement.
If I told you that you should read Marx's Communist Manifesto after telling you at length that I think Communism is terrible, am I endorsing Communism? Or am I telling you to read this because I think you should learn more about Communism, and not just from me?
> I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.
This is one of the sketchiest things in the article. Scott made it clear that his primary concern was that his patients and potential employers might associate him with his blog. So if you're a patient googling your new psychiatrist, would you google their first and middle name (a middle name you might not even know)? Or would you google "Scott Siskind"? Of course you'd do the latter! So the question is whether googling "Scott Siskind" would get you to SSC. I'd love to go back in time and check this. I'd also love to know if Cade Metz tried this and what result he got.
I would note that if I google "Scott Siskind" right now, I do get results related to SSC, but that's because Scott after Scott gave up his pseudonymity on Astral Codex Ten, the Wikipedia page for SSC was updated to include Scott's full name.
I'm sure there are more similarly sketchy parts of the article that others will note.
He needed links to categorise as 'those belonging to the Emperor' so I guess linking to the neo-monarchists was too good an opportunity to pass up.
For me to consider a link an endorsement it would need to have more context than just being in a long list of links.
1. Starts with a thought experiment based on statistics from various sources.
2. Has a parenthetical paragraph about gay male harassment, also with statistics.
3. Makes a speculative conclusion inside the parenthetical, never mentioning the famous metoo case of Terry Crews, the media coverage of which argues against said conclusion.
Can someone tell me if the other articles follow this pattern of building from first principles without having first done due diligence on a given topic?
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/04/against-overgendering-...
Edit: clarification
Thanks. With that in mind-- and with a proud and explicit rejection of the idiotic repostings of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect here on HN-- I'll do my due diligence and read some of the other postings, too.
As far as this article I stumbled upon wrt metoo-- I think it stands as a good example of how not to write an even-handed analysis for a general audience. Relying on a thought experiment without mentioning that there's an extant well-known case leads the astute reader to believe the author hasn't devoted adequate study to the subject.
Peculiar choice not to justify with source material when the topic is a public blog with public comments.
Which is hilarious since automod doesn't check if it was used as a verb or adjective.
That the people outraged over words are illiterate isn't a big surprise.
I don't think so. The right to free speech is a right the government to say what you want without consequences from the government beyond certain limited criteria. The right to be forgotten is a personal right where a person can decide they want certain information removed after a period of time. I consider this more a personal protection in a world where people have issues realizing that felons have paid for their crimes, that peoples views can change over time, etc...
Most people who support free speech, would probably also agree that it is good to give people tools to protect themselves from harassment.
https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting
Edit: here's an example, that's pretty instructive.
From NYT: >That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else — a memo he was later fired over. [Emphasis added]
But that isn't what Damore said, and you can go google and read the memo yourself, which NYT doesn't link for you, because it would directly contradict their framing.
> https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting
Am I reading that right? It complains the article didn't actually quote SSC, then contradicts itself by listing ten actual quotes from SSC that are in the article, and then lists ten other quotes that he happens to particularly like (one of which is a dreamlike thing that appears to be from some fiction).
I kinda get the impression the author of that blog post would have been satisfied with nothing less than something that read like it was written by an enthusiastic fan.
Hum, your definition of quote is very generous to the NYT, given than most of the 10 list items you mention are four words long or less.
A quote that is not a blockquote is still a quote.
A quote that is not a complete sentence is still a quote.
> Every quote need not be a complete sentence or paragraph, but including almost none strikes me as poor journalism. A good writer would include a bit more information and give Alexander's statements a chance to speak for themselves.
The kind of journalism that has lots of long quotes like that is called an interview. This article was not an interview, nor could it have possibly been, because Scott Alexander refused to be interviewed.
It's incredibly weak to criticize something for not happening to be the random thing you decided it should be instead. You might as well criticize the NYT for publishing this article as a newspaper story and not as a thick book.
This is a disingenuous take but it does fit the current NYT narrative of opposing speech (and venues) the editors disapprove of.