> I want to respond to four main negative claims in the article
> 1. The article tries to connect me to Charles Murray and The Bell Curve
> 2. In their litany of reasons I am bad, the Times says I compared some feminists to Voldemort.
> 3. The Times also presented a more general case that I was a bad ally to women in tech.
> 4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true -
A great response, in my opinion. Succinctly and effectively points out what was wrong with the NYT article, then tries to move on. Somewhat more of a sober tone than Scott's typical writing, but still with a dash of his typical wit:
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.
Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:
> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"]
I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.
Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example,
Q. What if I take too much?
A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.
This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.
Even as large as WebMD is, it would surprise me if they weren't using a third-party drug database to drive their public database. When I worked at a similar site, we used First DataBank [0], but there may be others too. The world of pharmaceuticals changes so rapidly that you need a small army of pharmacists and doctors scouring medical journals and materials from big pharma companies to keep your information up-to-date and it's just a lot easier to pay one of the dedicated companies that focus on that to do that work for you.
However it wouldn't surprise me if the NHS took on that task itself. Unlike WebMD, the NHS is also responsible for prescribing medications and would need to give their doctors and pharmacists up-to-date information, software and guidance for prescribing. Their scale and scope would allow them to take on this task in a way that makes less sense in the US system, where insurance providers, doctors, pharmacies and online health information are all separate entities with separate budgets/funding.
The legal and financial situations are quite different. WebMD is a US publishing company and Americans sue for everything so it has to be careful. The UK legal system makes it much harder to sue for dumb stuff and the NHS isn't going to be bankrupted being government owned.
I don't have any specifics handy, but over the years I've found a lot of information on webmd that is plainly false. Maybe it's better now, but I have been ignoring it for years and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Even Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a better source of medical information.
(To clarify, I'm not suggesting Wikipedia is a good source of medical information -- it's not. Often I find articles say one thing and the citation says the opposite. But in spite of that, it's a much better starting point than webmd, in my non-expert opinion).
> ConTracked: A proposed replacement for government contracting. For example, the state might issue a billion ConTracked tokens which have a base value of zero unless a decentralized court agrees that a bridge meeting certain specifications has been built over a certain river, in which case their value goes to $1 each. The state auctions its tokens to the highest bidder, presumably a bridge-building company. If the company builds the bridge, their tokens are worth $1 billion and they probably make a nice profit; if not, they might resell the tokens (at a heavily discounted price) to some other bridge-building company. If nobody builds the bridge, the government makes a tidy profit off the token sale and tries again. The goal is that instead of the government having to decide on a contractor (and probably get ripped off), it can let the market decide and put the risk entirely on the buyer.
This seems like a good idea.
The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.
> Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy.
I don't get it. Scott's response very clearly lays out the ways in which the NYT article was misleading--so clearly that it seems obvious that it was intentionally misleading. But to what end? What are the motivations driving NYT to try and create these poor associations with Scott and his writing? It seems a poor and short-sighted motivation for them to do this out of "revenge" for the bad press they got from the situation, it feels like there has to be something else going on here.
The only way to resolve the dissonance is to read Scott's work and the NYTimes article and see if they are talking about the same thing. Looks for things taken out of context, look for discussion at different levels etc...
It was misleading and unfair. But to understand it, you have to imagine yourself as a young, woke, sheltered person who went to a top private high school, a top college, and then got an internship and a job writing at the NY Times. To these people, there's only one correct world-view and anyone who even questions it, or thinks some truths are nuanced, is evil.
Rage clicks pay, shallow dismissals are easy to produce -- no
time-consuming investigative journalism necessary.
Most important perhaps is that new media like
Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the
NYT.
Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the
Firm, 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of
scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing,
paper distribution, subscriber and advertiser management. Essentially
all of this is gone. What modern newspaper scale on is branding, and
and selling influence, but this is in direct contradiction with strong
journalists' interest (who do not like to be told by their editors what to write and how). Until recently, top journalists could not go alone, since they lacked the expertise to handle monetisation of their writing. This changed with the likes of Substack, which centralises
(automates) subscriber management, and technical infrastructure, but
without editorship.
Hence, top writers are increasingly moving away from
traditional newspapers to something like Substack, with Greenwald
and Scott Siskind being two high-profile examples. They won't be the
last.
Newspapers see the writing on the wall and fight back.
I take your point with regard to the economic incentives at play. But at the end of the day, it seems likely that the net effect of this article will be to drive more readers to the new Subspace blog? (A sort of Streisand effect.)
That is likely to be the case. However the performance metrics that the authors are being evaluated on (like clicks, retweets, word-count) are unlikely to include hard-to-measure long-term effects like Streisand.
I think we are seeing a wounded animal's fight for survival ....
Things like integrity and trust matter more than ever, so the idea that newspapers would jeopardize that to get back at a somewhat meaningless scoop is pathetic.
The time will soon come when we cannot trust anything we don't see with our own eyes, and we will then need to have a web of trust with reliable sources.
Newspapers can still capitalize on being a source of trust and truth, if they don't fuck it up.
Of course, the NYT is still pretty reliable on citations of fact, even if their slant is worse than it should be.
I don't know, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. I wonder if we can apply Hanlon's Razor[1] and say it was just a poorly researched article. If the author did some brief googling for things people have said about Scott and his blog, they'll find other people who have quoted him out of context. For the example of "feminists are voldemort", Scott did mention that he's been quoted out of context lots of times on that line so it should show up lots of time on the internet. It might have been a sloppy re-quote instead of original research. Maybe it wasn't so much a hit-piece as a reflection of the easy-to-find popular trends of discussion about Scott's writing. In that case the NYT piece was very irresponsible, but not really malicious.
Part of the reason I'm leading this way is because and the end of the day, Scott just doesn't seem important enough to the NYT to focus on for a hit piece. And even then it reads more like a condemnation of SV tech culture than it does as a condemnation of Scott (however unfair it was to him).
Unfortunately, we know for sure that it was not just a poorly researched article. From Scott Aaronson[0]:
> I spent many hours with Cade, taking his calls and emails morning or night, at the playground with my kids or wherever else I was, answering his questions, giving context for his other interviews, suggesting people in the rationalist community for him to talk to…
and
> Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.
I have concluded that there's a fundamental conflict of interest between "mainstream" media like the New York Times and tech companies and people related to them. The former and the latter are competitors in the attention economy, and this manifests in substantial negative bias. I have observed this since the mid 2010s at least.
“Look at the evil ideas that people in the tech community are flirting with” is one more argument towards NYT’s overarching thesis that Tech is too powerful, doesn’t deserve its power, and must be smacked down.
Any potential community nexus that encourages sub-group-solidarity and class-unity is a threat to TPTB who maintain their power by encouraging us to view each other as potential threats to our various cultural/ethnic/gender/sexual/etc identities. It's Playstation-vs-Xbox playground mindset on a global scale. Ordo ab Chao.
>This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn't. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated."
The piece was bad. After all the time they had to work on it, it was a lazy hack job that normally wouldn't make the cut at the NYT. It is a sign of the days we live in when a Mean Girls style burn book page makes it into what used to be the paper of record.
You’re not kidding. It’s surprising how bad it is, and that’s after reading all these comments saying how bad it is. It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.
> It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.
This is a great summation.
To me it reads like the best attempt the journalist could pull off at writing a hit piece against some guy who just started a low cost medical practice, and has never actually done anything bad in his life. A whole lot of vague insinuations and guilt by association.
If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this was Metz's way to tell himself that he is a better person than this guy trying to make psychiatric care more accessible, just because he might disagree on some political issues.
This is well said. The article is so weak and poorly laid out its like listening to a bad pop song through cheap speakers. It doesn’t even have a proper closing. Just ends abruptly.
I think the closing was effective in what it was going for: implying that this has all been a "grift." The abruptness is intended to leave the reader with a reverberating final note in their mind. "$250,000... $250,000..."
Seemed fine to me, not negative in the slightest. Today's internet is not the same as Ender's Game. You don't get to become popular while remaining anonymous. Only the politburo can do that.
The last few years they have been overly focused on their agenda and many times haven't even made a visible effort to investigate fairly. NYT employees have been fired for disagreeing with the prevailing opinion in the newsroom.
Pushing Democratic rhetoric. They drank their own kool-aid by thinking they were responsible for the 2016 election. Perhaps they were but moving to overtly biased reporting was not the correct solution to that.
You can play a fun game with this snippet from the NYT article. You can replace the word "Rationalists" with the name of any group at all and the resulting statement seems vaguely true due to the imprecise nature of the language.
> Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.
"Republicans" and "Democrats" and "college students" and "Californians" all work, etc.
The whole thing is bizarre. The author has been working on this piece for something like 10 months now, and he can't get a basic definition of EA right? I saw a hot take on twitter that Metz deliberately did a bad job because he didn't actually want to write a hit piece and his superiors forced him into it.
This is an interesting theory. It also seems somewhat testable, because if true and Metz's superiors are not tone-deaf they we'd expect they will fire him, no?
I wonder if it was Metz who had the idea for the original more positive-angled story re SSC's COVID info.
[Charles Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that’s mine too.
.. in SSC becomes ...
In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
..in the NYT article. That was spicing it up a little much. Looks like a hit piece.
NY times is worse than fake news. It’s intentional fake news propaganda to instill establishment thought control on their audience.
They are now part of the fascist cabal establishment in US, hunting down any wrong thinkers.
It doesn’t matter is you’re left or right. The only thing that matters to NY times fascist establishment regime is keeping the lower classes in line to help make the establishment people retain control and get richer every second.
The sad part is, despite so many bad takes, ideology pushing, and hatchet jobs The NYT overall still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content out there.
The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be.
I know this has been true for me many times.
Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.
I'm aware of Gell-Mann Amnesia and read from a variety of sources.
This was really a comment on how most journalism is even worse. The NYT does occasionally have pieces where I know about the topic and their representation goes into details that others aren't likely to. Those are, however, not a large percentage of their output.
I've known about Gell-Mann amnesia for years but never experienced the feeling of 'this coverage of a thing I know is terrible', even in this piece. Maybe I don't know much about anything, or maybe I'm a conflict theorist, not a mistake theorist, so when I see them get things wrong like this, I assume it was on purpose.
It's pretty hard to find high quality alternatives. There is the wall street journal, maybe a few others, but not many. I personally read a few high quality news sources and science journals.
Inexplicably many here seem to think that random blog posts are somehow remotely equivalent. I value opinion at zero, and trust a random person to do quality research at about zero too. Trust is earned.
When random internet opinion becomes "news" I suppose we really are in a post truth world.
So does the NYT. The bias of the times just happens to be really well aligned with mainstream liberals in the US so it’s much harder to notice if you’re in that camp.
Washington Post? It's long been essentially the biggest rival to the NYT in terms of national political coverage, and my opinion is that as of late, it's been higher quality than the NYT.
I've come to respect The Economist and The Financial Times. Their articles don't go viral as much--I suspect because they aren't as optimized for virality ;-)
Ironically Scott Alexander has a couple of good posts about this topic
a discussion on how big institutions that are telling you the truth are competing both to keep their position and tell you the truth with a focus on medicine
> The WSJ has a ton of dubious articles. The Opinion pieces are garbage compared to the average one in the Times although of course both have misses
I agree with you on that. I subscribed to both for awhile, but dropped the WSJ because it had less international content, its articles tended to lack background (great if you're following a story closely, not so great if you haven't), and its opinion section was utterly boring and predictable.
If you don't think the journal has rag hit pieces I don't know what to say other than you obviously haven't read many articles or practically any opinion pieces from them.
This is shameful, and the second time this month NYT puts out such a shameful piece (the first time was the JetBrains/ Solarwinds article). I guess this should be enough to disregard everything NYT will write, and stop reading them.
Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott deleting the blog, and this is still the piece they decided to go with. It's a bit hard to trust the NYT's integrity..
No, it's a product of the ideological drivel the NYT chose to embrace, identity politics. Not all news outlets are like that.
It became obvious with the literal journalist purge going on there. You can't be a moderate and work there anymore, you have to subscribe to a certain thought framework, if you question it, you're deemed "offensive" and you're out.
The times is very pessimistic on tech, largely I believe because they're upset about being run over by google/facebook. It's definitely unfortunate, but the future of journalism is really not bright at all. No one is willing to pay for unbiased news, so you need to find a niche to attract people or churn out clickbait. The times has found their niche as technocrat skeptics.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.
But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.
Nikkei = FT. The FT has... interesting politics, and seems far more progressive than anyone would expect, although considering the cost of a subscription it's also a fairly exclusive crowd.
WSJ and Economist are hardly unbiased. (IMO The Economist is essentially a straightforward neoliberal pro-Gilded Age propaganda outlet, and always has been.)
The NYT has always been 'dodgy' as we say in the UK. I remember finding their op-eds clownishly stupid when I first started encountered them back in the 00s, and they don't seem to have improved since then.
But there's been a shift to woke since then. And the problem with woke is that so often it operates on the level of personal witch hunts and straightforward public bullying - which makes it depressingly close to its equivalent on the far right, but without the insane weapon fetish.
You can argue that sometimes this is justified. And sometimes - as with Weinstein, etc - it is. But it's harder to support it when it becomes an exercise in tokenism and tribal identity.
It's interesting how often woke goes after individuals deemed guilty of alleged bad-think and how rarely it goes after egregious corporate behaviour. Or even how rarely it mobilises to destroy the careers of politicians who act in unconscionable ways.
Ah, right, I forgot about the FT/Nikkei connection. I subscribe to the latter and not the former.
Economist is very opinionated, sure, but when I do read them I find the reporting on world business issues pretty informative and the tone a good test of how I feel about globalization that week. At least I know who's talking to me... well not literally "who" of course.
I recently dropped my NYT sub; jetbrains nonsense was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I know it's a meme to bring up Gell-mann amnesia here, but I will raise it as a basic test for quality in journalism.
When NYT writes about something I know about, I almost always have serious problems with it. Jetbrains in particular. And honestly some of the writing is so bad that even without knowing about the subject, I can tell it is crap, like the article about the SlateStarCodex. I had never read it before that post, but had heard it mentioned in passing. Also, NYT Opinion is Hannity/Shapiro level crap and should be dumped. Stick to the facts please.
On the other hand, The Economist has consistently impressed me; I read/listen with a critical ear and they do a wonderful job even with very niche topics. I've worked on some AR tech and they had a special report that just really nailed it and got into the weeds. Every time I thought "but they didn't mention..." they would mention or clarify a paragraph later.
Economist has a liberal viewpoint and they're not shy about it. I prefer that approach and accept that I disagree with the conclusions/advice from time to time, but the facts are right and error corrections are almost always very minor in nature.
There is good journalism out there, just maybe not from NYT. Please don't give up hope.
Yeah, the Jetbrains article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-...) was just too over-the-top conspiracy fluff. It’s sad to see some liberals critiquing QAnon and then immediately eating any kind of Russian conspiracy shit without any doubt.
It's not really. SolarWind uses a JetBrains component as a critical piece of infrastructure in the government which may have basically been built by Russia. Now maybe everything is above board but JetBrains does employ developers in Russia and was originally a Russian company. We don't run Kaspersky in the government either.
More to the point this should never have happened.
JetBrains was started in the Czech Republic [0] by three Russians. The same people who started it no longer run it.
Calling it a "Russian" company would be totally inaccurate. The hack that I saw cited, though I believe it was an unidentified source, was one that was injected at compile time. That would be very difficult to notice for any programmer.
So, here's my question:
Why did you refer to them as "Russian" when it's obviously not true?
I mean everything might be above board but it's probably bad or lax US policy and/or regulations that Solarwinds was deployed through out the government.
Yeah, none of that is accurate to the phrasing of "a Russian company" as a rhetorical device. This kind of quasi-hyperbole about Russians is also getting old. Russia has been an ideological enemy for a long time, maybe even as long as time. I've never second guessed the motivations of business owners and citizens from Russia the way certain crowds do. That's pretty tantamount to something dubious.
Does the government need to be scrupulous in whatever open and closed source software it chooses to vend? Yes. Do we need to be chiding about the motivations of every day Russians as one of our first order investigations? Probably not.
Yet you clearly second guess and misunderstand my intentions. The real problem is the threat vector. Where is it is easier for intelligence services to operate?
> Yet you clearly second guess and misunderstand my intentions
I can only go off of what you put in plaintext.
> The real problem is the threat vector
So, explain to me the threat vector. If we have a threat vector that is substantiated by, "is Russian" then I think we have a problem. If we have a threat vector of, "Government vets first order software dependencies, but not the second order and soft dependencies of software vendors" then we have something more akin to analysis.
It took Kaspersky being affiliated with, cooperating (and serving) the FSB in order for it to be banned, not because it was established by Russians.
I wasn't trying to move goal posts. Admittedly I might be sensitive to all the question of anything affiliated with Russia is now a conspiracy style thinking that has come from certain crowds. If I unfairly lumped you in with these folks, then I apologize.
> Russian intelligence
Someone will need to prove that there is a link between JetBrains as a company and Russian intel (aka the FSB) just as what happened with Kaspersky. I doubt that this is the case. It could certainly be a rogue employee, but that's a good amount of speculation. We've seen that the FSB has no issue hacking into companies and organizations without a mole.
> and a lack of due diligence.
I described the attack. What due diligence protects against something that injects itself during compile time and only triggers on specific events?
The risk here is that Jetbrains has significant operations in Russia. It is likely a lot easier to get an FSB agent hired into a Russian office. And in fact the Russian government can just order and enforce cooperation. The USA does this all the time and every operation is classified. I would not expect anything less from Russia or China. The companies registration in the Czech Republic (or anywhere) does not prevent this.
Kasperkey is even more obvious because the founder was involved with the KGB even before the 2017 ban. It should never have been used. Now maybe Kasperkey's affiliation is akin to a "communist youth party" card and not necessarily a genuine affiliation but the point is that you can't trust and then verify in these situations. You have to assume that everyone is hostile unless proven safe.
> the point is that you can't trust and then verify in these situations. You have to assume that everyone is hostile unless proven safe.
Are you getting this from somewhere or are you explaining how you perceive the standards?
The laws I'm familiar with generally have to do with pretty specific criteria for delivering software that touches specific types/classifications of data. None of that would've caught how the JetBrains software was allegedly used to exploit the SolarWinds product. This was some pretty sophisticated stuff.
Could you discuss in a bit more detail what you might want from such a study? My first guess was simply that you want a newspaper to be fact-checked from beginning to end.
I guess I was thinking, get a random sample of newspaper issues from each of a number of newspapers, and for each article in each of them, get a subject matter expert (or, not necessarily an expert, but someone knowledgeable in the field), and give a random ordering of (a selection of) the articles in the issue, and have them read them in that order, reviewing how accurate they think the information is before going on to the next one,
And then evaluate whether, if they thought any inaccuracies they found in the article about the topic that they have a good understanding of, whether that influences the accuracy they estimate of the later articles.
Or something like that.
Maybe have them answer some other questions about the articles other than just accuracy, such as quality of writing, in order to be less likely to cause them to re-consider how they are estimating accuracy?
And I suppose by “accuracy” I mean to also include “not misleading”, in addition to just “not false”.
I don't trust any mainstream news other than local because it all seems like either propaganda or theater. In my opinion, NYT and The Washington Post are the two most despicable out there.
They also outed a Chinese Twitter maker a few years ago. Or maybe that was vice and the reporter now works at nyt. I don't remember except that nyt these days is lame.
This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-...
It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for actual things you said years ago, now that’s not enough, they will go out of their way to form a narrative around you, whether the cap fits or not, in order to ostracise, they aren’t afraid to stretch the truth or outright lie. This is not unique to the NYT but it’s a concerning trend.
>It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians.
I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.
Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
> Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.
One quite possible scenario is that this is the dying process of the "legacy media", as it gets replaced by... whatever comes next.
That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.
> I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands.
This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.
There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.
As someone who majored in journalism and who graduated in 2009, what most people consider traditional journalism has been slowly dying since at least the 07/08 crisis. They were already struggling due to not knowing how to properly handle the internet. Giving away content for free was a mistake made in the 90s that was proving impossible to claw back, and online ads were nowhere close to making up for the lost revenue from print ads (because, in a bit of news surprising no one, there's no real proof that online ads work).
Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.
Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.
There's a huge tension in the society caused by the wealth shift from individuals to corporations. As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirecting the tension between people and corporations into tension between artificially created identity groups. So far they are very successful at it. Plenty of people are so busy trying to ruin someone else's life, they completely don't notice the decline of their own long-term perspectives.
> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership
This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.
Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
>The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.
>Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
There's enough space in the U.S. to build new housing. Like nice 2000+ sqft houses with lots, owned by the people living there. If only a huge chunk of the economy wasn't tied to a few megacorporations located in a handful of cities. So instead, we keep fighting for a right to live in a rented 500sqft box with barely enough space to sleep.
I think you are confusing cause and effect. Cities like SF aren't crowded because megacorporations are located there, but rather megacorporations are located there because they are crowded. SF, NYC, Paris, and London are cities that people have moved to for well over a century, because they were excited to live in places with so much culture, shopping, and restaurants. This has always meant that housing in these cities is much more expensive than elsewhere. People have tried to start tech centers elsewhere, which generally fail (In the 1990s the big new thing was the so called "Silicon Prairie" in the Midwest, but that didn't really take off). Some new centers, like Austin, TX do seem to be taking off, but that's because Austin is an exciting city.
Silicon Valley was built in the valley because that was cheap available land that was mostly empty but still accessible to a major coastal port. It only became the crowded modern environment after the corporations were built there and became successful. San Francisco became big because it was a major shipping port.
Not that long ago it was Detroit, Buffalo, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Princeton, Pittsburgh, Trenton, and more than I can count that were the bustling megalopolis' of America where you went to if you wanted engineering talent or culture for that matter.
I can't speak for the others, but why do you think Dallas and Houston are moribund? Based on the last decade of population growth, their respective metro areas certainly seem to be doing well for themselves.
The Valley and SF are different, despite being near each other. The Valley, as you say, started as a chip manufacturing hub and has transitioned over to software and services now that manufacturing mostly gone to Asia. SF is different. While it indeed started (as did NYC) as a shipping port, it has more recent history as a center of creative workers such as authors and artists. The reason that many Internet companies are located now in SF rather than the valley is that they (and the workers they want to attract) want to suggest that their work is cool and creative like that of authors and artists. Of course, an unfortunate side effect of this is making the city even more expensive and displacing the creative people that made the city "cool" to start with.
Austin is not "new". It was at competition with Silicon Valley and used to be referred to as Silicon Hill. A lot of hardware manufacturing happened in Texas. At some point, between favorable business laws and Google starting large scale recruiting events it sucked a lot of the talent out of places like Texas.
So your statement is more accurately framed as, "Austin is finally recovering as a tech hub."
While businesses these days may move to SV because of the large population and other businesses, that was not the case in the beginning.
I think the modern attraction of Austin has a bit more to do with its reputation as a "cool" city with its music scene than its history of chip manufacturing.
> It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.
This is false, why would you think this? My youngest sister makes $70k and bought a 3br/2ba house with a 2 car garage for $215k that’s 20 mins from where she works. That is in just a random medium city in the Midwest.
I have another friend who works in San Antonio. Got his house for $300k and makes $90k as a SWE.
Housing is seriously just an isolated problem in particular hot spots. Unless you need to be there, get the fuck out. The governments are broken.
> As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there?
In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will personally find you a wife if you don't have one, and will give you a raise if you have kids.
>That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist.
Except, with globalization, it's cheaper to import people from 3rd-world countries and then pay them just enough so that the current generation will keep doing its duties.
I'm a first-generation immigrant myself and I'm quite baffled at how unaffordable it is to raise 2+ kids and make sure their life quality will be similar to mine. It's almost like the expectation is that I won't do that because they will instead import those who were raised at a fraction of the cost elsewhere.
>As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
No, this is not "typical" of most cases, it is typical of millennials living in a small subset of property markets (DC, LA, SF, NYC) who have low earnings relative to their educational attainment + age but also a vastly disproportionate media influence. The delusion that the Ivy grad journo living in Brooklyn whose Twitter follower count is larger than their salary somehow reflects the voice of their generation is a huge problem.
This is nothing new from them. The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.
Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization playing politics, just as it has been since 1851. I still mostly respect them because they tend to report facts accurately and mostly follow the ideal of journalistic integrity better than many other media outlets. But there are certain topics now, just as always, where their prevailing politics shines through loud and clear.
A publication can be politically titled to one side and still be factually accurate and stay true to journalistic integrity principles (or at least that's what I want).
With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible just 10 years ago.
In the case of NYT, their political tilt is very clear (that's ok) but their journalistic integrity is being called into question more and more (that's problematic).
This seems to be contradictory. It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias? The NYT and others like it go out of their way to pretend they have no political bias, using the passive voice to give authority to slanted reporting which favours one "team" over another.
Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of its supporters repeatedly and falsely claim) that items described in the paper are more objective and carries greater weight than those in your average political party's weekly newsletter.
Not all partisan mouthpieces are equivalent. You can be factually accurate while leading people to the wrong conclusion. However, it’s much less work to find someone willing to lie, and much harder to detect lies than misleading statements.
Journalistic integrity is therefore critical when selecting which biased sources to pay attention to.
Leading people to believe things that are wildly untrue using statements that are technically not lies does as much damage to society as doing it any other way, in my opinion. Sure, in theory smart people might be able to spot that what the article is trying to convince them of isn't backed up by the facts it uses - but in practice they almost never seem to, not even other journalists. (Here in the UK, the BBC seems to be a bit of a repeat offender - some other partisan rag publishes something designed to lead people to an untrue conclusion without technically lying, and then the BBC just outright repeats the untrue claim.)
I've noticed this thought pattern with many people who argue against freedom of speech and for tighter control of media or "canceling" them recently:
1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about.
2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false" are defined by the arguer).
3. The arguer portrays himself at the same the victim of those media and the person who knows better than those media and therefore can decide between wrong and right, true and false better than the accused media.
4. The arguer presents no evidence of knowing better and when you ask them about their sources, they tend to be highly problematic, based on blogging and websites who often do not even employ journalists.
Paraphrase: "I know better than large group of people X but everybody else is mislead by X" - I don't think so.
Here's an alternative form of the "NYT/CNN should be canceled" argument: they should be held to the same standard as a private citizen when they behave poorly.
If you write a blog post that doxxes a prominent figure and link to it from Facebook and Twitter, you are going to get banned from those platforms. The NYT can apparently do this with impunity, and calls for canceling other people and organizations who do this.
In US law, there is a different standard for libel against "public figures" than against other people. The NYT gets to take advantage of this much looser libel law whenever they write a hit piece because they can argue that anyone who does something "newsworthy" is de-facto a public figure.
As far as I have seen, the "cancel NYT" crowd is arguing that the NYT should be held to the standards that it pushes into others and obviously doesn't follow.
In almost all cases I can think of I'm also against canceling individuals, so I agree with you. If NYT openly spread hate speech or called for murder and violence, then they should be "canceled" (boycotted).
You used the term "biased," not them -- just to be clear. Which way a publication leans can be determined by things that have nothing directly to do with integrity or truth telling -- which stories they cover, for instance. In practice, lean often comes along with audience. Like any publication, news outlets have audiences, and the interests of that audience group will determine what stories it covers and how it covers them. This can be done with full journalistic integrity; in fact, it's harder (and perhaps impossible) for a publication to have zero political lean.
Political lean != acting as a mouthpiece.
Do also please note that your personal political leanings will determine whether you view the reporting of any publication as unethically biased or not. No matter which sides we're talking about, what one party reports as truth, another will hear as politically motivated.
> It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias?
Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."
What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.
I think tilted is better, unless you can somehow be titled towards center. The BS they've published attacking Bernie and AOC should feel familiar to their attacks on the right.
Either you support unlimited free expression or you don't.
But the "Dark Enlightenment" folks want to have it both ways -- unlimited free expression for themselves even if it means platforming white nationalists, while simultaneously screaming bloody murder when the NYT publishes the well known real name behind the pseudonym Scott Alexander.
Then we have luminaries like Balaji Srinivasan wanting to "sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out".
The inconsistency and hypocrisy of "free speech for me but not for thee" is revolting.
This seems a silly line to toe that accomplishes nothing. Worse, it feels in bad faith.
The crowd is constantly crying foul. And often shouting noise for the sake of being noisy. As such, it is all too easy for any supposed side to claim that the crowd is intrinsically party of the other sides.
To that end, did this person make particular claims that others have to reveal who they are? If not, I'm not clear on how this was hypocritical. Are there inconsistencies in the crowd? Absolutely. But, they could be easily ascribed to the side you appear to be taking up, as well.
> they could be easily ascribed to the side you appear to be taking up
1) Your argument is whataboutism at its finest.
2) I'm not taking a side in favor of establishment journalism.
3) I'm showing that leaders of the anti-cancel-culture movement are themselves more than willing to intimidate, suppress and cancel the free speech of anyone who criticizes them.
4) Either you're in favor of unrestricted free speech for everyone, or you're not.
If you're in favor of unrestricted free speech for everyone, it necessarily, logically means:
- you oppose "cancel culture";
- you're okay with white supremacists having access to audiences via platforms, if someone is willing to provide them with that.
Intimidation and suppression cannot be avoided; they go hand in hand with having any sort of rules.
For instance, the law against stealing uses intimidation and suppression: people are intimidated against stealing with the threat of jail sentences, and offenders are suppressed with actual imprisonment.
You can't have guarantees of freedom of speech written in law without the intimidation and suppression being written into the same law: there have to be negative consequences for a law breaker infringing on someone else's constitutionally granted freedom of speech, which are written and enforced, in order for the law to have meaning.
If you scream about private platforms canceling speech you agree with, and then you intimidate and suppress other private platforms when they publish speech you don't agree with, that puts the lie to your ostensible unlimited-free-speech principles.
What if I criticize platforms canceling speech I disagree with, and don't intimidate anyone?
You've built a strawman model of a free speech advocate and are focusing on that. There may be some real life personalities who call themselves free speech advocates who resemble that strawman, but it's still a strawman.
My point was more that the subjects of this odd battle are not the actors in it. Such that the line you are drawing with the context you are drawing it in, feels in bad faith.
From all I have seen, which I confess is not everything, The blogger was asking for basic courtesy to not be named such that their practice could stay easily separate.
For my part, I care more for unpersecuted speech. I don't like the active screaming culture, but I can't bring myself to feel that someone should be able to have consequence free speech, either. Such that most of this debate is around gotcha moments that are people yelling at someone to reach the crowd.
It gets muddy, because I absolutely believe we have to allow people to be wrong. But I don't think we should tolerate active lying and gas lighting with deceptive rhetorical tricks that punish courage in openly exploring the boundaries of your knowledge.
This is similar to arguments I frequently make about the paper. The reason it has such standing as it does is because it was a mast of Northeast elite hedgemony. I mean this more in a sociological sense than in a true dynastic political sense. The Northeast had been thought for very long to have the best schools, culture, technology, leadership and values.
There was a time when that culture was not just dominant among elite circles but often revered by everyday people as something to live up to. As much as the 80s, 90s and on were seemingly about the decline of that power nexus, the institutions retained a lot of mystique and fascination.
That ideal of American life is in a tailspin. Norman Rockwell is more a punchline than a comfort to people. The nation's opinions aren't filtered through New York TV personalities any more.
The paper has weakend and that has allowed the social agreement about it to change. Before if you expressed a negative opinion about such a paper it was mostly washed away in a consistent wave of accolade. If disagreement always meets reproach it is hard for it to spread. Agreement is an innoculatiom against criticism.
This. Housing associations in the Northeast are getting completely out of control. Whatever happened to people trimming their own hedges in the style they see fit?
> The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.
> Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians"
There is always "a side that benefits politically" from literally every statement. What is clear, irrespective of the side that benefits politically from stating it: the NYT is willing to use its influence to distort the political opinions of its readers, using innuendo and cherrypicked facts.
Those who look to the NYT (and The Washington Post) for accurate facts are literally (mis)guided into holding a specific political opinion, and defending that opinion even against facts that would rationally moderate that opinion.
I am as certain as stone that most people who read the NYT will forever associate Scott Alexander Siskind with white supremacy, conservatism, and anti-woke ideology because of that hit piece; for these people, this will be a fact. For them "Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from calling that article a 'hit piece'" is a statement that actually has meaning, and they will operate on that assumption. His Wikipedia page will be inundated with editors who insist that the NYT interpretation is "true" while Scott's blog is "opinion", and will dutifully and duly note these interpretations as facts onto his Wikipedia entry. For these people, reading and discussing Scott Alexander will be tantamount to supporting white supremacy, and so a whole encyclopedia of delightful, thoughtful inquiry will be foreclosed.
It is reprehensible, and I cannot in future take anyone who cites the NYT without caution as a serious person who actually understands their world.
I lost count of the number of times the NYT used the same numbers and switched from praising to blaming and back the Swedish corona startegy.
I want facts and information goddammit. Not a tearjerking drama to fill my inbox. I was already annoyed with the NYT before this incident. This just broke the camel's back. I unsubscribed.
Reading the NYT piece was mortifying.[1] They were my primary source of all things news and then published this strange hit that's just... off base. They were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive. How can a reliable news source write an article like that? Why throw your reputation down the toilet for what seems like a grudge?
I suggest that perhaps you just have not had as much knowledge about previous hit pieces as you had about this one. The NYT did this to Jordan Peterson and no doubt others. They are completely morally bankrupt and do not deserve anyone's trust.
I could come up with more examples but the times have a very clear slant, much more marked than say the washington post. The NYT produces good reporting too but they can produce some real garbage.
I could have sworn the times wrote a really bad article about islam in London but can’t find it.
> Then in the 2016 election the NYT had a front page spread implying major scandal regarding Clinton’s emails. This probably cost Clinton the election.
Some of it is featured in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
"The film presents and illustrates Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model thesis that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination of the history of The New York Times' coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky says exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticize an ally of the elite."
// hey were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive.
You probably have heard of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" but in case not, it really explains a lot:
"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. ... Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect... you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page ... and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read"
That's just happened to you - you read a story you happened to already know the ground truth on and it struck you as obviously wrong. If you had an equivalent background in other stories, you'd be seeing this kind of falseness everywhere.
I have examples too numerous to cite of matters I knew well (eg: companies/industries I worked in, wealthy people I happened to know, countries/cultures/conflicts I studied or experienced first hand) that were covered completely backwards in the Times and other media.
Like: good employers characterized as horrible. Military conflict response characterized as provocation. Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.
A century ago, Times had whitewashed Stalin in a way that anyone who knew Russia would have instantly recognized as false. So I doubt the times was ever not "Fake News" it's just that it was so much harder to see it back then when your newspaper was how you knew anything.
Hence my frustration with the relentlessy inept articles across the MSM about the 737MAX crisis. Aviation Week's coverage was the only one that was even remotely credible.
BTW, if you're interested in the facts, this report should help:
// Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.
I actually want to explain what I meant here and what opened my eyes to this big-time.
Background: I am a dual (EU/US) citizen and care about both a lot. In 2016 I voted for Clinton and had the typical attitude towards Trump that you'd expect from a liberal New Yorker.
In early 2017, Trump was in the news for having said offensive/alienating things to our European allies. I was outraged and worried because this fit the narrative of him selling us out to Russia.
Until I chanced to watch the actual speech - what I heard was affirming and comforting for someone who cares about NATO and totally opposite of how it was presented.
The subsequent 4 years, this pattern repeated over and over - I'd watch the administration consistently make geopolitical moves against Russia and its allies (Iran being the crystalizing example) while the news kept telling me he was Putin's bitch.
I came out of this experience with a complete lack of belief in how things are presented in the media, which is a radical departure from my stance as a literate liberal New Yorker just 4 years prior.
If the clock strikes thirteen times, you don't just question the last strike, you must doubt the previous twelve too, even if they sounded reasonable before.
I want to hijack this thread to lend further credence to my conspiracy theory about an ongoing nation-state attempt to create nameclashes for maximum disruption in the U.S.:
The author quotes a NYT articles which quotes the author's piece on "Radicalizing the Romanceless." In it, the author writes this:
> And I made the horrible mistake of asking this question out loud, and that was how I learned about social justice.
Notice it's not "social justice warrior" or "SJW", the derisive terms for someone who speaks the lingo of widely-known, widely-respected collective grass-roots movements from history (or the present) for mere self-serving purposes: superficial fashion, personal advancement, petty vindictiveness, etc. No reasonable adult would read "SJW" and accidentally think the writer is talking about, say, Harriet Tubman.
Instead, the term used is social justice-- the original term-- as a nickname for the newer derisive term. (The author mentions "social justice movements" elsewhere in the same article.) I still won't confuse the author for referring to Harriet Tubman. But what about the Civil Rights movement from the 60s? The 1984 Nicaraguan Election? BLM?
Looks like we got ourselves an old-fashioned nameclashin'. Yeehaw!
Given a) social media in its current form has a greater incentive for derisive terms like SJW than its non-derisive referent, b) the derisive term includes the referent so that the referent can become a shorthand for the derision, and c) Americans have a shit understanding of history, the derision slowly but surely overtakes public consciousness of the original meaning on social media.
All that's needed is for a nation-state to find some nameclashin' efforts where the original term is included in the burgeoning derisive term... a little boost here and there... and voila, SJW will become a kind of "Bulverizing force" against the very idea of the efficacy of social movements from history. :)
What's so ironic here is that the author is both unwittingly nameclashin' while at the same time complaining about another case of nameclashin': "nice guy." Let's go through the steps:
1. Original term "nice guy" to mean "actually decent fellow who acts in good faith" for a given generation of speakers.
2. New term "nice guy" to mean a bad faith actor who claims by fiat they are decent as a means to manipulate others. Used by a newer generation of speakers.
3. boost of definition 2 by some entity/entities
4. Unnecessary disruption among these two generations who would otherwise understand each other just fine.
Nameclashin', baby!
Look for it at any participating locations where upvotes can be bought.
While "nameclashes" are a problem, I don't see any evidence that they have been created or promoted by any nation-state. Actually it seems to me that sjw was rather adopted as a more precise term than leftist, to reduce confusion. To refer to people who mainly talk about race and gender that rather than say raising taxes for the rich.
You say you have found an ally in someone who is known for his controversial take on intelligence and heritability and who maintains that it is this inherited difference in intelligence that is responsible for social division within the US. You call his ideas on class and culture sophisticated. Then you say that you agree with him only on a certain specific claim about teaching truckers to code. (You = Scott Alexander)
Who is being intellectually dishonest here? NYT or Scott Alexander?
Maybe he was being ironic, or not even ironic but using the word sophisticated in it's narrow meaning of complex. In the same way one might describe flat earthers as having a sophisticated world view.
If you believe in a sophisticated explanation where a simple explanation exists, you're probably a believer of nonsense. Occam's razor, basically.
I think it's now worth considering The New York Times as a hostile actor, in the same category as Google and Facebook. (Of course this is a gross generalization, but the beneficent- or neutral-actor model no longer seems appropriate.)
I am not sure I understand what you mean by these "models" of corporations. You believe that some corporations organize their actions to try to help... everyone? And others organize their actions to try to hurt... everyone? And you decide what category to put what corporation in?
Of course it is reductive, but I do think some businesses pursue mostly non-zero sum games. Their gain does not come at my expense.
There are yet others which have "mined out" all the non-zero sum games in their industry (or choose not to pursue them), and so instead play zero-sum games. In these games, their gains come at the expense of their customers, the public or the environment. These tend to be monopolies because there is no recourse.
In categorizing some of these businesses as hostile actors, I am suggesting that they are predominantly playing zero-sum games. To cite some examples of businesses not playing zero-sum games, I need not look further than the small businesses in my local town.
Hopefully this provides a more nuanced answer you were rightfully asking about.
This gets at part of what I find irritating about the self-described Rationalist community: they talk about "free speech" when what they really want is unrestricted, consequence-less speech that allows them to guiltlessly harm certain people in the name of innovation.
If you believe that's the case, perhaps you could provide an example of Scott's writing that shouldn't be allowed, and what you think the consequences should be?
I don't think that comment implies he disagrees with free speech - my interpretation was that he's talking about how some of Scott's supporters seem to think the NYT piece shouldn't have been allowed.
I’m attempting to find a charitable way to engage with those tweets, since on first read they seem a) deliberately false about the content of SSC, b) invoke a sneering tone common amongst folks who subscribe to certain segments of “woke” progressivism (especially in tech), and c) attribute maximum malice of forethought by the targeted party to all of it.
The arguments are also just bad. “Why don’t these free speech people take into account existing power structures?” But this is of course exactly what they are doing when they advocate for absolute free speech. How else do you account and adjust for the different levels of cultural power different groups, companies, whatever have in society?
Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts:
A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.
Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.
The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.
> Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience.
This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.
[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally
"Against murderism" was the last time it came up, I think? In context I believe it was supposed to be anti-anti-Trumpism, or at least that you should talk to Trumpists more rather than deplatform them.
The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.
>The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.
Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?
I read many books but skip many long blog entries. Blogs tend to be in sore need of editing, and most the books that make it to print are in general far higher quality. The main strength blogs have to me are time to print, which makes them more “real time” than books.
I'm not OP, but I find it easier to read a 50k word book than 10k blog article. The latter had better be really good (and many of Scott's are) if I'm going to make it to the end.
It's probably something about the nature of reading on a screen, on a device that's capable of fifty zillion other things at the press of a button. When I'm reading a book, there's only the book. Less willpower is required to maintain my focus.
Long blog posts are much easier to read if I send them to my Kindle, but I rarely bother.
Reading them feels different, right? Books have pages so you can go back and forth, they have editors, and so on.
More importantly, dense literary works exist but usually pop essay books are trying to prove a point. SSC essays usually try to make you forget you had a point, and instead go up a meta level in service of his extremely evenhanded let's-all-be-friends persona.
Which conflicts with the pretty bad comment section that always wants to sit around discussing culture war. (Which exists but is not worth quite as much time as they want to put into it.)
Not the OP, but I'm from the demographic that should really enjoy Scott Alexander's work and generally do but he definately has some weird right-wing tendencies.
For example, he appears to genuinely believe that recycling is a scam that was dreamt up by the New York mafia and that it's basically failed and been given up on. Ironically his main source for this seems to be old New York Times opinion pieces by a contrarian/libertarian.
His own cite of his comment about how there's a thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort is another good example. Yeah he's edited it and seems to be going for "it's just a joke bro", but if you live in the kind of bubble where you casually condemn the whole of "feminism" as an evil then you've probably got a weirdly fascistic friend group and/or auudience.
Talking of which, he mentioned that all his smart friends were really concerned about authoritarianism stemming from campus politics, much more so than they worried about Trump. His smart friends are either very dumb, or again weirdly fascist.
I think I originally started reading his stuff because he had informed and humorous takedowns of some extremist libertarian/fascist ideas like neoreaction and dark enlightenment, but I guess to know that much about the topics probably is a reflection of the circles he's moving in.
Yeah it's great that he mostly disagrees with them, but he seems fairly zen about it, like it's just their opinion man. Not like actual evils, like feminists, recycling or political correctness on campus, which get him a bit more worked up.
I dislike that you call people dumb or facist because they made a different judgement than you did, in regards of the "Is Trump worse than campus authoritarianism". Other people are able to feel differently about things.
Well in the context of fascism one of those things is an authoritarian government leader that praised dictators and tried to take over the government and another is a paid activity that's voluntary.
If you want to make obviously dumb claims about fascists, you might get called out.
Perhaps you should articulate a well-defined definition of fascism and provide arguments for why you clasify someone as a fascist if you are going to criticize someone else whose viewpoint is dfferent. Calling out someone for 'obviously dumb' claims assumes a universal non-subjective definition at the very least. It's also a seriously lazy way to argue a point.
Or perhaps you shouldn't have to ask people to go back and review every axiom and theorem from Eucli-- OK, from Politics 101 onwards -- in order to find some gotcha to make your point.
Starting one's argument from the consensus of the reality-based community may be "lazy", but starting to quibble over basic definitions in a much higher-level discussion is a pretty sure sign one is on the wrong side of whatever the argument is about.
>I think I originally started reading his stuff because he had informed and humorous takedowns of some extremist libertarian/fascist ideas like neoreaction and dark enlightenment, but I guess to know that much about the topics probably is a reflection of the circles he's moving in.
So you read and liked stuff that confirmed your likely ideological priors, but you disliked stuff that questioned them.
Do you actually expect a less-partial observer to agree that the fault here is with Scott rather than you?
>His own cite of his comment about how there's a thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort is another good example. Yeah he's edited it and seems to be going for "it's just a joke bro", but if you live in the kind of bubble where you casually condemn the whole of "feminism" as an evil then you've probably got a weirdly fascistic friend group and/or auudience.
How can you honestly not see the delicious irony of this statement?
Are you saying that condemning some feminists for being too militant is equivalent to "liv[ing] in the kind of bubble where you casually condemn the whole of 'feminism' as an evil"?!?
I can't see any "irony" there ar all; IMO because there is none to see.
The specific people he was condemning in that essay really were pretty bad. Mostly a few women trying to advance a political agenda on an uncharitable reading of the other Scott and then a lot of men piling on in case it got them laid.
(seriously, don't miss on reading some of Scott's posts -- you will be disappointed by almost every piece of nonfiction you read afterwards)
It's definitely one of those cases of "If everyone thought a little more like X, Earth would be a much better place.", (let X=Scott Alexander) -- and notably it becomes quite clear how to think like he does (he just tells you!).
Didn't spoil the nonfiction in general for me, but definitely did make me ask "why more people on the left can't be like Scott?" I'm not a leftist myself, and this makes me disagree with Scott - who is definitely on the left - from time to time, but even when I disagree I feel like I learned something and maybe improved my knowledge, understanding and appreciation for opposing points. I wonder if more people were like that, maybe we could have proper political discussions instead of the catastrophic calamity we are witnessing now.
Definitely, he is definitely not always right, and you should avoid taking any person's word as gospel. Scott's point isn't "I'm always correct/You should always agree with me", it is "We should be charitable and examine things without prejudice, and look into everything with as much depth and reason as possible". I've read a few of his articles where he was out of his depth (some related to math and statistics), but they have been generally well researched and open to criticism. I guess what I wrote about other non-fiction is how well he embraces not being right; it's almost a point of celebration -- to have learned something new (and approaching the truth), not a point of defense of ego. It's a radical[1] (at least in current culture) position of collaboration. Some of his posts remind me of the Polymath Project (see Tao, and others): the point is to get to the truth, together.
[1]: I also give you that, if this position weren't radical, then SSC might seem not so special -- a good psychiatry blog with interesting philosophical and rational thought.
If you speculated this might be the cause of the current calamity, I believe you're right. I don't think it's because we've suddenly changed and suddenly people have become polarized and dogmatic. I think culturally, and instinctively, we've been generally dogmatic for a really long time, with few individual exceptions. Most people want to quickly associate with a tribe, or dogmatic system, and blindly defend it without questioning its assumptions. It is extremely difficult to get an average person to change his mind on say his favored political party -- much more than you would expect from factual and philosophical basis alone (if you frame it as an abstract philosophical discussion, e.g. a trolley problem, I think it's easier to get people engaged and open to change their minds; an engineer that measures a poor performance of a system won't usually die on the hill of defending the system at all costs).
It's really counterintutive: by being shown a new point of view, by changing your view of how the world works (in description or aspiration), you are gaining, you are learning, it should be a good thing (for everyone) -- and yet we frequently over-attach to beliefs. I don't want to speculate too much, but it sometimes does make sense to defend yourself not to be convinced by anyone of anything (potentially with selfish or malicious intent), so this may be an over-correction (cultural and or evolutionary) trait. See the post "Epistemic Learned Helplessness"
I am wondering, what are the legal perspectives of suing NYT for libel at this point. If Scott started a crowdsourcing campaign to fund legal defense, I would gladly throw in a couple of grand. Given the support Scott received when the situation with NYT's plans got public in the first place, this could set a very interesting precedent.
Given that his explicitly stated goal is to move on from this, probably a bad idea. Right or wrong, a lawsuit would invite the Streisand effect.
As for whether there's any legal basis to sue, it's doubtful. There isn't a whole lot that's factually inaccurate in the NYT piece. It's innuendo and words taken out of context. California has a "False Light" claim that might apply, but I doubt any court would take that up. At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.
>At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.
I think, doing it with an explicit goal of misleading your audience in order to cause damage to a specific person should not be OK. I'm not saying censor it, but making NYT liable for any actual damage (like losing a job) + punitive damages would make sense.
The thing is, the woke mob is employing the same silencing tactics as Putin's Russia. You don't have resources to shut everyone up, so you semi-arbitrarily target random people and make sure the consequences are extremely harsh. A high-profile person like Scott can just walk away from it. An average rank-and-file person with a mortgage and at best couple of months in saving will keep their mouth shut and pretend to agree with whatever the party line is. Like literally, that's Russia now. Everyone is poor and miserable, but Putin's approval ratings are >70% because, well, losing everything you have is just not worth a random act of dissent.
I'm pretty sure that nothing they printed is technically libel. They should at least know by now how to write a good hit piece without technically committing libel.
I'm afraid there's not going to be a solution for what the American Media has become in the legal system.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it's extremely difficult to successfully sue someone for libel in the US, mainly due to all the First Amendment issues that come with letting the courts adjudicate what can and can't be said.
Professionally-trained journalists are very aware of libel concerns and are taught to stay within the law. The NYT's journalistic standards may have taken a nosedive in recent years but I'm sure they can still afford good enough lawyers to avoid getting sued over a hit piece, even one as sloppy as this.
The most hilarious part of the New York Times decline was the "public editor". Every public editor piece was carefully selected and prepared to admit the least amount of negligence possible, to frame even blatant lies in a mere "he said, she said" or a confusion of the moment.
Eventually, it dawned on them that having an obviously incompetent, incapable public editor is worse than having none at all, so they unceremoniously canned the position.
Ignore the politics, foreign affairs and opinion sections of the NYT. They basically peddle outright lies and exaggerations with ridiculous levels of bias.
Stick to the non-environment science pieces. Admittedly, not much of the paper left, but whats left is rather good. Until those writers get fired.
I didn't perceive the NYT article as negative at all. As for naming him, that's their choice as journalists, and a risk he took with recording his thoughts online just as all of us do.
I wish folks would rid themselves of the notion that the internet is anonymous or deletable. We'd all be much healthier by acknowledging the possibility that whatever you write here may be etched in stone. And if you become well known people may try to identify you. This isn't an OSC book it's the real world.
You've moved the goalposts. DDoS is against the law. Connecting an anonymous account to a name after confirming it is them is not. It may be libelous if the connection is not factual, but if it is a fact then that's legal to print.
This is also moving the goalpost, just because something is legal (and rightly so in this case) does not mean it is moral.
My point is that doing risky activities does not mean you cannot complain when things go wrong; you can both take responsability for your decision to partecipate in that risk and criticise the system for exposing partecipants to excessive risk.
In this case the criticism wasn't "the internet police should stop bad actors, but (hyperbole warning) "the most respected newspaper in the US should have higher standards than internet trolls"
> Some of the savvy people giving me advice suggested I fight back against this. [...] Say why it was necessary for my career to publish those papers under my real name.
> 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. [...]
> But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.
> No! There's no dignified way to answer any of these questions except "fuck you". Just don't kick me in the balls! It isn't rocket science! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
It’s interesting, though, that the NYT has been willing to respect the pseudonymity of other public figures in circumstances that I would consider comparable. One example is Virgil Texas, a cohost of the perennially controversial leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Virgil Texas is not his real name—and his real name can be found with a bit of searching, as in the case of Alexander/Siskind—but the Times has stuck with the pseudonym.[0] What principle is being followed here?
News outlets can make their own calls on who to name. If naming brings more readers and one outlet won't do it then that's an opportunity for another outlet, provided everything else in the article is legal.
I don't expect NYT or any outlet to be free from bias and that doesn't mean I want any of them to disappear. I want them all to thrive.
The NYT article[1] can hardly be called a hit piece at all, considering how little 'dirt' it actually contains.
What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
Thanks for including this link. I read the response before I read the NYT article. And while it was a pretty uninteresting article, the tactics used to obfuscate who holds what beliefs are laid bare. It's illuminating to see.
Thank you for the link to the NYT article. I completely agree with your reading.
Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.
Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again:
>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Where’d you get that idea? You not only have a right to privacy in your own bathroom, the courts have declared a reasonable expectation of privacy inside public bathroom stalls, and/or behind privacy partitions. CNN publishing nude photos of anyone going to the bathroom would generally be completely illegal.
Anonimity is certainly not a right but sometimes is the only protection for other rights. And we must acknowledge the consequences of technology, unintended or not. For example, nobody expects privacy in public spaces but I think everybody agrees camera surveillance can be abused. Sometimes quantity is a quality of its own.
Because if we let people be anonymous, then more people will feel comfortable writing insightful things for us to read. I'd rather have a wider selection of content than know everyone's real name. Knowing who writers are "in real life" is useless and uninteresting most of the time.
In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?
It's not a legal right if that's what you're getting at. Otherwise, do you also not understand why basically all platforms have pretty assertive (if questionably enforced) anti-doxxing rules?
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".
The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.
My reading of the article was that it wasn't about Scott at all. It was about the comment sections on Slate Star Codex, the Rationalist community (which the general public knows very little about), and its connection to the centers of power in Silicon Valley.
If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.
As the article points out, the name is hardly a secret, and I suspect the important thing is that the NYT has no practice of using pseudonyms. If a writer submits a story and the editor says, "Why'd you use a pseudonym," I'm not sure the writer gets to say, "They asked for one," because then why wouldn't everyone who genuinely is newsworthy and thinks they aren't newsworthy ask for one? If the writer says, "I didn't think it was worth finding out," the editor probably ought to question if the writer has actually done enough research on what they're reporting on - especially if the editor can find the name trivially. Remember that the NYT got in very public trouble recently for telling a story that turned out be false because they trusted a subject of the story too much. And even if it wasn't for that, the NYT is regularly in the business of reporting on situations where people would love to use pseudonyms to avoid accountability.
It makes sense to me that they have a default policy/norm against it, and weren't able to justify overriding it in this particular case, especially given that the name was already public information.
To be clear, I agree that there was no need to use his name to tell the story they were telling, and I think the world would have been a better place if they were able to. But I don't think it's only attributable to malice that they did.
> I suspect the important thing is that the NYT has no practice of using pseudonyms
NYT was happy to write about Virgil Texas of Chapo Trap House without revealing his real name [0].
Implying that their actual rule is: yes to pseudonymity for people with whom we politically sympathise, no to pseudonymity for people with whom we don't.
That kind of inconsistency isn't worthy of respect.
I don’t think consistency is actually that important here. I don’t expect the NYT’s editorial decisions to be perfectly consistent with each other as (a) they’re not necessarily being made by the same people and (b) the NYT makes a very large number of editorial decisions. I do expect those decisions to be justifiable considered individually on their merits.
I don’t see any reason not to give Scott Alexander’s real name. The mere fact that he’d rather keep it a secret doesn’t strike me as a good reason.
When an organisation justifies its decisions by reference to its policies, evidence that it doesn't apply its policies consistently is relevant to the question of how much we should believe its purported justifications. An organisation worthy of respect will either be consistent, or will openly admit its inconsistency as a shortcoming when called out on it. I'm not expecting the NYT to do that, which is part of why I don't respect the NYT. (The NYT is free to prove me wrong, in which case I will adjust my view of it accordingly.)
What reason did they have not to give Virgil Texas' real name? The article I cited acknowledged it as a pseudonym, so they knew it wasn't his real name. I'm sure they either know what his real name is, or they could have easily found it out – indeed, the first page of a Google search for "Virgil Texas real name" contains the answer.
I think they should respect people's requests for pseudonymity unless there is a compelling public interest in not doing so – which means they wouldn't reveal either Virgil Texas or Scott Alexander's real names. Alternatively, if they don't agree they should default to respecting people's requests for pseudonymity, then they should be consistent in denying it, and deny it to Virgil Texas as well.
Policies get applied inconsistently all the time for very uninteresting reasons. Inconsistency is what happens by default unless people make an enormous and concerted effort to be consistent. I don’t personally see any inconsistency - just two case-by-case decisions that went in different directions. But even if we grant that the two decisions are inconsistent, I don’t see why this is supposed to be a big deal. It certainly doesn’t mean that one of the decisions is necessarily wrong or unjustified. The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case.
The only interesting question here is whether there’s some overriding reason why the NYT should collude with Scott Alexander in keeping his identity semi-secret (it’s not like it was actually secret anyway). There just isn’t any such reason.
> The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case and isn’t obliged to be perfectly consistent.
I think the NYT is perfectly within its legal rights to publish bad journalism. If the NYT decided tomorrow to transform itself into the left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, that would be entirely legal, and so it should be.
But just as NYT has every right to publish what it wants, others have just as much a right to judge it negatively for doing so.
It is not legally obliged to be consistent, and I don't think it should be legally obliged to be consistent either. Giving the legal system the power to police journalism is very risky business, and I don't think the risk is worth it.
However, I personally think it is morally obliged to be consistent, and I will judge it negatively if it fails to be so – you may disagree, but maybe that's a sign that you and I have different moral values.
> The only interesting question here
Maybe the questions that interest you are different from the questions that interest me.
Why do you think consistency in itself is a moral obligation? To me that seems weird. For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice? The NYT is morally obliged to apply its editorial policies in good faith, but it’s not obliged to ensure that the many thousands of editorial decisions that it makes in a given year are all perfectly consistent.
I notice that other than consistency (which is symmetrical and could equally argue that the NYT should have published the other person’s real name) you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret.
> For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice?
No you are not. But I think, if someone points out your inconsistency, a person (or group/organisation) really ought to have the honesty to be able to say "Yes, you are right, that's a fair criticism, I am being inconsistent, I will try to be more consistent in the future". And one way of being more consistent in the future would be to do the moral thing from now on, and obviously that would be morally superior to achieving consistency by choosing to consistently make the bad choice instead.
> you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret
He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable. Faced with a reasonable request from a person that their privacy be respected, I think the ethical thing to do is to respect their request, unless there is a strong public interest in disregarding it – which I don't think there is in this case. (And I'd add that if you are going to justify violations of the privacy of others by appeals to the public interest, you ought to clearly state your claim in doing so, which NYT has failed to do here.)
I was one of the many people who already knew Scott Alexander's real name. I don't know him personally, I'd just worked it out. But I wouldn't have posted that info publicly, because he asked people not to, and even though I don't know him personally, he seems like a decent guy and respecting his wishes in this matter was the moral thing to do.
I don’t understand why you think that consistency in itself is a moral obligation. In any case, the consistency argument, even if successful, doesn't show that the NYT was wrong to reveal Scott Alexander's real name. It shows – at most – that it was either wrong to do this or wrong not to publish Virgil Texas's real name. That is why the only interesting question here is the one that you've finally addressed.
>He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable.
His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
In the end the NYT has to come to its own evaluation of the merits of anyone's request for anonymity. The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it. So just because Scott asked and the request wasn't granted doesn't mean that something has gone wrong.
> I don’t understand why you think that consistency in itself is a moral obligation
Cicero defined justice as giving each their due; not a definition original to him, Plato and Aristotle said more or less the same thing. Inconsistency is a form of injustice because you are giving to one different from what you give to another without a good reason. Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification – I give my own children hugs, I don't give hugs to the children of strangers, but that is not injust, since there is a good reason to justify that difference in treatment. Justice is a key part of ethics, indeed classically it is one of the four cardinal virtues.
> His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity
He had specific reasons due to his dual role as both blogger and psychiatrist, that do not apply to the average person. The profession of psychiatry has certain expectations about psychiatrists hiding their opinions from their patients which don't apply to most other professions. Those reasons don't apply to "almost everyone" because most people are not psychiatrists, and most other professions don't care anywhere near as much if clients find out your opinions on unrelated issues.
> It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
But what is "fit to print"? Traditionally journalism justified itself as serving the public interest. What is the public interest in publishing Scott Alexander's real name? I don't see how there was one.
> The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it
Yes they can: If someone asks for pseudonymity, they should grant it unless there is a strong public interest in refusing it; and if they refuse it, they should be explicit about why they believe denying it serves the public interest in that particular case.
Psychiatrists shouldn't go on political rants with their patients, but the idea that psychiatrists must completely conceal their political leanings from their patients is an idea that Scott has just made up. The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one.
> Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that *for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification*
There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason. Take gifts as an example. It's inconsistent if I give one friend a big gift and another friend a small gift, but it's not unjust, as I'm under no obligation to give any of them gifts at all – and consistency in itself isn't an ethical constraint on behavior. I'm certainly not required to have a specific reason for spending $15 on Bob's gift and $100 on Mary's gift.
How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you.
> The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one.
As I said, they ought to default to granting requests for pseudonymity unless there is strong public interest not to, which there wasn't any in this case.
> There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason
The difference with your example of gifts, is that neither Bob nor Mary have any right to expect any particular gift. By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to. It is one thing to be inconsistent in gifts to friends, when we don't owe them anything in particular. It is another thing to be inconsistent in fulfilling one's obligations to others.
>How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you.
Sure, maybe I'm wrong. I'm open to evidence of this. As far as I can determine, psychiatrists are not required to keep their political views a secret.
>By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to.
But what are the implications of that for consistency? Consider that you're free to grant someone's request for privacy even if there isn't an overriding reason to do so
or not to do so (just as you're free to give someone a gift without a reason). So just because the NYT honored one such request in the past doesn't entail that they're bound to honor all such requests in future. Again, the only interesting question is whether their reasons were good in each case.
I think rather than continuing to debate relatively peripheral issues (such as consistency or the culture of psychiatrists), let me just state what I think the crux of the issue is:
I believe that journalists ought to honour all requests for pseudonymity, unless they believe there is a strong public interest in not doing so in any particular case, and if they believe there is such a strong public interest, they should be explicit about what they think it is, so others can judge their public interest claim. I think this is the decent thing to do, and sustains a culture of respecting people's privacy.
NYT did not follow that standard in the case of Scott Alexander.
The underlying point of the article is that a large number of tech leaders are rationalists, what is rationalism, what are they reading (the blog), and what does that mean for society.
I am wondering if these 'hit pieces' are more like sermons of The Church of the NYT. Deriding sinners and their evil ways. They are not meant to reflect an objective reality, but hyperbole to act as a cautionary tale with enough plausible sounding details to allow the prefrontal cortex to accept them. A modern This way there be dragons Or Reefer Madness. The NYT has found it's tithing flock and they are pandering all the way to the bank.
Much of this behavior becomes a lot easier to understand when you realise that "wokeism" is a religion. I don't mean that ironically. John McWhorter is currently serialising a book on this topic on his own Substack, and he's far from the only person to make the observation.
Several months ago, people were saying that the Times was probably going to write a sympathetic piece. But they wrote a hitpiece. So, one wonders: Did the NYT write a hitpiece because of Scott's reaction -- deleting his blog, calling on his readers to send angry emails to NYT, etc -- or was it going to be a hitpiece from the beginning?
Scott's thermonuclear reaction seems justified now. But back then, some comments here convinced me that "They probably weren't going to write a hitpiece. Why would they do that?"
But we were wrong. So I'm wondering why we thought they'd do anything else.
Well here is an intelligent guy who writes long-form pieces that are fairly influential within a sector of society that is small, but also relatively powerful. But he's not aligned to the NYT ideological agenda. Of course it was gonna be a hit piece, no question about it IMHO.
435 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] thread> 1. The article tries to connect me to Charles Murray and The Bell Curve
> 2. In their litany of reasons I am bad, the Times says I compared some feminists to Voldemort.
> 3. The Times also presented a more general case that I was a bad ally to women in tech.
> 4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true -
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.
Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:
"WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
"List of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryp...
I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.
Q. What if I take too much?
A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.
This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.
However it wouldn't surprise me if the NHS took on that task itself. Unlike WebMD, the NHS is also responsible for prescribing medications and would need to give their doctors and pharmacists up-to-date information, software and guidance for prescribing. Their scale and scope would allow them to take on this task in a way that makes less sense in the US system, where insurance providers, doctors, pharmacies and online health information are all separate entities with separate budgets/funding.
[0] https://www.fdbhealth.com/
This seems like a good idea.
The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.
I guess the only criticism could be, won't you end up with a bunch of half-built bridges eventually?
*oops* hadn't realized it was by the same author!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_as...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A100495710953...
> Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy.
Most important perhaps is that new media like Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the NYT. Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the Firm, 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing, paper distribution, subscriber and advertiser management. Essentially all of this is gone. What modern newspaper scale on is branding, and and selling influence, but this is in direct contradiction with strong journalists' interest (who do not like to be told by their editors what to write and how). Until recently, top journalists could not go alone, since they lacked the expertise to handle monetisation of their writing. This changed with the likes of Substack, which centralises (automates) subscriber management, and technical infrastructure, but without editorship. Hence, top writers are increasingly moving away from traditional newspapers to something like Substack, with Greenwald and Scott Siskind being two high-profile examples. They won't be the last.
Newspapers see the writing on the wall and fight back.
I think we are seeing a wounded animal's fight for survival ....
Things like integrity and trust matter more than ever, so the idea that newspapers would jeopardize that to get back at a somewhat meaningless scoop is pathetic.
The time will soon come when we cannot trust anything we don't see with our own eyes, and we will then need to have a web of trust with reliable sources.
Newspapers can still capitalize on being a source of trust and truth, if they don't fuck it up.
Of course, the NYT is still pretty reliable on citations of fact, even if their slant is worse than it should be.
Part of the reason I'm leading this way is because and the end of the day, Scott just doesn't seem important enough to the NYT to focus on for a hit piece. And even then it reads more like a condemnation of SV tech culture than it does as a condemnation of Scott (however unfair it was to him).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
> I spent many hours with Cade, taking his calls and emails morning or night, at the playground with my kids or wherever else I was, answering his questions, giving context for his other interviews, suggesting people in the rationalist community for him to talk to…
and
> Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.
[0]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310
How I laughed out loud... Gold
This is a great summation.
To me it reads like the best attempt the journalist could pull off at writing a hit piece against some guy who just started a low cost medical practice, and has never actually done anything bad in his life. A whole lot of vague insinuations and guilt by association.
If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this was Metz's way to tell himself that he is a better person than this guy trying to make psychiatric care more accessible, just because he might disagree on some political issues.
Edit: to my commentor, I'm not an SSC reader.
Can you elaborate on this? What is their agenda?
Edit: ombudsmen are the solution.
> Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.
"Republicans" and "Democrats" and "college students" and "Californians" all work, etc.
I wonder if it was Metz who had the idea for the original more positive-angled story re SSC's COVID info.
In the country I live in, it is usual (I believe voluntarily mandatory) for a newspapers to publish a response by the subject of an article.
They are now part of the fascist cabal establishment in US, hunting down any wrong thinkers.
It doesn’t matter is you’re left or right. The only thing that matters to NY times fascist establishment regime is keeping the lower classes in line to help make the establishment people retain control and get richer every second.
The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be.
I know this has been true for me many times.
Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.
This was really a comment on how most journalism is even worse. The NYT does occasionally have pieces where I know about the topic and their representation goes into details that others aren't likely to. Those are, however, not a large percentage of their output.
Inexplicably many here seem to think that random blog posts are somehow remotely equivalent. I value opinion at zero, and trust a random person to do quality research at about zero too. Trust is earned.
When random internet opinion becomes "news" I suppose we really are in a post truth world.
a discussion on how big institutions that are telling you the truth are competing both to keep their position and tell you the truth with a focus on medicine
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
A more poetic version discussing the concept in general.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I agree with you on that. I subscribed to both for awhile, but dropped the WSJ because it had less international content, its articles tended to lack background (great if you're following a story closely, not so great if you haven't), and its opinion section was utterly boring and predictable.
Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott deleting the blog, and this is still the piece they decided to go with. It's a bit hard to trust the NYT's integrity..
I guess it's a product of actual-journalism not paying the bills.
It became obvious with the literal journalist purge going on there. You can't be a moderate and work there anymore, you have to subscribe to a certain thought framework, if you question it, you're deemed "offensive" and you're out.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.
But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.
WSJ and Economist are hardly unbiased. (IMO The Economist is essentially a straightforward neoliberal pro-Gilded Age propaganda outlet, and always has been.)
The NYT has always been 'dodgy' as we say in the UK. I remember finding their op-eds clownishly stupid when I first started encountered them back in the 00s, and they don't seem to have improved since then.
But there's been a shift to woke since then. And the problem with woke is that so often it operates on the level of personal witch hunts and straightforward public bullying - which makes it depressingly close to its equivalent on the far right, but without the insane weapon fetish.
You can argue that sometimes this is justified. And sometimes - as with Weinstein, etc - it is. But it's harder to support it when it becomes an exercise in tokenism and tribal identity.
It's interesting how often woke goes after individuals deemed guilty of alleged bad-think and how rarely it goes after egregious corporate behaviour. Or even how rarely it mobilises to destroy the careers of politicians who act in unconscionable ways.
Economist is very opinionated, sure, but when I do read them I find the reporting on world business issues pretty informative and the tone a good test of how I feel about globalization that week. At least I know who's talking to me... well not literally "who" of course.
http://Ground.news is a startup that's attempting to falsify that hypothesis. I hope they succeed.
I know it's a meme to bring up Gell-mann amnesia here, but I will raise it as a basic test for quality in journalism.
When NYT writes about something I know about, I almost always have serious problems with it. Jetbrains in particular. And honestly some of the writing is so bad that even without knowing about the subject, I can tell it is crap, like the article about the SlateStarCodex. I had never read it before that post, but had heard it mentioned in passing. Also, NYT Opinion is Hannity/Shapiro level crap and should be dumped. Stick to the facts please.
On the other hand, The Economist has consistently impressed me; I read/listen with a critical ear and they do a wonderful job even with very niche topics. I've worked on some AR tech and they had a special report that just really nailed it and got into the weeds. Every time I thought "but they didn't mention..." they would mention or clarify a paragraph later.
Economist has a liberal viewpoint and they're not shy about it. I prefer that approach and accept that I disagree with the conclusions/advice from time to time, but the facts are right and error corrections are almost always very minor in nature.
There is good journalism out there, just maybe not from NYT. Please don't give up hope.
More to the point this should never have happened.
Calling it a "Russian" company would be totally inaccurate. The hack that I saw cited, though I believe it was an unidentified source, was one that was injected at compile time. That would be very difficult to notice for any programmer.
So, here's my question:
Why did you refer to them as "Russian" when it's obviously not true?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains
"Among its customers is SolarWinds, JetBrains Chief Executive Maxim Shafirov said from St. Petersburg, Russia, where JetBrains has offices."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-cyber-jetbrains/fb...
I mean everything might be above board but it's probably bad or lax US policy and/or regulations that Solarwinds was deployed through out the government.
Does the government need to be scrupulous in whatever open and closed source software it chooses to vend? Yes. Do we need to be chiding about the motivations of every day Russians as one of our first order investigations? Probably not.
I can only go off of what you put in plaintext.
> The real problem is the threat vector
So, explain to me the threat vector. If we have a threat vector that is substantiated by, "is Russian" then I think we have a problem. If we have a threat vector of, "Government vets first order software dependencies, but not the second order and soft dependencies of software vendors" then we have something more akin to analysis.
It took Kaspersky being affiliated with, cooperating (and serving) the FSB in order for it to be banned, not because it was established by Russians.
> Russian intelligence
Someone will need to prove that there is a link between JetBrains as a company and Russian intel (aka the FSB) just as what happened with Kaspersky. I doubt that this is the case. It could certainly be a rogue employee, but that's a good amount of speculation. We've seen that the FSB has no issue hacking into companies and organizations without a mole.
> and a lack of due diligence.
I described the attack. What due diligence protects against something that injects itself during compile time and only triggers on specific events?
Kasperkey is even more obvious because the founder was involved with the KGB even before the 2017 ban. It should never have been used. Now maybe Kasperkey's affiliation is akin to a "communist youth party" card and not necessarily a genuine affiliation but the point is that you can't trust and then verify in these situations. You have to assume that everyone is hostile unless proven safe.
Are you getting this from somewhere or are you explaining how you perceive the standards?
The laws I'm familiar with generally have to do with pretty specific criteria for delivering software that touches specific types/classifications of data. None of that would've caught how the JetBrains software was allegedly used to exploit the SolarWinds product. This was some pretty sophisticated stuff.
Or something like that.
Maybe have them answer some other questions about the articles other than just accuracy, such as quality of writing, in order to be less likely to cause them to re-consider how they are estimating accuracy?
And I suppose by “accuracy” I mean to also include “not misleading”, in addition to just “not false”.
It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for actual things you said years ago, now that’s not enough, they will go out of their way to form a narrative around you, whether the cap fits or not, in order to ostracise, they aren’t afraid to stretch the truth or outright lie. This is not unique to the NYT but it’s a concerning trend.
I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.
Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.
That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.
This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.
There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.
Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.
Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.
The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirecting the tension between people and corporations into tension between artificially created identity groups. So far they are very successful at it. Plenty of people are so busy trying to ruin someone else's life, they completely don't notice the decline of their own long-term perspectives.
This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.
Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.
>Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
There's enough space in the U.S. to build new housing. Like nice 2000+ sqft houses with lots, owned by the people living there. If only a huge chunk of the economy wasn't tied to a few megacorporations located in a handful of cities. So instead, we keep fighting for a right to live in a rented 500sqft box with barely enough space to sleep.
Not that long ago it was Detroit, Buffalo, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Princeton, Pittsburgh, Trenton, and more than I can count that were the bustling megalopolis' of America where you went to if you wanted engineering talent or culture for that matter.
Austin is not "new". It was at competition with Silicon Valley and used to be referred to as Silicon Hill. A lot of hardware manufacturing happened in Texas. At some point, between favorable business laws and Google starting large scale recruiting events it sucked a lot of the talent out of places like Texas.
So your statement is more accurately framed as, "Austin is finally recovering as a tech hub."
While businesses these days may move to SV because of the large population and other businesses, that was not the case in the beginning.
This is false, why would you think this? My youngest sister makes $70k and bought a 3br/2ba house with a 2 car garage for $215k that’s 20 mins from where she works. That is in just a random medium city in the Midwest.
I have another friend who works in San Antonio. Got his house for $300k and makes $90k as a SWE.
Housing is seriously just an isolated problem in particular hot spots. Unless you need to be there, get the fuck out. The governments are broken.
That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there?
In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will personally find you a wife if you don't have one, and will give you a raise if you have kids.
Except, with globalization, it's cheaper to import people from 3rd-world countries and then pay them just enough so that the current generation will keep doing its duties.
I'm a first-generation immigrant myself and I'm quite baffled at how unaffordable it is to raise 2+ kids and make sure their life quality will be similar to mine. It's almost like the expectation is that I won't do that because they will instead import those who were raised at a fraction of the cost elsewhere.
No, this is not "typical" of most cases, it is typical of millennials living in a small subset of property markets (DC, LA, SF, NYC) who have low earnings relative to their educational attainment + age but also a vastly disproportionate media influence. The delusion that the Ivy grad journo living in Brooklyn whose Twitter follower count is larger than their salary somehow reflects the voice of their generation is a huge problem.
Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization playing politics, just as it has been since 1851. I still mostly respect them because they tend to report facts accurately and mostly follow the ideal of journalistic integrity better than many other media outlets. But there are certain topics now, just as always, where their prevailing politics shines through loud and clear.
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/04/14/archives/dr-king-and-the-...
With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible just 10 years ago.
In the case of NYT, their political tilt is very clear (that's ok) but their journalistic integrity is being called into question more and more (that's problematic).
Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of its supporters repeatedly and falsely claim) that items described in the paper are more objective and carries greater weight than those in your average political party's weekly newsletter.
Journalistic integrity is therefore critical when selecting which biased sources to pay attention to.
1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about.
2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false" are defined by the arguer).
3. The arguer portrays himself at the same the victim of those media and the person who knows better than those media and therefore can decide between wrong and right, true and false better than the accused media.
4. The arguer presents no evidence of knowing better and when you ask them about their sources, they tend to be highly problematic, based on blogging and websites who often do not even employ journalists.
Paraphrase: "I know better than large group of people X but everybody else is mislead by X" - I don't think so.
If you write a blog post that doxxes a prominent figure and link to it from Facebook and Twitter, you are going to get banned from those platforms. The NYT can apparently do this with impunity, and calls for canceling other people and organizations who do this.
In US law, there is a different standard for libel against "public figures" than against other people. The NYT gets to take advantage of this much looser libel law whenever they write a hit piece because they can argue that anyone who does something "newsworthy" is de-facto a public figure.
As far as I have seen, the "cancel NYT" crowd is arguing that the NYT should be held to the standards that it pushes into others and obviously doesn't follow.
Political lean != acting as a mouthpiece.
Do also please note that your personal political leanings will determine whether you view the reporting of any publication as unethically biased or not. No matter which sides we're talking about, what one party reports as truth, another will hear as politically motivated.
Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."
What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.
But the "Dark Enlightenment" folks want to have it both ways -- unlimited free expression for themselves even if it means platforming white nationalists, while simultaneously screaming bloody murder when the NYT publishes the well known real name behind the pseudonym Scott Alexander.
Then we have luminaries like Balaji Srinivasan wanting to "sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out".
The inconsistency and hypocrisy of "free speech for me but not for thee" is revolting.
The crowd is constantly crying foul. And often shouting noise for the sake of being noisy. As such, it is all too easy for any supposed side to claim that the crowd is intrinsically party of the other sides.
To that end, did this person make particular claims that others have to reveal who they are? If not, I'm not clear on how this was hypocritical. Are there inconsistencies in the crowd? Absolutely. But, they could be easily ascribed to the side you appear to be taking up, as well.
1) Your argument is whataboutism at its finest.
2) I'm not taking a side in favor of establishment journalism.
3) I'm showing that leaders of the anti-cancel-culture movement are themselves more than willing to intimidate, suppress and cancel the free speech of anyone who criticizes them.
4) Either you're in favor of unrestricted free speech for everyone, or you're not.
- you oppose "cancel culture";
- you're okay with white supremacists having access to audiences via platforms, if someone is willing to provide them with that.
Intimidation and suppression cannot be avoided; they go hand in hand with having any sort of rules.
For instance, the law against stealing uses intimidation and suppression: people are intimidated against stealing with the threat of jail sentences, and offenders are suppressed with actual imprisonment.
You can't have guarantees of freedom of speech written in law without the intimidation and suppression being written into the same law: there have to be negative consequences for a law breaker infringing on someone else's constitutionally granted freedom of speech, which are written and enforced, in order for the law to have meaning.
You've built a strawman model of a free speech advocate and are focusing on that. There may be some real life personalities who call themselves free speech advocates who resemble that strawman, but it's still a strawman.
From all I have seen, which I confess is not everything, The blogger was asking for basic courtesy to not be named such that their practice could stay easily separate.
For my part, I care more for unpersecuted speech. I don't like the active screaming culture, but I can't bring myself to feel that someone should be able to have consequence free speech, either. Such that most of this debate is around gotcha moments that are people yelling at someone to reach the crowd.
It gets muddy, because I absolutely believe we have to allow people to be wrong. But I don't think we should tolerate active lying and gas lighting with deceptive rhetorical tricks that punish courage in openly exploring the boundaries of your knowledge.
There was a time when that culture was not just dominant among elite circles but often revered by everyday people as something to live up to. As much as the 80s, 90s and on were seemingly about the decline of that power nexus, the institutions retained a lot of mystique and fascination.
That ideal of American life is in a tailspin. Norman Rockwell is more a punchline than a comfort to people. The nation's opinions aren't filtered through New York TV personalities any more.
The paper has weakend and that has allowed the social agreement about it to change. Before if you expressed a negative opinion about such a paper it was mostly washed away in a consistent wave of accolade. If disagreement always meets reproach it is hard for it to spread. Agreement is an innoculatiom against criticism.
This. Housing associations in the Northeast are getting completely out of control. Whatever happened to people trimming their own hedges in the style they see fit?
https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-rising-clamor-hadley/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
"The Agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers" v(._. )v
There is always "a side that benefits politically" from literally every statement. What is clear, irrespective of the side that benefits politically from stating it: the NYT is willing to use its influence to distort the political opinions of its readers, using innuendo and cherrypicked facts.
Those who look to the NYT (and The Washington Post) for accurate facts are literally (mis)guided into holding a specific political opinion, and defending that opinion even against facts that would rationally moderate that opinion.
I am as certain as stone that most people who read the NYT will forever associate Scott Alexander Siskind with white supremacy, conservatism, and anti-woke ideology because of that hit piece; for these people, this will be a fact. For them "Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from calling that article a 'hit piece'" is a statement that actually has meaning, and they will operate on that assumption. His Wikipedia page will be inundated with editors who insist that the NYT interpretation is "true" while Scott's blog is "opinion", and will dutifully and duly note these interpretations as facts onto his Wikipedia entry. For these people, reading and discussing Scott Alexander will be tantamount to supporting white supremacy, and so a whole encyclopedia of delightful, thoughtful inquiry will be foreclosed.
It is reprehensible, and I cannot in future take anyone who cites the NYT without caution as a serious person who actually understands their world.
It'd say towards the end of it. And yes, it is a very bad and concerning trend.
I want facts and information goddammit. Not a tearjerking drama to fill my inbox. I was already annoyed with the NYT before this incident. This just broke the camel's back. I unsubscribed.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
Then in the 2016 election the NYT had a front page spread implying major scandal regarding Clinton’s emails. This probably cost Clinton the election.
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/7/16747712/study-media-2016-elec...
I could come up with more examples but the times have a very clear slant, much more marked than say the washington post. The NYT produces good reporting too but they can produce some real garbage.
I could have sworn the times wrote a really bad article about islam in London but can’t find it.
I didn't realize James Comey worked at the Times.
Some of it is featured in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
"The film presents and illustrates Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model thesis that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination of the history of The New York Times' coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky says exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticize an ally of the elite."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent_(film)
You probably have heard of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" but in case not, it really explains a lot:
"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. ... Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect... you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page ... and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read"
That's just happened to you - you read a story you happened to already know the ground truth on and it struck you as obviously wrong. If you had an equivalent background in other stories, you'd be seeing this kind of falseness everywhere.
I have examples too numerous to cite of matters I knew well (eg: companies/industries I worked in, wealthy people I happened to know, countries/cultures/conflicts I studied or experienced first hand) that were covered completely backwards in the Times and other media.
Like: good employers characterized as horrible. Military conflict response characterized as provocation. Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.
A century ago, Times had whitewashed Stalin in a way that anyone who knew Russia would have instantly recognized as false. So I doubt the times was ever not "Fake News" it's just that it was so much harder to see it back then when your newspaper was how you knew anything.
BTW, if you're interested in the facts, this report should help:
2018 - 035 - PK-LQP Final Report http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/ntsc_aviation/baru/2018%20-%20...
If you want to argue with me, I'll just cite that report :-)
I actually want to explain what I meant here and what opened my eyes to this big-time.
Background: I am a dual (EU/US) citizen and care about both a lot. In 2016 I voted for Clinton and had the typical attitude towards Trump that you'd expect from a liberal New Yorker.
In early 2017, Trump was in the news for having said offensive/alienating things to our European allies. I was outraged and worried because this fit the narrative of him selling us out to Russia.
Until I chanced to watch the actual speech - what I heard was affirming and comforting for someone who cares about NATO and totally opposite of how it was presented.
The subsequent 4 years, this pattern repeated over and over - I'd watch the administration consistently make geopolitical moves against Russia and its allies (Iran being the crystalizing example) while the news kept telling me he was Putin's bitch.
I came out of this experience with a complete lack of belief in how things are presented in the media, which is a radical departure from my stance as a literate liberal New Yorker just 4 years prior.
The author quotes a NYT articles which quotes the author's piece on "Radicalizing the Romanceless." In it, the author writes this:
> And I made the horrible mistake of asking this question out loud, and that was how I learned about social justice.
Notice it's not "social justice warrior" or "SJW", the derisive terms for someone who speaks the lingo of widely-known, widely-respected collective grass-roots movements from history (or the present) for mere self-serving purposes: superficial fashion, personal advancement, petty vindictiveness, etc. No reasonable adult would read "SJW" and accidentally think the writer is talking about, say, Harriet Tubman.
Instead, the term used is social justice-- the original term-- as a nickname for the newer derisive term. (The author mentions "social justice movements" elsewhere in the same article.) I still won't confuse the author for referring to Harriet Tubman. But what about the Civil Rights movement from the 60s? The 1984 Nicaraguan Election? BLM?
Looks like we got ourselves an old-fashioned nameclashin'. Yeehaw!
Given a) social media in its current form has a greater incentive for derisive terms like SJW than its non-derisive referent, b) the derisive term includes the referent so that the referent can become a shorthand for the derision, and c) Americans have a shit understanding of history, the derision slowly but surely overtakes public consciousness of the original meaning on social media.
All that's needed is for a nation-state to find some nameclashin' efforts where the original term is included in the burgeoning derisive term... a little boost here and there... and voila, SJW will become a kind of "Bulverizing force" against the very idea of the efficacy of social movements from history. :)
What's so ironic here is that the author is both unwittingly nameclashin' while at the same time complaining about another case of nameclashin': "nice guy." Let's go through the steps:
1. Original term "nice guy" to mean "actually decent fellow who acts in good faith" for a given generation of speakers.
2. New term "nice guy" to mean a bad faith actor who claims by fiat they are decent as a means to manipulate others. Used by a newer generation of speakers.
3. boost of definition 2 by some entity/entities
4. Unnecessary disruption among these two generations who would otherwise understand each other just fine.
Nameclashin', baby!
Look for it at any participating locations where upvotes can be bought.
Edit: clarification
To dive deeper look at the criticisms of Murray and draw your on conclusion about the degree of sophistication of his assumptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Criticism_of_as...
Who is being intellectually dishonest here? NYT or Scott Alexander?
If you believe in a sophisticated explanation where a simple explanation exists, you're probably a believer of nonsense. Occam's razor, basically.
There are yet others which have "mined out" all the non-zero sum games in their industry (or choose not to pursue them), and so instead play zero-sum games. In these games, their gains come at the expense of their customers, the public or the environment. These tend to be monopolies because there is no recourse.
In categorizing some of these businesses as hostile actors, I am suggesting that they are predominantly playing zero-sum games. To cite some examples of businesses not playing zero-sum games, I need not look further than the small businesses in my local town.
Hopefully this provides a more nuanced answer you were rightfully asking about.
This gets at part of what I find irritating about the self-described Rationalist community: they talk about "free speech" when what they really want is unrestricted, consequence-less speech that allows them to guiltlessly harm certain people in the name of innovation.
Source: https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1360793868816556033
The arguments are also just bad. “Why don’t these free speech people take into account existing power structures?” But this is of course exactly what they are doing when they advocate for absolute free speech. How else do you account and adjust for the different levels of cultural power different groups, companies, whatever have in society?
A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.
Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.
https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1360787817459253251
This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.
[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally
The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.
Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?
It's probably something about the nature of reading on a screen, on a device that's capable of fifty zillion other things at the press of a button. When I'm reading a book, there's only the book. Less willpower is required to maintain my focus.
Long blog posts are much easier to read if I send them to my Kindle, but I rarely bother.
Edit: a word
More importantly, dense literary works exist but usually pop essay books are trying to prove a point. SSC essays usually try to make you forget you had a point, and instead go up a meta level in service of his extremely evenhanded let's-all-be-friends persona.
Which conflicts with the pretty bad comment section that always wants to sit around discussing culture war. (Which exists but is not worth quite as much time as they want to put into it.)
For example, he appears to genuinely believe that recycling is a scam that was dreamt up by the New York mafia and that it's basically failed and been given up on. Ironically his main source for this seems to be old New York Times opinion pieces by a contrarian/libertarian.
His own cite of his comment about how there's a thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort is another good example. Yeah he's edited it and seems to be going for "it's just a joke bro", but if you live in the kind of bubble where you casually condemn the whole of "feminism" as an evil then you've probably got a weirdly fascistic friend group and/or auudience.
Talking of which, he mentioned that all his smart friends were really concerned about authoritarianism stemming from campus politics, much more so than they worried about Trump. His smart friends are either very dumb, or again weirdly fascist.
I think I originally started reading his stuff because he had informed and humorous takedowns of some extremist libertarian/fascist ideas like neoreaction and dark enlightenment, but I guess to know that much about the topics probably is a reflection of the circles he's moving in.
Yeah it's great that he mostly disagrees with them, but he seems fairly zen about it, like it's just their opinion man. Not like actual evils, like feminists, recycling or political correctness on campus, which get him a bit more worked up.
If you want to make obviously dumb claims about fascists, you might get called out.
Starting one's argument from the consensus of the reality-based community may be "lazy", but starting to quibble over basic definitions in a much higher-level discussion is a pretty sure sign one is on the wrong side of whatever the argument is about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880
It is.
Also, how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
That’s not funny!
So you read and liked stuff that confirmed your likely ideological priors, but you disliked stuff that questioned them.
Do you actually expect a less-partial observer to agree that the fault here is with Scott rather than you?
How can you honestly not see the delicious irony of this statement?
I can't see any "irony" there ar all; IMO because there is none to see.
https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate...
hn discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128579
(seriously, don't miss on reading some of Scott's posts -- you will be disappointed by almost every piece of nonfiction you read afterwards)
It's definitely one of those cases of "If everyone thought a little more like X, Earth would be a much better place.", (let X=Scott Alexander) -- and notably it becomes quite clear how to think like he does (he just tells you!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
[1]: I also give you that, if this position weren't radical, then SSC might seem not so special -- a good psychiatry blog with interesting philosophical and rational thought.
If you speculated this might be the cause of the current calamity, I believe you're right. I don't think it's because we've suddenly changed and suddenly people have become polarized and dogmatic. I think culturally, and instinctively, we've been generally dogmatic for a really long time, with few individual exceptions. Most people want to quickly associate with a tribe, or dogmatic system, and blindly defend it without questioning its assumptions. It is extremely difficult to get an average person to change his mind on say his favored political party -- much more than you would expect from factual and philosophical basis alone (if you frame it as an abstract philosophical discussion, e.g. a trolley problem, I think it's easier to get people engaged and open to change their minds; an engineer that measures a poor performance of a system won't usually die on the hill of defending the system at all costs).
It's really counterintutive: by being shown a new point of view, by changing your view of how the world works (in description or aspiration), you are gaining, you are learning, it should be a good thing (for everyone) -- and yet we frequently over-attach to beliefs. I don't want to speculate too much, but it sometimes does make sense to defend yourself not to be convinced by anyone of anything (potentially with selfish or malicious intent), so this may be an over-correction (cultural and or evolutionary) trait. See the post "Epistemic Learned Helplessness"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
As for whether there's any legal basis to sue, it's doubtful. There isn't a whole lot that's factually inaccurate in the NYT piece. It's innuendo and words taken out of context. California has a "False Light" claim that might apply, but I doubt any court would take that up. At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.
I think, doing it with an explicit goal of misleading your audience in order to cause damage to a specific person should not be OK. I'm not saying censor it, but making NYT liable for any actual damage (like losing a job) + punitive damages would make sense.
The thing is, the woke mob is employing the same silencing tactics as Putin's Russia. You don't have resources to shut everyone up, so you semi-arbitrarily target random people and make sure the consequences are extremely harsh. A high-profile person like Scott can just walk away from it. An average rank-and-file person with a mortgage and at best couple of months in saving will keep their mouth shut and pretend to agree with whatever the party line is. Like literally, that's Russia now. Everyone is poor and miserable, but Putin's approval ratings are >70% because, well, losing everything you have is just not worth a random act of dissent.
That could be fairly good effect for a Substack writer who now strives to be independent.
Unless, of course, the end result is that Visa and MasterCard deplatform Substack.
I'm afraid there's not going to be a solution for what the American Media has become in the legal system.
None at all.
Professionally-trained journalists are very aware of libel concerns and are taught to stay within the law. The NYT's journalistic standards may have taken a nosedive in recent years but I'm sure they can still afford good enough lawyers to avoid getting sued over a hit piece, even one as sloppy as this.
Eventually, it dawned on them that having an obviously incompetent, incapable public editor is worse than having none at all, so they unceremoniously canned the position.
Stick to the non-environment science pieces. Admittedly, not much of the paper left, but whats left is rather good. Until those writers get fired.
I wish folks would rid themselves of the notion that the internet is anonymous or deletable. We'd all be much healthier by acknowledging the possibility that whatever you write here may be etched in stone. And if you become well known people may try to identify you. This isn't an OSC book it's the real world.
My point is that doing risky activities does not mean you cannot complain when things go wrong; you can both take responsability for your decision to partecipate in that risk and criticise the system for exposing partecipants to excessive risk.
In this case the criticism wasn't "the internet police should stop bad actors, but (hyperbole warning) "the most respected newspaper in the US should have higher standards than internet trolls"
> Some of the savvy people giving me advice suggested I fight back against this. [...] Say why it was necessary for my career to publish those papers under my real name.
> 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. [...]
> But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.
> No! There's no dignified way to answer any of these questions except "fuck you". Just don't kick me in the balls! It isn't rocket science! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
This is a strawman. I never said it was, and I don't think naming someone who generates a large following is immoral at all.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...
I don't expect NYT or any outlet to be free from bias and that doesn't mean I want any of them to disappear. I want them all to thrive.
What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
3. He now has a new blog.
Cool story, NYT.
[1]: https://archive.is/b1tyQ
Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.
>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?
Taking that line of reasoning further, doxxing someone who does not successfully maintain anonymity is also possible. Is it thus also a right?
If you want to remove that right you need to argue why it shouldn't exist
This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".
The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.
We are there again. The difference is that in the communist witch hunts at least there was a plausible external enemy.
This time it is all based on delusions, corporate global agendas and the need to stay relevant in one's bullshit job by "fighting" for some cause.
If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.
It makes sense to me that they have a default policy/norm against it, and weren't able to justify overriding it in this particular case, especially given that the name was already public information.
To be clear, I agree that there was no need to use his name to tell the story they were telling, and I think the world would have been a better place if they were able to. But I don't think it's only attributable to malice that they did.
NYT was happy to write about Virgil Texas of Chapo Trap House without revealing his real name [0].
Implying that their actual rule is: yes to pseudonymity for people with whom we politically sympathise, no to pseudonymity for people with whom we don't.
That kind of inconsistency isn't worthy of respect.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...
I don’t see any reason not to give Scott Alexander’s real name. The mere fact that he’d rather keep it a secret doesn’t strike me as a good reason.
What reason did they have not to give Virgil Texas' real name? The article I cited acknowledged it as a pseudonym, so they knew it wasn't his real name. I'm sure they either know what his real name is, or they could have easily found it out – indeed, the first page of a Google search for "Virgil Texas real name" contains the answer.
I think they should respect people's requests for pseudonymity unless there is a compelling public interest in not doing so – which means they wouldn't reveal either Virgil Texas or Scott Alexander's real names. Alternatively, if they don't agree they should default to respecting people's requests for pseudonymity, then they should be consistent in denying it, and deny it to Virgil Texas as well.
The only interesting question here is whether there’s some overriding reason why the NYT should collude with Scott Alexander in keeping his identity semi-secret (it’s not like it was actually secret anyway). There just isn’t any such reason.
I think the NYT is perfectly within its legal rights to publish bad journalism. If the NYT decided tomorrow to transform itself into the left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, that would be entirely legal, and so it should be.
But just as NYT has every right to publish what it wants, others have just as much a right to judge it negatively for doing so.
It is not legally obliged to be consistent, and I don't think it should be legally obliged to be consistent either. Giving the legal system the power to police journalism is very risky business, and I don't think the risk is worth it.
However, I personally think it is morally obliged to be consistent, and I will judge it negatively if it fails to be so – you may disagree, but maybe that's a sign that you and I have different moral values.
> The only interesting question here
Maybe the questions that interest you are different from the questions that interest me.
I notice that other than consistency (which is symmetrical and could equally argue that the NYT should have published the other person’s real name) you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret.
No you are not. But I think, if someone points out your inconsistency, a person (or group/organisation) really ought to have the honesty to be able to say "Yes, you are right, that's a fair criticism, I am being inconsistent, I will try to be more consistent in the future". And one way of being more consistent in the future would be to do the moral thing from now on, and obviously that would be morally superior to achieving consistency by choosing to consistently make the bad choice instead.
> you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret
He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable. Faced with a reasonable request from a person that their privacy be respected, I think the ethical thing to do is to respect their request, unless there is a strong public interest in disregarding it – which I don't think there is in this case. (And I'd add that if you are going to justify violations of the privacy of others by appeals to the public interest, you ought to clearly state your claim in doing so, which NYT has failed to do here.)
I was one of the many people who already knew Scott Alexander's real name. I don't know him personally, I'd just worked it out. But I wouldn't have posted that info publicly, because he asked people not to, and even though I don't know him personally, he seems like a decent guy and respecting his wishes in this matter was the moral thing to do.
>He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable.
His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
In the end the NYT has to come to its own evaluation of the merits of anyone's request for anonymity. The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it. So just because Scott asked and the request wasn't granted doesn't mean that something has gone wrong.
Cicero defined justice as giving each their due; not a definition original to him, Plato and Aristotle said more or less the same thing. Inconsistency is a form of injustice because you are giving to one different from what you give to another without a good reason. Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification – I give my own children hugs, I don't give hugs to the children of strangers, but that is not injust, since there is a good reason to justify that difference in treatment. Justice is a key part of ethics, indeed classically it is one of the four cardinal virtues.
> His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity
He had specific reasons due to his dual role as both blogger and psychiatrist, that do not apply to the average person. The profession of psychiatry has certain expectations about psychiatrists hiding their opinions from their patients which don't apply to most other professions. Those reasons don't apply to "almost everyone" because most people are not psychiatrists, and most other professions don't care anywhere near as much if clients find out your opinions on unrelated issues.
> It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.
But what is "fit to print"? Traditionally journalism justified itself as serving the public interest. What is the public interest in publishing Scott Alexander's real name? I don't see how there was one.
> The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it
Yes they can: If someone asks for pseudonymity, they should grant it unless there is a strong public interest in refusing it; and if they refuse it, they should be explicit about why they believe denying it serves the public interest in that particular case.
> Justice doesn't demand that you treat everyone the same, only that *for any difference in treatment there is a valid justification*
There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason. Take gifts as an example. It's inconsistent if I give one friend a big gift and another friend a small gift, but it's not unjust, as I'm under no obligation to give any of them gifts at all – and consistency in itself isn't an ethical constraint on behavior. I'm certainly not required to have a specific reason for spending $15 on Bob's gift and $100 on Mary's gift.
How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you.
> The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one.
As I said, they ought to default to granting requests for pseudonymity unless there is strong public interest not to, which there wasn't any in this case.
> There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treating people differently without a specific reason
The difference with your example of gifts, is that neither Bob nor Mary have any right to expect any particular gift. By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to. It is one thing to be inconsistent in gifts to friends, when we don't owe them anything in particular. It is another thing to be inconsistent in fulfilling one's obligations to others.
Sure, maybe I'm wrong. I'm open to evidence of this. As far as I can determine, psychiatrists are not required to keep their political views a secret.
>By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to.
But what are the implications of that for consistency? Consider that you're free to grant someone's request for privacy even if there isn't an overriding reason to do so or not to do so (just as you're free to give someone a gift without a reason). So just because the NYT honored one such request in the past doesn't entail that they're bound to honor all such requests in future. Again, the only interesting question is whether their reasons were good in each case.
I believe that journalists ought to honour all requests for pseudonymity, unless they believe there is a strong public interest in not doing so in any particular case, and if they believe there is such a strong public interest, they should be explicit about what they think it is, so others can judge their public interest claim. I think this is the decent thing to do, and sustains a culture of respecting people's privacy.
NYT did not follow that standard in the case of Scott Alexander.
I am wondering if these 'hit pieces' are more like sermons of The Church of the NYT. Deriding sinners and their evil ways. They are not meant to reflect an objective reality, but hyperbole to act as a cautionary tale with enough plausible sounding details to allow the prefrontal cortex to accept them. A modern This way there be dragons Or Reefer Madness. The NYT has found it's tithing flock and they are pandering all the way to the bank.
Scott's thermonuclear reaction seems justified now. But back then, some comments here convinced me that "They probably weren't going to write a hitpiece. Why would they do that?"
But we were wrong. So I'm wondering why we thought they'd do anything else.