It's just not helpful to call broad swathes of people "Marxist" to mean something other than specifically Communist in a fashion favored by Marx.
Similarly, folks these days call anything they don't like involving wealthy people "capitalism". It just confuses and escalates.
I think there's a good point about teleological approaches to politics and history that are increasingly popular. Marxism is a well known category of that. They tend to create unforgiving worldviews and attitudes. Admittedly words like teleological don't have the same rhetorical punch.
Some of the founders of BLM call themselves Marxist. They partner with pro-communist Chinese groups. And the organisation's platform has a Marxist history. The Black Panthers published a 10-point plan in 1966 which promoted a new form of racial Marxism, which was largely adopted by BLM and was posted as part of their syllabus on their website. They quietly toned it down a few months ago so it's not quite so obvious now.
BLM is a movement. Not an organization. The organization that owns blacklivesmatter.com is called BLM Global Network Foundation. Few people in the BLM movement pay any attention to the BLMGNF organization.
> Case in point: I was shadowbanned on HN for linking to a video where the BLM founder described BLM as a Marxist organization. It’s her own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM5zUwiCTzw
BLM the organization has diverged pretty drastically from BLM the movement. Linking them together without acknowledging that is a tad manipulative.
It's much like the slogan "defund the police" has been watered down from the original meaning. You can't hold those using the term today to the original intent.
Why do you believe "that's how communists act"? Did you learn that in third grade? Imagine if capitalism were tarred with the broad brush of the terrible things that some capitalists have done...
As a person who lived behind the iron curtain I can recommend you "Captive mind". It is non-fiction set of observations of an intellectual living in a communist regime.
Thank you for the recommendation. This seems like just the sort of book I would enjoy reading.
It's not news to anyone that life "behind the iron curtain" had its share of horrors. We anarchists know that life under any giant "national" government is similar, even if particular governments can be better or worse than others. Perhaps my questionable recent reading is to blame, but the first people I thought of when reading about "radical communist conspiracy" were the million Indonesians slaughtered by nationalist military and vigilantes with the firm planning and support of capitalist CIA in 1965 and 1966. These communists had "conspired" to feed the poor and support the existing democratically-elected government. So, blanket statements about communists (or capitalists, or I guess even monarchists), even if motivated by putative life experiences, don't hold much water with me.
I can't believe how we got into this situation - don't people feel shame if "their side" is smearing their opponents? Its this some lack of standards? Don't people sometimes wonder, "what if its us who are the baddies"? Am i missing something here?
> They might also be so far down the road of evildoing that every time they do ask themselves, they cling to any excuse that they’re not the baddies.
This describes nearly all of us. You can semi-honestly ask yourself if you are acting good, and mostly about non-essential stuff. But deep down it's just a rhetoric exercise. It is essentially impossible to question your fundamental beliefs. Also, it is easy to verify that this is the case: have you ever held contradictory fundamental beliefs? Not at the same time, of course, but along the years? Like, something that you thought was an immutable basis of your opinion when you were 18, and when you become 35 you think about it and it is obviously wrong. Do you think you were capable at 18 of asking that question to yourself? Do you think you are now capable to do so, regarding your current fundamental thoughts? I may lie and say that I do, but I'm actually incapable to really question my deep beliefs about justice and fairness (even if at some time in the past I held the opposite beliefs!).
I think I understand what you mean but I’d say the first step along the way to acquiring different fundamental beliefs is the step of questioning your current ones.
in my experience, the best way to improve your beliefs is to listen open-mindedly to the direct opposite beliefs, argued coherently by someone who believes them as strongly as you believe your own beliefs. You can either find a flaw in their reasoning, or you may end up synthesising their beliefs and yours into a greater whole.
Of course, but if you’re a landlord and raise prices until you think that perhaps you don’t need to raise them more even though you could, you don’t get any articles written about you.
Unless you’d go bragging about it yourself but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Dunno, accepting that you're a sinner and that you need to shape up runs throughout Christian theology. I'm not as familiar with other theological schools, but I believe Buddhism and Islam both recognize dysfunction, including outright baddiness, at least as part of the conversion or enlightenment process.
A lot of powerful people are only "religious" including Christian- when it is convinient. Ruthless business person Monday to Friday, compassionate individual over the weekend, back to ruthless business person during the week.
I was responding to "people never" do this kind of self reflection, which isn't true. Pointing out that there are a lot of hypocrites isn't really a counterpoint. Unless you're saying the problem is universal, which is more uncharitable than I think is warranted.
I certainly know people who have quit their jobs because of asking a question like this, and at that point (before they quit) they were part of "baddies" according to what they eventually figured out.
It's not very common, but it happens - and not necessarily after finding out something new about your organization, but also after finding out something new about yourself and your standards.
I think you have to work "we are baddies" into your entire system of thought.
The best example I can think of is Judeo-Christian thinking has the idea built in through the fall from paradise, Cain killing Abel, and broadly the repeated arc of humanity forming a covenant, breaking it, rinse, repeat; Christianity adds the whole story of Christ being crucified.
And I think that works, conceptually, because God can be good while people are awful. God is this immutable, objective "good" that we can't argue with or rewrite as we please.
Similarly, science can say that its theories are all wrong (bad), but the universe is right (good), so observations trump theory.
And a republic can work as a form of government because its premise is people are awful but reliably self-interested, so you can construct a structure of government that pits those different interests against each other and results in a big stalemate. There the "good" isn't very good, but self-interest is at least consistent, and the desire for a continuing political stalemate over a civil war is good enough.
So for an ideology to incorporate "we are baddies" into itself, it probably needs some external thing to be the "good" that it looks to, but that "good" has to be something that can't be easily rewritten to be whatever you want it to be.
Applejinx has been known to comment on Hacker News, an online forum where FAANGs are often defended and even celebrated, in spite of their destruction of privacy and democracy.
The Rationalist movement is deeply weird. It has curious connections with "race realists" and monarchists. It is deeply insular and rarely survives contact with mainstream scholarship. Eliezer Yudkowsky and other central figures are total crackpots. Any discussion of the movement that leaves those parts out is dishonest.
>"Aligned with race realists and monarchists (?)" Definitely not.
Definitely yes. Ever heard of Moldbug? The dude who claimed the rule of Leopold II (yes, that Leopold II) would be better than our current government?
I am not claiming that they are the same movement, but the Dark Enlightenment is closely related to the Rationalist movement. There is a great deal of cross-pollination.
The New York Times article is a great jumping-off point to read about this connection! It has several relevant links, including this one that explicitly discusses the monarchists:
Yes, I have heard of Moldbug. In fact, from one of the ginormous blog posts on SSC where Scott tore his beliefs to shreds.
You keep claiming that alt-right/monarchist movements have connections to rationalists, without any kind of proof or references to those connections. Which is exactly what the shitty NYT article did. Can you actually show how they are related, instead of just claiming they are?
Not everyone in Silicon Valley is a rationalist, but pretty much all Rationalists are in Silicon Valley. Some big names in Silicon Valley are central figures in the movement.
EDIT: To be clear, I don't know what the geographic distribution of Rationalists is. I also don't care. The fact of the matter is that the movement is irrelevant everywhere except Silicon Valley, and within Silicon Valley it is fairly powerful with several prominent adherents. This is spelled out in the New York Times article and its citations.
Sorry, the NYT is no longer an authoritative source on any topic. Please provide peer-reviewed research, published in at least 2 academic journals, with reproducible results. Thanks.
You dont know the difference between an opinion piece and scientifically gathered data, do you? And I'm stupid white trash by the way. You definitely have a shinier degree than me (you might want a refund by the way). Though I've always been on the NASA, JPL and general engineering side of tech. I like their irrational behavior to the rational Silicon Valley. Let that marinate.
Uh... okay. I really want to know how the hell you came to that conclusion. It's an area full of companies that have pr campaigns that boil down to "making the world a better place" while still being the most greed filled, ideological oppressive, and privacy violating companies in the country, let alone world.
Maybe you're right. Yes, they are the most rational. It is the academic and corporate elite's job to control and plunder the majority of civilization for their own benefit. So yea, best to go where the rest of them are doing it. Never mind, you're right. If you're a snake, best to go into the same snake pit as other snakes. Let that marinate.
I left the bay area for good after being burned repeatedly by folks whose social and moral beliefs aligned most closely with SSC’s grey tribe definition (as originally posted, not the summary from this article). While no doubt “not all Silicon Valley residents” applies, certainly after fifteen years of primacy of such beliefs my social circles, I’m sick of the grey tribe and will avoid living anywhere with a loud presence of it again.
I’m not interested in derailing the thread, so with apologies I must decline. I encourage you to read the original source material if you’d like to learn more.
it’s certainly your right to believe that, but I don’t envy you the frustration and alienation that such an approach can lead to with others who don’t feel the same way about conversation as you do. Your challenge does present an interesting question for other greys, though:
What process of data collection and rational evaluation did you use to test your hypothesis that it’s beneficial to your human development to disregard any story that doesn’t have the degree of supporting evidence you require?
I have a hypothesis that few are truly applying the principles of grey so deeply, as it’s quite a cognitive burden to do so, but to decry the question would contradict their principles to the core, exposing unconsidered cognitive dissonance that - if they’re rational enough - would force them to question their entire belief model to its very core. And so, instead, they will challenge the question itself, rather than apply their belief’s principles of rationality to their own beliefs.
Your datapoint in this matter would be a valuable contribution to my rational evaluation of this hypothesis, but of course I understand if you feel unable or unwilling to contribute. I shall continue developing it regardless, for any future encounters with greyfolk.
It would please me greatly to find that none are willing to respond to it, as that would perfectly contradict your belief using the honorable practices and methods of the greyfolk themselves. But it would please me most to find that they are able to reason and respond to such a question, and acknowledge their own irrationality if any is exposed, because it’s more important to me that they integrate rationality and human nature than it is that I be right.
(One caveat. The question you I expected you to have asked is why I would consider it appropriate to make such a statement without defending it further, and how I could possibly expect any outcome from that other than complete disregard by all readers. Your reply ignored that rational opportunity in favor of being dismissive. It’s a curious choice that conflicts with my read of you as a grey rationalist who’s set out to try and promote rationality at HN. If that is indeed your mission here, feedback duly noted so that you can improve the quality of your evangelism. If you aren’t a rationalist, I apologize for my misread and intend no insult by describing you as such, and I will take no offense if you simply disregard this entire reply.)
I'm not a rationalist. It does sound like you have been burned significantly based on the extensive comment that instead tries to attack this notion you have of them, rather than actually answer the question. The level of your trauma was not so apparent at the beginning, and I hope you work through it someday.
This is no fairer than saying any given Catholic must be a paedophile priest, any given Muslim must be a Salafi, or any given hippy must take LSD and sleep with strangers.
It's possible to be unfair without ever actually lying.
"Using the handle xirbeosbwo1234, <your name> posted on Hacker News, a forum where rich San Franciscan tech CEOs and thought leaders could talk about everything from the infamous Damore memo, to Trump advisor Peter Thiel, to race relations and the BLM movement. On an article from Reason magazine, a fiercely libertarian media outlet, he gleefully ventured opinions on monarchy and race realism. For him, the site was a space where the worst consequences he faced were downvotes and the disbelief of his equally pseudonymous peers."
"And <your name> criticized the Reason article, accused its author of dissembling, and called monarchists and race realists names."
The NYT article is perfectly fair. It states that Scott Alexander has sharply criticized neoreactionaries, which is true. It states that he has been a frequent critic of so-called SJWs and has written about possible genetic causes of some of the racial and sexual inequities we see in society, which is also true. Those things are part of the story. You are the one trying to leave them out.
Well, maybe not untrue, but are they meaningful? The rationalist movement ' has curious connections with "race realists" and monarchists.' What counts as a curious connection? You've cited one person, Moldbug. It 'rarely survives contact with mainstream scholarship'? Theses survive, or don't survive, contact with scholarship. I don't know what it means to say that a movement doesn't.
It would be reasonable to say that a movement may not be all that interested in being critically studied if they've got a conclusion they like and want to keep it. Staying "at the fringes" and claiming oppression is a good way to avoid having to answer critical scrutiny, or react to new evidence.
Once you start having scholars and other official positions in the hierarchy of discussion, you can't just ignore what you don't like any more.
Would you considering forming an opinion about the rationalists using more than just NYTimes as a single source? I assumed its established now that they aren't unbiased in this matter...
I am a long-time reader of Slate Star Codex and was a self-described Rationalist in my teenage years. I am still active in effective altruism circles.
I consider the article entirely fair. In fact, you will see that pretty much all I am doing in this thread is telling people to read the original article. Its treatment of SSC is evenhanded and, at times, downright glowing. It says everything I want to say more eloquently than I am able.
> In fact, you will see that pretty much all I am doing in this thread is telling people to read the original article.
That is only half the truth - you also called people monarchists and crackpots. You got flagged for doing that, rightly so.
You could bring your point across much better if you were to leave out the name-calling and pejorative language.
Cade Metz would benefit from this advice as well.
Oh, cut the crap. The whole Reason article is accusing Metz of acting in bad faith, calling his writing a "lazy hit piece that actively misleads readers", etc.
I called the Reason article a misrepresentation and I called Eliezer Yudkowsky a crackpot. If you're going to criticize me for saying that, then why are you leaving the Reason article alone? Cade Metz did not engage in name-calling and didn't use any pejorative language, so why are you criticizing him?
Am I ineffective for saying that? Maybe. But I'm also right. I don't particularly mind if you dislike my tone.
Also, "monarchist" isn't an insult. It's the word we use for people who think we should have a king. People like the neoreactionaries who have a strange tendency to pop up in rationalist circles.
A pejorative is a phrasing with negative connotations. Picked from the first paragraphs:
> It was also the epicenter of a community ...
An epicenter is the focus of a earthquake, which is associated with causing great damage and loss of life. Comparing a community to such an catastrophic event is a negative connotation. Is that not a pejorative in your eyes? Even if its not, its a way of making readers disliking said community without factual basis, which is not a very honest thing.
I will stop arguing here. If your view is that you and Cade Metz do not use pejorative language, then there is no common ground between us.
>If your view is that you and Cade Metz do not use pejorative language
I use pejorative language and make no apology for it. You seem to dislike pejorative language but seem to make an exception for the pejoratives in the Reason article.
Cade Metz did not use any pejoratives. Everything he wrote was correct and presented in context. His coverage of SSC varied between measured and glowing. I do even vaguely understand how someone could take it as an attack. It is fair in its coverage of Scott Alexander and far kinder to the Rationalists than they deserve.
Could you shed some light on what is wrong with being a monarchist? I mean there are still a lot of countries on the World that are monarchies: Sweden, UK, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium to name a few largest European monarchies.
Those countries does not seem to be hostile to their citizens (or anyone else for that matter) and are considered to be quite civilized?
Ah yes, Bhutan. That hellish nation where they have had one death from covid. Where the government is more concerned with happiness than with sales. Where education is free. The only nation that is carbon-negative. What terrible lives they suffer through.
Note to morons: I don't say this because I support monarchy or any authoritarianism. It's just... let's not exemplify the "clueless American" trope.
All of those countries only feature monarchies as vestiges of the feudal era. All of them have elections and the elected government is what actually runs those countries.
A real monarchy would be something like Saudi Arabia.
>The Rationalist movement is deeply weird. It has curious connections with "race realists" and monarchists.
Yes, the rationalist movement is weird, and in some ways, bad. But Scott Alexander didn't start the rationalist movement and doesn't control it. Holding him responsible for what other people post on his website (that he makes no money from), while Twitter, Reddit, Facebook et al continue to enjoy the complicity of the media in the equally awful discourse there, is just a case of stomping on the little guy because you can.
Insofar as the NYT declared SSC to be "a window into the Silicon Valley psyche", there's a much more obvious candidate forum for that, and you're posting on it.
This is why I wonder about the self-described "HN critics". If they really didn't like HN and wanted to harm it, it would be no trouble to hook a producer or editor at some news media firm on some ridiculous misinterpretation of any number of things said on HN on a regular basis. They could simultaneously leak something misleading to AOC and Josh Hawley to get both sides of the aisle in Congress wound up. Would NYT be frightened by actual SV connections?
This is actually a prescient point. We're one node away from the rationalist community (as SSC and this article have had huge threads the past couple weeks). Given NYT's blatant guilty-by-association of the rationalist community, and any competence from them would understand that HN has a far bigger impact on SV than the rationalists, I think we're not too far away from a huge slandering NYT piece like this for HN.
It's kinda funny that in his rush to explain why the NYT article is a hit piece, the author has brought his own ideological froth to the forefront. I found a lot of Scott's articles about medicine and psychology to be great, and some of his philosophical musings to be interesting as well. (something that the NYY piece mentions in the first paragraph) But all of the rationalists I have met in life were personally odious, somehow taking that ideology to the logical conclusion that libertarianism was not only the correct way to structure society, but also that disagreeing with it was a moral or intellectual failing. Which, sure, is something that a lot of ideologues would say... but the fact that they confidently claimed to have derived that ideology from first principles made any kind of discussion impossible. :(
(I actually agree with Scott's request to remain anonymous though. I guess politics are complex.)
Really? I feel like having an opinion based on reasoning from first principles should make discussion easier, because you can try and challenge any element in that explicit chain of reasoning. On the other hand, if someone adheres to ideology X because they feel like it's right, I wouldn't know where to start.
The problem is their opinion often aren't actually based on first principles. Humans have a strong tendency to form an opinion for various emotional and social reasons, and then build up a set of justifications ex post facto, often without realizing it. The more intelligent you are the easier it is to do subconsciously and it's often harder for your ego to admit the strong role your id played.
That's the dream :) but unfortunately it is quite difficult in practice, even when you are aware it is a potential issue. It seemed to make them more able to have nuanced discussions about some things, but much much more stubborn in the things they were confidently wrong about.
This requires the person to be self-aware to a significant degree. That is a completely different skill from logical thinking.
Logical thinking is one tool for developing self-awareness but not a necessary one.
For myself, I’m bipolar. Self-awareness is critical to keeping myself grounded and processing extreme emotions safely. Many people have told me I am an expert at this and I still fall into this trap again and again. I just eventually realize it.
I know many smart people who are blind or willfully ignorant of their own assumptions. This includes a number of vocal advocates of theology, philosophy, and rationality.
It's more that intelligent people are still human, and human beings are not good at being clear-headed when they feel that their identity is being attacked (ego protection). If you identify as "rational" or "intelligent" that makes you vulnerable to defensive behaviors to defend your self-perception.
> The problem is their opinion often aren't actually based on first principles. Humans have a strong tendency to form an opinion for various emotional and social reasons, and then build up a set of justifications ex post facto, often without realizing it. The more intelligent you are the easier it is to do subconsciously and it's often harder for your ego to admit the strong role your id played.
A more pithy/cheeky way of saying that would be the "Rationalists" are really Rationalizers.
I do not see much of rationalism in this article or in SCC for that matter, at least in the random samples I read.
Personally, I dislike rationalism /utilitarianism and still enjoy reading an occasional SSC article.
And this is the most glaring fault of the NYT. They just assume that Silicon Valley types take everything written on SCC as gospel. Which is understandable, since the totalitarian left enforces all-or-nothing views and the NYT is projecting their own shortcomings on Silicon Valley.
But Silicon Valley just wants to return to the free exchange of ideas of the Usenet age.
I enjoy SSC, thought that unmasking Scott was Not Cool, and agree with many that the NYT article crosses several lines of misrepresentation. But in the "politics are complex" side, I'm curious to hear what others think of this exchange linked in the article: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6rv2ib/did_...
On its surface, this reads that Scott supports D'amore's memo but doesn't want to be associated with it. Is there more context? In general, anybody advising others to hide their beliefs in order to be more persuasive should expect to invite speculation about what their own true intents are.
I've no clue whether Scott has turned into a misogynist over the past few years. (I think it unlikely, but theoretically possible.) I would assume, though, that he assumes that other people who say things that aren't inconsistent with his views while sounding like they agree with him are in agreement with him.
This is usually a reasonable heuristic, but it falls over when one person thinks “childhood malnutrition harms brain development, reducing intelligence, so improving the diet of poor children is urgent”⁰ and somebody else thinks “rich people are rich because they've earned their wealth because they're genetically really intelligent; it's social Darwinism”, but the only things the two are saying to each other are things like “poor people / members of minority ethnic groups score lower on average on IQ tests¹”.
---
⁰: I've seen Scott make basically this argument – though it was probably about intestinal worms rather than nutrition.
¹: Since I brought this up, I'm going to use the opportunity to suggest that Scott has, historically, put too much credence on IQ tests as a proxy for intelligence. I was basically tutored to be able to do well in IQ tests, as a result of my background, and I've never seen him take things like that into account – despite the decades of academic research backing up my anecdote (IQ tests are culturally-specific).
I think the most you can infer from that exchange is that scott generally supports damore's questioning of the orthodoxy, but doesn't necessarily agree with the content of the memo itself.
> But all of the rationalists I have met […] were […] taking that ideology to the logical conclusion that […] disagreeing with [libertarianism] was a moral or intellectual failing.
There are a lot of ideologies calling themselves rationalism, many of which feed into each other. Scott Alexander has basically invented his own, and it changes significantly over any given two-year period (as expected for somebody continuing to learn about the world); the best way (imo) to appreciate his articles is to read them, think about them and assume that around half of each is wrong (or, if you disagree with the core ideas of an article, which happens to me on occasion, that around half is right).
I found his politics around libertarianism to be a little ideologically incoherent, since he (correctly in my view) rejects the idea of labor/capital negotiations without unions to be fair and other things espoused in that essay. But then the archipelago and atomic communitarism (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...) piece was accidentally an argument that stumbled in some of the same ways libertarianism does.
In the end, I don't think it's damning to have an incoherent ideology (almost everyone, myself included, seems to) and on the whole I think that his blog is interesting and has high upside. (There is a lot of other stuff that I find kinda repulsive tbh.) But it seems worth examining that ideology when it seems to have a lot of billionaires in its orbit, and especially when those people are going to end up shaping the future of life in the US in a big way. (Especially given that the world that they have such a large hand in creating doesn't seem to be working super well for a lot of people.)
He literally wrote an essay generalising “capitalism is bad”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/. If a lot of billionaires read Slate Star Codex and took it to heart, he's one of the best billionaire-activists around. (Of course, it doesn't look like many did, and activism-at-billionaires is often considered not worth an activist's time.)
> But all of the rationalists I have met in life were personally odious
I think it is more likely that you mean this about people who build their identity around rationalism. Most people with a single dominant interest are tedious in one way or another.
The vast majority of the time you see someone say they're making an argument "from first principles," they are insufferable human beings. Whether the end argument is wrong or not isn't even entirely relevant.
Libertarianism (and especially American libertarianism) is not the logical conclusion of rationalism in the minds of many rationalists. Rationalism is more about analyzing bias and using reason to the greatest extent possible than promulgating any particular political view. In fact, in this comment on LW[1] which I recently came across, Scott appears to compare using rationalist ideas to win specific political arguments to the dark side. Also, take, for example, the CFAR[2], where the workshops cover:
- How to combine conflicting intuitions from multiple sources, including your gut reactions, your analytic reasoning, and of course the opinions of others;
- The structure of your own goals and motivations;
- How to learn new skills faster
So perhaps if the only rationalists you've met are haughty libertarians, you've gotten unlucky.
I will say that the rationalist community tends to be liberal on social views, but that's probably because the community tends to be utilitarian, and it's hard to justify, for example, banning homosexuality in a utilitarian framework.
In their relation with blogs and social media, traditional press is at the "fight" stage of the three-stage Ghandi progression "first they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win". Can't wait for stage three and good riddance, especially seeing how much they are willing to fight dirty and compromise their supposed principles.
I like the Ghandi philosophy but it does not always work out that way. I have seen a couple movements get to step 2 then either fail or give up, Occupy Wallstreet and Anon vs Scientology both come to mind.
There is another progression that accurately describes click-bate news:
1. Cause disagreements and strife
2. ???
3. Profit!
The debate about the contents of the blog and ideologies etc. is complex. But here's a simple question -
Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? It's just not a nice thing to do, simple as that. It may be easy to find if you go looking, but most people don't have any reason to go looking, so the pen name serves its purpose of providing anonymity. The NYT author makes it seem as if publishing the guys real name in a widely read paper is the same as it being googleable to someone who looks. Its a COMPLETELY different level of exposure.
The other key point is that doxxing someone who has been writing anonymously for decades is very different than believing that people should not have the right to write anonymously. Scott began writing under a pseudonym, under the expectation that it would stay anonymous - and so the space of things he said was much more controversial than what it would have been if he expected to be doxxed one day. NYT shows up to the world of blogs 10 years later, knowing nothing and starts pulling the rug out from under people who began writing in a different world, under completely different norms. Its just a shitty, shitty thing to do.
> I woke up the next morning to a torrent of online abuse, as did my editor, who was named in the farewell note. My address and phone number were shared by the blog’s readers on Twitter. Protecting the identity of the man behind Slate Star Codex had turned into a cause among the Rationalists.
One paragraph after detailing why Scott requested his name to be kept out, the reporter complains about the online abuse he received, which could have easily been prevented by not using real names.
> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to?
I thought the NYT held off publishing the original article, and although the article published in the last week did name him, this was only after Scott relaunched his blog under his real name?
I know they were threatening to reveal his name prior to this, but in the end Scott revealed his own identity first.
Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to?
The “why” is easy. The first part of this article makes the reason quite clear. This reporter believed that Scott’s site was giving safe harbor to “white supremacists” while making it hard for “social justice warriors’” voices to be heard [1].
So the reason he was doxxed is in keeping with a recent trend in the media: punish perceived right-leaning people for their views. Drag them out in the public square, and get them fired or at least ensure that their life will never be the same. It’s Mccarthyism, 2021 edition.
Welcome to the newly “united” America.
[1] The part of the article I am referring to is this: “...The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were "social justice warriors.". The author knew that the left-leaning readers of the NYT would be upset over this, and would want to know whom the person behind such a community was so that cancel culture could carry out its duties.
Because Scott is the most talented writer of the 21st century (so far, anyway) and he’s _not playing their game_. He’s not beholden to a publisher, an editor, or advertising cartels, and he’s demonstrating that their power is more tenuous than they’d like to believe.
Note that Dr. Friedman has explicitly said that the NYTimes article includes fabricated "quotes" that he never actually said. IIRC, Scott Aaronson's Shtetl-Optimized blog talks about this.
I read the blog you mentioned and saw no mention of fabricated quotes. In fact Aaronson has blogged twice. The first time he said he words to the effect of: I talked to Metz extensively and told everyone else to, I didn't like the article but I'll keep talking to journalists as much as they want because the NYT is the "blockchain of civilisation". In the second he says he read the comments on his first blog post and changed his mind.
I'm going to point out that McCarthy was a fierce right-winger, and the "punish people for wrongthink" mentality has been almost exclusively a right-wing thing until very recently. "Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox. Personally, I don't think "only we're allowed to cancel people" is a good enough reason to denounce this article.
A better argument would be that Scott isn't the right-winger the article writer thinks they are, and that the article is poorly researched. At worst, I'd say he's probably a little too dismissive of privilege narratives, but that doesn't make him a white supremacist or a neo-fascist. Of course, that doesn't make an article, and we gotta keep the content grill sizzling, so here's some tenuous connections to make an interesting story to meet quotas.
McCarthy was fiercely anti-communist, but so were most other people at that time. He became famous for alleging large scale infiltration of the US government by communist agents. He couldn't prove it, there are some historians who believe McCarthy was largely correct about the scale of the Soviet activity in the US government. They argue he was effectively 'cancelled' as a consequence of being dangerously correct, and that declassified decrypts released by the NSA decades later prove it. An example of this argument is:
"Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox
Can you give some examples. At least from the perspective of a British person, I cannot recall right wing people ever engaging in "cancel culture" during my life time. Are you thinking of religious people in the USA?
Then you're definitely old enough to remember them burning nikes and keurigs. How about their hatred of Starbucks for being inclusive with holiday greetings?
This had absolutely nothing to do with the French population of North America. I'd ask if you were trying to have a good faith discussion, but the fact that you pretended the original comment was actually talking about cancelling potatoes answers that.
McCarthy was exactly the example of right-wing cancel culture I was going to use. It's extremely prominent; his explicit goal was to ruin the careers of people too left-wing for him, and it was successful for at least a time. Him being correct about there being lots of left-wingers around doesn't mean he isn't engaging in cancel culture. Most of the things left-wingers bring up to cancel people are entirely factual.
For the record, the rest of my examples here are going to be extremely Amerocentric, too. I'm sure if I spent an hour I could find an example of Tories doing something cancel-y, but I'm more familiar with American politics. So you could argue that Tories specifically haven't cancelled anyone, but I'm not so sure that's the case. Cancelling is not "left wingers taking down people who aren't as left wing as them", it's what happens when the whole of society decides to disapprove of someone due to their actions. Everybody has some kind of button to press, some ideology they will find distasteful enough as to refuse to associate with people who believe in it.
A good example today of right-wing cancel culture would be the far-right primarying moderate Republicans. If you are a Republican politician and you don't think Donald Trump should forcibly lead a military coup to retake America, your days in politics are limited. The party was lost to right-wing radicals decades ago, and they don't tolerate anyone outside their little black hole on the political compass. Hell, state GOP branches are already censuring the seven or so Republicans that voted to convict Trump. The only difference is that the cancelling here is limited to inter-party struggles rather than breaking out into the wider culture.
There's also that time right-wingers tricked Disney into firing James Gunn over vile things he tweeted decades ago. Cancel culture doesn't need to be ideologically consistent. We usually think of it as left-wingers getting angry about right-wingers and purging them; but it can also be right-wingers getting angry about left-wingers, and then making up a story to sick their lefty friends on them. All you need for cancel culture is someone who wants someone else socially gone, and another group of people willing to disassociate with certain ideologies.
Furthermore, to actually fight cancel culture, you either need to compromise on free speech and prohibit people from revealing someone's political ideology; or you need to compromise on freedom of association and make it illegal to disassociate from someone over their political ideology. I'm not sure either of those changes are actually beneficial.
There's also that time right-wingers tricked Disney into firing James Gunn over vile things he tweeted decades ago.
Super curious what the “trick” is that you’re referring to. My understanding is that he did indeed write these things and publish them on his Twitter feed. Simply pointing that out isn’t a “trick,” unless I have missed something about the story.
I'm going to point out that McCarthy was a fierce right-winger, and the "punish people for wrongthink" mentality has been almost exclusively a right-wing thing until very recently
Saying that both sides have engaged in it does not make it the correct thing to do. It's a disgusting thing for people to engage in, regardless of the political affiliation of the people doing it. That said, I have seen countless examples of cancel culture in action coming from the left, and comparatively few from the right. Even Obama has decried the left's zealousness to cancel people [1]. When Obama calls you too woke, you're probably too woke.
As to the rest of your response, I was using the general idea of mccarthyism. The dictionary defines it as "a campaign or practice that endorses the use of unfair allegations and investigations". I think that definition squarely fits what happened here.
This is an attempt to bully competition (both in ideology and in business) off the internet by putting their personal well-being in danger.
This kind of defamation+doxxing is just utterly despicable. Journalists who repeatedly pull this kind of stunt should be fired.
And setting aside how this type of thing affects the individual victim, consider how it harms journalism as a whole, by painting journalists as untrustworthy immoral backstabbing asshats.
Put bluntly: when populists like trump call the media liars, the saddest part is that they're not wrong.
What’s sad is that most people, whether on the left or right, are decent, hardworking people that would never set out to so violently steal someone’s privacy like this. There are perfectly rational reasons for people to lean either left or right.
But members of the media are stoking the fires of division to satisfy their lust for money and attention. It’s wrong, and I hope that everyone can see these actions for what they are. The NYT and the reporter that wrote the article should be roundly criticized by both sides for what they did here. They should be canceled.
Indeed. Most discussions I've had other than on reddit and similar platforms have tended to be very pleasant and rational. It is possible to discuss something with someone who holds completely different opinions on the topic in such a way that everyone walks out of the discussion understanding it a bit better than before.
How this flips around into the mirror-world that is social media, is beyond my understanding. Either people who discuss on large platforms and those that do it offline or in more personal online communities are two distinct groups of people with little overlap, or some magic switch just flips in peoples heads when they put their hands on a keyboard.
The media are ultimately just following the market: outrage sells, so they deliver. Sure, we can blame them for abusing their power in cases like these, but more importantly, we should ask the question how they ended up in a position where everyone just blindly trusts what they read in a newspaper.
I think a discussion platform is a complicated dynamic system. Social media has various algorithms and even layout decisions (how comments are sorted) that promotes stuff that gets engagement. Then they have a mess of filters that tries to limit some of the worst behavior.
I suspect what makes it really hard to understand is there's a training effect as users subconciously learn what things get more attention, and what attention they see as favorable is a moving target depending on their emotional state.
So you really have no idea what changing the kind of attention they get will do, and even if you did, when you try to make changes to see what happens, you have to wait on the timescale of human learning to see what the result of those changes are; how the dynamic is settling into a new stable state.
Ironically, they are proving the point of his comment. There is a pretty large group of people here that will downvote anything that is critical of actions taken by the left, even when that criticism is fully justified. The NYT doxxes people that they believe disagree with them...HN just downvotes them into oblivion. This comment, and likely yours, will also get many downvotes.
You are wrong here, at least in my case. I feel very strongly that the NYT was wrong to dox Scott Alexander, and I cancelled my subscription over it. But I also downvoted the comment you are referring to, because I think it lowers the quality of the discussion and even weakens the argument against the NYT. See my other comment nearby for more explanation.
Except my comment had nothing to do with downvoting on HN, nor was it a general attack of "the left" (fuck, I am on the left myself) so it isn't really proving anything.
Unless, of course, this the NYT staff raiding HN downvoting comments, but something tells me that's neither the case nor what you're talking about.
This is an attempt to bully competition (both in ideology...
This is what I was referring to. The NYT used doxxing to bully him because of how they perceived his views. Much of HN uses downvotes to bully and silence anything that criticizes the left.
Upvoting/downvoting is not supposed to be used to express agreement/disagreement. It's about whether the comment contributes to the discussion. The comment from DarkWiiPlayer was very weak, especially in contrast to the original comment that it's replying to. It actually weakens the case against the NYT, by making unprovable assertions about their motives. That sort of emotional argument is very unlikely to convert anyone.
In contrast, the original comment (@zaptheimpaler) convincingly argues that the NYT has made a moral error in this case, regardless of where you stand on the ideological issues clouding it. It makes a strong argument by sticking to the facts, carefully avoiding appeals to emotion or bundled claims that could undermine the central point. That is what makes it such a good argument, and it's probably why it's the most upvoted comment here.
> Upvoting/downvoting is not supposed to be used to express agreement/disagreement
It is used that way by many people though. Downvoting out of disagreement is certainly something that happens on the internet.
> The comment from DarkWiiPlayer was very weak
Yes, the original comment already did a good job at presenting the case against the NYT. That wasn't really my intention.
> by making unprovable assertions about their motives
Well, yes, because it is simply impossible to make any provable assertion about anybodies motives. Unless you'd prefer judging actions without consideration for the actors motives (in which case there's no meaningful distinction between murder and a deadly accident), there will always be some degree of speculation about intent. In this case, there is two options: Either the NYT is utterly incompetent at basic text comprehension, or they deliberately lied about the opinions expressed on several blog posts. Assuming the NYT wouldn't have made it to where they are if they were so incompetent, there's only one possible conclusion: They intentionally spread lies with the goal of retaliatory defamation against a blogger that didn't dance to their music.
> It actually weakens the case against the NYT
Did I refute any of the arguments of the original comment? If not, then I couldn't possibly have weakened the case.
---
And what's more, your criticism only really addresses the first sentence in my comment.
The second sentence is just a moral judgement of the events. I shouldn't have to point out that this is my personal opinion, as an intelligent reader should just understand that implication.
My third point is: this behaviour ruins the reputation of journalism as a whole. I do consider the reasoning for this thought trivial. If you think it is fallacious, please point out why this is.
My last sentence, again, is simple because it's trivial. Trump is known to repeatedly call media liars on camera. The NYT article is misleading at best, and most would probably agree that it lied by omission in on several occasions. I also imply that I generally don't agree with these populists, hence the "the saddest part". That's two provable factual statements and one completely subjective opinion.
I don't think there's anything unreasonable about your feelings towards the NYT, and maybe if you'd expressed them in a standalone comment it might not have been downvoted. It's just you wrote your comment as a reply starting with "No," which could be taken as disagreeing with @zaptheimpaler's comment. And you seemed to be mainly calling for more outrage. The dispassionate approach was exactly what people liked about the @zaptheimpaler's comment, so your reply just seemed to miss the point. I don't know for sure, but that's my guess why some people downvoted your reply.
It's possible that the newspaper didn't understand what a web search entails.
Yes, if you search for the name of the blog you can find his personal name, but the issue is that if you searched for the personal name you wouldn't find the blog. A search of term to result is not symmetric if reversed.
The wish was that by publishing the name it connected the name to the blog, even though previously the blog was connected to the name. Thats not the same thing and it requires a bit of effort to understand.
For example, if you use the name of one of my online identities it could probably bring up a wiki page saying that I went to the web 2.0 conference a decade ago, but if you searched for the web 2.0 conference you would never find that identity in the search results.
Newspapers are in the business of publishing information. Part of that are the names of people involved in stories, who don’t get veto power unless they are clearly just passive “victims”.
Specifically, (potential) patients of Alexander might have a legitimate interest in knowing about his writing. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with being treated by him. But therapy is among the most sensitive subject, and I could easily see people having a legitimate interest in being given the opportunity to decide for themselves.
Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility.
After all, if it's important to an individual's therapy, it's even more important for government policy (foreign or domestic) affecting the lives and futures of millions of people.
> Good point. I look forward to a time where newspapers stop using anonymous sources and publish their names to let people decide on their credibility.
Boy, is that a false equivalency. You do realize that anonymizing a source is part of a bargain for the journalist to get access to information they wouldn't otherwise have had access to, often information the source isn't authorized to disclose (and thus could face punishment for disclosing it)?
It's also worth nothing that, in the real world, revealing someone's real name isn't the high crime of "doxxing," rather it's normal and expected. Journalists aren't typically creatures of pseudonymous web forums, and it's a category error to expect them to abide by the peculiar norms of them.
> It's also worth nothing that, in the real world, revealing someone's real name isn't the high crime of "doxxing," rather it's normal and expected. Journalists aren't typically creatures of pseudonymous web forums, and it's a category error to expect them to abide by the peculiar norms of them.
When i go to a foreign land, or even someone else's home, i try to abide by the rules and norms of the locals there, regardless of whether they are norms in my land or not. Its a basic part of being a guest.
I don't care if journalists typically use pseudonyms or not, its just basic human decency to respect the norms of a space you're a guest in. I don't see much reason why journalists should get a free pass on doxxing in a forum where pseudonomity/anonymity has been the norm for decades.
Even more so, the journo explicitly asked for consent to publish his name, didn't get it, and published it anyways. Like just doing whatever you like without the subjects consent is understandable only in a few rare cases of serious crime, definitely not for the modern "crime" of wrongthink on the internet.
> How will this help them make a choice if they don’t also have access to the writings of other therapists they might consider?
Isn't it obvious? To put it in mathy terms: if I have to choose from ten things, and I dislike 2. my chance of picking something I dislike is 0.2, if I can disqualify one of the disliked things up front, my chance of picking the remaining disliked thing is 0.11 (i.e. a big improvement).
> if I have to choose from ten things, and I dislike 2
What’s obvious is that 10, and 2 are not something you know in advance.
More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.
More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.
> More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.
I don't but you're moving the goalposts and asking a different question. I was talking about personal preferences (e.g. like/dislike), and you're talking about "efficacy as a therapist."
I'm also getting a vibe of a kind weird inversion from you, where it's the therapist's right to see a particular patient unless that patient can prove with a "model" that the therapist won't work for them.
> I don't but you're moving the goalposts and asking a different question. I was talking about personal preferences (e.g. like/dislike), and you're talking about "efficacy as a therapist."
No. You are advancing the position that the interests of people selecting therapists are served by newspapers publishing articles about their writings.
I think that if you ask people whether they would prefer a more effective therapist over a less effective one, most people would say they would prefer the more effective one.
Effectiveness as a therapist is part of how people form preference of therapists. Excluding it is arbitrary.
Nowhere do I suggest anything about therapists having any right to see any particular client. That idea is competely made up by you.
The position of Scott Alexander seems to be very, very different - entirely opposite from "patients of Alexander might have a legitimate interest in knowing about his writing." the general practice seems to be that it's imperative that patients do not know about his writing, as that affects the therapy in a negative manner. If a potential patient reads Scott Alexander's personal blog and knows who he is, then Scott would be ethically prohibited from taking them on, they are not a potential patient any more; if a current patient does the same, they may have to terminate the relationship and transfer to a different therapist solely because of that. It was also clearly stated that patients reading his public blog and knowing who he is is incompatible with the employment at his previous clinic - if he'd be outed, he'd be fired and all the patients would suddenly have to find a different therapist, which isn't good for the stability of their treatment.
A therapist is supposed to be a blank slate to project what is needed for therapy. The patient is not supposed to know whether the therapist is married or not or divorced, because that may affect (not in a good way) how the patient handles revealing their relationship trauma - the therapist should either appear neutral (to freely allow the patient to project whatever they want to project) or be free to create whatever impression about himself works best for the therapy. It would be near-taboo for a therapist to have a family picture in the room visible to the patient, and in the exact same manner the patient reading about therapist's personal life can only hurt therapy.
The patient should not know the therapists political opinions or moral opinions about various ethical dilemmas, as that may hurt the therapy as it involves the patients' current personal stresses. One patient might need the therapist to show agreement to their viewpoint in order to open up more, another patient might need the therapist to confront and dispute the same viewpoint. The therapist must not be taking sides based on their personal beliefs, they should project whatever viewpoint is needed for the particular patient at this moment. For this reason, various symbols of political or advocacy affiliation are near-taboo, all the therapist profiles are explicitly neutral, and (again) a patient reading their therapists personal blog is bad for the effectiveness of their therapy. A patient isn't supposed to choose a therapist based on their political opinions anyway, if the therapist lets out their politics in therapy, then they have failed at their job and the patient should get a better therapist no matter if they liked those politics or not.
Patients have a legitimate interest in knowing the professional qualifications and professional reputation of the therapist, but all the personal life and personal opinions of the therapist are out of bounds as it disturbs the relationship with the therapist - the patient has a right to read that, but it would force an ethical doctor to "fire" that patient. As far as I understand, currently Scott Alexander has to filter potential patients based on whether they read his blog as it's not anonymous anymore, but that's manageable as he now has a separate practice. But if indeed all his patients would have a "legitimate interest" in reading that and would actually do so, then he would have to stop blogging about pretty much everything meaningful because that would be incompatible with treating patients properly.
Searching the web for his real name would reveal his pseudonym even before all this. He chose to keep using the same pseudonym because he didn't want to lose his audience.
And who draws the line of what is "legitimate" interest?
Because the Gawker type "journalist" will tell you that there's no such line, and clearly leaked dickpics are a "legitimate interest" of their readership.
Because they want him to stop writing. Scott Alexander believes in open debate on any issue and to any participant. The NYT believes that "open" debate should only occur within limits, and that they are entitled to set these limits. If people like Scott Alexander can have a large audience then the NYT does not have the power that they believe they are entitled to. If the NYT did not have the motive to stop Scott Alexander from writing, then why didn't they publish the piece after he took down his blog? Why did the wait until right after he started writing again to run the piece? If their motive was real journalism they would have just run the article as planned.
Frankly, I think it's even simpler than that. It's a tattle-tale culture. Did someone post wrongthink in your comments? "I'm telling!" Do you have a different opinion about some outrage du jour? "I'm telling!" Did you make an offhand mention of some ideas from a bad scary man? "I'm telling!"
In the past few years at the NYT, all of the old-school journalists in leadership positions have been railroaded by the tattle-tales. Millenial and Gen Z apparatchiks have largely taken full reigns of the paper. In general these generations are broadly more supportive of limits on free speech and open discussion[1]. Even more so among journalists specifically.
We're a long way from the era of journalists like HL Mencken or Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. But we do have world class tattle-tales.
Right, but you also have to acknowledge the elephant in the room that the market really, really likes tattle-tale stories. They share well on Twitter, which itself is a strange attractor of this kind of reporting.
And it's not even a liberal thing or a social-justice thing. Conservatives and status-quo warriors do this all the time, and I'd argue more maliciously. Project Veritas's entire reason for being was to construct tattle-tale narratives around whatever organization conservatives were expected to hate this week.
Completely agree. Being a tattle-tale is just plain fun. Which is why young children pick it up so easily. It's not inherent to any ideology, but any ideology can adopt it to score easy points. It's great for getting re-tweets. What's it's not though, is a constructive way to make meaningful change in the world.
> Because they want him to stop writing. Scott Alexander believes in open debate on any issue and to any participant. The NYT believes that "open" debate should only occur within limits, and that they are entitled to set these limits.
That is basically a conspiracy theory.
It's far more likely that the journalists in question don't care one way or another if Scott Alexander continues writing or not, they just wanted to do their work according to their usual standards (e.g. use people's real names, not write a with the goal of making the subject and his fans happy).
I thought so too. But it's hard not to notice that this article was supposedly in the work for many months, yet reads as if it took a day's worth of work (being generous). Why did it disappear for months and then come out shortly after Scott Alexander poked his head above the parapet again? That timing is awfully suspicious.
As for the NYT believing they should control the parameters of debate, that's not a conspiracy theory. That's exactly what they seem to believe. There have been many incidents showing that in recent years, most recently, the Silicon Valley reporter whose daring investigation of Clubhouse boiled down to trying to cancel Marc Andresseen for dumb reasons. The Tom Cotton op ed, the firings of editors and staff who believed in non-woke speech and so on.
> I thought so too. But it's hard not to notice that this article was supposedly in the work for many months, yet reads as if it took a day's worth of work (being generous). Why did it disappear for months and then come out shortly after Scott Alexander poked his head above the parapet again? That timing is awfully suspicious.
Not really, he made himself relevant again by relaunching his blog.
And it's weird to assume they were continuously slaving away on this story since this kerfuffle started, polishing it to perfection. They probably just shelved it in a draft state and moved on to new things. When it because relevant again, spent a little time dusting it off and updating it, then shipped. My understanding is this story isn't even that long for this kind of thing, and it ran on a Saturday (which IIRC is the least read edition of the week).
This story is BIG NEWS in the Rationalist subculture and adjacent communities, and a small blip pretty much everywhere else.
They have in the past used pseudonyms for Internet personalities. The example often used is Virgil Texas, (former?) Chapo Trap House host, whose real name was available online but was not included in his profile. But it might have been easier to find Scott’s real name. The lesson might just be don’t make it too easy to find your real name.
Most people agree that there are limits to a debate. I think there are essentially two camps:
The intellectual/traditional camp wants to consider ideas independently from social context, so things like doxxing or guilt-by-association are way off-limits. But something that potentially reinforces "bad" behavior is within bounds as long as it's true, relevant, and leads into a worthwhile discussion.
The socially-aware camp is almost the opposite. Facts should be vetted based on whether they fit a story that promotes and reinforces "good" behavior. Off-limits are anything that challenges or complicates the story. But twisting or cherry-picking facts, or personally pressuring those involved in the debate, are in bounds.
I feel the second camp is self-defeating. It's essentially that the ends (e.g. getting Trump out of office) justify the means (nearly anything). The tactics used undermine trust as well as undercutting the values themselves. And the definition of "good" behavior is rapidly shifting away from basic morality (treating all people with respect and fairness) into political convenience (pandering to minority groups without actually helping) and then further into plain power grabs (punishing political opponents). Bad means don't create good ends.
> Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? It's just not a nice thing to do, simple as that.
As the saying goes, journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published, everything else is public relations.
That said, Metz’s claim that the NYT editors consistently require real names is inaccurate. Notably the NYT previously did a piece on Chapo Trap House and reported on host Virgil Texas using that pseudonym even though his real name is trivially discoverable.
> As the saying goes, journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published, everything else is public relations.
There's a world of difference between this and what's happening here. I'm pretty confident that Scott would not have mind if the NYT run a hit piece on his blog while keeping his real name out.
> One paragraph after detailing why Scott requested his name to be kept out, the reporter complains about the online abuse he received, which could have easily been prevented by not using real names.
This is a false equivalence. Alexander is an author publishing under a pseudonym, plain and simple.
Elena Ferrante was "unmasked" and while I'm sure she didn't appreciate it, it's not illegal or even particularly unethical. Somebody published a photo of Thomas Pynchon despite his best efforts to avoid it. Annoying sure but hardly a social crisis. Alexander has no more claim to anonymity than any of the above. If you publish long enough in a public forum to gain some amount of fame, it's unrealistic to expect your identity to be protected from all comers.
Meanwhile, a group organized to dox a reporter. It doesn't really matter what the reporter wrote: organized doxxing is deliberate, malicious, anti-social and probably illegal.
I feel out of the loop for never having read this guy's work before this faux-outrage-turned-scandal, but everything I'm reading of his is great. He's focused, honest, and straightforward, and you can tell her really lets his own voice come out in his writing.
It's funny seeing things I've said for 5-10 years come out as mainstream common knowledge, namely that mainstream journalism is either lazy, extremist, or both. When I first said it I was called reactionary, or paranoid.
I've come from yet another perspective as someone who once read a few SSC articles and found them lacking or outright bad, but this past week, reading more of them has changed my opinion. For sure I disagree with Scott on some fundamental points, but the balance he is able to bring and the nuance he is able to tease out, plus the consideration of ideas which on first glance lead to bad conclusions being shown that need not be the case.
I'm far from the typical political persuasion that one might consider to be interested in SSC (check my about text/comments on here) but I think I gain some perspective with the SSC articles I've read that goes beyond pure endless abstract philosophical rumination.
So from my point of view, Scott deserves at least one cheer, and probably more. His blog may not stand to the level of academic analysis, but in contrast to the quality of other blogs and especially Twitter style argumentation, it's quite a beacon and his writing style and intellectual charity something to emulate in online discourse.
One of the points brought up in the article that I think is becoming pernicious is dicrediting by association. Any view that is also positively regarded by an extremist group (right or left) becomes evidence of the author's support for that group, even though there is no connection between the two. That's kind of like saying Apple must have created iPhones for criminals because they're preferred by drug dealers for their privacy! It would be nice if ideas could be judged on their own merit, not by who likes them.
You joke, but both people with actual crime-fighting credentials, people in the intelligence community who should know better, and Donald Trump have made that same fallacy regarding iPhones.
> dicrediting by association. Any view that is also positively regarded by an extremist group (right or left) becomes evidence of the author's support for that group
Isn't this quite common in 'Cancel Culture' as well as in 'Hit Piece Journalism' ?
You can discredit anyone by portraying them as a single dimensional thought - generally stating their words or actions out of context.
Silly Example: A Person X has been seen frequenting a food joint that is participating in alleged inhumane industrial massacre of animals.
So we read - The person is an evil animal hater.
And so is everyone who has ever eaten at pretty much any fast food chain.
It’s really entertaining to watch Hacker News devolve and eat itself. It’s like contextual complex and nuanced thinking is impossible among those that self select as hackers. Have we gotten to the point where we can’t hold two opposing views of the same thing in the mind? Absolutism abounds here and while I’d say it is disquieting it’s more so simply sad. Sad in that it’s consistent across all facets of society. We’ve lost our critical thinking skills.
The most troubling part of the NYT article is a glimpse into how hostile some tech folks are towards the idea of journalism:
“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times, using a term, “Dark Enlightenment,” that was synonymous with the neoreactionary movement.
I have never heard of a tech person who is hostile to the idea of journalism, just the terrible implementations that exist in companies like the NYT and Fox News.
That quote is just suggesting they do to journalists what journalists do to other people.
I was referring to the "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal", claiming that it's okay for them to do what they do to regular people but not okay for regular people to do the same to them.
This is Gell-Mann amnesia taking place before even getting to the end of the article. You just read an entire piece, where Cade Metz continuously quotes Scott Alexander out of context with a healthy does of guilt by association to create faux scandal. This was so brazen that it was done to writing on a publicly accessible blog.
Then supposedly he "viewed an email" containing a quote that looks suspiciously similar to the above. Do we have any idea what the context of the broader email is? Is it possible that Srinivasan added "but we wouldn't stoop to their level" in the next sentence? Do we know whether the quote is paraphrased or not? Do we know whether they confirmed authenticity? (Viewed implies that someone sent a screenshot from their phone.)
Frankly, the credibility that Cade Metz has at this point is about the same as The National Enquirer.
Entirely fair. I am actively hostile towards the nature of Journalism as it exists today.
I dunno if it is troubling though. Rather, It is revealing. New-Journalism fundamentally opposes the ethos of old Journalism. The journalist is now an activist first, and a reporter second. The conclusion is decided before a story is selected, and lying by omission is the new norm.
I don't mind biased reporting, if the organization openly declares its bias. The Economist is 'pro free trade & free markets'. They do not claim to bring you the truth and the complete truth. I subscribe to 'Theprint.in' which also deeply cares about old journalistic values and is explicit about telling when a person is giving opinions vs news. They too openly declare their bias:'Liberal on economy, liberal on society'.
It is the main-stream media channels that claim to be neutral and fair. But, then use their power to push an agenda 24 hours of the day. I like journalists. I dislike activists, who refuse to face scrutiny for their stances.
> There’s a specific kind of misunderstanding [about journalism] that’s pervasive in tech, and it falls in this taxonomy of fallacies somewhere between the commentary/reporting confusion, and Uncle Chico [who is the most prolific Facebook shitposter I’ve ever met, who thinks journalists who do not work at Fox have all coordinated to ruin Donald Trump’s life]. It is like the former in that it fails to understand processes and classifications that are integral to how journalism is done, and necessary, and it’s like the latter in the sense that it attributes personal qualities to journalists that both comically overstate the level of personal investment journalists have in the people they cover, and assumes that journalists are motivated by (maybe even primarily by) assorted flavors of malice....
> There’s also a related fallacy that’s not universal, but inasmuch as it exists, it seems uniquely endemic to tech: the idea that tech journalism should support the tech industry. This interprets journalism as public relations, which it is not. Journalists are not supposed to cheerlead the industry; they’re supposed to cover it, and that means writing the good things and the bad with no overriding preference for one over the other.
I think it's quite interesting that the NYT hasn't linked Scott's response [1] in their article about him. Surely if their article was written in good faith they would be happy to do so
> I think it's quite interesting that the NYT hasn't linked Scott's response [1] in their article about him. Surely if their article was written in good faith they would be happy to do so
Good faith doesn't mean doing whatever some internet rando thinks is reasonable.
> Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.
Now this is not to compare modern liberal sensibilities to naziism, beyond the broadest of generalities such as "they are both political movements." I do think we can see that the modern liberal political body is inclined to purge SA's group of "deviationists" who they see as insufficiently ideologically pure.
That is the level of understanding that the NYT piece seems to be promoting, but it is not at all my point.
The point of the quote I posted is that these "deviationists" do not jump on bandwagons of any kind, be they good or bad. Therefore, political movements that expect uncritical acceptance of their ideas see them as opponents even if they mostly agree.
I confess I like the summary in your reply a great deal more than the excerpt in your original post. It is a fact about humans that many of them think and perhaps even overthink various topics of import, leading to indecision, ambivalence, sometimes even confusion. Those humans are not worse humans than their brethren who seek only to support what they currently perceive to be their tribe.
[EDIT:] In fact I think you have completely misunderstood Dorothy Thompson, since the Nazis were overwhelmingly the latter rather than the former sort of human. A complete reading of her essay is a complete reading of a set of wooden stereotypes, interesting only for the fact that it records the propaganda of an era in which a previously apparently peaceful nation was girding itself for world war. Ms Thompson includes such scintillating analysis as "Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi." Good grief.
NY Times in its quest to shame anyone who doesn't fit their uber woke mold is losing readers and credibility. I hope 2021 is the year that we start to reject this braindead culture and start to embrace real journalism and fact based reporting.
Racist AND eugenicist? Wow! How could a plan to give money to everyone be racist AND eugenists! So many -ists and -isms just giving money to people. I had to look it up to see what was so racist AND eugenicist about it. I found his description of it here:
To clarify, they want UBI that only applies to people 21 year and older, you could just have said it straight out instead of trying to make it sound worse than it is.
Edit: damnyou edited out all his posts. He originally called them out as eugenicists and racists for the style of UBI program they support.
In the states medicine is primarily private and unlike most of Europe not classed as government assistance so you'd use the 10K to pay medical insurance.
In the UK your point would be more applicable, UBI brings a lot of uncertainty for healthcare (amongst other things!)
Waste management, environment and policing are all things which benefit from a government. Tax seems to be more of a horror to Americans than Europeans and UBI seems to me to be, in the states a tax avoidance strategy, and in the UK it's a strategy to improving social security. Both views miss some complexion
Everyone is forced to buy the same basic health insurance in Switzerland, that is what makes it universal healthcare instead of just another health insurance. It is subsidised depending on your income, but the UBI version would just be a part of your UBI that automatically pays for the health insurance so subsidised in a similar manner.
You can add extra services above the basic insurance, but the basic insurance covers the same things as typical European universal healthcare so there is no need to.
> Murray is a eugenicist. Siskind openly endorses Murray's UBI proposal. A man is known by the company he keeps.
This is a really unhealthy stance. If you agree with one thing someone thinks, you agree with all of it? Are we supposed to find the tiniest bubbles of people who agree with us on everything and if they stray we cast them out?
It's kind of strange to watch the prevalence of this victim mentality amongst the 'Rationalists'. The article starts by quoting 5 paragraphs that include calling the blog erudite and funny, interviewing legal scholars about it and referencing rocket scientists who read. Paragraphs that go out of their way to describe the extremely broad range of views of those who read it. This author shows you those 5 paragraphs and concludes by talking 1 sentence out of it and goes "Look! He's calling us white supremacists!".
Note the difference, where the author agrees with someone like Damore, he'll go to lengths to say
>Damore qualified his claims throughout the infamous memo with language like "may in part explain"
But for the NYT, who he just doesn't like, he can ignore 4 straight paragraphs in order to get outraged about the 5th.
It's also this bizarre double think - the NYT telling readers that Siskind says the media ignores men being harassed by women is clearly an attempt to get their readers thinking Siskind is some kind of mad extremist. Oh but also, that's actually true and the media does ignore that. Well which is it, are you being discredited for your crazy views, or is the NYT accurately reporting something you do think.
Frankly, the way this comes across is a group of people who have convinced themselves that they're going to be called racist and sexist, and as a result whenever someone talks about them at all they respond as if they've been called racist or sexist. The NYT article actually didn't do that, which just makes it bizarre when they react like it did.
I think it's important to note that this article was (probably) not written by somebody from the Rationalist movement. It's from a libertarian blog that has its own axe to grind.
What I find astonishing is the use of the term "Safe Space" - clearly in an attempt to mock Scott Alexander, for -- I guess -- not being "manly" enough.
It's really quite funny, in a I-want-to-cry kind of way, that a term invented to protect "sissies" (I count myself among them!) is being used to mock people for their lack of masculinity. Its cynical deployment, here, actually serves to reinforce the very macho stereotypes the term was invented to combat. And all this from a supposed standard bearer of liberal orthodoxy.
Metz' cretinitude is surpassed only by his nastiness and shamelessness.
Glad to see that Reason magazine has made it to hacker news. Like Slate Star Codex this is what I consider one of the best researched and most thought through publications
233 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThe NYT writes hit pieces for the establishment; social media (including HN) uses shadowbans to enforce narrative conformity.
Manipulation is the norm.
Case in point: I was shadowbanned on HN for linking to a video where the BLM founder described BLM as a Marxist organization.
It’s her own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM5zUwiCTzw
The reason the NYT sees a radical conspiracy behind every bush is that’s how communists act — and the NYT staff are projecting.
Similarly, folks these days call anything they don't like involving wealthy people "capitalism". It just confuses and escalates.
I think there's a good point about teleological approaches to politics and history that are increasingly popular. Marxism is a well known category of that. They tend to create unforgiving worldviews and attitudes. Admittedly words like teleological don't have the same rhetorical punch.
BLM the organization has diverged pretty drastically from BLM the movement. Linking them together without acknowledging that is a tad manipulative.
It's much like the slogan "defund the police" has been watered down from the original meaning. You can't hold those using the term today to the original intent.
I believe most people donate to The Movement for Black Lives.
OP is more or less correct.
As a person who lived behind the iron curtain I can recommend you "Captive mind". It is non-fiction set of observations of an intellectual living in a communist regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captive_Mind
It's not news to anyone that life "behind the iron curtain" had its share of horrors. We anarchists know that life under any giant "national" government is similar, even if particular governments can be better or worse than others. Perhaps my questionable recent reading is to blame, but the first people I thought of when reading about "radical communist conspiracy" were the million Indonesians slaughtered by nationalist military and vigilantes with the firm planning and support of capitalist CIA in 1965 and 1966. These communists had "conspired" to feed the poor and support the existing democratically-elected government. So, blanket statements about communists (or capitalists, or I guess even monarchists), even if motivated by putative life experiences, don't hold much water with me.
What makes this sketch funny is that, no matter how outrageously bad they are, real people never ask this question about themselves.
They might also be so far down the road of evildoing that every time they do ask themselves, they cling to any excuse that they’re not the baddies.
This describes nearly all of us. You can semi-honestly ask yourself if you are acting good, and mostly about non-essential stuff. But deep down it's just a rhetoric exercise. It is essentially impossible to question your fundamental beliefs. Also, it is easy to verify that this is the case: have you ever held contradictory fundamental beliefs? Not at the same time, of course, but along the years? Like, something that you thought was an immutable basis of your opinion when you were 18, and when you become 35 you think about it and it is obviously wrong. Do you think you were capable at 18 of asking that question to yourself? Do you think you are now capable to do so, regarding your current fundamental thoughts? I may lie and say that I do, but I'm actually incapable to really question my deep beliefs about justice and fairness (even if at some time in the past I held the opposite beliefs!).
The sad thing is that there really is no venue to debate ideas anymore without either side banning the other for “trolling”.
Unless you’d go bragging about it yourself but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
It's not very common, but it happens - and not necessarily after finding out something new about your organization, but also after finding out something new about yourself and your standards.
Never, it requires maturity.
- Bertrand Russell
The best example I can think of is Judeo-Christian thinking has the idea built in through the fall from paradise, Cain killing Abel, and broadly the repeated arc of humanity forming a covenant, breaking it, rinse, repeat; Christianity adds the whole story of Christ being crucified.
And I think that works, conceptually, because God can be good while people are awful. God is this immutable, objective "good" that we can't argue with or rewrite as we please.
Similarly, science can say that its theories are all wrong (bad), but the universe is right (good), so observations trump theory.
And a republic can work as a form of government because its premise is people are awful but reliably self-interested, so you can construct a structure of government that pits those different interests against each other and results in a big stalemate. There the "good" isn't very good, but self-interest is at least consistent, and the desire for a continuing political stalemate over a civil war is good enough.
So for an ideology to incorporate "we are baddies" into itself, it probably needs some external thing to be the "good" that it looks to, but that "good" has to be something that can't be easily rewritten to be whatever you want it to be.
What does interest me is that both you and I are posting here with our legal name, while Applejinx hides behind a veil of anonymity.
They must have something to hide. /s
Go read it yourself. I think most people here are familiar enough with the "Rationalist" movement to be able to judge it on its own merits.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
The Rationalist movement is deeply weird. It has curious connections with "race realists" and monarchists. It is deeply insular and rarely survives contact with mainstream scholarship. Eliezer Yudkowsky and other central figures are total crackpots. Any discussion of the movement that leaves those parts out is dishonest.
The title is stupid. I'll give 'em that.
Definitely yes. Ever heard of Moldbug? The dude who claimed the rule of Leopold II (yes, that Leopold II) would be better than our current government?
I am not claiming that they are the same movement, but the Dark Enlightenment is closely related to the Rationalist movement. There is a great deal of cross-pollination.
The New York Times article is a great jumping-off point to read about this connection! It has several relevant links, including this one that explicitly discusses the monarchists:
https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/
You keep claiming that alt-right/monarchist movements have connections to rationalists, without any kind of proof or references to those connections. Which is exactly what the shitty NYT article did. Can you actually show how they are related, instead of just claiming they are?
"Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche."
This is just so obviously, insanely wrong that it's impossible to take anything else in the article seriously.
EDIT: To be clear, I don't know what the geographic distribution of Rationalists is. I also don't care. The fact of the matter is that the movement is irrelevant everywhere except Silicon Valley, and within Silicon Valley it is fairly powerful with several prominent adherents. This is spelled out in the New York Times article and its citations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
X: "This textbook says the earth is flat. It's wrong"
You: "But the earth is flat!"
X: "Citation please?"
You: "Look in the textbook you're holding!"
Uh... okay. I really want to know how the hell you came to that conclusion. It's an area full of companies that have pr campaigns that boil down to "making the world a better place" while still being the most greed filled, ideological oppressive, and privacy violating companies in the country, let alone world.
Maybe you're right. Yes, they are the most rational. It is the academic and corporate elite's job to control and plunder the majority of civilization for their own benefit. So yea, best to go where the rest of them are doing it. Never mind, you're right. If you're a snake, best to go into the same snake pit as other snakes. Let that marinate.
What process of data collection and rational evaluation did you use to test your hypothesis that it’s beneficial to your human development to disregard any story that doesn’t have the degree of supporting evidence you require?
I have a hypothesis that few are truly applying the principles of grey so deeply, as it’s quite a cognitive burden to do so, but to decry the question would contradict their principles to the core, exposing unconsidered cognitive dissonance that - if they’re rational enough - would force them to question their entire belief model to its very core. And so, instead, they will challenge the question itself, rather than apply their belief’s principles of rationality to their own beliefs.
Your datapoint in this matter would be a valuable contribution to my rational evaluation of this hypothesis, but of course I understand if you feel unable or unwilling to contribute. I shall continue developing it regardless, for any future encounters with greyfolk.
It would please me greatly to find that none are willing to respond to it, as that would perfectly contradict your belief using the honorable practices and methods of the greyfolk themselves. But it would please me most to find that they are able to reason and respond to such a question, and acknowledge their own irrationality if any is exposed, because it’s more important to me that they integrate rationality and human nature than it is that I be right.
(One caveat. The question you I expected you to have asked is why I would consider it appropriate to make such a statement without defending it further, and how I could possibly expect any outcome from that other than complete disregard by all readers. Your reply ignored that rational opportunity in favor of being dismissive. It’s a curious choice that conflicts with my read of you as a grey rationalist who’s set out to try and promote rationality at HN. If that is indeed your mission here, feedback duly noted so that you can improve the quality of your evangelism. If you aren’t a rationalist, I apologize for my misread and intend no insult by describing you as such, and I will take no offense if you simply disregard this entire reply.)
"Using the handle xirbeosbwo1234, <your name> posted on Hacker News, a forum where rich San Franciscan tech CEOs and thought leaders could talk about everything from the infamous Damore memo, to Trump advisor Peter Thiel, to race relations and the BLM movement. On an article from Reason magazine, a fiercely libertarian media outlet, he gleefully ventured opinions on monarchy and race realism. For him, the site was a space where the worst consequences he faced were downvotes and the disbelief of his equally pseudonymous peers."
The NYT article is perfectly fair. It states that Scott Alexander has sharply criticized neoreactionaries, which is true. It states that he has been a frequent critic of so-called SJWs and has written about possible genetic causes of some of the racial and sexual inequities we see in society, which is also true. Those things are part of the story. You are the one trying to leave them out.
Once you start having scholars and other official positions in the hierarchy of discussion, you can't just ignore what you don't like any more.
I consider the article entirely fair. In fact, you will see that pretty much all I am doing in this thread is telling people to read the original article. Its treatment of SSC is evenhanded and, at times, downright glowing. It says everything I want to say more eloquently than I am able.
The only problem I have with it is the title.
That is only half the truth - you also called people monarchists and crackpots. You got flagged for doing that, rightly so.
You could bring your point across much better if you were to leave out the name-calling and pejorative language. Cade Metz would benefit from this advice as well.
I called the Reason article a misrepresentation and I called Eliezer Yudkowsky a crackpot. If you're going to criticize me for saying that, then why are you leaving the Reason article alone? Cade Metz did not engage in name-calling and didn't use any pejorative language, so why are you criticizing him?
Am I ineffective for saying that? Maybe. But I'm also right. I don't particularly mind if you dislike my tone.
Also, "monarchist" isn't an insult. It's the word we use for people who think we should have a king. People like the neoreactionaries who have a strange tendency to pop up in rationalist circles.
> It was also the epicenter of a community ...
An epicenter is the focus of a earthquake, which is associated with causing great damage and loss of life. Comparing a community to such an catastrophic event is a negative connotation. Is that not a pejorative in your eyes? Even if its not, its a way of making readers disliking said community without factual basis, which is not a very honest thing.
I will stop arguing here. If your view is that you and Cade Metz do not use pejorative language, then there is no common ground between us.
I use pejorative language and make no apology for it. You seem to dislike pejorative language but seem to make an exception for the pejoratives in the Reason article.
Cade Metz did not use any pejoratives. Everything he wrote was correct and presented in context. His coverage of SSC varied between measured and glowing. I do even vaguely understand how someone could take it as an attack. It is fair in its coverage of Scott Alexander and far kinder to the Rationalists than they deserve.
Those countries does not seem to be hostile to their citizens (or anyone else for that matter) and are considered to be quite civilized?
Note to morons: I don't say this because I support monarchy or any authoritarianism. It's just... let's not exemplify the "clueless American" trope.
A real monarchy would be something like Saudi Arabia.
Yes, the rationalist movement is weird, and in some ways, bad. But Scott Alexander didn't start the rationalist movement and doesn't control it. Holding him responsible for what other people post on his website (that he makes no money from), while Twitter, Reddit, Facebook et al continue to enjoy the complicity of the media in the equally awful discourse there, is just a case of stomping on the little guy because you can.
Insofar as the NYT declared SSC to be "a window into the Silicon Valley psyche", there's a much more obvious candidate forum for that, and you're posting on it.
[edit]
I had not realized he had gone fully public with his name, to include blogging under his true name currently.
(I actually agree with Scott's request to remain anonymous though. I guess politics are complex.)
Logical thinking is one tool for developing self-awareness but not a necessary one.
For myself, I’m bipolar. Self-awareness is critical to keeping myself grounded and processing extreme emotions safely. Many people have told me I am an expert at this and I still fall into this trap again and again. I just eventually realize it.
I know many smart people who are blind or willfully ignorant of their own assumptions. This includes a number of vocal advocates of theology, philosophy, and rationality.
A more pithy/cheeky way of saying that would be the "Rationalists" are really Rationalizers.
Personally, I dislike rationalism /utilitarianism and still enjoy reading an occasional SSC article.
And this is the most glaring fault of the NYT. They just assume that Silicon Valley types take everything written on SCC as gospel. Which is understandable, since the totalitarian left enforces all-or-nothing views and the NYT is projecting their own shortcomings on Silicon Valley.
But Silicon Valley just wants to return to the free exchange of ideas of the Usenet age.
On its surface, this reads that Scott supports D'amore's memo but doesn't want to be associated with it. Is there more context? In general, anybody advising others to hide their beliefs in order to be more persuasive should expect to invite speculation about what their own true intents are.
This is usually a reasonable heuristic, but it falls over when one person thinks “childhood malnutrition harms brain development, reducing intelligence, so improving the diet of poor children is urgent”⁰ and somebody else thinks “rich people are rich because they've earned their wealth because they're genetically really intelligent; it's social Darwinism”, but the only things the two are saying to each other are things like “poor people / members of minority ethnic groups score lower on average on IQ tests¹”.
---
⁰: I've seen Scott make basically this argument – though it was probably about intestinal worms rather than nutrition.
¹: Since I brought this up, I'm going to use the opportunity to suggest that Scott has, historically, put too much credence on IQ tests as a proxy for intelligence. I was basically tutored to be able to do well in IQ tests, as a result of my background, and I've never seen him take things like that into account – despite the decades of academic research backing up my anecdote (IQ tests are culturally-specific).
[1] https://youtu.be/b0Ti-gkJiXc
Interestingly enough, Scott Alexander published an entire essay disagreeing with libertarianism. Your rationalists' views are not representative of Scott Alexander's views. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...
There are a lot of ideologies calling themselves rationalism, many of which feed into each other. Scott Alexander has basically invented his own, and it changes significantly over any given two-year period (as expected for somebody continuing to learn about the world); the best way (imo) to appreciate his articles is to read them, think about them and assume that around half of each is wrong (or, if you disagree with the core ideas of an article, which happens to me on occasion, that around half is right).
I think it is more likely that you mean this about people who build their identity around rationalism. Most people with a single dominant interest are tedious in one way or another.
- How to combine conflicting intuitions from multiple sources, including your gut reactions, your analytic reasoning, and of course the opinions of others;
- The structure of your own goals and motivations;
- How to learn new skills faster
So perhaps if the only rationalists you've met are haughty libertarians, you've gotten unlucky.
I will say that the rationalist community tends to be liberal on social views, but that's probably because the community tends to be utilitarian, and it's hard to justify, for example, banning homosexuality in a utilitarian framework.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GfMSiorAsYeezpn9o/the-proble...
[2] https://rationality.org/workshops/upcoming
There is another progression that accurately describes click-bate news: 1. Cause disagreements and strife 2. ??? 3. Profit!
Why did this reporter have to go and publish Scott's real name when Scott requested him not to? It's just not a nice thing to do, simple as that. It may be easy to find if you go looking, but most people don't have any reason to go looking, so the pen name serves its purpose of providing anonymity. The NYT author makes it seem as if publishing the guys real name in a widely read paper is the same as it being googleable to someone who looks. Its a COMPLETELY different level of exposure.
The other key point is that doxxing someone who has been writing anonymously for decades is very different than believing that people should not have the right to write anonymously. Scott began writing under a pseudonym, under the expectation that it would stay anonymous - and so the space of things he said was much more controversial than what it would have been if he expected to be doxxed one day. NYT shows up to the world of blogs 10 years later, knowing nothing and starts pulling the rug out from under people who began writing in a different world, under completely different norms. Its just a shitty, shitty thing to do.
> I woke up the next morning to a torrent of online abuse, as did my editor, who was named in the farewell note. My address and phone number were shared by the blog’s readers on Twitter. Protecting the identity of the man behind Slate Star Codex had turned into a cause among the Rationalists.
One paragraph after detailing why Scott requested his name to be kept out, the reporter complains about the online abuse he received, which could have easily been prevented by not using real names.
I thought the NYT held off publishing the original article, and although the article published in the last week did name him, this was only after Scott relaunched his blog under his real name?
I know they were threatening to reveal his name prior to this, but in the end Scott revealed his own identity first.
The “why” is easy. The first part of this article makes the reason quite clear. This reporter believed that Scott’s site was giving safe harbor to “white supremacists” while making it hard for “social justice warriors’” voices to be heard [1].
So the reason he was doxxed is in keeping with a recent trend in the media: punish perceived right-leaning people for their views. Drag them out in the public square, and get them fired or at least ensure that their life will never be the same. It’s Mccarthyism, 2021 edition.
Welcome to the newly “united” America.
[1] The part of the article I am referring to is this: “...The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were "social justice warriors.". The author knew that the left-leaning readers of the NYT would be upset over this, and would want to know whom the person behind such a community was so that cancel culture could carry out its duties.
A better argument would be that Scott isn't the right-winger the article writer thinks they are, and that the article is poorly researched. At worst, I'd say he's probably a little too dismissive of privilege narratives, but that doesn't make him a white supremacist or a neo-fascist. Of course, that doesn't make an article, and we gotta keep the content grill sizzling, so here's some tenuous connections to make an interesting story to meet quotas.
https://www.amazon.com/Blacklisted-History-Senator-McCarthy-...
Another is:
https://archive.org/details/josephmccarthyre00herm/page/5/mo...
A perhaps more accessible writeup in the Washington Post from 1996:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/w...
"Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox
Can you give some examples. At least from the perspective of a British person, I cannot recall right wing people ever engaging in "cancel culture" during my life time. Are you thinking of religious people in the USA?
For the record, the rest of my examples here are going to be extremely Amerocentric, too. I'm sure if I spent an hour I could find an example of Tories doing something cancel-y, but I'm more familiar with American politics. So you could argue that Tories specifically haven't cancelled anyone, but I'm not so sure that's the case. Cancelling is not "left wingers taking down people who aren't as left wing as them", it's what happens when the whole of society decides to disapprove of someone due to their actions. Everybody has some kind of button to press, some ideology they will find distasteful enough as to refuse to associate with people who believe in it.
A good example today of right-wing cancel culture would be the far-right primarying moderate Republicans. If you are a Republican politician and you don't think Donald Trump should forcibly lead a military coup to retake America, your days in politics are limited. The party was lost to right-wing radicals decades ago, and they don't tolerate anyone outside their little black hole on the political compass. Hell, state GOP branches are already censuring the seven or so Republicans that voted to convict Trump. The only difference is that the cancelling here is limited to inter-party struggles rather than breaking out into the wider culture.
There's also that time right-wingers tricked Disney into firing James Gunn over vile things he tweeted decades ago. Cancel culture doesn't need to be ideologically consistent. We usually think of it as left-wingers getting angry about right-wingers and purging them; but it can also be right-wingers getting angry about left-wingers, and then making up a story to sick their lefty friends on them. All you need for cancel culture is someone who wants someone else socially gone, and another group of people willing to disassociate with certain ideologies.
Furthermore, to actually fight cancel culture, you either need to compromise on free speech and prohibit people from revealing someone's political ideology; or you need to compromise on freedom of association and make it illegal to disassociate from someone over their political ideology. I'm not sure either of those changes are actually beneficial.
Super curious what the “trick” is that you’re referring to. My understanding is that he did indeed write these things and publish them on his Twitter feed. Simply pointing that out isn’t a “trick,” unless I have missed something about the story.
Saying that both sides have engaged in it does not make it the correct thing to do. It's a disgusting thing for people to engage in, regardless of the political affiliation of the people doing it. That said, I have seen countless examples of cancel culture in action coming from the left, and comparatively few from the right. Even Obama has decried the left's zealousness to cancel people [1]. When Obama calls you too woke, you're probably too woke.
As to the rest of your response, I was using the general idea of mccarthyism. The dictionary defines it as "a campaign or practice that endorses the use of unfair allegations and investigations". I think that definition squarely fits what happened here.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca...
No, this goes far beyond "not nice"
This is an attempt to bully competition (both in ideology and in business) off the internet by putting their personal well-being in danger.
This kind of defamation+doxxing is just utterly despicable. Journalists who repeatedly pull this kind of stunt should be fired.
And setting aside how this type of thing affects the individual victim, consider how it harms journalism as a whole, by painting journalists as untrustworthy immoral backstabbing asshats.
Put bluntly: when populists like trump call the media liars, the saddest part is that they're not wrong.
But members of the media are stoking the fires of division to satisfy their lust for money and attention. It’s wrong, and I hope that everyone can see these actions for what they are. The NYT and the reporter that wrote the article should be roundly criticized by both sides for what they did here. They should be canceled.
How this flips around into the mirror-world that is social media, is beyond my understanding. Either people who discuss on large platforms and those that do it offline or in more personal online communities are two distinct groups of people with little overlap, or some magic switch just flips in peoples heads when they put their hands on a keyboard.
The media are ultimately just following the market: outrage sells, so they deliver. Sure, we can blame them for abusing their power in cases like these, but more importantly, we should ask the question how they ended up in a position where everyone just blindly trusts what they read in a newspaper.
I suspect what makes it really hard to understand is there's a training effect as users subconciously learn what things get more attention, and what attention they see as favorable is a moving target depending on their emotional state.
So you really have no idea what changing the kind of attention they get will do, and even if you did, when you try to make changes to see what happens, you have to wait on the timescale of human learning to see what the result of those changes are; how the dynamic is settling into a new stable state.
Except my comment had nothing to do with downvoting on HN, nor was it a general attack of "the left" (fuck, I am on the left myself) so it isn't really proving anything.
Unless, of course, this the NYT staff raiding HN downvoting comments, but something tells me that's neither the case nor what you're talking about.
This is what I was referring to. The NYT used doxxing to bully him because of how they perceived his views. Much of HN uses downvotes to bully and silence anything that criticizes the left.
In contrast, the original comment (@zaptheimpaler) convincingly argues that the NYT has made a moral error in this case, regardless of where you stand on the ideological issues clouding it. It makes a strong argument by sticking to the facts, carefully avoiding appeals to emotion or bundled claims that could undermine the central point. That is what makes it such a good argument, and it's probably why it's the most upvoted comment here.
It is used that way by many people though. Downvoting out of disagreement is certainly something that happens on the internet.
> The comment from DarkWiiPlayer was very weak
Yes, the original comment already did a good job at presenting the case against the NYT. That wasn't really my intention.
> by making unprovable assertions about their motives
Well, yes, because it is simply impossible to make any provable assertion about anybodies motives. Unless you'd prefer judging actions without consideration for the actors motives (in which case there's no meaningful distinction between murder and a deadly accident), there will always be some degree of speculation about intent. In this case, there is two options: Either the NYT is utterly incompetent at basic text comprehension, or they deliberately lied about the opinions expressed on several blog posts. Assuming the NYT wouldn't have made it to where they are if they were so incompetent, there's only one possible conclusion: They intentionally spread lies with the goal of retaliatory defamation against a blogger that didn't dance to their music.
> It actually weakens the case against the NYT
Did I refute any of the arguments of the original comment? If not, then I couldn't possibly have weakened the case.
---
And what's more, your criticism only really addresses the first sentence in my comment.
The second sentence is just a moral judgement of the events. I shouldn't have to point out that this is my personal opinion, as an intelligent reader should just understand that implication.
My third point is: this behaviour ruins the reputation of journalism as a whole. I do consider the reasoning for this thought trivial. If you think it is fallacious, please point out why this is.
My last sentence, again, is simple because it's trivial. Trump is known to repeatedly call media liars on camera. The NYT article is misleading at best, and most would probably agree that it lied by omission in on several occasions. I also imply that I generally don't agree with these populists, hence the "the saddest part". That's two provable factual statements and one completely subjective opinion.
Yes, if you search for the name of the blog you can find his personal name, but the issue is that if you searched for the personal name you wouldn't find the blog. A search of term to result is not symmetric if reversed.
The wish was that by publishing the name it connected the name to the blog, even though previously the blog was connected to the name. Thats not the same thing and it requires a bit of effort to understand.
For example, if you use the name of one of my online identities it could probably bring up a wiki page saying that I went to the web 2.0 conference a decade ago, but if you searched for the web 2.0 conference you would never find that identity in the search results.
Doesn’t this imply that the newspaper is simply not competent to report responsibly in the year 2021?
Specifically, (potential) patients of Alexander might have a legitimate interest in knowing about his writing. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with being treated by him. But therapy is among the most sensitive subject, and I could easily see people having a legitimate interest in being given the opportunity to decide for themselves.
After all, if it's important to an individual's therapy, it's even more important for government policy (foreign or domestic) affecting the lives and futures of millions of people.
Boy, is that a false equivalency. You do realize that anonymizing a source is part of a bargain for the journalist to get access to information they wouldn't otherwise have had access to, often information the source isn't authorized to disclose (and thus could face punishment for disclosing it)?
It's also worth nothing that, in the real world, revealing someone's real name isn't the high crime of "doxxing," rather it's normal and expected. Journalists aren't typically creatures of pseudonymous web forums, and it's a category error to expect them to abide by the peculiar norms of them.
When i go to a foreign land, or even someone else's home, i try to abide by the rules and norms of the locals there, regardless of whether they are norms in my land or not. Its a basic part of being a guest.
I don't care if journalists typically use pseudonyms or not, its just basic human decency to respect the norms of a space you're a guest in. I don't see much reason why journalists should get a free pass on doxxing in a forum where pseudonomity/anonymity has been the norm for decades.
Even more so, the journo explicitly asked for consent to publish his name, didn't get it, and published it anyways. Like just doing whatever you like without the subjects consent is understandable only in a few rare cases of serious crime, definitely not for the modern "crime" of wrongthink on the internet.
"I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them." https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...
Isn't it obvious? To put it in mathy terms: if I have to choose from ten things, and I dislike 2. my chance of picking something I dislike is 0.2, if I can disqualify one of the disliked things up front, my chance of picking the remaining disliked thing is 0.11 (i.e. a big improvement).
What’s obvious is that 10, and 2 are not something you know in advance.
More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.
They don't have to be. The principle holds generally, as long as there's some choice out there you'd like.
More importantly, I am guessing you don’t have any model that predictively associates whether you like person’s writing at a particular instance in time with their efficacy as a therapist.
I don't but you're moving the goalposts and asking a different question. I was talking about personal preferences (e.g. like/dislike), and you're talking about "efficacy as a therapist."
I'm also getting a vibe of a kind weird inversion from you, where it's the therapist's right to see a particular patient unless that patient can prove with a "model" that the therapist won't work for them.
No. You are advancing the position that the interests of people selecting therapists are served by newspapers publishing articles about their writings.
I think that if you ask people whether they would prefer a more effective therapist over a less effective one, most people would say they would prefer the more effective one.
Effectiveness as a therapist is part of how people form preference of therapists. Excluding it is arbitrary.
Nowhere do I suggest anything about therapists having any right to see any particular client. That idea is competely made up by you.
A therapist is supposed to be a blank slate to project what is needed for therapy. The patient is not supposed to know whether the therapist is married or not or divorced, because that may affect (not in a good way) how the patient handles revealing their relationship trauma - the therapist should either appear neutral (to freely allow the patient to project whatever they want to project) or be free to create whatever impression about himself works best for the therapy. It would be near-taboo for a therapist to have a family picture in the room visible to the patient, and in the exact same manner the patient reading about therapist's personal life can only hurt therapy.
The patient should not know the therapists political opinions or moral opinions about various ethical dilemmas, as that may hurt the therapy as it involves the patients' current personal stresses. One patient might need the therapist to show agreement to their viewpoint in order to open up more, another patient might need the therapist to confront and dispute the same viewpoint. The therapist must not be taking sides based on their personal beliefs, they should project whatever viewpoint is needed for the particular patient at this moment. For this reason, various symbols of political or advocacy affiliation are near-taboo, all the therapist profiles are explicitly neutral, and (again) a patient reading their therapists personal blog is bad for the effectiveness of their therapy. A patient isn't supposed to choose a therapist based on their political opinions anyway, if the therapist lets out their politics in therapy, then they have failed at their job and the patient should get a better therapist no matter if they liked those politics or not.
Patients have a legitimate interest in knowing the professional qualifications and professional reputation of the therapist, but all the personal life and personal opinions of the therapist are out of bounds as it disturbs the relationship with the therapist - the patient has a right to read that, but it would force an ethical doctor to "fire" that patient. As far as I understand, currently Scott Alexander has to filter potential patients based on whether they read his blog as it's not anonymous anymore, but that's manageable as he now has a separate practice. But if indeed all his patients would have a "legitimate interest" in reading that and would actually do so, then he would have to stop blogging about pretty much everything meaningful because that would be incompatible with treating patients properly.
Because the Gawker type "journalist" will tell you that there's no such line, and clearly leaked dickpics are a "legitimate interest" of their readership.
That is completely normal thing to publish when you are writing about something like that.
In the past few years at the NYT, all of the old-school journalists in leadership positions have been railroaded by the tattle-tales. Millenial and Gen Z apparatchiks have largely taken full reigns of the paper. In general these generations are broadly more supportive of limits on free speech and open discussion[1]. Even more so among journalists specifically.
We're a long way from the era of journalists like HL Mencken or Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. But we do have world class tattle-tales.
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
And it's not even a liberal thing or a social-justice thing. Conservatives and status-quo warriors do this all the time, and I'd argue more maliciously. Project Veritas's entire reason for being was to construct tattle-tale narratives around whatever organization conservatives were expected to hate this week.
That is basically a conspiracy theory.
It's far more likely that the journalists in question don't care one way or another if Scott Alexander continues writing or not, they just wanted to do their work according to their usual standards (e.g. use people's real names, not write a with the goal of making the subject and his fans happy).
As for the NYT believing they should control the parameters of debate, that's not a conspiracy theory. That's exactly what they seem to believe. There have been many incidents showing that in recent years, most recently, the Silicon Valley reporter whose daring investigation of Clubhouse boiled down to trying to cancel Marc Andresseen for dumb reasons. The Tom Cotton op ed, the firings of editors and staff who believed in non-woke speech and so on.
Not really, he made himself relevant again by relaunching his blog.
And it's weird to assume they were continuously slaving away on this story since this kerfuffle started, polishing it to perfection. They probably just shelved it in a draft state and moved on to new things. When it because relevant again, spent a little time dusting it off and updating it, then shipped. My understanding is this story isn't even that long for this kind of thing, and it ran on a Saturday (which IIRC is the least read edition of the week).
This story is BIG NEWS in the Rationalist subculture and adjacent communities, and a small blip pretty much everywhere else.
The intellectual/traditional camp wants to consider ideas independently from social context, so things like doxxing or guilt-by-association are way off-limits. But something that potentially reinforces "bad" behavior is within bounds as long as it's true, relevant, and leads into a worthwhile discussion.
The socially-aware camp is almost the opposite. Facts should be vetted based on whether they fit a story that promotes and reinforces "good" behavior. Off-limits are anything that challenges or complicates the story. But twisting or cherry-picking facts, or personally pressuring those involved in the debate, are in bounds.
I feel the second camp is self-defeating. It's essentially that the ends (e.g. getting Trump out of office) justify the means (nearly anything). The tactics used undermine trust as well as undercutting the values themselves. And the definition of "good" behavior is rapidly shifting away from basic morality (treating all people with respect and fairness) into political convenience (pandering to minority groups without actually helping) and then further into plain power grabs (punishing political opponents). Bad means don't create good ends.
As the saying goes, journalism is writing something someone else doesn’t want published, everything else is public relations.
That said, Metz’s claim that the NYT editors consistently require real names is inaccurate. Notably the NYT previously did a piece on Chapo Trap House and reported on host Virgil Texas using that pseudonym even though his real name is trivially discoverable.
There's a world of difference between this and what's happening here. I'm pretty confident that Scott would not have mind if the NYT run a hit piece on his blog while keeping his real name out.
By thay standard, the NYT, and especially Twitter/FB, are antijournalism. They crush stories and ideas they don't like.
This is a false equivalence. Alexander is an author publishing under a pseudonym, plain and simple.
Elena Ferrante was "unmasked" and while I'm sure she didn't appreciate it, it's not illegal or even particularly unethical. Somebody published a photo of Thomas Pynchon despite his best efforts to avoid it. Annoying sure but hardly a social crisis. Alexander has no more claim to anonymity than any of the above. If you publish long enough in a public forum to gain some amount of fame, it's unrealistic to expect your identity to be protected from all comers.
Meanwhile, a group organized to dox a reporter. It doesn't really matter what the reporter wrote: organized doxxing is deliberate, malicious, anti-social and probably illegal.
It's funny seeing things I've said for 5-10 years come out as mainstream common knowledge, namely that mainstream journalism is either lazy, extremist, or both. When I first said it I was called reactionary, or paranoid.
I'm far from the typical political persuasion that one might consider to be interested in SSC (check my about text/comments on here) but I think I gain some perspective with the SSC articles I've read that goes beyond pure endless abstract philosophical rumination.
So from my point of view, Scott deserves at least one cheer, and probably more. His blog may not stand to the level of academic analysis, but in contrast to the quality of other blogs and especially Twitter style argumentation, it's quite a beacon and his writing style and intellectual charity something to emulate in online discourse.
More significant than those factors is time pressure and limited staffing.
You can have your news fast, cheap, or unbiased. Pick two.
Isn't this quite common in 'Cancel Culture' as well as in 'Hit Piece Journalism' ?
You can discredit anyone by portraying them as a single dimensional thought - generally stating their words or actions out of context.
Silly Example: A Person X has been seen frequenting a food joint that is participating in alleged inhumane industrial massacre of animals. So we read - The person is an evil animal hater. And so is everyone who has ever eaten at pretty much any fast food chain.
“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times, using a term, “Dark Enlightenment,” that was synonymous with the neoreactionary movement.
I don't think they are hostile to the idea of journalism per se. It's the current practice they object to.
That quote is just suggesting they do to journalists what journalists do to other people.
The infamous Richard Nixon quote comes to mind.
Then supposedly he "viewed an email" containing a quote that looks suspiciously similar to the above. Do we have any idea what the context of the broader email is? Is it possible that Srinivasan added "but we wouldn't stoop to their level" in the next sentence? Do we know whether the quote is paraphrased or not? Do we know whether they confirmed authenticity? (Viewed implies that someone sent a screenshot from their phone.)
Frankly, the credibility that Cade Metz has at this point is about the same as The National Enquirer.
I dunno if it is troubling though. Rather, It is revealing. New-Journalism fundamentally opposes the ethos of old Journalism. The journalist is now an activist first, and a reporter second. The conclusion is decided before a story is selected, and lying by omission is the new norm.
I don't mind biased reporting, if the organization openly declares its bias. The Economist is 'pro free trade & free markets'. They do not claim to bring you the truth and the complete truth. I subscribe to 'Theprint.in' which also deeply cares about old journalistic values and is explicit about telling when a person is giving opinions vs news. They too openly declare their bias:'Liberal on economy, liberal on society'.
It is the main-stream media channels that claim to be neutral and fair. But, then use their power to push an agenda 24 hours of the day. I like journalists. I dislike activists, who refuse to face scrutiny for their stances.
I thought this article was pretty insightful on that topic: https://mynewbandis.substack.com/p/slate-star-clusterfuck
> There’s a specific kind of misunderstanding [about journalism] that’s pervasive in tech, and it falls in this taxonomy of fallacies somewhere between the commentary/reporting confusion, and Uncle Chico [who is the most prolific Facebook shitposter I’ve ever met, who thinks journalists who do not work at Fox have all coordinated to ruin Donald Trump’s life]. It is like the former in that it fails to understand processes and classifications that are integral to how journalism is done, and necessary, and it’s like the latter in the sense that it attributes personal qualities to journalists that both comically overstate the level of personal investment journalists have in the people they cover, and assumes that journalists are motivated by (maybe even primarily by) assorted flavors of malice....
> There’s also a related fallacy that’s not universal, but inasmuch as it exists, it seems uniquely endemic to tech: the idea that tech journalism should support the tech industry. This interprets journalism as public relations, which it is not. Journalists are not supposed to cheerlead the industry; they’re supposed to cover it, and that means writing the good things and the bad with no overriding preference for one over the other.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...
Good faith doesn't mean doing whatever some internet rando thinks is reasonable.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
> Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.
Now this is not to compare modern liberal sensibilities to naziism, beyond the broadest of generalities such as "they are both political movements." I do think we can see that the modern liberal political body is inclined to purge SA's group of "deviationists" who they see as insufficiently ideologically pure.
The point of the quote I posted is that these "deviationists" do not jump on bandwagons of any kind, be they good or bad. Therefore, political movements that expect uncritical acceptance of their ideas see them as opponents even if they mostly agree.
[EDIT:] In fact I think you have completely misunderstood Dorothy Thompson, since the Nazis were overwhelmingly the latter rather than the former sort of human. A complete reading of her essay is a complete reading of a set of wooden stereotypes, interesting only for the fact that it records the propaganda of an era in which a previously apparently peaceful nation was girding itself for world war. Ms Thompson includes such scintillating analysis as "Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi." Good grief.
To be fair, NYT's motto was ( probably still is ) "All the News that's fit to Print" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-16918787
Reading that resignation letter I wonder who gets to decide if the TRUTH is 'Fit to Print'.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-a...
I couldn't find any racism or forced sterilization or breeding of a super race in his plan so maybe you're thinking of a different plan?
Edit: damnyou edited out all his posts. He originally called them out as eugenicists and racists for the style of UBI program they support.
In the UK your point would be more applicable, UBI brings a lot of uncertainty for healthcare (amongst other things!)
Waste management, environment and policing are all things which benefit from a government. Tax seems to be more of a horror to Americans than Europeans and UBI seems to me to be, in the states a tax avoidance strategy, and in the UK it's a strategy to improving social security. Both views miss some complexion
His proposal also includes universal healthcare similar to Switzerlands system. People aren't left to die in Switzerland.
You can add extra services above the basic insurance, but the basic insurance covers the same things as typical European universal healthcare so there is no need to.
This is a really unhealthy stance. If you agree with one thing someone thinks, you agree with all of it? Are we supposed to find the tiniest bubbles of people who agree with us on everything and if they stray we cast them out?
Note the difference, where the author agrees with someone like Damore, he'll go to lengths to say
>Damore qualified his claims throughout the infamous memo with language like "may in part explain"
But for the NYT, who he just doesn't like, he can ignore 4 straight paragraphs in order to get outraged about the 5th.
It's also this bizarre double think - the NYT telling readers that Siskind says the media ignores men being harassed by women is clearly an attempt to get their readers thinking Siskind is some kind of mad extremist. Oh but also, that's actually true and the media does ignore that. Well which is it, are you being discredited for your crazy views, or is the NYT accurately reporting something you do think.
Frankly, the way this comes across is a group of people who have convinced themselves that they're going to be called racist and sexist, and as a result whenever someone talks about them at all they respond as if they've been called racist or sexist. The NYT article actually didn't do that, which just makes it bizarre when they react like it did.
It's really quite funny, in a I-want-to-cry kind of way, that a term invented to protect "sissies" (I count myself among them!) is being used to mock people for their lack of masculinity. Its cynical deployment, here, actually serves to reinforce the very macho stereotypes the term was invented to combat. And all this from a supposed standard bearer of liberal orthodoxy.
Metz' cretinitude is surpassed only by his nastiness and shamelessness.
Safe space seems to refer to the article's claim "voices who might push back were kept at bay". Anything about masculinity is your own imagination.