A great response, in my opinion. Succinctly and effectively points out what was wrong with the NYT article, then tries to move on. Somewhat more of a sober tone than Scott's typical writing, but still with a dash of his typical wit:
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.
Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:
> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"]
I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.
Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example,
Q. What if I take too much?
A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.
This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.
I don't have any specifics handy, but over the years I've found a lot of information on webmd that is plainly false. Maybe it's better now, but I have been ignoring it for years and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Even Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a better source of medical information.
I don't get it. Scott's response very clearly lays out the ways in which the NYT article was misleading--so clearly that it seems obvious that it was intentionally misleading. But to what end? What are the motivations driving NYT to try and create these poor associations with Scott and his writing? It seems a poor and short-sighted motivation for them to do this out of "revenge" for the bad press they got from the situation, it feels like there has to be something else going on here.
Rage clicks pay, shallow dismissals are easy to produce -- no
time-consuming investigative journalism necessary.
Most important perhaps is that new media like
Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the
NYT.
Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the
Firm, 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of
scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing,
paper distribution, subscriber and advertiser management. Essentially
all of this is gone. What modern newspaper scale on is branding, and
and selling influence, but this is in direct contradiction with strong
journalists' interest (who do not like to be told by their editors what to write and how). Until recently, top journalists could not go alone, since they lacked the expertise to handle monetisation of their writing. This changed with the likes of Substack, which centralises
(automates) subscriber management, and technical infrastructure, but
without editorship.
Hence, top writers are increasingly moving away from
traditional newspapers to something like Substack, with Greenwald
and Scott Siskind being two high-profile examples. They won't be the
last.
Newspapers see the writing on the wall and fight back.
I have concluded that there's a fundamental conflict of interest between "mainstream" media like the New York Times and tech companies and people related to them. The former and the latter are competitors in the attention economy, and this manifests in substantial negative bias. I have observed this since the mid 2010s at least.
“Look at the evil ideas that people in the tech community are flirting with” is one more argument towards NYT’s overarching thesis that Tech is too powerful, doesn’t deserve its power, and must be smacked down.
It was misleading and unfair. But to understand it, you have to imagine yourself as a young, woke, sheltered person who went to a top private high school, a top college, and then got an internship and a job writing at the NY Times. To these people, there's only one correct world-view and anyone who even questions it, or thinks some truths are nuanced, is evil.
The only way to resolve the dissonance is to read Scott's work and the NYTimes article and see if they are talking about the same thing. Looks for things taken out of context, look for discussion at different levels etc...
Any potential community nexus that encourages sub-group-solidarity and class-unity is a threat to TPTB who maintain their power by encouraging us to view each other as potential threats to our various cultural/ethnic/gender/sexual/etc identities. It's Playstation-vs-Xbox playground mindset on a global scale. Ordo ab Chao.
> ConTracked: A proposed replacement for government contracting. For example, the state might issue a billion ConTracked tokens which have a base value of zero unless a decentralized court agrees that a bridge meeting certain specifications has been built over a certain river, in which case their value goes to $1 each. The state auctions its tokens to the highest bidder, presumably a bridge-building company. If the company builds the bridge, their tokens are worth $1 billion and they probably make a nice profit; if not, they might resell the tokens (at a heavily discounted price) to some other bridge-building company. If nobody builds the bridge, the government makes a tidy profit off the token sale and tries again. The goal is that instead of the government having to decide on a contractor (and probably get ripped off), it can let the market decide and put the risk entirely on the buyer.
This seems like a good idea.
The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.
> Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy.
>This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn't. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated."
Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts:
A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.
Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.
The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.
> Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience.
This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.
[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally
The NYT article[1] can hardly be called a hit piece at all, considering how little 'dirt' it actually contains.
What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".
The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.
Thank you for the link to the NYT article. I completely agree with your reading.
Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.
Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again:
>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
Thanks for including this link. I read the response before I read the NYT article. And while it was a pretty uninteresting article, the tactics used to obfuscate who holds what beliefs are laid bare. It's illuminating to see.
The underlying point of the article is that a large number of tech leaders are rationalists, what is rationalism, what are they reading (the blog), and what does that mean for society.
My reading of the article was that it wasn't about Scott at all. It was about the comment sections on Slate Star Codex, the Rationalist community (which the general public knows very little about), and its connection to the centers of power in Silicon Valley.
If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.
This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-...
It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for actual things you said years ago, now that’s not enough, they will go out of their way to form a narrative around you, whether the cap fits or not, in order to ostracise, they aren’t afraid to stretch the truth or outright lie. This is not unique to the NYT but it’s a concerning trend.
This is nothing new from them. The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.
Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization playing politics, just as it has been since 1851. I still mostly respect them because they tend to report facts accurately and mostly follow the ideal of journalistic integrity better than many other media outlets. But there are certain topics now, just as always, where their prevailing politics shines through loud and clear.
A publication can be politically titled to one side and still be factually accurate and stay true to journalistic integrity principles (or at least that's what I want).
With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible just 10 years ago.
In the case of NYT, their political tilt is very clear (that's ok) but their journalistic integrity is being called into question more and more (that's problematic).
> Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians"
There is always "a side that benefits politically" from literally every statement. What is clear, irrespective of the side that benefits politically from stating it: the NYT is willing to use its influence to distort the political opinions of its readers, using innuendo and cherrypicked facts.
Those who look to the NYT (and The Washington Post) for accurate facts are literally (mis)guided into holding a specific political opinion, and defending that opinion even against facts that would rationally moderate that opinion.
I am as certain as stone that most people who read the NYT will forever associate Scott Alexander Siskind with white supremacy, conservatism, and anti-woke ideology because of that hit piece; for these people, this will be a fact. For them "Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from calling that article a 'hit piece'" is a statement that actually has meaning, and they will operate on that assumption. His Wikipedia page will be inundated with editors who insist that the NYT interpretation is "true" while Scott's blog is "opinion", and will dutifully and duly note these interpretations as facts onto his Wikipedia entry. For these people, reading and discussing Scott Alexander will be tantamount to supporting white supremacy, and so a whole encyclopedia of delightful, thoughtful inquiry will be foreclosed.
It is reprehensible, and I cannot in future take anyone who cites the NYT without caution as a serious person who actually understands their world.
This is similar to arguments I frequently make about the paper. The reason it has such standing as it does is because it was a mast of Northeast elite hedgemony. I mean this more in a sociological sense than in a true dynastic political sense. The Northeast had been thought for very long to have the best schools, culture, technology, leadership and values.
There was a time when that culture was not just dominant among elite circles but often revered by everyday people as something to live up to. As much as the 80s, 90s and on were seemingly about the decline of that power nexus, the institutions retained a lot of mystique and fascination.
That ideal of American life is in a tailspin. Norman Rockwell is more a punchline than a comfort to people. The nation's opinions aren't filtered through New York TV personalities any more.
The paper has weakend and that has allowed the social agreement about it to change. Before if you expressed a negative opinion about such a paper it was mostly washed away in a consistent wave of accolade. If disagreement always meets reproach it is hard for it to spread. Agreement is an innoculatiom against criticism.
> The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.
>It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians.
I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.
Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
As someone who majored in journalism and who graduated in 2009, what most people consider traditional journalism has been slowly dying since at least the 07/08 crisis. They were already struggling due to not knowing how to properly handle the internet. Giving away content for free was a mistake made in the 90s that was proving impossible to claw back, and online ads were nowhere close to making up for the lost revenue from print ads (because, in a bit of news surprising no one, there's no real proof that online ads work).
Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.
Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.
> I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands.
This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.
There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.
One quite possible scenario is that this is the dying process of the "legacy media", as it gets replaced by... whatever comes next.
That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.
> Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.
I lost count of the number of times the NYT used the same numbers and switched from praising to blaming and back the Swedish corona startegy.
I want facts and information goddammit. Not a tearjerking drama to fill my inbox. I was already annoyed with the NYT before this incident. This just broke the camel's back. I unsubscribed.
There's a huge tension in the society caused by the wealth shift from individuals to corporations. As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirecting the tension between people and corporations into tension between artificially created identity groups. So far they are very successful at it. Plenty of people are so busy trying to ruin someone else's life, they completely don't notice the decline of their own long-term perspectives.
> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership
This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.
Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
>As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
No, this is not "typical" of most cases, it is typical of millennials living in a small subset of property markets (DC, LA, SF, NYC) who have low earnings relative to their educational attainment + age but also a vastly disproportionate media influence. The delusion that the Ivy grad journo living in Brooklyn whose Twitter follower count is larger than their salary somehow reflects the voice of their generation is a huge problem.
> As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests.
That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there?
In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will personally find you a wife if you don't have one, and will give you a raise if you have kids.
What I find noteworthy about this story is how contentious and weaponized have gender and race become. Out of the four negative claims, one accused Scott of racism and two accused him of of some variant of misogyny. The fourth associated him with some other form of non-pure thinking.
I am afraid things will get worse before they get better. I expect the trumpism/fascism wave will provoke unhealthy reaction and further chain-reaction. My personal lacmus paper is the use of "white male" label as an argument, which is not totally uncommon even here on HN.
The whole story background story is extremely alarming. NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered. This whole situation gives even more credence to the idea that decentralisation is the only way forward for mankind if we intend to preserve the liberties our ancestors enjoyed for the past 300 years.
> NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered.
I completely disagree. That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly. I think it was the wrong decision to publish his name, but it shouldn't be illegal. Like it or not, Scott has become a fairly important intellectual given who his readers are (and may I say, completely deservedly so).
While I don't think the NYT had a strong reason to reveal Scott's real name, it's absurd to say that newspapers shouldn't "reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes" in the general case.
As the saying goes, journalism means printing things that certain people don't want published, and everything else is PR. Journalists are supposed to reveal things against the subject's wishes.
Can you articulate a coherent framework for how and why an American news publication should be prohibited from revealing legally obtained true information about the leader of a large, popular, or otherwise noteworthy community?
Couldn't agree more. If there's one thing the last 5 or so years should teach us is that newspeak isn't a language, it's the entire technological communications apparatus of the West.
Weaponized is the correct word. The word "racist" is morphing into a racial slur. It's now just a bludgeon to shut up someone with the wrong views. I believe this comes from the idea that the only possible way to be moral is to wield power by any means necessary because you're right and "they" are evil.
This has been used for years, but only recently became weaponized.
I can recall in the early 80s, going to ACT UP meetings in NYC, we'd have random people come in and raise crazy issues about "racism" like "the word 'gay' is racist! You need to say 'queer'!"
Often these people who came to throw a monkey-wrench into meetings weren't gay men; they were just old-school Greenwich Village agitators. Their tactics work and have been mainstreamed.
As an Indian, I'd say this kind of "SJW" rhetoric serves no purpose other than causing a reactionary change -- of more normal people favoring extreme right wing instead, and leaving a bad impression about the total social justice thing.
The other alternative is to be independent. No tribe. Or you can be in a tribe, but as a critic and reformer. (Well, some tribes allow you to criticize them. Not the modern GOP.)
It sure will happen in Europe because people here are not really ashamed to admit they are sick and tired of that American 'justice' bullying. The only hope for America is when slightly more intelligent character than Trump suppress their political gains to put end to this madness.
As a white person from a poor post communist country with no colonial history (99.999% white) I cringe when some local SJW parrots the "white privilege" agenda. It just makes no sense in large parts of the world other than US.
The NYT abusing these kinds of allegations in a hit piece doesn't say anything about whether such claims can are "contentious and weaponized".
Hit pieces latch on current topics. In the 1950s, the NYT would have had invented ties to communists. Or, if possible, hit pieces often imply corruption or paedophilia. That doesn't necessarily mean that corruption or paedophilia are topics that are "contentious" or related to "pure thinking".
I feel like the NYT used to be more credible and run fewer hit pieces. I'm not trying to argue zero, by any means, but I feel like in a very short time -- basically the past 4-8 years -- they've gone from one of the most credible source of media to where I trust them as much as I do Fox News (and I read both, as well as a number of international news sources, to have a complete picture).
This sort of stuff seems to be their modus operandi now.
Seriously, WTF is going on with NYT. I think something has seriously gone off the deep end with their newsroom, but I feel like it must be so culturally ingrained in their newsroom now that even questioning some basic assumptions will get one vilified as a racist or sexist.
Now, I can certainly understand, and consider valid, the arguments both for and against capitalizing Black. However, the decision to capitalize Black, but not White, is completely non-sensical to me, as is NYT's bizarre 1 sentence explanation in that article: "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups." What? They don't even try to give any argument behind "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does", which reads like a poorly researched high school English paper. And the fact that some bad people have decided to capitalize White is their rationale that it must be lower-cased?
If anything, the top comments in response to that article make a hell of a lot more sense than the NYT's decision itself. I'll also note that many other news organizations, like the Washington Post and CNN, have decided to capitalize both Black and White, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post...
It seems very and crudely racist to assume all black people have a shared culture, in the same way assuming two black people must be related, would be.
I'm stealing this point from Twitter, but Africa is the most diverse continent on Earth - culturally, linguistically, even genetically. There are 250 ethnic groups within Nigeria alone, most of which have little in the way of shared language or culture, and had even less before colonists drew a circle around them and insisted they were a single nation. How on Earth does it make sense to say that all black people have a shared culture, especially if you simultaneously insist that white people don't?
You may find this philosophy bizarre, and I agree, but it's important to understand that it doesn't come from nowhere; it's been brewing in academia for decades and is spreading into the mainstream at alarming speed. I highly recommend learning more about "critical race theory" if you want to understand why what many now call "neoracism" is gaining so much traction within our elite institutions.
> "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does"
To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."
The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.
A stereotype is a negative amplification of facets of a group's culture. You can find stereotypes of white Americans everywhere, from /r/whitepeopletwitter to the movie Undercover Brother(great movie btw). The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.
> One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper
Interesting also that the overwhelming majority of the readers who commented on the article itself seem to find it pure nonsense. It's somewhat telling when a newspaper stubbornly keeps serving its readers one specific opinion which they keep refusing to subscribe to. You would expect a news outlet to publish a diversity of opinions centered around their readership's average- roughly half of the readers will be challenged every time. But what's the point in consistently presenting an opinion all your readership rejects? Who are you serving exactly?
Normalizing it for future generations. Once you grow up in a world where you only ever see Black capitalized but white not, it will feel natural to you, just like capitalizing the President is. (Not done in some languages like mine.)
As a non-native English speaker and European, I find these "minor language tweaks" pure distraction. I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone -- like many European countries already do. One could also enforce more wage transparency to fight systematic salary discrimination. But it's so much cheaper to capitalize one letter.
white Black
There! Now everyone knows I am actively fighting discrimination and it costs me zero.
> white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does
I have always found such statements to be... Observationally stunted. Without referencing my own beliefs at all, I go to Reddit and on the front page is see posts from /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/WhitePeopleTwitter. If there is no such thing as white culture, what do people post in the second subreddit?
This is shameful, and the second time this month NYT puts out such a shameful piece (the first time was the JetBrains/ Solarwinds article). I guess this should be enough to disregard everything NYT will write, and stop reading them.
Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott deleting the blog, and this is still the piece they decided to go with. It's a bit hard to trust the NYT's integrity..
No, it's a product of the ideological drivel the NYT chose to embrace, identity politics. Not all news outlets are like that.
It became obvious with the literal journalist purge going on there. You can't be a moderate and work there anymore, you have to subscribe to a certain thought framework, if you question it, you're deemed "offensive" and you're out.
I recently dropped my NYT sub; jetbrains nonsense was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I know it's a meme to bring up Gell-mann amnesia here, but I will raise it as a basic test for quality in journalism.
When NYT writes about something I know about, I almost always have serious problems with it. Jetbrains in particular. And honestly some of the writing is so bad that even without knowing about the subject, I can tell it is crap, like the article about the SlateStarCodex. I had never read it before that post, but had heard it mentioned in passing. Also, NYT Opinion is Hannity/Shapiro level crap and should be dumped. Stick to the facts please.
On the other hand, The Economist has consistently impressed me; I read/listen with a critical ear and they do a wonderful job even with very niche topics. I've worked on some AR tech and they had a special report that just really nailed it and got into the weeds. Every time I thought "but they didn't mention..." they would mention or clarify a paragraph later.
Economist has a liberal viewpoint and they're not shy about it. I prefer that approach and accept that I disagree with the conclusions/advice from time to time, but the facts are right and error corrections are almost always very minor in nature.
There is good journalism out there, just maybe not from NYT. Please don't give up hope.
Yeah, the Jetbrains article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-...) was just too over-the-top conspiracy fluff. It’s sad to see some liberals critiquing QAnon and then immediately eating any kind of Russian conspiracy shit without any doubt.
The times is very pessimistic on tech, largely I believe because they're upset about being run over by google/facebook. It's definitely unfortunate, but the future of journalism is really not bright at all. No one is willing to pay for unbiased news, so you need to find a niche to attract people or churn out clickbait. The times has found their niche as technocrat skeptics.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.
But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.
I don't trust any mainstream news other than local because it all seems like either propaganda or theater. In my opinion, NYT and The Washington Post are the two most despicable out there.
They also outed a Chinese Twitter maker a few years ago. Or maybe that was vice and the reporter now works at nyt. I don't remember except that nyt these days is lame.
I have never read the blog, or have any positive or negative association with it, but after all the attention this story has garnered, I just read both the NYT article and Mr. Siskind's response.
The main takeaway from the NYT article is that there is a group of people in whose writings/blog comment sections/etc racists/sexists have found a home, and his is one of them. He does not address this assertion, or what the root cause may be if it is true, or if it is not true, why not. This is the whole point of 1, 3 and 4 in his statement but he does not address it.
As to the only concrete point he addresses (point 2), he does something that is dishonest. He wrote (pre-edit):
> "blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort“"
and then claimed it's taken out of context. I read the whole article, especially the surroundings carefully to see if there was any context as to which could change the meaning of what he wrote here, but there is none. This simply states that there is a thin line between feminism and evil. If you believe that, then don't delete it. But if you don't, don't tell the reader it's taken out of context, just admit you made a mistake in writing this, or you have changed your mind despite this was what you believed when you wrote the article.
So there are 4 points in the rebuttal, 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best. I am not impressed.
A while back I mentioned to my mother that I had been to a "reddit meet up" and my mother, predictably, had never heard of reddit. Later, reddit made the news, I forget exactly what for, but in was the category of harboring child pornographers, racists, or nude celebrity photos. What I did remember is hoping my mother didn't see this news article and conclude that I was out meeting with racist pedophiles.
The thing is, it's not wrong to say that pedophiles and such use reddit. They do, in the same way they use phones, TVs, and cars. It's not an apt description though, if someone asks you what reddit is, to talk about the racism and hate and what not. The reason being is that the bad stuff isn't the typical reddit experience and doesn't describe the whole thing well.
In Scott's post he gives the example of the Wizard of Oz review (girl goes to a surreal landscape, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again). Maybe it's technically true, but it's not an apt description. It doesn't really capture what the movie is like.
Where I'm going with this is: maybe you can find neo-reactionary or pro-eugenics or racist comments on the blog. I don't recall any examples of horrible comments from the NYT but maybe they are there. Maybe you can find a line or two, like the "feminists are Voldemort" that seem bad and worse outside of context. That's not really what the blog is about though and in a newspaper article describing it probably shouldn't zero in on minor blemishes or debatable flaws and use them as the main focus. Wasn't this supposed to be about Silicon Valley's Safe Space, or getting into the zeitgeist of the "rationalists"? How did the NYT article even attempt to do that? To my reading the NYT was just focused on complaining about the "problematic" aspects and nothing else.
I think it's fair to talk about problematic comments on a blog but it's not fair to act like problematic comments or loose associations to objectionable figured are the main thing when they really aren't.
Regarding your point about the feminists and Voldemort, if memory serves Scott was referring to a specific group of feminists and not likening all feminists to Voldemort. That's not really the impression I got from the NYT though.
This leads to several keys questions: Are all feminist such people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them?
The second question is, are all people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them feminist?
The third question is if this definition of "nice guy" is the informal term or the sarcastic meaning, and how useful either are to describe a psychology profile or human male stereotype?
The fourth question is if a discussion around "nice guy" stereotype of either profile is of strategist benefit to goals of some feminist theory, and then which ones?
I fully understand your point re reddit, but I think a single person's blog is different than that. A blog is like a book and reddit is like a bookstore if you will, if you go to a bookstore selling a book that racists read that is not concerning to me (wrongly concerning to your mom as you said), but if you bought the book in question (even if non/anti-racists read it too) I would be concerned if I were your mother - just to make sure you are not aligned with them.
I am not saying this is the case (as I have no connection with the blog), but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great (which is the main takeaway I got from the article), that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there, and Mr. Siskind does not do that. If the claim is bogus, then the claim is bogus, but Mr. Siskind does not refute that they are attracted to his blog.
As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
It's amusing to watch HN lose its collective shit over the NYT article, which I believe you succinctly and correctly summarize.
This is the highest rated top level post that presents any degree of skepticism at all in Scott's rebuttal, below pages of anger against the NYT "hit." So much for that quality, rationalist examination of the facts. As somebody who read both his blog and HN throughout its run, I find the NYT article on the money.
Scott's own cowardice about revealing his real name is incredibly telling, too. So long as he remained anonymous the NYT actually respected his wishes and buried the story, while this champion of free speech refused to stand behind his own words publicly and lamented the abuse of the MSM coming to dox him. Now that the checks are coming in, he seems to have no problem, though.
My advice to you, dear HN, is to take a look in the mirror. This isn't a hit piece and Scott isn't a saint. If you believe his long winded rants have merit, you should also believe they stand on their own, and you should welcome the scrutiny.
Your characterization of point 1, at least, makes no sense to me. All the NYT article says on that point is:
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
I don't understand why you would say it is dishonest to dissect that paragraph and point out that Scott agreed with Murray on something non-racist, and quoted a racist statement without agreeing with it. Scott is not agreeing with "The Bell Curve" and Scott has not said that he believes that black people are "genetically less intelligent than white people.” Before defending yourself against such accusations it would be wise to point out that they are baseless, and of course it's much wiser to leave it at that.
> 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best
I meant counts of points, i.e., three of them not addressing the issue (points 1,3,4) and one dishonest (point 2) - reasons above. So dishonesty was not related to point 1, sorry if it reads like that.
To further elaborate for 1,3, and 4; I don't contend with his explanations - but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.
Had I not been prepped by reading about the controversy here on HN, I wouldn't have guessed that the NYT article was a hit piece. On the other hand, had I not noticed that the article came from the NYT, I wouldn't have guessed that it wasn't just another blog.
Lots of blogs praise one another while also including disagreements and disclaimers that they don't fully believe their own writing, much less the writing of others. But they consider the articles to be worth reading anyway.
Some of my opinions are unpopular and may even make people uncomfortable. So I admit with trepidation that I still like the NYT and will continue to subscribe.
Readit News
> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I have only gained respect for Scott, and lost respect for the NYT, throughout this while saga. Hopefully this is the end of it.
Edit: in the spirit of moving on, here are two of my favorite articles since his return, one enlightening, one funny:
"WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
"List of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC" -- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryp...
I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.
Q. What if I take too much?
A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.
This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.
Most important perhaps is that new media like Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the NYT. Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the Firm, 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing, paper distribution, subscriber and advertiser management. Essentially all of this is gone. What modern newspaper scale on is branding, and and selling influence, but this is in direct contradiction with strong journalists' interest (who do not like to be told by their editors what to write and how). Until recently, top journalists could not go alone, since they lacked the expertise to handle monetisation of their writing. This changed with the likes of Substack, which centralises (automates) subscriber management, and technical infrastructure, but without editorship. Hence, top writers are increasingly moving away from traditional newspapers to something like Substack, with Greenwald and Scott Siskind being two high-profile examples. They won't be the last.
Newspapers see the writing on the wall and fight back.
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This seems like a good idea.
The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_as...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A100495710953...
> Many types of public goods can be produced privately by profit seeking entrepreneurs using a modified form of assurance contract, called a dominant assurance contract. I model the dominant assurance contract as a game and show that the pure strategy equilibrium has agents contributing to the public good as a dominant strategy.
I guess the only criticism could be, won't you end up with a bunch of half-built bridges eventually?
*oops* hadn't realized it was by the same author!
How I laughed out loud... Gold
A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions.
Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience. We should all live by such standards.
https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1360787817459253251
This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.
[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally
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What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all.
Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI also donated to MIRI. Guess who also donated to MIRI? Peter Thiel!
The author then goes on to rattle off a bunch of other names who are in turn connected to Peter Thiel in some ways.
Like... really?
I just can't figure out why that paragraph should even be the article. Speaking of which, what is that article even about? If there's supposed to be some story or thread stringing it together, I can't see it.
It's essentially:
1. He deleted his blog.
2. Here's a list of unrelated things people he may know have done.
3. He now has a new blog.
Cool story, NYT.
[1]: https://archive.is/b1tyQ
This paragraph alone could be a textbox example from "Hit pieces for Dummies".
The piece is a hit piece through and through. That they weren't able to dig up any real dirt and instead resorted to name calling - both in the classical sense, and also in the sense of actually mentioning names like Thiel and Murray and Curtis Yarvin, etc to insinuate actual or intellectual closeness between those people and Scott - is what makes it a hit piece in the first place.
We are there again. The difference is that in the communist witch hunts at least there was a plausible external enemy.
This time it is all based on delusions, corporate global agendas and the need to stay relevant in one's bullshit job by "fighting" for some cause.
Politicians have known forever that sometimes is more important to control what the conversation is about that what you actually say and traditional media is the way you control the conversation. But they have lost their monopoly. I'm not comfortable with the monopoly being transferred to big tech companies by the way which are usually the main target of their hatred but in this case I think it signals a new low in ethics that they are attacking an independent blogger.
>CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-use...
If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.
It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for actual things you said years ago, now that’s not enough, they will go out of their way to form a narrative around you, whether the cap fits or not, in order to ostracise, they aren’t afraid to stretch the truth or outright lie. This is not unique to the NYT but it’s a concerning trend.
Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization playing politics, just as it has been since 1851. I still mostly respect them because they tend to report facts accurately and mostly follow the ideal of journalistic integrity better than many other media outlets. But there are certain topics now, just as always, where their prevailing politics shines through loud and clear.
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/04/14/archives/dr-king-and-the-...
With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible just 10 years ago.
In the case of NYT, their political tilt is very clear (that's ok) but their journalistic integrity is being called into question more and more (that's problematic).
There is always "a side that benefits politically" from literally every statement. What is clear, irrespective of the side that benefits politically from stating it: the NYT is willing to use its influence to distort the political opinions of its readers, using innuendo and cherrypicked facts.
Those who look to the NYT (and The Washington Post) for accurate facts are literally (mis)guided into holding a specific political opinion, and defending that opinion even against facts that would rationally moderate that opinion.
I am as certain as stone that most people who read the NYT will forever associate Scott Alexander Siskind with white supremacy, conservatism, and anti-woke ideology because of that hit piece; for these people, this will be a fact. For them "Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from calling that article a 'hit piece'" is a statement that actually has meaning, and they will operate on that assumption. His Wikipedia page will be inundated with editors who insist that the NYT interpretation is "true" while Scott's blog is "opinion", and will dutifully and duly note these interpretations as facts onto his Wikipedia entry. For these people, reading and discussing Scott Alexander will be tantamount to supporting white supremacy, and so a whole encyclopedia of delightful, thoughtful inquiry will be foreclosed.
It is reprehensible, and I cannot in future take anyone who cites the NYT without caution as a serious person who actually understands their world.
There was a time when that culture was not just dominant among elite circles but often revered by everyday people as something to live up to. As much as the 80s, 90s and on were seemingly about the decline of that power nexus, the institutions retained a lot of mystique and fascination.
That ideal of American life is in a tailspin. Norman Rockwell is more a punchline than a comfort to people. The nation's opinions aren't filtered through New York TV personalities any more.
The paper has weakend and that has allowed the social agreement about it to change. Before if you expressed a negative opinion about such a paper it was mostly washed away in a consistent wave of accolade. If disagreement always meets reproach it is hard for it to spread. Agreement is an innoculatiom against criticism.
https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-rising-clamor-hadley/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
"The Agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers" v(._. )v
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I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.
Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.
Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.
Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.
This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.
There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.
That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.
They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.
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I want facts and information goddammit. Not a tearjerking drama to fill my inbox. I was already annoyed with the NYT before this incident. This just broke the camel's back. I unsubscribed.
It'd say towards the end of it. And yes, it is a very bad and concerning trend.
The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirecting the tension between people and corporations into tension between artificially created identity groups. So far they are very successful at it. Plenty of people are so busy trying to ruin someone else's life, they completely don't notice the decline of their own long-term perspectives.
This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.
The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.
Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.
No, this is not "typical" of most cases, it is typical of millennials living in a small subset of property markets (DC, LA, SF, NYC) who have low earnings relative to their educational attainment + age but also a vastly disproportionate media influence. The delusion that the Ivy grad journo living in Brooklyn whose Twitter follower count is larger than their salary somehow reflects the voice of their generation is a huge problem.
That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there?
In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will personally find you a wife if you don't have one, and will give you a raise if you have kids.
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I am afraid things will get worse before they get better. I expect the trumpism/fascism wave will provoke unhealthy reaction and further chain-reaction. My personal lacmus paper is the use of "white male" label as an argument, which is not totally uncommon even here on HN.
I completely disagree. That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly. I think it was the wrong decision to publish his name, but it shouldn't be illegal. Like it or not, Scott has become a fairly important intellectual given who his readers are (and may I say, completely deservedly so).
As the saying goes, journalism means printing things that certain people don't want published, and everything else is PR. Journalists are supposed to reveal things against the subject's wishes.
As the
I can recall in the early 80s, going to ACT UP meetings in NYC, we'd have random people come in and raise crazy issues about "racism" like "the word 'gay' is racist! You need to say 'queer'!"
Often these people who came to throw a monkey-wrench into meetings weren't gay men; they were just old-school Greenwich Village agitators. Their tactics work and have been mainstreamed.
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Hit pieces latch on current topics. In the 1950s, the NYT would have had invented ties to communists. Or, if possible, hit pieces often imply corruption or paedophilia. That doesn't necessarily mean that corruption or paedophilia are topics that are "contentious" or related to "pure thinking".
This sort of stuff seems to be their modus operandi now.
One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
Now, I can certainly understand, and consider valid, the arguments both for and against capitalizing Black. However, the decision to capitalize Black, but not White, is completely non-sensical to me, as is NYT's bizarre 1 sentence explanation in that article: "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups." What? They don't even try to give any argument behind "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does", which reads like a poorly researched high school English paper. And the fact that some bad people have decided to capitalize White is their rationale that it must be lower-cased?
If anything, the top comments in response to that article make a hell of a lot more sense than the NYT's decision itself. I'll also note that many other news organizations, like the Washington Post and CNN, have decided to capitalize both Black and White, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post...
To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."
The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.
Interesting also that the overwhelming majority of the readers who commented on the article itself seem to find it pure nonsense. It's somewhat telling when a newspaper stubbornly keeps serving its readers one specific opinion which they keep refusing to subscribe to. You would expect a news outlet to publish a diversity of opinions centered around their readership's average- roughly half of the readers will be challenged every time. But what's the point in consistently presenting an opinion all your readership rejects? Who are you serving exactly?
It’s a good article, and largely innocuous, and it uses “Black” to describe a (fictional) French man in France.
white Black
There! Now everyone knows I am actively fighting discrimination and it costs me zero.
In fairness I'm not sure the New York Times really has the authority to do that.
I have always found such statements to be... Observationally stunted. Without referencing my own beliefs at all, I go to Reddit and on the front page is see posts from /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/WhitePeopleTwitter. If there is no such thing as white culture, what do people post in the second subreddit?
Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott deleting the blog, and this is still the piece they decided to go with. It's a bit hard to trust the NYT's integrity..
I guess it's a product of actual-journalism not paying the bills.
It became obvious with the literal journalist purge going on there. You can't be a moderate and work there anymore, you have to subscribe to a certain thought framework, if you question it, you're deemed "offensive" and you're out.
I know it's a meme to bring up Gell-mann amnesia here, but I will raise it as a basic test for quality in journalism.
When NYT writes about something I know about, I almost always have serious problems with it. Jetbrains in particular. And honestly some of the writing is so bad that even without knowing about the subject, I can tell it is crap, like the article about the SlateStarCodex. I had never read it before that post, but had heard it mentioned in passing. Also, NYT Opinion is Hannity/Shapiro level crap and should be dumped. Stick to the facts please.
On the other hand, The Economist has consistently impressed me; I read/listen with a critical ear and they do a wonderful job even with very niche topics. I've worked on some AR tech and they had a special report that just really nailed it and got into the weeds. Every time I thought "but they didn't mention..." they would mention or clarify a paragraph later.
Economist has a liberal viewpoint and they're not shy about it. I prefer that approach and accept that I disagree with the conclusions/advice from time to time, but the facts are right and error corrections are almost always very minor in nature.
There is good journalism out there, just maybe not from NYT. Please don't give up hope.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.
But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.
http://Ground.news is a startup that's attempting to falsify that hypothesis. I hope they succeed.
The main takeaway from the NYT article is that there is a group of people in whose writings/blog comment sections/etc racists/sexists have found a home, and his is one of them. He does not address this assertion, or what the root cause may be if it is true, or if it is not true, why not. This is the whole point of 1, 3 and 4 in his statement but he does not address it.
As to the only concrete point he addresses (point 2), he does something that is dishonest. He wrote (pre-edit):
> "blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort“"
and then claimed it's taken out of context. I read the whole article, especially the surroundings carefully to see if there was any context as to which could change the meaning of what he wrote here, but there is none. This simply states that there is a thin line between feminism and evil. If you believe that, then don't delete it. But if you don't, don't tell the reader it's taken out of context, just admit you made a mistake in writing this, or you have changed your mind despite this was what you believed when you wrote the article.
So there are 4 points in the rebuttal, 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best. I am not impressed.
The thing is, it's not wrong to say that pedophiles and such use reddit. They do, in the same way they use phones, TVs, and cars. It's not an apt description though, if someone asks you what reddit is, to talk about the racism and hate and what not. The reason being is that the bad stuff isn't the typical reddit experience and doesn't describe the whole thing well.
In Scott's post he gives the example of the Wizard of Oz review (girl goes to a surreal landscape, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again). Maybe it's technically true, but it's not an apt description. It doesn't really capture what the movie is like.
Where I'm going with this is: maybe you can find neo-reactionary or pro-eugenics or racist comments on the blog. I don't recall any examples of horrible comments from the NYT but maybe they are there. Maybe you can find a line or two, like the "feminists are Voldemort" that seem bad and worse outside of context. That's not really what the blog is about though and in a newspaper article describing it probably shouldn't zero in on minor blemishes or debatable flaws and use them as the main focus. Wasn't this supposed to be about Silicon Valley's Safe Space, or getting into the zeitgeist of the "rationalists"? How did the NYT article even attempt to do that? To my reading the NYT was just focused on complaining about the "problematic" aspects and nothing else.
I think it's fair to talk about problematic comments on a blog but it's not fair to act like problematic comments or loose associations to objectionable figured are the main thing when they really aren't.
Regarding your point about the feminists and Voldemort, if memory serves Scott was referring to a specific group of feminists and not likening all feminists to Voldemort. That's not really the impression I got from the NYT though.
The quote is explicitly only about "people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them". (https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...)
This leads to several keys questions: Are all feminist such people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them?
The second question is, are all people who talk about "nice guys" and who enable, praise and link to them feminist?
The third question is if this definition of "nice guy" is the informal term or the sarcastic meaning, and how useful either are to describe a psychology profile or human male stereotype?
The fourth question is if a discussion around "nice guy" stereotype of either profile is of strategist benefit to goals of some feminist theory, and then which ones?
I am not saying this is the case (as I have no connection with the blog), but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great (which is the main takeaway I got from the article), that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there, and Mr. Siskind does not do that. If the claim is bogus, then the claim is bogus, but Mr. Siskind does not refute that they are attracted to his blog.
As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
This is the highest rated top level post that presents any degree of skepticism at all in Scott's rebuttal, below pages of anger against the NYT "hit." So much for that quality, rationalist examination of the facts. As somebody who read both his blog and HN throughout its run, I find the NYT article on the money.
Scott's own cowardice about revealing his real name is incredibly telling, too. So long as he remained anonymous the NYT actually respected his wishes and buried the story, while this champion of free speech refused to stand behind his own words publicly and lamented the abuse of the MSM coming to dox him. Now that the checks are coming in, he seems to have no problem, though.
My advice to you, dear HN, is to take a look in the mirror. This isn't a hit piece and Scott isn't a saint. If you believe his long winded rants have merit, you should also believe they stand on their own, and you should welcome the scrutiny.
>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
I don't understand why you would say it is dishonest to dissect that paragraph and point out that Scott agreed with Murray on something non-racist, and quoted a racist statement without agreeing with it. Scott is not agreeing with "The Bell Curve" and Scott has not said that he believes that black people are "genetically less intelligent than white people.” Before defending yourself against such accusations it would be wise to point out that they are baseless, and of course it's much wiser to leave it at that.
> 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best
I meant counts of points, i.e., three of them not addressing the issue (points 1,3,4) and one dishonest (point 2) - reasons above. So dishonesty was not related to point 1, sorry if it reads like that.
To further elaborate for 1,3, and 4; I don't contend with his explanations - but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.
Lots of blogs praise one another while also including disagreements and disclaimers that they don't fully believe their own writing, much less the writing of others. But they consider the articles to be worth reading anyway.
Some of my opinions are unpopular and may even make people uncomfortable. So I admit with trepidation that I still like the NYT and will continue to subscribe.