Given the rather enormous of time and attention spent on it, not to mention the vast amounts of heated debate it had already spawned, I'd sort of assumed the NYT would either publish a really, really solid article or (more likely) just spike it and try and forget the entire thing had ever happened. After all, given that the NYT was now so much a part of the story, writing anything good would be pretty hard.
But no, kudos to them, they found a third way: Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association, and carefully ignore anything inconvenient.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
It feels weird even writing this argument down. If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
Such a badly-written, mean-spirited article. A typical paragraph has a few ominous claims, which, when you read the links, aren't supported at all, nor connected in the way they're suggested to. Such as :
> In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray. The paragraph makes Scott sound like a flaming racist. It's just totally dishonest writing. It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.
The anonymity thing seems to have been well and truly discarded – flung in his face, more like. What did he do to them to deserve such treatment, such contempt?
I did get one laugh, out of:
> “[Rationalists] are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson
If you read this article and know the types of things that Scott writes, remember this experience and try to imagine how many other nytimes outrage articles are similarly full of lies.
I think they know how deeply engrained their position is but I hope they underestimate how much deeper the connections people have to truly inspriring sources like SSC are.
I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.
In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary.
It's interesting how many of the article's claims, often quite vague, are unsupported by any quotes or citations. For example, Metz claims that social justice "voices who might push back were kept at bay" on SSC, but provides no clarification of what he means by this or how it was accomplished.
Peculiar choice not to justify with source material when the topic is a public blog with public comments.
I would generally reserve HN as a space worthy of more nuanced opinions than this but in this case there is one response that feels appropriate.
Fuck the nyt. That entire dumpster fire can hopefully fizzle out shortly.
Slatestar codex was some of the most interesting content I've read in my life. In comparison, I've never read anything in the nyt that compares to "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" or "Meditations on Moloch" or "The Toxoplasma of Rage" so in my mind the single most consequential thing that publication has done is to silence something of higher quality than itself out of fear.
Having followed SSC for a number of years in the mid-2010s, I eventually just started drifting away. The so-called Grey Tribe is really just toxicity that's managed to talk itself into self-unawareness. Case in point, quoted from the article:
> The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
This is exactly the sort of thing you manage to convince yourself of when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys, but also don't want to throw in with the sorts of people comfortable with being called the bad guys. Everybody in the Blue Tribe is going to precisely see the toxic nature of this statement. Women aren't interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. Reversing the order of the causation is making excuses for sexism and is itself sexist.
The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
Now, this is Hacker News, this community is very close to the SSC one, so I know a lot of people aren't going to take this well. But the Grey Tribe really isn't a nice place to be, and the sooner you can realize this, the sooner you can find actual political heft in the world.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities. When you state a contrarian opinion like it's fact, like it should be considered because you're the one saying it, and the reason you're stating it is none other than you don't like all those nasty SJWs, you're denying the lived experience of all the people out there who spent their lives being one of those oppressed minorities. All of those girls who hide their gender from their gaming pals. All those Black Americans who discover that the tech landscape doesn't reward knowledge and talent as much as it does the right race and skin color.
It may be a little better in the tech industry than it might be, say, in the construction industry, but to pretend these things don't exist or aren't as important as what your mind sees as bigger is, well, toxic. And it's the cornerstone of the Grey Tribe mindset.
s/But in late June of last year, when I approached Mr. Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished./But in late June of last year, when I doxxed Mr. Siskind, it vanished./ FTFY
I love the diffusion of responsibility via the passive voice. Oh it "just disappeared."
NYT is the same rag that published as "news" and helped expel a girl from college, because when she was 15, after passing her driving exam, she was caught on video bragging "I can drive, n..." (addressed to no-one, meant as a boast).
To me that's 1000 times more offensive and hideous than using the n-word by yourself, and the scum of the earth that wrote and posted that article (and those that expelled the girl), should be ousted from society.
The timeline you present here is all wrong. The article itself says that her college acceptance was rescinded, meaning it came before this article.
The article was published in December 2020 and these events happened in June 2020:
> The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
The mere act of reporting - documenting an event that happened for its readers - does not make the author “scum of the earth”.
You find it offensive and hideous that the journalist did things that they did not in fact do, while yourself presenting a false accounting of the facts.
I can't get over that either. The girl was not some redneck racist, she was an active BLM protester, but they still framed her hometown as
"Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling."
Media seems to be increasingly part of the enforcement arm of the monoculture. For those that are in the “club” there’s cover, for those that find themselves on the other side there’s smear.
Nowhere in the NYT article it explains the real problem Scott had with them publishing his name. It’s not the forward search (SSC -> real name) that’s the issue, it’s the reverse search (real name -> SSC). Before the NYT article his patients would mostly not be able to find his blog; after the article it’s one of the first results that comes up.
The fact that the article does not go into this is very dishonest as I’m sure Scott made this argument to the reporter.
> The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.
This is an age-old refrain and I am honestly surprised that people keep viewing it as a reasonable position. It's exactly the same line that Parler tried to peddle, along with every online community that eventually - shock horror - turns out to be a platform for hate rather than 'rational' thought.
Free speech is important, and should be defended. When your version of 'free speech' is only extended to alt-right ideals, you're not arguing in good faith for free speech.
Maybe I'm bitter and biased because I like SSC, but based on the author's social media profiles and his new book description, he's purely jealous that he wasn't allowed to be the man to "expose" SSC and how LessWrong and SSC played role in some events in his upcoming AI book "Genius Makers" (jeez what a name...).
Mr. Srinivasan said they could not let that kind of story gain traction.
“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
The NY Times has become such a petty, gossip ridden rag that it’s frankly embarrassing. I am personally angry about it, because I grew up in a tiny town, viewing the Times with admiration as a representative of the “cultured” world. What a disappointment.
On the "doxxing" controversy, it’s odd to see people who are supposedly in favor of free speech advocate for what is essentially the "right" to be publicly forgotten (since Scott’s real name was already public knowledge due to some of his past writings that were under his real name). Free speech and the right to be forgotten are in direct conflict.
I haven’t seen anyone frame the issue as a right. I’ve seen people argue that there was no public interest in publishing Siskind’s legal name and that it was unethical.
Well, it's not the right to be forgotten. It's the right not to have a major news outlet trumpet your name. There's still a conflict between "the NYT has the right to identify me" and "I have the right to say what I want pseudonymously", but the conflict is more nuanced than the one between between "the NYT has the right to identify me" and "I have the right to be forgotten".
One can simultaneously support a journalist's right to free speech and believe that he should not have published this. Just because I don't want to use state violence to prevent the publication of this article doesn't mean I endorse it. It's like saying that anyone who dislikes a product doesn't support the free market.
I do not think that fighting against against harassment, death threats, ect, is really the gotcha argument that free speech proponents would say is a huge contradiction with their beliefs.
Most people who support free speech, would probably also agree that it is good to give people tools to protect themselves from harassment.
> Free speech and the right to be forgotten are in direct conflict.
I don't think so. The right to free speech is a right the government to say what you want without consequences from the government beyond certain limited criteria. The right to be forgotten is a personal right where a person can decide they want certain information removed after a period of time. I consider this more a personal protection in a world where people have issues realizing that felons have paid for their crimes, that peoples views can change over time, etc...
While I largely agree with you, the motivations of doxxing is almost always to threaten someone into silence, and to chill others who might be considering opening their own mouths.
WSJ has the best straight news IMO. Their editorial section is nonsense though. The editorial section of NYT is a bit better, but just because it has a really broad stable, so most days there are both good and bad articles. I like The Atlantic for opinion on the left, and The Dispatch on the right. I also think Economist is good, but I'm not sure where to categorize it (which is one reason it is good).
Noam Chomsky covered this problem extensively in Understanding Power. You will do well to read it in whole, but here's a few helpful hints:
- All papers are biased in favor of their stake holders.
- Some are better at hiding it.
- Business sections are obfuscated with business-speak, but are way more factual because business people expect to be able to make business decisions.
- The best cross-section of news is a selection of newspapers with stakeholders who are not aligned or even clearly at odds.
- Papers from different countries often have different stakeholders.
- Having friends in the middle of the action is a great source of facts. Only works well if you have lots of such friends (e.g. if your name is Noam Chomsky).
I agree it’s gone downhill, I’m finding it really bizarre and somewhat sad to watch. It seems to me the pillars of legacy media like the NYT realized in the past decade they’re going to be outdone by newer internet-native ways of obtaining information (Substack, Twitter, etc. which do have their own issues), and their recent wave of SV tech industry bashing reeks of desperation. I’m not sure what’s going to rise to replace the idea of a “Paper of record”. Balaji is big on the idea of a “ledger of record” on some blockchain, but implementation difficulties aside, I’m skeptical that such a system would really solve the problem here.
WaPo is owned by the (second?) richest person on planet earth. To think it’s not used to advance his goals would be foolish. It’s not like Jeff is some kind of altruist.
Maybe viewing print news outlets as group-think hive-minds is part of the problem? Stories are written and edited by individuals with different views, styles of writing, agendas, ethics, etc.
The times is anti-tech but their other sections are the best I have found. Opinion obviously isn't for everyone but they have a wide enough range of ideas that most can find a columnist they like. The journal has good news too, but if you accidentally read the opinion section you'll want to vomit. The post I've found isn't as good outside of politics.
It's been a propaganda sheet for decades. The WP is worse.
...
On that topic, I find it mildly funny that the NY Times goes out of its way to grace Jill Biden [0] with the honorific "Dr" despite her bottom-of-the-barrel EdD, while a practicing clinician is "Mr. Siskind".
ZeroHedge, it’s crazy but in a balanced way (as long as it’s “anti-???”). And in contrast to NYT and other “reputable media” it doesn’t mislead you into thinking it’s not mostly fake news. Then I make my own opinions...
Have always had a soft spot for The Economist. I don’t always agree with their analyses but I like their generally pragmatic and humanistic style, and their global scope.
> Reading this article, some will say that they told me so, or even that I was played for a fool. And yet I confess that, even with hindsight, I have no idea what I should have done differently, how it would’ve improved the outcome, or what I will do differently the next time. Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.
It's incredible how defensive the comments on Hacker News seem to be about this article given how moderate and dry its tone is. Seeing people on here so bent out of shape over such a relatively pithy article is a bit telling frankly. I have to think the article wouldn't have made such a splash if it didn't touch on something deeper in the SV/Rationalist crowd.
And these are the people who are supposed to protect us from "disinformation"? The fact that the NYT can publish an article like this with a straight face just proves why we need freedom of speech as much as ever. Our once-trusted institutions have lost a sense of propriety and commitment to the truth.
[+] [-] Lazare|5 years ago|reply
But no, kudos to them, they found a third way: Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association, and carefully ignore anything inconvenient.
> He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something...?
It feels weird even writing this argument down. If you link to someone who supports X, then you're actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?
What a depressing waste of everyone's time.
[+] [-] yesenadam|5 years ago|reply
> In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray. The paragraph makes Scott sound like a flaming racist. It's just totally dishonest writing. It's hard to believe they're arguing in good faith there, but who knows.
The anonymity thing seems to have been well and truly discarded – flung in his face, more like. What did he do to them to deserve such treatment, such contempt?
I did get one laugh, out of:
> “[Rationalists] are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-o...
[+] [-] blhack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anm89|5 years ago|reply
I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.
[+] [-] karaterobot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|5 years ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
[+] [-] civilized|5 years ago|reply
Peculiar choice not to justify with source material when the topic is a public blog with public comments.
[+] [-] anm89|5 years ago|reply
Fuck the nyt. That entire dumpster fire can hopefully fizzle out shortly.
Slatestar codex was some of the most interesting content I've read in my life. In comparison, I've never read anything in the nyt that compares to "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" or "Meditations on Moloch" or "The Toxoplasma of Rage" so in my mind the single most consequential thing that publication has done is to silence something of higher quality than itself out of fear.
[+] [-] vinceguidry|5 years ago|reply
> The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
This is exactly the sort of thing you manage to convince yourself of when you don't want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys, but also don't want to throw in with the sorts of people comfortable with being called the bad guys. Everybody in the Blue Tribe is going to precisely see the toxic nature of this statement. Women aren't interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. Reversing the order of the causation is making excuses for sexism and is itself sexist.
The New York Times does not have to explain this to its audience. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.
Now, this is Hacker News, this community is very close to the SSC one, so I know a lot of people aren't going to take this well. But the Grey Tribe really isn't a nice place to be, and the sooner you can realize this, the sooner you can find actual political heft in the world.
Contrarian logic sucks. Rationalism isn't all it's cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities. When you state a contrarian opinion like it's fact, like it should be considered because you're the one saying it, and the reason you're stating it is none other than you don't like all those nasty SJWs, you're denying the lived experience of all the people out there who spent their lives being one of those oppressed minorities. All of those girls who hide their gender from their gaming pals. All those Black Americans who discover that the tech landscape doesn't reward knowledge and talent as much as it does the right race and skin color.
It may be a little better in the tech industry than it might be, say, in the construction industry, but to pretend these things don't exist or aren't as important as what your mind sees as bigger is, well, toxic. And it's the cornerstone of the Grey Tribe mindset.
[+] [-] djohnston|5 years ago|reply
I love the diffusion of responsibility via the passive voice. Oh it "just disappeared."
I hope big tech buries the NYT.
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-gall...
To me that's 1000 times more offensive and hideous than using the n-word by yourself, and the scum of the earth that wrote and posted that article (and those that expelled the girl), should be ousted from society.
[+] [-] brown9-2|5 years ago|reply
The article was published in December 2020 and these events happened in June 2020:
> The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
The mere act of reporting - documenting an event that happened for its readers - does not make the author “scum of the earth”.
You find it offensive and hideous that the journalist did things that they did not in fact do, while yourself presenting a false accounting of the facts.
[+] [-] flavius29663|5 years ago|reply
"Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling."
like it has anything to do with the girl.
[+] [-] adamjb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] high_derivative|5 years ago|reply
- Cancel NYT subscriptions
- Subscribe to independent journalists and writers on Substack or via other means
- Flag NYT articles
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lovecg|5 years ago|reply
The fact that the article does not go into this is very dishonest as I’m sure Scott made this argument to the reporter.
[+] [-] Peritract|5 years ago|reply
This is an age-old refrain and I am honestly surprised that people keep viewing it as a reasonable position. It's exactly the same line that Parler tried to peddle, along with every online community that eventually - shock horror - turns out to be a platform for hate rather than 'rational' thought.
Free speech is important, and should be defended. When your version of 'free speech' is only extended to alt-right ideals, you're not arguing in good faith for free speech.
[+] [-] pyentropy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Androider|5 years ago|reply
Mr. Srinivasan said they could not let that kind of story gain traction.
“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
[+] [-] ceilingcorner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argonaut|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chordalkeyboard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Smaug123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] da_big_ghey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stale2002|5 years ago|reply
Most people who support free speech, would probably also agree that it is good to give people tools to protect themselves from harassment.
[+] [-] kodah|5 years ago|reply
I don't think so. The right to free speech is a right the government to say what you want without consequences from the government beyond certain limited criteria. The right to be forgotten is a personal right where a person can decide they want certain information removed after a period of time. I consider this more a personal protection in a world where people have issues realizing that felons have paid for their crimes, that peoples views can change over time, etc...
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchusma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanderjd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|5 years ago|reply
- All papers are biased in favor of their stake holders.
- Some are better at hiding it.
- Business sections are obfuscated with business-speak, but are way more factual because business people expect to be able to make business decisions.
- The best cross-section of news is a selection of newspapers with stakeholders who are not aligned or even clearly at odds.
- Papers from different countries often have different stakeholders.
- Having friends in the middle of the action is a great source of facts. Only works well if you have lots of such friends (e.g. if your name is Noam Chomsky).
[+] [-] md2020|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xeeeeeeeeeeenu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leesalminen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobmaxup|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinmhayes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mynameishere|5 years ago|reply
...
On that topic, I find it mildly funny that the NY Times goes out of its way to grace Jill Biden [0] with the honorific "Dr" despite her bottom-of-the-barrel EdD, while a practicing clinician is "Mr. Siskind".
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/politics/jill-biden-fi...
[+] [-] fredsted|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tomp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0_____0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AngrySkillzz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neural_thing|5 years ago|reply
https://howthehell.substack.com/p/nyt-ssc-quoting
[+] [-] bryan0|5 years ago|reply
> Reading this article, some will say that they told me so, or even that I was played for a fool. And yet I confess that, even with hindsight, I have no idea what I should have done differently, how it would’ve improved the outcome, or what I will do differently the next time. Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.
[+] [-] abvdasker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta8645|5 years ago|reply