> my patients – who run the gamut from far-left anarchists to far-right gun nuts This strikes me as an off way for a mental health professional to publicly refer to his patients, even anonymously ...
"gun nut" isn't an insult to gun nuts.
I Am Deleting the Blog
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#122Somewhat related — does anyone know an easier way to cancel one's NYT subscription than going through the rigmarole of waiting for/talking with multiple "customer service" reps? After NYT's all-too-credulous parroting of Barr's mischaracherization of the Mueller report I tried to cancel mine, but spent over an hour on the phone with no progress, and gave it up. I should have persisted — I don't want to give them my m…
Switch billing to PayPal, cancel the PayPal subscription.
I did that a week ago, worked great.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
He wasn't really a source or a person in a hospital or elsewhere governed by privacy rules. As he says himself, his online persona is very lightly pseudonymous. It sucks that he's inconvenienced in this way but it's hard to see how these articles are relevant to his situation. If anyone actually wished him harm, they could probably find his name just as the reporter did before ever talking to him.
I don't agree that he wasn't a source. He seems to be the subject of the article, but he made contact with the reporter and claimed to explain his concerns which were not heeded. I've seen the New York Times omit the names of refugees who face persecution in their home countries. (I'm trying to find an example, but it's surprisingly hard to search for.) This is a different case, but I think it's broadly comparable.
I replied to these concerns at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611034 [so we don't keep two parallel threads of the same going]
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#124Amateur hour over at NYT. What happened to the whole protect your source journalism ethos there?
The NYT's institutional values died when A.G. Sulzberger became publisher at the beginning of 2018.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#125Am I the only one who is reading this as Scott flexing on NYT and that there's nothing to be sad about?
> After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.
So his blog will be offline for a bit but it is clearly not permanent (if everything goes as planned).
Great move and probably will gain him even more clout within the rationalist community.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#126I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly st…
Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it.
I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don't improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that's the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#127Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#128I’ve seen a lot of criticism for the NYT as of late, and, sadly, it’s almost all been warranted upon inspection.
I’m not sure if it’s a case of the top dog getting all the scrutiny, but it’s crazy to me how a company with so many good journalists can seem to have so many bad.
Much criticism is not even new (Manufactured Consent, Judith Miller).
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#129Seeing all this negative press about NYT (their website's weird trackers) and spotting increasingly more propaganda articles in their editorial section in the recent past, I am now going to stop my NYT subscription.
The last thing they deserve is my money.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#130Similar effect when reading the news on a topic that one is an expert in - they usually get it incredibly wrong. And then you turn the page and read the next article completely forgetting how bad the reporting actually is - there is no reason to assume they do a better job on topics that one is not an expert in! I think this bias had a name but I can't remember it.
It's called Gell-Mann Amnesia. And the only reason I remember that is because it was mentioned in a short story written by Scott Alexander.