771–780 of 1001 posts
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Dated a journalist who would ask me to explain tech things. Aghast, I asked if this was how she wrote about everything. It was. She's now a management consultant which explains alot.
Isn't it better that she's asking you rather than making up things?
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I think it's best to hear from NYT about why they strictly only use real names.
The policy doesn't even seem to be very consistently applied. There are a couple excerpts from articles floating around that happily use pseudonyms for, eg, one of the Chapo podcast hosts.
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Would it be worthwhile to create an index where people that are experts in something could vouch for the journalists that seem to know what they're talking about? E.g. I can verify that on the information security topic Joseph Cox from Motherboard is constantly on topic, but that information is useless to me personally, because by the time Vice publishes something it's already old news for people in the industry (or…
This is open to abuse for people, particularly companies, who have an axe to grind and will flood the "index." This is a bad idea.
I’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).
I 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…
That was bad journalism. Would you also stop trusting all doctors after meeting a bad one?
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How is this not theft? Journalism is expensive. Of course, there are other business models (full disclosure, we're building one too: https://blog.nillium.com/what-can-napster-teach-local-news/ ) but circumventing a paywall is not the answer. Yes, the NYT is one of the few outlets that is doing reasonably well right now. But many newspapers are going out of business, or at least furloughing employees -- employees who…
Loading a page and choosing not to run the code they ship with it is not theft.
Damn. I've been reading Slate Star Codex for a long time, and he's always been one of the most insightful voices on the internet. I'm really sorry to see him go. After reading this, I looked up NYT's policy of using real names, and it turns out this isn't the worst time that the NY Times has done this[1]. I've long said that if you want to know who an organization serves, see where its money comes from. The NY Times…
The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?
In the case of SSC I really worry that NYT would be trying to exercise control. They probably like many things written on the blog, but also hate other things like diving into statistics of gender based pay discrimination or statistics of racial motivation in police violence.
These are topics which the modern left (which I’m a million percent a part of) is increasingly pushing out of scope of the Overton window and treating them like they are not allowed to be subject to statistical evidence or neutral discussion.
There is only One Right Thing To Believe about police violence (that is targets blacks and minorities, even if this is simply not supported by data). There is only One Right Thing To Believe about gender-based pay discrimination (the popular notion of “women make 70 cents on the dollar” which is not close to the real effect size, and requires a ton of uncomfortable nuance to discuss properly because of confounding effects of women staying at home more often and choosing to stay home after maternity leave).
I think they want SSC to write about things that comply with their moral narrative, and see doxxing as a way to turn the screws and essentially promote a vague threat that if he writes something controversial about IQ or sexism or income inequality or whatever, and it doesn’t stick to liberal talking points, they can do a damaging hit piece.
The Columbia Journalism Review does a lot of "reporting on reporting," and has a very high profile in their field. I CC'd them on my email to the NYT section editor.
I've been reading this guy off and on since he was Yvain on Less Wrong. This is a really fucking strange place to take a stand when his name has been public knowledge for...almost forever. The guy physically meets people at conventions and the like and introduces himself with his full name. It's been less of a secret than who The Stig (top gear) is. NYT may or may not be doing a big wrong here, but it's a fruitless a…
That seems covered by this paragraph: "Some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients…
Many of the responses critical of his decision seem to read as "Here's reason X that his decision is non-sensical, and I didn't read the actual link where he clearly and reasonably addresses reason X."
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Both of those are right on point, and match my observations within my own circles. For me stallmans cancellation was a big turning point. I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now. I can't risk someone pulling up a comment or post years from now and using it to ruin my reputation or career, simply because i may have voiced an unpopular or controversial opinion that did not age well. It seems, too, that making jokes is ver…
It's undoubtedly more dangerous to be critical of the mainstream narrative now than it was 10-20 years ago. There's an alt right author called Vox Day (and I'm a little afraid to be referencing him here) who makes the following argument: if mainstream thought becomes increasingly constricted, and disagreeing with it becomes increasingly dangerous, people will do one of two things. Either they'll self-censor, or they'…
Went down a strange rabbit hole there for a while this morning after reading this. Ready to come back up for air now and put that behind me a while.