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I Am Deleting the Blog

slatestarcodex.com

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Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#971

Post by gjm11 »

taneq wrote: post #957
smsm42 wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott has been harassed by cancellers for years. It's a well-documented history, which was a serious issue for him and led to banning culture war topics in SSC-affiliated reddit section. There are still people and AFAIK organized communities on Reddit that target him. There were calls to his employers to get him fired and to friends to get them socially shunned. Now imagine how much more of this one would get if thei…

> Yes, there are also random crazies. The issue here is that he's a psychiatrist. Dealing with random crazies, some of whom might literally try to kill him if they knew where he lived, is his day job.

Those people already know his real name.

So the extra danger from that direction associated with the NYT publishing his real name in an article about SSC is that they might read that article, discover that Xxxxx Xxxxx who treats them for paranoid schizophrenia also has this blog that says yyyy yyyyy yyy yyyyyy and that zzzzzz zzz zzzzz, and then go after him (using the real name they already had).

The harm there isn't zero, but I think it's much less than the harm that results from giving his real name to people who already knew about SSC and hated it for some reason.

(Also, at present at least, it's easier to go from Scott's real name to his blogging pseudonym than in the other direction with a couple of minutes and a search engine. Neither direction is terribly difficult, but that's no reason why the NYT should make them both easier.)

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#972

Post by sinity »

enriquto wrote: post #624
lhnz wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The events of the last 4 years, make it clear to me that we are rapidly heading towards totalitarianism. I finally understand the answer to the childhood question of "But, how could this every happen here?" that used to be an automatic response to being taught about awful events in history. When there is extreme moral certainty about societal problems, people can feel that for the problems to be dealt with they will…

If you are a history nerd, reading what people wrote 90 years ago you will realize that we are exactly the same species, and our attitudes have not changed a bit. One of my favorite readings are the essays of french philosopher Simone Weil after two visits to germany in the thirties. She was concerned with the rise of the nazis, while at the same time describing the natural and understandable forces that were making…

... but there was a reason, sort-of, for the rise of Nazism. Maybe I understand it badly, but things weren't great then. Now, there aren't really... problems on a comparable scale.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#973

Post by deleuze »

macspoofing wrote: post #917
vb6sp6 wrote: post #912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't it obvious that the upcoming NYT articles is going to be a hit piece with the goal of ruining his personal credibility and professional career. I suppose if i had and axe to grind against NYT it might be "obvious". Even the blog author mentions it would be a "mostly positive piece". Where are you getting your information from?

>I suppose if i had and axe to grind against NYT it might be "obvious". Like I said, I hope to be wrong, but I am cynical about the motives of NYT, especially given this quote from the blog post: "He told me it would be a ___mostly___ positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation." (emphasis mine) - t…

Does the NYT have an obligation to write a fluff piece? You're being "cynical" because of the qualifier "mostly"?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#974

Post by enriquto »

sinity wrote: post #972
enriquto wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a history nerd, reading what people wrote 90 years ago you will realize that we are exactly the same species, and our attitudes have not changed a bit. One of my favorite readings are the essays of french philosopher Simone Weil after two visits to germany in the thirties. She was concerned with the rise of the nazis, while at the same time describing the natural and understandable forces that were making…

... but there was a reason , sort-of, for the rise of Nazism. Maybe I understand it badly, but things weren't great then. Now, there aren't really... problems on a comparable scale.

> things weren't great then. Now, there aren't really... problems on a comparable scale.

That was exactly the attitude back then. "Of course, there are problems right now, but nothing of the sort that happened before the Great War. Nobody wants another war, there's no way that it can happen again." If you read what the people wrote in the thirties, it is disturbingly chilling.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#975

Post by kerkeslager »

kbenson wrote: post #934
kerkeslager wrote: post #923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty true on Hacker News. I engaged with the post as if I were in a conversation with the original author, not by posting here, but by sending an email to the original author. I can't help but think that this effect isn't what I want from this community, however. I want reasoned discussion that helps me to see issues from various points of view, but instead I get a bunch of uninformed opinions from people w…

> I can't help but think that this effect isn't what I want from this community, however. I want reasoned discussion that helps me to see issues from various points of view, but instead I get a bunch of uninformed opinions from people who didn't even read the thing they're opining on. Some of the absolute best discussions I've read and sometimes participated in on HN have been tangents or inconsequential to the artic…

> Personally, since these comments aren't the comments of the article in question (usually. Sometimes they just refer you here!), I think of it less as comments to the author when posting here, and more like a discussion in a group examining that article.

But that's exactly not what they are: you can't examine an article without reading it, and in many cases it's blatantly obvious that commenters didn't read the article.

I'm fine with tangents, it's the on-topic ignorance that bothers me.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#976

Post by deleuze »

frogpelt wrote: post #506
nojs wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can one go to learn these controversial truths? I would love to see a list of these facts that apparently only insiders can talk about. Are they literally so confronting/offensive that they don’t exist on the internet?

It's not the "truth" and the "facts" that people are afraid to discuss. It's their opinions about truth and facts. When you see phrases like "wrong/right side of history" and you see things happening like mass cancellation of brands or people for their opinions, you are seeing it. When a police officer is immediately fired and then charged with murder for performing his job the way he was trained to do it, you are se…

Right, but the whole point is that their opinion isn't valid?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#978

Post by nullc »

uniqueid wrote: post #10
ve55 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of political extremists hate people like Scott, and it has caused him a lot of trouble in the past. This is why anonymity is more important now than ever, because just writing a scientific blog about interesting topics can make you the target of witch hunts designed to ruin your life and kill you. It's hard to describe how bad these things can get out of nowhere without having been through some of it or seeing…

Is there any public figure on the internet who doesn't receive death threats? You could maintain a blog for photos of puppies, and some lunatic would have a deadly-serious problem with it. The web isn't working. The saner and wiser a person is, the less likely they are to contribute content. The design of the web selects for morons with neither any reputation to lose, nor foresight to worry.

It's extremely random. There are plenty of public figures that don't get that stuff and whom don't get what the fuss it about and plenty of other otherwise indistinguishable people that get piles of it.

> The saner and wiser a person is, the less likely they are to contribute content. The design of the web selects for morons with neither any reputation to lose, nor foresight to worry.

Absolutely.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#979

Post by Psyladine »

recursive wrote: post #953
norswap wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

psst: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/ Might or might not be the same guy, but it's close enough to not matter.

Trying to make sense of this reminds me of reading monad tutorials. To dense with references (self- and otherwise) and analogy for me to make sense of. It's definitely possible I'm just not smart enough to understand this, but how does one go about learning to comprehend stuff like this?

If you want to read Russian literature, you don't have to be Russian ('but it wouldn't hurt!'), you have to want to read Russian literature, i.e. learn the language and have sufficient interest in the material to seek out enough context to understand it.

Unless of course you simply want to be seen as the type of person who reads Russian literature, in which case thelastpsychiatrist.com is probably better for reading...

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#980

Post by wutbrodo »

lliamander wrote: post #907
jychang wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott is the type of individual where literally any side of a political debate can write a hit piece with some quotes, because he considers ALL the sides of a debate. Unfortunately, that's a rare trait these days.

I don't think I've seen anyone right-of-center have anything really bad to say about Scott. I doubt any of those outlets (Breitbart, etc.) would want to do that to him. This may itself be reason for some people to distrust Scott, except that he's probably done more to bring people to a moderate or left-of-center position on some topics than all the people shouting "racist!" combined.

I think this is just because the right is on the cultural defensive right now. Most people are really bad people; they don't process liberal principles intended to protect the powerless (on any dimension) as anything but a hollow tool, to be used when they're being protected and ignored (to the extent possible) when they want to crush their enemies.

That is to say, those who are culturally out of power _need_ to act relatively civilized, because civilization is the only thing that protects them, while those that dominate norm-shaping are free to act as the monsters they truly are. It's no coincidence that so much of the left has started pretending that caring about free speech is only ever a tactical decision to protect unforgivable rightwing views: if you're the kind of morally hollow creature that can't conceive of holding a principle, you also can't conceive of anyone else holding one. (Not incidentally, this is why Scott is so often tarred as alt-right or alt-right-adjacent, despite being pretty firmly on the left).

In the GWB years of an ascendant cultural right, Scott would have likely faced the same threats from the right as he does from the left, over different issues.

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