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Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

newyorker.com

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Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#281

Post by zozbot234 »

krelian wrote: post #268
AzzieElbab wrote: post #93

I've been reading the NewYorker for decades. And this article makes me realize 100M Spotify is paying for Joe Rogan podcast is actually a bargain. Old media is done, they do not have a business valuable outside of adds driven model, all they can fight for is the power to develop narrative(s). In other words, they are fighting for status

Can you elaborate on why this article drives you to think that? As someone with no stake in the issue (aware of LessWrong but not much else) I found it very interesting and well written and it made me want to immerse myself more in the rationalist community which I found appealing. There was definitely an angle to this piece, like any piece, but I found it only slightly unbalanced. The unbalance was situated at the j…

It's not that hard to do research wrt. the blog if you're a dedicated person; many people have made archives available.

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#282

Post by ajkjk »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #57
ajkjk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't strike me as ugly as all.

It could have been much worse, but it's certainly not charitable.

I really disagree. I thought it was a balanced take, for the most part, and represented the SSC extended community in a way that did much better than naively misunderstanding it, and much better than the community understands _itself_.

I think that a lot of commenters on here have the exact self-righteous tone that this article criticizes (well, discusses with a bit of an air of judgment, but let's just agree that it's criticism): to these commenters, it is inconceivable that the NYT's behavior could be acceptable and not... what, profit-motivated, desperate for clicks, a salvo in a media war? But that's mostly absurd. Not impossible, per se, but unfounded.

This is one of those things where the Internet At Large seems to think that everyone has to agree on who's right here (it's Scott and friends?), and anyone who disagrees is Evil, and it's just a matter of figuring out _how_ they Are Evil. But in reality people can actually coexist, and be allowed to coexist, with _different_ opinions of what is right or reasonable, and the NYT / persons who are removed from the SSC/Silicon Valley/HN bubble have very different opinions there.

The commenters here act like it is not okay for these differences of opinion to continue to exist, and so they must be crushed. It really, really doesn't look great to the community that when commenters encounter this difference of opinion, they... launch into uninhibited tirades against it at every opportunity. To an external observer, the commenters seem ridiculously worked up, and this article (among other takes) seems very mature and charitable in contrast.

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#283

Post by psds2 »

waon wrote: post #187
memexy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-

He was pointing to the appropriate channel for reporting such an issue. How else do you think people can signal objections? At least not by writing in their own diaries for sure.

He pointed to several channels including a twitter account, phone number and email. Are all of these channels equally appropriate ways to pursue civil discourse with the appropriate parties? Also, he only asked followers to be polite in parenthesis after this. Parenthesis are used for afterthoughts and explanations that deviate from the main topic. They also generally follow punctuation but the SSC blog post followed with the "be polite" bit after a paragraph break. For these reasons I do believe the "be polite" statement was disingenuous.

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#284

Post by fewaw2322 »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #93

I've been reading the NewYorker for decades. And this article makes me realize 100M Spotify is paying for Joe Rogan podcast is actually a bargain. Old media is done, they do not have a business valuable outside of adds driven model, all they can fight for is the power to develop narrative(s). In other words, they are fighting for status

Your comment makes no sense. The companies that are upending old media, Facebook and Google, also have an ads-driven model. Youtube is ads-driven. Even Spotify runs ads if you aren't a subscriber. And Joe Rogan has sponsors.

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#286

Post by AnthonyMouse »

psds2 wrote: post #269
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's try it this way. For any given website, more likely than not they would want the Internet Archive to archive it. For any given internet user, more likely than not they wouldn't want a website to track them for the purposes of advertising and price discrimination. This tells us what the defaults should be in each case, and let the exceptions change the setting if they want.

Why do you believe that a website would want the Internet Archive to archive it? There is clear evidence that some do not want to be archived (the existence of opt out option). What data shows that most do?

Being archived is all advantages. Users don't generally go to the internet archive instead of the source, so it isn't really competing with you for users. People trust it as an independent party, so if you want to be able to claim that you said something a year ago, it allows you to point to it there and prove that you didn't just put it on your website yesterday and post-date it. If you blow up your website by accident, they've backed up the content for free. People like the idea of what they wrote being preserved for posterity.

The percentage of websites that actually opt out of being in the archive rounds to zero. Compare this to the much larger percentage of internet users who opt out of ads by installing ad blocking software, despite many websites whinging at you or refusing to display content if you do.

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#287

Post by [deleted] »

anoncareer0212 wrote: post #276
astine wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. " You made a bad argument and therefore you are stupid " is not an ad-hominem argument " You are stupid and therefore your argument is bad " _is_ an ad-hominem argument. The OP's comment clearly follows the pattern of the former, not the later, so it is not an ad-hominem. Bear in mind that tripletao's thesis is clearly that the NY article is a bad faith essay. That's his conclusion , not his premise.

This is one of the most intense HN nerdsnipes I've seen in a while, reminds me of code reviews :P TL;DR: google.com -> define ad hominem -> "(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining" -> go back to the quote we're arguing about, it reads: "so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous" -> looks like those are words directed against a person rather than the…

[deleted]

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#288

Post by mellosouls »

avivo wrote: post #85

As someone who works at the intersection of technology and journalism, it hurts to see how many misunderstandings there are in these comments and elsewhere. The tech world (and HN in particular) deeply needs a solid explainer on how journalism works. So many misunderstandings! (Of course, many/most journalists also need an explainer about the tech world. And that is not to say that some of the more nuanced critiques…

Journalists needs to regain trust and credibility by writing with integrity and impartiality and not through a biased, cliquey, activist mindset before worrying about issuing "explainers".

Do the right thing; the explainers won't be necessary.

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#289

Post by [deleted] »

zozbot234 wrote: post #124
baddox wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that simplifying the entire Scott Aaronson affair was necessary, since it was just a brief part of this article. I thought their choice of simplification was reasonable and in good faith, but of course others might disagree (and unfortunately, whether we agree or disagree is likely to be effected by our overall level of agreement with the article).

You can simplify, and then you can say Scott wrote an angry "screed" that misrepresents 99% of feminists and ignores the plight of vulnerable women in its bourgeois defense of the privileged, nerdy intellectual class. (The article doesn't actually say "bourgeois", but the dogwhistles are crystal-clear.)

[deleted]

Re: Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

#290

Post by tripletao »

baddox wrote: post #277
tripletao wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear: 1. I believe the New Yorker reporter disingenuously made a statement that he knew to be false (because deleting the blog is clearly effective as a protest and publicity stunt, and clearly ineffective in removing access to content that's been widely mirrored elsewhere already) in order to create the false impression that Alexander might be trying to hide something. 2. I consider knowing falsehoods intende…

I think that both the New Yorker reporter and Alexander know that deleting the blog will not meaningfully impede people from accessing it who want to access it. I think that the reporter's claim that deleting it might impede people looking for dirt in past posts and Alexander's claim that deleting it might protect his practice and his patients are both far-fetched although not completely impossible.

I agree that the primary benefit to Alexander from deleting his blog was in discouraging the NYT from publishing his name, and that his arguments for why it might still help even after he gets doxxed are much weaker. I'd tend to apply a more charitable standard to weak arguments for something he has the absolute right to do and that doesn't harm anyone else (what if he just didn't want to pay the hosting bill anymore?), than to innuendo questioning someone's character (by implying that this "creditable reason" might be out there) in one of the world's most-read magazines.
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