Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 584 posts

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

#471

Post by thu2111 »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #451
vslira wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article is just more propaganda in the evolving war of words between SV and journalism. There's no war between SV and journalism, theres a feud between technologically and business savvy content companies and decaying content companies. Op-eds, moral posturing and long forms are not journalism. Journalism is a truthful representation of facts with analysis added for context to inform the readers, which the NYT…

Along with the rest of HN, you have no idea what journalism is. When has journalism ever stuck to “facts”? When has the “news” and “history” been more than short stories and opinion? Hint: Never Read: A History of News by Mitchell Stephens https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1854941W/A_history_of_news Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_journalis…

The role of the press is dissent and debate.

Even if we take your rather controversial definition for granted, the press suck at dissent and debate as well.

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

#472

Post by thu2111 »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #294
analyte123 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that fringe, given the Elon Musk/Grimes connection: https://pagesix.com/2018/05/07/elon-musk-quietly-dating-musi... But you’re right it’s not part of the “discourse” except mostly as a joke.

Well, you're right, it's not fringe in the sense that no one knows about it, everyone has known about it for half a decade - taking it seriously is fringe.

I wouldn't say everyone knows about it. In fact one of the most baffling and stupid aspects of the Basilisk is the strong belief it propagates that nobody should talk about the Basilisk.

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

#473

Post by thu2111 »

paulgb wrote: post #166
eqvinox wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does strike me as ugly because there's just one "off" piece after the other. The thing about hiding posts from reporters while they know there's an ebook. Saying the NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning. Arguing that "de-anonymizing" Scott shouldn't be a problem because it was easy for them to do. Arguing that Scott should've expected unruly people to contact the NYT while drawing a…

> NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning. No need to generalize from the state of the media as an industry; NYT is a public company so their balance sheet is public. Here's their latest 10-Q, doesn't look like drowning to me. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169...

That isn't a refutation - the NYT is doing well whilst most of the news industry is drowning.

In fact there has even been an article in the New York Times arguing that the New York Times financial strength and power may be bad for news:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/media/ben-smith-...

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

#474

Post by thu2111 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #339
Natsu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've heard of the thin blue line, well this is the thin grey line. There's no attempt to stop any downhill trend. If they wanted that, they'd write to inform and attempt to give all relevant facts. Instead, they curate what the public is allowed to be showed, happily trumping up juicy anonymous rumors one moment and then failing to report well-documented, relevant facts the next. They're losing because that informa…

> I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientific paper should I care to, rather than some journalist's half-baked summary thereof. It's utterly shocking how often news articles summarize a paper incorrectly in some central, significant way. It's gotten to the point that, as you say, reading the paper and t…

Part of this is not the journalists fault, though. Or it is, but only in the sense that they should be more adversarial.

Very often when I read bad journalism, it's based on a bad academic paper in which the university press or even the paper's abstract has lied about what's actually inside it. To fix this would require journalists to both read and understand the contents of every paper they base a report on. Arguably they need to do that, but, I don't believe that's ever been the standard used before. They generally don't expect "respectable" people like academics, institutional spokespeople etc to flat out lie to them even though it keeps happening.

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

#475

Post by Frampy »

memexy wrote: post #398
Frampy wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof I was right - you don't like SA therefore his writing is bad and it has a secret evil message (never mind you couldn't even understand his point when you tried to write like him in another thread) and a 'critical' reading would validate your view, which is entirely unfalsifiable.

Which of my points is unfalsifiable? And where did I try to write like him?

Your attempt to rewrite the 'when I was young and stupid' excerpt, where you missed half the point of the piece, excised most of the words and declared him clearly not a good writer. Despite his writing being the reason he was even getting a nyt profile in the first place. It can't be that his writing speaks to people in a way you don't get, he's obviously a bad writer and all of those public intellectuals who are supporting him are... Not critical enough?

As for unfalsifiable, you claim there are dog whistles in every second sentence SA writes, and dog whistles are, by definition, unfalsifiable. You can claim anyone can see it if they look critically enough because if someone suggests they have looked critically and found nothing, you can simply claim they didn't do it right and mosey on. Dog whistles are also, by the way, fundamentally incompatible with the principle of good faith you claim to want to prosper. It's an interesting conceit, I'll give you that.

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

#476

Post by Frampy »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #376
jeremysalwen wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easy to find, and I know, because I have tried to find it multiple times, and I haven't found it, and I'm quite google-savvy. I don't doubt that I could find it if I put in enough time, or if I was lucky to try the "right" method on the first try. It's probably also significantly easier to find it now that there is a bunch of chatter about it.

Ive never found it either. And there are always comments saying “it’s easy to find” which feeds into the notion that he’s not really anonymous. I don’t buy any of it.

I think the words going unsaid here are 'if you look in the right places', probably because the right places in this situation are not places respectable people want to associate with (for good reason).

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

#477

Post by AgentME »

zozbot234 wrote: post #75
nullc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to paint SSC in a negative light the optimal tool isn't the posts-- it's the comments. Some of the posts were pretty cringe worthy but the comments were far more reliably cringe worthy.

Plenty of cringe worthy comments on HN, too. I mean, usually they're greyed out but still.

Ethnonationalists and race realists aren't too popular here or defended by the people in charge.

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

#478

Post by wizzwizz4 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #365
anoncareer0212 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please try to be civil, things like "That's not how this works, you give the definition and example" and "So far, the "yes that's an ad hominem" side seems disinclined to provide any evidence or engage directly." are factually untrue and ad hominem, we're downthread from me doing exactly that. I'll hang up and listen.

Okay, I'll try to refrain from that where it's unwarranted. That's a fair critique. Though you didn't address my argument here. You seem to be thinking that that definition means that a character attack at literally any point in an essay or report constitutes an ad hominem. It's not: the 'rather' implies a substitution, where the character attack essentially is the reasoning used. If I do an investigative report on a…

However, concluding that his policies are bad as a result of that would be.

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

#479

Post by wizzwizz4 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #267
saalweachter wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the Internet Archive archiving websites for the benefit of the internet users or the benefit of the website authors?

Yes.

Remember when that bank used the Internet Archive as a CDN by mistake? The Internet Archive functioned as a primitive form of version control, allowing them to get some client-side code they'd accidentally lost, but needed again.

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

#480

Post by wizzwizz4 »

psds2 wrote: post #296
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't think you can make that assertion without asking the maintainer of the website. Let me rephrase. More websites would want to be archived than not. So that should be the default. This is how defaults are meant to work. Unless the default is somehow harmful or dangerous, they should be the thing that the most people want, so as to reduce the amount of work involved in getting everyone to their preferre…

If a website that wants to be archived doesn't opt-in that is a failure of the website. If a website that doesn't want to be archived is archived that is a (possibly non criminal) trespass by the archivist.

Trespass? It's having a conversation with a public web server, not breaking and entering. It might fall under copyright law, but not trespass.
Post reply on HN