At the risk of bringing the level of commentary on HN down, why not create a new publication called: The Tomes
Resignation Letter
701–710 of 716 posts
Re: Resignation Letter
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bari Weiss is bringing politics into her behavior- she was tweeting insults about her own co workers during a meeting about the journalistic direction of the company she is participating in the journalistic direction of. If this came from anyone else she'd be fired immediately.
I've seen this comment a few times, but I haven't seen a source yet. Can you provide one?
I'm guessing this is referring to https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1268628680797978625:
The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.
Re: Resignation Letter
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I provided some evidence for the FT. Do you think a newspaper that literally flies the flag of a foreign government over its offices is going to be critical of that government? I'm not sure how you'd prove this rigorously though. Just look at other comments in this thread. One commenter observes he never saw a pro-Brexit op-ed in the FT, ever. They're always anti.
I doubt editorial policy is dictated by proximity to flags, so I'll leave that aside. The FT and Economist are both focused on economic issues. I don't think you can expect them to campaign for a cause that is (by the admission of its supporters) going to damage the economy. They do consider the positive economic outcomes and possibilities of Brexit within their reporting, but there just aren't many compared to the n…
That's a really weird construction, almost feels bad faith. I meant that the flag is dictated by proximity to their editorial policy, the other way around as you put it here is nonsensical. You're arguing with a strawman.
The idea that Brexit will harm the economy is:
1. Highly controversial to begin with. Plenty of Leave campaigners and voters were motivated by a belief that the EU is sclerotic and adopts many anti-growth economic policies that could be reversed or ignored once out. The idea it's economically harmful is not at all agreed on by both sides, but if you read the FT you can be forgiven for having a highly one-sided view on this!
2. Discredited. The whole population was told even just voting to leave would cause a huge recession. In fact the economy grew. Economists quite clearly cannot predict the effects of Brexit because they tried already and were as wrong as wrong can be.
Even Paul Krugman admitted that the stated beliefs of economists on Brexit were "dubious" and "motivated reasoning" ... of course he only admitted this after the vote was in:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/freshwaters-wro...
What we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that it will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious. Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics — but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility.
At this point, reporting on what economists think is about as useful as reporting on what epidemiologists think. They all disagree on everything all the time, so it's a way for the journalists to speak through their chosen 'experts'.
Re: Resignation Letter
#704> Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I…
That's the part I disagree with. The NYT isn't following Twitter. Twitter is the modern way to express at the 3rd person ("twitter mob says") what is really meant at the 1st person ("our editor thinks"). You will never see some angry tweet from Trump supporters quoted or even mentioned. In the old days you would interview enough random people in the street until you found one that said the narrative you wanted to pus…
> The NYT isn't following Twitter.
What is said here is that journalists are trying to appealing to their Twitter follower instead of doing their job. It's peer pressure, but on Twitter, not in the editing room of the NYT.
Re: Resignation Letter
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have agreed with you 5 years ago. Unfortunately pretty much every article in the FT has become politically motivated, following very much the NYT's "only the facts that fit the narrative". The FT is openly running campaigns on many topics, and then you aren't reading news, you are reading propaganda. The editor changed in January, I unsubscribed a month before. Perhaps things have changed since.
It's gotten a lot worse since January. I've subscribed for over a decade, and for the first time am questioning whether I should keep paying to be misinformed. It's very strange as FT subscribers often have money at stake and the last thing they want is to be surprised by events. Maybe their subscription numbers are falling and Nikkei is chasing the mass market and ad revenue. I don't see that working, as divisive cl…
Can you describe how it's gotten worse?
I have found, in general, that there's a lot more sloppy editing across the news media, which is understandable given how much has happened.
Re: Resignation Letter
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, you can find some on the left whose speech It is not just some though. It is a whole lot of people. Or, at least, this is what it is in online discourse. The overwhelmingly loud voices of the intolerant drown out anyone who is even attempting to be nuanced. But perhaps that says more about online discourse than it does about any left vs right debate.
>But perhaps that says more about online discourse than it does about any left vs right debate. By Jove! I think you've got it! Btw, any time I used to try to contribue to bona-fide conservative, right wing media (e.g. redstate), my account would be cancelled as soon as I asked any question that indicated I might be not completely bought into the nominal worldview of the medium. I hate whataboutism, but let's not pre…
Having your account canceled is not what is meant by cancel culture, though.
Re: Resignation Letter
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But, in 2020 you cannot question or be skeptical of the "progressive" agenda. Merely hinting that you are not fully bought in will get you labeled as a racist, or even worse these days, a "Conservative". Is it really the case? Or is it a perception you have? I've become less and less liberal the past three months, for multiple reasons, and at least in my liberal bubble, i did not face any backlash.
> I've become less and less liberal the past three months, for multiple reasons, and at least in my liberal bubble, i did not face any backlash. A lot of people are becoming less liberal - your liberal bubble might be trending in the same direction.
What does becoming less liberal mean? I mean it seems a lot of people are becoming more radical. And the US version of "liberal" was always more of a catch-phrase than any coherent ideology.
Re: Resignation Letter
#708The "orthodoxy" the author writes about is real. I am a skeptic and cynic by nature. In my experience "common wisdom" is usually anything but. In software and technology I've found when you eschew dogma and "best practices" you more often than not get better results. But, in 2020 you cannot question or be skeptical of the "progressive" agenda. Merely hinting that you are not fully bought in will get you labeled as a…
> But, in 2020 you cannot question or be skeptical of the "progressive" agenda. Merely hinting that you are not fully bought in will get you labeled as a racist, or even worse these days, a "Conservative". Is it really the case? Or is it a perception you have? I've become less and less liberal the past three months, for multiple reasons, and at least in my liberal bubble, i did not face any backlash.
Could you explain what becoming less liberal means for those who have no firm grasp on the US liberal label?
As to who gets labeled what for which action is a big mess, but the direction seems to be that people are very quick to call everyone else bad if they are not as far-whatever as they are. (Anyone trying to gather and assess data about anything like "race", police brutality, homicides, guns, socioeconomic status is instantly suspect. But also it's very clear that a lot of people just post incoherent unfounded stuff on twitter which happens to have citations and graphs and even some structure resembling a paper -- and of course discussing it on twitter is neigh impossible, but almost always an exercise in mental self-harm.)
Sadly the real internet hate machine is not 4chan's /b/, but serious platform like facebook and twitter, where real people grind their ideas on each other until they just become sharp sticks and slurs to poke others with.
Re: Resignation Letter
#709Bari Weiss is a problematic character in this area. She has played gatekeeper herself quite stridently and successfully. She is quite fine with her own "involvement in numerous campaigns to vilify and ruin the careers of several Arab and Muslim professors due to their criticisms of Israel" per Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
Apples to oranges. There's a huge difference between an individual journalist numerously reporting on something they feel strongly about vs. the most influential newspaper in the world turning into a hyper-partisan (left-wing) propaganda machine.
How is the NYT the most influential newspaper in the world? Even if it was at some point, even if the zeitgeist was that it was at some point, even if there was some metric that showed it was that at some point ... this seems like something that is almost impossible to rationally claim and verify (without let's say a lifetime's work).
Re: Resignation Letter
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the latest argument from people who claim cancel culture doesn't exist. "How are you being silenced when everyone will read it from your high perch?" High-level writers need to push back against illiberal and anti-free speech proponents to give cover for the lower ranks. If even the top tier writers can't speak their mind, does the lowly intern or new hire stand a chance?
The problem with this rebuttal is that it assumes that the high–level writers and editors are not themselves the illiberal and anti–speech proponents, gatekeeping what perspectives are allowed to be represented in the first place. For example: Harper's Magazine, which published the recent open letter on cancel culture that Bari Weiss signed, doesn't pay its interns [1], ensuring that only those who can afford to work…
"Cancel culture" doesn't mean no word from them for ever after. It means they get demoted, dismissed, let go, fired, etc. People are losing positions, jobs, power, control, income, reputation, titles and whatnot because of various reasons. Usually due to the pressure of a largely invisible mob.
For example the case of Stephen Hsu ( https://statenews.com/article/2020/06/michigan-state-geu-cal... ) ... I have no idea if he's right or not, but it's true he's bad at PR and science communication.
We know how regular big of a backstabbing parade the regular old natural science community is (string theory boo/yaay, money for colliders, SUSY, ITER/fusion vs something else). So it's not a surprise that social-adjacent science is even more hardcore in this regard, but this is likely too much and too fast. Yes, sure activism and change needs momentum, but people will be surprised when the hysteresis rears its head due to over-dampening.
But this has happened already many times (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sociobiology:_The... and here's an another example https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/hoeqyg/stereotype_ac... ) and likely will happen again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, note, I'm not saying we shouldn't raise the bar for public (and semi-public) discourse. For example, as far as I know, adopting Codes of Conduct turned out to be quite okay, it laid the foundation for the way to deal with problems, gave a structure and rules to point at when someone crosses a line.