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An upcoming story about Coinbase

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubtful the NYT would spend >2 months on a story about one relatively small company. Journalist time isn't free. The timing does look very odd and let's face it, the NYT has a lot of people who would absolutely hate a tech firm standing up to their agenda in the way Coinbase has done. Having successfully politicised the NYT they'd certainly feel entitled to do the same everywhere else. The 100% idpol nature of the s…

None of what you said makes sense, and Coinbase isn't standing up to any hidden agenda. It's simply being called it for is corporate behavior. And based on it's past behavior, it's likely the NYT report is true.

What past behaviour? Do you have any evidence that anyone at Coinbase is geniunely racist in any way at all? I've never heard such accusations before.

On the other hand, leftists spuriously accusing people of being racist happens all the time. My prior for such accusations being true is like 0.05

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#313
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the complaints at issue here certainly predate that infamous "please leave your politics at home" post. So while my comment above was made somewhat flippantly, I'm pretty sure it isn't wrong. It's no surprise that Coinbase touts some other changes. But these are made under duress, facing the imminent PR crisis that being called out in the paper of record. As such, they tell you as much about their true convic…

> that infamous "please leave your politics at home" post. Why is that 'infamous'? It's entirely reasonable to want to avoid political discussion at a workplace, in favour of work. Especially considering a particular political group (BLM) seems to have been the cause of issues at Coinbase. > an already incriminating attempt to preempt it Wanting to have your own say in advance of a newspaper that is objectively creep…

the world is not standing still of course they are "creeping towards the left". how could it be otherwise?

correlation that words like toxic masculinity are rising. well, they didn't exist before, did they? we had different problems then. we tackled them, now we're moving the the next ones.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#314
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume that CB is really the entirely innocent and maligned party here. In such a world, how would their response have differed?

You respond with specific facts and supporting evidence, not nebulous dismissals, which is how guilty companies respond.

> nebulous dismissals

this sounds like a good band name

sorry about the offtopic comment

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hit piece" is in and of itself a framing that clearly has a bias toward one side. Was the reporting from multiple outlets on Theranos a series of hit pieces? They were all negative, but that doesn't mean they were wrong. Coinbase has preemptively presented their side of the story in an effort to make us all say "oh, yeah, that's the hit piece we were warned about," but we haven't actually seen the other side of the…

All framing has bias. That’s standpoint theory in four words. It’s entirely possible the NYT reporter working on the piece about CoinBase feels they are being scrupulously honest and that anyone who reviewed their notes, interviews and background work would come to the same conclusions they do in the article. Not everyone would actually agree. People have divergent experiences and beliefs and will come to different c…

it all really depends on what happened there. some things are undefendable

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#316
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to provide examples of "race-baiting propaganda" as I called it, we would have to first agree on what constitutes race-baiting and propaganda. I assume we can agree that propaganda is material designed to sway an opinion, yet labels itself implicitly or explicitly as something other than "opinion". As for race-baiting, my definition is anything that brings race into the conversation when it is materially irr…

I’m white, and I read those same articles (I read pretty much everything in the 1619 project and the recent story on that poor girl’s death). I did not see any race-baiting in either. I did not see the introduction of “further division between two races”. I saw articles that covered some uncomfortable facts. If you’d rather ignore that reality you’re free to not read the Times. Edit: just looked at your comment histo…

[deleted]

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#317
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that infamous "please leave your politics at home" post. Why is that 'infamous'? It's entirely reasonable to want to avoid political discussion at a workplace, in favour of work. Especially considering a particular political group (BLM) seems to have been the cause of issues at Coinbase. > an already incriminating attempt to preempt it Wanting to have your own say in advance of a newspaper that is objectively creep…

the world is not standing still of course they are "creeping towards the left". how could it be otherwise? correlation that words like toxic masculinity are rising. well, they didn't exist before, did they? we had different problems then. we tackled them, now we're moving the the next ones.

I'm not sure why you think there's no alternative to creep to the left.

Ideas being new does not make them worthy of attention, especially when we definitely do have many more important issues.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#318
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "means they’re involved in preserving the present state of affairs" No it doesn't. Perhaps constantly forcing your subjective interpreted and implied meaning on everyone else is the root of the problem. > "call this being apolitical" Sure, call it that. It literally means not involved. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apolitical

I still feel that you're missing my point but I am clearly not skilled enough to make it more obvious.

Your point is exceedingly obvious. It's being refuted by both literal definition and reasonable interpretation of the vast majority.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#319
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this apropos to my comment? I didn't say anyone was. The only way I can see how this might fit as a reply to my comment would be the implication that it's okay to throw accusations around, and accepting accusations as automatically true, just because the accusation is not of a crime. That's exactly what we shouldn't do. That's my point and I for one am not gonna start doing such anytime soon, and I also try to…

Innocent until proven guilty is a standard used by law which places a very high burden on the accuser. Such a standard is in place because the consequences are both formal and very significant. Such a burden is also unreasonable in many informal situations, as being required to establish formal and indisputable evidence of wrongdoing would prevent many people from being able to speak out about wrongdoings (especially…

> Such a burden [innocent until proven guilty] is also unreasonable in many informal situations, as being required to establish formal and indisputable evidence of wrongdoing

Not automatically thinking that an accused is guilty is... Unreasonable.

I honestly have to ask if I'm reading that correctly because I'm really hoping I am.

> Even model citizen companies are able to trace down elements of racism within their organization when they look hard enough

Interesting, some people say this a lot, and also say the analogous regarding sexism. Yet when Google (a company that basically has "be evil" now as its unofficial slogan) actually "looked hard enough", they found they were actually paying women more than men.

So allow me to doubt this claim you're making.

> racism is a natural bias cooked into many of us

No, no it's not. Not only it is the naturalist fallacy (and without any solid evidence, unusual for this one), it's fundamentally cynical. People are not "naturally" bigots in any way, and even if the argument were for nurture (or "social conditioning", if you prefer), this claim would still be extremely suspect.

> while at the same time refusing to give charitable interpretations to the folks lodging the racism complaints.

I'm being charitable to both accusers and accused; there's no reason not to be, specially in this case where the complaints were investigated and found to be unfounded. You seem to prefer to be entirely on one side, and not only for this particular example; your original comment was far broader.

> it seems problematic to me that you would try and assert that actually everything is just fine [emphasis mine]

Is that what I said? Well, that you would twist my words this much in order to find them "problematic"—and that you would find such a claim "problematic" in this case—does explain why you think the existence of a complain surely means that a wrongdoing happened. Thanks for clearing that up.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 3. the louder correction came after they were called out for earlier silent edits: https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memo... (Side note I don’t really trust Quillette either but I do believe this sequence of events is what unfolded)

The NYT article linked to is from March, and predates your link by 6 months. All of the changes in the Quillette article were similarly announced by the NYT at the time they were made, though as smaller changes didn't get their own frontpage articles. As the 1619 project was itself described as an "ongoing" project it's bizarre and unusual for people to complain about it being corrected. That's the writing process: d…

> All of the changes in the Quillette article were similarly announced by the NYT at the time they were made

The changes to the framing of the project were not announced. The only way that anyone noticed them is that the lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones (NHJ), started claiming that conservatives were misrepresenting the project. She specifically said that the project did not claim 1619 as America's true founding date.

People then went back and found all of NHJ's tweets explicitly stating that this was the purpose of the project (NHJ deleted her entire Twitter history shortly thereafter). When people went to look at the 1619 Project website, however, they noticed that the intro paragraphs that explicitly stated that 1619 is America's true founding had been edited to no longer state that.

> In fact your complaint seems to be that the NYT corrects its articles on its website, which is a good thing.

The claim about 1619 being America's true founding was the central claim of the project, the thing that it had heavily publicized and used to gain attention. The NY Times spent months defending the project and attacking critics, only to edit out the central claim of the project without so much as a notice. The lead author then started going around denying that the project had ever made the claim, and calling the whole idea a conservative conspiracy theory.

Whatever problems the NY Times has had, this is not how people expect the newspaper of record to behave. If this were The Daily Beast, then it wouldn't be that surprising, but its the NY Times, the Gray Lady

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