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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#121

Post by notmarkus »

listless wrote: post #52
mimikatz wrote: post #4

The piece was bad. After all the time they had to work on it, it was a lazy hack job that normally wouldn't make the cut at the NYT. It is a sign of the days we live in when a Mean Girls style burn book page makes it into what used to be the paper of record.

This is well said. The article is so weak and poorly laid out its like listening to a bad pop song through cheap speakers. It doesn’t even have a proper closing. Just ends abruptly.

I think the closing was effective in what it was going for: implying that this has all been a "grift." The abruptness is intended to leave the reader with a reverberating final note in their mind. "$250,000... $250,000..."

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#124

Post by Retric »

forgingahead wrote: post #96
vinay_ys wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A publication can be politically titled to one side and still be factually accurate and stay true to journalistic integrity principles (or at least that's what I want). With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible ju…

This seems to be contradictory. It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias? The NYT and others like it go out of their way to pretend they have no political bias, using the passive voice to give authority to slanted reporting which favours one "team" over another. Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of…

Not all partisan mouthpieces are equivalent. You can be factually accurate while leading people to the wrong conclusion. However, it’s much less work to find someone willing to lie, and much harder to detect lies than misleading statements.

Journalistic integrity is therefore critical when selecting which biased sources to pay attention to.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#125

Post by eatplayrove »

I have never read the blog, or have any positive or negative association with it, but after all the attention this story has garnered, I just read both the NYT article and Mr. Siskind's response.

The main takeaway from the NYT article is that there is a group of people in whose writings/blog comment sections/etc racists/sexists have found a home, and his is one of them. He does not address this assertion, or what the root cause may be if it is true, or if it is not true, why not. This is the whole point of 1, 3 and 4 in his statement but he does not address it.

As to the only concrete point he addresses (point 2), he does something that is dishonest. He wrote (pre-edit):

> "blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort“"

and then claimed it's taken out of context. I read the whole article, especially the surroundings carefully to see if there was any context as to which could change the meaning of what he wrote here, but there is none. This simply states that there is a thin line between feminism and evil. If you believe that, then don't delete it. But if you don't, don't tell the reader it's taken out of context, just admit you made a mistake in writing this, or you have changed your mind despite this was what you believed when you wrote the article.

So there are 4 points in the rebuttal, 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best. I am not impressed.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#126

Post by john_moscow »

kortilla wrote: post #60
john_moscow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge tension in the society caused by the wealth shift from individuals to corporations. As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests. The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirec…

> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up. The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism. Take…

>The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.

It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.

>Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.

There's enough space in the U.S. to build new housing. Like nice 2000+ sqft houses with lots, owned by the people living there. If only a huge chunk of the economy wasn't tied to a few megacorporations located in a handful of cities. So instead, we keep fighting for a right to live in a rented 500sqft box with barely enough space to sleep.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#127

Post by john_moscow »

astrange wrote: post #103
john_moscow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge tension in the society caused by the wealth shift from individuals to corporations. As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests. The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirec…

> As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests. That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist. Doesn't everyone know what Ford did there? In highly-corporatist Japan your boss will person…

>That would not be against your employer's interests, because companies need customers to exist.

Except, with globalization, it's cheaper to import people from 3rd-world countries and then pay them just enough so that the current generation will keep doing its duties.

I'm a first-generation immigrant myself and I'm quite baffled at how unaffordable it is to raise 2+ kids and make sure their life quality will be similar to mine. It's almost like the expectation is that I won't do that because they will instead import those who were raised at a fraction of the cost elsewhere.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#128

Post by runsWphotons »

nexthash wrote: post #85

Wow, the NYT's actions on this one really made my blood boil. I don't even know how to process this... they typically put out reasonably high quality journalism that I read and enjoy on a regular basis. And then... this. They completely went beserk, like little children, with their heads firmly up their rears despite everything everyone begging them to keep Scott Alexander anonymous to preserve his profession and blo…

This has increasingly happened with topics I know about over the past five years at accelerating rate. [If you want to be uncomfortable, consider noticing this repeatedly is part of what has driven half of the US mad.]

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#129

Post by biztos »

colinmhayes wrote: post #106
NhanH wrote: post #13

This is shameful, and the second time this month NYT puts out such a shameful piece (the first time was the JetBrains/ Solarwinds article). I guess this should be enough to disregard everything NYT will write, and stop reading them. Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott dele…

The times is very pessimistic on tech, largely I believe because they're upset about being run over by google/facebook. It's definitely unfortunate, but the future of journalism is really not bright at all. No one is willing to pay for unbiased news, so you need to find a niche to attract people or churn out clickbait. The times has found their niche as technocrat skeptics.

> No one is willing to pay for unbiased news

I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.

But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#130

Post by ALittleLight »

eatplayrove wrote: post #125

I have never read the blog, or have any positive or negative association with it, but after all the attention this story has garnered, I just read both the NYT article and Mr. Siskind's response. The main takeaway from the NYT article is that there is a group of people in whose writings/blog comment sections/etc racists/sexists have found a home, and his is one of them. He does not address this assertion, or what the…

A while back I mentioned to my mother that I had been to a "reddit meet up" and my mother, predictably, had never heard of reddit. Later, reddit made the news, I forget exactly what for, but in was the category of harboring child pornographers, racists, or nude celebrity photos. What I did remember is hoping my mother didn't see this news article and conclude that I was out meeting with racist pedophiles.

The thing is, it's not wrong to say that pedophiles and such use reddit. They do, in the same way they use phones, TVs, and cars. It's not an apt description though, if someone asks you what reddit is, to talk about the racism and hate and what not. The reason being is that the bad stuff isn't the typical reddit experience and doesn't describe the whole thing well.

In Scott's post he gives the example of the Wizard of Oz review (girl goes to a surreal landscape, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again). Maybe it's technically true, but it's not an apt description. It doesn't really capture what the movie is like.

Where I'm going with this is: maybe you can find neo-reactionary or pro-eugenics or racist comments on the blog. I don't recall any examples of horrible comments from the NYT but maybe they are there. Maybe you can find a line or two, like the "feminists are Voldemort" that seem bad and worse outside of context. That's not really what the blog is about though and in a newspaper article describing it probably shouldn't zero in on minor blemishes or debatable flaws and use them as the main focus. Wasn't this supposed to be about Silicon Valley's Safe Space, or getting into the zeitgeist of the "rationalists"? How did the NYT article even attempt to do that? To my reading the NYT was just focused on complaining about the "problematic" aspects and nothing else.

I think it's fair to talk about problematic comments on a blog but it's not fair to act like problematic comments or loose associations to objectionable figured are the main thing when they really aren't.

Regarding your point about the feminists and Voldemort, if memory serves Scott was referring to a specific group of feminists and not likening all feminists to Voldemort. That's not really the impression I got from the NYT though.

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