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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#311

Post by _v7gu »

qz_ wrote: post #277
red_admiral wrote: post #273

The clever playground bully doesn't say "let's beat up Scott", at least not where teachers can hear - he knows he can say something like "Scott annoyed me a bit yesterday" and his followers/admirers will know that beating up Scott might just earn them popularity points. The clever mafia boss, at least in the movies, doesn't leave a paper trail showing they've ordered a hit job on someone, they say something like woul…

You could make the same point about this article.

Yeah, the paper which lead to war in Iraq vs some blogger with at most 10,000 reach. That's clearly a fair comparison

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#312

Post by curlypaul924 »

woofie11 wrote: post #246
cedilla wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT abusing these kinds of allegations in a hit piece doesn't say anything about whether such claims can are "contentious and weaponized". Hit pieces latch on current topics. In the 1950s, the NYT would have had invented ties to communists. Or, if possible, hit pieces often imply corruption or paedophilia. That doesn't necessarily mean that corruption or paedophilia are topics that are "contentious" or related to…

I feel like the NYT used to be more credible and run fewer hit pieces. I'm not trying to argue zero, by any means, but I feel like in a very short time -- basically the past 4-8 years -- they've gone from one of the most credible source of media to where I trust them as much as I do Fox News (and I read both, as well as a number of international news sources, to have a complete picture). This sort of stuff seems to b…

I avoid both NYT and Fox, because it's too much effort to fact check every detail of every article I read. Both have too high an error-to-fact ratio IMO. That sort of thing has a way of affecting one's thought.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#313

Post by CPLX »

bnj wrote: post #242
CPLX wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you articulate a coherent framework for how and why an American news publication should be prohibited from revealing legally obtained true information about the leader of a large, popular, or otherwise noteworthy community?

I haven’t thought up a framework, but one thing I’m wondering is why the identity of the person alone is newsworthy. I’m probably missing part of the background here, I’m new to the controversy. Did some kind of mystery arise around the true identity of the author? Your comment implies that NYT obtained the true identity of the author through legal means — how exactly did they do that? I don’t think finding out the i…

> Consider someone like... Satoshi, of bitcoin. The character has achieved this powerful notoriety and managed to remain anonymous. Do people want to know which person on the planet created that persona? Sure; do they need to know, is the identity alone newsworthy without some reason to need to publish it?

If a journalist were to learn the identity of Satoshi of course that would be newsworthy. Is this a serious question?

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#314

Post by curlypaul924 »

woofie11 wrote: post #285
yardie wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT lost credibility for me when they endorsed the Iraq War in 2003. I have been very vocal about their credibility ever since, even though I agree with some of their journalism. Your heroes will disappoint you. Even the NYT have traded their credibility for clicks, I mean “engagement.”

For me, credibility isn't binary, but a spectrum. I saw problems before (NYT was never one of my heroes, per se, but just a high-quality, thoughtful, high-integrity newspaper). It always had its flaws, but for the most part, it seemed okay pre-Trump. Especially during the Trump years, but a little before as well, it seemed like the ends (on both sides of the increasingly polarized political spectrum) became more impo…

I get the same feeling. Is there any way we can isolate the underlying cause? Maybe then it would be possible to change things for the better.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#315

Post by MrMember »

Traster wrote: post #279
LeanderK wrote: post #209

I don't understand why the NYT would do something like this. I will continue to read the NYT but with a different feeling, it eroded my trust. More missteps and I will loose my trust. This is just unacceptable, especially in the times of fake news. I think the piece just does not have any arguments, it's just based on held beliefs that some things are wrong. It's just connects dots and quotes sentences that offend a…

>EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with. I recommend you read the NYT peice then, because it points out that if they publish his name as Scott Alexander (as he was going by) people would find out who he was simply by Googling that name. How exactly is the NYT meant to guaran…

Scott has addressed this at least a few times. He didn't care so much that people could go from Scott Alexander the blogger to Scott Siskind the psychiatrist. That was trivial to do before the NYT got involved. He was more worried about people (ie his patients) googling Scott Siskind the psychiatrist and finding Scott Alexander the blogger, because of how that would impact his relationship with his patients. An article from the NYT plainly stating "Scott Alexander is Scott Siskind" would quickly become the top result for either search.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#316

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

MrMan wrote: post #188
ALittleLight wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the difference between a blog and reddit I would say that the comment section harbors people with many different views. Some of the comments may be objectionable (again: I didn't see examples) but so what? That's got to be true of everywhere with a comments section. Why make that a focus? You write "if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great" - but this isn't even the kind of t…

Some of our applied social scientists are being allowed to work with very large datasets at places like Facebook and I believe they are increasingly in a position to make quantifiable statements on what racists or any other cluster-able groups of humans like. If by spectrum you mean “distance from a centroid” it might be more precise. Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and…

> Some of our applied social scientists are being allowed to work with very large datasets at places like Facebook and I believe they are increasingly in a position to make quantifiable statements on what racists or any other cluster-able groups of humans like. If by spectrum you mean “distance from a centroid” it might be more precise.

Just because you have more data, it doesn't mean that you can identify constructs like racism from this loads of data. You'd need some kind of ground truth mechanism (like an index of behaviour towards different races) which neither Facebook (nor anyone else) has. It's just wildly implausible.

Maybe, in ten years, NLP will be good enough to identify this, but I don't think these constructs are easily identifiable from text, certainly not in a public space such as Facebook.

> Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and marketers know a lot about human preferences and how to link them to motivation.

I get what you're trying to say here, and maybe that works in a small number of places, but having worked with marketers in analytics for the past decade or so, suffice it to say that I rarely praise the standards of experimention and (lack of) rigour employed by them.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#318

Post by grumple »

There's a saying (of unconfirmed origin), but I'll use Jay-Z's version: 'A wise man told me don't argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.'

I think the NYT piece was, like most 'journalism' these days, poorly researched, biased, and unfair. It omitted quotes from insightful passages of SA's, instead picking out those instances of 'impure' thoughts.

But I also think SA does some things that are perhaps signaling to racists/sexists that he's an ally of theirs, or at least intentionally providing a forum for them. Quoting Charles Murray to tell us about the time you agreed with him is much like Congresswoman Mary Miller quoting Hitler when she said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future'. You are giving credibility to these people. Even the quote SA cites (of himself) seems to agree with this:

> But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either.

The part he left out is that Murray thinks the inability of this trucker to learn is largely because of his genetics. Sure, maybe a poor choice of words. I'll withhold judgment as I haven't read too much of Scott's blog.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#319

Post by johncena33 »

speedgoose wrote: post #100

I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police". Even Macron felt the need to tell them they fucked up.

> I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police".

That was so bizarre. As a minority, I am afraid to openly discuss about the racism I face. I don't want to participate in oppression olympics or let other people use my suffering as their own political agenda. I want to be treated as a human being. I want neither discrimination nor preferential treatment. I want my work to speak for myself, not my skin color. It just saddens me the amount of identity politics out there and lack of any nuanced discussion.

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