Cancel The New York Times

On the Doylist side, it's here because it was linked from Scott Siskind's response to the NYT article about himself: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

I read them in that order, and the OP article at least had context that way. It's in part deliberately bad for rhetorical reasons, since it's a call to arms asking for more people to write, just write, good or bad. It's art-prose in the vein of David Foster Wallace. (Edit: I totally meant Samuel Delany)

Vague accusations and insinuations without any substantiation whatsover...

Another comment below answers your question perfectly IMO:

> He feels he has no voice, no power politically and seems to want to lash out at an entity that appears to have both. I don't understand it, but it's not an uncommon story, especially recently.

> No one has declared themselves the "guild of truth"

Get back to me on this in a couple of years, when "fighting misinformation" reaches its peak. All social media already have "guild of truth", and you can be very effectively silenced if you run afoul of this guild. The formal institutionalization of this de-facto arrangement is still in the works, but there's no doubt there is a wide demand for it and wide agreement - at least among politicians, academia, news media, entertainers and big tech companies - that having a "guild of truth", tightly controlling masses' information intake, is a good and vital project.

> It seems perfectly adequate

Adequate for what? It is a partisan propaganda organ including some infotainment content along the way. For people that see the task of the press to be something else, it is abhorrent. For people seeing nothing wrong with a correct-minded propaganda, especially coupled with a bit of fun infotainment, it's perfectly fine.

To me, this shows radical leadership, and that he is very unattached to societal norms. Radical leadership meaning that this is kind of the antithesis of a follower mentality. I think it's a kind of genius, but also a personal failing. I really appreciate people who are willing to "question everything", because there are a lot of things we take for granted without thinking about why.

The failures I think this comes from are a form of ignorance and arrogance, and possibly a lack of empathy about how they're perceived. I personally know someone like this that is very intelligent, and thinks that they have all the right answers. There seems to be a mentality of, I have this information facts, given these facts, and that as a goal, *this* is the solution.

With the person I know, a significant problem with their reasoning is that they have important gaps in their knowledge (ignorance). They believe other people just aren't as enlightened as they are (arrogance), and if they were, they would have come to the same conclusion.

For my acquaintance, I believe that the mentality comes from a history of often being right, but also a prolonged social isolation that allowed them to build a myth in their head that they are always right.