Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Statement on New York Times Article

astralcodexten.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 437 posts

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#191

Post by runsWphotons »

b112 wrote: post #159
runsWphotons wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.]

An interjection here. Not directly related to the NYT article, just your comment. I feel the entire US has "gone mad". I'm a Canuck, and US and Canadian politics don't 'mesh'. So whenever I've spoken to Americans over the decades, often their politics make little sense, don't align, seem cogent to me. This, of course, I consider normal for a non-local such as myself. However over the last decade or so, I've noticed t…

I pretty much fully agree. I started noticing about five years ago that some people I knew for years were sometimes writing and talking in a way that was essentially gibberish to me. Now it has spread and become sort of what you describe even with old friends. I sometimes cannot even just state what I see with my own eyes without triggering the madness. It's like a decentralized psychological breakdown which I am witnessing from abroad. My phrase "half of the US" was a bit tongue and cheek. Pick your half. [Edit: just to engage the point about religion. It now seems to me that national politics in America is a religion. And maybe this was always and must be the case---if you read the founding documents and follow the early development. What is happening now looks like a potential schism. Staring at the other person and not understanding the words is what a schism looks like. No longer in communion.]

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#192

Post by MrMan »

dohnuts1919 wrote: post #162

> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” I laughed out loud at this paragraph, and it's such a perfect example of why I love Scott's wri…

The wizard of Oz humorous reference is from

https://ew.com/article/2012/10/26/wizard-of-oz-movie-descrip...

I think many people are aware of it, or were in 2012.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#193

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

remarkEon wrote: post #21
outoftheabyss wrote: post #14

This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-... It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for…

>It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob. Is leg…

As someone who majored in journalism and who graduated in 2009, what most people consider traditional journalism has been slowly dying since at least the 07/08 crisis. They were already struggling due to not knowing how to properly handle the internet. Giving away content for free was a mistake made in the 90s that was proving impossible to claw back, and online ads were nowhere close to making up for the lost revenue from print ads (because, in a bit of news surprising no one, there's no real proof that online ads work).

Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.

Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#194

Post by newsbinator »

twicetwice wrote: post #3

A great response, in my opinion. Succinctly and effectively points out what was wrong with the NYT article, then tries to move on. Somewhat more of a sober tone than Scott's typical writing, but still with a dash of his typical wit: > I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as:…

> ConTracked: A proposed replacement for government contracting. For example, the state might issue a billion ConTracked tokens which have a base value of zero unless a decentralized court agrees that a bridge meeting certain specifications has been built over a certain river, in which case their value goes to $1 each. The state auctions its tokens to the highest bidder, presumably a bridge-building company. If the company builds the bridge, their tokens are worth $1 billion and they probably make a nice profit; if not, they might resell the tokens (at a heavily discounted price) to some other bridge-building company. If nobody builds the bridge, the government makes a tidy profit off the token sale and tries again. The goal is that instead of the government having to decide on a contractor (and probably get ripped off), it can let the market decide and put the risk entirely on the buyer.

This seems like a good idea.

The government could prevent shorting government-issued tokens.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#195

Post by Traster »

So I may have come at this backwards- I read Scott's rebuttal and then read the NYT peice. No offence to Scott but I think he's got this all wrong. The NYT piece isn't about Scott, it's just a writing gimmick. The article is about the self-styled rationalists, Scott is just an entry point to open the discussion around these group of people. It's not trying to tie Scott to Thiel, it's describing the pantheon of people who move in this world, and it is a world, these people don't all agree on one thing, although they do fall into a sort of groupthink on some topics.

For example, almost every group likes to find a reason to think of itself as somehow better and more evolved than the outsiders, which is essentially exactly what you see with the people who frequent these groups. The rationalists think they're better than the NYT, largely because they look down on examining the world as it is, rather than inventing the world from first principles (in my view a key to the IQ debate between Harris & Klein).

There are genuine critiques to be made of the "rationalists" (let's just accept the label as a term for the group of people having discussions in and around Scott's blog). I don't think the NYT is particularly making any. It is quite clear to me however, that the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism and is entirely unwilling to actually debate the value of their approach with people who aren't already bought in to the appraoch. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone either from the Red tribe or the Blue tribe to say to the Grey tribe - "Sorry, but you can't be indifferent on the topics that you claim to be indifferent on". And the argument that the liberal end of the spectrum uses mob tactics seems rather... bizarre when made by an author who quite literally brags about the mob he stirred up against the NYT.

I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it - especially with anyone they've decided who isn't part of their Tribe.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#196

Post by rapsey »

nanna wrote: post #148
twicetwice wrote: post #3

A great response, in my opinion. Succinctly and effectively points out what was wrong with the NYT article, then tries to move on. Somewhat more of a sober tone than Scott's typical writing, but still with a dash of his typical wit: > I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as:…

> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"] I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.

They just have the best SEO.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#197

Post by loeg »

konjin wrote: post #157
sunpar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why people believe that anonymity is a right guaranteed to all people making content on the internet.

You don't have privacy in your bathroom either. Yet if CNN was to publish nude photos of you you'd be rightly upset.

You absolutely have a right to privacy in your house.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#198

Post by bobcostas55 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #107
musicbizsucks wrote: post #7

You can play a fun game with this snippet from the NYT article. You can replace the word "Rationalists" with the name of any group at all and the resulting statement seems vaguely true due to the imprecise nature of the language. > Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neore…

That's also a pretty bad definition of effective altruism. For how much they spout "do the most good" you'd think the author could just use that?

The whole thing is bizarre. The author has been working on this piece for something like 10 months now, and he can't get a basic definition of EA right? I saw a hot take on twitter that Metz deliberately did a bad job because he didn't actually want to write a hit piece and his superiors forced him into it.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#199

Post by dandare »

What I find noteworthy about this story is how contentious and weaponized have gender and race become. Out of the four negative claims, one accused Scott of racism and two accused him of of some variant of misogyny. The fourth associated him with some other form of non-pure thinking.

I am afraid things will get worse before they get better. I expect the trumpism/fascism wave will provoke unhealthy reaction and further chain-reaction. My personal lacmus paper is the use of "white male" label as an argument, which is not totally uncommon even here on HN.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#200

Post by c1ccccc1 »

sunpar wrote: post #144
konjin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again: >CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said h…

I don’t understand why people believe that anonymity is a right guaranteed to all people making content on the internet.

Because if we let people be anonymous, then more people will feel comfortable writing insightful things for us to read. I'd rather have a wider selection of content than know everyone's real name. Knowing who writers are "in real life" is useless and uninteresting most of the time.

In any case, blogging anonymously is certainly technologically possible. And it's neither illegal nor immoral. So I think that makes it a right, no?

Post reply on HN