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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#291

Post by curlypaul924 »

curlypaul924 wrote: post #288
nanna wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't have any specifics handy, but over the years I've found a lot of information on webmd that is plainly false. Maybe it's better now, but I have been ignoring it for years and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Even Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a better source of medical information.

(To clarify, I'm not suggesting Wikipedia is a good source of medical information -- it's not. Often I find articles say one thing and the citation says the opposite. But in spite of that, it's a much better starting point than webmd, in my non-expert opinion).

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#292

Post by snowwrestler »

dandare wrote: post #199

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 furthe…

To be fair, in the U.S., gender and race have been weaponized against women and minorities for a long time.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#293

Post by yownie »

newsbinator wrote: post #194
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 c…

I'm glad that I wasn't the only one who thought so too, even though it was meant to be a bunch of joke alt-coin ideas.

I guess the only criticism could be, won't you end up with a bunch of half-built bridges eventually?

*oops* hadn't realized it was by the same author!

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#294

Post by eatplayrove »

bondarchuk wrote: post #281
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…

Your characterization of point 1, at least, makes no sense to me. All the NYT article says on that point is: > In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.” I don't understand why you would say it is dishonest to dissect that parag…

Just to clarify, when I said

> 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best

I meant counts of points, i.e., three of them not addressing the issue (points 1,3,4) and one dishonest (point 2) - reasons above. So dishonesty was not related to point 1, sorry if it reads like that.

To further elaborate for 1,3, and 4; I don't contend with his explanations - but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#295

Post by yanderekko »

vinay427 wrote: post #255
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stereotype is a negative amplification of facets of a group's culture. You can find stereotypes of white Americans everywhere, from /r/whitepeopletwitter to the movie Undercover Brother(great movie btw). The existence of stereotypes shows that a common culture exists.

I tried browsing /r/whitepeopletwitter for the first time, and as far as I can tell it mainly consists of meme-like language that mocks views typically ascribed to Republicans or, in the case of race issues, white Americans that espouse white supremacy. This seems more like an expression of the political reality of some white Americans than any cultural aspect that applies to "white Americans" in general. > The exist…

>They were forced into a distinct reality and stereotypes served to reinforce the segregation that eventually may have led to cultural differences, not the other way around.

The thing that I don't accept about this argument is that this would seem to imply then that not expressing these differences could be seen as "white culture." It seems like only you try to disentangle Black Culture from American Culture, then the non-black aspects of American Culture can be thought of interchangeably with "White Culture." It's almost like a straightforward semantic thing, but it's aggressively resisted for reasons that I can't see as stemming from anything other than a prior desire to somehow elevate blacks.

Note that the argument can scale up to encompass other racial cultures as well - once you subtract "Latino Culture" and "Black Culture" and "Asian Culture" from "American Culture" why is it so offensive to call whatever residual that's left that's only associated with non-blacks/asians/latinos "white culture"? Is the because it would be argued that these cultural dimensions didn't arise because of a specifically-shared white identity? It seems pretty odd to find that relevant, however, as the specific practices of other racial cultures largely did not originate/propagate based on conscious racial identity. I think that it's really difficult to justify all of this stuff without embracing an axiomatic "white people are different" assumption somewhere in the argument.

Like, what does it matter for the definition of culture if group X and Y are different because X was "forced" to adopt different practices? Does this means that X culture exists but Y culture doesn't? That seems arbitrary to me.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#296

Post by yowlingcat »

Folks have covered a lot of great territory in the comment section, so I guess I'll just spit out my question about the elephant in the room: who makes up the "shadowy" cabal of NYT editors and execs who pushed this piece? It does seem like for all intents and purposes they wanted to make an example. And of course, the journalist who had to put his name on the piece is not necessarily the one who drove the whole gambit.

The gambit is quite risky. As another commentator wrote, it's not necessarily out of character for the NYT as a prominent vassal of American politics; they lambasted MLK and later on got somewhat of a black eye for it. But in the age of the internet, I can't help but think all of their opponents will seize on their indiscretion and that any moderates will be a little alienated. For so many people who didn't know what SSC is beforehand, won't they take a read and won't some of them conclude that they see more of themselves in his writing than the hit-piece? Is the NYT aware of the Streisand effect and just doesn't care or even wants to push people further into a "with us or against us" polarization? My sad fear is that the latter is true.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#297

Post by yownie »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #232
wskinner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to any examples that you found particularly annoying?

[flagged]

>His own cite of his comment about how there's a thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort is another good example. Yeah he's edited it and seems to be going for "it's just a joke bro", but if you live in the kind of bubble where you casually condemn the whole of "feminism" as an evil then you've probably got a weirdly fascistic friend group and/or auudience.

How can you honestly not see the delicious irony of this statement?

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#298

Post by edanm »

bnj wrote: post #283
edanm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Not really. Originally, the blog was pseudonymous. It was the first and middle name of the author, which he did because he's a psychiatrist who didn't want someone Googling his real name and finding his blog (for various professional and personal reasons). But it wasn'…

This is really helpful context, thanks! I don't really get why the NYT wanted to publish his name against his wishes. At first I thought it was sensationalism but I read elsewhere that the regular readership of the blog was estimated at around 8.5 thousand. No idea if that's right but if it's within an order of magnitude then I rather think the NYT should have more pressing stories to develop.

I mean, on the one hand the readership is higher than that but probably not crazy high. On the other hand, his readers really are fairly influential, so I think he really is worthy of an article in the NYT. (I mean I'm a huge fan of his as well and think he's one of today's leading intellectuals, so I might be biased)

The NYT initially said they wanted to publish his name because of editorial policy. The reported said it was kind of being forced on him because "them's the rules" or something like that.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#299

Post by cema »

snowwrestler wrote: post #292
dandare wrote: post #199

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 furthe…

To be fair, in the U.S., gender and race have been weaponized against women and minorities for a long time.

True more or less everywhere in the world, and does not make attempts to apply it in a different direction any better.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#300

Post by bondarchuk »

eatplayrove wrote: post #294
bondarchuk wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your characterization of point 1, at least, makes no sense to me. All the NYT article says on that point is: > In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.” I don't understand why you would say it is dishonest to dissect that parag…

Just to clarify, when I said > 3 of them not addressing the point at hand, and 1 point dishonest at best I meant counts of points, i.e., three of them not addressing the issue (points 1,3,4) and one dishonest (point 2) - reasons above. So dishonesty was not related to point 1, sorry if it reads like that. To further elaborate for 1,3, and 4; I don't contend with his explanations - but they do not address the larger q…

>but they do not address the larger question of whether/why racists/sexists find his blog appealing.

Whether or not that is something you can and should address is of course one of the main issues here. The NYT would like if you only quote, welcome, converse, engage with people who are 100% correct and approved in all their views. If you disagree with that then there is also not much to explain. Sometimes unpleasant people like to read good blogs, and sometimes unpleasant people say insightful things that you might want to incorporate in your blogpost. Such is life.

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