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Statement on New York Times Article

astralcodexten.substack.com

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#341

Post by taylorlunt »

chmod775 wrote: post #64

The NYT article[1] can hardly be called a hit piece at all, considering how little 'dirt' it actually contains. What is telling however is the lengths to which they went to connect Scott to anything negative at all. Look at how they 'connect' him to Peter Thiel for instance: Scott is a prominent figure in a loose group of "Rationalists". Some rationalists are concerned about AI. Some people who are concerned about AI…

Part of the problem with journalism is they're expected to publish regularly, even when they have nothing to say.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#342

Post by random5634 »

random5634 wrote: post #234

I went from avid reader of the times a decade ago to cancelled subscription. Any recommendations for other sources?

OK, the writer here mentions substack. May be worth signing up for this author or others with NY Times subscription money.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#343

Post by [deleted] »

wilsocr88 wrote: post #326
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…

Weaponized is the correct word. The word "racist" is morphing into a racial slur. It's now just a bludgeon to shut up someone with the wrong views. I believe this comes from the idea that the only possible way to be moral is to wield power by any means necessary because you're right and "they" are evil.

[deleted]

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#344

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#345

Post by dahart »

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.

Where’d you get that idea? You not only have a right to privacy in your own bathroom, the courts have declared a reasonable expectation of privacy inside public bathroom stalls, and/or behind privacy partitions. CNN publishing nude photos of anyone going to the bathroom would generally be completely illegal.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#346

Post by manfredo »

mawise wrote: post #289
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:…

I don't get it. Scott's response very clearly lays out the ways in which the NYT article was misleading--so clearly that it seems obvious that it was intentionally misleading. But to what end? What are the motivations driving NYT to try and create these poor associations with Scott and his writing? It seems a poor and short-sighted motivation for them to do this out of "revenge" for the bad press they got from the si…

I have concluded that there's a fundamental conflict of interest between "mainstream" media like the New York Times and tech companies and people related to them. The former and the latter are competitors in the attention economy, and this manifests in substantial negative bias. I have observed this since the mid 2010s at least.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#347

Post by kodah »

edanm wrote: post #267
Aqua wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole story background story is extremely alarming. NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered. This whole situation gives even more credence to the idea that decentralisation is the only way forward for mankind if we intend to preserv…

> NYT unilaterally decided to reveal someone's real identity against that person's wishes. It should honestly be made illegal but given the current political climate it's doubtful such course of action will ever be considered. I completely disagree. That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly. I think it was the wrong decision to publish his name, but it shouldn…

> That goes against the very free speech principles that readers of Scott's blog advocate so strongly

Not really. Doxxing someone mostly leads to harm. Anyone that was on the internet in the early days knows this, these days it's worse because the mobs that attack you aren't just doing mindless trolling, they're seeking something more intrinsic.

I look at it as in defense of free speech. That said, I don't generally believe in total anonymity. I believe in PGP style pseudo anonymity. With someone's real name you can attack their friends, family, and the place they live. With an online identity you can attack their ideas and if you're one of these people that enjoys grey areas you can attack their platform. That, to me, seems more fair.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#348

Post by kodah »

jhbadger wrote: post #153
john_moscow wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

I think you are confusing cause and effect. Cities like SF aren't crowded because megacorporations are located there, but rather megacorporations are located there because they are crowded. SF, NYC, Paris, and London are cities that people have moved to for well over a century, because they were excited to live in places with so much culture, shopping, and restaurants. This has always meant that housing in these citi…

You are very misinformed.

Austin is not "new". It was at competition with Silicon Valley and used to be referred to as Silicon Hill. A lot of hardware manufacturing happened in Texas. At some point, between favorable business laws and Google starting large scale recruiting events it sucked a lot of the talent out of places like Texas.

So your statement is more accurately framed as, "Austin is finally recovering as a tech hub."

While businesses these days may move to SV because of the large population and other businesses, that was not the case in the beginning.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#349

Post by webmaven »

yanderekko wrote: post #295
vinay427 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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"?

Perhaps because on the one hand you still need to subtract so many other immigrant cultures (Italian American, Polish American, Irish American, etc.), and on the other the "melting-pot" residue is still a set of (largely regional) subcultures that don't have all that much in common (California Surfers, Utah Mormons, Mountain Westerners, Texan Cattle Ranchers, Minnesota Nice, New England Yankees, Deep Southerners, etc.), and if you subtract those what's left over is a fiction that mostly exists only in media and advertising, like the Standard American Newscaster accent that no-one actually speaks natively, although you might make a case for the existence of a generic Suburban American culture that, if it can be said to exist, only came into being after World War II.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#350

Post by chillacy »

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…

Unsupervised learning doesn’t give us named labels. Someone still has to name cluster 1, 2, 3... etc. So not sure that actually gets around what amounts to a semantic question.
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