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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#371

Post by TeMPOraL »

sampo wrote: post #171
b112 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Babylon 5, season 2, episode Geometry of Shadows. The Drazi civil war between green and purple factions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxds-Co7G1Q

Also, the plot arc around Earth gov was good at demonstrating that cancellations is how fascism starts, not how you fight it.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#372

Post by TeMPOraL »

inglor_cz wrote: post #227
b112 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interestingly, politics in Poland, a rapidly de-religionizing country, seem to follow the same trend, even though it is a very homogeneous country otherwise.

As a Pole, IMO that's because the non-religious side imported the US extreme-left ideology wholesale, complete with talking points irrelevant to our country. So now we have loud fanatics fighting on both sides.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#373

Post by unethical_ban »

Cladode wrote: post #331
mawise wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rage clicks pay, shallow dismissals are easy to produce -- no time-consuming investigative journalism necessary. Most important perhaps is that new media like Substack are in direct competition with traditional newpapers like the NYT. Coase's great insight (in: The Nature of the Firm , 1937) was that firms exist in order to reap economies of scale. Traditional newspapers reaped economies of scale from printing, paper…

>What modern newspaper scale on is branding

Things like integrity and trust matter more than ever, so the idea that newspapers would jeopardize that to get back at a somewhat meaningless scoop is pathetic.

The time will soon come when we cannot trust anything we don't see with our own eyes, and we will then need to have a web of trust with reliable sources.

Newspapers can still capitalize on being a source of trust and truth, if they don't fuck it up.

Of course, the NYT is still pretty reliable on citations of fact, even if their slant is worse than it should be.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#374

Post by kodah »

sjg007 wrote: post #358
kodah wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains was started in the Czech Republic [0] by three Russians. The same people who started it no longer run it. Calling it a "Russian" company would be totally inaccurate. The hack that I saw cited, though I believe it was an unidentified source, was one that was injected at compile time. That would be very difficult to notice for any programmer. So, here's my question: Why did you refer to them as "Russian" when…

The CEO operates from St. Petersburg. I mean check his Twitter. They also have three dev offices in Russia. "Among its customers is SolarWinds, JetBrains Chief Executive Maxim Shafirov said from St. Petersburg, Russia, where JetBrains has offices." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-cyber-jetbrains/fb... I mean everything might be above board but it's probably bad or lax US policy and/or regulations that Solar…

Yeah, none of that is accurate to the phrasing of "a Russian company" as a rhetorical device. This kind of quasi-hyperbole about Russians is also getting old. Russia has been an ideological enemy for a long time, maybe even as long as time. I've never second guessed the motivations of business owners and citizens from Russia the way certain crowds do. That's pretty tantamount to something dubious.

Does the government need to be scrupulous in whatever open and closed source software it chooses to vend? Yes. Do we need to be chiding about the motivations of every day Russians as one of our first order investigations? Probably not.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#375

Post by astrange »

konjin wrote: post #137
astrange wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Against murderism" was the last time it came up, I think? In context I believe it was supposed to be anti-anti-Trumpism, or at least that you should talk to Trumpists more rather than deplatform them. The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.

>The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it. Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?

Reading them feels different, right? Books have pages so you can go back and forth, they have editors, and so on.

More importantly, dense literary works exist but usually pop essay books are trying to prove a point. SSC essays usually try to make you forget you had a point, and instead go up a meta level in service of his extremely evenhanded let's-all-be-friends persona.

Which conflicts with the pretty bad comment section that always wants to sit around discussing culture war. (Which exists but is not worth quite as much time as they want to put into it.)

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#376

Post by drdeca »

Smaug123 wrote: post #265
drdeca wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anyone has done a kind of scientific/statistical study of the whole gell-man amnesia idea?

Could you discuss in a bit more detail what you might want from such a study? My first guess was simply that you want a newspaper to be fact-checked from beginning to end.

I guess I was thinking, get a random sample of newspaper issues from each of a number of newspapers, and for each article in each of them, get a subject matter expert (or, not necessarily an expert, but someone knowledgeable in the field), and give a random ordering of (a selection of) the articles in the issue, and have them read them in that order, reviewing how accurate they think the information is before going on to the next one, And then evaluate whether, if they thought any inaccuracies they found in the article about the topic that they have a good understanding of, whether that influences the accuracy they estimate of the later articles.

Or something like that.

Maybe have them answer some other questions about the articles other than just accuracy, such as quality of writing, in order to be less likely to cause them to re-consider how they are estimating accuracy?

And I suppose by “accuracy” I mean to also include “not misleading”, in addition to just “not false”.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#377

Post by geofft »

chipsa wrote: post #365
geofft wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading of the article was that it wasn't about Scott at all. It was about the comment sections on Slate Star Codex, the Rationalist community (which the general public knows very little about), and its connection to the centers of power in Silicon Valley. If you read it as a story about Scott instead of as a story about Silicon Valley, it's less coherent of an article.

The problem with reading it as a story not about Scott is that there's no reason to use his professional name except to cause him problems.

As the article points out, the name is hardly a secret, and I suspect the important thing is that the NYT has no practice of using pseudonyms. If a writer submits a story and the editor says, "Why'd you use a pseudonym," I'm not sure the writer gets to say, "They asked for one," because then why wouldn't everyone who genuinely is newsworthy and thinks they aren't newsworthy ask for one? If the writer says, "I didn't think it was worth finding out," the editor probably ought to question if the writer has actually done enough research on what they're reporting on - especially if the editor can find the name trivially. Remember that the NYT got in very public trouble recently for telling a story that turned out be false because they trusted a subject of the story too much. And even if it wasn't for that, the NYT is regularly in the business of reporting on situations where people would love to use pseudonyms to avoid accountability.

It makes sense to me that they have a default policy/norm against it, and weren't able to justify overriding it in this particular case, especially given that the name was already public information.

To be clear, I agree that there was no need to use his name to tell the story they were telling, and I think the world would have been a better place if they were able to. But I don't think it's only attributable to malice that they did.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#378

Post by panarky »

kazinator wrote: post #363
panarky wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they could be easily ascribed to the side you appear to be taking up 1) Your argument is whataboutism at its finest. 2) I'm not taking a side in favor of establishment journalism. 3) I'm showing that leaders of the anti-cancel-culture movement are themselves more than willing to intimidate, suppress and cancel the free speech of anyone who criticizes them. 4) Either you're in favor of unrestricted free speech for e…

If you're in favor of unrestricted free speech for everyone, it necessarily, logically means: - you oppose "cancel culture"; - you're okay with white supremacists having access to audiences via platforms, if someone is willing to provide them with that. Intimidation and suppression cannot be avoided; they go hand in hand with having any sort of rules. For instance, the law against stealing uses intimidation and suppr…

If you scream about private platforms canceling speech you agree with, and then you intimidate and suppress other private platforms when they publish speech you don't agree with, that puts the lie to your ostensible unlimited-free-speech principles.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#379

Post by will4274 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #95

Seriously, WTF is going on with NYT. I think something has seriously gone off the deep end with their newsroom, but I feel like it must be so culturally ingrained in their newsroom now that even questioning some basic assumptions will get one vilified as a racist or sexist. One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper…

> white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does

I have always found such statements to be... Observationally stunted. Without referencing my own beliefs at all, I go to Reddit and on the front page is see posts from /r/BlackPeopleTwitter and /r/WhitePeopleTwitter. If there is no such thing as white culture, what do people post in the second subreddit?

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#380

Post by sjg007 »

kodah wrote: post #374
sjg007 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO operates from St. Petersburg. I mean check his Twitter. They also have three dev offices in Russia. "Among its customers is SolarWinds, JetBrains Chief Executive Maxim Shafirov said from St. Petersburg, Russia, where JetBrains has offices." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-cyber-jetbrains/fb... I mean everything might be above board but it's probably bad or lax US policy and/or regulations that Solar…

Yeah, none of that is accurate to the phrasing of "a Russian company" as a rhetorical device. This kind of quasi-hyperbole about Russians is also getting old. Russia has been an ideological enemy for a long time, maybe even as long as time. I've never second guessed the motivations of business owners and citizens from Russia the way certain crowds do. That's pretty tantamount to something dubious . Does the governmen…

Yet you clearly second guess and misunderstand my intentions. The real problem is the threat vector. Where is it is easier for intelligence services to operate?
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