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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#411

Post by anticristi »

sellyme wrote: post #408
anticristi wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-native English speaker and European, I find these "minor language tweaks" pure distraction. I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone -- like many European countries already do. One could also enforce more wage transparency to fight systematic salary discrimination. But it's so much cheaper to capitalize one letter. white Black There! Now everyone knows I am actively fighting…

> I mean, one could raise taxes and offer quality free education to everyone In fairness I'm not sure the New York Times really has the authority to do that.

Well, they could spend more paper on showing how other OECD countries tackle discrimination and even campaign for similar measures in the US.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#412

Post by webmaven »

yanderekko wrote: post #355
webmaven wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" r…

The same sort of decomposition can be done towards black culture as well though. It also strikes me as untenable that one can simultaneously support the notion of "white privilege" while attacking the notion of "white culture" - many things that are commonly-cited as reflective of white privilege are cultural in nature.

> The same sort of decomposition can be done towards black culture as well though.

You can, and it has been done, but that's a bit more like noting regional differences within a subculture than it is, for example, like examining the differences between Americans who identify as Latino/Tejano/Hispanic.

There are fewer differences between East Coast vs. West Coast Rap and Hip-hop than there are between "Country" and "Western" music.

> It also strikes me as untenable that one can simultaneously support the notion of "white privilege" while attacking the notion of "white culture" - many things that are commonly-cited as reflective of white privilege are cultural in nature.

There are plenty of privileges that have cultural markers that don't necessarily have a corresponding culture per-se. Rich, straight, and male privileges come to mind.

The privilege, in many respects, often simply comes from the assumption that members of your group are in some sense considered the default type of human, and that other humans are the exceptions (even if they actually outnumber the 'default') that the world may or may not choose to accommodate in various ways. That doesn't necessarily imply that the privileged 'default' groups have distinct cultures surrounding that core assumption.

Gah. Intersectionality is hard.

Perhaps a bit of nuance is in order. Rather than saying that "there is no such thing as White Culture", it would make more sense to say "in America there are many white cultures"?

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#413

Post by foldr »

skissane wrote: post #397
foldr wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policies get applied inconsistently all the time for very uninteresting reasons. Inconsistency is what happens by default unless people make an enormous and concerted effort to be consistent. I don’t personally see any inconsistency - just two case-by-case decisions that went in different directions. But even if we grant that the two decisions are inconsistent, I don’t see why this is supposed to be a big deal. It ce…

> The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case and isn’t obliged to be perfectly consistent. I think the NYT is perfectly within its legal rights to publish bad journalism. If the NYT decided tomorrow to transform itself into the left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, that would be entirely legal, and so it should be. But just as NYT has every right to publish what it wants, others have just as much a r…

Why do you think consistency in itself is a moral obligation? To me that seems weird. For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice? The NYT is morally obliged to apply its editorial policies in good faith, but it’s not obliged to ensure that the many thousands of editorial decisions that it makes in a given year are all perfectly consistent.

I notice that other than consistency (which is symmetrical and could equally argue that the NYT should have published the other person’s real name) you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#414

Post by curlypaul924 »

Traster wrote: post #195

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…

Christians like to think of ourselves as less degraded than our neighbors, rather than less evolved. It amounts to the same thing in the end - a false superiority.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#415

Post by foldr »

belorn wrote: post #398
foldr wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he wanted to call feminist voldemort then we would have used the word feminist Sorry, you’ve lost me here. Are you nitpicking over the difference between ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’? I don’t see how that helps. The comparison to Voldermort makes it pretty clear that he’s talking about people and not just an abstract ideology. > If the New York Times Article had accused the author of being critical to parts of femi…

The word "feminists" is not in the quote, and being critical to part of the feminist movement is not the same as calling specific feminist people for being Voldemort. "He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort" is about as hand wave phrase as it gets, and trying to convince people about an interpretation of a quote is an enterprise doomed before it even started unless the reader already has the same…

The full quote is:

>And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”

It's clear that the 'literally Voldermort' phrase is intended to apply at least to "the people who talk about 'Nice Guys'" (and given the 'already', to plenty of other feminists too).

The NYT said that Scott had used this phrase with respect to 'some feminists'. That is 100% accurate. Especially when you consider that the post the quote is taken from references specific feminist writers.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#416

Post by inglor_cz »

curlypaul924 wrote: post #314
woofie11 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, credibility isn't binary, but a spectrum. I saw problems before (NYT was never one of my heroes, per se, but just a high-quality, thoughtful, high-integrity newspaper). It always had its flaws, but for the most part, it seemed okay pre-Trump. Especially during the Trump years, but a little before as well, it seemed like the ends (on both sides of the increasingly polarized political spectrum) became more impo…

I get the same feeling. Is there any way we can isolate the underlying cause? Maybe then it would be possible to change things for the better.

Bari Weiss complained about internal war at the NYT: older staff vs. young woke employees.

If universities have gone fully woke, no wonder they churn out a lot of woke graduates. In that case, natural generational exchange will change things for worse across the board, at least until a new generation comes that scoffs at wokeism because it is what their stupid, old parents do.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#417

Post by skissane »

foldr wrote: post #413
skissane wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case and isn’t obliged to be perfectly consistent. I think the NYT is perfectly within its legal rights to publish bad journalism. If the NYT decided tomorrow to transform itself into the left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, that would be entirely legal, and so it should be. But just as NYT has every right to publish what it wants, others have just as much a r…

Why do you think consistency in itself is a moral obligation? To me that seems weird. For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice? The NYT is morally obliged to apply its editorial policies in good faith, but it’s not obliged to ensure that the many thousands of editorial decisions that it makes in a given year are all perfectly consistent. I notice that other t…

> For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice?

No you are not. But I think, if someone points out your inconsistency, a person (or group/organisation) really ought to have the honesty to be able to say "Yes, you are right, that's a fair criticism, I am being inconsistent, I will try to be more consistent in the future". And one way of being more consistent in the future would be to do the moral thing from now on, and obviously that would be morally superior to achieving consistency by choosing to consistently make the bad choice instead.

> you haven’t given any reason why the NYT should have colluded with Scott to keep his real identity a secret

He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable. Faced with a reasonable request from a person that their privacy be respected, I think the ethical thing to do is to respect their request, unless there is a strong public interest in disregarding it – which I don't think there is in this case. (And I'd add that if you are going to justify violations of the privacy of others by appeals to the public interest, you ought to clearly state your claim in doing so, which NYT has failed to do here.)

I was one of the many people who already knew Scott Alexander's real name. I don't know him personally, I'd just worked it out. But I wouldn't have posted that info publicly, because he asked people not to, and even though I don't know him personally, he seems like a decent guy and respecting his wishes in this matter was the moral thing to do.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#418

Post by foldr »

skissane wrote: post #417
foldr wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think consistency in itself is a moral obligation? To me that seems weird. For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice? The NYT is morally obliged to apply its editorial policies in good faith, but it’s not obliged to ensure that the many thousands of editorial decisions that it makes in a given year are all perfectly consistent. I notice that other t…

> For example, if I make one bad choice, am I then morally obliged to keep making the same bad choice? No you are not. But I think, if someone points out your inconsistency, a person (or group/organisation) really ought to have the honesty to be able to say "Yes, you are right, that's a fair criticism, I am being inconsistent, I will try to be more consistent in the future". And one way of being more consistent in th…

I don’t understand why you think that consistency in itself is a moral obligation. In any case, the consistency argument, even if successful, doesn't show that the NYT was wrong to reveal Scott Alexander's real name. It shows – at most – that it was either wrong to do this or wrong not to publish Virgil Texas's real name. That is why the only interesting question here is the one that you've finally addressed.

>He asked for it, and his reasons for asking for it were reasonable.

His reason was basically that he might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. But almost anyone whose name is mentioned in the NYT might suffer some negative effects from the publicity. It’s “all the news that’s fit to print”, not “all the news except when someone asked us not to publish it”.

In the end the NYT has to come to its own evaluation of the merits of anyone's request for anonymity. The paper can't simply grant anonymity to anyone who asks for it. So just because Scott asked and the request wasn't granted doesn't mean that something has gone wrong.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#419

Post by mawise »

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…

I don't know, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. I wonder if we can apply Hanlon's Razor[1] and say it was just a poorly researched article. If the author did some brief googling for things people have said about Scott and his blog, they'll find other people who have quoted him out of context. For the example of "feminists are voldemort", Scott did mention that he's been quoted out of context lots of times on that line so it should show up lots of time on the internet. It might have been a sloppy re-quote instead of original research. Maybe it wasn't so much a hit-piece as a reflection of the easy-to-find popular trends of discussion about Scott's writing. In that case the NYT piece was very irresponsible, but not really malicious.

Part of the reason I'm leading this way is because and the end of the day, Scott just doesn't seem important enough to the NYT to focus on for a hit piece. And even then it reads more like a condemnation of SV tech culture than it does as a condemnation of Scott (however unfair it was to him).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#420

Post by Traster »

LeanderK wrote: post #306
Traster wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with. I recommend you read the NYT peice then, because it points out that if they publish his name as Scott Alexander (as he was going by) people would find out who he was simply by Googling that name. How exactly is the NYT meant to guaran…

I've read the article. There's a difference in having your full name in the news vs. the name he writes his blog under. Even if it is easy to find out, that does make a difference. People can associate and recognise hime just by reading the article. He's not a public figure, I don't see a reason to so strongly feature his name. The lack of discussion and empathy on the side of the NYT is really concerning, repeating…

I don't see anything the NYT could have done to give this author the level of anonymity he wanted. He wasn't anonymous to start with, and the standard of "I don't mind being known, I just don't want to be mentioned in the NYT" isn't a reasonable standard.
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