431–437 of 437 posts
I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police". Even Macron felt the need to tell them they fucked up.
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.
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I wasn't trying to move goal posts. Admittedly I might be sensitive to all the question of anything affiliated with Russia is now a conspiracy style thinking that has come from certain crowds. If I unfairly lumped you in with these folks, then I apologize. > Russian intelligence Someone will need to prove that there is a link between JetBrains as a company and Russian intel (aka the FSB) just as what happened with Ka…
The risk here is that Jetbrains has significant operations in Russia. It is likely a lot easier to get an FSB agent hired into a Russian office. And in fact the Russian government can just order and enforce cooperation. The USA does this all the time and every operation is classified. I would not expect anything less from Russia or China. The companies registration in the Czech Republic (or anywhere) does not prevent…
Are you getting this from somewhere or are you explaining how you perceive the standards?
The laws I'm familiar with generally have to do with pretty specific criteria for delivering software that touches specific types/classifications of data. None of that would've caught how the JetBrains software was allegedly used to exploit the SolarWinds product. This was some pretty sophisticated stuff.
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> is an idea that Scott has just made up. How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you. > The NYT isn't gullible enough to fall for that one. As I said, they ought to default to granting requests for pseudonymity unless there is strong public interest not to, which there wasn't any in this case. > There are plenty of cases where there's no injustice in treat…
>How can you be so sure? Maybe he's telling the truth, and the idea that he made it up was made up by you. Sure, maybe I'm wrong. I'm open to evidence of this. As far as I can determine, psychiatrists are not required to keep their political views a secret. >By contrast, if someone asks that we respect their privacy, we ought to respect it unless we have good reason not to. But what are the implications of that for c…
I believe that journalists ought to honour all requests for pseudonymity, unless they believe there is a strong public interest in not doing so in any particular case, and if they believe there is such a strong public interest, they should be explicit about what they think it is, so others can judge their public interest claim. I think this is the decent thing to do, and sustains a culture of respecting people's privacy.
NYT did not follow that standard in the case of Scott Alexander.
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I've noticed this thought pattern with many people who argue against freedom of speech and for tighter control of media or "canceling" them recently: 1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about. 2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false"…
Apparently, you're so keen on attacking "this thought pattern" that the fact it bears no resemblance to what I said doesn't matter.
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I've noticed this thought pattern with many people who argue against freedom of speech and for tighter control of media or "canceling" them recently: 1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about. 2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false"…
Here's an alternative form of the "NYT/CNN should be canceled" argument: they should be held to the same standard as a private citizen when they behave poorly. If you write a blog post that doxxes a prominent figure and link to it from Facebook and Twitter, you are going to get banned from those platforms. The NYT can apparently do this with impunity, and calls for canceling other people and organizations who do this…
For anyone interested, seems like a good overview: https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate... hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128579 (seriously, don't miss on reading some of Scott's posts -- you will be disappointed by almost every piece of nonfiction you read afterwards) It's definitely one of those cases of "If everyone thought a little more like X , Earth would be a much…
Didn't spoil the nonfiction in general for me, but definitely did make me ask "why more people on the left can't be like Scott?" I'm not a leftist myself, and this makes me disagree with Scott - who is definitely on the left - from time to time, but even when I disagree I feel like I learned something and maybe improved my knowledge, understanding and appreciation for opposing points. I wonder if more people were lik…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
[1]: I also give you that, if this position weren't radical, then SSC might seem not so special -- a good psychiatry blog with interesting philosophical and rational thought.
If you speculated this might be the cause of the current calamity, I believe you're right. I don't think it's because we've suddenly changed and suddenly people have become polarized and dogmatic. I think culturally, and instinctively, we've been generally dogmatic for a really long time, with few individual exceptions. Most people want to quickly associate with a tribe, or dogmatic system, and blindly defend it without questioning its assumptions. It is extremely difficult to get an average person to change his mind on say his favored political party -- much more than you would expect from factual and philosophical basis alone (if you frame it as an abstract philosophical discussion, e.g. a trolley problem, I think it's easier to get people engaged and open to change their minds; an engineer that measures a poor performance of a system won't usually die on the hill of defending the system at all costs).
It's really counterintutive: by being shown a new point of view, by changing your view of how the world works (in description or aspiration), you are gaining, you are learning, it should be a good thing (for everyone) -- and yet we frequently over-attach to beliefs. I don't want to speculate too much, but it sometimes does make sense to defend yourself not to be convinced by anyone of anything (potentially with selfish or malicious intent), so this may be an over-correction (cultural and or evolutionary) trait. See the post "Epistemic Learned Helplessness"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...