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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#51

Post by AmericanChopper »

themgt wrote: post #30

Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts: A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions. Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are lon…

The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#52

Post by listless »

mimikatz wrote: post #4

The piece was bad. After all the time they had to work on it, it was a lazy hack job that normally wouldn't make the cut at the NYT. It is a sign of the days we live in when a Mean Girls style burn book page makes it into what used to be the paper of record.

This is well said. The article is so weak and poorly laid out its like listening to a bad pop song through cheap speakers. It doesn’t even have a proper closing. Just ends abruptly.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#53

Post by john_moscow »

andrewfong wrote: post #40
john_moscow wrote: post #34

I am wondering, what are the legal perspectives of suing NYT for libel at this point. If Scott started a crowdsourcing campaign to fund legal defense, I would gladly throw in a couple of grand. Given the support Scott received when the situation with NYT's plans got public in the first place, this could set a very interesting precedent.

Given that his explicitly stated goal is to move on from this, probably a bad idea. Right or wrong, a lawsuit would invite the Streisand effect. As for whether there's any legal basis to sue, it's doubtful. There isn't a whole lot that's factually inaccurate in the NYT piece. It's innuendo and words taken out of context. California has a "False Light" claim that might apply, but I doubt any court would take that up.…

>At its core, taking stuff you said in a public forum out of context is endemic to free speech in America. If we penalized it legally, a good chunk of Hacker News would be legally questionable.

I think, doing it with an explicit goal of misleading your audience in order to cause damage to a specific person should not be OK. I'm not saying censor it, but making NYT liable for any actual damage (like losing a job) + punitive damages would make sense.

The thing is, the woke mob is employing the same silencing tactics as Putin's Russia. You don't have resources to shut everyone up, so you semi-arbitrarily target random people and make sure the consequences are extremely harsh. A high-profile person like Scott can just walk away from it. An average rank-and-file person with a mortgage and at best couple of months in saving will keep their mouth shut and pretend to agree with whatever the party line is. Like literally, that's Russia now. Everyone is poor and miserable, but Putin's approval ratings are >70% because, well, losing everything you have is just not worth a random act of dissent.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#54

Post by TrispusAttucks »

themgt wrote: post #30

Steven Pinker maybe says it best, in a thread where he links to some notable SSC posts: A typical essay by Scott Alexander is deeper, better reasoned, better referenced, more original, and wittier than 99% of the opinion pieces in MSM. It's sad that the NYT can see him only through the lens of their standard political & cultural obsessions. Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are lon…

Jealousy is a dreadful and bitter motivator.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#55

Post by xyzelement »

donthitme wrote: post #17

Reading the NYT piece was mortifying.[1] They were my primary source of all things news and then published this strange hit that's just... off base. They were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive. How can a reliable news source write an article like that? Why throw your reputation down the toilet for what seems like a grudge? [1] https://www.nytimes.c…

// hey were the real news that was called fake news in a ridiculous/laughable sort of way. But it just doesn't jive.

You probably have heard of "Gell-Mann Amnesia" but in case not, it really explains a lot:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. ... Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect... you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page ... and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read"

That's just happened to you - you read a story you happened to already know the ground truth on and it struck you as obviously wrong. If you had an equivalent background in other stories, you'd be seeing this kind of falseness everywhere.

I have examples too numerous to cite of matters I knew well (eg: companies/industries I worked in, wealthy people I happened to know, countries/cultures/conflicts I studied or experienced first hand) that were covered completely backwards in the Times and other media.

Like: good employers characterized as horrible. Military conflict response characterized as provocation. Meaning of speeches and essays characterized as reverse of what anyone who's hear/read them would actually conclude.

A century ago, Times had whitewashed Stalin in a way that anyone who knew Russia would have instantly recognized as false. So I doubt the times was ever not "Fake News" it's just that it was so much harder to see it back then when your newspaper was how you knew anything.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#56

Post by bpodgursky »

Tenoke wrote: post #10

The sad part is, despite so many bad takes, ideology pushing, and hatchet jobs The NYT overall still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content out there.

The WSJ produces just as much good content, and you can subscribe there without inadvertently funding rag hit pieces like this.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#57

Post by lazyasciiart »

seieste wrote: post #32
donohoe wrote: post #27

As someone else said (and I agree): This gets at part of what I find irritating about the self-described Rationalist community: they talk about "free speech" when what they really want is unrestricted, consequence-less speech that allows them to guiltlessly harm certain people in the name of innovation. Source: https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1360793868816556033

If you believe that's the case, perhaps you could provide an example of Scott's writing that shouldn't be allowed, and what you think the consequences should be?

I don't think that comment implies he disagrees with free speech - my interpretation was that he's talking about how some of Scott's supporters seem to think the NYT piece shouldn't have been allowed.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#58

Post by lazyasciiart »

gnramires wrote: post #33

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…

Your taste may vary - I certainly haven't noticed "almost every piece of nonfiction" suffering since I first read his work.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#59

Post by tensor »

throwmtlsPhD wrote: post #15
Tenoke wrote: post #10

The sad part is, despite so many bad takes, ideology pushing, and hatchet jobs The NYT overall still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content out there.

Can I suggest an alternative? The pieces of the NYT that you think are “some of the best journalistic context out there” might be in area that you are less well read than you believe yourself to be. I know this has been true for me many times. Try reading what someone who disagree with the NYT would consider a high quality alternative.

It's pretty hard to find high quality alternatives. There is the wall street journal, maybe a few others, but not many. I personally read a few high quality news sources and science journals.

Inexplicably many here seem to think that random blog posts are somehow remotely equivalent. I value opinion at zero, and trust a random person to do quality research at about zero too. Trust is earned.

When random internet opinion becomes "news" I suppose we really are in a post truth world.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#60

Post by kortilla »

john_moscow wrote: post #47
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…

There's a huge tension in the society caused by the wealth shift from individuals to corporations. As a rank-and-file millennial, in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership, are expected to do your shitty job until death, and you starting a family would be directly directly against your employer's interests. The woke movement and is artificially splintering people based on identities. It is redirec…

> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership

This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.

The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.

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.

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