>the hunter, logger, and geologist will walk through the same patch of wilderness and see an entirely different forest, for each eye is trained to notice something different. The more abstract the things observed the greater individual variance there will be. For intangible social processes like market exchange, mass movements, and elections, our understanding is all model, no matter.
I really like this snippet. Captures an idea I hadn't ever been able to put into words before.
By using that analogy, the author puts himself above his subjects. He understands various perspectives (reporters, editors, rationalists, SV "decentralization" fanatics), and that they are mere perspectives, while also acknowledging their relative validity.
This entails a meta-perspective, a perspective-of-perspectives. This kind of consciousness is why people like Scott Alexander: he makes an attempt to understand other people's perspectives and rarely dismisses anything out of hand.
The questions is...why is this sort of consciousness, that understands the relative validity of virtually everyone's perspective, so uncommon outside of various internet blogs? Is it too much to ask for editors and reporters with this kind of open-mindedness?
I think this book, "The Master and his Emissary"
https://www.amazon.com/The-Master-and-His-Emissary-audiobook...
would argue that the right hemisphere of our brain acknowledges multiple perspectives and contextualizes them, and that our culture suffers from a severe left hemisphere bias.
Brain lateralization probably isn't what you think it is since pop culture gets almost everything about it wrong and it has become a career-ender for academic study so that no one synthesizes the research into coherent theses. Sadly, the topic has gotten such a bad reputation that I have to take a brief moment to defend the validity of bringing it up.
It's possible that too much openness has a failure mode in indecisiveness, and acceptance of any and everything.
Not dismissing people's perspectives is one thing, but if you cannot actually understand them, will that really help you make better decisions, or are you getting lost by adding more complex dimensions to a problem you already barely understand?
Open-mindedness is beneficial in general, but it cannot be blind. Some perspectives are just wrong. How do you cut through the noise?
You do have to pick a side. But you should be able to choose while keeping in mind that your choice is contingent. That is, if circumstances change, so might your choice. And even when picking a side, there's no need to purge from your mind the recognition of the relative validity of other perspectives.
The issue of accounting for other people's opinions and experiences is a good one to bring up - it is a broad way of framing this whole SSC controversy.
Part of the reason why it's rare is, I think, because of our schools. A lot of education pushes people to see things as having only one correct answer. That it's more important to win the debate than to explore ideas. There is not much emphasis on how one develops solid and correct ideas. There is a tendency towards justifying ideas, coming up with good-sounding reasons, whether or not they are actually true.
Also, writing that explores other perspectives in a fact-based manner can easily come across as an if-by-whiskey fallacy [1].
As far as a real answer goes - I think that it's a genuinly difficult problem. Religious figures have been talking about perspectives and empathy and compassion for thousands of years. It's clearly a big thing.
As far as the specifics of the SSC controversy, my attempt to understand both sides is this: Scott made ethical commitments as a psychiatrist, both to his clients in particular and his profession in general. The NYT made ethical commitments both to their readers in particular and to journalistic standards in general. In the SSC controversy these commitments conflict. Whose commitments should win? Whose commitments are the most important?
Scott found a way to make his ethical commitments work for him. Maybe it was a compromise, but I think it worked well enough so that his patients couldn't easily find out who he was. I think that the NYT could have easily made it work with their commitments, and everyone would have been better off.
> Scott made ethical commitments as a psychiatrist, both to his clients in particular and his profession in general. The NYT made ethical commitments both to their readers in particular and to journalistic standards in general. In the SSC controversy these commitments conflict.
I'm sorry, what "ethical commitments" did the NYT have that required them to reveal Scott's identity? They have—over the last few years—systematically abused the privilege of anonymous sources. If this was some sort of manifest reversal of said abuse, I could maybe understand. But that's not what this was. It was a partisan choice to "out" him in a direct or incidental attempt to cancel/silence him.
They hold absolute secrecy for other sources that seek anonymity. (Or, in some cases, when revelation of that source wouldn't be a good look for their paper.) I cannot fathom any sort of ethical purpose—to their readers or to journalism—that necessitates his reveal.
Maybe you can help me understand the gymnastics of contorting ethics in such a way that this makes any logical sense, I would appreciate it. Because—from my vantage point and from innumerable other examples—the NYT has tossed every ethical framework out the window for the sake of their ego, id, wallets, power, and agenda.
They try to maintain the aire of integrity in their rapidly crumbling empire, but the emperor has no clothes. So please help me see what I'm missing.
I honestly don't know all of the ethical commitments that the NYT has made. But I'm assuming that they are at least broadly following some standard of journalistic ethics [1]. I believe that journalistic ethics are a fairly standard part of journalism school, and that many of the reporters at the NYT have been exposed to them.
As far as the NYT abusing their sources for the last few years, well, I could easily believe that it's true. But I think that it was clear from the context that I was speaking specifically about the current SSC controversy.
As far as doxing Scott, I agree that it was the wrong thing to do. Also, as Scott himself often discusses, it's important and worth while to try to understand the other side. For example, the New Statesman wrote about Scott's doxxing [2] earlier. It at least considers the possibility that the NYT has a reason for doxxing Scott, that they have a reason for their policies regarding anonymous sources.
It's certainly possible that the NYT is simply a bunch of slavering monsters who, as you wrote "tossed every ethical framework out the window for the sake of their ego, id, wallets, power, and agenda." But I'd bet that there was a fair bit of internal discussion over the issue. I'm willing to give them at least some credit, even if I disagree with their conclusions.
> I honestly don't know all of the ethical commitments that the NYT has made. But I'm assuming that they are at least broadly following some standard of journalistic ethics [1]. I believe that journalistic ethics are a fairly standard part of journalism school, and that many of the reporters at the NYT have been exposed to them.
I understand you aren't sure what they've enumerated for themselves. The point is that they don't follow most of the most obvious standards one could conceive on a whim. If one had no formal knowledge of ethics, but chose to engage in a quick thought experiment in which one identifies "the basis of communicating truth", the NYT (currently) do not adhere to practically any beyond "factual".
Let's say they follow the generalizations in your wikipedia link:
> ...most share common elements including the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability.
Abject failure on:
- accuracy
- objectivity
- impartiality
And just a bit further down:
> ...the ethics of journalism include the principle of "limitation of harm." This may involve the withholding of certain details from reports, such as... information not materially related to the news report where the release of such information might, for example, harm someone's reputation.
Well the NYT article is an absolute rejection of this principal. (Not that you disagree.)
I'm not sure what ethical standards you do think they follow, but whatever conversation they had about whether to reveal his name (or the ethics of the article at large) clearly didn't emphasize honorable intent in good faith.
The most generous interpretation I can muster for their ethics revolves around some notion of, "for the greater good." But history is pretty clear that's an invariably evil form of ethics.
I have no doubt they think they're doing "good", but their rejection of objective standards puts them in the camp of "partisan propaganda", far away from "journalism".
Editors and reporters have to reflect their audience and given them something at least somewhat relatable.
I would be careful though: we could also describe a meta-meta-perspective, where you recognize the dangerous seductiveness of thinking yourself one level of abstraction higher than others. But then that leads to an infinite recursion...
This perspective is what high end journalism like the NYT should be, but clearly isn't. I think that part of why the NYT has it in for Scott Alexander is because they know he is light years better than them.
It’s a bit funny that the main defender of NYT that this article puts forward is a co-founder of gawker of all things.
A journalist that then promptly proceeds to explain that it’s the interviewee’s fault that a journalist misrepresents them, with a strange paternalistic argument about this being “how journalism works”.
Literally Every Single Person I have talked to about being interviewed have described the exact same experience, the journalist misrepresented what they said. Maybe, just maybe, the common factor here are the journalists?
But journalist are completely unable to understand this point-of-view, because they view themselves as the righteous defenders of “the truth”.
Regarding question two ("was the article misrepresenting SA/the rationalists"), a bit of the misunderstanding is cultural, I think. The NYT article makes heavy use of (what seems to be) guilt by association, i.e. he is in the same scene as "known bad" Peter Thiel etc.. While this is an accepted argument in some circles, it is frowned upon a lot in the rationalist community and seen as cheap smear. I think this is a major point on why opinions diverge on the article and why it is seen as malicious by so many people.
Regarding point 3, the argumentation given about framing and narrative just supports the hit job claim IMHO. Part of the NYT narrative is that anyone who doesn't support the narrative is an enemy. Writing a piece within that frame about someone who does not toe the line almost automatically turns it into a hit piece.
There has been a long tradition of people writing books under pseudonyms. I don't think the NYT has made it a point to publish, for e.g., every book review with the author's actual name. I honestly don't see why publishing a rather non-controversial blog should be different.
This was my attempt to answer the question: was it ok to 'out' Scott Alexander? I don't mind that someone disagrees - I expect disagreement - but please explain the downvotes. Was it because SSC was somehow exceptionally controversial? Are there some special circumstances that would prevent the usual sort of anonymity extended to, say, any book author that talked about personal mental health problems?
I think that what I'm trying to say is that there have been many reasons given, some better some worse, but I personally find this one the most compelling. Anonymity is commonly extended to authors of books, and the fact checking doesn't necessarily need to break that anonymity. So why is this case so different?
Content matter is not the primary concern for censors. If you consider, for example, that most content comprehension is subjective anyway, it should be clear that what is the concern is the establishment of authoritative and/or trusted voices. [p.s. i.e. this sort of establishment behavior leaks insider knowledge of what it takes to shape opinions in human society. Answer: the soap box.]
So not a "CEO" just an unfortunte internet chicken that has been used to obliquely instruct unkown monkeys with aspirations to taking up 'The Pen'. (Remember, that mightier than kinetic weaponry instrument of the intelligent?)
I'm not really familiar with the chicken/monkey metaphor, but it seems to be about "making an example out of someone in order to threaten others". So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that Scott was made an example of in order for the NYT to scare him and stop his writing, with the end goal of preserving their authority?
Honestly, it sounds very broad and rather conspiratorial. I'm really not clear on the scope of your statements. Maybe I could believe that it's a clash of cultures thing, where a qualitative culture (typified by, say, Liberal Arts/English majors) is in conflict with quantitative STEM/Engineering culture. But I don't think that's what you mean. Am I wrong?
It is conspirational but it addresses what imho was a wrong conclusion. There was an item in article that basically said 'this is an obscure figure, why go after him?' And I just wanted to point out that that reasoning is not conclusive and rather narrow: that going after a relative nobody can actually be of utility, in an oblique way, for an establishment.
> You're saying that Scott was made an example of in order for the NYT to scare him and stop his writing, with the end goal of preserving their authority?
I don't know, it's just a hypothesis, but this is the question you can answer for yourself: would the proverbial Scott today start an anon blog, or would he first do a liability analysis regarding his personal and professional life? In otherwords, has the social calculus of anonymous [non-estalishment] expression been altered in a significant way?
> By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
I'm shocked this is the case, though I've felt this has been the case. I don't know how one "speaks truth to power" when talking about narratives. It gives the NYT a very Game of Thrones feel, but more like the South Park version with reporting like this in mind.
Secondarily, as the author points out, people are looking for place to punch. This the author sets up a dichotomy of "up" for people more powerful and "down" for people less powerful.
The problem with power is that it's very perspective based. The author lays out some criteria but even that doesn't seem enough. If you have a Silicon Valley SWE who has saved up $5M and done nothing political, but has a popular blog talking about software and investing, are you entitled to fix them and frame them as you wish?
Personally, I have gravitated away from the idea of "punching" because as the author later alludes, punching implies a use of perspective which can change. Your punch cannot though, once send is hit, that is it.
> the hunter, logger, and geologist will walk through the same patch of wilderness and see an entirely different forest, for each eye is trained to notice something different. The more abstract the things observed the greater individual variance there will be. For intangible social processes like market exchange, mass movements, and elections, our understanding is all model, no matter.
I really liked this perspective, it was very thought provoking. It's always perplexed me why people can witness the same things and derive such different perspectives. It doesn't put those perspectives at less competition with each other, but it does make them more understandable.
I can't find anything in that treatment I'd actually want to argue with. This sounds pretty much exactly right to me.
That said, here is as good an example as I am aware of for why the left-leaning world finds rationalists so outrageously exhausting. Including footnotes (footnotes!), this is a seven thousand word treatise on what can only be called a minor quibble. A psychiatrist wrote an anonymous blog, got outed, and doesn't actually seem to have been harmed much in practice. He's back to writing rationalist stuff under his own name.
Yet... this is somehow an existential thing we need to revisit (pg himself tweeted out this story this morning) again and again and again?
This is where the rest of us just throw up our hands. The whole idea of the rationalist perspective is that it's supposed to be detached from parochial loyalty. It's supposed to be about real problems and real solutions that affect real people in real ways.
And... when push comes to shove, it's not. It's just another tribe, waging just another tribal war. The fact that Alexander was wronged here is real. The idea that his wronging is of existential importance is just not remotely "rationalist". At all.
His life was upended. He gave up his full time practice and moved on to writing as his #1 source of income.
That’s because he managed the situation spectacularly well. Imagine if NYT had gone ahead with the doxx earlier: it could have disrupted his life a lot more.
Rationalists are angry about the principles/norms being violated. The outcome doesn’t negate the criticisms.
On the other hand, it’s clear that the Left is willing to throw principles under the bus in pursuit of outcomes desirable to them.
Oddly enough, I noticed the verbosity of the "rationalists" but only put it off as an amusing characteristic and not a flaw. Anybody who enjoys reading the New Yorker has no right to complain. ;-)
>>> The whole idea of the rationalist perspective is that it's supposed to be detached from parochial loyalty. It's supposed to be about real problems and real solutions that affect real people in real ways.
I believe this is a race against time. Rationalism has to actually influence the implementation of real solutions before it becomes a parochial loyalty in its own right. Unfortunately, one symptom of such a shift is the development of a shared enemy and a sense of embattlement, and the NYT/SSC affair may have provided the seed crystal for that shift.
> I believe this is a race against time. Rationalism has to actually influence the implementation of real solutions before it becomes a parochial loyalty in its own right.
I've deliberately ceded (in my head) from “rationalism”, to try to help push that off for a little while longer.
I'm old enough to have passed through one or more rationalist phases already. Note that I love rationality, and depend on it for my bread and butter, but this doesn't earn my endorsement of any specific "rationalist" author or movement.
Plenty of people in that community have written at length about how "rational" only applies to "understanding true factual statements" or "achieving your goals". No end goal is irrational. There is nothing you can care about where someone can correct you and say you ought not to care because "rationality".
I feel this community generates more reading comprehension failures in the general public than almost any other.
I would disagree with that characterization. In fact, SSC's essays often involve emotionally colored language, some are even parables/fiction that clearly engage in more than rational argument.
Ideally what it tries to do instead is to make us mindful of the emotional aspect, and re-examine it. That's for instance why rationalists are so obsessed with ingroup-outgroup processes: they notice themselves exhibiting the same patterns and want to understand why.
Isn't reporting the identity of an anonymous author a "true factual statement" important to understand his "goals" though? I mean, I agree this article was bad, but reporting it looks pretty rationalist to me.
I'm not saying you "shouldn't care" about this. I'm saying the fact that you clearly care so deeply is evidence that "rationalism" is largely a fraud. You want rationalism except when you get criticized, then you want a safe space.
Just commenting on the first paragraph. Not going to touch the second.
I'm not convinced his last name has anything to do with understanding him, rationalism, SSC, SSC's wider influence, etc any better. His thin pseudonym is what was actually well known anyway, and without his last name the article would have still included the fact that he is a psychiatrist in the Bay area.
You imply there is a particular goal of his that you could figure out by knowing his last name. That sounds ridiculous, but I guess I'll ask anyway: What is that goal that you figured out through knowing his last name?
> What is that goal that you figured out through knowing his last name?
Hell if I know. But that's not really the standard, is it? It was a true fact. It's relevant to discussion about the guy. A "rationalist" would, objectively, be expected to celebrate this sort of thing. Let's get all the facts on the table and stop hiding stuff, then we'll figure it all out. Deliberate anonymity like this certainly can be used to hide an agenda. You agree with that much, right?
Also: don't fall into the rhetorical trap of claiming the guy was "cancelled" (which you seem to be dancing around without saying). He wasn't. His patients didn't leave, his clinic didn't fire him. He just quit, taking the opportunity to strike out on substack.
It is a true fact, but it is not relevant to discussion, which I think I already made pretty clear. I don't actually care if you'd call it rationalist or not. Neither I nor the NYT are rationalist (either by hawkice's narrow definition, or as members of the community in question), so I don't know why you would hold either of us to that standard. And I have zero clue why you think that I think he was cancelled. He certainly was not cancelled. I didn't say he was because I don't believe he was.
Again, I have no idea why you think knowing his last name could cause anyone (since you say it didn't actually work for you apparently) to know his goals.
Anyway, I seem to be violating some HN norms given the downvotes, so I'll end this here.
I think it's not as bad as you make out. Over time, with thousands and thousands of words written, I get the impression people are actually converging on some semblance of truth. In my rather optimistic view of what's happening: initial reactions give way to longer, more thoughtful pieces, and eventually there's broad consensus and people stop discussing it.
Exactly! "Everyone has their own opinions and perspective and the right to express them and have them heard and respected by others" is an excellent philosophy!
It's also something that most rationalists tend to reject outright[1]. It sounds downright woke to me.
[1] When it's about someone else's opinions and perspectives.
It is a significant understatement to say that I carry no water for rationalists, but I would nonetheless love to see you attempt to defend this claim that they broadly seek to repress speech they don't agree with.
That's not it at all. The point is that rationalism (in all other contexts) down right celebrates pointed and extensive criticism of others' ideas. Rationalists, stated bluntly, are "jerks who want to be right all the time", and they will tear apart arguments that they feel are wrong.
Except when a rationalist is the target, then they circle the wagons like this and claim that their speech is being "repressed" and that they shouldn't be criticized in this way.
Well, they argue they shouldn’t be criticized because they think the criticisms are wrong. But isn’t that just disagreement, in the same blunt style you acknowledge is common? I don’t see many voices saying (and Alexander certainly didn’t say) that Cade Metz should be fired or nobody should read the NYT.
> Was it a premeditated “hit job” or revenge piece? Or is there a better explanation for what happened?
The OP offers as the better explanation that the NYT had a narrative for the piece to fit; and that narrative should not be seen as retaliation, because the trouble SSC gave them was beneath their notice.
This might be right, I don't know, but how do you square it with all the sources saying Metz told them he was researching a basically positive piece on the rationalists being right early about the pandemic? Was he just lying? (E.g. this post by Scott Aaronson, C-f for "Cade": https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310)
Also, it's not clear that the paper or the writer would only retaliate against a party viewed as powerful -- you don't necessarily see swatting a mosquito as not worth the effort; it's not as if a negative story is more work than a neutral one.
Does anyone know more about when papers write hit pieces and when they don't?
The whole thing is just so weird to me, that it's just hard to even know what a convincing explanation might look like. My current best guess is that the NYTimes journalist felt that they had to write something after the whole kerfuffle we're all too familiar with, and somehow all they managed to come up with was that really sad piece of SneerClub-grade innuendo. You could call it a "revenge" piece from that POV but that's really pushing it, even calling it a hit piece goes way too far. The New Yorker actually published a way more respectable critical piece on Scott, many months before the NYTimes did.
> This might be right, I don't know, but how do you square it with all the sources saying Metz told them he was researching a basically positive piece on the rationalists being right early about the pandemic? Was he just lying?
Why wouldn't he be lying?
Talking to journalists is like talking to the police. They will play nice with you to get you talking, and then use whatever you say however they want.
> Here is where I break ranks with the rationalists: all the talk about “hit jobs” is silly and conspiratorial.
I don't think the "hit job" conspiracy theories are silly, I think they're a big deal. The conspiracy theorizing in the rationalist community right now is what worries me about the way that they're trending. Remember that this is a community that has a great deal to say about the downside of cognitive biases on their entire thought process, and specifically identifies conspiracies and tribalism as biases that can distort our perceptions. Yet the community seems to increasingly be awash in exactly the biases that they identify as most toxic. This is not some small concern, it's a problem that undermines the entire project. And while I agree that "rationalists" aren't some sort of Illuminati that controls Silicon Valley, they've certainly got enough of a following that a "Scientology" level culthood could emerge out of the group if they allow this to happen. I think that there is a dark timeline where that could really happen, and it would be a lousy outcome, especially since I have friends and colleagues who are attracted to this community.
TL;DR: I don't know if the NYT is the problem here, but I wish the community would spend more time thinking about its own tendency to identify conspiracy theories and close ranks against the "outgroup" and put serious thought into how they're going to fight this. Because this is antithetical to the purpose of the entire project.
But what if it's true? Just calling something a "conspiracy theory" doesn't make it false. "The NYT is doing hit jobs on their ideological opponents" is a pretty mainstream opinion at this point, it's really pretty tame as far as alleged conspiracies go.
>For a public intellectual like Will Wilkinson all press is good press; he lives in a world of ceaseless self-promotion, and is not properly situated to understand what being targeted by an international media outlet feels like for folks outside of that world.
Will Wilkinson was fired few weeks ago based on one tweet. He knows. He has also been close to the rationalist community from the start and has no ill will. He is in good position to criticize and he does it well. His criticism probably hurts most because it's so insightful.
If we frame this era as a struggle for power between the media and everyone else (at least all the other poeple who have power to lose), I think the picture gets clearer. I am not saying that's the only valid way to frame a complex world, just that it clarifies a lot of the important battles.
If you ask me, the media has taken way too much power and that's bad for everyone. It might feel like a victory when Trump is taken down, but as we see here, the power can and will be turned against anyone.
I'm not sure if you're being downvoted because readers disagree that media has too much power, uses that power inappropriately, or the resolution they infer from your last paragraph.
However, I think it's clear that many media institutions have abused their power upon the foundation of their seminal integrity. They've had the power for a long time—and have instances of abuse—but not like we've seen the last few years.
The notion that they have "too much" power, however, is a very, very dangerous one. Any forcible resolution for this is—or should be—unpalatable. (And that's usually the insinuation when one discusses "too much" anything.)
It's clear that we need a reckoning among the people to help shift perception of what is deemed appropriate forms of news. I don't know that's possible in the current state of our culture, though.
The technological landscape has transformed the psyche of the people with such rapidity and force the likes of which has never been seen on this planet. Some self-aware individuals recognize the psychological dangers of our current state and choose not to participate, but I don't know that there's enough of them to make a difference.
Laziness, depersonalization, greed, envy... these are all rampant within our online communities, and all forms of media prey on our vulnerability to them. The world has largely transformed to a seething mass of unsustainable behavior. While the media has the power to at least influence a healthy message, they're desperately trying to maintain control... fire with fire.
The only ethical response to this is rejection. Rejection of communities that engage in unhealthy behavior. Rejection of media that engage in unhealthy behavior. Rejection in general of the unhealthy behavior.
Fortunately, a lot of people who grew up in the world before this insanity took over see how bad it's gotten. Others are burned and leave. Some never got involved.
The best we can hope for is rapid acceleration to such a degree that people reject the forms of messaging that have taken the world, en masse. At this rate, that actually may happen.
The worst that could happen would be one of either forceful rejection or such a slow burn that not enough jump ship.
Who knows what will happen, but we have at most one or two generations for the majority to recognize this or the well is poisoned. For all the worry about global warming or communism or fascism or whatever, very few seem too concerned about the implosion that's been growing the last couple decades.
I hate to use the phrase, "but this time it's different," because it's usually not. But this global connection that's been abused to infect our minds by charlatans is truly unprecedented in scale, force, and insidiousness.
The world is increasingly addicted to new forms of mind drugs that are anything but apparent, and their use are rationalized, increasingly less optional, and devastatingly subversive.
I know I sound like a madman, but if the state of our modern communities—in parallel with the growth of global connectedness over the last decade—doesn't reveal the cause, I challenge anyone to provide an alternative explanation.
The internet is quite possibly the most wonderful and most insidious development by the human mind, ever. To enable and amplify the best and the worst of humanity is truly unique, and at such a devastating scale. And I don't think the human race is is equipped do anything but abuse it for the worst.
Disclosure: I am a former singularitarian fast turning luddite.
Thank you for replying. I don't quite get the downvotes, but I assumed that what I said was just uninteresting rather than controversial.
> The notion that they have "too much" power, however, is a very, very dangerous one.
I didn't advocate for any forcible resolution. I am a strong proponent of the 1st Amendment. There are lots of things we can do, though.
One example of structural change would be to move towards more economic policy at the state level. If fewer battles are happening in D.C., the media will be forced to decentralize a bit to cover state issues.
> The only ethical response to this is rejection.
Rejection by small groups/communities of what they consider "bad" content, or some collective rejection that feels more like censorship (e.g. FB, Twitter, and mainstream media squashing a story in unison)?
The difference here is critical. A collective rejection also centralizes power to an insane level, which is where we are now.
> I am a former singularitarian fast turning luddite.
Haha, me too! (An exaggeration, but not far from the mark.)
> Rejection by small groups/communities of what they consider "bad" content, or some collective rejection that feels more like censorship?
Voluntary rejection by individuals based on internal principals and a desire to avoid unhealthy media as a personal choice. No cancelling, no censoring, just people deciding not to expose themselves to such things, just as most choose not to drink all day, for example. There may be some social stigma that arises from this, but hopefully not much more than, "Ah, that's too bad."
HBD is human biodiversity, which is considered by some on the left to be a euphemism for "black people aren't as clever as white people" and aligned with eugenics. In fact, it's the study of human genetic variation [0], which has many implications for fields such as healthcare.
As you can imagine, it's an extremely sensitive subject which is widely mischaracterized by people on both the left and the right for their own political ends.
Hmm, which geneticist coined the term? Oh, it was VDARE contributor Steve Sailer? The one who writes about black genetic inferiority and Jewish control of the media?
Ah, you're right, Marks clarifies that racists appropriated the term he coined (http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com/2019/12/i-coined-phrase-hu...). Siskind obviously was referring to the nazi/alt-right/nrx meaning of the term, associated with Sailer, though.
Well, Jews are 3x over-represented in US Congress and to a variable degree in other high-effort, high-reward areas such as law and yes, media management.
Unless you'd suspect a conspiracy, there has to be a genetic or a cultural reason for that and the problem with that is that any such reason could plausibly apply to Black Americans.
To all the people who consider these ideas criminal, a little thought experiment:
A tribe has been discovered that is a close approximation of Homo heidelbergensis. They have basic language (100 words or so) and craft brutish tools, but, whatever you do, do not advance further than a 10 year old Homo sapiens in most areas of their mental development, however are way more aggressive and physically strong. Babies adopted into H. sapiens show improvement, but still markedly fall behind, never able to learn to read.
What should the public policy with regards to these people be? Should they be considered sui juris and generally held to the standards of the rest of the world? Should they be isolated and forbidden for contact?
Alternatively, a gene has been discovered in 0.01% of humans that, if present in 2 copies, produces an Einstein of sorts, less childhood problems. Should the carriers of the gene be allowed to seek each other out? What should be the policy towards the lucky 25% of their children?
My take: this is a tricky ethical dilemma that we should thoroughly explore in fiction. I'm glad its premise is incredibly unlikely, but the future is scary and might need a solution to the problem.
It's an admission that I don't know the answers. Honestly, I'm suspicious of somebody who claims to have the answers, here; they'd have to have a pretty darn good argument behind it, because people have been trying to solve this since before WWII.
The automatic characterization of examining human biodiversity as "Nazi race science" is a little concerning to me. While I understand that 95% of the people intrigued by HBD probably aren't in it for the sake of biology as much as they are for the sake of bigotry, I feel that Scott's treatment of it in that email was fairly reasonable. I certainly don't know enough about genetics, nature vs nurture, impacts of socioeconomics and culture, etc. to have an opinion on HBD, but I'm tentatively willing to acknowledge that there are probably at least two people groups in the world whose brains have adapted differently to different problem domains (though I'm strongly opposed to the idea that those two groups are "black people in the USA" and "white people in the USA"). If this wasn't true, it would be surprising enough to me that I'd need reasonable evidence to the contrary. If it is true, then it's likely significant, and needs to be talked about with the appropriate level of discourse. From his other writing, I feel like Scott understands this, and him limiting his statement on HBD to an email is due to the fact that it's incredibly hard to do so responsibly, and incredibly scary - e.g. my green account and the fact I fired up Tor to write this.
All of this is true, but I do think this "outing" still means something.
My hackernews account here is "anonymous", but not carefully so. I'm sure any dedicated reporter could figure out who I am (I have no pretensions that I would ever merit attention like this). Still, if one decided to out me after I asked them not to AND it didn't even really advance the story, I would indeed feel violated. And I'm not a therapist with patients to consider, I'm an IC FAANG grunt.
I think his spiel has been that while blog readers could trivially find out his real name, but his patients could not (searching 'scott siskind' wouldn't bring up his blog in the first n page of results), until this association was made in the NYT. If you search that now the first two results are the wiki for SSC and the NYT stories, and if you look in the wiki for SSC you'll see that his real name was kept off of it (despite weekly-ish edits attempting to re-add his name) up until the NYT story.
i get that point but still it is a little tough to buy. When I lived in the Bay Area (until 2019), the only psychiatry office that accepts medical insurance upfront is the PCPA. As a software engineer living in Oakland wanting to use my company health insurance I saw Scott on the list at Walnut Creek. I remember immediately thinking "bay area psych, Scott Alexander, oh my god what if i got an appointment with this dude?"
I never made the appointment because it would have been really difficult to separate the writing from the person. However, that is on him! Plenty of mental health professionals blog and see patients.
Again: The point was not to break the Alexander -> Siskind link, but to break the Siskind -> Alexander link. Barring death threats, Alexander didn't care whether readers found out where he lived, but whether patients found his blog on the first page of Google.
He not only didn’t make much effort to hide his name but had even published some of his SSC writing under his full name. The way his supporters focus on this particular attack rather than the substance makes me inclined to believe they’ve selected it as the line of argument most likely to garner support from a general audience since it’s not exactly outside of long-running journalistic practice.
There is a difference between searching for "sbilstein" and the results returning your actual name and searching for your actual real name and your hacker news posts being returned.
In the past if you searched for "Scott Alexander" you could find the real person but if you (or a patient) searched for his real name they wouldn't have found the blog posts.
He admits ‘At some point Scott would have to choose which role he wanted to play full time.’ And then immediately negates himself by saying ‘But that should have been his decision. What right did the New York Times have to make that decision for him?’ The answer is: because they are a newspaper. I dislike NYT as much as anyone (mostly because of their focus on access journalism). But The New York Times is still a newspaper. Their job is to report the news, and much of the time they do so it is against the personal or professional interests of the people they are reporting on. in many cases not reporting the news against those interests would actually be a violation of their own professional ethics. It is not their job to help someone tightrope walk the ethics of their profession in the precarious way they’ve chosen. The author here admits that the anonymous blogger at the center of this controversy is walking such a tightrope, at their own risk. Isn’t that on them? lots of people would like to remain anonymous.
would you like to live in a world where the New York times lets powerful people who are doing awful, unethical things remain anonymous as they would like to? wouldn’t that be the opposite of journalism? so what’s different here? the fact that we are ok with or even admire what the subject is doing? and why should the ny times care about that?
> would you like to live in a world where the New York times lets powerful people who are doing awful, unethical things remain anonymous as they would like to?
I think there's a structural difference between anonymity in actions and anonymity in writing, where in actions it is easy to leverage resources from one persona to benefit in the other, hence anonymity providing you with a structural advantage. But writing generally rests only on your skill as a writer, not your financial or political resources.
The one case where writing benefits structurally from political resources in your de-anonymized persona is whistleblowing - a situation where journalists do their level best to keep people anonymous!
Likewise, I think there's a difference between a newspaper trying to drag corruption into the light, and a newspaper, made up by writers, depriving another writer of a layer of protection, against community norms and their own standard, in order to (or at least accepting the risk to) destroy their livelihood. The NYT and Scott Alexander are not in direct competition, but it's still hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to bring harm on a fellow writer for their own gain.
In other words, the goal of a newspaper should be to increase the views and voices available to the public, not to shut them up.
"lots of people would like to remain anonymous. would you like to live in a world where the New York times lets powerful people who are doing awful, unethical things remain anonymous as they would like to?"
That's a false dichotomy. You can respect a wish for anonymity in cases like Scott's without giving up the possibility of making the names of other people public, when there's a good reason for it.
In principle, I really like the legal situation in Germany, where I live: There’s a fundamental right to “informational self-determination”, but this right is not absolute. Journalists have the duty to weigh the freedom of the press and especially the "interests of the public to be informed" against this “personality right”.
In the end, a person like Scott would be able to sue the newspaper, if he thinks that in their case the interests of the public did not outweigh his personality rights and a court would decide.
(Sorry, this post contains a lot of ad hoc translations of German legal terms, I hope it's still understandable and more or less correct English)
Yup. I don't think anybody has an inherent right to make a significant ongoing attempt to influence the public without people saying, "Well who is this person really?"
People living private lives should have that privacy respected. And journalists certainly have the right to agree to protect somebody's anonymity when they think the circumstances merit it. But if somebody is going to step onto the national stage, they don't have any sort of right to demand that everybody else help conceal obvious facts about them. Somebody is welcome to try that, of course, but the opsec burden is on them, not every other person with a keyboard.
But what does it mean to step onto the national stage here? As far as has been reported, Alexander didn’t seek publicity, or obtain any position of power, or make himself available for the rich and powerful to privately consult. He just wrote a blog that a lot of people happen to like. There can be very serious costs to being thrust onto the national stage, so I’m not comfortable with the idea that you can just get promoted there by default.
He apparently wrote, "Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people." [1] That to me is very clear intent to influence. And it's not like this was a blog about knitting. So whatever the bar is, he's well over it.
Another way to come at it is not intent, but impact. Whatever one thinks of Metz's article, I think he's correct that a) Silicon Valley has huge influence in the world, b) that the people making big decisions there are worth covering, and c) the ideas that shape those decisions are relevant. More disputable is the last piece of his chain is d), SSC has some influence on those ideas, and is a useful case study. But given the strident defenses of SSC here and elsewhere, I think the reaction to the article proves that the topic is significant enough to merit coverage.
I agree one shouldn't get promoted to national prominence "by default". But spending years publishing something to the world with an ever-growing audience is not something one does by accident. I'm sure Siskind put at least thousands of hours into his blog, and now it's his full-time job. One can't reasonably spend years courting public attention and then be mad that the public will attend to something as they see fit. Freedom of speech goes both ways.
I have no idea who Topher Brennan is, and he appears to have deleted these tweets, so it's pretty hard for me to evaluate whether this is a credible accusation. I definitely agree that it's fair for journalists to unveil someone's pseudonym if they're networking with important people.
You are welcome to evaluate his general credibility and the merits of the emails for yourself. He did remove the emails, but hasn't removed the claim that Siskind said a key point that was in them: https://twitter.com/TopherTBrennan/status/136066305645645004...
I'm open to finding out that they're fake, but on the "balance of probabilities" standard, I believe they're real.
The NYT article gives a pretty clear explanation for why they believed it was of interest: someone influencing a lot of high-level people in an industry which has an outsized influence on society.
It might be useful to think about it in terms of similar but older mediums: would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.? This wasn’t at the level of, say, Norman Vincent Peale but it’s not like every single story is required to be about national level politics, either. I’ve certainly read plenty of articles over the years about people who are influential in a community but not well known outside of it - it’s one of the reasons why journalism matters for helping you learn about things you wouldn’t have thought to ask about on your own.
"Influencing" covers a lot of things that don't seem equivalent to me. If he were swapping investment advice with Sam Altman, discussing the future of AI with Paul Graham, playing around on jetpacks with Elon Musk - sure, that's a mover and shaker, and in order to be properly informed on the tech industry you'd need to know who he is.
On the other hand, if Sam Altman and Paul Graham regularly made small talk with a barista at a coffee shop near YC headquarters, it would be strange and invasive for the NYT to put a spotlight on her against her will and identify her as a woman with the ear of Silicon Valley elites. And I'd argue that's a much closer analogy to what's happening here. It doesn't seem (again, as far as has been reported) that he had any concrete personal relationship with any VCs or tech executives.
A widely cited public blog which those people have referenced seems a lot closer to the public end of the spectrum than talking to a barista, especially when you consider that the topics covered have a significant public interest. It’s not like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin – for example, topics like gender or racial differences create a pretty legitimate area of interest when you think about how many people run or work at SV companies influenced by the people named, or use systems designed by them — the flip side to talk about eating the world is that the rest of the world is going to be watching closely.
I'd point to those topics as perfect examples of why pseudonymous debate is valuable. In the modern US, most subcultures have a standard perspective on race and gender and ostracize people who don't agree with it. So if everyone has to fear that their opinions might be promoted to the national spotlight, there's a huge range of thought that the public will never get to see at all.
Consider affirmative action for a concrete example. It consistently loses at the ballot box in even the most left-leaning states, but it's incredibly rare to hear a left-wing case for why we might not want it, because in the Internet age, anyone who presents such a case is putting their career and social circle in significant jeopardy. This kind of mismatch between what people think and what they can say is deeply unhealthy for our political environment, and I think pseudonymous blogging is a very important outlet to alleviate that.
If something is written pseudonymously, we can't possibly know whether it is a "left-wing case". It's just an argument.
If you want that argument to be situated, given context and weight, then you at best need mediated anonymity, where a trusted source like a newspaper verifies pertinent context without exposing an actual identity. But there's good reason that's quite rare. So we end up pretty quickly back at people needing to own their words when they try to influence the public.
That's especially true on a topic like race in America. The most prominent people who wanted to intercede on race anonymously were the KKK. And they make especially clear why there's no broad moral obligation to preserve the anonymity of people trying to act publicly while concealing their identity.
> would you consider it problematic to learn about, say, a philosopher, preacher, guru, etc. who was cited by a bunch of people like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, etc.?
Potentially, yes. What does the biographic information add to the story?
If this hypothetical philosopher were influencing people under a pseudonym, then their real identity is important only if it somehow interacts with their influence. Maybe there's a conflict of interest; maybe there's some sort of fraud (i.e. it'd be remarkable of Alexander were not in fact a psychiatrist); maybe the person is otherwise independently notable in a surprising way.
The Times article was written from the perspective that Alexander's blog is harmful, dangerous, or risky because of its message. That perspective is neither strengthened nor weakened by hearing irrelevant details about the messenger, so in a publication always short on column-inches I'd think that the balance of convenience is in preserving the pseudonymity.
What the biographic information adds is context. If we want to ask, "Why is this person doing X? What makes them say Y?" then we naturally inquire into who the person is. Their situation in society, their interests, their sources of power and wealth.
There's a reason that biography is a major genre. If you never have gotten anything out of a biography, that's fine. But you shouldn't be surprised that other people do.
But what public good, in this instance, was served by depriving the writer of their anonymity? It was a puerile attempt at harming someone they disagreed with.
If it had been someone who was already a public figure or someone who was leveraging their writing into something beyond the ideas presented, it would have been newsworthy.
The infantilization of the NYT from its glory years continues apace.
Scott lost his anonymity when he chose to publish under his real name, not to mention blogging under his real first and middle names with a fair amount of biographical information. The NYT highlighting this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t public for years prior.
Ah, I think I have a maybe simpler way to describe my anger about this:
Consider the difference between these two reported pieces of information:
1. Senator McSenatorface has, anonymously via a shell company, accepted donations from Boeing in a quid pro quo to adjust the regulations to require less oversight.
2. Senator McSenatorface has, anonymously, booked three holiday tickets for himself and his family at the Isolated Mountain Lodge in Canada, where he will be out of phone contact for the coming four weeks.
Both are true information, that the person prefers to keep hidden, that some readers would find informative or useful, and both can be used to harm their interests. But I hope we are in agreement that one is valid and important journalism and the other is three inches away from incitement of violence. So by what criterion do we divide them? To me, the distinguishing factor is whether the information is more useful to moral or immoral action. In my opinion, revealing Scott's name is primarily of benefit to not just immoral action, but action that is near-universally acknowledged as immoral. If it has a redeeming moral justification, I don't see it.
For the opposite side of this, I highly recommend that people read http://eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill..., which does a thorough explanation of why Scott is a bad writer and how he promotes incorrect and damaging views. Scott's entire game is to use rhetoric to support poorly backed hypotheses like "feminism is terrible".
There was literally a women in the rationalist community who committed suicide due to harassment and Scott's first reaction was to insinuate that all of her accusations were false.
The essay begins with a thought-terminating cliche in the third paragraph:
>This is someone who repeatedly speaks admiringly of Charles Murray, puts Nick Land, Razib Khan, and various other fashy types on his blogroll, and openly advocates eugenics.
>The claim that he’s troublingly invested in racist bullshit is straightforward and, frankly, uninteresting; anyone trying to dispute it has a disingenuous agenda most likely involving racist bullshit.
Ironically enough, the essay throws an accusation of "tedious Gish gallop working its way through a host of minor claims" into the mix, also in the same third out of 100-odd paragraphs. Thank you for providing a morning chuckle.
You might want to try reading the article more carefully. The author is giving his quick explanation of why they aren't going to discuss the race stuff. Of course it's a "thought-terminating cliche", the author is explicitly terminating that particular discussion quickly to move onto the topic that they want to discuss. The focus of the essay is to thoroughly explore Scott's rhetoric and views on feminism.
While there are some interesting points in this essay, the accusations of wrongthink it leads with are very offputting. In general, the position that some topics may not be argued is not a strong one if you want to criticise someone for their rhetoric.
She raised some good points, but I think she missed the points of the articles she critiqued. I especially still think Scott is more right than she is about the outgroup article. And I'm not convinced Scott writes in bad faith.
I really like this snippet. Captures an idea I hadn't ever been able to put into words before.