Silicon Valley’s Safe Space

Given the rather enormous of time and attention spent on it, not to mention the vast amounts of heated debate it had already spawned, I&#x27;d sort of assumed the NYT would either publish a really, really solid article or (more likely) just spike it and try and forget the entire thing had ever happened. After all, given that the NYT was now so much a part of the story, writing anything good would be pretty hard.<p>But no, kudos to them, they found a third way: Just write a poorly written article that alternates between interjecting disconnected ideas and making vague attempts at guilt by association, and carefully ignore anything inconvenient.<p>&gt; He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.<p>So he denounced the works of <i>one</i> person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a <i>second</i> person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a <i>third</i> group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he <i>didn&#x27;t</i> link to them, which proves...something...?<p>It feels weird even writing this argument down. If you link to someone who supports X, then you&#x27;re actually supporting every other person who has ever supported X? Link to a pro-vegan website, you must support every terrible ideology that has had at least one vegetarian supporter?<p>What a depressing waste of everyone&#x27;s time.

Such a badly-written, mean-spirited article. A typical paragraph has a few ominous claims, which, when you read the links, aren&#x27;t supported at all, nor connected in the way they&#x27;re suggested to. Such as :<p>&gt; In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”<p>And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive&#x2F;Collective vs Optimistic&#x2F;Pessimistic, then says &quot;The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray.&quot; This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray. The paragraph makes Scott sound like a flaming racist. It&#x27;s just totally dishonest writing. It&#x27;s hard to believe they&#x27;re arguing in good faith there, but who knows.<p>The anonymity thing seems to have been well and truly discarded – flung in his face, more like. What did he do to them to deserve such treatment, such contempt?<p>I did get one laugh, out of:<p>&gt; “[Rationalists] are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;23&#x2F;three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;23&#x2F;three-great-articles-o...</a>

If you read this article and know the types of things that Scott writes, remember this experience and try to imagine how many other nytimes outrage articles are similarly full of lies.

It&#x27;s interesting how many of the article&#x27;s claims, often quite vague, are unsupported by any quotes or citations. For example, Metz claims that social justice &quot;voices who might push back were kept at bay&quot; on SSC, but provides no clarification of what he means by this or how it was accomplished.<p>Peculiar choice not to justify with source material when the topic is a public blog with public comments.

I would generally reserve HN as a space worthy of more nuanced opinions than this but in this case there is one response that feels appropriate.<p>Fuck the nyt. That entire dumpster fire can hopefully fizzle out shortly.<p>Slatestar codex was some of the most interesting content I&#x27;ve read in my life. In comparison, I&#x27;ve never read anything in the nyt that compares to &quot;I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup&quot; or &quot;Meditations on Moloch&quot; or &quot;The Toxoplasma of Rage&quot; so in my mind the single most consequential thing that publication has done is to silence something of higher quality than itself out of fear.

Having followed SSC for a number of years in the mid-2010s, I eventually just started drifting away. The so-called Grey Tribe is really just toxicity that&#x27;s managed to talk itself into self-unawareness. Case in point, quoted from the article:<p>&gt; The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.<p>This is exactly the sort of thing you manage to convince yourself of when you don&#x27;t want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys, but also don&#x27;t want to throw in with the sorts of people comfortable with being called the bad guys. Everybody in the Blue Tribe is going to precisely see the toxic nature of this statement. Women aren&#x27;t interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. Reversing the order of the causation is making excuses for sexism and is itself sexist.<p>The New York Times <i>does not have to explain this to its audience</i>. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.<p>Now, this is Hacker News, this community is very close to the SSC one, so I know a lot of people aren&#x27;t going to take this well. But the Grey Tribe really isn&#x27;t a nice place to be, and the sooner you can realize this, the sooner you can find actual political heft in the world.<p>Contrarian logic <i>sucks</i>. Rationalism isn&#x27;t all it&#x27;s cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities. When you state a contrarian opinion like it&#x27;s fact, like it should be considered <i>because you&#x27;re the one saying it</i>, and the reason you&#x27;re stating it is none other than you don&#x27;t like all those nasty SJWs, you&#x27;re denying the lived experience of all the people out there who spent their lives being one of those oppressed minorities. All of those girls who hide their gender from their gaming pals. All those Black Americans who discover that the tech landscape doesn&#x27;t reward knowledge and talent as much as it does the right race and skin color.<p>It may be a little better in the tech industry than it might be, say, in the construction industry, but to pretend these things don&#x27;t exist or aren&#x27;t as important as what your mind sees as bigger is, well, toxic. And it&#x27;s the cornerstone of the Grey Tribe mindset.

s&#x2F;But in late June of last year, when I approached Mr. Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished.&#x2F;But in late June of last year, when I doxxed Mr. Siskind, it vanished.&#x2F; FTFY<p>I love the diffusion of responsibility via the passive voice. Oh it &quot;just disappeared.&quot;<p>I hope big tech buries the NYT.

NYT is the same rag that published as &quot;news&quot; and helped expel a girl from college, because when she was 15, after passing her driving exam, she was caught on video bragging &quot;I can drive, n...&quot; (addressed to no-one, meant as a boast).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;26&#x2F;us&#x2F;mimi-groves-jimmy-galligan-racial-slurs.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;26&#x2F;us&#x2F;mimi-groves-jimmy-gall...</a><p>To me that&#x27;s 1000 times more offensive and hideous than using the n-word by yourself, and the scum of the earth that wrote and posted that article (and those that expelled the girl), should be ousted from society.

Nowhere in the NYT article it explains the real problem Scott had with them publishing his name. It’s not the forward search (SSC -&gt; real name) that’s the issue, it’s the reverse search (real name -&gt; SSC). Before the NYT article his patients would mostly not be able to find his blog; after the article it’s one of the first results that comes up.<p>The fact that the article does not go into this is very dishonest as I’m sure Scott made this argument to the reporter.

&gt; The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.<p>This is an age-old refrain and I am honestly surprised that people keep viewing it as a reasonable position. It&#x27;s exactly the same line that Parler tried to peddle, along with every online community that eventually - shock horror - turns out to be a platform for hate rather than &#x27;rational&#x27; thought.<p>Free speech is important, and should be defended. When your version of &#x27;free speech&#x27; is only extended to alt-right ideals, you&#x27;re not arguing in good faith for free speech.

Maybe I&#x27;m bitter and biased because I like SSC, but based on the author&#x27;s social media profiles and his new book description, he&#x27;s purely jealous that he wasn&#x27;t allowed to be the man to &quot;expose&quot; SSC and how LessWrong and SSC played role in some events in his upcoming AI book &quot;Genius Makers&quot; (jeez what a name...).

From the article:<p>Mr. Srinivasan said they could not let that kind of story gain traction.<p>“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to <i>their</i> advertisers&#x2F;friends&#x2F;contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times

The NY Times has become such a petty, gossip ridden rag that it’s frankly embarrassing. I am personally angry about it, because I grew up in a tiny town, viewing the Times with admiration as a representative of the “cultured” world. What a disappointment.

On the &quot;doxxing&quot; controversy, it’s odd to see people who are supposedly in favor of free speech advocate for what is essentially the &quot;right&quot; to be publicly forgotten (since Scott’s real name was already public knowledge due to some of his past writings that were under his real name). Free speech and the right to be forgotten are in direct conflict.

The New York times has really gone downhill. What are people liking these days? Washington Post?

My take: it doesn&#x27;t actually quote SSC, what a failure.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;howthehell.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;nyt-ssc-quoting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;howthehell.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;nyt-ssc-quoting</a>

Scott Aaronson blogged about the article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=5310" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottaaronson.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=5310</a><p>&gt; Reading this article, some will say that they told me so, or even that I was played for a fool. And yet I confess that, even with hindsight, I have no idea what I should have done differently, how it would’ve improved the outcome, or what I will do differently the next time. Was there some better, savvier way for me to help out? For each of the 14 points listed above, were I ever tempted to bang my head and say, “dammit, I wish I’d told Cade X, so his story could’ve reflected that perspective”—well, the truth of the matter is that I did tell him X! It’s just that I don’t get to decide which X’s make the final cut, or which ideological filter they’re passed through first.

It&#x27;s incredible how defensive the comments on Hacker News seem to be about this article given how moderate and dry its tone is. Seeing people on here so bent out of shape over such a relatively pithy article is a bit telling frankly. I have to think the article wouldn&#x27;t have made such a splash if it didn&#x27;t touch on something deeper in the SV&#x2F;Rationalist crowd.

Here&#x27;s a link to view the article without generating page views for the NYT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;0Ghdl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;0Ghdl</a>

And these are the people who are supposed to protect us from &quot;disinformation&quot;? The fact that the NYT can publish an article like this with a straight face just proves why we need freedom of speech as much as ever. Our once-trusted institutions have lost a sense of propriety and commitment to the truth.

It feels like Balaji Srinivasan and Sam Altman are taking much bigger hits in this article than Scott Alexander is.

It is just astounding to me what has happened to NYT over the past 5 years. They used to be a reliable source of good information and widely regarded as the paper of record. Now they have obliterated their own credibility by getting involved in a ridiculous, dangerous culture war.

Is this the article that cause Scott to delete Slate Star Codex? Shame on NYT.

&gt; In his first post, Mr. Siskind shared his full name.<p>Absolutely incredible way to end this article, as if him &quot;sharing&quot; his full name had nothing to do with the whole fiasco:<p>&gt; I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn&#x27;t be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees.<p>– <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;astralcodexten.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;still-alive" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;astralcodexten.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;still-alive</a>

This article could be a Tweet.

The NYTimes precipitated the Slate Star Codex controversy [1]:<p>&gt; Slate Star Codex was launched in 2013, and was taken down by its author on June 23, 2020, due to fears of having his full name published in an upcoming piece by the New York Times.<p>I’m assuming this article is the delayed result from the NYTimes.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slate_Star_Codex#Controversy_over_potential_revelation_of_full_name" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slate_Star_Codex#Controversy_o...</a>

Well I had never heard of this before, but now I want to read the blog. So, I guess thanks NYTimes.

This is a terrible take on SSC, but even weirder is the attempt to connect it to big tech. The narrative aspects of this seem pulled out of thin air and the quotes appear to be wildly out of date, appearing to be from before SSC went down. Given NYT’s and presumably this author‘s part of the story, the presentation here crosses the line all the way to either intentionally or negligently disingenuous.<p>Like other commenters here, I hope now that Trump’s out of office, it becomes less taboo on the left to talk about how poor a job mainstream media does.

&gt; They were “easily persuaded by weird, contrarian things,” said Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University who helped create the blogs that spawned the Rationalist movement. “Because they decided they were more rational than other people, they trusted their own internal judgment.”<p>The article as a whole is <i>meh</i>, but that quote made skimming it worthwhile.<p>I&#x27;ve never been impressed by the &quot;rationalist&quot; community around SSC, LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, etc., but I&#x27;ve really struggled to put my finger on it. This gets pretty damn close.<p>The whole sphere struck me from the beginning (<i>way</i> before present controversies) as a big circle jerk of smart people trying to impress each other. The standard issue rationalist flex is to pick a contrarian point of view and invent an extremely novel argument for it. Bonus points if it skirts <i>close</i> to something controversial or taboo, but doesn&#x27;t quite cross the line. Then an endless thread of discussion can ensue where all the participants have an opportunity to flex by either agreeing or taking apart the argument.<p>Problem is: I never got the sense that anything was being accomplished, nor that the ideas coming out of these places stood up when dragged out of their bubbles and examined in the context of the wider world and the wider sphere of human experience.<p>The first thing that really put me off was the whole idea of runaway super-intelligent AI. Please, please, please for the love of g-d study some biology. Dunning-Krueger is a worn out meme but I think the idea of it applies well to CS people talking about intelligence (as opposed to glorified statistical regression) without knowing anything about biology, which is the only existing example of an intelligent system.<p>The neo-racist (&quot;human biodiversity&quot;) and neoreactionary stuff just put me off further. When it emerged it didn&#x27;t surprise me one bit that it came from those circles. Contrarian? Check. Controversial? Check. Elitist? Check.<p>In the end I started thinking of it as an online cult, sort of a really high-brow companion to the &#x27;chans. I guess the hierarchy goes: rationalist sphere &gt; &#x27;chan culture &gt; Qanon.

Lots of &quot;fine people on both sides&quot; rationalizing here in these comments.<p>There were social and professional consequences for prejudice before &quot;cancel culture&quot; was full-throated wailed from atop privilege mountain. Rebranding the combination of &#x27;reverse racism&#x27;, &#x27;dangerous time for men&#x27;, &amp; &#x27;free speech&#x27; as a form of McCarthyism is so ludicrously transparent. Maybe it doesn&#x27;t feel obvious in anti-intellectual edgy enclaves, but it&#x27;s farcical to the majority of people that are too polite to remind that consequences for antisocial behavior has always existed.

I kind of wish NYT would post an annual list of all the wrongthink material that that their journalists think is too dangerous for a pleb like me to engage with. It would fill my reading list for years.

It was taken down because of this sentence:<p>“ The allure of the ideas within Silicon Valley is what made Scott Alexander, who had also written under his given name, *** ***, and his blog essential reading.”<p>Was it worth it NYT?

There&#x27;s almost nothing productive in this article so let&#x27;s try not to amplify its reach by talking about it too much on public social media.<p>Best way to respond to this is to ignore it.

Seems like if you&#x27;re going to write about something a lot of people find a lot of value in, you at least owe it to your readership to explain why they find it valuable.

You could infer depth of the entire article from the very first paragraph where author whines about verbosity of a blog. These people are not smart

It&#x27;s wild to see the NYT publish tabloid pieces.

The SSC subreddit is also discussing this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;lixeor&#x2F;why_slate_star_codex_is_silicon_valleys_safe_space&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;lixeor&#x2F;why_...</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;liz5wk&#x2F;silicon_valleys_safe_space_nyt_publishes_its&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;liz5wk&#x2F;sili...</a>

Read here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nyts.link&#x2F;https:&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;13&#x2F;technology&#x2F;slate-star-codex-rationalists.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nyts.link&#x2F;https:&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;13&#x2F;technolo...</a>

It&#x27;s ironic that a paid publication is deriding someone who posted articles for free. It&#x27;s even more ironic that the paid article is considerably worse than the free stuff.

And now The Verge is doing the dirty work of the New York Times by amplifying their sloppy hit piece as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;2&#x2F;13&#x2F;22281796&#x2F;go-read-this-slate-star-codex-silicon-valley-nytimes-blog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;2&#x2F;13&#x2F;22281796&#x2F;go-read-this-sla...</a><p>This isn&#x27;t surprising because The Verge very regularly takes cheap shots at anyone who does not align with their progressive bias - that includes Silicon Valley rationalists.

archive link for those that dont want to sign up

Just a reminder, the New York Times threatened to doxx the author of Slate Star Codex and was heavily criticized for it. They also seem to exercise a double standard in this regard: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;slate-star-codex-dox-scott-alexander-new-york-times&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;slate-star-codex-dox-scott-ale...</a>

Looks like a bit of a hit piece to me...

This is more like the NYPostTimes

This is where we are today: it’s national news to report on a now defunct blog that believes in liberal discourses and methods of discovering truth, or as close as we can get to it.<p>And then of course try and discredit it as heretical since some people we think are racist or their ideas may drop into the discussion from time to time.

The NYTs embracing woke culture has been a disaster.

I&#x27;d like to dive in to one of the specifics. It&#x27;s easy to disagree about which values people hold when you don&#x27;t back up those assertions. From the NYT article:<p>&gt; He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books.<p>This isn&#x27;t very informative because feminism has become such a generic broad brush label. Feminists of different eras believe different things because the people identifying as feminist changes, and people change their opinions. &quot;Feminism&quot; now basically means you&#x27;re talking about sex&#x2F;gender issues and you think some of those issues are hurting women. Both the trans-exclusionary and trans-inclusive communities will identify as &quot;feminist&quot; because they are both discussing sex&#x2F;gender issues, and they both think the other side is hurting women in particular. Your opinion about the various sides depend heavily on the specifics of what those sides are advocating for.<p>With that said, now let&#x27;s look at what Alexander&#x27;s article says:<p>&gt; 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”~~ EDIT: ARE TOTALLY GREAT, NO NEED TO TAKE THIS ONE SENTENCE OUT OF CONTEXT AND TRY TO SPREAD IT ALL OVER THE INTERNET.<p>Yeah, calling people &quot;Voldemort&quot; is a super minor aspect of the article he wrote. Let&#x27;s examine the context, which is his analysis of the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label. This is my summary of his article (which he has conveniently divided into 7 sections):<p>1) He describes one guy who&#x27;s poor as setup for his complaints about the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label. He says the <i>worst</i> response to someone complaining they&#x27;re poor is as follows:<p>&gt; You keep whining about how “unfair” it is that you can’t get a good job. “But I’m such a hard worker.” No, actual hard workers don’t feel like they’re entitled to other people’s money just because they ask nicely.<p>2) He describes a terrible guy with 5 ex-wives whom he abused, beat, and cheated on. He asserts that people complaining about not having a girlfriend despite being a &quot;Nice Guy&quot; are mystified because they&#x27;re nicer than this terrible guy who&#x27;s had lots of sex.<p>3) He quotes 5 articles talking about &quot;Nice Guys&quot;. He asserts that the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label unfairly maligns many men who are legit nice guys. (I believe the harassment he&#x27;s discussing is mostly the mocking on the &quot;Nice Guys of OKCupid&quot; blog, but it seems like there&#x27;s a bunch of subtext about other instances which he doesn&#x27;t link to or discuss.)<p>4) Alexander quotes &quot;Barry&quot; (IDK who this is) who says &quot;I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists.&quot; Alexander says that the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label predates the &quot;manosphere&quot;, so it can&#x27;t be a response to bad behavior by men. In reality, feminists are acting like people in the manosphere because:<p>&gt; People were coming up with reasons to mock and despise men who were sad about not being in relationships years before the manosphere even existed.<p>5) Alexander says the manosphere exists because women are being mean, and the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label is one instance of women abusing men. He says that shitty male behavior is radicalization caused by feminists verbally abusing genuinely nice guys.<p>6) He states that &quot;Nice Guys&quot; aren&#x27;t trying to date for just sex because otherwise they&#x27;d just hire a prostitute. Everybody deserves companionship and pair-bonding, and feminists complaining about &quot;Nice Guys&quot; are denying these dudes needs which friendship can&#x27;t fulfill.<p>7) He concludes his article by saying that virtuous people can have trouble dating, and unvirtuous people can do a great job dating. That seems unfair, and the manosphere is doing right by saying &quot;yes that&#x27;s unfair&quot; but feminists are doing wrong by saying &quot;Nice Guys are a problem&quot;.<p>I hope you find this summary accurate. It should give enough context for people who would agree with this article to follow along with why I think this is a shitty take. Alexander isn&#x27;t doing a enlightened analysis of the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label because he never acknowledges that the articles are complaining about the men who say they are &quot;Nice Guys&quot; because they are in fact not nice. One of the articles he cites (Feministe) addresses this very criticism:<p>&gt; As discussions like this happen, inevitably someone gets defensive about the idea that “Nice Guys” are really assholes in disguise, because there are plenty of guys (and girls) who are actually very decent and respectful, just perhaps too shy to make the first move, and so on, and that they may appear to be “Nice Guys” even when they’re not. … I dated a “Nice Guy” for a while. It was suffocating. I never felt like I could relax and just be myself around him, because he had constructed some kind of idealized version of me, and that was who he was dating. He was also damned hard to get rid of.<p>He just blunders through a 7-section article complaining about dating without once addressing whether the &quot;Nice Guys&quot; the women are complaining about are actually being nice.

Never read Slate Star Codex before. Took the link to an entry on metoo[1]:<p>1. Starts with a thought experiment based on statistics from various sources.<p>2. Has a parenthetical paragraph about gay male harassment, also with statistics.<p>3. Makes a speculative conclusion inside the parenthetical, never mentioning the famous metoo case of Terry Crews, the media coverage of which argues against said conclusion.<p>Can someone tell me if the other articles follow this pattern of building from first principles without having first done due diligence on a given topic?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;04&#x2F;against-overgendering-harassment&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;04&#x2F;against-overgendering-...</a><p>Edit: clarification

The main general thing I don&#x27;t like about this is the continued and increasing conflation of rationalism with stuff like libertarianism, alt-right, or that weird paragraph about rationalists being a bunch of polyamorous hippies. The general thinking behind Bayesianism - being honest about where you&#x27;re coming from, listening to counterpoints, and allowing your beliefs to change from evidence - is hardly partisan.<p>Same with free speech. You&#x27;d think the W.H. Auden branch of free speech defenders were an endangered species, when they&#x27;re really not - they&#x27;re just not reading alt-right blogs and screaming about being canceled.

I for one look forward to the erosion of the unholy axis of massive tech monopolies and hall monitor journalists that we&#x27;ve seen rise in the past few years as the latter begin to overreach and demand the cancellation of Silicon Valley darlings like Scott. With Trump out of the picture tech figures will realize that the burden (both financial and psychological) of complying to ever-ratcheting demands of performative wokeness is not worth bearing.

As others have noted, this is a good time to think about Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Here&#x27;s some points in the article that I think are particularly sketchy that others haven&#x27;t yet noted ...<p>&gt; He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.<p>Take a look at Slate Star Codex (SSC) in The Wayback Machine on January 1, 2020 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200101140213&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200101140213&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestar...</a><p>The Blog Roll is on the left side. It&#x27;s a long list of weirdly categorized links without any additional annotation. Nick Land&#x27;s is &quot;Xenosystems&quot; (which now appears to be defunct). I think calling this an &quot;endorsement&quot; is really stretching things here.<p>Scott wrote about the neoreactionary movement on SSC more than once, and it&#x27;s quite clear he _does not_ endorse those viewpoints (which to be fair, the article does say). But given that he wrote about the topic repeatedly, it&#x27;s no surprise he linked to a prominent neoreactionary blog. Presumably, he trusted his readers to come to their own conclusions about the content on the linked blogs. And he also probably assumed that readers would realize this _wasn&#x27;t_ an endorsement, given his own writing on the neoreactionary movement.<p>If I told you that you should read Marx&#x27;s Communist Manifesto after telling you at length that I think Communism is terrible, am I endorsing Communism? Or am I telling you to read this because I think you should learn more about Communism, and not just from me?<p>&gt; I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.<p>This is one of the sketchiest things in the article. Scott made it clear that his primary concern was that his patients and potential employers might associate him with his blog. So if you&#x27;re a patient googling your new psychiatrist, would you google their first and middle name (a middle name you might not even know)? Or would you google &quot;Scott Siskind&quot;? Of course you&#x27;d do the latter! So the question is whether googling &quot;Scott Siskind&quot; would get you to SSC. I&#x27;d love to go back in time and check this. I&#x27;d also love to know if Cade Metz tried this and what result he got.<p>I would note that if I google &quot;Scott Siskind&quot; right now, I do get results related to SSC, but that&#x27;s because Scott after Scott gave up his pseudonymity on Astral Codex Ten, the Wikipedia page for SSC was updated to include Scott&#x27;s full name.<p>I&#x27;m sure there are more similarly sketchy parts of the article that others will note.

HN has become a forum largely devoted to media criticism. We should change the motto to “ethics in journalism”

G͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇͇̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̋̋̋̋̿̿̿̿̿̿̿̿̿̿̿̿ood times

A solid article trying to understand exactly what is so important about Rationalism that it must be hidden and treated as a gnostic induction into a mystery religion.<p>Note that the author did the courtesy of not mentioning Roko&#x27;s Basilisk. Clearly they <i>do</i> understand that some things shouldn&#x27;t be talked about. But they don&#x27;t think that any of the writers mentioned here deserve to avoid public scrutiny.

Y&#x27;all can attack the messenger, make light of it, dismiss it, but fact is that antidemocratic forces in America are gaining funding, influence and power. There is an honest to goodness conspiracy among powerful silicon valley elites led by Thiel to spread these ideas and subvert our democracy. With slogans like &quot;we&#x27;re a republic not a democracy&quot;, and justification for policies like voter suppression and gerymandering they&#x27;ve succeeded in shifting the overton window and convincing many Republicans that democracy is bad. These are dangerous ideas that will lead to violence. I am personally willing to die for democracy.

I guess hackernews users really like slatestar codex

&quot;Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared&quot;<p>I did not read TFA because I know I&#x27;d just be ticked off - the hoopla and sloppy reporting around GME trying to fit it all into a simplistic narrative really was quite annoying and has caused me to revise my understanding of modern day journalism.<p>My opinion is that &quot;the journalist&quot; in a lot of cases wrote things up in a simplistic way so that they could understand it for themselves - or they just slapped something together in an ad hoc fashion following all the other lemmings - or the intent was to spew more propaganda about whatever they think is important.<p>All this has convinced me the &quot;Right&quot; do have a bit of a good point about the MSM being sloppy, unfair, and trying to control the public&#x27;s interpretation of reality (not that the &quot;Right&quot; are correct about much of anything...) But whatever happened to trying to really comprehend all the different angles to a story? Or understanding the worldview of the subject? That takes a lot of work aka empathy and the economics of the MSM nowadays precludes that, I guess. Louis Theroux and Adam Curtis are the antithesis of this sort of journalist.<p>Geez... the implied connotation of this lede makes it quite obvious the angle taken on this topic was predetermined just like Scott feared. It all fits in with the general fad going on now about how Big Tech is so evil now and out to enslave everyone. I&#x27;ve been in this industry for 30 years and yes there are problems, but just like with any other technology or shift in society. A mutant version of capitalism is the real problem now but you&#x27;ll never see the MSM writing articles about that.<p>I&#x27;m not even a Rationalist or part of that community; I read SSC occasionally when a topic came up that I am interested in. In general, I think they are a bit short sighted and blinkered in a lot of respect - though the angle taken is useful. To really grok something, you have to look at all of the angles and to believe only &#x27;this angle&#x27; is the real Truth is stupid. The idea that SSC was the coffeehouse for &quot;many tech leaders&quot; is really .... I want to say ludicrous but that is perhaps too strong of a word. Not all engineers are autistic robots.<p>Counterpoint: Zuckerberg has a degree in psychology so he can&#x27;t automatically be lumped in the Rationalist community; he certainly knew from the beginning he was building a digital Skinner box and how people would behave given the right stimuli.

Great article. There’s definitely something there. It reads like the beginning of a good New Yorker article.<p>There’s definitely a relationship between rationalism, objectivism and libertarianism. It seems to afflict the captains of industry. And in this case it’s Silicon Valley’s turn.<p>Yep definitely something there, probably a book too. After all It’s a marketplace of ideas.

So it appears that the NYT actually went ahead and published that attack job on Scott. I had hoped that they had choosen to forget it, but no.<p>Hopefully this will be what we remember as the legacy of the NYT. Pointlessly destroying things out a shear inability to create it themselves.

FTA: “ The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” ”<p>This is a disingenuous take but it does fit the current NYT narrative of opposing speech (and venues) the editors disapprove of.

For anyone who has seen enough rotten articles from this particular organization <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blocknyt.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blocknyt.com&#x2F;</a>

A great deal has been written about the public fear of government, but I contend that we now face a period where people are equally afraid of the media. I have not read one good reason for the NY Times to have published this man&#x27;s true identity, and I fear what could happen if you did anger the media. They have almost as much power as the government: While they can&#x27;t handcuff and put you in prison, they can destroy everything else about your life; or change it for the better, the power is there.

&gt; “Because they decided they were more rational than other people, they trusted their own internal judgment.”<p>This is my core criticism of those who call themselves rationalists. You don&#x27;t have to call yourself that, you can just be rationalist. But when you adopt the cult-like mentality of rationalism it becomes very ironic indeed.

Step 1: find a group or movement<p>Step 2: find the individual in that group of movement who says something crazy<p>Step 3: make them the defacto face of the group, make the group about them, take everything out of context.<p>Step 4: ignore everything else.<p>Step 5: threaten individuals with doxxing them unless they stop talking about things you don&#x27;t want them to talk about [1]<p>Step 6: promotion to editor<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slate_Star_Codex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Slate_Star_Codex</a>

This article grossly overplays the importance of such places. Back in the day these types of discussions were commonplace, even on the internet. Now that the internet is increasingly sanitized of opposing speech, and the media serves as the arbiter of allowed discussion topics and (most importantly) allowed thought, communities like this just stick out.<p>They say this is an important and unusual place, but really what they mean is that it’s a different place than what’s allowed.<p>Even their use of language like “neo-fascist” is telling. As if labeling people a regular fascist doesn’t inflict the same type of cultural damage it used to have...