Like, you really have to bring up Roko's basilisk? What is the point, besides "look at how silly these Silicon Valley types are"? They present it like a central example of "Grey Tribe" discourse, when it's pretty fringe, even by LessWrong standards.

But you’re right it’s not part of the “discourse” except mostly as a joke.

Looks like it didn't propagate very well. I'm a few degrees removed from the "rationalist community" and I heard about it years ago.

Yudkowsky tried to prevent people from talking about it, which predictably backfired. The LessWrong wiki has an entry on the whole thing.

The article also calls the author "Scott _____" instead of just "the author of S.S.C.".

Wasn't this exactly what he was trying to prevent with the NYT in the first place? So now other journalists feel like they have to step in and "doxx" him instead? And this New Yorker article ultimately got published in spite of all the controversy surrounding his identity. What kind of backlash is that going to generate? On top of the reaction to all the other veiled attacks on people in the article and irrelevant detours into "controversial" details about SSC and the rationalist community, etc.

I don't see a good outcome to this at all. Maybe it says something if the people who put the most effort into overcoming bias and trying to foster reasoned conversation couldn't prevent all of this from blowing up as it did. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know. It's certainly ugly.

"...the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement." - ok, so his gentle manner is a "persona", but he "surely" incites his readers to harass journalists.

"Slate Star Codex is often held up as an example of what the well-behaved Internet can look like—a secret orchard of fruitful inquiry." - note the passive voice.

"Much of the support Alexander received was motivated simply by a love for his writing." - implies that the support was not founded on actual judgment of the situation.

"On the blog, Alexander strives to set an example as a sensitive, respectful, and humane interlocutor..." - note the word 'strives'. To be fair, the rest of the sentence is genuine praise for his skill as a writer.

"...the rationalists’ general willingness to pursue orderly exchanges on objectionable topics, often with monstrous people, remains not only a point of pride but a constitutive part of the subculture’s self-understanding." - note how willingness to pursue orderly exchanges (with people that are presented as objectively monstrous) is a subjective point of pride.

Compare:

"the business model of the Times has little to do with chasing “clicks,” per se, and, even if it did, no self-respecting journalist would conclude that the pursuit of clicks was best served by the de-anonymization of a "random blogger." - presented as a factual statement.

"...a near-pathological commitment to the reinvention of the wheel, using the language of game theory to explain, with mathematical rigor, some fact of social life that anyone trained in the humanities would likely accept as a given." - why is this commitment pathological? Why is it as worthless as presented?

"These conversations, about race and genetic or biological differences between the sexes, have rightfully drawn criticism from outsiders." - why was this criticism rightful?

"The rationalists regularly fail to reckon with power as it is practiced, or history as it has been experienced, and they indulge themselves in such contests with the freedom of those who have largely escaped discrimination." - fairly standard accusations of privilege presented as facts.

"there is some evidence to support the idea that he, like anyone, is wont to sacrifice rigor in moments of passion." - presented as a statement supported by evidence.

Similarly, concerns and worries of the group are presented as subjective, over-reacting and reaching into conspiracy theory territory. By contrast, worries that the group itself is problematic are presented as legitimate.

And of course 'rationalists' are consistently presented as low-status dorks, but I guess it is the usual New Yorker snobbery and not something nefarious.

It's a bit ironic that you would say that, even as others have complained that the "subjective" presentation is just weasel words and fake balance, i.e. saying "Some people think X." when you really really want to say "X." At least when the author is stating things directly from their POV ("News media is totally not chasing for clicks, honest!") it's clear that it's their own stance.

Wait, didn't you just pull that trick on me, by referring to some vague 'others'? :) In seriousness, here is for example the Wikipedia policy that indeed discourages the use of weasel words in attributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... . The difference is, that policy explicitly prohibits presenting opinions as facts without any attribution so there is a temptation to write in some bogus attribution so that is prohibited too. In any case, an opinion stated with no attribution whatsoever appears to bear more weight.

Of course I am not advocating that magazine articles should be written in the encyclopedic style but I think it is important to be consistent. E.g. it is well-known that authors of The Economist write as omniscient gods and that's OK because readers can correct for that, but mixing styles is suspicious. And isn't it suspicious that almost all statements written from the author's POV in the article are negative?

See, this is what I'm not sure about. An opinion stated with no attribution looks just like that, an opinion held primarily by the author. (After all, you can tell that it can't possibly be an uncontested fact, just by the subject matter. I mean, stuff like "news sites are not chasing for clicks" is bound to be controversial.) Whereas if the author says "Some people think X.", they're pointing to something that's supposedly the shared opinion of a whole group, so it looks a lot more relevant. Of course that's just my point of view, I may well be mistaken.

https://tomdehnel.com/what-is-russell-conjugation/

But you are right, there are examples of Russel Conjugation too (e.g.: "Alexander’s supporters were working themselves into a tizzy") as well as other tricks. This article is quite a case study on spin!

He shows up in person to meetups and things like that, so that doesn't really work.

Semi-anonymity works fine as long as there are cultural norms toward respecting it. Nothing really works if people with resources acting in bad faith decide they want to make your life hard.

I think the article both directly addresses this and also succinctly summarizes its tone: "[...] the stridency and hyperbole of the reactions of Alexander’s cohort to his cause bear the classic markers of grandiosity: the conviction that they are at once potent and beleaguered."

The New Yorker reporter criticizes Alexander for calling on his audience to lobby the NYT not to publish his name, while ignoring entirely the much worse consequences that Alexander was likely to face from the NYT's own mob. I think it's hard to be that blind by accident, so I think it's deliberate, and that the proposed doxxing showed either an intent to harm Alexander or cheerful indifference to that harm. Do you disagree? Note that I'm asking whether the reporters were pleased to harm Alexander, not whether you think that harm was justified (i.e., whether you'd be pleased to as well).

I insulted the New Yorker article and reporter, but I accompanied that with an argument for why they deserved it--I believe the article contained many false or misleading statements that tend to impugn Alexander's character. If my reasoning wasn't clear from my brief comment, I've explained it to exhaustion elsewhere in this thread. Your comment quotes from the article to insult mine ("stridency", "hyperbole", and "grandiosity" are all strongly negative terms), but with no such accompanying argument for why the insult should hold.

This. It’s a really easy trap to fall into online, but, the whole idea of someone deserving an insult is, 99.9% of the time, toxic.

Are you sure that you're not focusing on language to avoid engaging with an argument that would lead you to a conclusion that you find undesirable (i.e., that the NYT intended harm to Alexander, and the New Yorker stepped in to excuse their actions)? That's another easy trap to fall into online.

And, I don't think I'm doing that other thing you're saying but am all ears if you feel that's the case.

And what do you think is grandiose? I think there's a decent chance that Alexander would have been forced out of his chosen career if the article ran, and that he might be yet. Do you doubt this? That seems like a pretty significant life event for anyone, an odd thing to minimize unless you're indifferent to harm to him.

Finally, what do you agree with in pvg's post? I don't see any argument there myself, just a lot of words with negative connotations.

To be honest, with regards to the ultimate intention of the New Yorker article, I don’t know. And with regards to your question, I ultimately don’t know what Alexander intended.

I think that the domain of plausible answers to the questions you raise is pretty big and that the article doesn’t really provide enough information to give definitive answers.

We obviously each had different overall impressions of the New Yorker article and it’s authors intent.

With regards to grandiosity, well, the way grandiosity was talked about in the article and the comment was a combination of “beleaguered” and “potent”, I think.

I may have jumped the gun , but to me your comment read as though you felt a particular group that you had some degree of sympathy with was being deliberately targeted by The NY Times. Thus - beleaguered.

At the same time, that particular comment also had a lot of judgements on various things and on various people’s intentions. Judgements which to me traveled a very narrow chain of logic. Lots of either/or black and white, basically. Which I do too at times. But - Thus - potent.

Hope that’s useful information and not crossing a line to say.

Also obviously I don’t believe that The NY Times is specifically targeting anyone or a group in that way. Which isn’t to say they haven’t. And, I could be wrong. My general take is that the motivations of an org like The NY Times are more multifaceted and nuanced than how they’ve mostly been discussed in this comment thread. Same with the New Yorker

Which isn’t to say I haven’t felt a lot of anger towards their reporting at times.

And, I enjoy both those publications FWIW.

I do think there's an ideological bias to whom an NYT reporter is likely to treat favorably or unfavorably. In this thread and elsewhere, people listed comparably semi-anonymous figures that the NYT declined to name that one might, in the usual oversimplified binary view, described as left-leaning. The world isn't perfectly orderly, and maybe they just got lucky and Alexander got unlucky. I see moderately strong evidence that's not the case, though.

But I'm more concerned that this is happening than to whom. I was aware that Alexander's blog existed before these events, but I hadn't read it much, and I had no particularly favorable or unfavorable impression. I wrote my comment not out of sympathy for Alexander's views, but out of concern that reporters from mainstream outlets now seem happy to bring about or abet actions that are likely to cause people serious and unfair ("Alexander deserved to get fired for what he wrote, so good" is a perfectly consistent and honest position, but I'm actually kind of surprised that no one said that here) harm. I think Marxists are dangerously wrong, but I don't think they should be run out of their unrelated jobs for that reason.

What Alexander feared the NYT would do to him seems to me more polished and subtler than a Project Veritas article on Breitbart, but basically in the same spirit. I do think it's to the NYT's credit that (so far) they dropped the piece, and to the New Yorker's that their piece didn't use Alexander's real name--no one doubts that Breitbart would have ploughed ahead. I'm disturbed that it got that far, though.

Plus, what if the New Yorker article got something wrong (not necessarily thru negligence)?

Or what if the NY Times article changes between now and its publication (if it's published)?

What if Alexander misunderstood something? Or, what if there are circumstances which people have not chosen to publicly share for whatever reason?

I appreciate you writing back. At the end of the day, it just seems like this whole topic struck an emotional chord with a lot of people for reasons I don't understand, or, don't agree with.

To be fair, I've definitely felt an emotional response. There's a lot of fear going around in the world right now, and understandably so.

Maybe people respond in proportion to their self-assessed risk that they themselves would end up in Alexander's predicament? That probably explains some of the left/right split on this and similar topics. I just can't help thinking that those with views broadly similar to an average NYT reporter's are underestimating that personal risk, given that: (a) the boundaries of acceptable thought may change quickly and unpredictably; and (b) a much greater fraction of their personal and professional network is likely to come along with the mob, increasing the risk that public censure has consequences to their daily life. "Cancel culture" poses much less risk to a Breitbart reporter (who's already beyond the pale) than to a broadly liberal writer who misses or disregards the latest change in that boundary.

Or are you doubting that the doxxing would have harmed him? A lot of his phrasing is creepy even to me--the word "like" goes poorly with "eugenics", regardless of one's views on anything. I haven't read his blog extensively, but from the full context of what I've seen I'd attribute that to autistic-style disregard for social conventions rather than any intent to cause harm; but I do believe an article quoting selectively from his writing and including his real name had a decent chance of making it impossible for him to continue in his present career. A Mexican-American utility worker just lost his job for resting his hand out the window of his van in a shape that the Twitter mob thought implied white supremacy. Would the sins they perceive in Alexander not be much, much worse?

Or are you just pointing out that thanks to Alexander's stunt, the NYT seems to have held off (for now)? But unless you're saying that the NYT was never actually going to publish his real name (which I see no reason to believe) or that threats of harm are fine until you act (which would make life easier for extortionists, but which I don't believe is a serious argument), I'm not sure how that's relevant.

Or is it just that you want to see him harmed for the views he expressed, but you consider yourself too nice a person to actually say that? "Alexander wrote stuff under a pseudonym that's so bad he should be forced to abandon his career as a psychiatrist, and if the NYT can make it happen then I'll be glad" is at least a consistent and honest position; so if that's what you think, why not say it?

This has caused Scott Alexander to faint on the couch and the response that warrants is probably smelling salts, not the mobilization of all legions west of Cappadocia. The only thing we have so far is his side of the story, his prone frame on the couch and his call for the mobilization of all legions west of Cappadocia.

Is this because you think it's unlikely that would happen even if the piece did run? If so, then I gave the reasons in my previous post why I disagree--so we have a simple disagreement about a prediction for the future, and we could each give our reasons why we expected our respective outcomes. Why didn't you engage with any of those arguments?

Or is it just because you're indifferent to whether he loses his career, or indeed might be glad to see it happen? That seems most consistent to me with your statements so far--but would you feel the same if the person staring down the Twitter mob were your ideological ally? You yourself? If we normalize this behavior, then what makes you think that it won't be someone you care about next?

Is there any substantive argument that you'd be willing to engage with? I'm not sure why you keep responding if not. You can't actually believe that nothing happened here, unless you believe that nothing happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis because the missiles never flew.

I'm always curious about the expectations people when they write things like "have you ever considered the possibility that you're mistaken". It seems totally ineffective as a rhetorical move, but I wonder if might have some slim chance of being productive if accompanied by a show of good faith. Like, for instance, any evidence whatsoever that the person saying it had ever been inclined to concede anything on the forum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421917

Close enough? Or in a different sub-thread here (that the mods seem to have detached), another poster and I probably still disagree on the original question, but we did manage a respectful discussion in which we agreed on other related points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23783613

I didn't mean it as a rhetorical device--I'm genuinely curious, how someone came to be so sure that I'm wrong that it's not even worth explaining why. There's very few things I'm that sure of.

A snarky original post like the one I wrote here starts from a negative interaction with someone who disagrees, which I agree is bad. You'll find mostly more nuanced comments in my history, including those about semi-political topics like the coronavirus; but those mostly get no replies at all.

Short-term, this has probably net increased the visibility of Alexander's content (slightly less convenient to access, but much more attention), and I assume he expected that. The reporter can't actually believe that Alexander is trying to hide something horrible that he wrote, so the sentence I quoted can only be knowingly dishonest innuendo. That's why I said "ugly".

How very optimistic of you. In my mind, it just changed the status of the story from "almost ready for publishing" to "Developing" - the action of taking down the blog and the words of the various parties are definitely news-worthy. The story can no longer be about one guy; the NYT will need a bigger canvas, and more time to work on it.

It might be a little farfetched, but no moreso than Alexander's own reasoning for deleting the blog. I think it's a little much to call the whole article "ugly" because of that.

1. I believe the New Yorker reporter disingenuously made a statement that he knew to be false (because deleting the blog is clearly effective as a protest and publicity stunt, and clearly ineffective in removing access to content that's been widely mirrored elsewhere already) in order to create the false impression that Alexander might be trying to hide something.

2. I consider knowing falsehoods intended to harm others to be ugly.

I thought you were disagreeing with (1), which is why I thought it's relevant that Alexander himself said his goal was that publicity, and that his actions seem consistent with his words. Are you saying that you agree with (1) but disagree with (2)?

Assertion 2: deleting his blog is NOT a meaningful way of hiding gross and reactionary discussion happening on his blog, by way of adding an extra step to anyone who wants to search for it.

These seem contradictory to me. He is absolutely trying to hide or obfuscate something, we're just debating what it is.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...

In short, he's not worried about dedicated antagonists finding him. He's worried about his psychiatric patients finding his blog, and that interfering with his relationships with them. Deleting the blog makes it moderately more difficult for them to do that.

He might at some later date decide that he needs to erase his iInternet presence entirely, but I don't think that's his current game.

Some of the posts were pretty cringe worthy but the comments were far more reliably cringe worthy.

Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird.

“Childhood exposure to radical literature”?

“radical literature” almost sound like a disease.

>Also I mean your phrase “uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature” is .... weird.

Well, I'm not qualified to write for the New Yorker, but surely they could have written a sentence that wasn't false.

Maybe you could read a more detailed account on The Atlantic, and decide for yourself how it could be summarized. (Seriously, the "dating market," does not come up even once.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blo...

FYI it mentions Andrea Dworkin though -- not Judith Butler, who you mentioned earlier. Not an expert but think they're fairly different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin

I dunno, just seems like emotions are running high. To be fair, mine included. Sigh ...

* I admit that the "somewhere else" could have been my imagination.

The thing about hiding posts from reporters while they know there's an ebook.

Saying the NYT "isn't about clicks" while most of the news industry is drowning.

Arguing that "de-anonymizing" Scott shouldn't be a problem because it was easy for them to do.

Arguing that Scott should've expected unruly people to contact the NYT while drawing a complete blank that that's exactly what Scott would've been facing, except with possible physical violence rather than angry e-mails...

There's more but I'm lazy. My "wat?s per minute" were significantly above average. It went far enough for me to call it "ugly."

No need to generalize from the state of the media as an industry; NYT is a public company so their balance sheet is public. Here's their latest 10-Q, doesn't look like drowning to me.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000071691/000007169...

Feel free to ignore that item.

…

But actually… that sheet also says that $51 million of their revenue is from digital advertising, down from $55.5 million a year ago. It's 11.5% of their total revenue, down from 12.7%. Not a huge problem but… it's still a business consideration.

And let's not forget zest and sensationalism can sell subscriptions and print media too. (Publishing the full name would at least have counted as "zest" IMHO, if not full-on sensationalism.)

Not even suggesting malice there, just my imagination :)

[Ed. add:]

It's also that I don't even think Metz was necessarily aware the name would be such a big deal. It's very much normal practice to name people, and even if they saw that Scott was privacy conscious it might not have registered properly and just seemed like a "little bit of extra zest." However, IMHO they just should have backed off after it became apparent to them.

edit: Compare digital advertising to digital subscriptions, not overall subscriptions

Note that newspapers make little if any profit from print subscriptions in themselves, because they're little better than breakeven with the cost of printing and delivery. The real profit has always come from the advertising. Digital subscriptions are something new in that they're actually making money from subscription revenues instead of just using them to cover unit costs, but they're currently still tiny.

A more effective paywall drives subscriptions. Once you have a paywall, subscriptions are as much about clicks as ads.

I don't have a subscription myself, but I have considered paying for one because acquaintances with a low bar for quality occasionally want to share and discuss something behind the paywall and I can't rely on all of them to know how to print a pdf and share that with me.

As subscribers witness the quality decline, they'll cancel their subscriptions.

The NY Times today is not the NY Times of A.M. Rosenthal.

But it's a business consideration that exactly supports the claim that NYT isn't about clicks and, in fact, that dependence on click-driven ad revenue is a declining focus of NYT and similar media outlets.

The fact that ad revenue is declining doesn’t tell us that they intentionally moved focus away from clicks.

As another matter, all those subscriptions grant access to their website content. More clicks on their site probably lead to more new subscriptions, and better retention of existing subscribers. To the extent that clicks lead to subscriptions, they are undoubtably all about the clicks.

In fact there has even been an article in the New York Times arguing that the New York Times financial strength and power may be bad for news:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/media/ben-smith-...

I think that a lot of commenters on here have the exact self-righteous tone that this article criticizes (well, discusses with a bit of an air of judgment, but let's just agree that it's criticism): to these commenters, it is inconceivable that the NYT's behavior could be acceptable and not... what, profit-motivated, desperate for clicks, a salvo in a media war? But that's mostly absurd. Not impossible, per se, but unfounded.

This is one of those things where the Internet At Large seems to think that everyone has to agree on who's right here (it's Scott and friends?), and anyone who disagrees is Evil, and it's just a matter of figuring out _how_ they Are Evil. But in reality people can actually coexist, and be allowed to coexist, with _different_ opinions of what is right or reasonable, and the NYT / persons who are removed from the SSC/Silicon Valley/HN bubble have very different opinions there.

The commenters here act like it is not okay for these differences of opinion to continue to exist, and so they must be crushed. It really, really doesn't look great to the community that when commenters encounter this difference of opinion, they... launch into uninhibited tirades against it at every opportunity. To an external observer, the commenters seem ridiculously worked up, and this article (among other takes) seems very mature and charitable in contrast.

> This plea conformed with the online persona he has publicly cultivated over the years—that of a gentle headmaster preparing to chaperone a rambunctious group of boys on a museum outing—but, in this case, it seemed to lend plausible deniability to what he surely knew would be taken as incitement.

I just can't see that being written in good faith.

>Overall, I’m pretty impressed by this article. It’s the sort of thing I could see myself aspiring to write. It spends ample time presenting SSC in its own terms, touches on enough of the major touchstones and obscurities of the blog to indicate a serious examination of it, and is precise and restricted in its criticisms. I appreciated in particular the attention it paid to the specific quirks of rationalist subculture rather than trying to lump it in as part of something it isn’t, and the way it (accurately) called out the people who were looking more for a war with the media and were willing rovers use Scott as a convenient casus belli.[0]

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slat...

For any given website, more likely than not they would want the Internet Archive to archive it.

For any given internet user, more likely than not they wouldn't want a website to track them for the purposes of advertising and price discrimination.

This tells us what the defaults should be in each case, and let the exceptions change the setting if they want.

The percentage of websites that actually opt out of being in the archive rounds to zero. Compare this to the much larger percentage of internet users who opt out of ads by installing ad blocking software, despite many websites whinging at you or refusing to display content if you do.

I really don't think you can make that assertion without asking the maintainer of the website.

AND if that's the case, IA can either reach out to the maintainer via the email address gotten from the public WHOIS data OR the maintainer can easily go to the IA website and opt in!

Let me rephrase. More websites would want to be archived than not. So that should be the default.

This is how defaults are meant to work. Unless the default is somehow harmful or dangerous, they should be the thing that the most people want, so as to reduce the amount of work involved in getting everyone to their preferred outcome. Having 1% of websites opt out is far less work for the websites than having 99% of websites opt in.

> AND if that's the case, IA can either reach out to the maintainer via the email address gotten from the public WHOIS data OR the maintainer can easily go to the IA website and opt in!

You do realize how many websites there are. Why would you want to dump a collective million man hours of work on all of them to opt in, or the even worse consequences when they forget and then don't get archived like they would've wanted?

I don’t think a hit piece would explain how some potentially controversial SST articles were either later qualified by the author, or, qualified by the author at the time of publishing.

> The reporter is unaware that the Internet Archive exists? The content is obviously still readily available, so the reporter is either stupid or disingenuous.

We would have to see what NY Times policy is on using The Internet Archive as a source. I don’t know, and, you didn’t go out of your way to find and share that information, so I think your conclusions are premature.

Honestly the article didn’t seem ugly to me.

As many other posters noted, there's also an e-book, and the article itself quoted from the blog. So are you asking me to prove the nonexistence of an NYT policy banning the use of any of those sources, despite the New Yorker somehow figuring it out? It's hard to prove a negative, but I could see what I could find online. But do you really think the burden of proof is on me here? Perhaps your impulse is to defend the New Yorker reporter here, and you think the burden of proof for accusing him (of false accusations against Alexander) should be high; but the reporter is accusing Alexander (of having written something that would be a "creditable reason" for negative coverage), so shouldn't the burden be on him?

I didn't say the article was a hit piece, and I don't think it was one. Another poster called it a "smoothed-over hit piece", and that seems closer to me, a piece designed to leave both a negative impression and an impression that Alexander has been treated fairly.

But the very fact we are arguing over the meaning of a single word is, I think, kind of a signal of an anti-pattern, so to speak.

It’s like bikeshedding over a single line of code. Sure, in certain cases that single line might be super important (part of an algorithm, performance critical, etc).

Often however there’s a range of acceptable ways to write a single line of code and, if we want to analyze and understand a codebase, it only makes so much sense to spend so much time on that one line.

There’s a lot more code to look at as well and to understand how something works or the intent of the author of the code we should look at individual lines in the context of the whole.

Plus if we’re going to get that specific about individual words, then it’s even more important to be comprehensive and correct and not jump to one of several plausible meanings ;).

Though I agree that judging a long piece of writing by a few quotes out of context is generally bad--indeed, I'm surprised no one suggested that I've done the same thing to the New Yorker reporter that Alexander was afraid the NYT would do to him (though with no foreseeable risk to the reporter's job).

I've tried not to--those sentences seemed particularly egregious to me, but broadly within the tone of the overall piece. Human attention behind limited, I'm afraid any discussion of a long piece of writing must either talk about subjective feelings and impressions (where it's hard to identify the reasons for those different feelings), or focus on a tiny subset at the cost you correctly note.

[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ho6g2b/slate...

(Or both.)

Um, unless you think Scott lied about what the reporter said, this is not a very sensible take. The blog takedown page reads like a factual account of what happened, and a request to direct any criticism towards the NYT's editors through the proper channels. He has never called for a mad frenzy or anything like that.

Um, yes? How does using any of these methods turn civil discourse into harassment?

> Also, he only asked followers to be polite in parenthesis after this

That's a real twist. He wouldn't want to sound like he assumes his readers are rude people, would he?

> I don't think his words were polite, in fact I think it was quite the opposite. If I wanted a civil discussion I would not have listed any contact information about anyone. I would have said, "I am archiving the blog until further notice because I need to think about what kind of content should be made publicly available because words have power and it's important to think about what information and inferences we make available to others through those words".

The fact that he didn't do that means he did not have such intentions. There is now evidence for an actual harassment campaign against the journalists.

Here is the link and the quote

(https://mobile.twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/128066344682499...)

> Community message, pls share around as you like

> If you have spoken with C_de M_tz, or if he has reached out to you, since the day that Scott took down Slate Star Codex: there may be something you can do to help

> Please feel free to reach out to me by DM and I can fill you in

The coded message is referring to the original journalist. I don't understand how people can look at all this evidence and still think the rationalist community isn't acting in bad faith when there is actual evidence on twitter of actual coordination among its members for a harassment campaign.

> There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at [email protected], contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS.

> (please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.)

Can you elaborate on what was un-civil about this? How is directly the users towards the feedback page of the New York Times and the editor in charge of the NYT technology section (the sub-group that Carl Metz belongs to), accompanied with explicit calls to be civil uncivil?

The notion that this is a harassment campaign is nothing less than laughable.

Even if the author's real name were used:

> Community message, pls share around as you like

> If you have spoken with Cade Metz, or if he has reached out to you, since the day that Scott took down Slate Star Codex: there may be something you can do to help

> Please feel free to reach out to me by DM and I can fill you in

How would this be considered harassment? This user is asking for people who have spoken to Cade Metz to get into contact. How is this evidence of harassment?

You seem to be inserting your own imagination that this tweet author is planning to release private contact information or something similar. When in reality this could easily be people sharing their experiences with Cade and whether similar situations of doxxing or de-anonymoization by the NYT authoer have occurred in the past.

A civil phrasing would have been, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved". That would have been civil. Asking anyone to act on your behalf by giving feedback to a 3rd party when it's obvious the intent is negative is not civil. It is sinister.

It's also becoming clear to me these conversations are no longer productive and I have started to re-iterate points I made in other posts. If you want to argue further make sure you understand what point I'm making and why and then make a good faith and pertinent point. Otherwise I will no longer engage with anyone responding to posts in this thread.

You can also email me if you want and make your points in a longer format. I will consider them and respond if you have well researched rebuttals.

Perhaps this was the case, but you seem to have edited many parent comments in this chain with a '-'. Unless the flagging behavior has changed without my knowing. My understanding is that flagging removes the comment from users without showdead enabled, but does not edit the comment.

> If I was a psychologist who read the comments of my posts I would have realize that subtle suggestions can be blown out of proportions and I would be very careful with what words I was using to express my intent.

> A civil phrasing would have been, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved". That would have been civil. Asking anyone to act on your behalf by giving feedback to a 3rd party when it's obvious the intent is negative is not civil. It is sinister.

He explicitly tells people to be police, to not be a jerk, and to be mindful that they are representing the SSC community. How is this failing to express his intent that anyone commenting on his behalf to be civil? And how on Earth is it "obvious the intent is negative is not civil" when he explicitly tells any potential commenters to be civil?

Your suggestion that Scott instead write, "I'm making this decision of my own volition but I personally plan to work out a peaceful solution for all parties involved" is not a rephrasing. It's a completely different message. He is not making this decision on his own volition, he was prompted to delete the blog due to the actions of another person. Your suggested phrasing not only completely omits this fact, but says the complete opposite.

If your argument is that he had no choice in the matter then I'm not really arguing with you because in my world people can make choices of their own free will. To assume otherwise is a slippery slope and so I'm not interested in making that argument. If you have compelling evidence that Scott had no choice in deleting his blog then present it and we can argue about it.

Actions have consequences. The kind of community SSC fostered was not able to stand up to scrutiny even though its members pride themselves on reasoned and rational argumentation and scrutiny. When push came to shove they did not uphold and stand up for their own principles, instead they adopted the same tactics that their detractors use (innuendo and vague insinuations of great moral crimes) to defend themselves. You can look at the Twitter threads where people actually "doxxed" the journalist and his interactions and as the kids say "dragged" him on Twitter. It was all very ugly. No sane person would want to associate themselves with that kind of behavior.

Here is an actual trail of evidence for one of the members of the tech community actively harassing a reporter: https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=from%3Abalajis%20Taylor&....

I have no opinions on the editors or journalists at NYT or any other news publication. I have no reason to believe they're the enemy and yet SSC and its members seem to think so. I find such opinions and the people that hold them confused and irrational (the opposite of certain, reasoned, and rational).

You're using the words "choice" and "voluntary" in a very pedantic way.

If someone puts a knife to your throat and demands the contents of your wallet under threat of being killed, you're also handing over the contents of your wallet out of your own free will. You chose to give up your property. You could have chosen to refuse and suffer the consequences. Your decision to give up your property was voluntary, in the sense that you could have chosen otherwise. This isn't technically wrong, but it also isn't what how the overwhelming majority of people use the word "voluntary".

When people talk about being forced to do something, they're talking about being pressured into taking a certain action due to the necessity of avoiding some consequence if they don't. In this case, Scott was being threatened with the consequence of having his identity revealed to a much broader audience with the probably consequence of adversely affecting his career and his patients. Yes, he chose to delete his blog. He could have left it up and lived with the adverse consequences to his livelihood. But this decision was made due to the threat of these consequences - it was not voluntary.

> Here is an actual trail of evidence for one of the members of the tech community actively harassing a reporter

This person isn't talking about either Cade Metz (the New York Times journalist that was writing about SSC), nor Pui-Wing Tam. The mention of Slate Star Codex comes at the end of this thread. How does this connect, in any way, to Scott's blog post? Furthermore, do you realize how absurd it is to form an opinion of an entire community of thousands if not tens of thousands of people based on the actions of a single person?

Furthermore, how is this harassment? This person is criticizing a journalist on false claims, and calling them a sociopath. You seem to be under the impression that the simple act of saying unfavorable things about someone is harassment. It isn't. If calling someone a liar and a sociopath is harassment, then a lot of people harassing a certain national leader on a regular basis (and rightly so, IMO. The point is to demonstrate that calling someone a liar and a sociopath isn't harassment).

Calling someone a sociopath is indeed harassment if you have no compelling evidence to prove your point. Because if you claim someone is a sociopath without providing compelling evidence then you're arguing in bad faith which is a characteristic of sociopathic people.

I don't know who Taylor is but I can tell that she's not a sociopath but the person harassing her on the other hand has certain sociopathic characteristics.

But this is irrelevant. Calling someone a sociopath regardless of whether or not you have evidence isn't harassment. You realize that harassment is a crime, right? It's honestly quite astounding that you believe restrictions on speech are this tight. Being offended or insulted does not make speech harassment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that banning speech on the basis of offensiveness is not allowed [1]. Speech protections go even further than that - even burning a cross and calling for "revengeance" against minorities is protected [2]. No, Balaji's Tweets aren't harassment. They aren't even near it.

Harassment laws almost always revolve around non-consensual speech (e.g. someone following you or otherwise forcing you to be exposed to their speech), or a captive audience (a boss saying something to an employee. The employee is a captive audience, they can't avoid their boss without losing their job). Harassment is about keeping people from having to listen to speech that they do not consent to receiving. Harassment laws are not about preventing people from saying offensive things about other people. Taylor isn't a captive audience - if she does not consent to seeing Balaji's Tweets she can easily block him.

And on a side note: using your own expansive definition of harassment, aren't you now harassing Balaji by calling him a sociopath or saying he has "sociopathic tendencies"? If not why is it okay for your to call someone a sociopath, but harassment for him to call Taylor a sociopath?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._Phelps

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

I have never argued for any restrictions on free speech and yet you continue to say that I have. Why is this confusing for you? I have continued to present evidence for why I think what I think and yet all I hear back is my definitions are wrong and pedantic. What in your opinion is not pedantic and correct? Can you provide the definitions so we can have a fruitful argument instead of going around in circles about what words means and how they can be associated with actions that can cause harm.

I also never called anyone a sociopath. I presented evidence for what I consider to be harassment and sociopathic actions. Here is my exact quote

> Calling someone a sociopath is indeed harassment if you have no compelling evidence to prove your point. Because if you claim someone is a sociopath without providing compelling evidence then you're arguing in bad faith which is a characteristic of sociopathic people.

I don't know who Balaji is or what he does. I'm just inferring his characteristics from his obsession with Taylor and his constant combative language about the free press and journalists (specifically targeting Taylor with his tweets and calls to action to harass her along with calling her a sociopath without compelling evidence). Balaji is using exactly the same tactics Trump uses to discredit his detractors.

I will again re-iterate what I said. This is getting tiresome. If you have an actual argument against anything that I have said then my email is in my profile. I will no longer respond to more replies to my posts in this thread.

You have repeatedly said that Balaji's actions are harassment. Again, harassment is illegal. Why is this confusing for you? When you say that somebody is harassing someone, you're saying that their actions are illegal and it's the government's responsibility to put a stop to it. For the third time harassment is illegal.

Do you believe Balaji's Tweet are illegal? If not then you agree with me: he is not harassing people. Is he being a jackass? Sure. Is this harassment? No.

> I'm just inferring his characteristics from his obsession with Taylor and his constant combative language about free press and journalists.

Right. And Balaji is inferring Taylor's status as a sociopath given her actions. But apparently this isn't harassment when you do it, but it is harassment when other people do the same.

That's the definition of harassment from wikipedia and it characterizes the actions from many people in the tech community. I showed an example of such from Balaji against Taylor. In fact, he goes further into bullying territory because his actions are repetitive and consistently of sinister nature of painting the free press in broad and negative brushstrokes. He's not just bullying and harassing a specific member of the free press but he does so more generally and demeans the entire profession. That's what I call harassment. I don't care about legality. I care about decent behavior. And Balaji is not acting as a decent person so I'm using his actions as evidence of what I mean by harassment and indecent.

And again, you've still neglected to establish any sort of link between Baiaji and Scott's post. Baiaji didn't even mention Metz or the editor of the technology section. He didn't post about the New York Times' threat to dox Scott until after he posted about Taylor. So establishing any sort of causal link bewteen Scott's post and Baiaji's behavior.

To top it all off, I can't help but appreciate the fact that you're replicating the same behavior for which you are criticizing Baiaji here:

> In fact, he goes further into bullying territory because his actions are repetitive and consistently of sinister nature of painting the free press in broad and negative brushstrokes. He's not just bullying and harassing a specific member of the free press but he does so more generally and demeans the entire profession.

Yet in your post you characterize many people in the tech industry as harassers:

> That's the definition of harassment from wikipedia and it characterizes the actions from many people in the tech community.

So it's bullying when Baiaji paints a group of people in broad and negative brushstrokes. Yet you feel it's appropriate to write that the definition of harassment characterizes the actions of many people in tech.

I've repeatedly told you to write an argument in a longer format if you have any actual points to make but you continue responding to the thread even when I've repeatedly said I'm no longer interested in this discussion because it is tiresome to go around in circles.

* Originally you claimed that Scott was being uncivil by directing people to share their feedback on the situation with the New York Times designated feedback contact. Despite the fact that the explicitly directed potential commenters to be civil.

* I asked how this could possibly be uncivil when Scott explicitly tells commenters to be civil, to which you responded that you "have already said several times what was uncivil about it" (you haven't, or maybe it was in the posts that you edited to '-'). You also linked to this twitter post [1] as "actual evidence on twitter of actual coordination among its members for a harassment campaign" despite there being nothing at all indicating the existence of a harassment campaign.

* You then wrote that a civil phrasing would have been for Scott to say that his deletion of the blog was voluntary. I point out that this isn't a rephrasing of the original message, it's a completely different message and one that doesn't capture the fact that the deletion of the blog wasn't voluntary.

* You then claim that it was voluntary, because Scott could have just lived with the negative consequences of leaving it up. I then point out that doing something out of fear of consequences is what it means for something to be involuntary. You also then link to this twitter post [2] as evidence of "one of the members of the tech community actively harassing a reporter". But this tweet doesn't even mention Cade Metz or Pui-Wing Tam. And it doesn't even mention Scott until after the supposedly harassing tweets are made.

How is explicitly telling a community to be civil indicative of incivility? Nothing in your first twitter link even so much as mentions harassment yet you claim it's "actual evidence on twitter of actual coordination among its members for a harassment campaign". How do you convince yourself that taking action under the threat of doxxing and negative impact on your career and patients is voluntary? How is Balaji's tweets supposed to support the claim that Scott is being uncivil - especially when he only mentions Scott after the "harassing" tweets?

Each of your comments gets further from the original claim, and more and more outlandish.

1 https://mobile.twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/128066344682499...

2. https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=from%3Abalajis%20Taylor&...

I have no fear of public scrutiny. My actions have clearly demonstrated that because I have engaged everyone that has contacted me in good faith but I have not received the same treatment so I'm getting tired of re-iterating my points. If you think it's a trick then you can contact me on keybase and I will happily sign any statement that you want attributed to me and that I think is a fair assessment. If you don't think cryptographic proof is sufficient then we have nothing to argue about.

I stand by all my original claims. If you have specific arguments then quote me, and state your argument. I'm not looking for out of context quotes and mis-characterizations. If you want to continue arguing then provide actual quotes, state what you think I said and why, and make a counter-point for why you think my claim is incorrect with compelling evidence. You can contact me on keybase and cross-post our conversation on whatever public forum you want.

That's not a way him to raise objections. You're demanding that he shut up.

> His suggestion wasn't civil

The fact that you keep repeating this doesn't make any of this true. He didn't make any suggestions to harass anyone.

> I don't understand how people can look at all this evidence

Your "evidence" is unrelated to Scott himself, and it doesn't show any sort of harassment taking place either.

> You're demanding that he shut up.

I did not demand anything. I gave reasons and arguments about what I thought. He silenced himself by deleting his blog, no one demanded that he do so, he took the action of deleting his blog of his own volition.

But you repeatedly criticized him for voicing his objections to being de-anonymized. When asked how he could’ve done so differently, you said that he should’ve wrote about how terrible his blog posts were instead. How is this different from demanding that he shut up?

> It's silly to jump from what I actually said to what you inferred.

That’s an explanation of what you’ve been doing all along with the whole “making suggestions” nonsense.

I have no opinions on his anonymity. I personally don't care or want to know who he is and wasn't planning on reading the NYT article. I have my own conclusions about SSC and its community that I doubt would be changed by the article and no one here has yet convinced me otherwise or given any compelling evidence to the contrary.

I have explained why I used the words that I did. If you have any more points to make then quote me in context and provide an actual rebuttal instead of calling what I wrote "nonsense".

I'm not saying your interpretation is incorrect. I'm saying, knowing what I know about SSC, I know that certain people would interpret his letter differently and cause problems for the editor and the original jouranlist and that seems to be exactly what happened. A vocal minority took up his cause and shaped the discourse around him being a victim and the editor and journalist being evil.

Even in this thread, any kind of actual discussion is almost impossible. The general opinion is very skewed by very specific interpretations of Scott's persona.

By your standards, any form of activism is a harassment campaign unless you can control the actions of every single individual in your group. I see this line of argument a lot recently, but frankly it’s nonsense.

> Even in this thread, any kind of actual discussion is almost impossible. The general opinion is very skewed by very specific interpretations of Scott's persona (which I don't think is actually valid because in my opinion he was not a benevolent person).

We’re talking about non-debatable facts here. You keep saying that the blog take down post “suggested” people to harass NYT. That post is there in plain view, and it clearly does not.

Peaceful marches become nazi rallies while arsonist riots are stirring protests. Scott Alexander is nice to the point of stupidity, but he is the enemy therefore his actions are inherently nefarious, while the nyt - who recently accused Noam Chomsky and a black academic of white supremacy - become saints harassed by evil incels.

A hacker news thread about it spends god knows how long arguing about the definition of ad hominem, and even though the leftist is just plain fundamentally incorrect they refuse to back down and accuse others of bad faith for not buying their fantasy definition.

Looting was really just about ... looting.

I don’t think it’s appropriate or fair to say “Floyd riots”, though I’ve said that too at points.

Feel free to disagree.

I find this an interesting reaction. Could you defend "clearly intended"? I feel familiar with Scott's writing, and familiar with his audience, and I think his clear intention was exactly what he said --- "please be polite" and "I will be very sad if you are a jerk".

I could understand if you said "I took it to mean" or "He should have been aware that some people would take it to mean", but what gives you the confidence to say "clearly intended"? Are you sure you're familiar enough with his writing and his audience to make this claim?

If he did not intend his followers to attack anyone then he should not have named anyone or put any kind of contact information in his post. Only someone that deliberately wants people to contact and pressure the editor would have used the language that he did. He created plausible deniability by saying "he doesn't want anyone to be harmed" and then in the next sentence listed contact information with "suggestions".

If you really wanted a civil discussion, would you have used the type of language that he did?

This reads to me like "his words were perfectly polite but I've decided that he must have intended a certain subtext and the subtext I believe that he intended is evil". Which ... I mean, you can certainly claim that, but when you're talking about the writings of somebody who used a lot of words to do his best to make his meaning clear in the text, accusation-via-subtext at least needs some sort of evidence to be a reasonable thing to do.

> If he did not intend his followers to attack anyone then he should not have named anyone or put any kind of contact information in his post.

The complaints form and the relevant editor are precisely how feedback is supposed to be given to news organisations. Some publications have a "Public Editor" position to handle such things, in which case they should have been contacted instead, but the NYT axed that position a while back.

I'm also unsure why you believe that providing the contact information of the correct person to contact given an issue with a potential article to be published by their department is a bad thing.

Are you sure you're not just starting with a belief that Scott is malicious and then reasoning backwards to find a way that his actions in this case could have been malicious? I'm quite probably missing something, but I find myself unable to follow your logic any other way.

I already stated several times that if my intent was for civil discourse then I would not have used the language that was used in the letter because it is full of contradictions. It outlines victimhood and becomes a rallying cry for those that identify with Scott and that's exactly what has happened. Everyone discussing the post assumes the position of a victim. I think this is odd because if Scott is so smart then why is everyone making him out to be the victim? Even the logic used to justify Scott as a persona is contradictory, he's a victim and yet he's not a victim.

The letter is deceptive and that's why I attribute malice to it. It's intention and the words used are misaligned.

The point I'm trying to make here is that "It's hard to explain but his intention in much of his writing was coded. He would consistently use certain keywords and phrases to make certain associations and when you follow through the logic it becomes very sinister" does not, in fact, outline an argument. It merely asserts that "much of his writing" is "sinister" without making any argument for why - and you've now once again claimed "his writing is full of associations" ... without ever having named such an association.

There's no requirement to make such an argument, of course, but if you're simply going to state your beliefs with zero explanation then it would be preferable if you were up front about having chosen to do so rather than claim to have made an argument where none exists.

I stopped reading SSC after I noticed certain patterns and decided I did not want those ideas rattling around in my head. So I gave you a high level impression / outline of what conclusions I reached without providing the actual trail of evidence that lead to it. If you want more precision then you will need to point me to specific posts of his so we can argue about them because even the people defending him are not providing any actual arguments for why his writing was good. They're providing very high level impressions shaped by an echo chamber.

But let's go with this one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200202214359/https://slatestar...

since I suspect that will comfortably draw out our underlying disagreements (and if you don't know who Phedre no Delauney is, the Kushiel's Dart novels are fantastic and you've missed out).

It's terrible and dreadful writing (it elicits terror and dread in the reader).

Should people ask taboo questions? Yes, they should ask such questions in private conversations with people they trust. When the interpretation is out of your hands then you need to be really careful what information you are making available to the public / audience. It's clear he doesn't think through the logic and wants to come across as smart. It's juvenile. Adults speak with intent and they address people directly and respectfully. I have never seen any adult conversations on SSC, I've only ever seen people that are peacocking their intelligence.

-- begin quote

When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.

Luckily, since I was a classical liberal, my reaction to this mistake was – to not bother them, and to get very very angry at people who did bother them. I got upset with people trying to fire Phil Robertson for being homophobic even though homophobia is stupid. You better bet I also got upset with people trying to fire transgender people back when I thought transgender was stupid.

And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.

But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have.

-- end quote

I read the humility and desire to not to harm even when you're wrong inherent in that passage as the exact opposite of "peacocking intelligence" - and I find your choice to use PUA terminology to describe the behaviour to be either unintentionally gross or deliberately unkind depending on whether or not you were aware that was what you were doing.

Let's rewrite that paragraph and use fewer emotionally charged words.

--

As a younger person I thought transgenderism was about seeking attention. But being trained in the liberal arts I decided to question this assumption and not act antagonistically towards them because of my personal interpretation of their situation.

As I got older I realized my initial assumption about attention seeking was incorrect and I took responsibility for and corrected my beliefs.

I guess it could have turned out differently if I hadn't been trained in the liberal arts. So I'm glad my training included keeping an open mind and accepting people different from me and with different life circumstances.

--

Same exact content, none of the emotional baggage and vainglory.

Notice all the words I took out because I knew they would elicit negative reactions in the reader: stupid, dumb, mistake, very very angry, upset, homophobic. He repeated those words enough times that a perceptive reader would have picked up on the subtext of him trying to distance himself from those negatively valenced words. He's not trying to educate the reader, he's trying to put distance between himself and certain associations. That's why it's not good writing. It's about him, it's not about the reader. And in his attempt to "peacock" he's putting associations into the reader's mind that are detrimental to the reader's thought processes all the while elevating himself as a paragon of goodness. As the term "peacock" suggests, his writing is vainglorious.

The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".

You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.

And that part was the single most important part, and the principle he was arguing in favour of.

If you think your rewrite was the same exact content, then I'm afraid I don't think you understood what he was saying at all.

Bingo!

He's obviously not a very good writer. I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens. I don't need to justify to myself or others why those truths are self evident. Nor do I need to recount a story about being young and stupid. Everyone used to be young and stupid, that's also a given. There is no need to write it on a blog and show how you're so much better than what you used to be. Let your actions show how you are better. I don't need to be told when I can infer directly from someone's actions whether they're good or not. Words are deceptive, actions are truthful.

I don't put words like "very stupid", "angry", "I'm afraid", "fearful", etc. in my writing because I don't identify with those things and I don't want anyone reading my words to identify with them either. If I intend to say something then I say it without flowery language about my youth or emotionally charged words because I reserve those words for private conversations with people that I trust.

The article was about somebody who was arguing that using falsified numbers about rape statistics was not only acceptable feminism but was actually a good thing and that anybody who disagreed with that deserved to be destroyed.

Speaking as somebody who believes that the truth is quite sufficient justification for feminism to win, and that lying serves only to hand our enemies means to attack us, I believe that sadly we live in a world where that argument does need to be made.

I would prefer to live in a word where these arguments don't need to be made. I would prefer to live in a world where those truths are self evident.

But we don't yet, as both Adria Richards and David Shor have found out to their detriment. So making the argument that we should continues to be valuable.

But I would note that "there are better ways to make those arguments" is quite a distance from your original position.

> When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.

> And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.

> The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".

> You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.

What word other than "sinister" would you use to characterize the cluster of words I quoted which are implicit in the writing I quoted?

But do you have a dispute for the counterpoint from mst? If so, what is it?

I'm not going to quote it here, because it gives you a chance to talk about it at me rather than with the original person who brought up the counterpoint.

If you want me to talk to you then make a direct point instead of confused remarks about what I know and don't know and conversations I had with other people that were unrelated to you.

Yes, I was.

> When I asked you to clarify you dodged the question. I wouldn't ask if I knew, I asked because I didn't know what you were referring to.

If you didn't know what I was referring to, then you didn't know who you were referring to when you said the following: >> andrewprock already found an example and I agree with his assessment.

> If you want me to talk to you

I have no desire for you to talk to me: that was exactly why I asked you to respond to the other person and not me.

"Why not assassinate prominent racist and sexist politicians and intellectuals?"

I would definitely qualify these kind of straw-men as a "certain pattern" of language designed to incite rather than for insight.

This was basically a random selection because I'm curious to hear what your objections actually are:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190102011649/https://slatestar...

He already starts off with antagonism. Where is the data for this? How does he know what the popular consensus is? Why is he drawing such a sharp delineation between "popular" and their association with X and Y?

> A few iconoclasts say that X is definitely right and important, but maybe we should also think about Y sometimes.

Seems like he thinks he's an iconoclast and the people that associate with that will start to act out iconoclastically themselves and if you look at the comments you will notice that. They're modeling what Scott is outlining in the post.

> I can see why this pattern is tempting.

How clever of him to notice this pattern and point out it is tempting.

> If somebody said the US should allocate 50% of its defense budget to the usual global threats, and 50% to the threat of reptilian space invaders, then even though the plan contains the number “50-50” it would not be a “moderate” proposal.

He's making a really weird analogy. This is not what people argue about and he has created an extreme view that does not exist by comparing a position to "space invaders".

Anyway, I'm not reading further. I'm already convinced he's not making any worthwhile point here. He's using emotionally charged language to draw the reader in and make them identify with him. It's a poor tactic. It only works on people that don't notice it. And I think this is the most damning evidence against him, as a psychologist he should know this is what he's doing by making these statements. He doesn't speak / write like someone that has knowledge of human psychology. He speaks / writes like someone that uses knowledge of human psychology to confuse his audience.

The two professions are quite different.

> A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are medical doctors, unlike psychologists, and must evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments, or strictly psychiatric. A psychiatrist usually works as the clinical leader of the multi-disciplinary team, which may comprise psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, and nursing staff. Psychiatrists have broad training in a bio-psycho-social approach to assessment and management of mental illness.

> A psychologist is a person who studies normal and abnormal mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior by experimenting with, and observing, interpreting, and recording how individuals relate to one another and to their environments.

I have a doctorate in psychology, which gives me a PhD. It does not qualify me to prescribe drugs and save the lives of people on airplanes, which is something that a psychiatrist could be reasonably asked to do.

While psychiatrists spent time understanding physical and mental disorders, psychologists spend time understanding cognitive and behavioural aspects of humanity and running experiments (most of which are extremely difficult to control).

They are completely different things, like.

I am mentioning my credentials because I have been complaining about people not distinguishing between psychologists and psychiatrists for many, many years. I am a little triggered by such comparisons.

The human psyche (incidentally not a word you ever hear in psychology (and potentially psychiatry) classes) is large, and psychologist and psychiatrists focus on very different things.

Like it's fine if you don't see a difference between the two subjects, but others do as they are very, very different.

I guess the closest analogy would be if I called you (a mathematician by training, i assume) a statistician.

Many people might not see the difference between the two roles, but I am relatively confident that you would.

It would feel, to me, inappropriate to do otherwise while defending him.

More importantly though, I like Scott, but I think he is preposterously naive and friendly to a fault. And I think that has been weaponised against him countless times in the past, and is being weaponised against him now. And nothing makes me angrier than seeing friendly, charitable people being taken down by the vindictive and unscrupulous.

> If you really wanted a civil discussion, would you have used the type of language that he did?

Maybe, it depends on how aware I was of my audience. If my intended audience was the primary public posters on SSC, I can see saying just what he said. If I remembered in my fluster that 98% of the readers who never post might react differently, then probably not. If you picture Scott (as I do) as a really bright semi-autist who communicates online primarily with self-declared "rationalists", it doesn't seem impossible that he might forget in the heat of the moment (this had to be a stressful decision for him) that some percentage of his audience is going to interpret his words counter to his stated intent, even if that intent is real.

(I appreciate your response, by the way. I don't think you needed to delete your earlier comments. Yeah, they'll be flagged and downvoted, then we'll vouch for them to recover them and vote them back up. As long as you try to phrase things politely, there are enough people here who'll stand up for you even if we disagree with your conclusion.)

I think your interpretation is valid but I still think his writing caused harm even if it was inadvertent and someone should have pointed these things out to him much sooner but the SSC echo chamber did not allow for dissenting opinions so it had to be NYT journalist to make these things obvious to him and he did not respond well.

> Then there are better ways to make those arguments.

which, yes, there quite possibly are. There are always better ways to make any given argument.

But memexy's claim that Scott's work was bad because

> I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens.

fails, in my opinion, to understand that there are many people for whom, sadly, those things aren't givens and that arguing that they should be is a lot of Scott's thing.

I would love to live in a world where those things are givens.

I appreciate Scott for making principled arguments for why, ideally, we would live in a world where those things are givens, and I appreciate Scott for, however imperfectly, trying to move us towards such a world as best he can.

(note, this is my (opinionated) summary of the thread that ensued from my sibling comment; if unsure whether I've captured things accurately, please read that whole thread and draw your own conclusions)

> I [mst] am entirely fine with you [memexy] believing that there are better ways to make those arguments - in fact, given any specific argument is almost certain to be imperfect, one would assume that there are.

> But I [mst] would note that "there are better ways to make those arguments" is quite a distance from your original position.

You [mst] made that conclusion, I did not. So I would appreciate it if you refined the phrasing to properly reflect the understanding that you are reaching the conclusion, not me.

I will also note the sophistic device being used here by mst of jumping up the thread to shortcircuit the evaluation of the actual evidence. This is quite deceptive.

My actual final response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23786943) is now hidden away behind "more" button and unlikely to be visible so posting it here for visibility.

--

Yes, and you [mst] provided an example of such associations with "youth", "stupidity", "anger", "fear", "transphobia", "homophobia", "atrocity", "anger at others", "anger with self", "dislike of others", "opposition to others", etc.

> When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.

> And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.

> The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".

> You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.

What word other than "sinister" would you use to characterize the cluster of words I quoted which are implicit in the writing I quoted?

--

I have explicitly encouraged poeple to read the rest of the thread.

Your choice to characterise my doing so as a "sophistic device" and "deceptive" is your own.

I continue to encourage people who are unsure if my attempted summary is appropriate to read the whole of the original thread and draw their own conclusions.

I was civil throughout this discussion and I don't appreciate how you ended it.

And yet, I explicitly said: this is my (opinionated) summary of the thread that ensued from my sibling comment; if unsure whether I've captured things accurately, please read that whole thread and draw your own conclusions.

You are welcome to claim that my explicit invitation to people - in a situation where, as you say, your last comments are 'hidden away behind "more" button' - is deceptive, but given I was actively encouraging people to read things upstream that would otherwise have been, as you said, 'hidden away', I personally do not consider my actions to have been deceptive in the least.

As for 'civil', it seems to me that this conversation has, in and of itself, made very clear to anybody reading it that you and I have significantly different definitions of that concept, and how to interpret this fact can only be left as an exercise to the reader.

I used to just walk away from such conversation but realized I'm letting the bullies win when I do that. By walking away I'm letting sophistry become a viable strategy. We will continue this as long as you want. I am not backing down and will continue to argue my position and provide reasons for what I believe and why.

You have consistently used bad faith and misleading tactics to derail the entire conversation. Every time I have assumed good faith you have thwarted it. Every time I have extended an explanatory provision you have used it against me by quoting me out of context, and then tried to put words in my mouth and pretended to not have done so. Whereas I have taken no such actions and have always quoted you in context.

My actions have been civilized. Yours have been otherwise.

I encourage people to read as well and reach their own conclusions without me putting words in their mouth or biasing their reasoning as you did in your shortcircuit post. Because rational and reasoned argument requires each individual to weigh the evidence and then respond with compelling arguments for refuting or accepting them.

I continue to stand by my choice to invite people to read the entire thread and draw their own conclusions.

You should just stop because you are no longer making any points.

Not everything is a tactic. Sometimes people just mean what they say.

That's called shifting the blame because you're shifting the responsibility and consequences of your actions onto someone else. That is not how one begins an apology. An apology begins as "I am sorry. I will reflect and consider the feedback given and do better next time. Please feel free to give further feedback if you feel like it and I will consider it and improve my behavior".

I accept that my phrasing was not entirely clear but given having made what I meant explicit and still being attacked I'm unsure that my mistakes were the primary problem in this case.

You mean I've been reading SSC wrong all this time and missed out on secret messages encoded in kabbalistic puzzles?

If you were confused then you should have asked clarifying questions instead of arguing with incomplete information.

You have demonstrated several times and very clearly you were not interested in a reasoned argument even though I gave you the benefit of the doubt by outlining what I thought and engaged every one of your examples in good faith. You did no such thing and went out of your way to shape and bias the discourse in your favor. So I'm no longer interested in arguing with you or making any more attempts to clarify my reasoning.

If you want to engage further then you can reach me by email or on keybase. I'm no longer interested in being a prop for your performance in front of a group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

"Critical theory is the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With origins in sociology as well as in literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation,[1] critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. The latter sociologist described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[2]

In sociology and political philosophy, the term Critical Theory describes the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s and draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, the capitalization of Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun particularly stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School"

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/

As for unfalsifiable, you claim there are dog whistles in every second sentence SA writes, and dog whistles are, by definition, unfalsifiable. You can claim anyone can see it if they look critically enough because if someone suggests they have looked critically and found nothing, you can simply claim they didn't do it right and mosey on. Dog whistles are also, by the way, fundamentally incompatible with the principle of good faith you claim to want to prosper. It's an interesting conceit, I'll give you that.

I don't know what a "dog whistle" is or what it's used for. I explained exactly what I meant by "coded" and I made a point about emotionally charged language by rewriting quoted texts to demonstrate good writing vs bad writing.

It's all clearly stated in all my posts. You are welcome to actually quote me and demonstrate directly instead of mis-directing and mis-characterizing what I said / wrote as being a "dog whistle".

And what was your point about emotionally charged language? Aside from that you don't like it?

I wasn't pretending. You said what I described is called a "dog whistle". I have no problem with using that phrase.

Scott Alexander uses the Kolmogorov post to have plausible deniability for his discussion of "race science". There's a reason writing "HBD" was banned in the comments section and it's that it was giving the game away to too many people. (discussion of HBD is not banned, it's simply not permitted for that string to appear - i wonder why that might be)

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2014-06.html#drury-on-strauss

Have you missed this post?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-a...

The reason is that most people who casually reference "HBD" have no idea what they're talking about, and end up grossly misrepresenting the actual science as cover for unrelated ideas like ethno-nationalism or bigoted views about other groups. Tabooing "HBD" is a legitimate way of forcing everyone to unpack whatever it is that they actually have in mind; in many ways, it is the opposite of playing dog whistle politics.

Yup, pretty much.

> Yup, pretty much.

How do you propose I respond to your answer? I asked for clarification and you replied with a troll response. How would you respond if I did the same?

He didn't even name the reporter in his last post, much less ask people to attack him.

And yet, the original context of you asking what was ugly was

> Your points are valid but what is the point of calling the article ugly?

You somehow managed to forget your own comment in the space of a few minutes.

I'm just pointing out that you either forgot your own comment, or were using a weird rhetorical trick where you pretend that the other commenter was calling the blog ugly, instead of the article.

There's an irony of seeing this behavior mixed in with comments about how Scott's language "uses associations" in a harmful way.

Convenient, rather than modify it to clarify the vagueness you instead deleted it. Now no one can see for themselves what the evidence was, only take your word for it.