Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by whatshisface on Thursday July 09, 2020 @01:04PM (#23782349)

Reading the Scott Aaronson affair described as being about the trouble of male nerds on the "dating market," was awfully ugly. Of course, this doesn't mean that the New Yorker has it out for "rationalists," it's just an example of the callous and not-exactly right coverage that subcultures usually get from the mainstream. The truth is that the Aaronson affair was that he had crippling anxiety when he was young, got mixed up with Judith Butler literature, and it didn't really help him. He never had any trouble finding a partner once his anxiety had resolved, so you really have to do some free word association to get from the reality to the description.

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by baddox on Thursday July 09, 2020 @01:24PM (#23782597)

It seems to me that simplifying the entire Scott Aaronson affair was necessary, since it was just a brief part of this article. I thought their choice of simplification was reasonable and in good faith, but of course others might disagree (and unfortunately, whether we agree or disagree is likely to be effected by our overall level of agreement with the article).

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by whatshisface on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:43PM (#23784954)

There's simplifying, and then there's misrepresenting. Simplifying it would be calling it "crippling anxiety exacerbated by uncritical childhood exposure to radical literature."

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by adamsea on Friday July 10, 2020 @12:18PM (#23793066)

The article isn’t about Scott Aaronsen.

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.

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by whatshisface on Friday July 10, 2020 @12:41PM (#23793349)

Just because he wasn't the subject doesn't mean it's okay to make materially false statements about him...

>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...

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by adamsea on Friday July 10, 2020 @04:30PM (#23796087)

That's a great article!

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 ...

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by whatshisface on Friday July 10, 2020 @07:32PM (#23797852)

I think the association with Butler came from somewhere else* . The Dworkin reference was a positive one in Aaronson's original post. If you're really interested in digging through all the details, the original post by Aaronson that sparked the whole thing was called "comment 171." You may come away from it with different ideas than I, but you'll definitely come away from it with different ideas than the New Yorker. ;)

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

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by adamsea on Friday July 10, 2020 @10:52PM (#23799056)

I think we have to make a variety of assumptions to draw any conclusions about what the author of the New Yorker article intended. There’s too little info in the article to go on.

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by zozbot234 on Thursday July 09, 2020 @01:31PM (#23782686)

You can simplify, and then you can say Scott wrote an angry "screed" that misrepresents 99% of feminists and ignores the plight of vulnerable women in its bourgeois defense of the privileged, nerdy intellectual class. (The article doesn't actually say "bourgeois", but the dogwhistles are crystal-clear.)

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Re:Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media by mst on Thursday July 09, 2020 @02:22PM (#23783340)

I confess that any description of anything that uses the word "screed" will tend to seem to me to be in bad faith. Largely because every time I've dug into the origins of such a description, it has indeed been in bad faith.

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