Maybe the good editors at the NYT are too busy getting fired.
> NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing”
Plenty of people that deeply respect NYT reporting (and I'm a WaPo person) think NYT editorial is, like that of the WSJ, a total clownfire.
Where's the lie though? Incredible indeed…
Recently a NYT freelance editor Lauren Wolfe, who mostly worked on the "live updates" team, was fired, but this firing caused some controversy due to the timing of some tweets and who knows what else. It's not completley clear why she was fired, as the NYT responded to requests for comment by the WaPo by saying [1]: "There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter. For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved we don’t plan to comment further. (To clarify something that has been incorrectly reported, Ms. Wolfe was not a full-time employee, nor did she have a contract.)"
Quite a few leftists initially blamed the NYT for caving to conservative pressure, apparently by making the claim there was a relation between the tweets she made and her firing, which she confirmed in another WaPo interview [3] by saying "...that an editor at the paper contacted her after she published the “chills” tweet. The Times couldn’t be associated with such a tweet, said the manager, and that her gig with the paper would be ending."
Some leftists also seemed to blame Glenn Greenwald for his involvement in the matter; a single tweet in response to hers that he later called "light mockery"[2]. Glenn Greenwald, previously strongly supported by the left and many others, has recently been victim to a series of character assassination attempts due to his unconformity to the mainstream leftists viewpoints, so it rather seems the twitter left mob just used him as a lightening rod without having all the facts in this case.
The tweets in question?
LW: "The pettiness of the Trump admin not sending a military plane to bring him to D.C. as is tradition is mortifying. Childish
LW: “Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills”
GG: "If you're in the national press and will be on TV at any point today and being to feel the need to weep joyously, just hold it in until you find a private place. Nobody is expecting any adversarial coverage over the next 4 years, but it's just a matter of personal dignity."
2. https://youtu.be/uL-e6XfWppo?t=293
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/25/lauren-wo...
The difference is now they're coming after Silicon Valley, because they realize they've lost their attention and advertising monopoly. It's all very predicable and boring.
It's the same deal with Balaji. The only reason he cares is because the reporting might hurt a company he's invested in.
Follow the money. Always follow the money.
If you’re going to bring in contrarian views on things like race, that some view as racist - okay. But I would recommend expanding that to bring in views that are also contrarian but perhaps not so controversial but nevertheless worth discussing.
My impression is SSC readers get caught up in a sort of intellectual exoticism rather than any rigorous analysis of what the landscape actually looks like; the non-conventional but ultimately boring takes are left unexamined.
Not just non-college Republicans, huge swaths of non-liberal Democrats (mostly people of color). Are the majority of Black Democrats, who believe you can’t be a moral person without believing in God, represented? Are there any Muslims who hold social positions their religion tells them to be true? When it comes to immigrants, anyone who actually believes what your typical Indian or Bangladeshi believes? (Or is it just the elite who deliberately left those countries and assimilated into white American culture? And even among the latter, is it the first generation parents hoping their kids will integrate to a degree, but hold on to traditional social morals, or is it the second generation ones who picked up western social morals despite their parents’ efforts?)
Again, none of these assumptions are wrong or bad or right or good. My point is just these are the assumptions you'll see across nearly every commenter on the blog because of its narrow, Western-educated audience. There are many popular, interesting, and dynamic political discussions happening elsewhere in the world (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
And I can't find the anti-neoreactionary & in-defense-of-democracy post that goes through these problems, and tries to justify the assumptions.
> (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
If you could point these out I think SSC/LessWrong folks would love to ponder over them!
I want to read that, but Google failed me. Do you have a link or a clue to help me find a link?
> “It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints.
Yes, David just said that, thanks for the repetition. Where were the editors on this?
I conjecture that they just felt like they had to publish something after all this time and they went with what they had.
It’s also strange that it doesn’t link to the NYT magazine article on rationalist retreats from a few years ago, nor the New Yorker article about this dispute, nor the New Yorker article about HN, all of which fill in the picture.