notadonut
The Silicon Valley version of this is raising a lot of money when you don't have product-market fit or the right co-founder or both. Getting other people to commit millions of dollars to a bad idea or the wrong team is a great way to waste years of your life. It leads to what I call perverse persistence -- not letting go until long after you should have.
These blue-sky pronouncements about truth being a public good do not move the discussion forward. "Truth" is socially manufactured (by that I'm not saying that nothing is true or false), and the process of manufacture has enormous costs.
Your Medium post does not prove your claim. That's not how newspapers work. There is a wall between advertising and news at the big national papers (less so at local ones sometimes).
Newspapers like horse races. That's why they report on politics the way they do. Tesla's consistent lead in EV doesn't get them readers. But that's not the kind of venality you're falsely accusing them of.
https://books.google.com/books?id=wtQkDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR9&lpg=PR...
Voluntarily publishing something like that makes me believe that Scott did not make a clear effort. It's not about holes or opsec. It's about Scott putting his full name out there and then regretting it. He doxxed himself, and he can't be undoxxed.
2. Scott never claimed that the reporter was going to reveal his home address, but he said the reporter threatened to doxx him for clicks. I have a very hard time believing that, and I define doxxing very differently than "publishing a name that the subject of the article has already voluntarily revealed."
3. Scott is an old hand at Internet flame wars. I consider it highly likely that he knew that, by claiming that the reporter threatened to doxx him, that the reporter would be doxxed. The rest is protesting too much.
1. What it means is simply we do not know the whole story. We definitely do not know that the reporter, in fact, threatened to doxx Scott. In any case, I think Scott has a very different definition of that word than most people do.
4. If we believe that Scott encouraged his fans to turn up the heat on the reporter, then he is participating in a trend, which I highlighted, that bodes ill for American and the free flow of information. Every time an independent press tries to write a story, do its reporters get doxxed? I guarantee you will read fewer interesting stories when that is widespread.
* We only have SSC's account of the conversation between him and the NYT reporter.
* The NYT does not have a history of doxxing people, particularly their home addresses. Revealing that sort of personal information is traditionally what "doxxing" means.
* SSC's fans revealed the NYT reporters name and home address. That is to say, the only person doxxed here has been the reporter. So the power dynamics are not as clear cut as SSC made out.
* Tucker Carlson has since used his fans to doxx NYT reporters when he objected to them writing a story about him. That is, this has become a right-wing tactic. And that will be unhealthy for a free press.
* It's not at all clear that Scott Alexander is anonymous, or that revealing his real last name constitutes doxxing. Scott Alexander are his first and middle names. He blogged under his full real name for many years at LessWrong. He published an SSC post in a Springer book in 2017 under his first and last names.
Thiel was an early backer of SI and attendee of the Singularity Summits that ran from 2006-2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Summit
Soon after that, awareness of AI and superintelligence went mainstream, and we got FHI, FLI, etc.
I don't know if Thiel backs MIRI as he did SI. Arguably, he doesn't need to. He made his money on DeepMind and helped trigger a larger movement, and other institutions with a lot more resources, like Alphabet and MSFT, carry forward the torch.
And the vision of what AI was becoming was voiced much earlier by Yudkowsky, whose Singularity Institute received funding from Thiel.
If anything, they heard what a few prophets were shouting. They saw some early demos in a startup pitch. They responded and DeepMind's work soon became as public as AI research is. That is to say, most people ignored it until the Google acquisition.
That was my point. Belgium, a famously neutral country, allows you to do that.
https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-strategi...
As well as another company that partners with a Chinese government lab.
I have to wonder whether this was about technology transfer and geopolitics as it becomes more difficult to work with both China and the US.