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

1  2020-07-11 by caliberoverreaching

43 comments

Jesus Christ the mental gymnastics going on over one blogger just not wanting a massive mainstream media outlet to publish his name.

He asked nicely not to be doxxed and they said no, so he stopped asking nicely. Cue words words words on why doxxing is fine actually. Why did nasty Thiel have to bully Gawker's innocent virginal bussy?

I'm sure this journo's private info and address are 'obtainable' but that doesn't make it okay to publish it to as many people as possible for no reason that serves public interest. All doxxing contains readily obtainable information you moron, that's how they obtained it. Doxxing is spreading that information as much as possible.

God I hate journos. Fucking vultures. I'm mad. I'm seething boys. Fucking journo shits.

I might believe that they really had to follow their ethics policy if it was any other outlet than the NYT. They can't even go a week without ignoring their own ethics policy, like when their own Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed that the police were using fireworks to keep black people awake at night and they had nothing to say about it.

Dude's a fucking retard

"Scott Alexander is my real first and middle name, but I've tried to keep my last name secret."

Good job you told people your job, where you work, and your first and middle name it's not dox if you just tell everyone the info. I don't get why he was so booty blasted about the article.

Shouldn’t his last name already be publicly known by now

It’s findable. It’s one of those things where followers agree to not look too hard, just like how @dril was supposedly found and then everyone forgot about it

I don't know much about SSC so I might just be misinterpreting this.. Does the author begin by painting SSC readers as delusional for thinking the NYT article was going to be a hit piece only to then turn around and say a hit piece may have been warranted / forthcoming towards the end?

Also the author seemingly recognizes his need for anonymity while in the same breath doxing him anyway. Then they rationalize their choice to do so by saying the info isn't hard to find, which doesn't make it right.

The New Yorker's writing style is advanced smug posting for people addicted to thesauruses.

Journos universal hate for Peter Thiel any time Gawker is mentioned drives me crazy. Gawker outed Peter Thiel for his love of bussy. Then they basically published Hulk Hogan revenge porn. Yet somehow Journos see Gawker as the victim when Thiel decided to fund Hogan's lawsuit which bankrupted Gawker.

They will never stop seething about the Gawker "journalists" being held to account. Even while being sued the guy in charge of Gawker was being an idiot. He said during the deposition the only sex video they wouldn't publish was if the person was four. That is a great way to lose the jury.

Does the author begin by painting SSC readers as delusional for thinking the NYT article was going to be a hit piece only to then turn around and say a hit piece may have been warranted / forthcoming towards the end?

Only if you really really really want this to be the case. The article is incredibly sympathetic to SSC readers and """"rationalists""". Of course those people have a huge victim complex and honestly software engineers need to be kept chained in their cubicles and prevented from interacting with society.

Did you read the entire thing? I didn't much read SSC, most of it seemed like fart-sniffing, but while the first few paragraphs hand-holds the autists, it gets a bit dirtier farther down.

I did. The author comes across as a fan of Scott Alexander to me or at least very appreciative of him. It may be a little defensive of the media in general, but that is to be expected.

Complains about autists rationalists using complicated words when writing for the New Yorker, lol.

Journos universal hate for Peter Thiel any time Gawker is mentioned drives me crazy.

It's basically "How dare you have your rights upheld". The issue with the Gawker affair is not that Thiel brought down the rag, it's that it needed a millionaire backed by a billionaire for it to happen.

Yeah, I was always confused by the whole "info isn't hard to find" justification for doxxing. Yeah, but being able to find something through actual digging around is a bit different from having the name and pseudonym conflated in one of the first five Google results for either.

Yeah, regardless of the result, their intent to to reduce the obscurity of a certain bit of information, even if it causes net harm

Also the author seemingly recognizes his need for anonymity while in the same breath doxing him anyway. Then they rationalize their choice to do so by saying the info isn't hard to find, which doesn't make it right.

I don't really care for the article, but I don't believe that the author doxxes him? Scott Alexander is the name he blogs under.

I'm baffled as to why anyone would even want to dox him.

It says in the article it is New York Time's policy to use real names. But the author also admits to articles where they only use pseudonyms like for the Ch*po Virgil Texas.

incoherent rambling

You just went full snappy. 💅

stream of consciousness posting 💅

[removed]

Due to the flexibility of the work, most modern media journalists bounce around like 100 different publications (within ur particular polarised political sphere of course) . One of the main side effects is that you end up with massive amounts of solidarity between journalists, as any position you find someone else in could realistically be you. A knock on effect from that is that end up defending any potential employer (no matter how detestable) not only because the writer in that situation could've been you, but could also be future you.

Hence most journalists spin gawker as being about the freedom of journalism and the nature of public interest, instead of harassment with a glossier sheen.

Sorry for seriousposting.

The fact that supposed truth seekers have so much solidarity amongs each other should tell you they aren't truth seekers at all.

Based and FakeNewsPilled.

This article is the journalist version of "there was no Holocaust, but if there was they brought it on themselves."

I am so stealing this line .

I stopped paying to this attention to this story like 3 days after it started, but at the time, there was literally no evidence of it being hit piece. I've never rly interacted with the "rationalist" community b4, but they seem like a bunch of self-fellating retards.

there was literally no evidence of it being hit piece

You really think the NYT was going to write about how some sperg blogger predicted covid better than they did? 🙄

I know u guys don't read, but yeah that does sound like something they might do 🙄🙄

they seem like a bunch of self-fellating retards.

My experience is that rationalists tend to have disproportionately high neuroticism.

Hit piece wasn't the issue, the original attitude towards the article was that it was probably a positive piece but the writer insisted on using SSC guy's real name which started the drama.

The hit piece part came in after the drama started as rumors that the NYT was going to not use his real name but change the piece to a negative one as reprisal for calling them out.

Your last sentence is 100% though.

The hit piece part came in after the drama started as rumors that the NYT was going to not use his real name but change the piece to a negative one as reprisal for calling them out.

Some people were convinced that it would be a "hit piece" nearly from the beginning due to their distrust of the media and minor things that the reporter said to interviewees (e.g. the reporter claimed to most people that it would be a tech piece about things like how SSC predicted COVID-19 early but then asked someone about SSC's influence in Silicon valley or something like that).

Later on I saw people claiming that the reporter had been asking about evidence of "white supremacy" at SSC gatherings and about the proportion of women there, which exacerbated issues. The current silence from NYT also didn't help matters.

The current silence from NYT also didn't help matters.

Probably related

Meh, they seemed mostly all right "in the wild", but absolutely any community centred around a clear, specific leader will always become a cult eventually, no matter how much the hypothetical leader might try to resist it. That's just how humans work - a psychiatrist should have better awareness of that than anyone else.

Oh the guy's got the usual blind spots of anyone in that community.

He made a comparison between ebola and cops killing people to argue that charity is a more powerful force than activism but completely ignores that it's a really unequal comparison because of both geographic relativity (effects people in domestic proximity) and because while ebola is universally reviled and there are plenty of existing structures to research it out of existence, the same cannot be said of police violence.

That being said, the little rationalist cult that exists pales in comparison to the value of his best of as a good primer on big issues, Moloch is pretentious but it's good duplo blocks on game theory and such.

Oh, sure, some of his points are clearly off - I can remember the COVID and heart attack comparison recently (as in you wouldn't spend 20% of GDP to reduce the number of heart attacks) which is a bit disingenuous considering that there's actually nobody saying that spending 20% of GDP will really get rid of heart attacks.

Everyone makes mistakes. Some of his other posts (such as the zombie-mouse brain chemistry and blue/red tribe one) were an absolute pleasure to read, though. Just because some other ones are a total miss doesn't mean that it's all bullshit - it just means that you shouldn't take everything he writes as gospel and develop a full-blown cult around it (as a lot of his readers did).

I guess for me it's all fairly standard because I have rather idiosyncratic views and rarely get to see anyone that I fully agree with on everything - more standard liberals/conservatives/libertarians/whatever probably have an easier time with the one-strike-you're-out philosophy.

Defending gawker

Good morning I hate journalists

it does suck that they killed what was probably a cool sounding blog for no good reason

Word word word.

All of this for a power nerd blog smh.

How can I be expected to read this without you making a funny title for me?

“I am a pro-gay J-w who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat.”

  • psychologist blogger after 10 years of auto-analysis

Do you think people at the New Yorker have back pain from all the bending they do to smell their own farts?

Damn, that's fucking shitty. I really enjoyed the occasional read of that blog. Some of his short stories (such as the The Last Temptation of Christ) were positively amazing.

Seems like an overreaction, though, it's not like his name was ever really that hidden.

silicon valley's war against the media

where do I donate?

Just hit the like button a bunch on Facebook