Thursday, July 09, 2020

New Yorker Article on the Slate Star Codex Controversy

The article is long, perceptive, reasonably fair. It's critical mostly of the overreaction of some in Silicon Valley, seen as part of a more general conflict between tech and media. And it doesn't give Scott's real name.

One interesting question is whether its publication will result in the NYT dropping its article as no longer timely. One can hope.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This seems relevant:

> Alexander told me, via e-mail, that he’d “gotten word that more of my enemies and people connected to embarrassing incidents in my life were interviewed, all after I went public with my blog post.”

This reporter seems pretty naïve in his discounting of the possibility of a hit piece.

Anna said...

To Anonymous: Not naive enough to avoid filling the piece with Russell Conjugations.

However, he mentions briefly that he talked to NYT reporter off record, so it's likely he knows more than he says.

Anna said...

"And it doesn't give Scott's real name".

Scott's last name is all over twitter. At this point, it's hard not to find it out. Not including it in this article is a mere gesture, which is still nice, but not substantial.

Hopefully, most of this article's material is from Metz's draft which he freely gave away because he will not use anymore. Lewis-Kraus seems to know a lot at some points of this article, and clueless in several others, which would support this theory.

Joe said...

I was dissapointed it didn't include the fact that the nyt reporter contacted the exes of Scott.

To me that is a major factor in thinking this nyt article is likely some kind of click bait hit price, or was originally envisioned as such.

Iirc the piece also says stuff like Scott might just be asking people to be nice for plausible deniability purposes, which strikers me as bizzare.