Responses to Cade Metz’s hit piece on Scott Alexander

This depraved rubbish got quite a few responses. Please let me know about any I’ve missed. Inner bullets are subtitles or exerpts. Open to adding good Twitter threads too!

• Scott Alexander, Statement on New York Times Article
  • I have 1,557 other posts worth of material he could have used, and the sentence he chose to go with was the one that was crossed out and included a plea for people to stop taking it out of context.
  • I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
  • I believe they misrepresented me as retaliation for my publicly objecting to their policy of doxxing bloggers in a way that threatens their livelihood and safety. Because they are much more powerful than I am and have a much wider reach, far more people will read their article than will read my response, so probably their plan will work.
• Cathy Young, Slate Star Codex and the Gray Lady’s Decay
  • The New York Times hit piece on a heterodox blogger is a bad stumble — the latest of many
  • The New York Times has wandered into an even worse culture-war skirmish. This one involves bad (and arguably dishonest) reporting as well as accusations of vindictiveness and violation of privacy. It’s a clash pitting the Times against a prominent blogger critical of the social justice progressivism that has become the mainstream media’s dominant ideology in the past decade. The Times does not look good.
• Robby Soave, What The New York Times‘ Hit Piece on Slate Star Codex Says About Media Gatekeeping
  • “”Silicon Valley’s Safe Space” has misinformed readers.”
  • It’s a lazy hit piece that actively misleads readers, giving them the false impression that Siskind is at the center of a stealth plot to infiltrate Silicon Valley and pollute it with noxious far-right ideas.
  • The idea that a clinical psychiatrist’s blog is the embodiment of Silicon Valley’s psyche is very odd
  • To the extent that the Times  left readers with the impression that Siskind is primarily a right-wing contrarian—and Silicon Valley’s intellectual man-behind-the-curtain to boot—it is actually the paper of record that has spread misinformation.
• Matt Yglesias, In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics
  • Some thoughts on the New York Times’ Slate Star Codex profile
  • I think Metz kind of misses what’s interesting about it from the get-go.
  • something about the internet is making people into infantile conformists with no taste or appreciation for the life of the mind, and frankly, I’m sick of it.
• Tom Chivers, When did we give up on persuasion?
• Freddie deBoer, Scott Alexander is not in the Gizmodo Media Slack
• Scott Aaronson, A grand anticlimax: the New York Times on Scott Alexander
• Sergey Alexashenko, How The Hell Do You Not Quote SSC?
  • “The NYT misses the point by a light-year.”
• Kenneth R. Pike, Scott Alexander, Philosopher King of the Weird People
• Noah Smith, Silicon Valley isn’t full of fascists
• Thread by Steven Pinker