Here’s how I think about it: suppose you were an attorney for the side of truth and justice (I won’t say which that is :-) ), and suppose the US Supreme Court nevertheless ruled against you. In fact, suppose they were so ideologically slanted that they ruled against you 25 times in a row. Could you then say: I reject the Supreme Court’s authority and will seek out a different court? Alas, it’s not so simple: your options are either (1) continue working within the system, trying to push the court in the direction you think right, or (2) a coup or an insurrection.
The New York Times is basically the Supreme Court of educated public opinion. Which means: when it makes bad calls, those of us who understand that can either work within the system to try to fix it, or we can all coordinate to depose the court and set up a new court. Those are our options. But if we go for the latter, we’d better succeed, and it’s going to be super difficult, so we’ll need all the powerful allies we can get, and to that end it will help if we can show everyone that we exhausted the first route to no avail.
I’ve never had any pretensions to being a Moses or a Joshua. But I’d be satisfied if people said the following at my funeral: “he told about as much truth as he could get away with, and was about as nice as he could be given a commitment to openness and truth.”
OK, I'm back. Here's my problems with your argument here:
First, you compare the NYT to the Supreme Court, and in doing so try to imply that the NYT is a nearly unstoppable juggernaut whose power is binary and cannot be modulated - that it's either in existence and omnipotent, or completely gone. But neither is so - the NYT has only been profitable in the last few years, and it's a shell of it's former self as-is. In the pre-Trump era, it had dwindled down to a fraction of what it once was; It's currently doing worse on all metrics besides subscriber counts than it was a year ago.
For a company that a decade ago required a quarter-billion bailout just to keep its doors open and whose primary antagonist is about to fade into obscurity, this is bad news for their reach and influence even if we do nothing.
Your second premise is that the smart money is on a plan to "work within the system" and thus changing their behavior. I was recently told that this doesn't work; that when you try to do this they sign your name to things you didn't say and laugh as they twist your words to support whatever they wanted to say anyway. It's uncharitable to point out, but it was you who told me this. You just tried this, and they used it to hurt somebody you like.
In the meantime all this "work within the system" has had the beneficial influence of changing the NYT from a consistently biased, mostly dishonest paper to one with basically no editorial standards besides prose; it's managed to improve it from the kind of paper that reported with a significant slant to one that fires editors for daring to allow any substantial disagreement on their opinion page.
It's instructive to look at both possible worlds here: what would we expect if we abandoned your plan, and what would we expect if we followed it? We certainly can't say for sure that a bunch of respected voices who claim a respect for truth and fair thinking would admit the NYT isn't interested in those things at all; it might work, or it might be pissing in the wind.
But we CAN say what would happen if all those same voices refused to take any kind of stand against the bad behavior, because we've already seen it. They very gladly took your unwillingness to admit they are dirty people who do dirty things, thanked you for the support, and moved steadily in the wrong direction. Can you honestly say they've ever been worse from a truth perspective than they were in the last year?
Nobody expects any individual to be Moses by themselves; even Moses wasn't. He needed Aaron to speak for him, and friends to hold his arms up. Each of us has a certain amount of influence - you have readers who believe what you say and trust you to some extent. But even where our influence is small, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You're currently using yours to prop up an organization you know first-hand to have at best an only fleeting relationship with truth, stopping only at the edge of the absurd in terms of what you will say to do so. The small size of the affect here does nothing to change its nature.
(1) You’re basing everything on this one example. With the two pieces on quantum computing I did for NYT, I was able to reach a large audience with a message somewhat different from what the editors wanted or expected — e.g., I successfully made the case that I needed to explain the basics of quantum mechanics (amplitudes and interference), and to throw cold water on overhyped applications. Granted, the editors surely care less about quantum computing than about tech vs. media or race and gender politics! But my point is that there’s a window of possibilities, and within that window we can push for better outcomes. Even the SlateStarCodex piece could’ve been even worse, had I not talked to Cade and urged him to talk to Kelsey Piper.
(2) As I mentioned, I thought the earlier New Yorker piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus was *much* fairer to the rationalists (and better-written too). So it was reasonable to hope the NYT would be similar. It wasn’t, but that outcome wasn’t inevitable. The New Yorker piece shows how Cade could’ve produced something much better while staying well within the window of mainstream acceptability.
(3) Look, I’m as alarmed as anyone by what seems like the NYT’s illiberal turn of the last few years — even if it’s largely in reaction to an even scarier illiberal turn in the wider society. Still, the NYT has been perhaps the US intelligentsia’s main consensus-forming organ for over a century, surviving massive societal transformations including the rise of the Internet and social media. When do you expect this to change, and what do you expect to take the NYT’s place? Substacks by assorted nerd bloggers? (One can dream...)
1. Is the strongest counterargument here to me. It's pretty hard to argue that what seems to be pretty good article on quantum mechanics (I'm no fit judge on that subject) isn't an abstract good. It probably is; as concerns quantum computing, In it you got what you wanted (prestige, pleasure of writing, what have you) and the NYT got what it wanted (an article with a known name behind it, increased prestige). But it's hard to pretend this touches on anything significant we could mean by expert consensus - nobody who is anywhere close to the nuts-and-bolts side of that world learned anything new from that article; the format doesn't allow it.
But the trade is pretty good for them - they give you something that doesn't really matter to them; they let you do work for them that doesn't touch on anything they care about or even understand. I don't want to say the article doesn't matter; but it doesn't matter to them besides the currency of the small amount of legitimacy you lend them - legitimacy they later spend on things like lying about Scott or ecstatically popularizing evidence-free claims that a police officer was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher.
But the claim exists - the value of the article is weighed against the value they get from you going easy on them in other situations. This is more than Other-Scott and Jesse have; their work intrinsically touches on things the NYT cares about while not reliably toeing the line of what the NYT accepts on those subjects. As such the spectrum of interaction the NYT allows from them ranges from "wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole" to "active slander", and they don't even get paid.
#2 seems unrelated - we aren't talking about the New Yorker. It's not god's own paper, but it's miles better on average than the NYT as far as truth goes. Not only did you not interview there, you didn't have to; they still have some semblance of editorial standards and some small regard for truth. Most places have at least SOME regard for truth - it's mostly just Vox and NYT that think honesty is a joke for suckers, in terms of the big boys. There's no specific reason why the NYT's bad behavior would make me expect the same from the New Yorker, or vice versa.
But this all misses the point - I'm not criticizing you for talking to Cade Metz in the first place; that's a mistake I might have made myself. I'm criticizing you for talking to Cade, having your positive words be twisted into a negative thing where they weren't ignored, and THEN saying "You know what, though? It's OK. These are good guys. These are important men, giants of our time; they are to be cooperated with, never resisted.".
3 is a weird strawman AND manages to deny that something that has already happened could ever possibly happen again. I'm not/nobody is suggesting the NYT would go away completely from this, or that it would even lose it's "biggest paper in the US" status. This is a weird dodge you keep doing. Even if people were suggesting that, it wouldn't change the relevant bit: However much influence an individual has, their support makes the NYT that much stronger and their criticism would make it that much weaker. You are throwing your support behind the NYT even after they lied, obviously and to your face, using your own words.
The weird denial part of this is that, as you know, assorted nerd bloggers among other things already drove the NYT to near bankruptcy once, so shrunken did their readership become. They spent the better part of a decade as a near-joke to everyone but true believers; they were at least once so demonstrably vulnerable in this way that it took a quarter-billion dollar investment to keep their doors open.
They then remained unprofitable until trump, at which time they turned a tiny-for-their-budget profit of $50 million a year or so; this profit has already started to evaporate now that Trump is that much less of a present danger. The only thing that keeps a business this consistently unhealthy alive is exactly what you provide them - devotion to the idea of the thing. Not only would they collapse without it, they already have.
For the record, you aren't as "alarmed as anyone at the NYT's illiberal turn; I know several people who are alarmed enough at it not to support them, for instance. What you are doing is something like "being alarmed enough to wish it was different, but not alarmed enough to admit it's a substantial problem of the type that should require any action or changes", which is more a fashion choice than anything else.
For what it's worth, I don't believe your narrative of decline in quality is supported by objective metrics: The NYT is winning more Pulitzers in the last decade than in any previous decade.
Also, are you sure about the accuracy of your information about the NYT's financial performance? It seems like they've been consistently profitable on an EBITDA basis (minus the Great Recession).
It's certainly not a numerical metric, for sure. In the sense that no value judgement rendered by humans can ever be perfectly objective, the Pulitzers are not objective.
I can't think of another way to dispassionately and scientifically evaluate the claim of journalistic quality, though.
(A) There are other "courts" in this case, we don't have to subscribe to the times, that's the joy of capitalism. It's not even difficult to do and you don't need allies!
(B) Even if that weren't the case, if the court keeps ruling against truth we absolutely should say "this court is corrupt and needs to be reformed or abolished" not "this court is great and we should respect it."
I wish I had expressed this better - thanks for picking that out. People can think I'm wrong about the NYT; that's fine. But that doesn't change the bit where we've got a lot of people, not just these three, who say "Wow, the NYT has done some terrible stuff - here's some more terrible stuff, it's really, really bad. And remember: the NYT is fine and you should read and respect them".
Some public figures, because they don't want people scraping their histories for out-of-context sentences, periodically delete their tweets. Ezra Klein has none available before November 2020. You're being a little trigger-happy on what constitutes revenge or even targeted behavior.
I offer an alternative, one that I believe requires less assumptions and is more plausible: The NYT is just, simply, right. The rationalist reaction is, simply, wrong.
The NYT article was fine.
The NYT IS fine.
There was no hit piece, there is no conspiracy. The NYT is not on a crusade to destroy bloggers 10,000x smaller than them, any more than a person is on a crusade to destroy an ant when they step on an ant on the way to the store.
And those you're quoting? They know it, deep down. They know their audience requires nothing less than fervent loyalty, and if they don't condemn the NYT then they will be labeled as the "outgroup". And so, they write some tepid commentary to assuage their irrationally angry fanbase, then move on with their lives.
1. You describe the NYT as destroying people as carelessly as one destroys an ant. I'm not sure why you think this is better.
2. The people I'm quoting claim to see a bunch of problems with the NYT, and then still support it defend it. You claim that instead they are lying to their audiences about the problems they claim to see. Again, I'm not sure why you think this is better.
3. If there's a completely negative piece done on someone which lies-by-implication in several places and that's not a hit-piece to you, I'm not sure we speak the same language enough to have a conversation on what a hit piece is or isn't.
4. I don't really think it's possible to convince someone who loves the NYT or derives self-worth from being an NYT reader it's bad. I'm not sure it's even particularly likely that I could convince any registered democrat voter it is - it agrees with them too often; there's nothing in it for them. This article isn't particularly aimed at convincing you the NYT's recent dislike of contrary opinions or whatever makes it bad; it's talking about how people who make lists of it's many sins still then spend a ton of time hoping it loves them.
Here’s how I think about it: suppose you were an attorney for the side of truth and justice (I won’t say which that is :-) ), and suppose the US Supreme Court nevertheless ruled against you. In fact, suppose they were so ideologically slanted that they ruled against you 25 times in a row. Could you then say: I reject the Supreme Court’s authority and will seek out a different court? Alas, it’s not so simple: your options are either (1) continue working within the system, trying to push the court in the direction you think right, or (2) a coup or an insurrection.
The New York Times is basically the Supreme Court of educated public opinion. Which means: when it makes bad calls, those of us who understand that can either work within the system to try to fix it, or we can all coordinate to depose the court and set up a new court. Those are our options. But if we go for the latter, we’d better succeed, and it’s going to be super difficult, so we’ll need all the powerful allies we can get, and to that end it will help if we can show everyone that we exhausted the first route to no avail.
I’ve never had any pretensions to being a Moses or a Joshua. But I’d be satisfied if people said the following at my funeral: “he told about as much truth as he could get away with, and was about as nice as he could be given a commitment to openness and truth.”
—Scott Aaronson
OK, I'm back. Here's my problems with your argument here:
First, you compare the NYT to the Supreme Court, and in doing so try to imply that the NYT is a nearly unstoppable juggernaut whose power is binary and cannot be modulated - that it's either in existence and omnipotent, or completely gone. But neither is so - the NYT has only been profitable in the last few years, and it's a shell of it's former self as-is. In the pre-Trump era, it had dwindled down to a fraction of what it once was; It's currently doing worse on all metrics besides subscriber counts than it was a year ago.
For a company that a decade ago required a quarter-billion bailout just to keep its doors open and whose primary antagonist is about to fade into obscurity, this is bad news for their reach and influence even if we do nothing.
Your second premise is that the smart money is on a plan to "work within the system" and thus changing their behavior. I was recently told that this doesn't work; that when you try to do this they sign your name to things you didn't say and laugh as they twist your words to support whatever they wanted to say anyway. It's uncharitable to point out, but it was you who told me this. You just tried this, and they used it to hurt somebody you like.
In the meantime all this "work within the system" has had the beneficial influence of changing the NYT from a consistently biased, mostly dishonest paper to one with basically no editorial standards besides prose; it's managed to improve it from the kind of paper that reported with a significant slant to one that fires editors for daring to allow any substantial disagreement on their opinion page.
It's instructive to look at both possible worlds here: what would we expect if we abandoned your plan, and what would we expect if we followed it? We certainly can't say for sure that a bunch of respected voices who claim a respect for truth and fair thinking would admit the NYT isn't interested in those things at all; it might work, or it might be pissing in the wind.
But we CAN say what would happen if all those same voices refused to take any kind of stand against the bad behavior, because we've already seen it. They very gladly took your unwillingness to admit they are dirty people who do dirty things, thanked you for the support, and moved steadily in the wrong direction. Can you honestly say they've ever been worse from a truth perspective than they were in the last year?
Nobody expects any individual to be Moses by themselves; even Moses wasn't. He needed Aaron to speak for him, and friends to hold his arms up. Each of us has a certain amount of influence - you have readers who believe what you say and trust you to some extent. But even where our influence is small, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You're currently using yours to prop up an organization you know first-hand to have at best an only fleeting relationship with truth, stopping only at the edge of the absurd in terms of what you will say to do so. The small size of the affect here does nothing to change its nature.
I appreciate your substantive response! But:
(1) You’re basing everything on this one example. With the two pieces on quantum computing I did for NYT, I was able to reach a large audience with a message somewhat different from what the editors wanted or expected — e.g., I successfully made the case that I needed to explain the basics of quantum mechanics (amplitudes and interference), and to throw cold water on overhyped applications. Granted, the editors surely care less about quantum computing than about tech vs. media or race and gender politics! But my point is that there’s a window of possibilities, and within that window we can push for better outcomes. Even the SlateStarCodex piece could’ve been even worse, had I not talked to Cade and urged him to talk to Kelsey Piper.
(2) As I mentioned, I thought the earlier New Yorker piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus was *much* fairer to the rationalists (and better-written too). So it was reasonable to hope the NYT would be similar. It wasn’t, but that outcome wasn’t inevitable. The New Yorker piece shows how Cade could’ve produced something much better while staying well within the window of mainstream acceptability.
(3) Look, I’m as alarmed as anyone by what seems like the NYT’s illiberal turn of the last few years — even if it’s largely in reaction to an even scarier illiberal turn in the wider society. Still, the NYT has been perhaps the US intelligentsia’s main consensus-forming organ for over a century, surviving massive societal transformations including the rise of the Internet and social media. When do you expect this to change, and what do you expect to take the NYT’s place? Substacks by assorted nerd bloggers? (One can dream...)
Taking these one by one:
1. Is the strongest counterargument here to me. It's pretty hard to argue that what seems to be pretty good article on quantum mechanics (I'm no fit judge on that subject) isn't an abstract good. It probably is; as concerns quantum computing, In it you got what you wanted (prestige, pleasure of writing, what have you) and the NYT got what it wanted (an article with a known name behind it, increased prestige). But it's hard to pretend this touches on anything significant we could mean by expert consensus - nobody who is anywhere close to the nuts-and-bolts side of that world learned anything new from that article; the format doesn't allow it.
But the trade is pretty good for them - they give you something that doesn't really matter to them; they let you do work for them that doesn't touch on anything they care about or even understand. I don't want to say the article doesn't matter; but it doesn't matter to them besides the currency of the small amount of legitimacy you lend them - legitimacy they later spend on things like lying about Scott or ecstatically popularizing evidence-free claims that a police officer was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher.
But the claim exists - the value of the article is weighed against the value they get from you going easy on them in other situations. This is more than Other-Scott and Jesse have; their work intrinsically touches on things the NYT cares about while not reliably toeing the line of what the NYT accepts on those subjects. As such the spectrum of interaction the NYT allows from them ranges from "wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole" to "active slander", and they don't even get paid.
#2 seems unrelated - we aren't talking about the New Yorker. It's not god's own paper, but it's miles better on average than the NYT as far as truth goes. Not only did you not interview there, you didn't have to; they still have some semblance of editorial standards and some small regard for truth. Most places have at least SOME regard for truth - it's mostly just Vox and NYT that think honesty is a joke for suckers, in terms of the big boys. There's no specific reason why the NYT's bad behavior would make me expect the same from the New Yorker, or vice versa.
But this all misses the point - I'm not criticizing you for talking to Cade Metz in the first place; that's a mistake I might have made myself. I'm criticizing you for talking to Cade, having your positive words be twisted into a negative thing where they weren't ignored, and THEN saying "You know what, though? It's OK. These are good guys. These are important men, giants of our time; they are to be cooperated with, never resisted.".
3 is a weird strawman AND manages to deny that something that has already happened could ever possibly happen again. I'm not/nobody is suggesting the NYT would go away completely from this, or that it would even lose it's "biggest paper in the US" status. This is a weird dodge you keep doing. Even if people were suggesting that, it wouldn't change the relevant bit: However much influence an individual has, their support makes the NYT that much stronger and their criticism would make it that much weaker. You are throwing your support behind the NYT even after they lied, obviously and to your face, using your own words.
The weird denial part of this is that, as you know, assorted nerd bloggers among other things already drove the NYT to near bankruptcy once, so shrunken did their readership become. They spent the better part of a decade as a near-joke to everyone but true believers; they were at least once so demonstrably vulnerable in this way that it took a quarter-billion dollar investment to keep their doors open.
They then remained unprofitable until trump, at which time they turned a tiny-for-their-budget profit of $50 million a year or so; this profit has already started to evaporate now that Trump is that much less of a present danger. The only thing that keeps a business this consistently unhealthy alive is exactly what you provide them - devotion to the idea of the thing. Not only would they collapse without it, they already have.
For the record, you aren't as "alarmed as anyone at the NYT's illiberal turn; I know several people who are alarmed enough at it not to support them, for instance. What you are doing is something like "being alarmed enough to wish it was different, but not alarmed enough to admit it's a substantial problem of the type that should require any action or changes", which is more a fashion choice than anything else.
For what it's worth, I don't believe your narrative of decline in quality is supported by objective metrics: The NYT is winning more Pulitzers in the last decade than in any previous decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pulitzer_Prizes_awarded_to_The_New_York_Times
Also, are you sure about the accuracy of your information about the NYT's financial performance? It seems like they've been consistently profitable on an EBITDA basis (minus the Great Recession).
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/ebitda
The Pulitzer prize is not an objective metric; that's not what objective means. I'm not sure it's possible to generate an objective metric of
I think you are probably right that I'm probably wrong here on profitability.
It's certainly not a numerical metric, for sure. In the sense that no value judgement rendered by humans can ever be perfectly objective, the Pulitzers are not objective.
I can't think of another way to dispassionately and scientifically evaluate the claim of journalistic quality, though.
They're winning more pulitzers than Duranty could have dreamed of!
(A) There are other "courts" in this case, we don't have to subscribe to the times, that's the joy of capitalism. It's not even difficult to do and you don't need allies!
(B) Even if that weren't the case, if the court keeps ruling against truth we absolutely should say "this court is corrupt and needs to be reformed or abolished" not "this court is great and we should respect it."
This article isn't about the NYT. It's about seeking social approval at the cost of yourself. People are looking at this backwards.
I wish I had expressed this better - thanks for picking that out. People can think I'm wrong about the NYT; that's fine. But that doesn't change the bit where we've got a lot of people, not just these three, who say "Wow, the NYT has done some terrible stuff - here's some more terrible stuff, it's really, really bad. And remember: the NYT is fine and you should read and respect them".
Some public figures, because they don't want people scraping their histories for out-of-context sentences, periodically delete their tweets. Ezra Klein has none available before November 2020. You're being a little trigger-happy on what constitutes revenge or even targeted behavior.
Good catch! I'll amend this part, with a note.
I offer an alternative, one that I believe requires less assumptions and is more plausible: The NYT is just, simply, right. The rationalist reaction is, simply, wrong.
The NYT article was fine.
The NYT IS fine.
There was no hit piece, there is no conspiracy. The NYT is not on a crusade to destroy bloggers 10,000x smaller than them, any more than a person is on a crusade to destroy an ant when they step on an ant on the way to the store.
And those you're quoting? They know it, deep down. They know their audience requires nothing less than fervent loyalty, and if they don't condemn the NYT then they will be labeled as the "outgroup". And so, they write some tepid commentary to assuage their irrationally angry fanbase, then move on with their lives.
Further reading:
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/grey-lady-steel-man
This is a weird argument in a couple ways:
1. You describe the NYT as destroying people as carelessly as one destroys an ant. I'm not sure why you think this is better.
2. The people I'm quoting claim to see a bunch of problems with the NYT, and then still support it defend it. You claim that instead they are lying to their audiences about the problems they claim to see. Again, I'm not sure why you think this is better.
3. If there's a completely negative piece done on someone which lies-by-implication in several places and that's not a hit-piece to you, I'm not sure we speak the same language enough to have a conversation on what a hit piece is or isn't.
4. I don't really think it's possible to convince someone who loves the NYT or derives self-worth from being an NYT reader it's bad. I'm not sure it's even particularly likely that I could convince any registered democrat voter it is - it agrees with them too often; there's nothing in it for them. This article isn't particularly aimed at convincing you the NYT's recent dislike of contrary opinions or whatever makes it bad; it's talking about how people who make lists of it's many sins still then spend a ton of time hoping it loves them.