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Jan 30, 2021Liked by Resident Contrarian

I think Scott's failure mode is less that he wants everyone to like him and more that he just wants peace. Being in a fight with the NYT is stressful and uncomfortable to him, so he wants to turn down the heat, even if that means unreasonably discounting the odds that NYT writers and editors were politically motivated.

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Like a lot of things, I think it's a lot of things - I focus on the niceness at least in part because Scott is very significantly nicer than me, so it stands out like a sore thumb to my eyes. Your version is probably a part of it - Scott's an adult man who might just want to move on, or he might be scared/tired/bothered by the whole thing.

The reason I don't think "Scott wants peace" is or can be the entire explanation is that if it were, he could simply say "Listen, guys - it's clear something bad was going on here just as I've said before. But it's equally clear I'm tired of it; let's not talk about it any more.". He doesn't need to remove the NYT's culpability/guilt in this scenario.

But we find Scott going "listen, these are really essentially good people; they didn't do anything wrong, it's just a real hard job for them, you know? They didn't mean to try to cut off my head with a machete, it's just things end up looking like vines, you know?". For some reason. In both expected scenarios we find Scott saying "let's not talk about this anymore, OK?" but only in one do we find him saying "And there's no such thing as the NYT treating me different because of my perceived political leanings - that's just crazy, those are good folks over there".

With all that said nobody is a perfect rationality robot, so this might all just be noise in the signal too.

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Scott Alexander has his own political motivations though. He banned me from his old blog for showing that one of his buddies had deliberately misquoted Marx.

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