For some reason, I rarely know what points the authors of Nautilus articles are trying to make. What are they claiming? How are they backing up those claims?
"failure disguised as success" is a profound insight.
The Silicon Valley version of this is raising a lot of money when you don't have product-market fit or the right co-founder or both. Getting other people to commit millions of dollars to a bad idea or the wrong team is a great way to waste years of your life. It leads to what I call perverse persistence -- not letting go until long after you should have.
Please propose a system whereby facts can be collected, interpreted, verified and distributed for free. If it is not free, who funds it? How do we prevent the organization funding it from perverting the facts to serve its own interest? If we cannot prevent perversion by the financing organs, then we have propaganda.
These blue-sky pronouncements about truth being a public good do not move the discussion forward. "Truth" is socially manufactured (by that I'm not saying that nothing is true or false), and the process of manufacture has enormous costs.
In Europe we often have public service media, paid for by the public. Here in the Czech Republic the public service media is not perfect (what is?), but they do a very good job. (Which is also why they are under constant attacks by politicians.)
Of course, this is not “free”, but it’s high-quality journalism that’s not behind a paywall.
The New York Times is not perfect, but they do a very good job as well, despite what some commenters in this thread may think. And the paper is not run by a political appointee, as are most of the public service media organizations in Europe (Radio France comes to mind).
I have to wonder: how does your public service media cover events that reflect poorly on the Czech Republic's elite and its government? How did it cover the decision to split from your poorer sister state of Slovakia? How does it cover the vulnerability of the Czech elite to blackmail by the Russian intelligence services? How does it cover the historical issues related to the expulsion of Sudetenland Germans from their homes?
Separately, for what it's worth, the US has national public radio, which is a public service radio largely funded by local listener/donors. It is much better than most media here.
Hungary also as a public service media. In fact, I am not certain there is any independent media still existing in Hungary. Which goes to show that public media is not always the best.
> furthermore, nyt are mostly shills for their advertisers.
Your Medium post does not prove your claim. That's not how newspapers work. There is a wall between advertising and news at the big national papers (less so at local ones sometimes).
Newspapers like horse races. That's why they report on politics the way they do. Tesla's consistent lead in EV doesn't get them readers. But that's not the kind of venality you're falsely accusing them of.
Revenge is underrated. The opportunities to avenge oneself without also shooting oneself in the foot, or entering an endless cycle of reciprocal vendettas, are very rare. But when they do come, the closure is liberating.
This conflict is complicated and our understanding of it is limited.
* We only have SSC's account of the conversation between him and the NYT reporter.
* The NYT does not have a history of doxxing people, particularly their home addresses. Revealing that sort of personal information is traditionally what "doxxing" means.
* SSC's fans revealed the NYT reporters name and home address. That is to say, the only person doxxed here has been the reporter. So the power dynamics are not as clear cut as SSC made out.
* Tucker Carlson has since used his fans to doxx NYT reporters when he objected to them writing a story about him. That is, this has become a right-wing tactic. And that will be unhealthy for a free press.
* It's not at all clear that Scott Alexander is anonymous, or that revealing his real last name constitutes doxxing. Scott Alexander are his first and middle names. He blogged under his full real name for many years at LessWrong. He published an SSC post in a Springer book in 2017 under his first and last names.
1. I do not think this counts as a rebuttal or a reason to distrust either side
2. Scott never claimed that his home address would be published, and implying he did just to disprove it likely would be considered strawmanning
3. I think this is the real point that should be used here, and credit should be given to it. That said, the people who did this are not Scott, so I think he should not be blamed anymore than J.D. Salinger should be blamed for an assassin carrying _The Catcher in the Rye_
4. This seems to be entirely irrelevant to SSC-vs-NYT at all, I cannot see how this weighs on them
5. He has made a clear effort, but he isn't running a darknet market, so there will be holes. As a fan, I have only ever seen his name on a website that is over a decade old and I cannot find this book for sale. That said, I'd be willing to concede that he failed N years ago if you can find that the book and link me to it.
Voluntarily publishing something like that makes me believe that Scott did not make a clear effort. It's not about holes or opsec. It's about Scott putting his full name out there and then regretting it. He doxxed himself, and he can't be undoxxed.
2. Scott never claimed that the reporter was going to reveal his home address, but he said the reporter threatened to doxx him for clicks. I have a very hard time believing that, and I define doxxing very differently than "publishing a name that the subject of the article has already voluntarily revealed."
3. Scott is an old hand at Internet flame wars. I consider it highly likely that he knew that, by claiming that the reporter threatened to doxx him, that the reporter would be doxxed. The rest is protesting too much.
1. What it means is simply we do not know the whole story. We definitely do not know that the reporter, in fact, threatened to doxx Scott. In any case, I think Scott has a very different definition of that word than most people do.
4. If we believe that Scott encouraged his fans to turn up the heat on the reporter, then he is participating in a trend, which I highlighted, that bodes ill for American and the free flow of information. Every time an independent press tries to write a story, do its reporters get doxxed? I guarantee you will read fewer interesting stories when that is widespread.
Sorry to reply late, I do not check comments frequently.
5. That isn't what was claimed, that's a book that included him, not a book he published (as far as I am able to tell). It seems to be _very_ different given that he did not make the effort to publish and the book even fails to call him "Scott Alexander", making it hard to link them together.
2. As point above says, the argument has become incongruent now that it becomes clear he did not publish the book. And, again, there is much value to not publishing a piece on how you are tied to fringe groups online even if your full name was once connected to them in a print book.
3. This isn't a very fair assumption. You, and others, are calling what he did bad because he knew what would happen, but aren't showing he knew ahead of time. It is very easy to say you would have realized WWII would have started, but even something that large would be outside the reach of most people's predictors in the moment.
1. I think _you_ are the one with a different definition, and I would also note that the lack of the other side being published should speak to some extent too. He showed his side, but you are taking the lack of evidence against him as proof he did something wrong, which is not very sound.
4. This attempt at universalization doesn't hold very well given that this was not a reporter trying to cover the story with full honesty; his name was a largely irrelevant detail. They could have named him "Big Bird" and the story would have been the same but with no chance of controversy, since his identity in his private life is not important to the story.
Thanks for the well-organized points, it makes replying a lot more sane.
> We only have SSC's account of the conversation between him and the NYT reporter.
True. But Scott only asked to not to have his full name published and I trust him enough to have asked the NYT beforehand. Even if he didn't, the NYT could've simply said "we won't, but ask next time" and it would look pretty bad for him.
> The NYT does not have a history of doxxing people, particularly their home addresses. Revealing that sort of personal information is traditionally what "doxxing" means.
Just revealing the name is not "traditional" doxxing, I agree. It's clear, though, what he tries to say.
> SSC's fans revealed the NYT reporters name and home address. That is to say, the only person doxxed here has been the reporter. So the power dynamics are not as clear cut as SSC made out.
Well, just after Scott put the blog offline. And he did explicitly ask his readers not to doxx or attack anyone. Now, it is possible say that, given this action, one could know that this would happen with a high likelihood, but, given his situation, he did what he could to prevent it IMO. That's debatable, though, I give you that.
> Tucker Carlson has since used his fans to doxx NYT reporters when he objected to them writing a story about him. That is, this has become a right-wing tactic. And that will be unhealthy for a free press.
That's not on Scott. He neither "invented" this nor asked anyone to do it; in fact, he said the reporter is probably innocent and asked his readers not to. So you can't blame this on him.
> It's not at all clear that Scott Alexander is anonymous, or that revealing his real last name constitutes doxxing. Scott Alexander are his first and middle names. He blogged under his full real name for many years at LessWrong. He published an SSC post in a Springer book in 2017 under his first and last names.
I can see the NYT side on this; not publishing the name of someone who's name is already kinda public if you search a bit seems strange at hand. But on the other hand Scott is right, too; a NYT article would've directly brought up SSC when searching his name. Therefore, I think it's fair enough to ask not to have his name published and I don't think it's too much to ask, to be honest. Also, similar to the sibling, I can't locate this book.
Overall, I can see why he did what he did, but I can also see why it came to this.
You don't need secrets for your theory of insiders to work. What Thiel and Musk saw was DeepMind. Then they invested in it. Altman acted later.
And the vision of what AI was becoming was voiced much earlier by Yudkowsky, whose Singularity Institute received funding from Thiel.
If anything, they heard what a few prophets were shouting. They saw some early demos in a startup pitch. They responded and DeepMind's work soon became as public as AI research is. That is to say, most people ignored it until the Google acquisition.
MIRI was, until 2013, called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Apparently the name change was part of a deal with Singularity University to avoid brand confusion. Announcement here:
Soon after that, awareness of AI and superintelligence went mainstream, and we got FHI, FLI, etc.
I don't know if Thiel backs MIRI as he did SI. Arguably, he doesn't need to. He made his money on DeepMind and helped trigger a larger movement, and other institutions with a lot more resources, like Alphabet and MSFT, carry forward the torch.
Why are we doing these "privilege" callouts? What does this add to the discussion? Should Malan apologize? Should the New Yorker apologize for him? Individuals are regularly used metonymically to represent a larger system. And those systems need a "face", because without it we don't care about the story.
You’re too used to privlage being used as a pejorative I think. It’s highly relevant that if a school admin wanted to use Malan’s work as an example to base some classes off of, that they can’t just throw a teacher at their normal course load and expect anything close to that level of work. I know many teachers in the public school system who’s admins don’t seem to realize how difficult a good online syllabus is to put together, and those administrators could do to be reminded that you need to put a lot of resources behind someone if you want quality work from them.
It’s not a bad thing that Malan has the privilege to be in a position where he can successfully focus on perfecting a single class. In fact it’s fantastic for us all that he’s doing this work. It’s just important to acknowledge the privileges he has so we don’t look at normal teachers and say “if you only tried a bit harder, couldn’t you do something like this?” It’s not just about effort and intelligence, it’s also about the resources that are put behind the educator.
Eclipse is an open source project. There's no technology to transfer because it's already accessible to everyone. This move is about improving the foundation's governance, and the EU has several advantages over the United States in this regard.
The US doesn't give open source a pass on sanction enforcement. Witness the heavy-handedness of Github post acquisition. Maintaining US operations for a global team can create issues as the political winds shift.
Quite a lot of activity on GitHub isn't open source, especially not where they get their revenue from. But you're right that US authority can have severe impacts.
Genuinely curious. What are these? I was hoping to find these in the article. The article talks about growing in Europe (which seems like it should be possible if the "base" is in North America but with a large EU presence) and working on "innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere.
>"innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere
not if you're an Iranian developer and shut out due to US sanctions, which someone like the Eclipse foundation would have to comply with if they were still located in the US.
A year or so ago Github had to shut out Iranian, Syrian and Crimean developers for example.
My (limited) understanding is that US regulations are that firms that aid the government of Iran also are subject to sanction. If the move to Europe was primarily about allowing developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea to contribute, is there any threat to Eclipse's relationship with US developers?
Full disclosure - I work for the Eclipse Foundation. We are a vendor-neutral, membership-led organization with global reach. The primary motivations for this move were that ⅔’s of our members and ⅔’s of our committers were based in Europe, and we saw an opportunity to become even more relevant to our stakeholders. We think that being based in Europe will be an interesting differentiator, but we are in this to help foster worldwide collaboration, not get bogged down in politics.
I'm guessing it's about avoiding US authority for at least some current or future projects under the aegis of the foundation, or allowing some members like Huawei to participate more fully.
Even if technology transfer doesn't get away from US export rules for existing US-based projects, the switch might be relevant for future donations from Huawei to Eclipse.
