Hounding the president of Harvard out of a job because you think she’s a DEI hire is one thing, but going after a Billionaire’s wife? How dare these journalists! What big bullies.
Bonus downplaying of EA’s faults. He of course phrases the Bostrom affair as someone being “accused” of sending a racist email, as if there were any question as to who sent it, or if it was racist. And acts like it’s not just the cherry on top of a lifetime of Bostrom’s work.
Sneering my way through the comments.
Here’s Jonatan Pallesen, whose twitter bio is: “PhD in statistical genetics. I analyze and tweet about questions in science and economics.” HMM.
Another example of targeting in this case is me. I wrote a critique of Claudine Gay’s research, which I think is quite strong. (https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1749546447811277119 and https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1740324971430154471)
Putting aside the validity of the critiques, why does this fellow feel the need to look into this research at this point in time? Could it be that he is… targeting Gay while she is in the limelight? Couldn’t be, only the evil media would do such a thing.
And for this I was attacked by the Guardian for things completely unrelated, such as my views on immigration, and previous coauthors.
So I went ahead and searched the dude’s name and “guardian”. Here’s what showed up.
If I were to guess why he was “attacked” (really just reported on accurately), it would be that he was name checked by one of the main parties involved in Gay’s resignation, and the guardian was doing its due diligence and investigating every aspect of the story. That’s way less assuming than Jon’s explanation of being targeted.
It can obviously have a chilling effect if you write a critique of a scientific paper, you risk being called racist by a major newspaper.
Better ways to say what really happened:
- A racist dude sung my praises, the guardian suspected I am racist by association, investigated, and found out that I am indeed racist.
- If you say and do racist shit like race science, people will call you racist, because you are racist
I can’t believe you targeted him 🎯 by googling his name and finding out he’s eugenicist scum.
(Seriously, thanks for slogging through the comments to find gems like this.)
I haven’t read Scott’s comment sections in a long time, so I don’t know if they’re all this bad, but that one is a total dumpster fire. It’s a hive of Trump stans, anti-woke circle-jerkers, scientific racists, and self-proclaimed Motte posters. It certainly reveals the present demographic and political profile of his audience.
Scott has always tried to hide his reactionary beliefs, but I’ve noticed he’s letting the mask slip a bit more lately.
It has been getting worse over time for a long while, it is what drove away the (unfortunately named) yodatsracist from the subreddit. He even made a sneerclub comment about it. See this thread on reddit 5 years ago. (I forgot what the url was for the archived sneerclub site sorry).
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The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.
At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics. […] The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions on his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled that with his professed “colorblindness”. He did not respond directly to any questions put to him but instead made a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.
(source)
There’s a lot to snark at. A few in particular:
- Scott is irrationally scared of journalism. He talks about it as if it’s an omnipresent, omnipotent spectre that swoops down on people on a whim and destroys their lives when it pleases the spectre. In reality, the “whims” are a confluence of the subject’s presence in the public consciousness and market pressures on reporting.
- Scott has no clue how power works. On one side, you have someone who resigned because of a billionaire-backed witch hunt. On the other, Oxman didn’t resign. Scott fails to see that it’s the billionaire who holds power here, and instead thinks it’s the journalists, specifically the ones that said his understanding of journalism was shit at best.
- This whole post is really an expression/extension of Scott’s victim mentality/persecution complex/“nice guy” personality, where the mean ‘jocks’ (journalists/people scott doesn’t agree with) get to ‘date the hot girls’ (by which I mean, ‘commit lots of mild misdeeds’), while the ‘nice guys’ (the eugenicist sex creeps) are shunned by society.
What Scotty is missing or rather eliding is that Ackmann, Rufo et consortes hounded a woman of color out of a prestigious job by knowing how to manipulate the media. That, of course, is just valiantly exposing wrongdoing and hypocrisy. Someone cheekily pointing out that Ackman’s wife did essentially the same thing is however a vicious attack on the saintly Ackmann.
This is what Substack does. Instead of having an editor telling the writer “JFC Scott this is just Streisanding” they have to Produce Content. Oh well, it’s all grist for the sneer mill.
missing or rather eliding
This is one of those malice/stupidity things except it’s both. The malice is obvious but I genuinely think he is too stupid to see the manipulation at play.
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smokes a joint made out of NRx printouts
You know how leftism is Cthulhu? inhales Journalism is Nyarlathotep (And yes, Lovecrafts infiltrating evil elder god being a swarthy egypthian pharao type is a bit on the nose)!
Scott is to Journalists as other Scott is to Women.
Yeah, exactly. My first draft of this included this passage from the post:
If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite. Again, I don’t think I’m discovering anything surprising here, I just want to make this explicit for people who have otherwise just sort of been noticing it on the fringes of their consciousness.
Basically: “Why can’t journalists just give nice guys like us a chance?”
I genuinely wonder if years of training one’s self to be “rational” makes you forget how fundamental stories are to the human experience. Journalists write stories about real life, for good or ill. If something happens in real life but isn’t a story, it doesn’t get printed. “Random lady plagiarized her thesis” is not a story, but “lady related to major plagiarism story also plagiarized her thesis” is a story.
His observation that EA suddenly got piled on is missing a more subtile point: lots of the coverage of EA was probably an extension of the tech beat and thus benefitted from the access journalism and rosey-glasses’d that was rampant in the early aughts before a more critical eye was cast in the last few years. Tech Won’t Save Us does a good job explaining the phenomenon (ctrl+f “access” in the transcript) in part of its Musk series.
also we just had a 2023 of Sam Bankman-Fried in the media as the extremely criminal public face of EA
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Oxman didn’t resign
She’s pretty much self-employed and out of academia, so that probably wasn’t in the cards to begin with. Perhaps her company will lose some business, but I kind of doubt it. The stuff she does seems sufficiently low-profile that nobody will care that she plagiarized a bit.
I mean, if you see a bit of sculpture in a corporate lobby, you’re probably not going to wonder if the designer stole a paragraph in a thesis, let alone care.
Oh, absolutely. I didn’t have the time to investigate her position and whether or not it was a resignation situation. I was mainly trying to show how Scott misses the point entirely and doesn’t understand how power works in as few words as I could get away with.
Thanks for the added context, though; it is an excellent point. Someone in Oxman’s position is insulated from the kinds of power plays that can oust people in positions like Gay, which Scott does not recognise at all.
conservative journalists Chris Rufo
Journalist …
Rufo …
(For those who don’t know the guy, Rufo is basically somebody who goes ‘for my next racist trick, im going to make all the journalists go crazy over some racist shit I mostly invented and blew up. Look at how I will make CRT the new boogyman’ and then after he explained the trick it causes all the ‘both sides centrists (like Scott)’ follow with his frame and fall into the very obvious pittrap he just dug. And it keeps happening. I know it is very much passe already to call people who you disagree with who others call journalists propagandists, so I will not do so here butttttt (even wikipedia calls him an activist)). Another edit, look revelant stuff from twitter And the ‘sorry nitter is dead’ screenshot (referenced link)
Amazing how I cannot finish the first couple of paragraphs of a SSC post without getting mad.
E:
I have a personal interest in this because of my experiences with effective altruism.
And not your ‘im secretly NRx just wish they focussed more on the racism and less on the kings’ skeleton on the closet?
Rufo is basically somebody who goes ‘for my next racist trick, im going to make all the journalists go crazy over some racist shit I mostly invented and blew up. Look at how I will make CRT the new boogyman’
it’s hard for me to imagine anyone here doesn’t know who rufo is but on the off chance someone is hearing about him for the first time: the above description is completely literal. he actually does this
I actually didn’t recognize the name (or I would have made a big deal out of it in the OP) but this being the CRT guy tracks.
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It’s absolutely bizarre that Scott labels Rufo a journalist. Rufo is a right-wing activist who has only ever worked for right-wing think tanks. He first came to my attention as a part of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based “think tank” best known for promoting creationism.
Then again, Scott has previously said that he’s impressed by the arguments of creationist Michael Behe, another Discovery Institute lackey.
Isn’t the discovery institute also a bit involved in proving that certain skin colors give you lower IQ? Anyway very much not surprised, and also not surprised considering Scotts history of ‘im basically left wing, I agree with the left on these subjects [list of subjects, notably race is not one of them (he also has some issues with feminism, and don’t think I have seen him express pro sex work is work sentiments but the last one is understandable)]’
im secretly NRx
Sometimes building my vocabulary here is fun. I know nothing about his company but I empathize with their PR people who no doubt comb the internet for media hits.
What is this moldbug and why does it keep ending up in our google search stats?
Scott’s wearing a very tasteful tinfoil hat that no one in good society would object to.
What’s the relation to Target the department store? Are they problematic or somehow involved in this scandal?
Sometimes the author includes images that are just a pun. A better illustration for this article might be a man angrly flinging a newspaper into a trash can.
The first section made sense. I nodded a few times. The second section made me grimace a few times. “Criticize a leftist and we’ll go after your family” really misses the general point that the whole “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” coverage really emphasized. When the third section mentioned EA I immediately flipped back to the comments both prepared to rip OP a new one and hoping I was in sneerclub. I am so thankful I was in sneerclub because fuck is this article dumb as shit.
It’s only targeting if the card or errata says so.
I’m not criticizing Rufo and Brunet.
Why not, you hypocritical fuck?
ChatGPT, give me a phrase for when university professors are found having committed plagiarism in their dissertations:
*fifteen-year-stale peccadillos *
“And are these fifteen-year-stale peccadillos in the room with us right now?”
