I really don’t see it as much of a hatchet job. It reads to me like “these people are a bit strange, but interesting”, which I have trouble taking offense at. Certainly it picks and chooses the “interesting” stuff, but it doesn’t strike me as particular worse than normal human interest stories (judging by the very limited sample of news articles that I have close personal knowledge of the subjects of).
I suspect if this was actually a hatchet job (as in, the reporter really was intentionally trying to make LW look bad, or really didn’t like someone), it would be a lot worse.
Calling it a hatchet job seems… disingenuous. Especially given that I don’t see many specific objections being raised. Sure, it could be better, and it’s not something an insider would have written. But neither of those surprises me, based on what I know about journalists and news articles.
A hatchet job implies destruction as the goal. Usually the target would be someone or something the author finds threatening or dangerous. Targets that are perceived as legitimate or powerful get hack jobs. This was just pure mockery.
I agree. I don’t think this great publicity, but I don’t think that it is too actively bad particularly given the intended audience (this is the paper Sex and the City is based on I expect that the have a relatively pro-poly attitude). Furthermore, I think the negative aspects are due to the unfortunate(from our perspective) fact that the article was about the NY group as a tribe/lifestyle than about the singularity or rationality per se, and not the result of the kind of malice that “hatchet job” usually implies.
Many of the people mentioned are not in the New York group currently; they’re in Berkeley. However, New York media stereotypically see the world as revolving around New York.
It seems to me that some of the biggest tension between this article and the way LWers see ourselves is that the article is about people and their human quirks (living arrangements, sexual habits, and physical behavior), with the ideas presented as irrelevant eccentricities. Whereas within the LW-space, the ideas are pretty important. It’s like an article about Nikola Tesla that focuses on his affection for pigeons.
I really don’t see it as much of a hatchet job. It reads to me like “these people are a bit strange, but interesting”, which I have trouble taking offense at. Certainly it picks and chooses the “interesting” stuff, but it doesn’t strike me as particular worse than normal human interest stories (judging by the very limited sample of news articles that I have close personal knowledge of the subjects of).
I suspect if this was actually a hatchet job (as in, the reporter really was intentionally trying to make LW look bad, or really didn’t like someone), it would be a lot worse.
Calling it a hatchet job seems… disingenuous. Especially given that I don’t see many specific objections being raised. Sure, it could be better, and it’s not something an insider would have written. But neither of those surprises me, based on what I know about journalists and news articles.
A hatchet job implies destruction as the goal. Usually the target would be someone or something the author finds threatening or dangerous. Targets that are perceived as legitimate or powerful get hack jobs. This was just pure mockery.
I agree. I don’t think this great publicity, but I don’t think that it is too actively bad particularly given the intended audience (this is the paper Sex and the City is based on I expect that the have a relatively pro-poly attitude). Furthermore, I think the negative aspects are due to the unfortunate(from our perspective) fact that the article was about the NY group as a tribe/lifestyle than about the singularity or rationality per se, and not the result of the kind of malice that “hatchet job” usually implies.
Many of the people mentioned are not in the New York group currently; they’re in Berkeley. However, New York media stereotypically see the world as revolving around New York.
It seems to me that some of the biggest tension between this article and the way LWers see ourselves is that the article is about people and their human quirks (living arrangements, sexual habits, and physical behavior), with the ideas presented as irrelevant eccentricities. Whereas within the LW-space, the ideas are pretty important. It’s like an article about Nikola Tesla that focuses on his affection for pigeons.
I think you’re right. Maybe if LW’s ideas bore more fruit in the external world, journalists would give them more airtime compared to gossip...