I think most of the parts I’d see as “hatchet job” can be explained by sensationalism and are subverted by other parts of the article. Maybe the biggest subversion is that LW gets treated as a group of “others” in only two places, while much of the article is spent on humanizing people, which is unusual during a hatcheting. The impression I got was less “here’s this weird group of people, let’s apply the absurdity heuristic” and more “here’s this group of people who believe something interesting and unusual, and here is everything I could find out about their sex lives.” Which can still be bad for the people tabloidized (sorry!), but for LessWrong seems fine.
This was an attempted hatcheting that ended up with the author really sincerely liking the group, but she still had to publish a hatchet piece because that’s what her editors were expecting.
I think most of the parts I’d see as “hatchet job” can be explained by sensationalism and are subverted by other parts of the article. Maybe the biggest subversion is that LW gets treated as a group of “others” in only two places, while much of the article is spent on humanizing people, which is unusual during a hatcheting. The impression I got was less “here’s this weird group of people, let’s apply the absurdity heuristic” and more “here’s this group of people who believe something interesting and unusual, and here is everything I could find out about their sex lives.” Which can still be bad for the people tabloidized (sorry!), but for LessWrong seems fine.
I’d be willing to swap “tabloid” for “hatchet”, sure.
How come I don’t see an “edited” star in the original comment? Is it because it was edited using Mod Powers?
This was an attempted hatcheting that ended up with the author really sincerely liking the group, but she still had to publish a hatchet piece because that’s what her editors were expecting.
Are you just speculating, or do you have a strong reason to believe this?
Speculation, but I’m somewhat confident that this is how the editorial process of a tabloid works.