tl;dr this is in fact kinda a big deal and there is more context I’ll put in another post
I wanted to feel like you did. But tcheasdfjkl is right. They aren’t a few yahoos in a basement. They’re an online and print magazine with nine permanent staff and offices in London and New York. And their editor violated tacit discussion norms in the rationality community when debating Scott online. And they regularly publish critical opinion pieces on topics of interest to the rationality community, such as anti-ageing, effective altruism, and technology companies. And Scott was thrust onto a national stage which got him cited in the New York Times, and one way or another he received enough hate mail for the near future it appears he won’t be going out of his way to challenge journalistic coverage in major national online/print publications. Correcting misinformation like Scott does is a public service. It’s the sort of thing which demonstrates the public the value of this whole “rationality” things and could draw them in. Slate Star Codex meetups are a big deal too now. And Scott has been shut down because all pretense of collaborative truth-seeking was pulled out like a rug from under Scott’s feet. Nathan Robinson of CA is the first journalist with a bigger audience than Scott’s to do something like this, so this could be a lot of people’s introduction to SSC. It’s the sort of thing the rationality community isn’t used to, and we can learn lessons from it to become savvier. I think we can learn more than just debating politics for public-facing projects out of the rationality community, e.g., how do we build a working trust-based relationship with other communities focused on AI safety/alignment with very different cultural/communication norms than us?
tl;dr this is in fact kinda a big deal and there is more context I’ll put in another post
I wanted to feel like you did. But tcheasdfjkl is right. They aren’t a few yahoos in a basement. They’re an online and print magazine with nine permanent staff and offices in London and New York. And their editor violated tacit discussion norms in the rationality community when debating Scott online. And they regularly publish critical opinion pieces on topics of interest to the rationality community, such as anti-ageing, effective altruism, and technology companies. And Scott was thrust onto a national stage which got him cited in the New York Times, and one way or another he received enough hate mail for the near future it appears he won’t be going out of his way to challenge journalistic coverage in major national online/print publications. Correcting misinformation like Scott does is a public service. It’s the sort of thing which demonstrates the public the value of this whole “rationality” things and could draw them in. Slate Star Codex meetups are a big deal too now. And Scott has been shut down because all pretense of collaborative truth-seeking was pulled out like a rug from under Scott’s feet. Nathan Robinson of CA is the first journalist with a bigger audience than Scott’s to do something like this, so this could be a lot of people’s introduction to SSC. It’s the sort of thing the rationality community isn’t used to, and we can learn lessons from it to become savvier. I think we can learn more than just debating politics for public-facing projects out of the rationality community, e.g., how do we build a working trust-based relationship with other communities focused on AI safety/alignment with very different cultural/communication norms than us?
London, New York, and nine full time employee in the NYT media orbit… updated!