Look, instead of going to all this trouble to impute dark motives, maybe you could go look at the whole purpose of this post, the three NYT articles I cited, see what they’re writing about, and notice “wow, this well-trusted institution really was bending over backwards to deceive many thousands of people about the Ukraine war, it’s pretty cool that Trevor found this and put the work into a post pointing it out!”.
It looks like the disagreement stems entirely from this line:
On Scott Alexander’s criteria for media lies, these would be Level 6 lies; however, Level 7 lies are not practical for journalists, nor particularly necessary in a world where the lawyers-per-capita is as high as it is today.
That list was sent to me by a friend, and I figured citing it would be helpful. Upon going and looking through Scott’s other writings on the topic e.g. The Media Very Rarely Lies, it looks clear that Scott went to a lot of trouble to standardize a very specific definition for the word “Lie”. It is not surprising that lots people in this community got most of their understanding of news outlets deception from a few Scott Alexander posts (which are great posts), and subsequently expect short inferential distances from people who approached the topic from completely different backgrounds.
I haven’t spent the last 10 years on Lesswrong, and don’t really have experience with people finding galaxy-brained ways to write deceptive posts that are plausibly deniably disguised as mistakes. My understanding is that that sort of behavior is common among corporate executives. I instead spent the last 10 years in environments where people would just take mistakes at face value, and ask about the details of word definitions, instead of immediately jumping to accusations of deliberate dishonesty.
I did, in fact, read the post and the NYT articles, and I am not convinced that your description of what they do and what it means is correct. So, if my response to your article doesn’t consist mostly of the gushing praise your first paragraph indicates you’d prefer, that’s one reason why.
But, regardless of that: If you write something wrong, and someone points out that it’s wrong, I don’t think it’s reasonable to respond with “how dare you point that out rather than looking only at the other parts of what I wrote?”.
Scott is not using some weird eccentric definition of “lie”. E.g., the main definition in the OED is: “An act or instance of lying; a false statement made with intent to deceive; a criminal falsehood.” (Does that first clause soften it? Not really; it’s uninformative, because they define the verb “lie” in terms of the noun “lie”.) First definition in Wiktionary is ” To give false information intentionally with intent to deceive”. But, in any case, even with a very broad definition of “lie” the first four levels in his taxonomy are simply, uncontroversially, obviously not kinds of lying. Again, the first one is “reasoning well, and getting things right”.
If I say “There are seven classes of solid objects in the solar system: dust motes, pebbles, boulders, mountains, moons, small planets, and large planets” and you identify something as a small planet, you should not call it “a Level 6 Planet, according to gjm’s classification of planets”.
And, while I understand a preference for being charitable and not leaping to calling things dishonest that aren’t necessarily so … I don’t think you get to demand such treatment in the comments on an article that does the exact reverse to someone else.
Look, instead of going to all this trouble to impute dark motives, maybe you could go look at the whole purpose of this post, the three NYT articles I cited, see what they’re writing about, and notice “wow, this well-trusted institution really was bending over backwards to deceive many thousands of people about the Ukraine war, it’s pretty cool that Trevor found this and put the work into a post pointing it out!”.
It looks like the disagreement stems entirely from this line:
That list was sent to me by a friend, and I figured citing it would be helpful. Upon going and looking through Scott’s other writings on the topic e.g. The Media Very Rarely Lies, it looks clear that Scott went to a lot of trouble to standardize a very specific definition for the word “Lie”. It is not surprising that lots people in this community got most of their understanding of news outlets deception from a few Scott Alexander posts (which are great posts), and subsequently expect short inferential distances from people who approached the topic from completely different backgrounds.
I haven’t spent the last 10 years on Lesswrong, and don’t really have experience with people finding galaxy-brained ways to write deceptive posts that are plausibly deniably disguised as mistakes. My understanding is that that sort of behavior is common among corporate executives. I instead spent the last 10 years in environments where people would just take mistakes at face value, and ask about the details of word definitions, instead of immediately jumping to accusations of deliberate dishonesty.
I did, in fact, read the post and the NYT articles, and I am not convinced that your description of what they do and what it means is correct. So, if my response to your article doesn’t consist mostly of the gushing praise your first paragraph indicates you’d prefer, that’s one reason why.
But, regardless of that: If you write something wrong, and someone points out that it’s wrong, I don’t think it’s reasonable to respond with “how dare you point that out rather than looking only at the other parts of what I wrote?”.
Scott is not using some weird eccentric definition of “lie”. E.g., the main definition in the OED is: “An act or instance of lying; a false statement made with intent to deceive; a criminal falsehood.” (Does that first clause soften it? Not really; it’s uninformative, because they define the verb “lie” in terms of the noun “lie”.) First definition in Wiktionary is ” To give false information intentionally with intent to deceive”. But, in any case, even with a very broad definition of “lie” the first four levels in his taxonomy are simply, uncontroversially, obviously not kinds of lying. Again, the first one is “reasoning well, and getting things right”.
If I say “There are seven classes of solid objects in the solar system: dust motes, pebbles, boulders, mountains, moons, small planets, and large planets” and you identify something as a small planet, you should not call it “a Level 6 Planet, according to gjm’s classification of planets”.
And, while I understand a preference for being charitable and not leaping to calling things dishonest that aren’t necessarily so … I don’t think you get to demand such treatment in the comments on an article that does the exact reverse to someone else.