My prior for malice was also pretty high, and had updated in that direction significantly in the last year or so from monitoring the coverage, and also with recent details. It may not be an “evil villain” highly coordinated malice, but the incentives and dynamics led in the direction of enough general “bad faith” insinuation to be net negative. It didn’t have to be intended as an attack on Scott or the blog, but rather as a morally obligatory denunciation of perceived ideas or associations—the increase of obligatory denunciation in its pieces makes it structurally very difficult for them to cover many topics in a net positive way. Ten, even five, years ago, I would have had totally different priors and been much less suspicious. I feel like people are treating the legacy media like a programmed computer and not like a group of humans in a specific set of circumstances. Of course, we can’t know anything for sure, and people too easily assume malice. And I’m not claiming most people at the NYT are malicious. But I’m surprised at how much people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NYT at this point, especially in terms of principled consistency. If this were a policy matter, it should have been settled long ago—what could be so complicated?
My prior for malice was also pretty high, and had updated in that direction significantly in the last year or so from monitoring the coverage, and also with recent details. It may not be an “evil villain” highly coordinated malice, but the incentives and dynamics led in the direction of enough general “bad faith” insinuation to be net negative. It didn’t have to be intended as an attack on Scott or the blog, but rather as a morally obligatory denunciation of perceived ideas or associations—the increase of obligatory denunciation in its pieces makes it structurally very difficult for them to cover many topics in a net positive way. Ten, even five, years ago, I would have had totally different priors and been much less suspicious. I feel like people are treating the legacy media like a programmed computer and not like a group of humans in a specific set of circumstances. Of course, we can’t know anything for sure, and people too easily assume malice. And I’m not claiming most people at the NYT are malicious. But I’m surprised at how much people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NYT at this point, especially in terms of principled consistency. If this were a policy matter, it should have been settled long ago—what could be so complicated?
Here’s an example of one thing that made me wary of the paper: https://medium.com/@lessig/lessig-v-nyt-very-good-news-d8b3c57150c4