The New York Times Slimes Slate Star Codex
After almost eight months the Times publishes its story on Slate Star Codex and it's ...not good
For the past few years, there has been a low simmering war being fought between legacy media and Silicon Valley; over this past weekend, one of the brighter flashpoints in this war made a surprising return. The New York Times finally published its story on the blog Slate Star Codex and its readership titled “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space”, the contents of which kicked off a firestorm of criticism.
Before I get too far into this piece I want to make clear that throughout this piece I will be using Scott Alexander Siskind’s real last name, not because the Times decided to use it, but because Siskind is now posting under it at his Substack newsletter Astral Codex Ten. Had he chosen to continue posting under Scott Alexander, the abbreviated version of his name he posed under on Slate Star Codex, I would have used Alexander instead. I condemn doxing in the strongest terms possible and I do not use someone’s real name until that person decides to do so on their own.
To catch everyone up who missed the beginnings of this controversy, in June 2020 Siskind was contacted by a Times reporter who was interested in writing a story on Slate Star Codex. During that conversation, the reporter let Siskind know that he had discovered Siskind’s full name and was planning on using it in the story. When Siskind asked that his full name not be used, the Times reporter could not guarantee that it would not be printed. In response to his full name being potentially published in the Times, Siskind deleted every post on Slate Star Codex save one posted on June 22nd explaining why he deleted all of the material. Siskind’s reasoning was that if the blog no longer existed then there would be no reason for the Times to run a story about it, which would then keep his full name from being published.
For a while, that approach seemed to work. The Times seemed to back off the story and Siskind restored the old blog posts. Everyone moved on, or so it seemed. On February 13th the Times released online its story on Slate Star Codex, almost eight months after Siskind first posted about it. The story, written by Cade Metz, can be accurately described as a hit piece; it’s a mess of journalistic malfeasance.
I’ll start my critique of the Times piece by saying that there was absolutely no reason to use Siskind’s full name. Using his full name adds nothing to the piece -- in fact the story isn’t really about him at all. The focus of the piece is the contents of Slate Star Codex and its readership, all of which could have been discussed while respecting Siskind’s wish that he be referred to by Scott Alexander. The Time’s excuse that it does not allow pseudonyms to be used in its stories is nonsense, as they extended that courtesy to Virgil Texas in their profile of Chapo Trap House. I don’t know what the Times’ intent was in publishing Siskind’s full name, but the effect is obvious.
The Times story doesn’t pull its punches on what their real issue is with Slate Star Codex. After a brief introduction to the blog and the topics discussed on it -- if you’d like a more in-depth discussion of the Rationalist movement as promoted on Slate Star Codex Matt Yglesias has you covered -- we start getting to the real point of the story
“As the national discourse melted down in 2020, as the presidential race gathered steam, the pandemic spread and protests mounted against police violence, many in the tech industry saw the attitudes fostered on Slate Star Codex as a better way forward. They deeply distrusted the mainstream media and generally preferred discussion to take place on their own terms, without scrutiny from the outside world. The ideas they exchanged were often controversial — connected to gender, race and inherent ability, for example — and voices who might push back were kept at bay.
Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions.
And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.”
Knowing that people who work in Silicon Valley read a specific blog is a long way from knowing “the Silicon Valley psyche” and it’s a bizarre jump to make that claim. There also seems to be some brow-furrowing over people having semi-private conversations about controversial topics, which is an odd but ever-increasing concern among tech journalists.
There’s some nifty smearing by association Metz uses to discredit the readers of Slate Star Codex and Siskind himself, let’s start with the first instance in this piece.
“Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who heldracist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.”
Anyone who has engaged in a bad faith argument on the internet knows this trick; if the person you’re arguing with agrees with a person on issue A then by default that person must also agree with that person’s positions on issues B - Z. By putting those two sentences next to each other the implication is that anyone who embraces effective altruism is a racist. Nowhere is it stated or even implied that Yarvin believes in effective altruism, let alone why that would mean that everyone who does believe in it would agree with everything Yarvin has to say. It’s a nasty bit of sophistry, and it’s not the last time Metz uses it in the story.
After spending some time discussing who read what, who is friends with who, and who funded which startup AI company we get to what has become the most controversial portion of the story
“In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in ‘The Bell Curve.’ In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people ‘are genetically less intelligent than white people.’”
If you didn't know better or were too lazy to click on the link provided, you would think that Siskind agrees with Murray on the topic of race and IQ. What Siskind actually agrees with Murray on is the use of a universal basic income as a remedy for those who have lost their jobs due to their field of work being eliminated. That agreement comes in the context of a post written by Siskind discussing the root causes of poverty in the US and how best to eliminate them. Like the Yarvin example earlier, these two sentences placed next to each other are meant to paint a very specific picture, which in this case is a flat-out falsehood.
Metz then goes on to grossly misstate James Damore’s Google memo in order to conflate Damore’s views with Siskind’s
“In 2017, Mr. Siskind published an essay titled “Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes.” The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else — a memo he was later fired over. One Slate Star Codex reader on Reddit noted the similarities to the writing on the blog.”
To correct Metz -- Damore never said that biological differences between men and women were the only reason more women don’t enter technical positions but that it is a possible reason. Siskind doesn’t agree with Damore on that point; he argues that there is no biological difference at play, simply that women prefer to enter other fields of work. Again, this is Metz trying to conflate Siskind with someone much more controversial than himself to frame a specific narrative of Slate Star Codex as a hotbed of far-right thought. Siskind himself is no far-right lunatic either; he identifies as a left-leaning Democrat who voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primary and for Joe Biden in the general election.
As to why Metz thought it was fine to use Siskind’s real name against his wishes, he trots out one of the oldest excuses in the doxing handbook
“The issue, it was clear to me, was that I told him I could not guarantee him the anonymity he’d been writing with. In fact, his real name was easy to find because people had shared it online for years and he had used it on a piece he’d written for a scientific journal. I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.”
Is Metz under the impression that doxers receive their information via carrier pigeon? The vast majority of information used to dox a person is found via the internet and, as anyone familiar with OSINT will tell you, there is very little “private” information that isn’t available via the internet. The standard for determining if someone was doxed isn’t “how easy was the information to find” but rather “did you specifically go looking for that information in order to make it public.” And as I stated above, there was no reason to not respect Siskind’s wish to remain Scott Alexander.
Siskind has posted a response to the Times story in which he states
“I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I believe they misrepresented me as retaliation for my publicly objecting to their policy of doxxing bloggers in a way that threatens their livelihood and safety. Because they are much more powerful than I am and have a much wider reach, far more people will read their article than will read my response, so probably their plan will work.”
I don’t entirely agree with that framing, as I think this goes beyond Siskind and Slate Star Codex. Perhaps the framing of this piece was changed after Siskind made it known that the Times intended to dox him; I doubt we’ll ever know that for sure. What we do know is that there is a level of open hostility in legacy media, the Times specifically, against Silicon Valley and nobody seems to feel the need to pretend to be objective and honest in their tech reporting.
There already exists a deep distrust of legacy media to accurately report on, well, almost everything. The Times running a story like this, with the number of attempted smears and factual inaccuracies, perpetrates the idea that the media will go out of its way to hurt those who it perceives as a threat.
But hey, it’s the Times’ prerogative to trash what is left of its reputation by chasing the approval of a dwindling pool of readers.