Can anyone please ELI5 what this is about? What does the phrase "Slate Star Codex" mean? Now that all his blog posts were gone, what topics had he generally written about that attracted so much attention?
He was a blogger who used to blog on controversial issues with somewhat heterodox opinions (not since 2017 anymore though) and generally blogged about interesting stuff, related to cognition and psychiatry; I was somewhat of a fan and thought he was a great writer. He attracted a large community, some of who were a bit, well, let's say "controversial", but it is also one of the most interesting communities I have ever encountered. He was part of the rationalist ideology/movement.
He also wrote Unsong, which is a very interesting work of fiction and blogged about various other stuff.
Scott said that the NYT was going to publish a piece containing his real name, so he deleted his blog (slate star codex) which at this is point famous.
Plot twist: Scott's real name has been easily findable for at least a year, based on his own words. So I don't understand why he went full nuclear.
It's also an assumption by everybody that the NYT article was going to be a hit piece, even though there's no evidence of that whatsoever. It was simply going to contain his real name. Scott didn't want that. Therefore Scott deleted his entire 5-8 year history because the big bad NYT was going to do something that Scott didn't like that totally wouldn't impact his life anyway.
Look, I'm a big proponent of anonymity. Heck, I was pseudonymous for years. Sometimes there are valid reasons. But often, it becomes a perpetual thing of "I'm doing this for the sake of doing it, not because people are out to get me."
Scott also recently published a piece raising questions about racism (a good piece, worth reading, but nonetheless ruffled some feathers). So this is possibly a well-timed deflection move.
Read the single article on his blog, he is not anywhere near fully nuclear. He's just playing a fair game with them, helping NYT "be more considerate". What would they get from this real name policy anyway?
Secondly, the content is not gone, just hidden (and probably reachable elsewhere).
This paragraph puts it succinctly. Especially the last sentence:
When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.
> Scott's real name has been easily findable for at least a year, based on his own words. So I don't understand why he went full nuclear.
Findable in the opposite direction, and that is an important difference.
If you know about Scott's private life, you can find his job. But if you only know about his profession and full name, googling for his full name will show you his professional life, not his private life.
There are many Scotts, many Alexanders, even many Scott Alexanders, and some of them are relatively famous (there is a screenwriten, and a baseball player). Unless you already read Scott's blog, there is no reason to assume he would be the same person as the doctor you are looking for, and the blog will not be shown on the first page of results for his full name.
But if NYT publishes the article as originally planned, when Scott's potential patients enter his full name in search engine, the article about him and his blog can easily be the first result. This is exactly the outcome Scott wants to avoid.
> Plot twist: Scott's real name has been easily findable for at least a year, based on his own words. So I don't understand why he went full nuclear.
He pointed out that there’s a difference between googleable by looking up someone’s words, where you have to do a bit of work to find it, and it being published in the NYT.
> It's also an assumption by everybody that the NYT article was going to be a hit piece, even though there's no evidence of that whatsoever.
Is that the assumption? Again, going by his words (as well as others who were interviewed for it) it was going to be a generally very positive article.
Be warned that I didn't read the post I'm commenting on, site seems to have succumbed to the high load.
what this is about?
NYT was about to run a story about Scott and his blog. By policy, they'd reveal his real name, and they told him so in advance. Scott tried to negotiate, but that failed. So he took down the blog, sort of in protest. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
What does the phrase "Slate Star Codex" mean?
It's the blog title, an almost anagram of "Scott Alexander", missing the "n", doubling the "s". I don't think it has any deeper meaning.
I won't address the final question on the content, others have summarised it.
RationalWiki (or more precisely its admin) has a strong opinion on which political opinions are the valid ones, and treats other political opinions as pseudoscience. Debating your political opponents is considered a bad thing, because you should not provide them platform to explain their beliefs. The proper way to discuss people who disagree with you is using the "snarky point of view" (yes, this is the official policy).
Scott Alexander is the opposite extreme. He tries to find the good parts even in the Time Cube (yes, literally). Although Scott himself mostly has the usual liberal opinions, he does not enforce them in the comments; he usually only enforces civil behavior. The result is a highly intelligent forum where liberals talk to conservatives, Christians talk to atheists, etc., mostly in a friendly way, on a wide range of topics, some of them political, some not.
Each of these styles is attractive to a different type of personality. Sadly, the former often have a problem with the latter.
I honestly don't know. RationalWiki seems to hate on anybody even vaguely associated with LessWrong, up to and including misrepresenting their ideas (or outright lying about what people have said and done) so they can more easily criticise them. Their articles are worth reading once, to get a list of Bad Things™ about a person or idea, which you can then filter down into actually true stuff at your leisure.
It's frustrating, because some of the criticism is actually warranted, but they just fill such articles with so much banal nonsense, like "Scott Alexander criticised communism, but also studied something the USSR did… :thinking_face:" (paraphrased) that the signal-to-noise ratio approaches Uncyclopedia's.
It's really frustrating, because the articles about topics they haven't got a bee in their bonnet about can actually be insightful introductions, beating out the Wikipedia articles. Nowadays, though, those are few and far between.
What’s the point of settling on planets if you can sustainably develop anywhere in space, which I think is within the reach of any typical space-faring civilization?
For a little background, Tryton is a fork of Odoo when it was still called TinyERP, motivated by disagreements among TinyERP founders and early developers on the technical and business directions.
1. Customize a decent browser eg Firefox to my own safety standard (disable cookies, Autoplay, etc.)
2. Treat every website like an application. If a site is usable under my settings, fine.
3. If a site needs an additional capability, e.g a login credential or cookies, only provide them for that site if it’s compelling enough, otherwise blame the site and move on.
After customizing for a few dozens of sites, and not being able to use countless others, the modern web becomes a lot more manageable for me.
I do similar things and it kinda works for people like us. But, firstly, what about the rest of the world that's less knowledgable or technically inclined; and secondly, the fact that we (figuratively) have to put on armor and carry an arsenal of weapons before we can think of using the web still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
In reality, however, some Bloomberg users struggle daily with inaccurate data, lack of documentation, manual (slow) help on trivial issues, and poor performance when running analytics. It is more like a bloated GUI app pretending to be a terminal, worst of both worlds.
This data seems highly valuable to hedge funds: if a fund could pin the devices of well-known bankers and executives of potential acquisition targets, it could see deals coming before announcements. Is this legal?
Hell, track their social relations, and the same for all of their employees, estimate their personal relations with social models, quantify and predict their mood on an organizational level. Then go long or short on the company. Rinse and repeat for everything on this planet.
