To me this reads as a person caught in the act of bullying who is trying to wriggle out of it. Fair play for challenging him, yuck at the responses.
The last answer is especially gross:
He chose to be a super-popular blogger and to have this influence as a psychiatrist. His name—when I sat down to figure out his name, it took me less than five minutes. It’s just obvious what his name is.
Can we apply the same logic to doors? "It took me less than five minutes to pick the lock so..."
Or people's dress choices? "She chose to wear a tight top and a miniskirt so..."
Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander's real name in order to critique his ideas.
This is not a good metaphor. There's an extreme difference between spreading information that's widely available and the general concept of justifying an action. I think your choice of examples adds a lot more heat than light here.
Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander's real name in order to critique his ideas.
It's not obvious that that should be the standard. I can imagine Metz asking "Why shouldn't I publish his name?", the implied "no one gets to know your real name if you don't want them to" norm is pretty novel.
One obvious answer to the above question is "Because Scott doesn't want you to, he thinks it'll mess with his psychiatry practice", to which I imagine Metz asking, bemused "Why should I care what Scott wants?" A journalist's job is to inform people, not be nice to them! Now Metz doesn't seem to be great at informing people anyway, but at least he's not sacrificing what little information value he has upon the altar of niceness.
But can you imagine writing a newspaper article where you are reporting on the actions of an anonymous person? Its borderline nonsense.
I can easily imagine writing a newspaper article about how Charlie Sheen influenced the film industry, that nowhere mentions the fact that his legal name is Carlos Irwin Estévez. Can’t you? Like, here’s one.
(If my article were more biographical in nature, with a focus on Charlie Sheen’s childhood and his relationship with his parents, rather than his influence on the film industry, then yeah I would presumably mention his birth name somewhere in my article in that case. No reason not to.)
1Kudos for getting this interview and posting it! Extremely based.
As for Metz himself, nothing here changed my mind from what I wrote about him three years ago:
But the skill of reporting by itself is utterly insufficient for writing about ideas, to the point where a journalist can forget that ideas are a thing worth writing about. And so Metz stumbled on one of the most prolific generators of ideas on the internet and produced 3,000 words of bland gossip. It’s lame, but it’s not evil.
He just seems not bright or open minded enough to understand different norms of discussion and epistemology than what is in the NYT employee's handbook. It's not dangerous to talk to him (which I did back in 2020, before he pivoted the story to be about Scott). It's just kinda frustrating and pointless.
I think you're ascribing to stupidity what can be attributed to malice on a plain reading of his words.
The only reason that someone like Cade Metz is able to do what he does, performing at the level he has been, with a mind like what he has, is because people keep going and talking to him. For example, he might not even have known about the "among the doomsayers" article until you told him about it (or found out about it much sooner).
I can visibly see you training him, via verbal conversation, how to outperform the vast majority of journalists at talking about epistemics. You seemed to stop towards the end, but Metz nonetheless probably emerged from the conversation much better prepared to think up attempts to dishonestly angle-shoot the entire AI safety scene, as he has continued to do over the last several months.
From the original thread that coined the "Quokka" concept (which, important to point out, was written by an unreliable and often confused narrator):
...Rationalists are, in Scott Alexander's formulation, missing a mood, or rather, they are drawn from a pool of mostly men who are missing one. "Normal" people instinctively grasp social norms without having them explained. Rationalists lack this instinct.
In particular, they struggle with small talk and other social norms a
3I can visibly see you training him, via verbal conversation, how to outperform the vast majority of journalists at talking about epistemics.
Metz doesn't seem any better at seeming like he cares about or thinks at all about epistemics than he did in 2021.
Interesting interview. Metz seems extraordinarily incurious about anything Vassar says - like he mentions all sorts of things like Singularity University or Kurzweil or Leverage, which Metz clearly doesn't know much about and are relevant to his stated goals, but Metz is instead fixated on asking about a few things like 'how did X meet Thiel?' 'how did Y meet Thiel?' 'what did Z talk about with Thiel?' 'What did A say to Musk at Puerto Rico?' Like he's not listening to Vassar at all, just running a keyword filter over a few people's names and ignoring anything else. (Can you imagine, say, Caro doing an interview like this? Dwarkesh Patel? Or literally any Playboy interviewer? Even Lex Fridman asks better questions.)
I was wondering how, in his 2020 DL book The Genius Makers he could have so totally missed the scaling revolution when he was talking to so many of the right people, who surely would've told him how it was happening; and I guess seeing how he does interviews helps explain it: he doesn't hear even the things you tell him, just the things he expects to hear. Trying to tell him about the scaling hypothesis would be like trying to tell him about, well, things like Many World...
9
5I might be misunderstanding, I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics. Something like "if Zack keeps talking, Cade will learn to the surface level features of a good Convo about epistemology and thus, even if he still doesn't know shit, he'll be able to trick more people into thinking he's someone worth talking to."
In response to that claim, I shared an older interview of Cade to demonstrate that his been exposed to people who talk about epistemology for a while, and he did not do a convincing job of pretending to be in good faith then, and in this interview with Zack I don't think he's doing any better a job of seeming like he's acting in good faith.
And while there can still be plenty of reasons to not talk to journalists, or Cade in particular, I really don't think "you'll enable them to mimick us better" is remotely plausible.
2
1I agree, except for the last statement. I've found that talking to certain people with bad epistemology about epistemic concepts will, instead of teaching them concepts, teach them a rhetorical trick that (soon afterward) they will try to use against you as a "gotcha" (related)... as a result of them having a soldier mindset and knowing you have a different political opinion.
While I expect most of them won't ever mimic rationalists well, (i) mimicry per se doesn't seem important and (ii) I think there are a small fraction of people (tho not Metz) who do end up fostering a "rationalist skin" ― they talk like rationalists, but seem to be in it mostly for gotchas, snipes and sophistry.
1I hope these responses help people understand that the hostility to journalists is not based on hyperbole. They really are like this. They really are competing to wreck the commons for a few advertising dollars.
If you're looking to convince without hyperbole, drawing the link from "Cade Metz" to "Journalists" would be nice, as would explaining any obvious cutouts that make someone an Okay Journalist.
2That they have a "real names" policy is a blatant lie.
They withhold "real names" every day, even ones so "obvious" as to be in wikipedia. If they hate the subject, such as Virgil Texas, they assert that it is a pen name. Their treatment of Scott is off the charts hostile.
If we cannot achieve common knowledge of this, what is the point of any other detail?
I think for the first objection about race and IQ I side with Cade. It is just true that Scott thinks what Cade said he thinks, even if that one link doesn't prove it. As Cade said, he had other reporting to back it up. Truth is a defense against slander, and I don't think anyone familiar with Scott's stance can honestly claim slander here.
This is a weird hill to die on because Cade's article was bad in other ways.
Let's assume that's true: why bring Murray into it? Why not just say the thing you think he believes, and give whatever evidence you have for it? That could include the way he talks about Murray, but "Scott believes X, and there's evidence in how he talks about Y" is very different than "Scott is highly affiliated with Y"
I assume it was hard to substantiate.
Basically it's pretty hard to find Scott saying what he thinks about this matter, even though he definitely thinks this. Cade is cheating with the citations here but that's a minor sin given the underlying claim is true.
It's really weird to go HOW DARE YOU when someone says something you know is true about you, and I was always unnerved by this reaction from Scott's defenders. It reminds me of a guy I know who was cheating on his girlfriend, and she suspected this, and he got really mad at her. Like, "how can you believe I'm cheating on you based on such flimsy evidence? Don't you trust me?" But in fact he was cheating.
107I don't think "Giving fake evidence for things you believe are true" is in any way a minor sin of evidence presentation
How is Metz's behavior here worse than Scott's own behavior defending himself? After all, Metz doesn't explicitly say that Scott believes in racial iq differences, he just mentions Scott's endorsement of Murray in one post and his account of Murray's beliefs in another, in a way that suggests a connection. Similarly, Scott doesn't explicitly deny believing in racial iq differences in his response post, he just lays out the context of the posts in a way that suggests that the accusation is baseless(perhaps you think Scott's behavior is locally better? But he's following a strategy of covertly communicating his true beliefs while making any individual instance look plausibly deniable, so he's kinda optimizing against "locally good behavior" tracking truth here, so it seems perverse to give him credit for this)
Weirdly aggressive post.
I feel like maybe what's going on here is that you do not know what's in The Bell Curve, so you assume it is some maximally evil caricature? Whereas what's actually in the book is exactly Scott's position, the one you say is "his usual "learn to love scientific consensus" stance".
If you'd stop being weird about it for just a second, could you answer something for me? What is one (1) position that Murray holds about race/IQ and Scott doesn't? Just name a single one, I'll wait.
Or maybe what's going on here is that you have a strong "SCOTT GOOD" prior as well as a strong "MURRAY BAD" prior, and therefore anyone associating the two must be on an ugly smear campaign. But there's actually zero daylight between their stances and both of them know it!
This is reaching Cade Metz levels of slippery justification.
He doesn't make the accusation super explicit, but (a) people here would be angrier if he did, not less angry
How is this relevant? As Elizabeth says, it would be more honest and epistemically helpful if he made an explicit accusation. People here might well be angry about that, but a) that's not relevant to what is right and b) that's because, as you admit, that accusation could not be substantiated. So how is it acceptable to indirectly insinuate that accusation instead?
(Also c), I think you're mistaken in that prediction).
(b) that might actually pose legal issues for the NYT (I'm not a lawyer).
Relatedly, if you cannot outright make a claim because it is potentially libellous, you shouldn't use vague insinuation to imply it to your massive and largely-unfamiliar-with-the-topic audience.
However, Scott has no possible gripe here.
You have yourself outlined several possible gripes. I'd have a gripe with someone dishonestly implying an enormously inflammatory accusation to their massive audience without any evidence for it, even if it were secretly true (which I still think you need to do more work to establish).
I think ...
It seems like you think what Metz wrote was acceptable because it all adds up to presenting the truth in the end, even if the way it was presented was 'unconvincing' and the evidence 'embarassing[ly]' weak. I don't buy the principle that 'bad epistemology is fine if the outcome is true knowledge', and I also don't buy that this happened in this particular case, nor that this is what Metz intended.
If Metz's goal was to inform his readers about Scott's position, he failed. He didn't give any facts other than that Scott 'aligned himself with' and quoted somebody who holds a politically unacceptable view. The majority of readers will glean from this nothing but a vague association between Scott and racism, as the author intended. More sophisticated readers will notice what Metz is doing, and assume that if there was substantial evidence that Scott held an unpalatable view Metz would have gladly published that instead of resorting to an oblique smear by association. Nobody ends up better informed about what Scott actually believes.
I think trevor is right to invoke the quokka analogy. Rationalists are tying ourselves in knots in a long comment thread debating if actually, technically, strictly, Metz was misleading. Meanwhile, Metz never cared about this in the first place, and is continuing to enjoy a successful career employing tabloid rhetorical tricks.
2
2They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your reputation.
I am so confused about this statement. Is this a joke?
But that seems like a weird joke to make with a journalist who almost certainly doesn't get it.
Or maybe I am failing to parse this. I read this as saying "people in the rationality community believe that criticism is bad because that hurts your reputation, but I am a contrarian within that community and think it's good" which would seem like a kind of hilarious misrepresentation of where most people in the community are at on the topic of criticism, so maybe you meant something else here.
I thought he just meant "criticism is good, actually; I like having it done to me so I'm going to do it to you", and was saying that rationalists tend to feel this way.
11I affirm Seth's interpretation in the grandparent. Real-time conversation is hard; if I had been writing carefully rather than speaking extemporaneously, I probably would have managed to order the clauses correctly. ("A lot of people think criticism is bad, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that criticism is actually good.")
3aZMD: Looking at "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", I don't think it was a good article. Specifically, you wrote,
In one post, [Alexander] 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."
End quote. So, the problem with this is that the specific post in which Alexander aligned himself with Murray was not talking about race. It was specifically talking about whether specific programs to alleviate poverty will actually work or not.
I think Zack's description might be too charitable to Scott. From his description I thought the reference would be strictly about poverty. But the full quote includes a lot about genetics and ability to earn money. The full quote is
...The only public figure I can think of in the southeast quadrant with me is Charles Murray. Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t th
3ZMD: Looking at “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space”, I don’t think it was a good article. Specifically, you wrote,
In one post, [Alexander] 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.”
End quote. So, the problem with this is that the specific post in which Alexander aligned himself with Murray was not talking about race. It was specifically talking about whether specific programs to alleviate poverty will actually work or not.
So on the one hand, this particular paragraph does seem like it's misleadingly implying Scott was endorsing views on race/iq similar to Murray's even though, based on the quoted passages alone, there is little reason to think that. On the other hand, it's totally true that Scott was running a strategy of bringing up or "arguing" with hereditarians with the goal of broadly promoting those views in the rationalist community, without directly being seen to endorse them. So I think it's actually pretty legitimate for Metz to bring up incidents like this or the Xenosystems link in the blogrol...
So, I love Scott, consider CM's original article poorly written, and also think doxxing is quite rude, but with all the disclaimers out of the way: on the specific issue of revealing Scott's last name, Cade Metz seems more right than Scott here? Scott was worried about a bunch of knock-off effects of having his last name published, but none of that bad stuff happened.[1]
I feel like at this point in the era of the internet, doxxing (at least, in the form of involuntary identity association) is much more of an imagined threat than a real harm. Beff Jezos's more recent doxxing also comes to mind as something that was more controversial for the controversy, than for any factual harms done to Jezos as a result.
- ^
Scott did take a bunch of ameliorating steps, such as leaving his past job -- but my best guess is that none of that would have actually been necessary. AFAICT he's actually in a much better financial position thanks to subsequent transition to Substack -- though crediting Cade Metz for this is a bit like crediting Judas for starting Christianity.
Scott was worried about a bunch of knock-off effects of having his last name published, but none of that bad stuff happened.
Didn't Scott quit his job as a result of this? I don't have high confidence on how bad things would have been if Scott hadn't taken costly actions to reduce the costs, but it seems that the evidence is mostly screened off by Scott doing a lot of stuff to make the consequences less bad and/or eating some of the costs in anticipation.
I mean, Scott seems to be in a pretty good situation now, in many ways better than before.
And yes, this is consistent with NYT hurting him in expectation.
But one difference between doxxing normal people versus doxxing "influential people" is that influential people typically have enough power to land on their feet when e.g. they lose a job. And so the fact that this has worked out well for Scott (and, seemingly, better than he expected) is some evidence that the NYT was better-calibrated about how influential Scott is than he was.
This seems like an example of the very very prevalent effect that Scott wrote about in "against bravery debates", where everyone thinks their group is less powerful than they actually are. I don't think there's a widely-accepted name for it; I sometimes use underdog bias. My main diagnosis of the NYT/SSC incident is that rationalists were caught up by underdog bias, even as they leveraged thousands of influential tech people to attack the NYT.
2I don't think the NYT thing played much of a role in Scott being better off now. My guess is a small minority of people are subscribed to his Substack because of the NYT thing (the dominant factor is clearly the popularity of his writing).
My guess is the NYT thing hurt him quite a bit and made the potential consequences of him saying controversial things a lot worse for him. He has tried to do things to reduce the damage of that, but I generally don't believe that "someone seems to be doing fine" is almost ever much evidence against "this action hurt this person". Competent people often do fine even when faced with substantial adversity, this doesn't mean the adversity is fine.
I do think it's clear the consequences weren't catastrophic, and I also separately actually have a lot of sympathy for giving newspapers a huge amount of leeway to report on whatever true thing they want to report on, so that I overall don't have a super strong take here, but I also think the costs here were probably on-net pretty substantial (and also separately that the evidence of how things have played out since then probably didn't do very much to sway me from my priors of how much the cost would be, due to Scott internalizing the costs in advance a bunch).
What credence do you have that he would have started the substack at all without the NYT thing? I don't have much information, but probably less than 80%.
I mean, just because him starting a Substack was precipitated by a bunch of stress and uncertainty does not mean I credit the stress and uncertainty for the benefits of the Substack. Scott always could have started a Substack, and presumably had reasons for not doing so before the NYT thing. As an analogy, if I work at your company and have a terrible time, and then I quit, and then get a great job somewhere else, of course you get no credit for the quality of my new job.
The Substack situation seems analogous. It approximately does not matter whether Scott would have started the Substack without the NYT thing, so I don't see the relevance of the question when trying to judge whether the NYT thing caused a bunch of harm.
Many comments pointed out that NYT does not in fact have a consistent policy of always revealing people's true names. There's even a news editorial about this which I point out in case you trust the fact-checking of NY Post more.
I think that leaves 3 possible explanations of what happened:
- NYT has a general policy of revealing people's true names, which it doesn't consistently apply but ended up applying in this case for no particular reason.
- There's an inconsistently applied policy, and Cade Metz's (and/or his editors') dislike of Scott contributed (consciously or subconsciously) to insistence on applying the policy in this particular case.
- There is no policy and it was a purely personal decision.
In my view, most rationalists seem to be operating under a reasonable probability distribution over these hypotheses, informed by evidence such as Metz's mention of Charles Murray, lack of a public written policy about revealing real names, and lack of evidence that a private written policy exists.
But one difference between doxxing normal people versus doxxing "influential people" is that influential people typically have enough power to land on their feet when e.g. they lose a job.
It may decrease their influence substantially, though. I'll quote at length from here. It's not about doxxing per se, but it's about cancellation attempts (which doxxing a heretic enables), and about arguments similar to the above:
...If you’re a writer, artist or academic who has strayed beyond the narrow bounds of approved discourse, two consequences will be intimately familiar. The first is that it becomes harder to get a hearing about anything. The second is that if you do manage to say anything publicly — especially if you talk about the silencing — it will be taken as proof that you have not been silenced.
This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead.
The only counter to this is specific examples. But censorship is usually covert: when you’re passed over to speak at a conference, exhibit in a gallery or apply for a visiting fellowship, you rarely find out. Every now a
+1, I agree with all of this, and generally consider the SSC/NYT incident to be an example of the rationalist community being highly tribalist.
(more on this in a twitter thread, which I've copied over to LW here)
1There were two issues: what is the cost of doxxing, and what is the benefit of doxxing. I think the main crux an equally important crux of disagreement is the latter, not the former. IMO the benefit was zero: it’s not newsworthy, it brings no relevant insight, publishing it does not advance the public interest, it’s totally irrelevant to the story. Here CM doesn’t directly argue that there was any benefit to doxxing; instead he kinda conveys a vibe / ideology that if something is true then it is self-evidently intrinsically good to publish it (but of course that self-evident intrinsic goodness can be outweighed by sufficiently large costs). Anyway, if the true benefit is zero (as I believe), then we don’t have to quibble over whether the cost was big or small.
There's a fact of the matter about whether the sidewalk on my street has an odd vs even number of pebbles on it, but I think everyone including rationalists will agree that there's no benefit of sharing that information. It's not relevant for anything else.
By contrast, taboo topics generally become taboo because they have important consequences for decisions and policy and life.
When the NYT article came out, some people discussed the hypothesis that perhaps the article was originally going to be favorable, but the editors at NYT got mad when Scott deleted his blog so they forced Cade to turn it into a hit piece. This interview pretty much demonstrates that it was always going to be a hit piece (and, as a corollary, Cade lied to people saying it was going to be positive to get them to do interviews).
So yes this changed my view from "probably acted unethically but maybe it wasn't his fault" to "definitely acted unethically".
Wow, what a bad justification for doxxing someone. I somehow thought the NYT had a slightly better argument.
I've produced a multi voiced Elevenlabs reading of this post, for ease of listening and speaker differentiation.
https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/my-interview-with-cade-metz-on-his
The New York Times ceases to serve its purpose if we're leaving out stuff that's obvious.
Actually a funny admission. Taken literally, this almost means The New York Times' purpose is to say stuff that's obvious, which of course is a very distinct purpose from informing people about nonobvious important things.
And whatever people think, my job at the Times is to give everyone their due, and to give everyone's point of view a forum and help them get that point of view into any given story.
This of course can't be literally true: most people and most vi...
11This frankly enraged me. Good job on the directness of the opening question. I think you fell back a little quickly, and let him get away with quite a lot of hand-waving, where I would have tried to really nail him down on the details and challenge him to expand on those flimsy justifications. But that's very easy to say, and not so easy to do in the context of a live conversation.
I'll provide a dissenting perspective here. I actually came away from reading this feeling like Metz' position is maybe fine.
Everybody saw it. This is an influential person. That means he's worth writing about. And so once that's the case, then you withhold facts if there is a really good reason to withhold facts. If someone is in a war zone, if someone is really in danger, we take this seriously.
It sounds like he's saying that the Times' policy is that you only withhold facts if there's a "really" good reason to do so. I'm not sure what type of magnitude ...
1Recently I've been getting into making "personality types" (after finding an alternative to factor analysis that seems quite interesting and underused - most personality type methods border on nonsense, but I like this one). One type that has come up across multiple sources is a type I call "avoidant" (because my poorly-informed impression is that it's related to something a lot of people call "avoidant attachment").
(Also possibly related to schizoid personality disorder - but personality disorders are kind of weird, so not sure.)
Avoidants are characterize...
As far as journalists go, I'm not 'avoidant'.
I have talked to a number of journalists over the years. I actually agreed to interview with Cade Metz himself on the subject of SSC before this all came out; Metz just ghosted me at the arranged time (and never apologized).
What I have always done, and what I always advised the people who ask me about how to handle journalists, is maintained the unconditional requirement of recording it: preferably text, but audio recording if necessary.* (I also remind people that you can only say things like "off the record" or "on background" if you explicitly say that before you say anything spicy & the journalist assents in some way.)
I've noticed that when people are unjustly burned by talking to journalists, of the "I never said that quote" sort, it always seems to be in un-recorded contexts. At least so far, it has worked out for me and as far as I know, everyone I have given this advice to.
* oddly, trying to do it via text tends to kill a lot of interview requests outright. It doesn't seem to matter to journalists if it's email or Twitter DM or Signal or IRC or Discord, they just hate text, which is odd for a profession which mostly deals in,...
I feel pretty sympathetic to the desire not to do things by text; I suspect you get much more practiced and checked over answers that way.
I suspect you get much more practiced and checked over answers that way.
In some contexts this would be seen as obviously a good thing. Specifically, if the thing you're interested in is the ideas that your interviewee talks about, then you want them to be able to consider carefully and double-check their facts before sending them over.
The case where you don't want that would seem to be the case where your primary interest is in the mental state of your interviewee, or where you hope to get them to stumble into revealing things they would want to hide.
On 16 March 2024, I sat down to chat with New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz! In part of our conversation, transcribed below, we discussed his February 2021 article "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", covering Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog and the surrounding community.
The transcript has been significantly edited for clarity. (It turns out that real-time conversation transcribed completely verbatim is full of filler words, false starts, crosstalk, "uh huh"s, "yeah"s, pauses while one party picks up their coffee order, &c. that do not seem particularly substantive.)
ZMD: I actually have some questions for you.
CM: Great, let's start with that.
ZMD: They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your reputation. But I think criticism is good, because if I write a bad blog post, and someone tells me it was bad, I can learn from that, and do better next time.
So, when we met at the Pause AI protest on February 12th, I mentioned that people in my social circles would say, "Don't talk to journalists." Actually, I want to amend that, because when I later mentioned meeting you, some people were more specific: "No, talking to journalists makes sense; don't talk to Cade Metz specifically, who is unusually hostile and untrustworthy."
CM: What's their rationale?
ZMD: Looking at "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", I don't think it was a good article. Specifically, you wrote,
End quote. So, the problem with this is that the specific post in which Alexander aligned himself with Murray was not talking about race. It was specifically talking about whether specific programs to alleviate poverty will actually work or not.
This seems like a pretty sleazy guilt-by-association attempt. I'm wondering—as a writer, are you not familiar with the idea that it's possible to quote a writer about one thing without agreeing with all their other views? Did they not teach that at Duke?
CM: That's definitely true. It's also true that what I wrote was true. There are different ways of interpreting it. You're welcome to interpret it however you want, but those areas are often discussed in the community. And often discussed by him. And that whole story is backed by a whole lot of reporting. It doesn't necessarily make it into the story. And you find this often that within the community, and with him, whether it's in print or not in print, there is this dancing around those areas. And you can interpret that many ways. You can say, we're just exploring these ideas and we should be able to.
ZMD: And that's actually my position.
CM: That's great. That's a valid position. There are other valid positions where people say, we need to not go so close to that, because it's dangerous and there's a slippery slope. The irony of this whole situation is that some people who feel that I should not have gone there, who think I should not explore the length and breadth of that situation, are the people who think you should always go there.
ZMD: I do see the irony there. That's also why I'm frustrated with the people who are saying, "Don't talk to Cade Metz," because I have faith. I am so serious about the free speech thing that I'm willing to take the risk that if you have an honest conversation with someone, they might quote your words out of context on their blog.
CM: But also, it's worth discussing.
ZMD: It's worth trying.
CM: Because I hear your point of view. I hear your side of things. And whatever people think, my job at the Times is to give everyone their due, and to give everyone's point of view a forum and help them get that point of view into any given story. Now, what also happens then is I'm going to talk to people who don't agree with me, and who don't agree with Scott Alexander. And their point of view is going to be in there, too. I think that's the only way you get to a story that is well-rounded and gives people a full idea of what's going on.
ZMD: But part of why I don't think the February 2021 piece was very good is that I don't think you did a good job of giving everyone their due. Speaking of Kelsey Piper, you also wrote:
End quote. I don't think this is a fair paraphrase of what Kelsey actually meant. You might think, well, you weren't there, how could you know? But just from knowing how people in this subculture think, even without being there, I can tell that this is not a fair paraphrase.
CM: Well, I think that it definitely was. From my end, I talked to her on the phone. I checked everything with her before the story went up. It was fact-checked. She had an issue with it after the story went up, not before. There's a lot of rigor that goes into this.
ZMD: But specifically, the specific sentence, "She felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair." I think if we asked Kelsey, I do not think she would endorse that sentence in those words. If I can try to explain what I imagine the point of view to be—
CM: Sure.
ZMD: It's not that you shouldn't discuss critics at all. I think the idea is that you can exercise judgment as to which criticisms are legitimate, which is not the same thing as, "Don't discuss critics at all." I feel like it would be possible to write some sentence that explains the difference between those ideas: that you can simultaneously both not just blindly repeat all criticisms no matter how silly, while also giving due to critics. Maybe you think I'm nitpicking the exact wording.
[Editor's note: when reached for comment, Piper said that she told Metz that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion, and that I felt our duty as journalists was to figure out the truth. The context was a conversation about whether Slate Star Codex was a 'gateway' into right-wing extremism, and I suggested he look at the annual SSC survey data to figure out if that was true or not, or at surveys of other populations, or traffic to right-wing sites, etc. I don't remember all the suggestions I made. I was trying to give him suggestions about how, as a journalist, he could check if this claim held up."]
CM: No, this is great. But I think that when the story did come out, that was the complaint. Everybody said, you shouldn't give this point of view its due, with the Charles Murray stuff. But that is part of what's going on, has gone on, on his blog and in the community. And it's very difficult to calibrate what's going on there and give an accurate view of it. But let me tell you, I tried really hard to do that and I feel like I succeeded.
ZMD: I don't agree, really. You might object that, well, this is just that everyone hates being reported on, and you didn't do anything different than any other mainstream journalist would have done. But The New Yorker also ran a couple pieces about our little subculture. There was one in July 2020, "Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War Against the Media" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, and just [recently], "Among the AI Doomsayers" by Andrew Marantz. And for both of those, both me and other people I talk to, reading those pieces, we thought they were much more fair than yours.
CM: I haven't read the [second] one, but I didn't think The New Yorker was fair to my point of view.
ZMD: Okay. Well, there you go.
CM: Right? Let's leave it at that. But I understand your complaints. All I can say is, it is valuable to have conversations like this. And I come away from this trying really hard to ensure that your point of view is properly represented. You can disagree, but it's not just now. If I were to write a story based on this, it happens in the lead-up to the story, it's happening as the story's being fact-checked. And I come back to you and I say, this is what I'm going to say. Is this correct? Do you have an objection? And what I was trying to do from the beginning was have a conversation like this. And it quickly spiraled out of control.
ZMD: Because Scott values his privacy.
CM: I understand that. But there are other ways of dealing with that. And in the end, I understand that kind of privacy is very important to the community as well, and him in particular. I get that. I had to go through that whole experience to completely get it. But I get it. But the other thing is that our view, my view, The New York Times view of that situation was very, very different. Right? And you had a clash of views. I felt like there were better ways to deal with that.
ZMD: But also, what exactly was the public interest in revealing his last name?
CM: Think about it like this. If he's not worth writing about, that's one thing. He's just some random guy in the street, and he's not worth writing about. All this is a non-issue. What became very clear as I reported the story, and then certainly it became super clear after he deleted his blog: this is an influential guy. And this continues to come up. I don't know if you saw the OpenAI response to Elon Musk's lawsuit. But Slate Star Codex is mentioned in it.
ZMD: Yeah, I saw that.
CM: Everybody saw it. This is an influential person. That means he's worth writing about. And so once that's the case, then you withhold facts if there is a really good reason to withhold facts. If someone is in a war zone, if someone is really in danger, we take this seriously. We had countless discussions about this. And we decided that—
ZMD: Being a psychiatrist isn't the equivalent of being in a war zone.
CM: What his argument to me was is that it violated the ethics of his profession. But that's his issue, not mine, right? He chose to be a super-popular blogger and to have this influence as a psychiatrist. His name—when I sat down to figure out his name, it took me less than five minutes. It's just obvious what his name is. The New York Times ceases to serve its purpose if we're leaving out stuff that's obvious. That's just how we have to operate. Our aim—and again, the irony is that your aim is similar—is to tell people the truth, and have them understand it. If we start holding stuff back, then that quickly falls apart.