(2021-02-15) Spiers Slate Star Clusterfuck

Elizabeth Spiers on Slate Star Clusterfuck. Scott is not the first subject who’s unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of journalism who, confronted with a portrayal he didn’t like, attributed all forms of bad faith to the person who produced the portrayal.

The malicious journalist thesis is the one that was the hardest on my ocular muscles yesterday. Scott Alexander, the figure at the center of the piece himself believes this and has advanced this theory that the journalist who wrote the piece, and perhaps The New York Times institutionally, was out to smear him. To what end, it’s unclear. (A favorite fallacious rationale: clicks! More about that in a bit.)

Even the reporter working on the story has no especial investment in its subject. That reporter is also probably working on six other stories at the same time

Scott is not the first subject who’s unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of journalism who, confronted with a portrayal he didn’t like, attributed all forms of bad faith to the person who produced the portrayal

“But tech journalism is overwhelmingly negative!” I hear a self-described empiricist whining somewhere on Twitter. No it is not, my friends. You just don’t notice it when it isn’t.

The Times article referred to the tech industry as a community of iconoclasts, and somehow that is not flattering enough to some people. (My own experience of the tech industry is more akin to what the late Christopher Hitchens referred to as a “herd of independent minds.”)

negative pieces are not de facto “hit pieces.”

I am sympathetic to critiques of the Times piece that say the piece did not capture the depth of it, and I think in a longer treatment, it might have. The article was not a particularly long piece and sometimes brevity leads to oversimplification.