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 there are multiple further points to be made about why it's unacceptable, outside of the dark side epistemology angle above. Here's Scott's direct response to exactly your accuastion, that despite Metz having been dishonest in his accusation, he does truly believe what Metz implied:
This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.
I sort of agree that it's quite plausible to infer from this that he does believe there are some between-group average differences that are genetic in origin. But I think it allows Scott several gripes with the Metz' dishonest characterisation:
And in case you or Metz would argue that those sentiments post-date the article in question, here's an earlier Scott quote from 'In Favor of Civilisation':
Having joined liberal society, they can be sure that no matter what those researchers find, I and all of their new liberal-society buddies will fight tooth and nail against anyone who uses any tiny differences those researchers find to challenge the central liberal belief that everyone of every gender has basic human dignity. Any victory for me is going to be a victory for feminists as well; maybe not a perfect victory, but a heck of a lot better than what they have right now.
He's talking about feminism and banning research into between-gender differences, there, but it and many other of Scott's writings make it very clear that he supports equal treatment and moral consideration for all. Is this not an important detail for a journalist to include when making such an inflammatory insinuation, that could so easily be interpreted as implying the opposite?
Your position seems to amount to epistemic equivalent of 'yes, the trial was procedurally improper, and yes the prosecutor deceived the jury with misleading evidence, and no the charge can't actually be proven beyond a reasonable doubt- but he's probably guilty anyway, so what's the issue'. I think the issue is journalistic malpractice. Metz has deliberately misled his audience in order to malign Scott on a charge which you agree cannot be substantiated, because of his own ideological opposition (which he admits). To paraphrase the same SSC post quoted above, he has locked himself outside of the walled garden. And you are "Andrew Cord", arguing that we should all stop moaning because it's probably true anyway so the tactics are justified.
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.