[TODO: Sasha disaster, breakup with Vassar group, this was really bad for me]
-[TODO: NYT affair and Brennan link, prelude to pronouns post
- * On 13 February 2021, [the _New York Times_ article on _Slate Star Codex_](https://archive.ph/zW6oX) came out.
- * notably, the Charles Murray guilt-by-association was a reach on the part of the reporter
- * a "[Gettier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem) attack"—right for the wrong reasons
- * Anyone who's _actually read_ Scott's work, knows that Scott thinks hereditarianism is plausible.
- * Charles Murray is _also_ agnostic about causality.
- * (maybe footnote) ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) or the ["Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting"](https://expost.padm.us/biodet), or the mention of _Human Varieties_ in ["Can Things Be Both Popular And Silenced?"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/)
- * (It's certainly _possible_ for the Ashkenazi IQ advantage to be real and genetic, and black–white gap to be fake and environmental.)
- * Scott's denial doesn't go into this, of course
- * Brennan email leak
- * my comment on bullies and heresy / my Twitter comment on lying
- * If you actually read the email, it doesn't look like Brennan made any promises—Scott confessed, and threatened. I don't think Scott did anything wrong—_because_ I don't think belief in hereditarianism is wrong. If you imagine someone confessing to a real crime and then threatening "Don't tell anyone this", we would regard the leaker as a valiant whistleblower, not a privacy breaker
- * Yudkowsky reopens the conversation?! Why?!
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-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228 my comment at 10:37 a.m.
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-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608
-> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.
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-Oh, this was also on 18 February 2021 4:13 p.m. (same day as my comment about SneerClub); maybe the conjunction of the two made me more salient
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362555980232282113
-> Oh, maybe it's relevant to note that those posts were specifically part of my 21-month rage–grief campaign of being furious at Eliezer all day every day for lying-by-implicature about the philosophy of language? But, I don't want to seem petty by pointing that out! I'm over it!
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-And I think I _would_ have been over it, except—
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-https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article
-https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643403673004851200/reddragdiva-topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228
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-Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
-https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
-> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present.
+On 13 February 2021, ["Silicon Valley's Safe Space"](https://archive.ph/zW6oX), the _New York Times_ piece on _Slate Star Codex_ came out. It was ... pretty lame? (In contrast to a vicious hit piece that one might concede was competently done for all of its mendacity.) Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while [pushing hard on the subtext](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310) to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that are surpising to read from someone who has been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of _Slate Star Codex_. ["Nominally"](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominally)?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed to me more like a critique of the "many"'s reading comprehension, rather than Alexander's writing.
-]
+Although the public's poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that can only attack you over things that look bad when quoted out of context, can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that the mob can't read. The _Times_ article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt:
+
+> In one post, he [aligned himself with Charles Murray](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/), 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."
+
+(Weirdly sloppy of the _Times_ to link the first post, but not [the second](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/)?)
+
+[Alexander's reply statement](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article) points out the _Times_'s obvious chicanery: "align[ing] himself with Murray" in an article
+seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
+
+[...]
... except that Yudkowsky reopened the conversation in February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions and concluding that, "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically rude_, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."
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