Seems Like Targeting
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Hounding the president of Harvard out of a job because you think she’s a DEI hire is one thing, but going after a Billionaire’s wife? How dare these journalists! What big bullies.

Bonus downplaying of EA’s faults. He of course phrases the Bostrom affair as someone being “accused” of sending a racist email, as if there were any question as to who sent it, or if it was racist. And acts like it’s not just the cherry on top of a lifetime of Bostrom’s work.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      Yeah, exactly. My first draft of this included this passage from the post:

      If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite. Again, I don’t think I’m discovering anything surprising here, I just want to make this explicit for people who have otherwise just sort of been noticing it on the fringes of their consciousness.

      Basically: “Why can’t journalists just give nice guys like us a chance?”

      • Evinceo@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        I genuinely wonder if years of training one’s self to be “rational” makes you forget how fundamental stories are to the human experience. Journalists write stories about real life, for good or ill. If something happens in real life but isn’t a story, it doesn’t get printed. “Random lady plagiarized her thesis” is not a story, but “lady related to major plagiarism story also plagiarized her thesis” is a story.

        His observation that EA suddenly got piled on is missing a more subtile point: lots of the coverage of EA was probably an extension of the tech beat and thus benefitted from the access journalism and rosey-glasses’d that was rampant in the early aughts before a more critical eye was cast in the last few years. Tech Won’t Save Us does a good job explaining the phenomenon (ctrl+f “access” in the transcript) in part of its Musk series.