The NYT SSC piece as bad writing

main thought I had while reading nytssc was "this is bad writing. people read stuff like this?" not bad as in evil bad as in someone made a meal by adding an incoherent combination of spices to stale rice and putting it in bread as a sandwich 🤨 it was just all over the place twitter.com/eigenrobot/sta…

Feb 13, 2021

anyway, @liminal_warmth has the best actual critique of the thing I've read so far, in this thread twitter.com/liminal_warmth…

this tweet in particular really stood out to me really highlights the difference between virtue signalling and actually trying to care for literally anything, and how Cade's doing the former maybe? maybe his model of causality is just terrible, idk twitter.com/liminal_warmth…

on further reflection, not sure if I agree with myself here. hazards of thinking out loud, or thinking seriously at all I guess the apparent hypocrisy is only visible in a frame that is not actually the frame the writer or audience is using

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Feb 13, 2021

@mechanical_monk @liminal_warmth but this does indeed only make sense from a frame where the problems are things like "polarization" & "people are afraid to speak unorthodox things", and I guess that frame is in a battle with frame of Cade/BlueTribe which says "these opinions bad" (or maybe just "sell clicks")

and at any rate, I'm also a proponent of "no scolding" am not personally scolding Cade here, I don't think? just trying to make sense of what's going on

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv · Feb 11, 2021

I seldom articulate this explicitly but one of the cornerstones of my approach to peopling is "no scolding". In fact the more urgent and important it is that I get someone to change their mind/position on something, the more clinical I believe I have to be about not dissing them

in the meantime, Scott's back, and he's got lots of great new writing on Astral Codex Ten that was the main thought behind my first tweet—the contrast in the quality of writing & thinking in the nyt piece vs ssc itself astralcodexten.substack.com

oh man @yashkaf nails this mostly-serious mostly-joking assessment of why it's so bad 😙👌 (is a whole thread)

Jakeup @myhandle · Feb 13, 2021

So what happened is that Cade Metz was going to write a benign story but was pressured by his bosses to write an anti-SV hit piece or lose his job. And so, in a heroic act of self-sacrifice, he wrote it in the most boring and tortuous prose possible so that no one will read it.