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.
I think this is a bullshit excuse. I believe there are plenty of true facts that if you told Metz, he would decide not to publish them.
For example, someone could tell him a story of David Gerard’s decade-long crusade against the rationalist community in general, and Scott Alexander specifically. How David is the person who made “Roko’s basilisk” popular, how he created SneerClub (an entire subreddit dedicated to bullying Scott and related people), how he abused his privileges as an administrator of Wikipedia to push his point of view as the official Wikipedia perspective, including the “citogenesis” of “write it on RationalWiki, give an interview to a journalist, insist that the journalist quotes the part from RationalWiki, now update the Wikipedia page to quote the reliable unpartial journalist”, and how ultimately David got banned from editing the Wikipedia article about Scott Alexander but still keeps editing other articles related to the rationalist community.
If telling the truth about Scott Alexander is so super important for the NYT, this should obviously be, too. But I am 90% sure that Metz would find an excuse not to publish any of this.
I agree, it is sort of BS but the reasons you are giving isn’t it. There is a difference between not doing an article on a piece you aren’t interested in and not allowing fair comment or withholding information relating to story you publish. He is talking about the latter, not publishing information that is readily available and relevant to a story you are writing. Where i think it is BS is there is always obvious information that gets left on the editing room floor, part of their job is going through the information and identifying what is of the greatest public interest, what context is relevant and what isn’t worth publishing. I think he (and quite likely the NYT broadly) misjudges the importance of full names and undervalued the harm publishing Scott’s full name could do.
I think this is a bullshit excuse. I believe there are plenty of true facts that if you told Metz, he would decide not to publish them.
For example, someone could tell him a story of David Gerard’s decade-long crusade against the rationalist community in general, and Scott Alexander specifically. How David is the person who made “Roko’s basilisk” popular, how he created SneerClub (an entire subreddit dedicated to bullying Scott and related people), how he abused his privileges as an administrator of Wikipedia to push his point of view as the official Wikipedia perspective, including the “citogenesis” of “write it on RationalWiki, give an interview to a journalist, insist that the journalist quotes the part from RationalWiki, now update the Wikipedia page to quote the reliable unpartial journalist”, and how ultimately David got banned from editing the Wikipedia article about Scott Alexander but still keeps editing other articles related to the rationalist community.
If telling the truth about Scott Alexander is so super important for the NYT, this should obviously be, too. But I am 90% sure that Metz would find an excuse not to publish any of this.
I agree, it is sort of BS but the reasons you are giving isn’t it. There is a difference between not doing an article on a piece you aren’t interested in and not allowing fair comment or withholding information relating to story you publish. He is talking about the latter, not publishing information that is readily available and relevant to a story you are writing. Where i think it is BS is there is always obvious information that gets left on the editing room floor, part of their job is going through the information and identifying what is of the greatest public interest, what context is relevant and what isn’t worth publishing. I think he (and quite likely the NYT broadly) misjudges the importance of full names and undervalued the harm publishing Scott’s full name could do.