Ah, no thanks. It’s just a rewording of (my understaning of) Jacob’s article, plus an attempt to preempt the obvious question: “why does outgroup ‘follow the narrative’, but ingroup ‘speaks their mind freely’, ain’t that a bit too convenient?”.
Also, as Kaj’s link suggests, my idea of “eigen-opinion” may be mathematically elegant, but it’s not how things actually happened. Unless we take it one level above and say that NYT was constrained in their choice of narrative. Maybe, dunno. But the proximate cause of NYT reporters writing as they do is “being ordered to do so by their boss”, which is quite boring explanation, so perhaps the real lesson here is not to skip boring explanations in favor of looking for mathematically elegant ones.
And… although I am not sure whether this is a good lesson… but maybe also not to try too hard to be charitable to assholes. (Of course, it is difficult to find the right amount of charity in situations where I already take sides.) I mean, in some sense my explanation was an attempt to partially excuse the NYT as being victims or maybe collaborators of a stronger force, as opposed to being an uncaused cause of bad things. But they had more agency that I attributed to them, and they knowingly used it for evil.
Consider adapting this into a top-level post? I anticipate wanting to link to it (specifically for the “smaller audiences offer more slack” moral).
Ah, no thanks. It’s just a rewording of (my understaning of) Jacob’s article, plus an attempt to preempt the obvious question: “why does outgroup ‘follow the narrative’, but ingroup ‘speaks their mind freely’, ain’t that a bit too convenient?”.
Also, as Kaj’s link suggests, my idea of “eigen-opinion” may be mathematically elegant, but it’s not how things actually happened. Unless we take it one level above and say that NYT was constrained in their choice of narrative. Maybe, dunno. But the proximate cause of NYT reporters writing as they do is “being ordered to do so by their boss”, which is quite boring explanation, so perhaps the real lesson here is not to skip boring explanations in favor of looking for mathematically elegant ones.
And… although I am not sure whether this is a good lesson… but maybe also not to try too hard to be charitable to assholes. (Of course, it is difficult to find the right amount of charity in situations where I already take sides.) I mean, in some sense my explanation was an attempt to partially excuse the NYT as being victims or maybe collaborators of a stronger force, as opposed to being an uncaused cause of bad things. But they had more agency that I attributed to them, and they knowingly used it for evil.