I'm going to make a different critique than most people, here :
It means that if people like you, and you’re doing well, then you can commit lots of mild misdeeds and journalists will never bother you. But if you become unpopular, or seem weird, or take a stand against something widely believed, then investigative journalists will dig up all your decades-old mistakes and ruin your reputation.
This is hilariously naive. It's not just or even mostly journalists, in the same way that a pressure wave isn't just or even mostly any one particle.
There's a poster on tumblr named brazenautomaton, who's a bit of a mad artist in all of the best ways. One of those are his rants -- and I use the term as a compliment -- on popularity. I can't find the best one of the top of my head, but as a good example:
It’s not self-hatred at all. It’s popularity. These “woke” white men who can’t shut up about how evil white people are tend to be attractive, well-off, upper-middle-class, and most important of all, popular. Inherently popular. Other people instinctively align themselves with their goals and desires, because they are popular. Because they are popular, their goals and desires are “Punish unpopular people”.
If you are well-off, attractive, upper-middle-class, and popular, you have very very little to fear from social punishment, because people will not WANT to punish you. They want to punish unpopular people. One of the best ways you can find unpopular people so you can punish them, is to just start trying to punish everyone in your zone of perception – the other popular people will remain unpunished, the middling people will suffer a bit but you don’t care, and the unpopular people will be revealed by how much punishment rains upon them because they do not have popularity and thus are unable to stop it from happening. Then, once you have located the unpopular people by seeing who actually gets punished from your omnidirectional punishment attempts, you can continue to punish them. Forever and ever and ever, because it will never end, and they will not stop, and they will not be stopped.
Yes, this is clinical depression, though see Scott re: Malcolm Muggeridge. It's also non-falsifiable: anyone who can be punished can't be popular, and anyone who is popular can't be punished. But it's also a pattern that exists.
Scott knows this, more intimately than most. It's not like that's even a one-off! But I can play examples of the confessed rapist you could not even discuss the 'allegations' of over at RPGnet, until they annoyed someone enough to get booted, and then the deluge. I can give examples as severe as alleged grooming and as minor as 'appropriated her own culture' in the furry fandom. Nor is it specific to online or the left: the pastor everyone loves until, posthumously, it turns out everyone had a horror story about is trope with a lot of recently-live examples. Nor it is about big stuff: the Friday Fun thread conversation about Palworld has some steelmen, but it's almost certainly downstream of some popular people wanting to start wars over AIgen.
You and I will do it too. It's hard to care for what's real, rather than what's talked about and what the people around you find important.
Maybe Scott doesn't think it necessary to say, maybe he knows that one of the big rules for being on the Inside is that you don't mention that there's an Inside.
But it's not just the journalists doing this, and I'm increasingly convinced that they're neither driving the stampede nor surfing the crowd.
I don’t agree with the second quote. I think the performance of wokeness is a fashionable belief that they tend to use either to get attention and praise or to distance themselves from the ordinary person who must hold more pragmatic ideals about themselves and the world. He’s in a sense showing off his position by arguing that life should be made harder for people like himself. He does this because as a successful entertainer, he doesn’t have to worry about DEI or similar programs because he isn’t applying for the kinds of jobs that are subject to those programs. Even in the acting community, they’re not going to skip a major star because he’s the wrong color. Casting a star means several million from the jump. It might affect more junior actors because they don’t yet have his draw, but he’s already got his.
This seems to be how these sorts of luxury beliefs work. They’re impractical, often doing real damage to lower class people who naively believe them and follow the advice. And rarely do those espousing those beliefs practice them in their own lives. I’ve yet to see any actor turn down a role to give it to a minority or a woman. It’s more often that they insist that others give up theirs to others. They don’t want to give up their roles, they want you to give up your promotion.
I don't actually know what point Scott is making. No one cared about Claudine Gay until she made a fool of herself in front of congress. And Rufo demonstrating he can take scalps is explicitly why he did it. But that doesn't make it wrong- she did commit plagiarism, and it is an offense that is supposedly a big deal in academia.
I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.
Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately.
This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
georgioz 10mo ago
I’m forgetting the timeframe - was TheMotte.org operational when Scott was doxxed/had to disavow it?
As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny.
Isn’t the meta-rule for a more global truth more geared for this? The example you give to stay the light of truth is just more friend-enemy distinction.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
Scott was never doxxed because his identity was always a single google search away and he didn’t have a problem admitting it in real life. What he wanted to avoid was his patients and employers immediately seeing him as a public figure in a way that affected his day job, which is what the NYT article did.
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison ,
the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.
See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
An adult human who produces ovum.
An adult human with XX chromosomes.
An adult human who lacks the SRY gene.
An adult human who has a vagina.
An adult human who doesn't have a penis.
An adult human capable of becoming pregnant.
An adult human whose adolescent development was dominated by estrogen.
An adult human whose adolescent development was naturally dominated by estrogen.
An adult human who was classified as female shortly after birth.
An adult human who passes enough tests in this list that the majority of people would call them a woman.
Etc., etc.
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant. Someone who's otherwise a woman but can't become pregnant would be described as "a woman who can't become pregnant", not as not literally being a woman. It doesn't work that way for transwomen either. Someone who doesn't want them in women's bathrooms but doesn't care too much about pronouns would never say "transwomen are women, but they are women who should be kept out of women's bathrooms". People don't make distinctions that way.
If you only like onions in soup, you aren't going to claim "I like all onions, but I define onions as a plant of genus Allium cepa that is located in a soup".
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
The whole point of using the word "women" for trans people is that using the word is supposed to go with treating them like regular women in all possible ways. That's the exact opposite of your examples. Trans supporters want to blur the distinction, using the term "woman" broadly. Using "woman" to mean only someone who's fertile, or borne a child, or married, etc. is the opposite of that; it narrows the category of "woman".
I feel like you're missing the point, the bigger and much scarier claim from a trans perspective is the acknowledgment that that identity is a tool for the identifier more than it is a property of the identified, thus exposing all the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense as the lie that it is.
"Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
He talks about Fauci here. Hlynka may have been getting these posts up, given that this post largely reads as apologia for Fauci being less-than-maximally honest.
I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.
In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.
The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.
I'm reminded of the recent effortpost about Saltburn reading near the end here. Journalists, for all the noble aspirations of the profession, seem no more immune to the cycle of vindictive popularity than the rest of us lowly humans.
Also, just to pick out a quote that jumped out at me:
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.
Alas, as online fandom has shown, randos on the Internet are a good enough substitute for journalists in this regard.
Can't say I was too impressed by this one. When you leverage your influence to take a stance on something, it's fair game to attack your influence. Journalists absolutely should be applying a higher level of scrutiny to people who speak out. If there's a problem there it's jourbalists' bias, not their methods.
It feels like vintage Scott to me. He is loudly and explicitly calling bullshit on a clearly false proposition. I didn't read him as making a huge value judgement here. To be a good Bayesian, you have to reason properly about the process that produces the evidence. People who don't operate on the presumption that the media "targets" people are going to be systematically wrong.
It feels like vintage Scott to me. He is loudly and explicitly calling bullshit on a clearly false proposition.
Is it "clearly false" though?
I'm reminded of a speech our Company VP made at our year-end/new-years all hands to the effect of "science" is 90% bullshit because scientists can just make shit up and no one but another scientist (who's probably their friend, colleague, and/or engaged in the same sort of chicanery) will ever be in a position to call them on it. Engineering is where the real challenge and intellectual rigor lies because any lay-man can tell look and tell you if the bridge stands, or the airplane flies.
If Claudine Gay was targeted, what does that change? If Scott genuinely feels that tribal Affiliation and political expediency should trump intellectual rigor, let us see him make that argument.
Scott isn't arguing against rigor. He's arguing that it's a problem when rigor is applied if and only if the subject is on the outs. I am confident that he would have no objection had Dr. Gay been banished to the eighth circle before she got famous.
The "clearly false" bit is journalists insisting that it's about ethics in games journalism they are only interested in rigor, certainly not politics, and don't dare suggest otherwise:
[Journalists] do not sit around thinking about how they’re going to “get” people they write about, and when subjects think they do, it’s more a reflection of the subject’s self-perception (or self-importance) and, sometimes, a sprinkling of unadulterated narcissism.
What value that rigor has is in that it applies equally and brooks no excuses, IE in that it is rigorous. Arguing that rigor shouldn't apply under certain circumstances or to only certain parties IS arguing against rigor.
Yes, a basic level of academic scrutiny ought to have been applied twenty years ago. Since it wasn’t, choosing the right moment to apply it is not rigorous, but opportunistic. Maybe it’s still the right choice—“that which can be destroyed by the truth should be”—but anyone choosing this moment shouldn’t get to act innocent. The “clearly false proposition” is that this is rigorous, apolitical, common decency.
Compare the last time a statute of limitations was in the news. Would you believe someone who insisted that New York’s sexual assault law wasn’t politicized? That changing the rules wasn’t trying to “get” particular targets?
He's arguing that it's a problem when rigor is applied if and only if the subject is on the outs.
The problem with this is that, as Gay proves, there's no single "on the outs." There are many different groups constantly looking for targets. I think this is good, and a world where they did not look for targets would be worse. His critique is only relevant in fields where there is only one group in power, and then the issue is not that that group is looking for targets, it's that that group has all the power.
Scott isn't arguing against rigor. He's arguing that it's a problem when rigor is applied if and only if the subject is on the outs. I am confident that he would have no objection had Dr. Gay been banished to the eighth circle before she got famous.
The dynamic is real, but Gay is a horrible example, part of the issue with her is that she should have never been hired in the first place. If someone is practicing medicine without a license, but nobody notices until he shoots his mouth off and causes a controversy, are we then supposed to allow him to continue to practice in the name of "not applying rigor only when the subject is on the outs"?
If that VP has never sat down at a CDR and thought "these engineers are talking out of their asses," then wow, he's got some talented employees.
The defense industry is littered with projects that went over-budget in order to under-deliver. Software engineering wrote the book on feature creep. Tech startups scramble to get a functional demo together so they can pull enough cash to fund the other 80% of development. And no one involved in any of these wants to admit it!
It's just that in the world of real money and real deadlines, there is a continuum of "calling them on it." At the extreme end are the lawsuits and the bankruptcies. But at the other, there's a series of reminders that sunk costs aren't always a fallacy.
Any layman can tell you that the airplane flies. What he can't tell you is if it is worth $109M or only $100M. If it complies with every term of a thousand-page contract. If an extension to update one or two of those terms will actually achieve anything. If, in ten years, USMC techs will be cursing his name for signing off on the sick VTOL thruster.
Engineering involves challenge and rigor because the problems are fundamentally not easy. Knowing exactly how they'll turn out hard isn't easy, either. It's a collaborative process of dozens or hundreds of people collecting estimates, reports, designs, results, and bills into a coherent product. All of that can apply to science, too. When everything goes right, it does. On the other...well, sometimes someone just earns a layoff.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
netstack 10mo ago·Edited 10mo ago
The point is not that engineers don't occasionally over-promise and under-deliver. The point is that unlike people who work in science or academia, they actually have to deliver.
ETA: in short, what @SnapDragon said, the critical difference between a scientist, an academic, and an engineer is that unlike the other two, the engineer actually has to actually produce something of value if he/she wants to keep their job.
And that's the point. That's the one, last, important step that (much of) science is lacking. Have you built something that works AT ALL? It's not that engineering doesn't suck. It's that modern "science" is even worse, because so much of its product (random unreplicated research papers, written on esoteric subjects, skimmed by friendly peer reviewers and read by nobody else) never needs to pass that final filter.
I read it as saying "smearing is irrelevant" when I find it very relevant. More to the point, in the real world, where arguments are not usually logical propositions, I'm a big believer in ad hominem. I'm a lot less likely to look into someone's theory of quantum gravity if it turns out their phd was faked. Ad hominem is a very useful heuristic.
The media targetting people is a separate thing and has a lot more to do with media bias than with the smearing/sniffing out personal details itself.
The false proposition is "journalists don't target hitpieces against people they don't like".
I guess I'm not big on the plagiarism train because I already assumed Gay's academic credentials were hogwash. From [Wikipedia:]
"Claudine Gay (born 1970)[2][3] is an American political scientist and academic administrator who was the 30th president of Harvard University, and is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard.[4] Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.[5]"
This isn't quite the same as saying someone is "The L. Ron Hubbard Professor of homeopathy and psychoanalysis", but it's pretty darn close. I don't care if a homeopathy journal has a plagiarism scandal. That doesn't affect my opinion of it's accuracy.
I don't care if a homeopathy journal has a plagiarism scandal. That doesn't affect my opinion of it's accuracy.
You're already sold on homeopathy being bad, but a plagiarism scandal is absolute gold if other methods of convincing others that the journal is bunk have failed.
The false proposition is "journalists don't target hitpieces against people they don't like".
Well I'll definitely agree that's a false proposition, but to me the article seemed more focused on "hitpieces are bad" than on "actually journalists do write hitpieces."
If it’s fair game, then why were Spiers and others so eager to deny it?
Undermining opponents’ credibility is effective. It’s also considered gauche. Perhaps even a sign that one is acting in bad faith! This is not a coincidence; as Scott points out, that sort of strategy is symmetric. Agnostic to the truth.
For professionals who like to portray themselves as noble truth-seekers, that’s an awkward position. The mythos of American journalism is complicated, but I really do think it leans into “speaking truth to power.” Call it a legacy of the Cold War. The reflex, then, is to insist that whatever one is doing—no, it’s very cool and very countercultural.
I like it when that’s actually true. I’d like it to win out over the tribalistic, partisan allure of scoring easy points. If that means we don’t learn about the sex lives and past transgressions of people we’d never otherwise have met…so be it.
If it’s fair game, then why were Spiers and others so eager to deny it?
Mainly because most journalists are on one side of the equation. So long as smearing is only a tool the left can use against the right, smearing should be defended. The thing is that "smearing" isn't really the problem here, the problem is that the smearing only goes one way (due to the political distribution of journalists) and there's nobody in the other corner to defend you or counter-smear.
This is not a coincidence; as Scott points out, that sort of strategy is symmetric. Agnostic to the truth.
I think this is where our disagreement lies. I find personal details highly relevant to the value of someone's opinion. A professor who plagiarizes should not be given the same respect as one who does not. A philosopher who cheats on their spouse, likewise. Virtue clings to virtue; the more someone has their life in order the more attention I will pay to what they have to say.
[Journalists] do not sit around thinking about how they’re going to “get” people they write about, and when subjects think they do, it’s more a reflection of the subject’s self-perception (or self-importance) and, sometimes, a sprinkling of unadulterated narcissism.
That’s defensive, right? Spiers doesn’t want to be described as “get”ting people, so she’s denying that someone might have done it to Scott. (But if they did, then it’s all his fault…)
The category of smearing can’t be legitimized. If it were, then Rufo and others would get some of that legitimacy. More importantly, journalism would lose a lot of prestige. I think journalists would be largely unhappy with a world where media outlets were best known for publishing salacious personal details, even if all those details were always 100% true. It’s strictly less classy than the stereotype of hard-hitting investigative journalism.
Many things, such as Scott's doxxing, rape accusation investigations, and reporting on a politician's track record, qualify as "smearing."
Smearing is OK if it's accurate, and there aren't other broader issues such as rampant selection bias targetting only one side of an issue.
I think Spiers would disagree with #1, and basically say that if her side does it, it's hard-hitting investigative journalism, while if the other side does it, it's smearing. She'll rationalize this as being about intent--her side wants what's best for everyone; her opponents are solely motivated by pure malice--which is why she says it's ridiculous to suggest that her side's smears are actually smears.
Scott, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be aware of #2. He sees that smears can be used to portray only one side of a story, and therefore smearing is always bad. The thing is, the reason that's bad is because it's only portraying one side of the story, not because it's smearing specifically.
I think if we lived in a world where everyone suffered the degree of scrutiny that heterodox progressives suffer, Scott wouldn't have much of an issue with his treatment.
This is only semi-related to the article, but I can see an argument in the comments about how "Claudine Gay job was mostly administrative and scientific/academic credentials are not that important".
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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
I'm going to make a different critique than most people, here :
This is hilariously naive. It's not just or even mostly journalists, in the same way that a pressure wave isn't just or even mostly any one particle.
There's a poster on tumblr named brazenautomaton, who's a bit of a mad artist in all of the best ways. One of those are his rants -- and I use the term as a compliment -- on popularity. I can't find the best one of the top of my head, but as a good example:
Yes, this is clinical depression, though see Scott re: Malcolm Muggeridge. It's also non-falsifiable: anyone who can be punished can't be popular, and anyone who is popular can't be punished. But it's also a pattern that exists.
Scott knows this, more intimately than most. It's not like that's even a one-off! But I can play examples of the confessed rapist you could not even discuss the 'allegations' of over at RPGnet, until they annoyed someone enough to get booted, and then the deluge. I can give examples as severe as alleged grooming and as minor as 'appropriated her own culture' in the furry fandom. Nor is it specific to online or the left: the pastor everyone loves until, posthumously, it turns out everyone had a horror story about is trope with a lot of recently-live examples. Nor it is about big stuff: the Friday Fun thread conversation about Palworld has some steelmen, but it's almost certainly downstream of some popular people wanting to start wars over AIgen.
You and I will do it too. It's hard to care for what's real, rather than what's talked about and what the people around you find important.
Maybe Scott doesn't think it necessary to say, maybe he knows that one of the big rules for being on the Inside is that you don't mention that there's an Inside.
But it's not just the journalists doing this, and I'm increasingly convinced that they're neither driving the stampede nor surfing the crowd.
I don’t agree with the second quote. I think the performance of wokeness is a fashionable belief that they tend to use either to get attention and praise or to distance themselves from the ordinary person who must hold more pragmatic ideals about themselves and the world. He’s in a sense showing off his position by arguing that life should be made harder for people like himself. He does this because as a successful entertainer, he doesn’t have to worry about DEI or similar programs because he isn’t applying for the kinds of jobs that are subject to those programs. Even in the acting community, they’re not going to skip a major star because he’s the wrong color. Casting a star means several million from the jump. It might affect more junior actors because they don’t yet have his draw, but he’s already got his.
This seems to be how these sorts of luxury beliefs work. They’re impractical, often doing real damage to lower class people who naively believe them and follow the advice. And rarely do those espousing those beliefs practice them in their own lives. I’ve yet to see any actor turn down a role to give it to a minority or a woman. It’s more often that they insist that others give up theirs to others. They don’t want to give up their roles, they want you to give up your promotion.
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He seems incorrect regarding Brunet, as he seems to have published critiques of Gay before she became Harvard president.
I think someone mentioned this in the comments, yeah.
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I don't actually know what point Scott is making. No one cared about Claudine Gay until she made a fool of herself in front of congress. And Rufo demonstrating he can take scalps is explicitly why he did it. But that doesn't make it wrong- she did commit plagiarism, and it is an offense that is supposedly a big deal in academia.
I think he forgot to put another one of these at the end maybe. Everything he wrote here is either obvious or sad.
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I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.
This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
I’m forgetting the timeframe - was TheMotte.org operational when Scott was doxxed/had to disavow it?
Isn’t the meta-rule for a more global truth more geared for this? The example you give to stay the light of truth is just more friend-enemy distinction.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
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Scott was never doxxed because his identity was always a single google search away and he didn’t have a problem admitting it in real life. What he wanted to avoid was his patients and employers immediately seeing him as a public figure in a way that affected his day job, which is what the NYT article did.
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The problem is when the Overton window shifts. So what is safe today in a decade will be uncovered as a skeleton.
I mean, plagiarism was also considered a pretty big deal for an academic ten years ago.
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Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison , the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
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I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
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I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant. Someone who's otherwise a woman but can't become pregnant would be described as "a woman who can't become pregnant", not as not literally being a woman. It doesn't work that way for transwomen either. Someone who doesn't want them in women's bathrooms but doesn't care too much about pronouns would never say "transwomen are women, but they are women who should be kept out of women's bathrooms". People don't make distinctions that way.
If you only like onions in soup, you aren't going to claim "I like all onions, but I define onions as a plant of genus Allium cepa that is located in a soup".
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
The whole point of using the word "women" for trans people is that using the word is supposed to go with treating them like regular women in all possible ways. That's the exact opposite of your examples. Trans supporters want to blur the distinction, using the term "woman" broadly. Using "woman" to mean only someone who's fertile, or borne a child, or married, etc. is the opposite of that; it narrows the category of "woman".
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I feel like you're missing the point, the bigger and much scarier claim from a trans perspective is the acknowledgment that that identity is a tool for the identifier more than it is a property of the identified, thus exposing all the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense as the lie that it is.
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I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
He talks about Fauci here. Hlynka may have been getting these posts up, given that this post largely reads as apologia for Fauci being less-than-maximally honest.
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I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.
In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.
The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.
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I'm reminded of the recent effortpost about Saltburn reading near the end here. Journalists, for all the noble aspirations of the profession, seem no more immune to the cycle of vindictive popularity than the rest of us lowly humans.
Also, just to pick out a quote that jumped out at me:
Alas, as online fandom has shown, randos on the Internet are a good enough substitute for journalists in this regard.
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Can't say I was too impressed by this one. When you leverage your influence to take a stance on something, it's fair game to attack your influence. Journalists absolutely should be applying a higher level of scrutiny to people who speak out. If there's a problem there it's jourbalists' bias, not their methods.
It feels like vintage Scott to me. He is loudly and explicitly calling bullshit on a clearly false proposition. I didn't read him as making a huge value judgement here. To be a good Bayesian, you have to reason properly about the process that produces the evidence. People who don't operate on the presumption that the media "targets" people are going to be systematically wrong.
Is it "clearly false" though?
I'm reminded of a speech our Company VP made at our year-end/new-years all hands to the effect of "science" is 90% bullshit because scientists can just make shit up and no one but another scientist (who's probably their friend, colleague, and/or engaged in the same sort of chicanery) will ever be in a position to call them on it. Engineering is where the real challenge and intellectual rigor lies because any lay-man can tell look and tell you if the bridge stands, or the airplane flies.
If Claudine Gay was targeted, what does that change? If Scott genuinely feels that tribal Affiliation and political expediency should trump intellectual rigor, let us see him make that argument.
Oh, on a separate note.
Scott isn't arguing against rigor. He's arguing that it's a problem when rigor is applied if and only if the subject is on the outs. I am confident that he would have no objection had Dr. Gay been banished to the eighth circle before she got famous.
The "clearly false" bit is journalists insisting that
it's about ethics in games journalismthey are only interested in rigor, certainly not politics, and don't dare suggest otherwise:Corporate_needs_you_to_find_the_differences.png
What value that rigor has is in that it applies equally and brooks no excuses, IE in that it is rigorous. Arguing that rigor shouldn't apply under certain circumstances or to only certain parties IS arguing against rigor.
That cuts both ways.
Yes, a basic level of academic scrutiny ought to have been applied twenty years ago. Since it wasn’t, choosing the right moment to apply it is not rigorous, but opportunistic. Maybe it’s still the right choice—“that which can be destroyed by the truth should be”—but anyone choosing this moment shouldn’t get to act innocent. The “clearly false proposition” is that this is rigorous, apolitical, common decency.
Compare the last time a statute of limitations was in the news. Would you believe someone who insisted that New York’s sexual assault law wasn’t politicized? That changing the rules wasn’t trying to “get” particular targets?
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The problem with this is that, as Gay proves, there's no single "on the outs." There are many different groups constantly looking for targets. I think this is good, and a world where they did not look for targets would be worse. His critique is only relevant in fields where there is only one group in power, and then the issue is not that that group is looking for targets, it's that that group has all the power.
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The dynamic is real, but Gay is a horrible example, part of the issue with her is that she should have never been hired in the first place. If someone is practicing medicine without a license, but nobody notices until he shoots his mouth off and causes a controversy, are we then supposed to allow him to continue to practice in the name of "not applying rigor only when the subject is on the outs"?
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If that VP has never sat down at a CDR and thought "these engineers are talking out of their asses," then wow, he's got some talented employees.
The defense industry is littered with projects that went over-budget in order to under-deliver. Software engineering wrote the book on feature creep. Tech startups scramble to get a functional demo together so they can pull enough cash to fund the other 80% of development. And no one involved in any of these wants to admit it!
It's just that in the world of real money and real deadlines, there is a continuum of "calling them on it." At the extreme end are the lawsuits and the bankruptcies. But at the other, there's a series of reminders that sunk costs aren't always a fallacy.
Any layman can tell you that the airplane flies. What he can't tell you is if it is worth $109M or only $100M. If it complies with every term of a thousand-page contract. If an extension to update one or two of those terms will actually achieve anything. If, in ten years, USMC techs will be cursing his name for signing off on the sick VTOL thruster.
Engineering involves challenge and rigor because the problems are fundamentally not easy. Knowing exactly how they'll turn out hard isn't easy, either. It's a collaborative process of dozens or hundreds of people collecting estimates, reports, designs, results, and bills into a coherent product. All of that can apply to science, too. When everything goes right, it does. On the other...well, sometimes someone just earns a layoff.
The point is not that engineers don't occasionally over-promise and under-deliver. The point is that unlike people who work in science or academia, they actually have to deliver.
ETA: in short, what @SnapDragon said, the critical difference between a scientist, an academic, and an engineer is that unlike the other two, the engineer actually has to actually produce something of value if he/she wants to keep their job.
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And that's the point. That's the one, last, important step that (much of) science is lacking. Have you built something that works AT ALL? It's not that engineering doesn't suck. It's that modern "science" is even worse, because so much of its product (random unreplicated research papers, written on esoteric subjects, skimmed by friendly peer reviewers and read by nobody else) never needs to pass that final filter.
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What's the false proposition?
I read it as saying "smearing is irrelevant" when I find it very relevant. More to the point, in the real world, where arguments are not usually logical propositions, I'm a big believer in ad hominem. I'm a lot less likely to look into someone's theory of quantum gravity if it turns out their phd was faked. Ad hominem is a very useful heuristic.
The media targetting people is a separate thing and has a lot more to do with media bias than with the smearing/sniffing out personal details itself.
The false proposition is "journalists don't target hitpieces against people they don't like".
I guess I'm not big on the plagiarism train because I already assumed Gay's academic credentials were hogwash. From [Wikipedia:]
This isn't quite the same as saying someone is "The L. Ron Hubbard Professor of homeopathy and psychoanalysis", but it's pretty darn close. I don't care if a homeopathy journal has a plagiarism scandal. That doesn't affect my opinion of it's accuracy.
You're already sold on homeopathy being bad, but a plagiarism scandal is absolute gold if other methods of convincing others that the journal is bunk have failed.
Well I'll definitely agree that's a false proposition, but to me the article seemed more focused on "hitpieces are bad" than on "actually journalists do write hitpieces."
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If it’s fair game, then why were Spiers and others so eager to deny it?
Undermining opponents’ credibility is effective. It’s also considered gauche. Perhaps even a sign that one is acting in bad faith! This is not a coincidence; as Scott points out, that sort of strategy is symmetric. Agnostic to the truth.
For professionals who like to portray themselves as noble truth-seekers, that’s an awkward position. The mythos of American journalism is complicated, but I really do think it leans into “speaking truth to power.” Call it a legacy of the Cold War. The reflex, then, is to insist that whatever one is doing—no, it’s very cool and very countercultural.
I like it when that’s actually true. I’d like it to win out over the tribalistic, partisan allure of scoring easy points. If that means we don’t learn about the sex lives and past transgressions of people we’d never otherwise have met…so be it.
Mainly because most journalists are on one side of the equation. So long as smearing is only a tool the left can use against the right, smearing should be defended. The thing is that "smearing" isn't really the problem here, the problem is that the smearing only goes one way (due to the political distribution of journalists) and there's nobody in the other corner to defend you or counter-smear.
I think this is where our disagreement lies. I find personal details highly relevant to the value of someone's opinion. A professor who plagiarizes should not be given the same respect as one who does not. A philosopher who cheats on their spouse, likewise. Virtue clings to virtue; the more someone has their life in order the more attention I will pay to what they have to say.
That’s defensive, right? Spiers doesn’t want to be described as “get”ting people, so she’s denying that someone might have done it to Scott. (But if they did, then it’s all his fault…)
The category of smearing can’t be legitimized. If it were, then Rufo and others would get some of that legitimacy. More importantly, journalism would lose a lot of prestige. I think journalists would be largely unhappy with a world where media outlets were best known for publishing salacious personal details, even if all those details were always 100% true. It’s strictly less classy than the stereotype of hard-hitting investigative journalism.
Agreed.
I believe that:
Many things, such as Scott's doxxing, rape accusation investigations, and reporting on a politician's track record, qualify as "smearing."
Smearing is OK if it's accurate, and there aren't other broader issues such as rampant selection bias targetting only one side of an issue.
I think Spiers would disagree with #1, and basically say that if her side does it, it's hard-hitting investigative journalism, while if the other side does it, it's smearing. She'll rationalize this as being about intent--her side wants what's best for everyone; her opponents are solely motivated by pure malice--which is why she says it's ridiculous to suggest that her side's smears are actually smears.
Scott, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be aware of #2. He sees that smears can be used to portray only one side of a story, and therefore smearing is always bad. The thing is, the reason that's bad is because it's only portraying one side of the story, not because it's smearing specifically.
I think if we lived in a world where everyone suffered the degree of scrutiny that heterodox progressives suffer, Scott wouldn't have much of an issue with his treatment.
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This is only semi-related to the article, but I can see an argument in the comments about how "Claudine Gay job was mostly administrative and scientific/academic credentials are not that important".
You think the mayor tells the schools how to teach kids or health department how to do it's job or sanitation how to pick up trash? But, get elected and suddenly they know police work.
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