Scott Alexander is back! A lot of my subscribers are from the extended Slate Star Codex community and are here because I’m part of that community. A significant amount of those that aren’t are Marginal Revolution readers or here from Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish, both of which have at least some overlap on the readership Venn diagram with SSC. So most of you probably know this already, but Scott coming back into the light is a big deal.
I think Scott's failure mode is less that he wants everyone to like him and more that he just wants peace. Being in a fight with the NYT is stressful and uncomfortable to him, so he wants to turn down the heat, even if that means unreasonably discounting the odds that NYT writers and editors were politically motivated.
The Triumphant Return of Scott Alexander, Overcorrecting Towards Niceness, and Taking Charitability Too Far
I think Scott's failure mode is less that he wants everyone to like him and more that he just wants peace. Being in a fight with the NYT is stressful and uncomfortable to him, so he wants to turn down the heat, even if that means unreasonably discounting the odds that NYT writers and editors were politically motivated.