Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Your daily reminder that "in a nutshell, so-and-so said..." should raise flags, even when you're reading that line in an ostensibly reputable publicationhttps://twitter.com/balajis/status/1187151642572906497 …

IMO, the job of a journalist, when writing about any person, is to produce work that their subject, when acting in good faith, **may agree or vehemently disagree with re: the conclusions drawn, but does not consider themselves mischaracterized by.**

Of course, not everyone is acting in good faith. But some contexts are easier to evaluate than others: a talk given to a relatively large audience, transcribed, etc. vs. e.g. a private conversation. FWIW, I fully believe Balaji to be a deeply sincere person across the board.

The important thing is that the typical reader ought to be able to very easily make the distinction between what the subject has said or done, and the writer's interpretation of those statements or actions. This is an absolutely sacred line, IMO.

Did you feel like "secession" was an unfair way to summarize Balaji's proposal? “build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology" I went into the article expecting that to be a misrepresentation (because Anand does that a lot) but it seemed apt?

I think an exodus is meaningfully different from a secession, with one implying a large movement of willing actors & the other implying an exit by something that is or akin to a state, with presumably far from total buy-in. The connotations are appropriately worse for the latter