The NYT's original pitch was interest in how Scott Alexander warned early about the coronavirus pandemic and urged mask-wearing before it was standard advice.
Mixed Partly true and partly false in roughly equal measure.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
What would count as true or false
The claim is that the NYT's stated pitch was as described; it does not claim the pitch was sincere. Judged as of 2021-02-14. True: records (the reporter's outreach, accounts by Scott or others, or NYT statements) show the reporter first described the story as being about how Scott or his blog community warned early about COVID-19 and urged mask-wearing before official advice. Mostly true: the pitch was about early COVID warnings, but a detail (for example the masks) is not confirmed. Mixed: the pitch was partly about COVID and partly about something else. Mostly false: COVID was a minor part of the stated pitch. False: the pitch was about something else entirely.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 Astral Codex Ten Podcast: NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog Astral Codex Ten Podcast (libsyn), audio reading of Scott Alexander's post · 23 June 2020 Own record
“He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation.”
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E2 Silicon Valley's Safe Space The New York Times (Cade Metz), copy hosted at pdf.stafforini.com · 13 February 2021
“hoping to get his views on the Rationalist way and its effect on Silicon Valley”
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E3 The Slate Star Codex saga proves a new blasphemy code is emerging among liberals New Statesman · 24 February 2021
“Metz allegedly led him to believe that the focus would be on Alexander’s prescient warnings about Covid 19.”
Reasoning
Scott Alexander's own June 2020 account (E1) said the reporter described a piece about the blog as an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and about how it was ahead of the curve on aspects of the coronavirus. It does not mention masks. The NYT article itself (E2) says the reporter approached Alexander hoping to get his views on the Rationalist way and its effect on Silicon Valley. A New Statesman commentary (E3) says Metz "allegedly" framed the story around the early Covid warnings, also without mentioning masks. Taken together, the stated pitch appears to have been partly about COVID and partly about the tech community, and the mask detail is not confirmed.
Cite this claim
Scott Alexander, “The NYT's original pitch was interest in how Scott Alexander warned early about the coronavirus pandemic and urged mask-wearing before it was standard advice.” (said 14 February 2021). Verdict: mixed. Reliability API, claim c_18c8837286e3, method 0.1.0+8bea457b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_18c8837286e3
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Scott Alexander
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Mostly true
“Reader Nikita Sokolsky has completed his work getting some extra Fatima documents from Portugal and translating them into English.”
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Resolved true
“Rob Ennals, who made this year’s book review contest site, has gathered the reviews from earlier years into epubs here.”
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Resolved true
“There’s a good interview with Skarbek in last month’s issue of Asterisk, I think it will be online shortly.”
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Resolved true
“Things felt so fuzzy that I (partly) abandoned my usual clear-resolution probabilistic predictions for total guesses.”
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Resolved true
“Also last month, I suggested Manifold Markets have a loan feature to help boost investment in long-term markets.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.