Shtetl-Optimized " Blog Archive " No more NYT cooperation: my dog-rape red line

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The Blog of Scott Aaronson

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No more NYT cooperation: my dog-rape red line

Over the years, I’ve written two op-eds for The New York Times about quantum computing, at the NYT editors’ invitation:

Quantum Computing Promises New Insights, Not Supermachines (2011)

Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters (2019)

I’ve also visited the NYT office and helped NYT reporters with numerous stories about quantum computing and beyond. In the wake of Cade Metz’s infamous NYT hatchet job against Scott Alexander and the rationalist community, I resolved no longer to talk to Metz, but it never even occurred to me to extend that to a broader ban against the NYT itself. After all, it’s the friggin’ NYT!

This week, however, Nicholas Kristof—a man who I praised fulsomely in a blog post 20 years ago, for his coverage of the genocide in Darfur—has used the NYT to broadcast the oldest, crudest form of antisemitic libel, accusing the Jews of garishly preposterous crimes (poisoning wells? baking blood into matzo? in this case, training dogs to rape prisoners). As countless others have since pointed out, the sole source for this ludicrous accusation was a Hamas-linked organization called "Euro-Med" that praised the October 7 "martyrs." Kristof’s piece came out the same day an Israeli human rights organization released a major report meticulously documenting Hamas’s mass rapes on October 7–something that did happen—and was apparently designed to neutralize the impact of that report.

While the debunking of Kristof came fast, it wasn’t fast enough: now that antisemitic blood libel (dog libel?) has the Gray Lady’s imprimatur, I expect it to ignite violence against Jews all over the world, and I expect my kids to be less safe. So I hereby announce:

I, Scott Aaronson, member of the National Academy of Sciences, will no longer cooperate with anyone from the NYT on anything—neither quantum computing stories nor anything else—until the NYT, at minimum, formally retracts its dog-rape claim and fires Kristof.

To my friends doing good science and technology writing for NYT: I’m sorry, I hope you understand, and please fight for what’s right within the organization.

I say "bare minimum" because I hope this scandal causes a major reckoning for the NYT as an institution. I don’t know if any libel or other laws were broken, but if they were, I hope Kristof personally and the NYT as a whole get sued for whatever they’re worth.

Luckily, others have already said most of what I would’ve wanted to. Here’s Eli Lake, in a passage that part of me wishes I’d never read:

Let’s start with what is known about the biology of male dogs. Their penises are small and thin. They become erect only when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat. Brandon McMillan, the three-time Emmy-winning host of CBS’s Lucky Dog, who has spent 25 years training animals, told me he had never heard of a dog who was trained to rape a human being and doubted this was possible.

“When a female is in heat, the pheromones released carry it to the male canine,” McMillan said. “That’s how they reproduce and the miracle happens. I don’t see how you would train a dog to do that. The dog has to get turned on, for lack of a better word.”

On the NYT’s "vetting process" (or lack thereof), here’s comedian Jeff Maurer:

Imagine that you’re a fact checker or editor at The New York Times. You know damn well that you’ve nabbed a lifeboat while most of your field is being picked apart by hagfish at the bottom of the North Atlantic. If you’re a lowly fact-checker, you might be in your 20s and desperate to rationalize your choice to enter a field that might as well be buggy repair. I‘ve had similar gigs and been in similar environments; I feel like I can get in these peoples’ heads. And that’s why I’m convinced that the dog claim should have made things easier for the fact checkers.

One day, Nicholas Kristof — the award winning columnist who has been with the Times since it was Farmer Sulzberger’s New Amsterdam Seed Catalogue — comes to you, the lowly fact checker. He’s working on a big piece, and it’s scorching hot: It’s sexual assault plus Israel/Palestine, which is like detonating a nuclear weapon inside a volcano. You know it will be very tough to say “I don’t find this source credible” or “we can’t run that without more substantiation”. And that’s true even before we consider that you probably run in a social circle in which Israel is thought of as a substantially-more-evil version of The Borg Collective from Star Trek (which is why they have those vaporizing weapons).

But you do notice that Kristof’s...