"the dude" implies I actually personally did it, reached in and deleted his blog or whatever your claim is. "go google" is not much of a response when you made the ill-specified claim.

What was your specific claim? Note that I'm not the only one asking you.

And the important point, since you made it on this post: how does your claim relate in any way to Buterin?

You know exactly why contextualization and characterization is important, don't pretend there isn't merit to such an accusation if indeed true.

still not seeing an actual claim, nor its backing, and still eager to find out how I cancelled Siskind and what it has to do with Buterin!

Okay, direct question: in your own words, what was your relation to the Scott Alexander / NYT interaction, if any?

I was called by Cade Metz well after Siskind pulled the blog - I didn't seek him out - which is why I'm asking how precisely I cancelled him.

(There were arguments for revealing his name in the NYT (mostly that it was already very public, entirely by Siskind's own hand, as directly linked to SSC) and arguments against it (mostly that the NYT is a different scale of publicising it).)

Direct question: do you know what this claim of me cancelling Siskind could mean, since OP doesn't seem able to answer? Also, wtf it has to do with Buterin. Siskind is certainly one of the "There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs" reasoners from first principles rather than knowing things that I was talking about in the linked post, but there are (as I say) a heck of a lot of them.

> Direct question: do you know what this claim of me cancelling Siskind could mean, since OP doesn't seem able to answer?

That I'm not sure on: I wasn't asking to accuse you of cancelling Siskind, I was asking to hear your description of the events. Given you have actual descriptions of events in a chronology, I tend to believe your story on this one.

> Also, wtf it has to do with Buterin.

Well, nothing--it was an ad hominem attack on you by the poster. It's Hacker News: a lot of people here are capitalist to the point of sociopathy, and will defend any money making venture even if it means abandoning ethics, logic, evidence, and/or social acceptability. You lost the respect of most of Hacker News, but have you seen the guys these people respect?

> Siskind is certainly one of the "There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs" reasoners from first principles rather than knowing things that I was talking about in the linked post, but there are (as I say) a heck of a lot of them.

I don't get the feel that Siskind was just reasoning from first principles--that was some of what he did on SSC, but I do think he knew a lot as well (and, given he has a doctorate, there's at least a few people who agree on that point). If anything, I think what I got a lot of from SSC was the opposite: using knowledge to figure out what the first principles are.

As for there being a lot of these guys and a lot of words: I'm not sure why I should care about either of these criticisms.