Here is an example of the NYT prominently writing about how men weren't allowed to leave in March 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/world/europe/ukraine-poland-families-separation.html

I think using the phrase "level 6 lies" when referring to Scott's taxonomy is itself at least a "level 6 lie".

Here, by way of reminder, is Scott's list. (I've abbreviated it a bit; you can find the full version at the far end of trevor's link if you want to check my honesty.) 1. Reasoning well and getting things right. 2. Reasoning well and getting things wrong by bad luck. 3. Reasoning badly through honest incompetence. 4. Reasoning badly because of unconscious bias. 5. Presenting true facts in a way that misleads, "subconsciously and unthinkingly". 6. Presenting true facts in a way that misleads, with deliberate intent to deceive. 7. Saying false things on purpose, in order to deceive.

I claim that "levels" 1-4 in this list are simply, straightforwardly, uncontroversially not lying.

It seems highly dubious to me to call 5 and 6 (5 especially) "lying", but even if we decide to do so Scott's 6 is not in any useful sense the sixth of seven levels of lying, it's at most the second of three levels.

Further, Scott's own position, stated very clearly in the article you linked to, is that things at level 5 are not lies, and that most things at level 6 are not lies either. "I prefer to reserve lying for 7 and the most egregious cases of 6, and to have a pretty high standard for accusing people of this rather than 2/3/4/5."

If you call things at level 6 (and, it seems to me, not in fact "the most egregious cases of 6" in this case) "level 6 lies" then you are not, contrary to your own description, applying "Scott's criteria for media lies".

I suggest that "brazenly lied" also strongly implies something more than "lying by omission".

(Others have already made essentially the same point I am making here, but I think it needs making with more force and details.)

The title of this post is a "level 6 lie" too. I, and I'd guess many if not most of your readers, came here expecting to read some type 7 once we saw "routinely and brazenly lied". Which means you built a false model in our heads, even if you can claim you are technically accurate because Scott Alexander once wrote a thing where NYT's behavior is type 6. Plus I will note that his description of type 6 calls it not technically lying, which rather weakens your claim to be even technically correct.

Your 3 NYT quotes are not lies.

Trevor, I have noticed previously that you keep making allusions to the Ukraine war. I prefer that you have now approached the topic directly, so that I can be more sure that this is something you actually care about, rather than merely a random example to illustrate a more general point. (Sensor Exposure can Compromise the Human Brain in the 2020s [LW · GW]; Helpful examples to get a sense of modern automated manipulation [LW · GW]; An intuitive explanation of the AI influence situation [LW · GW])

In this article, you seem to make two points: about the draft in Ukraine per se, and about its coverage by NYT.

In case of draft, you admit that it is generally not considered a human rights violation... but then you still conclude that is bad if Ukraine does it -- because Ukraine is a hybrid regime; because although Zelensky won with 73% of votes, his approval ratings later dropped a lot; because people in post-communist countries are skeptical towards their governments; and because the war will be long and bloody. (That makes it sound like draft is acceptable only when a highly popular leader in a democratic country intends to fight a short and bloodless war.)

You also link an article discussing draft from the perspective of human rights, but that article actually talks about draft in Russia. That is, it talks about soldiers drafted for an offensive war rather than for the defense of their homeland, and its point is roughly: "before you condemn the attacking soldiers as individuals for the invasion, consider the fact that most of them are probably there unwillingly".

I could agree in general with the principle "draft is bad". I mean, we are talking about 18 years old kids who get a probabilistic death penalty for the sole crime of being born male! But that is not what you are saying. You seem to suggest that the draft in Ukraine is a special kind of evil, as opposed to... a normal draft.

In case of media coverage, you say NYT "routinely and brazenly lied" in the title, but in response to DanielFilan you kinda admit that your actual problem is that NYT does not talk frequently enough about how draft is bad.

In summary, it seems to me that you are twisting facts in order to support your perspective.

This post released evidence, which I was sitting on for almost 1.5 years now, that America's largest newspaper probably went out of their way to conceal information that would embarrass the Ukranian regime and instead printed obvious propaganda in favor of the Western side of the proxy war.

I'm incredibly disappointed with the comments here. This was something we all saw at the time, maybe fewer people than I thought had the professional background needed to recognize it while it was happening, or critical thinking skills either weren't applied or weren't sufficient to see how openly hostile the major media outlets became.

In large part, it was my fault for not tagging it well, resulting in attracting randos who were more interested in the semantics of the title than the object-level arguments of the post, due to inability to understand or evaluate the arguments (or even read them, which seems to be what happened here).

However, I knew that I wouldn't have access to internet and thought that just putting it on the "world modelling" tag would leave it on the front page long enough that people who knew what they were talking about would read it. This was a mistake; every post I've put up so far had more tags, that attracted more specialists over time. Perhaps the "world modelling" tag attracts people who have learned over time to prioritize prediction market wording/resolution criteria over actually modelling reality, a problem that people don't have to worry about as much on dath ilan [? · GW]. I also could have posted larger chunks of the articles rather than assuming that people would click one of the links and take my word that the other two would be similar. 

I should have gotten webarchive links of many more NYT articles in March 2022, sadly at the time these 3 seemed more than extreme enough to illustrate the point, and I didn't think to gather more. If you're investigating media accuracy, make sure to get as many webarchive links as possible at the time, not just the most extreme examples, these firms have basically unlimited leeway to edit articles after the fact and LLMs might soon be involved.

I'm going to write up another copy of this post, making sure to put tons of effort into the title and only use words that nobody could possibly take issue with. It will also fix the actual problem with this post (which only Viliam came close to noticing), which is that I poorly/vaguely described connection between the smoking gun NYT evidence, and its implications for geopolitics and the survival of democracy.