I wouldn’t know anything about the thread, as it’s impossible for me to read without a twitter account. Yet another reason why the site is trash.
But by all means, go on generating content for a bigoted fascist who will use everything you write to increase engagement with his platform and give it undeserved credibility and $$$.
(And no, I won’t block you.)
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.
I’d really like to know the back story on this interview too. I realize weirdness isn’t exactly distinctive when it comes to rationalists, but Zack is in a league of his own.
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I’m probably not saying anything you didn’t already know, but Vox’s “Future Perfect” section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They’ve also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it’s just taken for granted that he’s some kind of visionary genius.
Non-paywall link.
You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.
I used to be more sanguine about people’s ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.
Happy Valentine’s Day everybody!
It’s kind of fascinating how rotten the “New Atheist” movement turned out to be. Whether it’s Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it’s no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.
I haven’t read Scott’s comment sections in a long time, so I don’t know if they’re all this bad, but that one is a total dumpster fire. It’s a hive of Trump stans, anti-woke circle-jerkers, scientific racists, and self-proclaimed Motte posters. It certainly reveals the present demographic and political profile of his audience.
Scott has always tried to hide his reactionary beliefs, but I’ve noticed he’s letting the mask slip a bit more lately.
It’s absolutely bizarre that Scott labels Rufo a journalist. Rufo is a right-wing activist who has only ever worked for right-wing think tanks. He first came to my attention as a part of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based “think tank” best known for promoting creationism.
Then again, Scott has previously said that he’s impressed by the arguments of creationist Michael Behe, another Discovery Institute lackey.
Glowfic feels like a writing format designed in a lab to be the perfect channel for Eliezer’s literary diarrhea.
My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.
Exactly. It would be easier to take Scott’s argument more seriously if it wasn’t coming from the very same person who previously labeled as unstable and thereby non-credible a woman who accused his rationalist buddies of sexual harrassment – a woman who, by the way, went on to die by suicide.
So fuck him and his contrived rationalizations.
Imagine thinking there is actually some identifiable thing called “white culture”. As if a skin color defines a culture.
Yeah, sounds like a Nazi.
I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.
Only an EA could take seriously someone who approvingly cites journals like “Mankind Quarterly” and crackpots like Richard Lynn, Steven Hsu, Jonathan Anomaly, and Emil Kirkegaard.
The author considers himself a “rationalist of the right” and a libertarian who enjoys Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander. He describes ten tenets of right-wing rationalism, 8 of which are simply rephrasings of various ideas promoted by scientific racists. It would be an understatement to say this guy is monomaniacally focused on a single topic.
(Oh, and he publishes his brain farts on Substack. Because of course he does.)
She seems to do this kind of thing a lot.
According to a comment, she apparently claimed on Facebook that, due to her post, “around 75% of people changed their minds based on the evidence!”
After someone questioned how she knew it was 75%:
Update: I changed the wording of the post to now state: 𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻*
And the * at the bottom says: Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio. And of course this is not proof that everybody changed their mind. There’s a lot of reasons to upvote the post or down vote it. However, I do think it’s a good indicator.
She then goes on to talk about how she made the Facebook post private because she didn’t think it should be reposted in places where it’s not appropriate to lie and make things up.
Clown. Car.
What a bunch of monochromatic, hyper-privileged, rich-kid grifters. It’s like a nonstop frat party for rich nerds. The photographs and captions make it obvious:
The gang going for a hiking adventure with AI safety leaders. Alice/Chloe were surrounded by a mix of uplifting, ambitious entrepreneurs and a steady influx of top people in the AI safety space.
The gang doing pool yoga. Later, we did pool karaoke. Iguanas everywhere.
Alice and Kat meeting in “The Nest” in our jungle Airbnb.
Alice using her surfboard as a desk, co-working with Chloe’s boyfriend.
The gang celebrating… something. I don’t know what. We celebrated everything.
Alice and Chloe working in a hot tub. Hot tub meetings are a thing at Nonlinear. We try to have meetings in the most exciting places. Kat’s favorite: a cave waterfall.
Alice’s “desk” even comes with a beach doggo friend!
Working by the villa pool. Watch for monkeys!
Sunset dinner with friends… every day!
These are not serious people. Effective altruism in a nutshell.
Until a month ago, TW was the long-time researcher for “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast hosted by Katie ‘TERF’ Herzog and relentless sealion Jesse Singal.