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Notes -
Another day, another Guardian hit job.
The title reads "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back"
Take a moment to form a hypothesis about what kind of group this could be. The KKK? Some fringe right-wingers? An Israeli lobby group?
Turns out their target of the day is Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is running lesswrong, which is a grandparent of themotte.
I personally have only heard of lightcone in context of TracingWoodgrains' writings on the Nonlinear investigation conducted by Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka. (TIL that this is a name different from the handle of a former motte mod. In my defense, I did not read a lot from either of them. Blame my racist brain.)
Of course Trace's critique could not be more different from what the Guardian writes about lightcone.
They start off by linking the NYT article on Scott Alexander. I think it is the one where they tried to doxx him. Apparently the NYT does not like my adblocker or something, the only think I get (besides a picture which indicates that the NYT designers have way too much time on their hand) is the text "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space -- Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared." -- I guess that is one way to phrase it. Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again, not that anyone cares (but it's the thought that counts).
Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!
Apparently they found no dirt on Eliezer, which to me seems like a failure of investigative journalism. EY has written a lot more than the six lines Cardinal Richelieu would have required.
Then they come to the "extreme figures" present at Manifest 2024.
Jonathan Anomaly is apparently pro eugenics. Never heard of him. However, given that anything from "select embryos which do not have a genetic disease" to "encourage smart and successful people to have kids" can be called eugenics, and given that the article would cite the most damning quotation, I will assume that he is not a Nazi.
Razib Khan is a
journalistscientist and writer who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.I vaguely recall Stephen Hsu being discussed on slatestarcodex and from what I remember my conclusion was that he got cancelled for a lack of ideological purity -- calling for research into increasing human intelligence is not acceptable, and talking about race differences is even less acceptable.
Brian Chau is apparently an e/acc and thus probably the most controversial person from my personal point of view. But then, engaging in honest discussion with advocates of other positions is generally a good thing, so if Lighthaven is more inclusive than Aella's birthday party, I am kinda fine with it.
Of course, the narrative would not be complete without the specter of antisemitism, here in the form of a quote "[Hsu is] often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people [...]". I think the rationalist community is a bad place for antisemites for the same reason why the marathon Olympics are a bad place for white supremacists.
In the end, the plug for this story -- lightcone having received money from SBF -- has no bearing on the bulk of the article, which is about how icky these ratsphere nerds are. It does not matter if SBF donated to the Save Drowning Puppies Foundation or to the Feed Puppies to Alligators Alliance -- either the donations can be kept or not.
Edit: fixed Khan's profession.
Real mask-off moment from the author on Twitter:
Spoken like a fox on Rottnest Island. Of course this guy took the flimsiest possible excuse to list the worst things people he doesn’t like have ever said. That’s just “responsible journalism”. What you never get from these kinds of articles is any sort of intellectual curiosity about the ideas in question.
"Don't be this kind of person" is really a skeevy way to put it (in my opinion).
He justifies his interference in their activities not because they've impacted him in any way, they've not directed a single iota of attention towards him and thus there's no impetus for 'smoke' in the first place. It's not a rap beef where they dissed his fashion sense or cursed his dead mother and thus justified a response.
But oh, they're the 'kind of person' who invites such scrutiny. Isn't it so handy-dandy that he's the one who gets to describe what 'kind of person' they are and the audience is supposed to just assume that BECAUSE he states this that they are indeed worthy targets of his uninvited ire. And if they disagree with how he characterizes them, that is further proof that they're the 'kind of person' who needed to be called out.
I'd also guess that what he means by "kind of person" is almost literally just "someone who believes things that I find offensive" and so really he has no external reason for it, and he sees this as perfect justification for swinging the hatchet their way.
These are the sort of moments, I've learned, where being a quokka doesn't quite pay off, and it would be useful to have the resources available to hit back hard enough to convince this person that it is indeed not worth the smoke but also doing it in such a way that you're not retroactively justifying the hit piece itself.
But I'm also inclined to inflict the greatest insult an enemy can suffer. To be ignored.
OK. Let's try to put our "recovering quokka" title to the test and say any response is on the table. Let's also pretend all resources are available to me. What's your solution?
It sounds to me like it's wishful thinking and cope.
First pass?
Just hire some research pros to dig into the background of any journos involved in the piece in question with the explicit goal of discrediting them, embarrassing them, or getting them fired.
Find any embarrassing or potentially criminal behavior they can, find solid evidence or cross reference it enough to prove it, then hire someone to write about it all in the most unkind light manageable. Then find the biggest platform for publication you can, and get ready to publish it.
Give the Journo about 30 minutes to respond to a request for comments before hitting 'publish.'
Kind of like how Christopher Rufo came after University Presidents and managed to get a few of them to resign merely by digging into their past scholarship and running it through a plagiarism detector. If it works on people in such positions of power, it'll work on Journos.
Or if they're too unremarkable and impotent for it to work, then yeah, revert to utterly ignoring them.
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