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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.
I'm not sure what to make of this hostility towards the article. What about it is wrong, exactly?
By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic.
Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences. Even if you always imagined yourself an enlightened rationalist far above the boorish outcasts that, unlike you, must have reached these very same racist conclusions through some dark age anti-rationalist sorcery.
Though I doubt this will lead anywhere, as this sort of reporting is usually just about petty politics and interpersonal relations between the uncool kids from school, I wouldn't mind it actually doing some damage. Why should this group of smarts be exempt from the contempt of mainstream society? They have certainly proven themselves to being no better morally.
It seems like some humbling is in order. After all, the very same 'rationalist sphere' in question has proven time and time again that they stand firmly behind the principles of 'racism bad', 'misogyny bad' and all the rest. By what mechanism do they propose to defend themselves after their better part falls firmly on the wrong side of these things? Like, does it need spelling out to these big brained luminaries of ours? You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology. It doesn't matter how nuanced and detailed your blogpost is. Some wordcel is just going to copy paste your conclusion and now you're no better than the evil racists you spent 15 paragraphs trying to distance yourself from. And you know what? The wordcel is right! You did reach the same conclusion, after all.
I too would love it if rationalists were forced to bite the bullet and say something like "yes, racism (in some senses) is rational". However, I'd say that most of them are simply deliberately silent on these issues because they know that dissenting would wipe out their credibility and force them to become a full-time advocate on an issue that they don't particularly care about. For example, James Damore.
I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues. I commend Zack M. Davis for calling them out on this and being brutally honest, but he has a horse in this race.
Also, what did Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu do wrong? They put their jobs on the line to talk about the truth. They didn't go so far as to explicitly say that racism (in some senses) is fine, but they pull their punches less than anyone who hasn't been banned entirely.
Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?
Zack Davis's posts on LW lay out the case for that in exhaustive detail, though he covers Yudkowsky more than Scott.
The gist of it is that Zack claims that identifying the word "male" with having the Y chromosome is carving reality at its joints, while saying that whoever decides they identify as male should be called male is a strictly worse way of describing reality.
The post implies that EY and Scott kinda agree with the biological definition being more robust in principle, but endorse the trans-favoring position out of political considerations.
I am mostly on board with Scott and EY here, even though I agree with Zack that in theory the chromosome-based definition is more robust. Being willing to die on definitional hills seems stupid. Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen. From that, I could make the argument that the service industry should not refer to male (whatever's definition) customers as Sir unless they are indeed OBE or whatever.
But this is would be extremely stupid. Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it. What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict. Instead, we just swim with the tide.
Contrary to common belief, most interactions of humans in our society are not resulting in common offspring. The utility of tagging humans by whom they could breed with is basically zero (and in any case we would also want to encode fertility information if we were serious about that). Social genders are simply a weird leftover remnant, just like "Sir". We can adapt such words whatever we want them to mean.
Unlike blankly denying the possibility of any HBD because it would be to ugly to be true, calling a trans-man a man has no significant real life or epistemic costs. It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten, and society would advise a trans-man, and cis-woman couple to just try to following a cycle calendar or specific sex positions if they have trouble conceiving a child.
The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs, so I would prefer it even if I was language czar and could decide what "male" means. The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as if the New Atheists had decided that their No 1 priority was getting rid of "OMG" in chats.
Trans people want to be called by their assumed sex because they're well aware that the word for that sex already has a preexisting meaning, and they want to be treated as though that preexisting meaning applies to themselves. Claiming that words can mean anything you want is disingenuous because if the words really did mean anything you wanted, trans people would no longer want to use them. And Zack already covered all of this.
The "sir" analogy doesn't work because people who want to be called "sir" don't do so because they want to be treated like English noblemen. The word did once refer to English noblemen, but people today are not using the word because they want to get in on the English nobleman business.
Zack's extensive posts include direct references to the Sequences recommending otherwise.
You are conflating "not pushing back" with "actively promoting".
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It sounds like you think this definitional battle is, in fact, worth it?
I'm encouraged that you acknowledged that there are costs - can you elaborate? I think Zac would claim that one serious downstream cost is autogynophiles being encouraged to castrate themselves. To me that is the main problem - confused and unhappy people being encouraged to mess up their bodies unrecoverably. I think that frank acknowledgement of the senses in which, due to the limitations of medical technology, trans people aren't actually their desired gender, would lessen this problem. So I do think that this is a definitional battle worth fighting (as do pro-trans advocates).
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The cis-/trans- prefix is already on the spectrum of verboten. Behold, the parts of woke subculture that insist on spelling transwoman as two words. This is to emphasize the woman-ness of transwomen and de-emphasizes the transness as a mere modifier, like brunette.
Similarly, if you hang around progressives and always refer to cis women as just "women" and always refer to trans women as "trans women" I am pretty sure you'd get a talking to, eventually. I hope nobody is silly enough to say, "Well that's just a couple crazy people on reddit." I know because my real-life woke friends don't actually mention that someone is trans unless it's to mention how fearful they are for their safety somewhere as a victim.
That you suggest to taboo the word "male" (not "man!") shows just how far down the slippery slope these language games have moved us this past decade. At first, progressives merely claimed the word "man," and left "male" around for us to talk about chromosomes. Sure enough in the current year, progressives act like man and male are synonyms again!
I predict that the ever-more-cumbersome phrases we retreat to, like "biological sex," will also get phased out. Make no mistake, the purpose of putting trans and cis into the same mental bucket is to push normative behaviors onto people. Someone saying "no, no I only date people with a biological sex of female, you see..." is told, "that's not a sexual orientation, that's just bigotry."
What the sequences actually say about defining a word any way you like is that it is a common misconception
I am kind of with Scott on this one. Love is the one area where one can discriminate. People are attracted to what they are attracted, which includes presenting gender, what kind of interface the other person has between their legs, skin color, body type, hair color, relative height, dialects, high nobility, potential for offspring, appearance, socioeconomic status, criminal record and anything else under the sun.
And for what it is worth, I don't think that this "either date transgender or be called a bigot" will fly even in the LGBTQWhatever community. If some hairy dude goes into a lesbian bar, declares that he identifies as a woman and challenges some lesbian to take him home or be a bigot, then the queers will not be on the side of the dude.
Have you seen what's happened to lesbians lately? They have absolutely been attacked for "don't ask women to suck your dick at a lesbian bar" policies! The thing you're suggesting would never happen already happened 5 or 6 years ago, and with the full support of the lgbtqxyz++ media!
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