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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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SBF had a long interview with NYT where they were remarkably soft on him. The whole thing can be read read here.

For my part, it seems like he has little remorse and is spinning things as "things expanded too fast and I made a mistake". The fact that his hedge fund (Alameda Research) was propped up by client deposits without their knowledge is not something he wishes to mention.

Over at Twitter, he has been consistently deleting tweets such as his Nov 7th tweet assuring everyone that FTX has a "long history of safeguarding client assets". Some are speculating that his recent gibberish tweets are in fact a way to keep his tweet count constant, so to not alert bots when a large amount of tweets are suddenly deleted (as some bots may begin to do auto-archiving). In his interview with NYT, he instead spun his new tweets as some kind of cryptic message he wants to send.

All these things re-affirm my view that he's basically a manipulative psychopath. What's disappointing but not surprising is the soft gloves treatment he gets in the NYT. One cannot help but ask whether his status as democrat megadonor plays a part in that.

From our own point of view it's clear that SBF is grey tribe, so we've been focusing on the Effective Altruism angle, but I don't think the mainstream knows of the grey tribe yet, and if the blue tribe has recognised him as one of their own (with him being a democratic donor and all), then it makes more sense that the media would be defending him.

From our own point of view it's clear that SBF is grey tribe

Whose?

Read his and caroline's twitter history. They talk just like themotte posters. HBD, IQ maximization, nootropics, alternative lifestyles, AI risk, game theory, all the trendy topics.

They're fucking nerds dude.

But are all nerds "Grey Tribe"?, as I said in another comment, at least in the Scott piece some of the signifiers of grey tribe is using Uber, but that seems nonsensical to me when you can't afford a car but need to go somewhere on a timely manner.

"Grey tribe" is blue tribe (often the very bluest of the blue tribe) who just don't happen to agree with a fair amount of typical blue-tribe-associated political views for whatever reason.

so, blues that sometimes vote republican/third party in a nutshell?

That of the people who aren't confused by a term like "grey tribe", i.e. rationalist-adjacent people.

This sounds like consensus building more than any other thing, considering the pushback affirmations like yours got in the recent thread about this topic in the main page. Is there anything significant that separates a blue triber from this so called grey one?

It's from this.

Like any tribal or sectarian squabbles, "significant" is relative. I'm grey and I think there's significant difference. That a lot of people here were discussing the EA angle is kind of how you can tell.

I kind of agree with your comment on consensus building though.

What would you say is the characteristics that separate you from the average Blue triber?

I think he's blue. What has he done or said that makes him grey?

from wiki:

Contributions for the year 2022, through August 15, 2022, also went to members of both parties, with $105,000 donated to conservatives (0.3%) and $35,872,000 to liberals (99.7%) .[81]

What has he done or said that makes him grey?

I dunno about Fried, but Caroline was an active part of the tumblr ratsphere under worldoptimization for a few years, to the point of getting linked from Scott as an effortposter. While bluer than the reddit side on average, she was still willing to do (and able to get away with) no small amount of Darkly Hinting.

Being an effective altruist basically makes him grey, no? He's certainly politically aligned with democrats, but so is Scott, and that doesn't make him blue tribe.

After reading through his ballot discussions, there is nothing that makes me thing Scott is anything other than a party-line blue triber. In every case he is maximally charitable to the D candidate, and maximally uncharitable to the R candidate (ex: he states anyone disputing the 2020 election is an automatic no vote from him, yet conveniently forgets a large number of Ds did the same in 2016, and as happens in every presidential election). While he discusses and presents the issues in a very thoughful manner- why most of us read ACX in the firet place- I dont see him ever voting a majority not-blue ballot.

His parents teach at Stanford. His gf at MIT. His mothers been a Democratic and Biden bundler for a long time. His Aunts like Harvard and work in public health. Deep administrative state people with Democrat connections.

I remember asking a question a while ago on whether effective altruist were just Democrats who came up with new branding so they weren’t Democrats but the upper class Democrats to seperate themselves from the peons in the party.

Honestly EA just looks like Democrats to me now even more. People who want to say the ends justify the means to take other peoples money and spend it. Old school tax and spend Dems.

Perhaps grey tribe just doesn’t exists. Thiels just a conservative with edgier branding and libertarians are just conservatives.

She talked about HBD on her blog! Both of them were scott fans! A lot of the gray tribe came out of elites and top universities.

I mean, a lot of white nationalists came out of top universities. Jared Taylor went to yale. just being democrat-related doesn't tell you everything.

Sounds like you are just describing grey tribe as being a bit smarter than your tribe and a little autistic so able to think outside of social pressure.

But I basically defined him as claiming grey tribe as it lets him be in the upper intellect of blue tribe and above the peons so are definitions don’t really disagree.

He's grey in the sense that he's a Silicon Valley rationalist utilitarian who ticks all the grey-tribe boxes. See the original definition in I can tolerate anything but the outgroup

There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time

Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk

This does not constitute a basis for a political tribe, especially because permissive attitudes on gay rights and drug use are being increasingly embraced by both the right and the left.

libertarian political beliefs

This might constitute a basis for a political tribe, depending on exactly how libertarian you are, and on what issues. But, the blue tribe has already defined libertarianism as a red tribe position, and the concept of the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is well established in highly online leftist circles, so as a libertarian you're basically red tribe, unless you're the sort of libertarian who can fit within blue tribe moral constraints, in which case you're basically blue tribe.

I'm skeptical of the utility of the concept of a "grey tribe" in the contemporary American culture war.

The Blue / Red / Grey tribe distinction is explicitly cultural rather than political.

The purpose was not for it to be a political first tribe and Scott was intentionally using non-political examples. He even calls the gray tribe a subset of the blue tribe in the piece, it's worth reading to post if for no other reason than to get acquainted with the origin of some of the jargon here.

what is the utility of this distinction? just to identify the "Efective Altruists" from among the blues?

It was more to distinguish almost all non-Blue Tribe internet-users, and probably motivated in part by the (for Scott, formative) collapse of internet atheism into left- and not-left groups in the mid-Bush era.

It's almost an Albion's Seed-type category. You're looking at a socio-cultural sub-group, like "Hot Topic goths," "preppy girls," or "theater kids" back in high-school. It's a personal tendency and personality type married to a particular set of tropes and cultural products.

The thing that sometimes confuses me is that they assign things like using Uber to this tribe (like in the Scott article), but that is almost a necessity in an urban context for all the people that don't earn enough for a car (a Tesla in case of the blues) but need to go somewhere in a timely maner.

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Ah, the previous poster didn't post the actual source Keep in mind they're categories drawn in 2014. Their purpose is to identify cultural bubbles more than political parties with the understanding that there can be blue tribe Republican voters. I do recommend reading the entire, long, article. It has a firm place in the canon of this community.

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