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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3718 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 18, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Imagine being Glenn Ellison. You’re a highly respected academic at the top of your field, Department head of economics at MIT. One day you wake up and see your daughters face all over the internet. Half the world is calling her ugly, stupid, and evil. At the office, your colleagues are too polite to mention it, but you can see the disgust on their faces. What are you gonna do, blame it on the Harry Potter fan fiction? How does the daughter of the chief MIT economist not understand margin requirements or decreasing marginal utility? Everyone knows you failed as a father, and you just have to sit there and take it.

Sorry to be a killjoy but I don't believe this is what's happening (though there are American academics here, they should know better). Everyone is a hero of one's own story. And on top of that, academic elites are a highly conscious class as a whole, a guild on the level of a discipline, and a mafia on the level of a department. They are intensely clannish, prize loyalty over reason, and are largely incapable of taking responsibility or seeing things from the perspective of strangers. It's always the children, the profane masses, who are wrong. Doesn't matter if this is about replication crisis or collapsing an entire financial ecosystem. It is natural for an academic to fail precisely in the way he teaches not to, and to refuse to acknowledge it, appealing to his authority in the domain. Even more natural to excuse allies for the same. If anyone is disappointed, it's people who were already critical.

This is how I see it (modulo tone which I admittedly can't mimic well enough):

– Glenn... I was so sorry to hear about Caroline. Is she doing okay? If she has time, I can refer her to Pasternak, he's got an opening after getting rid of that crazy piece of shit. He's a real pro.

– Mr. Ellison, you should know we of the Nth Lab always have your back! Do not blame yourself and don't listen to those vile haters on the Internet! Tell Caroline we looove her!

– So G, I'll be blunt, this is a valuable life lesson for the kids. They got into a seedy market for criminals and tried to turn it into candy. Sounds nice, doesn't work like that – some things, some people, some communities are just rotten to the core, no point even trying to help. Yellen says they'll slam this crypto stuff with regulations over the next year and it'll die at last. And uh, you've other things on your mind, but just an advice: they should lay low now, maybe come back to Jane Street for a few years. Okay? Anyway, don't beat yourself over it, they'll come out stronger on the other side.

– What an awful situation. This ugly cunt Zhao, or what's his name, will rot in jail for what he did! I think she should go and set the record straight, even if it's stressful. What about an interview with The Economist?

– Ugh, so many Nazis have crawled out of the woodwork, on Twitter and other places... But you know how they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. I've called Jonathan and there's an expert group forming to bring attention to those fuckers and put heat on the platforms.

– Caroline and Sam, you know how I've always thought about them, both brilliant kids, very talented, real doers. I've told you on Sam's Bar Mitzvah «that boy's gonna make a splash», and he sure did. It's such a great thing they met. A terrific project, too!. Losers love to see great people stumbling, so there's all this noise. Bah, everyone makes mistakes. I am sure Sam's going to get back on his feet and they'll do many more amazing things together. Just don't lose heart. Don't you and Caroline dare let the bastards see they're getting to you, you hear? It wasn't her fault.

When did he say Ellison was Jewish?

I think that was implied by the "Nazis crawling out of the woodwork" bit.

To be clear, that this will be/is being said whether or not Ellisons are Jewish, because Sam is and people assume they are too, and there is quite a bit of explicitly Antisemitic content being posted in relation to these events. I assume that MIT Department of Economics faculty do not take kindly to it; and as good liberals they are also driven to tar all attacks against their own with the discrediting Nazi brush – especially when the situation lends itself to it.

No idea if reaching out to Greenblatt is actually in the cards. The situation keeps getting sillier, Forbes has basically labeled her an alt-right figure:

In recent days, Ellison has faced a barrage of particularly nasty criticism from crypto boosters who blame her for overseeing the downfall of Alameda. But amid the vitriol she has found some defenders in an unlikely group of people who have celebrated the musings about race science and imperialism on a blog she allegedly wrote in college. Some of her defenders, who call her “Queen Caroline,” are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling. Many of the people who have flocked to Ellison’s defense gather on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by Yarvin, one of her online supporters told Forbes. [...]

The now-deleted blog, called WorldOptimization, is unsigned but a close associate confirmed that it was hers. In it, she wrote that "the sexual revolution was a mistake" and that she believed “women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing Careers." She also mused about race science, in one post saying the "genetic differences there are massive" when it comes to Indian people from different provinces and castes — which has become a source of discrimination in Silicon Valley. And at the top of her list of “cute boy things” was “controlling most major world governments.”

That's so strange, especially given that one anti-rationalist/EA journalist guy you linked once who also appears to be a big Urbit booster.

As with SBF, I suppose I have to ask: Caroline Ellison--secretly based? I've seen worldoptimization before back when I was on Tumblr, but they didn't seem so prominent in the Tumblr ratsphere (or at least, not compared to argumate or the-grey-tribe).

Some of her defenders, who call her “Queen Caroline,” are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling. Many of the people who have flocked to Ellison’s defense gather on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by Yarvin, one of her online supporters told Forbes.

Reportedly, this bit from the Forbes article came from someone who went full "Rahul Ligma" on them.

Argh.

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