This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I Accidentally Got SBF To Admit to Fraud
So...SBF is simply a moron. I've been trying to resist that conclusion, but now I'm asking myself why I bothered.
In the link above Youtuber Coffeezilla drops into a call with SBF (a second time! Why is he still taking calls??) and proceeds to basically get him to admit that funds were comingled.
Coffeezilla noted that SBF always deflects the issue by arguing that some accounts were trading on margin and so were deliberately open to being used by Alameda, unlike regular accounts. So literally all he does - and all any journalist needed to do - was just keep drilling down on whether the FTX only customers who weren't doing that could still get their funds. SBF obviously has no answer. Even worse, he basically screws himself by admitting that they had one withdrawal process which was him admitting to comingling funds.
So...the guy is just a moron. He doesn't have some grand legal plan to plead negligence or ignorance. He has a half-baked plan based on the idea that everyone is dumber than him (despite multiple counterexamples) and he falls apart the minute anyone puts any thought into his answers.
The entire video is actually a good look at how a journalist should view someone like SBF and his word games and deflections and how they should strategize to defeat them (and the end has the sort of pure joy at skewering the target that I bet all journalists feel but are too dignified to admit when picking up their Pulitzer). And this is coming from someone who thought the idea of people like Coffeezilla being "journalists" laughable.
But he has legitimately done the best job of questioning SBF out of everyone (Stefanopoulos was the close second)
SBF and his friends stole billions of dollars. Either they go to jail at some point, or they manage to sneak away like most crypto fraudsters. Neither outcome would be remarkable.
This kind of gotcha journalism is lame. SBF gives the same so slow stupid answers to every question and never really says anything concrete. Hopefully his new lawyer can convince him to stop embarrassing himself.
The interesting part is the people who jumped ship back before any of this came out, when Bankman-Fried was still being lionised as a genius and philanthropist. Some of them make vague allusions to being scared to say anything because Bankman-Fried was vindictive, and that's probably true: at the time, he had enough clout and good reputation that he could have make things uncomfortable for people who spoke out against him.
But that's a deficit of the EA crowd that I've noted (reading back the reports around sex pests and worse in the community, it struck me very much): nobody wants to be a nark. There's a real reluctance and indeed abhorrence of "going to the cops". Reading the various accounts of, and reactions to, that case about a harasser and abuser had me yelling all through it "For fuck's sake, he did that, why didn't you go to the cops???"
But, no. There's so much nuance, you see, and context, and grey areas, and that might be victim blaming, and this is not the community norm to be vindictive and punitive, and and and... so in several cases there were formal committees which set up and investigated and issued a report and said, in effect, 'we can't do anything about anything'.
Bankman-Fried got away with all this for so long because EA/Rationalist values are to be nice people and value community and not to engage with the state because of their non-traditional values and attitudes (I mean, cops are all part of the carceral state which has a monopoly on violence and and and).
So there were people who, back at the start, had an idea shady shit was going on but they didn't want to rock the boat especially not drag the other people still there into trouble, so they just left. It would be very, very interesting to track them down and find out what they knew; why did you resign as co-CEO of Alameda, for instance? Why did this set of people leave? What was going on, that they didn't like and didn't think was what they signed up to?
But we probably won't ever get that, because Bay Area Omertà .
Yeah I've heard some awful shit (like death threats to AI researchers from AI safety folks) but can never actually accuse anyone because the code of silence among that group is surprisingly strong.
There are some public accusations - such as stuff against leverage research here, here, drama in comments, commentary, potentially wrong initation of curzi post. Even there there's a sense it should've been public earlier. There's also the ziz stuff.
There are also periodic struggle sessions about being safe for women - in the comments specific people are called out for misconduct.
Any of these would make for great effortposts on the marsey site!
Yeah, but it's all within the group. Whisper campaigns. Nods and winks about "we can't invite so-and-so because, well, you know what he's like". But never going outside, never any suggestion that maybe if so-and-so is such a pest, it's not safe to be around him if you're a woman or trans or whatever, that this behaviour is at the level of "get the authorities involved". Lots of internal drama and struggle sessions, but dead silence around outsiders.
That "safe for women" link - and what did this delicate blossom do, apart from clenching fists and tears streaming down her face? Write a long blog post that will only be read by insiders, instead of (if there really is a genuine problem, instead of simply "you are not validating my lived experience and so I must stamp my foot!") doing anything concrete - even just going "hump this for a game of soldiers" and walking away.
More options
Context Copy link
Agreed! Those posts, including Ziz's blog and general craziness, are what I was thinking of. I've also heard some recent stuff said in confidence from a couple of friends in the space. At one AI Safety workshop apparently there was an older gentleman who owned an AI research company. In the anonymous 'ideas to save the world' spreadsheet, apparently someone wrote "kill X person (owner of the AI company, in that same workshop)."
My friend reported that the young event organizers just kind of nervously laughed and said don't do it again, without really addressing it or trying to find out who was responsible. That kind of behavior with kids in/just out of college who legitimately think the world will end soon is deeply troubling to me.
Trying to find out who was responsible for a specific post on a designed-to-be-anonymous spreadsheet would have been a massive breech of trust.
True... but that sort of death threat, even joking, should warrant immediately shutting down the workshop and severely scolding everyone in any remotely healthy group setting. Again, especially when dealing with impressionable and radicalized young folks. I see it as only a matter of time before AI safety terrorists start doing incredibly dumb things, shooting the movement in the foot.
More options
Context Copy link
Zounds am I sick of "Death Threats" discourse. What named person has ever actually been killed following an anonymous death threat from some extremely online dork? If you'd looked around the AI conference and seen the scrawny pale guys there, you wouldn't have worried about the death threat either. Death threats can't be used as some trump card of oppression, they're too easy to fake and too hard to verify.
It's also actually a good conversation starter. If X's work is going to destroy the world, don't we have a responsibility to restrain him if he won't restrain himself? There's a lot of good philosophical debate to be had there, it wouldn't surprise me if X threw it in the hat himself to start discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Boy oh boy. It's sad to see how much effort Scott et al. need to expend on defense in the comments for every post like this, and they can just post the same one each week until people are ground down and give in. The last one was demanding Title IX inquisitions for EA, right?
More options
Context Copy link
Struggle sessions about being safe for women, in particular, seem more like a null hypothesis than indication of anything actually wrong. If anything, I would expect it to be counter-associated with actually being an unsafe place for women.
Oh, agree - the above is evidence of EA publicly discussing 'awful shit', as opposed to evidence that EA is bad - as the comments go into, EA puts a lot of effort into 'safe place for women'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IMO the crypto people are much more likely to be in the boat of "I know this is a scam but I won't say" than EA people SBF knew (besides people directly in FTX) since they're deeper on the process side of making that money.
But the crypto people know that imo because they themselves are running the same scam. Binance's CZ (who basically helped take down SBF) for example looks very shady. Ever since this FTX thing he's continually been saying they have no problems (like SBF did) while steadfastly refusing to do an audit.
Not only do they not want to out themselves, not only do they hold each other's funny money as (worthless) collateral, everyone has to worry about what happens to the entire space when large exchanges go down. (This is why SBF was cultivating the image of savior for failing exchanges)
Combine their shared complicity and interests with SBF being a booster for crypto and courting regulators and politicians I'm not surprised that the people most knowledgeable shut up.
All the crypto people I know weren't touching FTX with a 50 foot pole. Crypto people tend to mess around with decentralized exchanges.
Crypto people would also know that margin trading is bullshit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If there is a warrant for his arrest, which I am sure will eventually happen, the odds are not good (except this guy [1] and a few others, so we're talking a tiny possibility, but this was in 1998; feds have way better tech and will not make those mistakes again).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruffo [1]
I have followed this for awhile. The level of incompetence in that case is astounding, if not willful. They basically let him walk away ..a guy who had millions presumably overseas an a 15+ year sentence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Enough people buy into his game. Maxine Waters. Even Bill Ackman has talked about him being honest. On a jury of 12 I wouldn’t be surprised if he could convince 1 or 2 every joes who know nothing about the evidence issues to vote with him.
I highly doubt he will submit to a jury trial. It would take years and the odds would be greatly against him prevailing.
He might have no choice. I think the facts in the case would rationalize a Madoff level punishment. He might be better off hoping his snake oil salesman routine fools a couple jurors.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
unlikely. this is why the feds wait so long to arrest , to gather enough evidence to make sure this cannot happen ever.
Why do you think evidence would matter? We are talking about a good salesman versus boring accounting and custodial rules. The entire argument I’m making is he could just get a few jurors to like him versus some UC Chicago professor brought in as an expert witness that what he did was outright theft.
the feds have something like a 99% conviction rate. The odds he will be among those lucky 1%? not too good, imho
Why is that relevant when I’m citing a specific reason for why that would not be relevant.
I do agree he gets convicted more likely than not but I would buy that 99-1 odds all day long. It’s a completely obvious Ponzi scheme and he’s got high ranking congresswomen praising him who had to get scolded by higher ups.
because it would not work..jury nullification is rare, usually motivated by political reasons, not fraud
I’m not calling it nullification. They would just believe he’s innocent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link