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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Well, its too soon to say. This seems to be the first sexual misconduct allegation confirmed against an official EA leader, so you can't really call the TIME story which broke it to be a complete pile of journalistic garbage.

I don't think that anyone claimed it was journalistic garbage in the sense that the specific incidents had not occurred. Rather, the claim was that most of the incidents are so vague that basically everything there might be completely innocuous. For example, the second paragraph merely describes Gopalakrishnan getting asked out. The 7'th paragraph describes one adult "grooming" another adult (I believe this means "asking out") as well as the incident with Owen Cotton-Barratt.

This is strung together in a manner designed to trick casual readers into believing EA is somehow more dangerous than other more socially accepted subcultures, such as journalism or ordinary philanthropy, even though no evidence of this has been presented.

The core question here is whether a social and ideological group is allowed to be weird and also if members can ask each other out, particularly if that subculture has money that some mainstream folks wish to capture. The EA-aligned folks (Yudkowsky, Aella) seem to think weirdness should be permitted. Gopalakrishnan and Time seem to think subcultures they dislike should change to accommodate them.