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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32843 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Maybe this is asking too much, but why wouldn't Rationalist women adopt a different viewpoint of male sexual behavior, being Rationalists?

Instead of taking the same progressive approach of "toxic masculinity must be extirpated," it seems like the Rationalist view would be something like: "Male Sexual Behavior is how it is for reasons, and has been this way since the beginning. Even if we wanted to change it, it is unlikely to change. Therefore lets find a way to harness it for the greater good. One way that this has worked historically is for women to engage with male sexuality and control it as best as possible via marriage..." etc.

There's a good deal of path dependency going on here. Rationalists, especially the Bay-area variety, are overwhelmingly progressive. They are not going to endorse a traditionalist/conservative position if they can help it.

Hanania:

What does EA do with its women problem? Well, it starts by treating women as rational individuals, which means adopting polyamory. Why stick to an outdated practice like monogamy when one can develop multiple fulfilling relationships with all kinds of different people, as long as everyone is honest with themselves and others about their boundaries and what they want? I honestly couldn’t write that last sentence without laughing. Who could’ve foreseen that this would end up with an article in Time about how young women who entered into such relationships found them unfulfilling and are now plagued by regret? And such stories would be used to tar the whole movement as hostile to women?

https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die

The big problem here is that EA is becoming the victim of its own success. It wanted (especially now with concerns about existential risk and AI risk) to become more than just a little group of the like-minded in their own bubble, it wanted to go mainstream, and it looks like it has.

So this woman was not part of the whole Bay Area/Less Wrong/Rationalist/EA scene. She went to Oxford and signed up as a (to use the term) normie who bought into the rhetoric and did want to do good according to their principles.

Then she hit up against the existing culture, where cuddle piles (though I haven't heard much of them lately), minors and runaways, trans and all kinds of kink-friendly and sex-positive and poly and unconventional lifestyles are welcomed and tolerated, and where there's a good chance of pinning the weasel (if I may be forgiven the reference). But she's an outsider, so to her this kind of "Hey, I'm Georgiou, I'm EA, vegan, poly and kinky, wanna see my etchings?" approach like shaking hands when introduced to someone is normal and acceptable did not come across as 'this is how professionals work in the settings I know'.

As EA expands and normies start joining, this is only going to be more of a problem. I do think the split between 'the original band' and 'now we're big enough to do corporate venues, are we selling out?' is happening.

went to Oxford

I shouldn't have closed these tabs, but have you noticed that most of the attacks on EA are coming from people affiliated with Oxford"? Like https://twitter.com/oxhcai

And this David Thorstad guy is from the Global Priorities Institute at Oxord, "Using academic research to drive positive change within and outside of the effective altruism movement." : https://twitter.com/IneffectiveAlt4 https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/david-thorstad

He's been heavily attacking people on the EA forum, after joining in 2021.

He protected his tweets and they weren't archived, but this is what he was saying to scott (dead twitter link):

@slatestarcodex Perhaps you would like to start? Repeat after me: "I unequivocally reject all forms of racist pseudoscience" and "people of color are not genetically inferior to anyone else". They are simple words. Say them.

The EA forum is finally beginning to denounce the worst offenders. LessWrong still has a long way to go. Delete, denounce, and do better next time

You know, honeyed words about "growth and change," followed by the standard bullying commissar stuff as soon as he thinks he has power over someone.

Smells like an entryist clique to me. Somebody on EA really ought to call him out about this.

(Edit: noticed by Ilforte last month)

Some of the Twitter stuff was archived

As for his demand to repeat a mantra about "racist pseudoscience", the best substantive answer is probably along the lines of:

"If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are true, I wish to believe they are true. If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are not true, I wish to believe they are not true. Labeling an idea 'racist pseudoscience' does not affect its truth value".

But most of EA will likely prefer to stick with the cool kids over everything else, and so will be utterly subsumed into the progressive leviathan.

Thanks! I searched .is for the tweet URLs, but nothing came up. Guess the archived one was the top tweet.

This strikes me as the opening blows in a conflict that EA will be unable to deal with. The activist community has seen a lot of money flowing to the Wrong kind of people, and now they are moving in to deal with a potential threat to their status and position. How exactly is the EA movement going to protect itself against an avalanche of bad-faith actors like the one you have identified, while also dealing with an equally withering barrage of negative stories from legacy media? They can't just attack the media without painting themselves as members of the Trump tribe, which would cause lots of people and donators to leave. Long-winded rationalist essays might be able to convince the core members of the group, but they are worse than useless when it comes to defending oneself against spurious accusations in the court of public opinion.

I really don't see how the movement survives if this continues - people like David Thorstad would (at least, in my reading of his statements and actions) prefer that the movement sink into irrelevancy and fail to have any noticeable positive impact on the world, instead becoming a den of comfortable sinecures that people like him and his friends can occupy without having to actually do any real work... and they have existing institutions (Oxford, the mainstream media, etc) putting a thumb on their end of the scale.

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