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Notes -
Effective Altruism drama update:
You may remember a few weeks ago the article Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse was published in TIME (Motte discussion here).
It's been a hectic two weeks on the EA forum. Meta community posts have been consistently getting more engagement than object-level posts about actual charity. There is a palpable tension on the site between the hardcore rationalists and the mainstream liberals. Vote counts swing on an hourly basis depending on who has the upper hand, but overall the discussion has remained civil (mostly). A few days ago, the (in)famous Aella posted "People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You", a devastating screed against prudes, anonymous allegations, and haters of eccentric Bay Area parties. Eliezer himself even shows up, taking a break from doomscrolling to deliver a supporting bombardment against the mainstream press.
There's nothing EAs care about more than cute poly girls and AI. Once Aella and Eliezer weigh in, case closed right? WRONG.
A statement and an apology
EV UK board statement on Owen's resignation
One of the perpetrators from the article has been identified. So who wins?
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. It does seem like a pretty minor infraction though. After reading Owen's statement it seems like it could fall under the "weird nerds trying to date" umbrella, but maybe you can't use that excuse when you're a board member.
One aspect I haven't seen discussed is that this is the same guy who was behind the controversial decision to buy Wytham Abbey for 15 million pounds (see here). In light of current events, it sure looks to me like EA officials decided to blow millions on a luxury venue in Oxford in order to impress women.
Yeah, I dunno. I feel like I have no right to comment on any of this, since I'm nowhere near any of the physical places, I don't know any of the people involved save at second-hand by reading accounts written by others, and I'm not part of Less Wrong ("thank God" says them and me both).
But that Aella piece - I'm torn between "well yeah she probably does get a lot of hate for no apparent reason other than she's a big fish in their small pond" and "this is a group that makes a huge point out of being welcoming and non-judgemental to the unconventional and the neurodivergent, can she really be shocked at this hour of her life to learn sometimes unstable people are unstable and interpret things in a wildly different way to what happened?"
Well, welcome to the party, rationalists and EA movement. We Catholics had our own sex scandals, now it's your turn. I do think this may be the moment - not over sex scandals per se but because of a conflux of issues and tensions all coming to the boil at once - where the endeavour splits off into the "normie" version that goes mainstream (EA seems to be there already) and the remnants of the original 'true believers' who will wonder what happened and where it all went, leaving them behind.
EDIT: I am sardonically amused about the vegan commenting on that, and her story of all the horrible meat-eaters making up lies about pure innocent vegans. I have my own Vegan Big Traditional Meal story to tell, and that really was a vegan making a fuss and inconveniencing everyone. But then, I am a horrible meat-eater, maybe I'm just "[lying] so they'd have a dramatic story to tell about vegans and cement their own ingroup status or so they'd have a seeming-reason to dismiss animal welfare asks and play the victim themselves and cement their control for future interactions" 😐
Yeah, I'm not at all informed about Aella herself aside from what she herself posts and a information from some people who have met her personally.
But its one thing to say "people will make up lies about you, sometimes." and another to be shocked at how the behavior that you admit to and the other facets of your public persona might lead people to weird conclusions about you.
She's a professional escort who is incredibly open about her drug use and her hosting of orgies, who often makes ambiguous jokes about edgy topics.
How might people end up with the belief that she may have hosted drug-fueled orgies where edgy sorts of behavior occurred?
No, that doesn't justify the lies. But if you know how humans have a tendency to leap to incorrect conclusions from limited/bad evidence, then notice that your entire persona is custom built to shock normie sensibilities, one would not be particularly surprised that normies have been primed to believe shocking things.
Or maybe they aren't lies at all. Maybe "the prudes" are correct about how entertaining someone who's whole schtick is being a transaction-bot seeking to extract the maximum amount of utilitons (aka hedonism points) for herself really is ultimately stupid, dangerous, and socially corrosive.
There's always the outside possibility that she is manipulating every facet of her public persona to control the narrative around herself, and the stuff she admits to is just the tip of a large iceberg.
I have no special insight on that.
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