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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29059 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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New from me - Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong, a deep dive into the sequence of events I summarized here last week. It's much longer than my typical article and difficult to properly condense. Normally I would summarize things, but since I summarized events last time, I'll simply excerpt the beginning:

Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek's Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they'd heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase "HBD" is muttered, but it's nobody's birthday.

A few days before publication, they present key claims to the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), who furiously tell them that many of the claims are provably false and ask for a brief delay to demonstrate the falsehood of those claims, though their principles compel them to avoid threatening any form of legal action. The Times unconditionally refuses, claiming it must meet a hard deadline. The day before publication, Scott Alexander gets his hands on a copy of the article and informs the Times that it's full of provable falsehoods. They correct one of his claims, but tell him it's too late to fix another.

The final article comes out. It states openly that it's not aiming to be a balanced view, but to provide a deep dive into the worst of EA so people can judge for themselves. It contains lurid and alarming claims about Effective Altruists, paired with a section of responses based on its conversation with EA that it says provides a view of the EA perspective that CEA agreed was a good summary. In the end, it warns people that EA is a destructive movement likely to chew up and spit out young people hoping to do good.

In the comments, the overwhelming majority of readers thank it for providing such thorough journalism. Readers broadly agree that waiting to review CEA's further claims was clearly unnecessary. David Gerard pops in to provide more harrowing stories. Scott gets a polite but skeptical hearing out as he shares his story of what happened, and one enterprising EA shares hard evidence of one error in the article to a mixed and mostly hostile audience. A few weeks later, the article writer pens a triumphant follow-up about how well the whole process went and offers to do similar work for a high price in the future.

This is not an essay about the New York Times.

The rationalist and EA communities tend to feel a certain way about the New York Times. Adamantly a certain way. Emphatically a certain way, even. I can't say my sentiment is terribly different—in fact, even when I have positive things to say about the New York Times, Scott has a way of saying them more elegantly, as in The Media Very Rarely Lies.

That essay segues neatly into my next statement, one I never imagined I would make:

You are very very lucky the New York Times does not cover you the way you cover you.

[...]

I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It's my job. The response I saw from the EA and LessWrong communities to [the] article was thoroughly ordinary as far as subculture pile-ons go, even commendable in ways. Here's the trouble: the ways it was ordinary are the ways it aspires to be extraordinary, and as the community walked headlong into every pitfall of rumormongering and dogpiles, it did so while explaining at every step how reasonable, charitable, and prudent it was in doing so.

Roko was banned for revealing Alice and Chloe's real names. It's not hard to figure out their names, but I'll refrain from revealing them, to prevent the search engines from linking them to this.

I want to highlight this comment, contrasting the nonlinear environment with normal professional employment. Erica had the insight that Alice and Chloe might be "exploited immigrants," and indeed they are from Germany and Denmark.

Chloe is still active in EA, with a similar job title, but hopefully her current job is lower stress and more aligned with her interests. Her boyfriend from Puerto Rico has also continued in the EA space and has several posts on EA forums.

Alice has been deleting some of her online activity, and possibly changing her name. She frequents vegan restaurants and continues to be poly (amazingly, with prediction markets).

When the real names are that easy to find, the ethics of enforcing a prohibition on 'doxxing' get a bit weird. What, exactly, are you protecting?

Probably, most people are just lazy and won't look anyway, so it still has a significant effect on the number of peripheral people who know. But I think people feel like they're really protecting alice/chloe's names more than they are.

It's also somehow funny that he only got a 1 week ban from the forum. It feels very short.

(note: I only quickly crosschecked with your descriptions, not with the nonlinear post content)

What, exactly, are you protecting?

Norms, generally. Deanonomizing people is something I'd rather not become allowable, and the incompetence of others shouldn't affect me.

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