First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard
Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you’re “the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference.” How is that fair? :-(
The comments about the event are great over here. The initial poster talks about 8 invited racist speakers, but you could argue there were more like 10 or 12. The owners/organizers then talk about how the confrence had 60 speakers. They later say they would have backed off the “edginess” (i.e racism) by 5%.
So even by their own take, instead of having 15% racist invited speakers, they would prefer 10% invited racist speakers. We want 5 racists next time, not 8.
no, they will go from 10 racist talks to 9.5 racist talks
I don’t want to come and help “balance out” someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide.
Does anyone really think this, or are you just using hyperbole?
Not hyperbole. Hanania, Manifest promoted speaker, wrote “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?” in May 2022.
I just can’t, it’s like that one scene from Austin Powers.
And the comment was edited to add:
(sorry this was a bad example as discussed in the comments so I’ll stick with the pretty clear “has stated that black people are animals who need to be surveilled in mass to reduce crime”)
Which is the second or third time in this saga I’ve seen people back down from good points due to bad replies. Like someone needs to tell him he’s in the wrong crowd and this isn’t normal.
And this is their reply:
I still think this is hyperbole
Followed by ten thousand words that I’m not reading
Here’s the “what did you like least” survey entries the organizers say they classified as “edgy people”:
“all the racism stuff” = “edgy people”. Yup.
Where is this from? Sorry if I missed the link in the big watermuddying wall of text.
Bio people here are poorly informed. Just in general some of the presentations are factually incorrect
B-but rationalists are experts at covalent bonds
Also meeting people… as a woman I have never felt as ignored and disrespected as I have in some instances the pa…
I’m sure the feedback becomes more positive in the cut-off part, no doubt about it
i’m gonna rewrite and expand on that rambling comment someday
Fails to list SlateScott as a controversial guest.
Also, did he just use a bang path to refer to a racist dude’s Twitter persona? Seeing old school lore adopted by these mutants gives me heartburn.
Oh, and that bit at the end disclaiming it as an EA event despite it clearly being an EA event is classic “decoupler” (or, if you like, responsibility avoider.)
a Stars On 45 of blatant racists’ disingenuous excuses for blatant racism
Wow, the commenters seem surprisingly…not ok with the guest choices. Especially Hannania
They are more defensive of the racists in the other blog post on this topic: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MHenxzydsNgRzSMHY/my-experience-at-the-controversial-manifest-2024
Maybe its because the HBDers managed to control the framing with the other thread? Or because the other thread systematically refuses to name names, but this thread actually did name them and the conversation shifted out of a framing that could be controlled with tone-policing and freeze peach appeals into actual concrete discussion of specific blatantly racists statements (its hard to argue someone isn’t racist and transphobic when they have articles with titles like “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?”).
Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?
I had to google this but it’s real.
Author has a pronoun right in the title. Just like one of these “there is a huge spider perching on your shoulder” situations.
“pronouns” is a right-wing word meaning “f*ggots”
“Pronouns” with a hard R
It’s a combination of those things.
Because rationalism the coherent phenomenon was founded with the more or less explicit intention of building a cult, Yudkowsky’s original rule-set incorporated all of the basic cult rules, which every cult leader tends to be able to work out mostly for themselves by looking at what they outwardly want to build (a movement) and what they inwardly want to do with it (retain personal power over that movement)
So, for example, the particular way that Yudkowsky frames “objectivity” coalesces later on around the “object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy, “low” vs “high” “decoupling”, the “grey tribe”, but it’s there from the beginning in his insistence on the highly specific and idiosyncratic framework proposed in The Sequences, his constant explicit insistence on the rarity of his chosen elect, and also just in (a) his consistent lambasting of people who work outside that framework in the text of The Sequences themselves, and (b) his sometimes hilarious neg/love-bombing of the reader
Of (b), my favourite example is that passage where he bizarrely takes an unnecessary moment to call you an idiot if you think that there’s a universal clock measuring time throughout the universe, in the full knowledge that his nerdy readers are aware of relativity
So the whole system, beginning with LessWrong’s very founding, is geared to control the framing in ways like not naming names. Naming names is a failure of objectivity, because it brings in the sorts of particulars that might exercise your ordinary human judgement - ordinary human judgement is bad, we know this from Daniel Kahneman, and that’s another rule of objectivity. So, moreover, the whole system is geared so as to keep “objective” framings which favour HBD “in-group”, and to displace good human judgements (‘Richard Hanania is a ridiculous mendacious racist’) into the “out-group”).
HBD hegemony within the movement (in influence if not in numbers), moreover, could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set. In spite of his own protestations, Yudkowsky’s pugilistic naturalism was sufficiently both insisted upon and theoretically naive as to ultimately yield hegemony to the HBDers by sheer inertia: once you have eliminated and salted the earth of any thinking which fails to embrace the most childish physical-scientistic reductionism, then when your rules for thinking enter the arena of politics (especially American politics) and human biology, you have already ceded all possible theoretical ground to HBD, and any counter-weight you try to introduce thereto becomes the pathetic mewling of Kahnemanian irrational beliefs. Your rhetoric already implied “it’s just basic biology” from the very beginning.
So, for anyone keeping score, the only way for anyone on LessWrong to win the rhetorical argument is, unfortunately, just to be normal, and violate one or more of the LessWrong standards for thinking.
Yudkowsky’s original rule-set
Yeah the original no-politics rule on lesswrong baked in libertarian assumptions into the discourse (because no-politics means the default political assumptions of the major writers and audience are free to take over). From there is was just a matter of time until it ended up somewhere right wing.
“object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy
I hadn’t linked the tendency to go meta to the cultishness or no-politics rule before, but I can see the connection now that you point it out. As you say, it prevents simply naming names and direct quotes, which seems to be a pretty good tactic for countering racists.
could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set
I’m not sure that rule-set made HBD hegemony inevitable, there were a lot of other factors that helped along the way! The IQ-fetishism made it ripe for HBDers. The edgy speculative futurism is also fertile ground for HBD infestation. And the initial audience and writings having a libertarian bend made the no-politics rule favor right wing ideology, an initial audience and writing set with a strong left wing bend might go in a different direction (not that a tankie internal movement would be good, but at least I don’t know tankies to be HBD proponents).
just to be normal
Yeah, it seems really rare for a commenter to simply say racism is bad, you shouldn’t invite racists to your events. Even the ones that seem to disagree with racism impulsively engage in hand wringing and apologize for being offended and carefully moderate their condemnation of racism and racists.
I think it misses the word for the trees to put the emphasis on a libertarian bent. The British and American class systems are perfectly capable of enforcing the same rules for prestige and polite discussion in order to favour some preferred hegemonic power without endorsing libertarian values. Indeed libertarianism as a movement most certainly adopts those rules because - for all that it may derive political support from (primarily white) guys of all sorts of backgrounds - it’s a fundamentally aristocratic proposition, right down to almost absurdist details such as its propensity to distribute land amongst an elite who employ lesser beings to work it.
In the case of rationalism, the emphasis should instead be on control: Yudkowsky built his system to control what was and wasn’t acceptable thinking, ostensibly for the benefit of the thinker. Its departures from actually very good patterns of thinking are what take it into cult territory, as the rigidity of the rules meets the hard wall of reality, and forces adherents to choose between reality and fantasy.
And as I say below to David, sure, there were other trends in play (most especially - as I note above as well - the tendency for America’s moral arc to bend towards racism). But I’d push back on suggesting that IQ-fetishism is distinct from naive biologism. Rather, IQ-fetishism itself is an expression of naive biologism (as we can see tracing its antecedents through back to Herbert Spencer), because you don’t get IQ-fetishism without the spectres of relativism and nurturism which, politically, it purports to counter-act - “IQ” is a supposedly sound, stable, measurable, cognitive category, where the alternative is understood to be a tangled mess of occult entities which cannot be reduced to any structure in the brain (and IQ holds out the promise of being reducible to g, which is in its whole conception reducible to a structure in the brain).
In this way the speculative futurism is simply of a piece with the biologism: once you reduce everything to (this very peculiar and highly naive, already science-fictional, concept of) the physical, you can manipulate it to generate whatever future you want. By the same token, the eugenic and fascistic trend in science-fiction pursues the same conceptual route. But it is only with the right historical ingredients, and the right players to activate those ingredients - which is to say an unequal society and the tendency to have people who want to naturalise that inequality - that the mixture becomes potently racist, and Yudkowsky, so to speak, is the one building the pot to specification.
The IQ-fetishism made it ripe for HBDers.
also that a lot of members of the subculture were already race scientists, e.g. Moldbug and Razib Khan
Yeah, this is just as much or more a narrativisation of the inevitable conceptual trend as it is an attempt to explain what actually happened one event after another. If I were writing a book it would go next to much longer passages about racism and race science in American and world history and about race science in California Ideology land and the rationalist movement itself. This story would appear with a “but LessWrong would always have turned out this way”.
It’s notable, I think, that you can tell the same sort of story about Spencer back in the 19th century: as long as you have the backbone of naive biologism, everything will come out right for your Imperial project.
that habryka dude sure is quite something (and by something i think he’s a fucking shithead):
This is like the argument I got in on Lemmy where a guy told me I was subhuman because I approved of banning Nazis from social media.
First they came for the Nazis, and I screamed and screamed because I totes wasn’t a Nazi, nu-uh, just a Free Thinker™
It’s like you were there! Lol
I winner why someone like that would call you untermensch?
some commenters in those threads are talking about the New York EAs vs the Berkeley EAs - the former are rich liberals, the latter are rationalist cultists. there are several suggestions that EA needs to expel the rationalists.
the furious defenders of racism^Wfreedom of ideas in those threads don’t seem to figure out that they’re why the non-racist EAs are suggesting that expelling rationalism from EA is even possible
i mean, they should have done so about a decade ago, because they were only and ever a fucking embarrassment
but now they’re being a hugely racist embarrassment, not just a nerd-weird one, and it’s harder to spin that
i mean, not that liberals aren’t all for a bit of systemic racism, but you can’t make it personal like that
Our sessions and guests spanned a wide range of topics: prediction markets and forecasting, of course; but also finance, technology, philosophy, AI, video games, politics, journalism and more.
haha
Our sessions and guests spanned a wide range of topics: grifting and grifting, of course; but also grifting, grifting, racism, grifting, racism, racism, racism and more.
these guys should really stop using words they don’t understand. (i know, in case of the muppet quoted below it’s almost impossible.)
“Human biodiversity denial.” There’s a guy who is self-aware about his racism laying the groundwork for pretending he is not.
“a hbd denial movement” sure is a hell of a turn of phrase for “oh fuck. maybe they don’t like our weird racist shit, quick everyone PANIC STATIONS”
him referring to lysenkoism in this context is extra weird; the scientific racists and lysenko are but another facets of the antiscientific ignorance
I said in a comment the other day that Roko’s view here is the natural consequence of Yudkowsky’s original naive physical-scientific reductionism. He proceeds from those (abysmally vague but superficially straightforward) premises here. In essence, if everything ultimately reduces to the physical, then when you perform the natural reduction on e.g. the status of black people in modern America, the causes must by physical-biological causes.
The reference to Lysenkoism is perfectly apt on this (stupid) model: attempts to thwart the reduction are merely ideologically driven cludges to the real theory, and the example of Lysenko demonstrates how easy it is for a whole discipline (in this case: biology in the USSR) to fall to that ideology. Liberal (read: communist) biologists are just pandering and making exceptions when they produce their own demonstrations that scientific racism is bunk.
It’s helpful that, for historical and political reasons, i.e. America and modern Europe’s original sins (colonialism and slavery) scientific racism is always waiting in the wings when the Rokos of the world reach their inevitable conclusions. Put it’s important not to conceive of scientific racism as a form of ignorance: it is, rather, an often highly organised political movement devoted to proving and promoting its claims by any means necessary - it is a knowing lie, with the caveat that insofar as scientific racists frequently show that they implicitly know that they lie (with absurd clandestine promotion strategies and revealing statistical sleights-of-hand), it’s rarely clear that they are wholeheartedly aware of it.
chemtrails guy: look at least we’re not flat earthers
(chemtrails guy: even if we agree it’s the jews)
Clearly you need to go up a layer of meta to see the parallels, you aren’t a high enough decoupler!
/s just in case, because that’s exactly how they would defend insane analogies.
The net downvotes are the rest of the community frantically whispering “FFS Roko keep our racism on the down-low!”
Roko is also violating their rules of assuming charitably and good faith about everything and going meta whenever possible. Because defending racists and racism is fine, as long as your tone is careful enough and you go up a layer of meta to avoid discussing the object level claims.
Roko’s role is mad prophet who just says the loud part ever louder
if there is a huge split in EA because the rationalists insist on turbo racism it will be hilarious
if they did, they would have nothing to say (at least some of them)
lol who the hell gave this a downvote
whoever it was, i clicked the arrow down too, so that person didn’t feel so alone.
I’m sure deciding who to seat next to whom at dinner for optimal conversation must have been exciting.
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Ok I’ve been giving $25 a month to Effectivealtruism.com for about 5 years now, and my understanding was they predominantly buy mosquito nets and give cash directly. Should I swap to a different charity?
it’s literally these guys. MacAskill, who is splashed on the front page, goes on in his book about how much more important it is to think about 10^54 future computer emulations than mere tawdry actual existing people suffering now.
So you will probably want to look inside the box and look precisely where your donations go, if the organisation you’re sending your money to has a public list up.
They do buy mosquito nets, although it’s unclear that all malaria net charities do so in culturally-appropriate ways where they’ll be used as intended. I believe they’ve stopped with the large grants to deworming charities, which is good, because the effectiveness of deworming programs is extremely controversial. Depending on where you direct your money at that parent website, it might go to EA Funds, who send a lot of money at global development but has also paid a ton of salaries for people researching LLMs and AI. Or it could go to EffectiveVentures, which might have spent your money buying a castle. For reasons.
If you support mosquito nets, you can give to the mosquito net charity directly, cut out the overhead. Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières does good global development work if you don’t mind giving to a huge organization that by necessity has higher overhead. Avoid the Red Cross and you should be fine.
Lol that money went to buy 20,000 copies of HPMOR
I hope you had bamboozle insurance
Very late, but for the love of God, make sure you raise your black child with enough respect for themselves and their race that they’ll avoid debating twitter racists. Make sure your router drops requests to 4chan.org! Disable DNS over HTTPS on their devices! Run all their traffic through a proxy, MitM every request for an image and have a chat with them if you start seeing a lot of pfp sized pictures of roman statues. You need your kid to avoid these people the way they should avoid a hot stove.
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