shinigami3EA is becoming a cult? It must be wokeism fault
they must be just great at conga crossbars, with spine that jelly
The People Who Pray At Prompts are suddenly very worried about cults.
o7___o7I’ve been appreciating the term “high-control group” as an alternative.
David Gerardgood thing Nonlinear has never operated as high-control,
I’ve thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.
Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a “cult”, watch how much more they flip out at being called a “high-control group”. It’s a very good disarming technique.
why tf can’t she say the word “racist”? like is it supposed to be a dogwhistle insinuating similarity between “racist” and “leftist”??
Amoeba_Girlit’s a dirty political word that only intellectual terrorists use. not only is it beneath her to acknowledge social facts, she wants to make it clear she won’t be intimidated into considering it.
Because the community has both racists, sexists and facists. None of who are real nor should they be avoided or shunned!
blaming your issues on a conspiracy is a great way to ensure your movement doesn’t become a cult!
Do you really think “cult” is a useful category/descriptor here?
My view: things identified as “cults” have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they’re associated with the label “cult” or not.
Not only is this real, I think this is a paraphrase of a thing Yud wrote. Which makes it even cultier.
Nobody:
EA: Scientology has some good traits, we should copy them.
“Look, all I’m saying is that Scientology managed to scale massively, both in members and funding! There’s obviously something there that we can learn from!”
Fuck me…I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Effective Altruism, Dude. At least it’s an ethos!"
it’s about the curse of ___ism
One objection is that “woke ideology hurts EA cause areas”.
There are many counters to that.
First off, are they actually “woke”? There is a ton of disagreement.
“kicking the racists out might mean less rich racists giving me money for Nonlinear”
“I just think it’s really unfair for my friends and donors to have to feel this uncomfortable because …”
aaaah, the language of the complicit and the vile. how I loathe thee.
skillissuernow it got me wondering: how closely is chief shithead pete thiel involved in EA? that probably wouldn’t be much, unless indirectly via his fellowship and such?
not very visibly personally that i know ,but a lotta Thiel-adjacent people involved
flere-imsahoby jingo!
the indignant outrage at the mere suggestion that the cultists be slightly less visibly racist, maybe, is 10/10, no notes.
Honestly bonkers to hear “woke” used unironically
and with its original meaning! i.e., awareness of systemic racism
btw, this is Kat Woods from our good friends Nonlinear:
Rationalist posts detailed catalogue of confirmed bad behaviour by EA/rationalist org Nonlinear. Second rationalist goes meta on first post: how can we even know anything, it's so unfair to Nonlinear - awful.systems
* original post [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lc8r4tZ2L5txxokZ8/sharing-information-about-nonlinear-1] detailing mistreatment of employees * meta post [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJagsfKmQKeaW5oG3/what-is-the-optimal-frontier-for-due-diligence] about how a good rationalist should correctly epistemically assess the fairness of the post cataloguing and confirming the bad behaviour tl;dr these fucking guys
of all fucking people, the audacity
oh god. these people are exhausting.
BigMuffin69Ugh, I feel like I just gazed into the abyss on this one 🤮 . Also love (fucking hate) how the only output from these EA charities is galactic scale fraud and abuse of some poor volunteers. Just the other day I randomly stumbled upon her musing about chat bot suffering without knowing who she was. If only she would give the same consideration to her employees.
chat bot suffering
fuckin
also, isn’t that the “nonlinear” thing co-founder?
ding ding ding!
Which, to recap for everyone, involved underpaying and manipulating employees into working as full time general purpose servants. Which is pretty up there on the scale of cult-like activity out of everything EA has done. So it makes sense she would be trying to pull a switcheroo as to who is responsible for EA being culty…
full time general purpose servant
and fucktoys on the side, this is EA after all
That’s actually a very common feature of cults, including a lot of the ones considered less extreme.
these people can’t stop telling on themselves lmao
There’s currently a loud minority of EAs saying that EA should ostracize people if they associate with people who disagree with them. That we should try to protect EAs from ideas that are not held by the majority of EAs.
how fucking far are their heads up their own collective arses to not understand that you can’t have a productive, healthy discourse without drawing a line in the sand?
they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum “debating” this shit, which mostly consists of them insisting that they’re “'open to criticism” at the same time they’re trashing anyone who does criticize them, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
I swear these fuckers have never actually had to fight for or defend something that is actually important, or directly affects the day-to-day lived experience or material conditions of themselves or anyone they care about
I hope we protect EA’s incredible epistemic norms
lol, the norms that make it a-okay to spew batshit stuff like this? fuck off
Also, it’s obvious that this isn’t actually EA cultiness really, but just woke ideology trying to take over EA
YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMthey spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
Adderall
nah. i have a proper adhd and am medicated to my ears with medikinet (yeah, so it’s metylphenidate, not adderall, but for the purpose of the reply it doesn’t make a difference), but it didn’t make me an adult debating club aficionado. can we please do not medicalise gobshittery?
I’m saying they abuse adderall, it has bugger all to do with the appropriate use of ADHD medication
adderall is an amphetamine (or a mix of its salts), but it is not the metamphetamine, and it’s not what makes the eas racist, cultish or even overly verbose debating club dropouts. (and neither would speed, fwiw.)
(and i certainly hope that there’s no need to explain basic organic chemistry here, so please do not use the “the difference is just a methyl group” argument)
also: what in “don’t medicalise gobshittery” is unclear?
Alright.
Well I could be, and I really really want to be, incredibly sarcastic and dismissive, because I genuinely believe that you’ve missed the mark incredibly hard, and your eminently reasonably and good request that people not medicalise assholery in general would, in this case, imply not mentioning the fact that people abuse prescription drugs and act like assholes. Alcoholics act like assholes, so do cokeheads, and so do people who abuse prescription medications which are, at the appropriate dosage, a perfectly good and fine support and indeed lifeline for managing whatever condition they may have. And this is just the truth: one of the central reasons that you have alternatives to Adderall, such as the drug which you personally are prescribed, is that there are risks associated with Adderall even for patients with nothing but good intentions.
But I also know it’s bad and counter-productive for me to both try to explain that I think I’m actually being quite reasonable and be sarcastic and dismissive like that.
So instead, I’d like to ask you, first, for a little charity. I’m going to copy paste my original comment below, and point out that it does not say that Adderall is what “makes the eas racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts” (your words, my emphasis on “makes”). Then I’m going to point out what I think it does say:
they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
Adderall
So Jax isn’t here saying “what makes them racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts?” What she’s asking is how are they able to go around in circles amongst themselves talking about this shit, without acknowledging that the ideas they entertain have real world consequences. The joke I’m making focuses narrowly on this point: they’re able to waste all of this time (given that they’re already eas) going round in circles, and denying that words have effects, because they (very very famously!) have a cultural problem with prescription drug abuse. The joke categorically does not attribute their racism or cultishness to Adderall.
Now, the joke does attribute their combined dissociation from real world consequences and their verbosity - specifically, their energy for verbosity - to abuse of Adderall. That’s a stretch, but it’s in the nature of a one-word joke to generalise a little! I need my reader to have a modicum of charity here, in imagining that I am aware that there are other things going on with these people. You, in fact, should be more than aware of this, because I replied to you in another context just the other day with three quite long paragraphs giving an analysis of Yudkowsky and the culture of LessWrong which didn’t once mention prescription drugs of any kind.
And the joke is a little inter-textual: the word “abuse” does not appear next to “Adderall”. Again, I need a little charity from my reader to make the joke work, but I think it’s actually a really reasonable amount of charity. I think, personally, that on SneerClub at least, where I am a frequent commenter, people are generally aware that the abuse of prescription ADHD medication (and other, similar, drugs) is a famous problem amongst rationalists/EAs. At least on SneerClub, I think, people can be trusted to know the difference between attributing behaviours to Adderall outright, and attributing behaviours to its abuse. In this context, I think we can in this case safely skirt discourses of medicalisation that I wholeheartedly agree exist in lots of places.
So this is where I think you’re just wrong: I think that you’re misusing the warning label we rightly put on discourses of medicalisation. And I think misusing those warning labels is generally not a good thing. I think that you do a disservice to me personally, and I think you do a disservice to people’s collective ability to communicate and socialise with one another if you call them out on bare associations between the names of drugs, bad behaviours, and discourses of medicalisation.
that’s as fine parody of the ea communication style as i ever^1 seen.
let me bow out^2 now.
My friend, you are being an asshole.
Maybe count yourself lucky they can medicate your ADHD because they can’t do shit for my autism. Fucking asshole.
fwiw it looks like we were just pushing each other’s pain points; i should’ve disengaged much earlier eiter.
Honestly on my end this mostly comes from a place of genuine confusion. That’s the reason I wrote up a long reply trying to put my frustration with your tone aside to explain the point.
Am I in a bubble? In my world, over-prescription and abuse of prescribed drugs - with Adderall, specifically Adderall, being a big one - is understood to be a widespread and systemic problem. I spent most of 2022 in rehab for albeit a different substance addiction, and continue in recovery today, so I reckon I do have some expertise in when and how it’s ok to make light of it.
I honestly don’t really get how the mere mention of Adderall, in a context where I understood it to be pretty clear the reference is to abuse, is supposed to be beyond the pale.
I love your work here, my man, but–as an ADHD enjoyer–I did subvocalize an “oof.”
OTOH, as someone who is familiar with exactly how many Blue Grocery Store Pharmacies exist within an hour’s round trip time due to ongoing shortages, I get where you’re coming from.
Jonathan HendryThis post is the worst Burma Shave roadside ad ever.
how fucking far are their heads up their own collective arses to not understand that you can’t have a productive, healthy discourse without drawing a line in the sand?
they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
They discovered scope creep (but for racism) and made it into a religious obligation.
borariCan there be a rule about acronyms being defined on first usage? I spent way to long trying to figure out how Electronic Arts had some cult infestation in their upper management and how “wokeism” applied, especially since stuff like that has been in the game developer news cycle again. I started getting really confused when I saw some linked post conversation talking about some founder and their polyamorous relationship.
I’ve figured out that we’re talking about effective altruism, but at this point I’ve wasted my entire pre-bed shit time on people I couldn’t care less about.
Unfortunately in this case the problem is you (as a non-frequenter of this sub (which is explicitly about dunking on these fools)) coming in with no context, although I’d agree with you in principle otherwise
Also it sounds like that game-EA thing could do with a sneer on techtakes
(idly, didn’t mean that aggressively. wrote it pre-coffee, but, yeah)
blakestaceyI’m trying to think of a polite way to say “in short, no” and “the linked tweet having “effectivealtruism” in it twice should have been a clue”, because I’m not that mean, but I probably need more coffee too.
“I’ll take ‘cases where the wallpaper would have been a clue’ for $200, Alex”…
I mean in my defense I literally said I realized what was being talking about in my post.
What killed lurking before posting, and can we blame WOKE? (just kidding!)
I do wonder if seamless federation can be too seamless, since it clearly makes it easier for people to get a bit lost and wander into niche forums unintentionally.
Probably also to blame is whichever clients people end up using - sorta seems like most don’t make it easy to see the details of a sub (although I say that under correction, not having tried them all)
I’m using Arctic, I’m easily able to look at the community sidebar, which I did. It seemed like it was dedicated to just roasting shit, not anything in particular, which didn’t help my confusion. I was hoping it was a community dedicated to taking the piss out of something/someone specific.
I’m sorry I was browsing Lemmy by all while I took a shit, stumbled in to your community, and totally derailed the entire conversation and immeasurably ruined your day by making a post that somebody else commented functionally verbatim hours after me.
banned for obnoxious not-pology