I’m not sure the “Quokkas with machineguns” picture is an accurate one. The people in this community who are quokkas are fairly distinct from the people with the machine guns; the quokka is the careful introverted nerd who likes math and logic, and the person with the machine gun is probably the attractive, poly, highly-sociosexual woman who tried to sleep with the boss’s brother and then potentially emotionally manipulated people into writing hitpieces on her behalf.
If the broader rationalist community was all quokkas it would probably not have this kind of scandal, but with success and fame and impact on the world more of the machine gunner types will show up, and we’ll see more and more of this.
This is what nonviolent or fifth generation warfare looks like. Informational and reputational warfare. Competition for money, fame, power, and so on by trashing the reputations of your adversaries with lies or with exaggerations.
And as more normies enter the space, we’ll see a greater susceptibility to these kinds of tactics; trial by vibes, the power of accusations and groupthink. If the normies win, the rationality movement will turn into something like Forbes 30u30 or Ted Talks.
Zooming out even more, I feel that there’s a missing piece in our understanding of rationality as a discipline, which is that rationality is not exempt from human social games and in particular from female or feminine forms of violence—crybullying, reputation destruction, use of sociosexuality to manipulate the men in the group, etc. If you don’t take into account these effects you will simply lose to people who do; epistemology is fundamentally a social game that is all about emotions, feelings, narrative control, and how people can be manipulated. This is part of the more general missing theory of words as weapons and people getting very mixed up between what’s true and what’s politically/socially expedient.
By the way, who was that malcontent you mentioned got you into this, I didn’t get a chance to see the link?
I am skeptical of the gender angle, but I think it’s being underdiscussed that, based on the balance of evidence so far, the person with the biggest, most effective machine gun is $5000 to the richer and still anonymous, whereas the people hit by their bullets are busy pointing fingers at each other. Alice’s alleged actions trashing Nonlinear (and 20-some former people???) seem IMO much worse than anything Lightcone or Nonlinear is being even accused of.
(Not that this is a totally foregone conclusion—I noticed that Nonlinear didn’t provide any direct evidence on the claim that Alice was a known serial liar outside of this saga.)
Hey, Roko! Sincere thanks for alerting me to this situation, as well as motivating a petty “There are a million better ways to disagree with them; let’s see what I can do” urge when I saw your post about it. I wouldn’t have noticed or responded to this all without that prompting.
As for quokkas and machine guns, I don’t disagree that someone can be one or the other, but—well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think Ben is an attractive, poly, highly sociosexual woman. As a more general archetype, I think there’s a distinct sort of first-principles thinking that can lead someone to do a lot of harm without precisely meaning any of it.
Yes, obviously, but they use different strategies. Male sociopaths rarely paint themselves as helpless victims because it is not an effective tactic for men. One does notice that, while the LW community is mostly male, ~every successful callout post against a LW community organization has been built on claims of harm to vulnerable female victims.
Was that a particularly key part of the accusation? TBH, I completely forgot about that part of it. Is this just me? Do other people remember that aspect or did they forget it?
For me the key accusations were (a) he did a lot of smallish bad things and (b) he would repeatedly do something bad, be told that it was bad, apologize, say he’d “updated”, and then he’d keep doing the thing.
So I don’t think any of the object level harms in the post are “key”; it was how many there were and how he responded to feedback on them.
I didn’t remember it as key, but the highlights I’d cached about the whole affair (before rereading the post) were that he’d been astroturfing reviews and that he’d required unpaid ‘volunteer’ work from employees (well, and that employees had been doing some of the astroturfing, possibly on ‘volunteer’ time).
Well, I don’t actually know what “crybullying” or “sociosexuality” mean, but I definitely know that male sociopaths make use of reputation destruction.
Can confirm. I mean, different sociopaths use different strategies; there are probably many who survive on scams and physical violence alone. But once you e.g. get into politics, you probably have the skills and the motivation to do reputation attacks. And I just remembered two specific examples.
I think this just shows another weakness of the actual, real-world rationality culture we currently have—trying to bend the pursuit of truth so that it just happens to coincide with popular narratives.
Eliezer was really onto something when he wrote that future rationalists would live like monks and not partake in social status games …
I’m not sure the “Quokkas with machineguns” picture is an accurate one. The people in this community who are quokkas are fairly distinct from the people with the machine guns; the quokka is the careful introverted nerd who likes math and logic, and the person with the machine gun is probably the attractive, poly, highly-sociosexual woman who tried to sleep with the boss’s brother and then potentially emotionally manipulated people into writing hitpieces on her behalf.
If the broader rationalist community was all quokkas it would probably not have this kind of scandal, but with success and fame and impact on the world more of the machine gunner types will show up, and we’ll see more and more of this.
This is what nonviolent or fifth generation warfare looks like. Informational and reputational warfare. Competition for money, fame, power, and so on by trashing the reputations of your adversaries with lies or with exaggerations.
And as more normies enter the space, we’ll see a greater susceptibility to these kinds of tactics; trial by vibes, the power of accusations and groupthink. If the normies win, the rationality movement will turn into something like Forbes 30u30 or Ted Talks.
Zooming out even more, I feel that there’s a missing piece in our understanding of rationality as a discipline, which is that rationality is not exempt from human social games and in particular from female or feminine forms of violence—crybullying, reputation destruction, use of sociosexuality to manipulate the men in the group, etc. If you don’t take into account these effects you will simply lose to people who do; epistemology is fundamentally a social game that is all about emotions, feelings, narrative control, and how people can be manipulated. This is part of the more general missing theory of words as weapons and people getting very mixed up between what’s true and what’s politically/socially expedient.
By the way, who was that malcontent you mentioned got you into this, I didn’t get a chance to see the link?
I am skeptical of the gender angle, but I think it’s being underdiscussed that, based on the balance of evidence so far, the person with the biggest, most effective machine gun is $5000 to the richer and still anonymous, whereas the people hit by their bullets are busy pointing fingers at each other. Alice’s alleged actions trashing Nonlinear (and 20-some former people???) seem IMO much worse than anything Lightcone or Nonlinear is being even accused of.
(Not that this is a totally foregone conclusion—I noticed that Nonlinear didn’t provide any direct evidence on the claim that Alice was a known serial liar outside of this saga.)
Hey, Roko! Sincere thanks for alerting me to this situation, as well as motivating a petty “There are a million better ways to disagree with them; let’s see what I can do” urge when I saw your post about it. I wouldn’t have noticed or responded to this all without that prompting.
As for quokkas and machine guns, I don’t disagree that someone can be one or the other, but—well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think Ben is an attractive, poly, highly sociosexual woman. As a more general archetype, I think there’s a distinct sort of first-principles thinking that can lead someone to do a lot of harm without precisely meaning any of it.
This felt unnecessarily gendered to me. There are obviously masculine manipulative sociopaths.
Yes, obviously, but they use different strategies. Male sociopaths rarely paint themselves as helpless victims because it is not an effective tactic for men. One does notice that, while the LW community is mostly male, ~every successful callout post against a LW community organization has been built on claims of harm to vulnerable female victims.
An example of a post that wasn’t was Concerns with Intentional Insights, where most of the accusations were not about harming specific victims but for the ones that were (subverting Upwork’s minimum wage rules) the victims were mostly male.
Was that a particularly key part of the accusation? TBH, I completely forgot about that part of it. Is this just me? Do other people remember that aspect or did they forget it?
For me the key accusations were (a) he did a lot of smallish bad things and (b) he would repeatedly do something bad, be told that it was bad, apologize, say he’d “updated”, and then he’d keep doing the thing.
So I don’t think any of the object level harms in the post are “key”; it was how many there were and how he responded to feedback on them.
I didn’t remember it as key, but the highlights I’d cached about the whole affair (before rereading the post) were that he’d been astroturfing reviews and that he’d required unpaid ‘volunteer’ work from employees (well, and that employees had been doing some of the astroturfing, possibly on ‘volunteer’ time).
Well, I don’t actually know what “crybullying” or “sociosexuality” mean, but I definitely know that male sociopaths make use of reputation destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociosexuality
It’s a term in psychology.
Can confirm. I mean, different sociopaths use different strategies; there are probably many who survive on scams and physical violence alone. But once you e.g. get into politics, you probably have the skills and the motivation to do reputation attacks. And I just remembered two specific examples.
I think this just shows another weakness of the actual, real-world rationality culture we currently have—trying to bend the pursuit of truth so that it just happens to coincide with popular narratives.
Eliezer was really onto something when he wrote that future rationalists would live like monks and not partake in social status games …