I guess one challenge with this is Zack doesn’t exactly seem to agree with sex essentialism. Rather he used to be a strong opponent of it and then Eliezer told him(?) that he shouldn’t blindly oppose sex essentialism because often sex essentialism is correct and important, and now Zack wants the rationalist community to stop randomly lashing out against sex essentialism and instead invest in figuring out which part of sex essentialism are good vs bad? Whereas the rationalist community is mostly too propagandistic/lazy/busy to investigate sex essentialism systematically.
(Zack bets mostly on “too propagandistic”; this is clearly the case for Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, as he has documented well in this post. But there’s plenty of rationalists with different opinions, and also the rationalist community doesn’t invest that much into figuring out other socially significant matters, so I would personally put more weight on the lazy/busy aspect.)
🤔 I guess even with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, one could question how much the problem is that they started being propagandistic, versus that they never put grit in to research these topics in the first place. Much of their earlier sex essentialist rhetoric seems derived from easy anecdotes and opinions from other sex essentialists. What’s the biggest rationalist research project that overlaps with sex essentialism?
I guess one challenge with this is Zack doesn’t exactly seem to agree with sex essentialism. Rather he used to be a strong opponent of it and then Eliezer told him(?) that he shouldn’t blindly oppose sex essentialism because often sex essentialism is correct and important, and now Zack wants the rationalist community to stop randomly lashing out against sex essentialism and instead invest in figuring out which part of sex essentialism are good vs bad? Whereas the rationalist community is mostly too propagandistic/lazy/busy to investigate sex essentialism systematically.
(Zack bets mostly on “too propagandistic”; this is clearly the case for Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, as he has documented well in this post. But there’s plenty of rationalists with different opinions, and also the rationalist community doesn’t invest that much into figuring out other socially significant matters, so I would personally put more weight on the lazy/busy aspect.)
🤔 I guess even with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, one could question how much the problem is that they started being propagandistic, versus that they never put grit in to research these topics in the first place. Much of their earlier sex essentialist rhetoric seems derived from easy anecdotes and opinions from other sex essentialists. What’s the biggest rationalist research project that overlaps with sex essentialism?