throwaway46237896

• throwaway46237896 3 Nov 2021 13:50 UTC

  −41 points

  in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  You can avoid both by not having leaders who believe in terrible things (like “black people are genetically too stupid to govern themselves”) that they have to hide behind a veil of (im)plausible deniability.

• throwaway46237896 3 Nov 2021 13:49 UTC

  −32 points

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  It would still be a straw if it started with the current version, because it is defending Scott for holding positions and supporting people I find indefensible. The moment someone like Steve Sailer is part of your “general theory of who to listen to”, you’re intellectually dead to me.

  The last straw for me is that the community didn’t respond to that with “wow, Scott’s a real POS, time to distance ourselves from him and diagnose why we ever thought he was someone we wanted around”. Instead, it responded with “yep that sounds about right”. Which means the community is as indefensible as Scott is. And Eliezer, specifically, doing it meant that it wasn’t even a case of “well maybe the rank and file have some problems but at least the leadership...”

• throwaway46237896 28 Oct 2021 13:14 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  I think it would be good to acknowledge here Eliezer’s edits.

  I don’t. He made them only after ingroup criticism, and that only happened because it was so incredibly egregious. Remember, this was the LAST straw for me—not the first.

  The thing about ingroupy status-quo bias is that you’ll justify one small thing after another, but when you get a big one-two punch—enough to shatter that bias and make you look at things from outside—your beliefs about the group can shift very rapidly. I had already been kind of leery about a number of things I’d seen, but the one-two-three punch of the Scott emails, Eliezer’s response, and the complete refusal of anyone I knew in the community to engage with these things as a problem, was that moment for me.

  Even if I did give him credit for the edit—which I don’t, really—it was only the breaking point, not the sole reason I left.

• throwaway46237896 21 Oct 2021 1:25 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: hg00’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  The rant (now somewhat redacted) can be found here, in response to the leaked emails of Scott more-or-less outright endorsing people like Steve Sailer re:”HBD”. There was a major backlash against Scott at the time, resulting in the departure of many longtime members of the community (including me), and Eliezer’s post was in response to that. It opened with:

  it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics

  ...which is, to put it mildly, absurd.

• throwaway46237896 21 Oct 2021 1:19 UTC

  −14 points

  in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  I’m a former member turned very hostile to the community represented here these days. So that’s appropriate, I guess.

• throwaway46237896 18 Oct 2021 18:53 UTC

  −68 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  You also wrote a whole screed about how anyone who attacks you or Scott Alexander is automatically an evil person with no ethics, and walked it back only after backlash and only halfway. You don’t get to pretend you’re exactly embracing criticism there, Yud—in fact, it was that post that severed my ties to this community for good.