EA Forum post: People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You
You may have wondered about the origins of Aella’s previous, seemingly unprovoked Twitter diatribe against the lying liars who conspire against her. Wonder no more; she has elaborated at considerable length upon those initial thoughts in the EA forum, and it turns out that the source of her consternation is the recent Time magazine article about allegations of sexual misconduct in EA.
Come for the forum post, stay for the comments. In service to the community I have summarized Aella’s thesis so that interested readers can focus their attention on the more interesting material in the comments. Her reasoning is as follows:
The comments section is a mixture of earnest concern for the EA community, solipsistic personal grievance, and paranoia. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationalism’s newly-ronin prophet of doom, makes a special guest appearance.
One woman pushes back (very gently) on Aella’s skepticism, noting especially that Time’s coverage reflects her experiences as a woman in the EA community. Her perspective is not convincing to the skeptics, and Yudkowsky suggests that if she believes there are problems within the community then she should do a thorough investigation and produce a report.
In the same response Yudkowsky also objects to steel-manning perspectives that are printed in mass media, on the grounds that mass media is the enemy and he feels personally aggrieved by it. The same sentiment is echoed elsewhere.
Another commenter offers a spirited defense of media coverage, but Aella and Yudkowsky are having none of it. Judging by the comment vote count, neither are other EA forum users. Paranoia and grievance carry the day.
A sexual abuse survivor thanks the other commenters for validating her feelings about the Time magazine article. She too was skeptical of it, and she had felt concerned that her skepticism indicated that she was still struggling with dysfunctional attachment styles.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s: one commenter has a hard time understanding the relevance of Aella’s personal grievances to the allegations of misconduct within the EA community.
And there’s more yet, but I’ll stop here.
Yud reveals his research methods
Serious “Do YoUr OwN rEsEaRcH, tHiS iSn’T a pyramid scheme boss babe 😘” energy
Time didn’t even consider the base rate of harassment!!
these fucking people
responders: “well yeah >80% of the Time article is true, but. They were so rude about it!!”
this reply elsewhere details how dogshit the EA community response to its predators is
someone did do a real investigation, and a real writeup
then they published it in time magazine
why does yudkowski ignore that he’s responding to an investigation and ask another commentor to do one
All of this is so fucking unhinged. Just take thirty seconds to look inside yourselves and like…apologize
The part where Elizier misattributes the ‘Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect’ to Richard Feynman, the physicist, and is corrected that, in fact, it was Micheal Crichton, the hack science fiction author, seems indicative.
Just want to clarify something:
This is abuse, and would be recognized as abuse in the wider polyam community (at least, the non-shithead corners of it). Not surprised to see that Rationalists are getting polyam as well as everything else they do wrong.
I love EA insider spaces, they actually say what they are thinking.
“So like, vibe check, if someone is super fucking creepy and coerces people to have sex with them up to and including supplying mind-altering substances is that acceptable behavior IF they also donate millions of dollars into pipe-dream pseudoscientific”research” into how to make the artificial intelligences that we don’t have and possibly will never work or at least not how we pretend they will not make infinite paperclips? Asking for a friend.”
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That Duncan Sabien fellow was friends with Brent Dill. 👀
I scrolled through her post, and wow, the narcissism in jumping into a community’s discussion of sexual harassment to complain that someone said you were a bore at parties. It also seems unavoidable or dare I say rational that people will say and believe crazy things about you if you make yourself notorious for both throwing sex/nudity/drug parties and arguing against all taboos.
Isn’t Eliezer supposed to be working on alignment right now? Like… given his stated priors and the state of the world, is there any reason for him to spend time on anything else other than alignment, eating and sleeping?
Yudkowsky and Aella have an Epstein/Ghislaine relationship. Prove me wrong
Just realized im one of the people being bitched about. 👋