[dig this last followup](https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/182264887148/ms-demeanor-the-grey-tribe-ms-demeanor)
wherein he admits he literally didn't know what the fuck he was talking about
but he was right anyway
and it's everyone else's fault for not providing inline explanations to his satisfaction, because Google doesn't fucking exist
and why can't politics be *nice* and not like something that literally affects people's lives
and please don't think mean things about him uwu
>I want boys to play with dolls, if they want to, and girls to play football, if they want to,
Off to a good start...
> but I am fine with girls being girls and boys being boys
...and back to square one.
> I guess we shouldn’t use the language of virtue ethics if we think about utilitarian consequentialism
No shit, Sherlock.
> I may or may not have seen the stream.
Oh seriously.
> I want boys to play with dolls, if they want to, and girls to play football, if they want to, but I am fine with girls being girls and boys being boys and playing with different toys, if they want to.
What? Is- I- Does this sentence even make sense? Did he just say the same thing twice? Like, "I want people to do what they want but I'm fine with them doing what they want!" Like, what?
> I don’t want politics to be wrestling. Or a doll house. Or football.
Hmmm...
He probably thought this was deep, too. Damn.
I think they're saying that they're fine with kids playing with OPPOSITE GENDER TOYS but that uh they also are fine with the kids being cis and that they're not forcing the kid to transition and brainwashing them into believing they're trans, which is definitely a thing that could happen if you're very rational I suppose??
But they don't know how to turn on the lights in the factory or get the beavers into the hole, so whatever.
christ, this rationalist
>(imagine if it was for autism speaks and the reason they chose autism speaks was that someone said autism speaks shouldn’t recieve funding.)
>I don’t know IF mermaids is shitty the way autism speaks is shitty or not but that’s basically the question, and saying ‘this charity is actually bad and donating to it out of spite isn’t a good thing’ isn’t derailing. I don’t know if it’s correct or not but it is a relevant question.
he first (a) directly puts Mermaids on the level of Autism Speaks (b) confesses that *he didn't bother finding out a fucking thing about what he was talking about*, he's just bloviating from first principles and using rectal discovery for mere tawdry factual content
and also
> Maybe that has made me a bit more open to believing that some people are not TERFs, because Singal has been called a TERF ever since the Zucker thing.
LEARN ABOUT SINGAL FROM SOMEONE OTHER THAN SCOTT, YOU HORRIBLE SHITHEAD.
> confesses that he didn't bother finding out a fucking thing about what he was talking about, he's just bloviating from first principles and using rectal discovery for mere tawdry factual content
I feel like so many of rationalists' problems could be solved by *just fucking checking whatever they're talking about before talking about it*
One thing that's interesting is that on first discovering this term "Rationalism" one generally has to spend a lot of time working out ("just fucking checking") that it isn't *supposed* to be a recapitulation of "rationalism" in Early Modern Philosophy (or at least you do if you're the sort of over-educated arsehole who associates "rationalism" with that usage - with all due apologies to my friends and family: I got into a thing and ended up with a post-graduate degree, dunno how).
But *then* the whole enterprise ends up looking so remarkably like a recapitulation of the worst *caricature* of the likes of Descartes, where just *thinking* - solipsistically - about things gets you to the answers you need, without ever having to check.
Of course, be they Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, whatever, the Early Modern Rationalists didn't actually believe that (although they could be accused of behaving like it sometimes - cf. Spinoza's *Ethics*), and that kind of rationalism was devoted to putting *empirical* observations on a sound metaphysical footing, whereas this extremely online Rationalism seems primarily to posit as undeniable and in need of no justification certain metaphysical claims (everything is just matter; ethics is utilitarian calculus; objective rationality is co-extensive with a "view from nowhere"; hence why simulations are qualitatively identical with that which they simulate).
And then you get all this solipsistic guff about made-up numbers and stats and so on, because somebody's adopted the biggest criticism of that caricature as a maxim rather than a warning: if I just apply the technique rigorously enough (by my own, often self-serving, standard for rigour) then my extrapolations are worth it just on their own.
It seems natural, at that point, that people just forget to do any checking: they've adopted a powerfully individualist metaphysics that brooks no alternative hypotheses and which insists that the most important thing for anybody to do in working things out is not to work stuff out bit by bit and respond adequately to evidence, but to come up with as complete a single picture of how things are in one fell swoop...inevitably that's going to run into problems when knowledge might be benefited more by us going out into the world and looking, responding critically to counter-evidence, and embracing at least a modicum of general scepticism (that's "scepticism" as in moderation and agnosticism - I was gonna do a bit about Berkeley here but I would probably top myself if I were ever asked to re-read it).
It’s almost as if it that says something about the validity of
effective altruism that playing endless amounts of Donkey Kong out of
spite towards a washed up TV writer did more to help people than
endlessly bickering over the internet about what the best way to help
people is.
Also from this:
Anyway, making the messaging around this based on “pissing off
Linehan“ instead of “these are the positive things this charity does“ is
still bad, and hbomberguy, media/blogs and the tumblr commentariat are
all engaging in this to varying degrees.
And that means that viewers/donors also came and donated primarily to
spite the outgroup, not to help the needy.
It becomes very clear that this guy, at the very least, did not watch
the stream, or bother to dig deeper into it. Because if he did he would
know that the big thing about it is how many transpeople it had speaking
out about their issues, and how much it engendered support for the
subject beyond a bunch of internet trolls just throwing money away to
shit on some guy.
[Heres an article](https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/01/23/hbomberguy-trans-kids-donkey-kong/) about it. To summarize, a charity called Mermaids got a 500k grant from the UK government to provide counselling and support to help trans kids and their parents. A transphobic ex-comedy writer then started a campaign to flood the department with complaints, and the funding was pulled. To protest this, a youtuber called hbomberguy launched a charity stream for mermaids playing DK64 for 60 hours. The stream blew up, raised 350k for the charity and had a ton of cool guests like Chelsea Manning, Alexandria Ocassio Cortez, and John romero.
Now, some annoying tumblr rationalist isn’t saying that hbomb shouldn’t have done all that because it was “motivated by spite” and therefore not morally pure.
> Now, some annoying tumblr rationalist isn’t saying that hbomb shouldn’t have done all that because it was “motivated by spite” and therefore not morally pure.
Who fucking cares, doing good things to spite an evil/bad person is a morally pure motive.
These deontological dweebs are worse than useless.
Spite donating also makes perfect sense as a political tactic. The TERFS might think twice about targeting other charities now that they know it’ll backfire harshly. For a similar example, see the town that turned a nazi march into a “[walkathon](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/18/neo-nazis-tricked-into-raising-10000-for-charity)” raising money for anti-fascism.
There's a difference between feelgood and dogood, and the difference is (one of 'em, anyways) that dogood can be fueled by very negative emotions. Doing great things for petty reasons is still great.
They’re not genuinely deontological, just consequentialists lying about their motives. The grey tribe in particular wouldn’t know how to argue in good faith after spending so much time “proving” the Russia investigation is a nothingburger.
There is, of course, no such thing as a grey tribe, and it's a silly invention by people who should know better than to be so simplistic, although of course that's holding them to a higher standard than they deserve
To add:
* [Here's a Reddit thread with the stream highlights](https://np.reddit.com/r/hbomberguy/comments/aj91sk/could_someone_give_a_recap_of_the_dk64_stream/)
* [Here's HBomberguy's video announcing the charity stream] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIM-GKRS9Vk) (3min)
* Here's the archived stream:
1. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/365966431 (38h)
2. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/366901309 (21h)
3. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/367450055 (8h)
Its sad that (this?) rationalists like to shape how what is rational manifests on the world. No nuance, no subtext, nothing more than one dimensional objections to every other thing that appears just a little bit different by choice or by nature. I say dada to all of them.
>The stream blew up, raised 350k for the charity and had a ton of cool guests like Chelsea Manning, Alexandria Ocassio Cortez, and John romero.
I think you forgot Mara Wilson.
...
Yes, I'm putting the woman who played Matilda 20 years ago in the same tier as Chelsea Manning and AOC. That's my childhood dammit.
I think Glinner should qualify as an honorary rationalist based entirely on his level of self-awareness:
https://twitter.com/Hbomberguy/status/1088733774936977409
TL;DR of the “grey tribe” guy’s argument:
i know nothing about the thing i’m gonna talk about
spite is bad
calling terfs terfs is bad
keep in mind that i didn’t actually check anything about this
but you know maybe what the terfs said was right
like i know the guy is a known liar but actually i don’t ’cause i didn’t bother checking
but you know maybe it’s the trans people who are all wrong
i want to make it extremely clear that i don’t actually know anything about all this
Actually, that’s still too long.
Real TL;DR is:
and the rationalist is still fucking at it
(ms-demeanor commented on this elsewhere “i should know better but I don’t”)
It’s almost as if it that says something about the validity of effective altruism that playing endless amounts of Donkey Kong out of spite towards a washed up TV writer did more to help people than endlessly bickering over the internet about what the best way to help people is.
Also from this:
It becomes very clear that this guy, at the very least, did not watch the stream, or bother to dig deeper into it. Because if he did he would know that the big thing about it is how many transpeople it had speaking out about their issues, and how much it engendered support for the subject beyond a bunch of internet trolls just throwing money away to shit on some guy.
I’m out of the loop. What is this about?
Hot take: HBomberguy exaggerated how he’s doing this to spite Graham Linehan. He’s been thinking about doing a charity stream playing Donkey Kong 64 since February 2017. Initially he wanted to do it in October 2018, and the charity was going to be Special Effect.
I have a special type of contrarian rationalist acausal torture. Just FYI.