It took me a few comments to realize that we were taking about Effective Altruists and not Electronic Arts. I read EA was becoming a cult and yelling at wokeism for all its troubles, ya, that sounds about right.
For a moment there I wanted to say, “ok hold on for a minute: you think EA doesn’t create cult-like behaviour, only woke creates cult-like behaviour, but even if I grant all that about woke, surely EVERY charitable enterprise in modern history has tended towards cult behaviour?”
“So what do you think makes EA so goddamn special?”
Then I realised it’s the “incredible epistemic norms” of EA, i.e. the strongest drivers of cult-like behaviour going almost worldwide at the moment, which are the primary bulwark against EA behaving like a cult
Do you really think “cult” is a useful category/descriptor here?
My view: things identified as “cults” have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they’re associated with the label “cult” or not.
Nobody:
EA: Scientology has some good traits, we should copy them.
“Look, all I’m saying is that Scientology managed to scale massively, both in members and funding! There’s obviously something there that we can learn from!”
Fuck me…I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Effective Altruism, Dude. At least it’s an ethos!
Not only is this real, I think this is a paraphrase of a thing Yud wrote. Which makes it even cultier. (A reason why I called the Rationalismsphere a cult incubator, as their teachings make you more susceptible to getting into cults).
Edit: For example on his writing on cults, and more ‘Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult’. (Look Cade Metz is referenced, before they turned on him)
these people can’t stop telling on themselves lmao
There’s currently a loud minority of EAs saying that EA should ostracize people if they associate with people who disagree with them. That we should try to protect EAs from ideas that are not held by the majority of EAs.
how fucking far are their heads up their own collective arses to not understand that you can’t have a productive, healthy discourse without drawing a line in the sand?
they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
I swear these fuckers have never actually had to fight for or defend something that is actually important, or directly affects the day-to-day lived experience or material conditions of themselves or anyone they care about
I hope we protect EA’s incredible epistemic norms
lol, the norms that make it a-okay to spew batshit stuff like this? fuck off
Also, it’s obvious that this isn’t actually EA cultiness really, but just woke ideology trying to take over EA
where “debating” here is continually claiming to be “'open to criticism” while, at the same time, trashing anyone who does provide any form of legitimate criticism, so much so that it seems to be a “norm” for internal criticism to be anonymous for fear of retribution ↩︎
how fucking far are their heads up their own collective arses to not understand that you can’t have a productive, healthy discourse without drawing a line in the sand?
they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
They discovered scope creep but for racism and made it into a religious obligation.
they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
Adderall
This post is the worst Burma Shave roadside ad ever.
nah. i have a proper adhd and am medicated to my ears with medikinet (yeah, so it’s metylphenidate, not adderall, but for the purpose of the reply it doesn’t make a difference), but it didn’t make me an adult debating club aficionado. can we please not medicalise gobshittery?
I’m saying they abuse adderall, an amphetamine, which class of drugs I can tell you from personal experience do turn you into a gibbering asshole if you abuse them, and it has bugger all to do with the appropriate use of ADHD medication
But please, if you want to call me out, have the good grace to use the second-person pronoun, this “can we please not” shit is the single most disingenuous phrase that’s entered the language since “I’m not a racist, but”
adderall is an amphetamine (or a mix of its salts), but it is not the metamphetamine, and it’s not what makes the eas racist, cultish or even overly verbose debating club dropouts. (and neither would speed, fwiw.)
(and i certainly hope that there’s no need to explain basic organic chemistry here, so please do not use the “the difference is just a methyl group” argument)
also: what in “don’t medicalise gobshittery” is unclear?
Alright.
Well I could be, and I really really want to be, incredibly sarcastic and dismissive, because I genuinely believe that you’ve missed the mark incredibly hard, and your eminently reasonably and good request that people not medicalise assholery in general would, in this case, imply not mentioning the fact that people abuse prescription drugs and act like assholes. Alcoholics act like assholes, so do cokeheads, and so do people who abuse prescription medications which are, at the appropriate dosage, a perfectly good and fine support and indeed lifeline for managing whatever condition they may have. And this is just the truth: one of the central reasons that you have alternatives to Adderall, such as the drug which you personally are prescribed, is that there are risks associated with Adderall even for patients with nothing but good intentions.
But I also know it’s bad and counter-productive for me to both try to explain that I think I’m actually being quite reasonable and be sarcastic and dismissive like that.
So instead, I’d like to ask you, first, for a little charity. I’m going to copy paste my original comment below, and point out that it does not say that Adderall is what “makes the eas racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts” (your words, my emphasis on “makes”). Then I’m going to point out what I think it does say:
they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
Adderall
So Jax isn’t here saying “what makes them racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts?” What she’s asking is how are they able to go around in circles amongst themselves talking about this shit, without acknowledging that the ideas they entertain have real world consequences. The joke I’m making focuses narrowly on this point: they’re able to waste all of this time (given that they’re already eas) going round in circles, and denying that words have effects, because they (very very famously!) have a cultural problem with prescription drug abuse. The joke categorically does not attribute their racism or cultishness to Adderall.
Now, the joke does attribute their combined dissociation from real world consequences and their verbosity - specifically, their energy for verbosity - to abuse of Adderall. That’s a stretch, but it’s in the nature of a one-word joke to generalise a little! I need my reader to have a modicum of charity here, in imagining that I am aware that there are other things going on with these people. You, in fact, should be more than aware of this, because I replied to you in another context just the other day with three quite long paragraphs giving an analysis of Yudkowsky and scientific racism in LessWrong which didn’t once mention prescription drugs of any kind.
And the joke is a little inter-textual: the word “abuse” does not appear next to “Adderall”. Again, I need a little charity from my reader to make the joke work, but I think it’s actually a really reasonable amount of charity. I think, personally, that on SneerClub at least, where I am a frequent commenter, people are generally aware that the abuse of prescription ADHD medication (and other, similar, drugs) is a famous problem amongst rationalists/EAs. At least on SneerClub, I think, people can be trusted to know the difference between attributing behaviours to Adderall outright, and attributing behaviours to its abuse. In this context, I think we can in this case safely skirt discourses of medicalisation that I wholeheartedly agree exist in lots of places.
So this is where I think you’re just wrong: I think that you’re misusing the warning label we rightly put on discourses of medicalisation. And I think misusing those warning labels is generally not a good thing. I think that you do a disservice to me personally, and I think you do a disservice to people’s collective ability to communicate and socialise with one another if you call them out on bare associations between the names of drugs, bad behaviours, and discourses of medicalisation.
@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @sneerclub The joke is in fact so much better, explained.
Thank you.Honestly? Whatever. I know I’m not in the wrong here. I shouldn’t have come in hard at the beginning.
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what the heck EA forum doesn’t have a block feature? That’s just… ew.
Also how long have all these people been obsessed with “woke” and “the left”? Because it’s been really obvious and over the top lately.
Because they’re the wealthy or at least believe in wealth’s ability to do good. A basic interpretation of EA would say that you should start a company, and maximize profit even at the expense of worker compensation so you have more to give to charity
They approximate by forming private companies that they then talk about as if they’re 501(c)3 charities and pay accordingly, or less - see our friends such as Kat Woods at Nonlinear here for a previous worked example.
what the heck EA forum doesn’t have a block feature? That’s just… ew.
You don’t need a block feature if you’re as insufferable as the average EA /j
Gamergate. Nuff said.
nah. under whatever name, the reactionary racists have been in the rationalist subculture since the '90s at latest
If we trace one ancestry path back to science-fiction fandom, well, there’s John W. Campbell.
In the first Foundation story, there’s a weird mention of applying symbolic logic to human language that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Campbell insisted upon it because
he felt in our discussions that symbolic logic, further developed, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind as to leave human actions predictable. The reason human beings are so unpredictable was we didn’t really know what they were saying and thinking because language is generally used obscurely. So what we needed was something that would unobscure the language and leave everything clear.
Clear being a fortuitous choice of wording on Asimov’s part there, given, well.
TESCREAL and Scientology don’t just share methodology; they both descend directly from “Golden Age” science fiction. In this essay I will
yeah, I have posited previously that the California Ideology traces in a straight line through science fiction to Rudyard Kipling.
“And a waifu is only a waifu, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
Ah, I do believe I now see a bit of an extra in the reason for the makeup of the story in that one writer/writing episode of DS9
you’re so much more graciously subtle than I’m feeling tonight, but then I did clock my brain out after this fucker of a week
wut
Can there be a rule about acronyms being defined on first usage? I spent way to long trying to figure out how Electronic Arts had some cult infestation in their upper management and how “wokeism” applied, especially since stuff like that has been in the game developer news cycle again. I started getting really confused when I saw some linked post conversation talking about some founder and their polyamorous relationship.
I’ve figured out that we’re talking about effective altruism, but at this point I’ve wasted my entire pre-bed shit time on people I couldn’t care less about.
Unfortunately in this case the problem is you (as a non-frequenter of this sub (which is explicitly about dunking on these fools)) coming in with no context, although I’d agree with you in principle otherwise
Also it sounds like that game-EA thing could do with a sneer on techtakes
What killed lurking before posting, and can we blame WOKE? (just kidding!)
I do wonder if seamless federation can be too seamless, since it clearly makes it easier for people to get a bit lost and wander into niche forums unintentionally.
Absolutely magnificent that this guy took a break from posting about OLED WLAN DNS SKU TCL and 800 ISO without bokah at like f/16 to come in here and chastise us for using in-group terms.
800 ISO without bokah at like f/16
on film, handheld, at night. for when you love grainy images and need every part of the frame to be blurry, but specifically not the kind of blur that looks good
fuck, now I have a hankering to grab a medium format camera and a fast (for medium format) lens and take some weird black and white closeups of whatever I see that’s lit interestingly
and even with multiple outs, they had to get indignant. some people…
Probably also to blame is whichever clients people end up using - sorta seems like most don’t make it easy to see the details of a sub (although I say that under correction, not having tried them all)
I’m using Arctic, I’m easily able to look at the community sidebar, which I did. It seemed like it was dedicated to just roasting shit, not anything in particular, which didn’t help my confusion. I was hoping it was a community dedicated to taking the piss out of something/someone specific. Looking at it now, I see that following the link in the first sentence kind of explains it, but if you’re just skimming the sidebar the note about AI shit being acceptable really makes it read like it’s not targeted towards whatever the fuck this effective altruism thing is.
I’m sorry I was browsing Lemmy by all while I took a shit, stumbled in to your community, and totally derailed the entire conversation and immeasurably ruined your day by making a post that somebody else commented functionally verbatim hours after me.
how are you this unable to shut the fuck up
Mastodon has Reply Guys. Lemmy has Cater To Me Whilst I Am Literally, Not Figuratively, Taking a Shit Guys.
mods, can we please have a rule so that only people who are shitting can post here. thanks in advance xoxo
I uh… thought this rule had been in place the whole time. you mean the rest of you haven’t been…?
mods, can we please have a rule so that only people who are shitting can post here. thanks in advance xoxo
The Rule of 2
same thing
5 posts and not a single sneer among them. dry out there today.
I’m going back to reddit, at least the idiots from /destiny /redscare and /stupidpol didn’t have this level of blown up self importance. ;)
banned for obnoxious not-pology
(idly, didn’t mean that aggressively. wrote it pre-coffee, but, yeah)
I’m trying to think of a polite way to say “in short, no” and “the linked tweet having “effectivealtruism” in it twice should have been a clue”, because I’m not that mean, but I probably need more coffee too.
“I’ll take ‘cases where the wallpaper would have been a clue’ for $200, Alex”…
I mean in my defense I literally said I realized what was being talking about in my post.
Also it sounds like that game-EA thing could do with a sneer on techtakes
Careful with that one, it might bring out the people who want to redo 2015, but worse.
blaming your issues on a conspiracy is a great way to ensure your movement doesn’t become a cult!
also, isn’t that the “nonlinear” thing co-founder?
Which, to recap for everyone, involved underpaying and manipulating employees into working as full time general purpose servants. Which is pretty up there on the scale of cult-like activity out of everything EA has done. So it makes sense she would be trying to pull a switcheroo as to who is responsible for EA being culty…
full time general purpose servant
and fucktoys on the side, this is EA after all
That’s actually a very common feature of cults, including a lot of the ones considered less extreme.
ding ding ding!
Honestly bonkers to hear “woke” used unironically
and with its original meaning! i.e., awareness of systemic racism
the indignant outrage at the mere suggestion that the cultists be slightly less visibly racist, maybe, is 10/10, no notes.
The People Who Pray At Prompts are suddenly very worried about cults.
E: haha spoke too soon
from the replies:
Do you really think “cult” is a useful category/descriptor here?
My view: things identified as “cults” have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they’re associated with the label “cult” or not.
Wonder what went wrong there, did they just see the word EA and Cult and went 'people are calling Rationalism a cult again, time to deploy the Rationalist answer. A bot? Something else? (More edit, ah prob somethign else as this is prob a reaction to the whole line of tweets and not that specific tweet, a line of tweets which are doing the geek social fallacies there is a little bit more to being a cult than just ostracizing people)
I’ve been appreciating the term “high-control group” as an alternative, with reference to the BITE [1] model of thought control. People trapped in the group housing situation easily check all of those boxes.
[1] https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/ (note: Steven Hassan has done good work, but can be a little too profit-seeking himself imho)
I’ve thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.
Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a “cult”, watch how much more they flip out at being called a “high-control group”. It’s a very good disarming technique.
good thing Nonlinear has never operated as high-control,
btw, this is Kat Woods from our good friends Nonlinear:
https://awful.systems/post/220620
https://awful.systems/post/682110Ugh, I feel like I just gazed into the abyss on this one 🤮 . Also love (fucking hate) how the only output from these EA charities is galactic scale fraud and abuse of some poor volunteers. Just the other day I randomly stumbled upon her musing about chat bot suffering without knowing who she was. If only she would give the same consideration to her employees.
chat bot suffering
fuckin
of all fucking people, the audacity
oh god. these people are exhausting.
it’s about the curse of ___ism
One objection is that “woke ideology hurts EA cause areas”.
There are many counters to that.
First off, are they actually “woke”? There is a ton of disagreement.
“kicking the racists out might mean less rich racists giving me money for Nonlinear”
“I just think it’s really unfair for my friends and donors to have to feel this uncomfortable because …”
aaaah, the language of the complicit and the vile. how I loathe thee.
now it got me wondering: how closely is chief shithead pete thiel involved in EA? that probably wouldn’t be much, unless indirectly via his fellowship and such?
not very visibly personally that i know ,but a lotta Thiel-adjacent people involved
by jingo!
why tf can’t she say the word “racist”? like is it supposed to be a dogwhistle insinuating similarity between “racist” and “leftist”??
it’s a dirty political word that only intellectual terrorists use. not only is it beneath her to acknowledge social facts, she wants to make it clear she won’t be intimidated into considering it.
Because the community has both racists, sexists and facists. None of whom are real nor should they be avoided or shunned!
they must be just great at conga crossbars, with that little spine
