Which part? He's said it's his personal philosophy. And he's currently an unelected official making top-level executive decisions in our federal government. At least one of the young tech workers helping him feed foreign aid "into the wood chipper" is also an avowed effective altruist.
Over the last few years community members have gone to great lengths to assure people that EA did not favor the idea of prioritizing deaths among poor third-world national human populations in order to preserve wealthier nations for the purpose of fostering artificial intelligence that could one day save humanity.
This idea was popularized in a very influential founding document of longtermism, and every public-facing EA figure had to defend themselves against accusations of believing this.
Now, however, with an EA as acting president, we are seeing aid to third-world countries systematically dismantled under an explicitly America-first agenda led by a tech entrepreneur in the AI space.
Point taken about the frontpage placement, although my comment mostly intended to point at a lost opportunity for meaningful engagement, self-reflection, and stepping outside the internal logic of groupthink, rationalizing, and defensiveness (which are the phenomena I have observed on previous posts of this nature) – not just the house metric of clicks.
My worry is that the EA mentality is capable of absorbing information publicly revealing increasingly puerile forms of abuse and using the high-level thinking so important to the valorization of the ideology as a tool to obfuscate the real, problematic power dynamics within the ranks of its movement. The article does explicitly address this.
This seems to be one of the most major pieces yet about EA for a mass audience, so I'm hoping it's taken with a sense of gravity and thoughtfulness. I see no one else has commented, unfortunately. The account I'm replying to has now made accusations of journalistic dishonesty and bias, though, about which I'm interested to hear more.
I have made no such comment about marginalized groups, so I'm not sure what the warning was for.
Sadly I fear stories like this are lost on the devoted EA crowd here. We're likely to see another round of rationalizing, distancing, downvoting, and flooding the forum with posts to drown out the stories of power being abused at the hands of tech industry elites at the expense of young idealistic women. I fully expect this comment to be downvoted to oblivion, if it is even approved. But I would love to see a real reckoning from this community about its chummy relationship with the powerful (abusers and exploiters of labor), and the cultish single-minded fixation on technological "solutions" at the expense of any sense of camaraderie and sympathy for the vulnerable and downtrodden. Not everything is a problem that you can solve on a whiteboard. Most issues require being a human being in the real world that we have right now.
It's hard to say what "memetics adjacence" means. I take it to be the list of ideologies he subscribes to or feels an affinity with.
Which part? He's said it's his personal philosophy. And he's currently an unelected official making top-level executive decisions in our federal government. At least one of the young tech workers helping him feed foreign aid "into the wood chipper" is also an avowed effective altruist.
Over the last few years community members have gone to great lengths to assure people that EA did not favor the idea of prioritizing deaths among poor third-world national human populations in order to preserve wealthier nations for the purpose of fostering artificial intelligence that could one day save humanity.
This idea was popularized in a very influential founding document of longtermism, and every public-facing EA figure had to defend themselves against accusations of believing this.
Now, however, with an EA as acting president, we are seeing aid to third-world countries systematically dismantled under an explicitly America-first agenda led by a tech entrepreneur in the AI space.
How can we deny that this is what EA stands for?
Point taken about the frontpage placement, although my comment mostly intended to point at a lost opportunity for meaningful engagement, self-reflection, and stepping outside the internal logic of groupthink, rationalizing, and defensiveness (which are the phenomena I have observed on previous posts of this nature) – not just the house metric of clicks.
My worry is that the EA mentality is capable of absorbing information publicly revealing increasingly puerile forms of abuse and using the high-level thinking so important to the valorization of the ideology as a tool to obfuscate the real, problematic power dynamics within the ranks of its movement. The article does explicitly address this.
This seems to be one of the most major pieces yet about EA for a mass audience, so I'm hoping it's taken with a sense of gravity and thoughtfulness. I see no one else has commented, unfortunately. The account I'm replying to has now made accusations of journalistic dishonesty and bias, though, about which I'm interested to hear more.
I have made no such comment about marginalized groups, so I'm not sure what the warning was for.
Sadly I fear stories like this are lost on the devoted EA crowd here. We're likely to see another round of rationalizing, distancing, downvoting, and flooding the forum with posts to drown out the stories of power being abused at the hands of tech industry elites at the expense of young idealistic women. I fully expect this comment to be downvoted to oblivion, if it is even approved. But I would love to see a real reckoning from this community about its chummy relationship with the powerful (abusers and exploiters of labor), and the cultish single-minded fixation on technological "solutions" at the expense of any sense of camaraderie and sympathy for the vulnerable and downtrodden. Not everything is a problem that you can solve on a whiteboard. Most issues require being a human being in the real world that we have right now.