fwiw i was mostly annoyed by the “his wife is doing what” in the comment i was answering directly – going after him just because of his wife would be like going after varoufakis just because his wife is supposedly the heroine of blur’s “common people”.

and i happily agree that doctorow could dispense with his privilege, tone down the smugness and try for less shallow takes once in a while.

fwiw it looks like we were just pushing each other’s pain points; i should’ve disengaged much earlier either.

that’s as fine parody of the ea communication style as i ever^[1] seen.

let me bow out^[2] now.

(if we were to question bonafides of leftist intellectuals^[1] just because they are supported by someone belonging to the moneyed class, or come from the moneyed class themselves, we’d need to start with certain mr. marx, comrades. and numerous others.)

so should he have divorced her in 2017 to prove his ideological purity?

(waves to the local chapter of the leftist circular firing squad)

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?

whoever it was, i clicked the arrow down too, so that person didn’t feel so alone.

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?

so now we have confirmation that tracing w. is (a) a petty, vengeful prick and (b) reads this; good. tracing, whoever you are, why don’t you focus on some introspection, like consider what causes you to agree with obvious anti-scientific crap (scientific racism, hbd) and why do you prefer the company of fascists (proto, wannabe, true, disguised, and the illinois nazis) to the company of people who don’t think genocide can be justified for any reason?

yup.

i think this one is my favourite so far.

that atleson person is absolutely first class sneerer.

by jingo!

also, isn’t that the “nonlinear” thing co-founder?

the indignant outrage at the mere suggestion that the cultists be slightly less visibly racist, maybe, is 10/10, no notes.

him referring to lysenkoism in this context is extra weird; the scientific racists and lysenko are but another facets of the antiscientific ignorance

these guys should really stop using words they don’t understand. (i know, in case of the muppet quoted below it’s almost impossible.)

it’s the type of the very dense cult jargon that you stop noticing only when you’re ears-deep into the cult.

that was noticed by the gobshites and they’re not happy about it, i think the tracingwoodgrains person really dislikes you:

I respect that and agree that those comments cross a line that should not be crossed. I’m sympathetic to the value of red lines and taboos, and I regularly put active effort into defending the sentiment that racism is bad and should be condemned (though I am extremely cautious about tabooing people as a whole based on specific bad sentiments).

It’s more complicated for me here because as mentioned above, I find Hanania’s commentary on other topics unusually valuable and think I have had valuable, worthwhile interactions with him such that I am glad for opportunities to do so.

More than that, I am conscious that many who most eagerly pursue the taboo, including the writers of the Guardian article and people like David Gerard who provided background for it openly despise you, me, and others in these spheres, and given taboo-crafting power would craft a set of norms emphatically disagreeable to me. I think parts of the EA community have themselves shown some susceptibility to similar impulses, throwing people like Nick Bostrom under the bus to do so. That post in particular actively made me more wary of EA spaces and left me wondering who else would be skewered.

The individual who wrote that post no longer works at CEA but openly demands that EA cut ties with the entire rationalist community. I like you and broadly trust your own instincts here, even where we might disagree about where to draw specific lines, but I am extremely wary of yielding norm-setting power to people who treat my approach (engaging seriously with anyone) as worthy of suspicion and condemnation, and I think when they succeed in setting the frame, it works against a lot of the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent community norms I value.

(i find it symptomatic, but not at all surprising that the person who criticised bostrom is not with the movement anymore, but scientific racists and hbd-curious fuckers like tracing… are.)

Totally Not A Cult.