Some reading on the issues of sexual harassment for women in EA:
https://time.com/6252617/effective-altruism-sexual-harassment/
https://keerthanapg.com/random/ea-women/
Lead me to the following posts with a few gem comments extracted:
” EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang. Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with ‘suboptimal’ human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it, red pill is an optimized sexual strategy with the humanity of women stripped from it. ”
http://hn.premii.com/#/comments/34646361
“EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they’re always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.
I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits.
They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves. They also had a deep contrarian bias, which turned into a belief that drugs weren’t actually as bad as the system wanted us to believe.
Combine these two factors and they convinced themselves that they could harness recreational opioid use to improve their lives, but avoid the negative consequences that “normies” suffered by doing it wrong. I remember being at a party where several of them were explaining that they were on opioids right now and tried to use the fact that nothing terrible was happening as proof that they were performing rational drug use.
Long story short, the realities of recreational opioid use caught up with them and they were blind to the warning signs due to their hubris. I intentionally drifted away from that group around that time, so I don’t know what happened to them.
I will never forget how confident they were that addiction is something that only happens to other people, not rationalists like them.”
What the goddamn fuck. I’ve got nothing against doing drugs if that’s your thing, but how much of a goddamn moron do you have to be to think “I’ve got a special drug strategy that will make them safe” and start with opiates. You’d think that a movement that prides itself on the broad application of scientific rigor would at least know not to start with the most extreme and high-risk version of what they were testing.
Look, I’m the first to say that the drug war narratives are full of propoganda, but fucking opioids???
the racism and classism baked into this is chef’s fucking kiss
poppy maximisers
That HN post is one of my favorites. It’s just on another level. It captures the rationalist mindset perfectly.
Lieter would know about toxic cultures for women but okay.
I thought this quote was very astute.
Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it, red pill is an optimized sexual strategy with the humanity of women stripped from it.
Even beyond the way EA men treat women, the diagnosis of EA as “altruism with … human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it” is extremely insightful. And it helped me understand what bothers me so much about that community, i.e., why has a community devoted to charitable giving become such a comfortable home for sociopaths?
Is any of this new/unknown from the stuff that came out like a month ago?