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our new piece on SBF gets stuck into the rationalists
(davidgerard.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
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At this point, if a rationalist says SBF is “smart” it’s probably out of shame/denial that they got duped by a junkie
My own self doubt asks: do rationalists feel shame, though?
Some of them yes, or well most of them I gather. They are just people after all.
My impression is that, as a group, on average, rationalists tend to both feel and repress more intense feelings of shame and guilt than the rest of society can be bothered dealing with, and I say that as somebody who has spent nearly two years doing addiction recovery
LessWrong and EA can help people to understand logical fallacies, but they can't help people to actually understand their emotions. In fact, the culture around them encourages adherents to feel contempt for their "irrational" emotions and for people who are led by emotion.
Of course it is extremely unpleasant to repress all your emotions, and it is ultimately impossible to do so all the time. How did the LessWrong community solve this problem? Its users limited their emotional expression to acceptable forms and acceptable targets, and expressed their emotions through cult accepted techniques like taking drugs, having sex, cyberbullying leftists and writing really long blogposts.
Like most subcultures, it's the powerful and respected people in EA who determine the dominant norms. With pretty much every leading EAist a middle-class dominant-culture American man who works in tech and wishes feminists would quit whining, it should be no surprise that the norms they created are stereotypically, nay, toxically white and masculine.
Apparently, pace my own username, you don’t know who the fuck I am.
I don’t think any of that first paragraph is true. LessWrong and EA very blatantly do not teach people how to spot fallacious reasoning. Nor does the culture of either encourage the adherents of their one movement to repress their “irrational” emotions. Fallacious reasoning, emotional reasoning, irrational thinking - all three of these self-evidently ran rampant in the culture, so there has to be something else going on here which would explain both what the culture is like and why you have an impression that seems to line up so squarely with their self-presentation.
Rather, it seems that what happens at LessWrong and EA is roughly that a charismatic self-presentation of “rational thinking” (with attendant ideas along the lines of repressing one’s emotions and so on) hooks in impressionable people, who - like victims of any multi-level marketing scheme - quickly replace their own styles and habits of thought with those propounded and taught by the movement. So those people do do something like “repress” their emotions, but only in the sense that they repress those styles of thought and emotional presentation which had previously come naturally to them. But of course the movement also teaches that it is right and proper or that there is even a sort of duty to make impassioned (whiny) emotional appeals to this or that privileged source of the right kind of emotions to feel (such as feeling indignant about normie reasoning, or feminism, or whatever), which are (some would say fallaciously) considered above rational criticism themselves.
You can see that sort of thing play out in basically any rationalist discussion or article at Vox’s “Future Perfect”!
So what you describe with respect to drugs and so on is true enough but misses the point. It’s rather that throughout the movement there’s a strong current of precisely the things that in its self-presentation the movement is supposed to ward off. The drug scene isn’t an outlet for repressed feelings, it’s just a particular place (of many) towards which the movement’s leaders have directed the energies (which they don’t repress but encourage) of their followers.
The shame and guilt thing is a separate issue, it has nothing to do with the conscious or directed repression of emotions under the auspices of the movement.
Indeed. They teach you to memorize a list of fallacies and biases (with their own weird names and jargon), and then proceed to just do whatever motivated reasoning you want using them as weapons against wrongthink that disagrees with The Rationalist Viewpoint.