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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 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.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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So what's the deal with Oxford? I know exactly what's up with Stanford from Palo Alto but anyone have a good explainer on why Oxford is like this?
Oxford educating the creme de la creme of the murderous British empire for centuries got to have given them expertise in rationalisations. Before the genocides and the pillage can really get going you need an officer class who can order murder for the greater good without stopping to ask "Hans, are we the baddies?"
@mountainriver Uh, yeah, no. It’s more that it’s a massive university which is seen as a very prestigious place for various people with money to splash it about funding research institutions or whatever and because government funding for higher education and research is in a dire state they’re very enthusiastic about taking the cash. It’s also got a whole lot of weird little colleges and private halls. The military types who did the colonialising wouldn’t have dreamed of wasting time on higher education - straight from Eton or Harrow to Sandhurst and a commission in their father’s old regiment. Orwell went straight from Eton to the colonial police in Burma.
This was no doubt true for the purely military arm of the British imperial project, but at least for India the Indian Civil Service was associated with higher education. And these were the types who'd feel the need to justify their rule, unlike the soldiers who'd rely on the Maxim gun.
That and the gentry that made a lot of the officer class also had brothers who, going into the clergy, parliament or administrative roles, would be university-educated.
@gerikson Yeah, that’s a point well made. In this particular instance - did a bit of digging and the “Global Priorities Institute” is funded by… Open Philanthropy, which is run by… EAs. Lordy.
@mountainriver (Another great example is Churchill - went to Harrow and his father had decided he was joining the army so he was put in the “army form”, which existed solely to prepare them for the Sandhurst entrance exams. Still took the old racist three tries to pass)