this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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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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Guess who's having a big mad about Journalism again! (www.astralcodexten.com)
submitted 10 months ago by Evinceo@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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Hounding the president of Harvard out of a job because you think she's a DEI hire is one thing, but going after a Billionaire's wife? How dare these journalists! What big bullies.

Bonus downplaying of EA's faults. He of course phrases the Bostrom affair as someone being "accused" of sending a racist email, as if there were any question as to who sent it, or if it was racist. And acts like it's not just the cherry on top of a lifetime of Bostrom's work.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (11 children)

There’s a lot to snark at. A few in particular:

  • Scott is irrationally scared of journalism. He talks about it as if it’s an omnipresent, omnipotent spectre that swoops down on people on a whim and destroys their lives when it pleases the spectre. In reality, the “whims” are a confluence of the subject’s presence in the public consciousness and market pressures on reporting.
  • Scott has no clue how power works. On one side, you have someone who resigned because of a billionaire-backed witch hunt. On the other, Oxman didn’t resign. Scott fails to see that it’s the billionaire who holds power here, and instead thinks it’s the journalists, specifically the ones that said his understanding of journalism was shit at best.
  • This whole post is really an expression/extension of Scott’s victim mentality/persecution complex/“nice guy” personality, where the mean ‘jocks’ (journalists/people scott doesn’t agree with) get to ‘date the hot girls’ (by which I mean, ‘commit lots of mild misdeeds’), while the ‘nice guys’ (the eugenicist sex creeps) are shunned by society.
[–] jonhendry@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oxman didn’t resign

She's pretty much self-employed and out of academia, so that probably wasn't in the cards to begin with. Perhaps her company will lose some business, but I kind of doubt it. The stuff she does seems sufficiently low-profile that nobody will care that she plagiarized a bit.

I mean, if you see a bit of sculpture in a corporate lobby, you're probably not going to wonder if the designer stole a paragraph in a thesis, let alone care.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 10 months ago

Oh, absolutely. I didn't have the time to investigate her position and whether or not it was a resignation situation. I was mainly trying to show how Scott misses the point entirely and doesn't understand how power works in as few words as I could get away with.

Thanks for the added context, though; it is an excellent point. Someone in Oxman's position is insulated from the kinds of power plays that can oust people in positions like Gay, which Scott does not recognise at all.

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