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 9 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 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.
[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Scott is to Journalists as other Scott is to Women.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, exactly. My first draft of this included this passage from the post:

If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite. Again, I don’t think I’m discovering anything surprising here, I just want to make this explicit for people who have otherwise just sort of been noticing it on the fringes of their consciousness.

Basically: "Why can't journalists just give nice guys like us a chance?"

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I genuinely wonder if years of training one's self to be "rational" makes you forget how fundamental stories are to the human experience. Journalists write stories about real life, for good or ill. If something happens in real life but isn't a story, it doesn't get printed. "Random lady plagiarized her thesis" is not a story, but "lady related to major plagiarism story also plagiarized her thesis" is a story.

His observation that EA suddenly got piled on is missing a more subtile point: lots of the coverage of EA was probably an extension of the tech beat and thus benefitted from the access journalism and rosey-glasses'd that was rampant in the early aughts before a more critical eye was cast in the last few years. Tech Won't Save Us does a good job explaining the phenomenon (ctrl+f "access" in the transcript) in part of its Musk series.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

also we just had a 2023 of Sam Bankman-Fried in the media as the extremely criminal public face of EA

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