> The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments.
How smart you are has nothing to do with it. If you're motivated enough to believe something that you shouldn't believe, you'll talk yourself into it. Smart people might be able to come up with an objectively better (or at least more convoluted) rationalization, but only because they'll require of themselves a better rationalization. Less-smart people won't be as capable of rationalizing, but they also won't be as discerning about the quality of the rationalization. Kind of like how people develop about the right amount of muscle to carry their own weight around, whether that be 90 or 180 lbs.
> EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything.
This sounds negative until you realize this also applies to programming and litigation, chess and go, everything in academia, communism and anarcho-capitalism, etc. The fact that something appeals to know-it-alls says next to nothing about the quality of the thing. Chess isn't a worse game because it attracts insufferable braniacs and other pretentious people, it's just the community around it that suffers. But the communities around everything interesting suffer from those same sorts of people.
> And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things.
> Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. People who know perfectly well they're misbehaving will claim that they aren't, using the same arguments. It won't hold water, but now we're swamped, and the entire thing crumbles.
Once again, yes, people who want to justify terrible things can do so. It's not unique to tech bros. Fundamentalist christians, the homeless, and young activists of any alignment can do it too.
> ...in part because I know too many of the type of people who get involved and aren't trustworthy.
This is the meat; the only question that actually matters: Is it true that EA is disproportionately populated by the "untrustworthy"? If so, then there's a reason to stay away from it. This article's pair of anecdotes are worse than useless for arriving at the answer. All I know after reading it is that the TIMES is interested in taking EA down a peg. The evidence presented is utterly insufficient to support the claim that "EA has a sexual harassment problem [to an unusual--and therefor newsworthy--extent]".