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Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

time.com

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Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#201

Post by seti0Cha »

ben_w wrote: post #141
freejazz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone posted it upthread. You can replace any catastrophic event with global warming and it's just as facially stupid. Literally like the thought process of a child. It's completely divorced from reality.

While I don't expect extinction from any particular given cause — and definitely not from any of global warming, nuclear war, loss of biodiversity, peak phosphorous, or the ozone layer — humans have a few massive failure modes: 1. We refuse to believe very bad scenarios until much too late. Doesn't need to be apocalyptic: The Titanic isn't sinking; all of Hiroshima must have gone silent because a telegraph cable was…

My money is on the quiet failure mode. The demographic collapses we see happening around the world continue and spread as more people have the resources to live individually, without family. Through automation we overcome the economic issues caused by population inversion, leisure is the norm, ambitions are confined to personal goals, and the human species coasts comfortably down to nothing.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#202

Post by gjm11 »

astrange wrote: post #119
JohnFen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. However, in practice, it all-too-easily devolves into something really terrible. Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. Personally, I started "tithing" when my first business was a succe…

> Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. The fundamental idea is sound. It's largely a reinvention of a philosophical program called logical positivism, which the philosophers gave up on because it didn't work, so it's not sound. They just brought it back because it's the most STEMy kind of philosophy and they think anything with enough math must be right. (E…

Effective Altruism is not a reinvention of logical positivism.

Perhaps you mean rationalism (in the internet-rationalist sense; there are others) which is closely associated with EA but not at all the same thing, and is somewhat like logical positivism.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#204

Post by ianburrell »

smegger001 wrote: post #158
Dylan16807 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet. I can imagine a situation where that's true. But right now, for almost any situation, a series of super-bunkers is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective. A lot of ridiculously destructive things can happen to Earth and it will still be a better place to live than Mars.

our earth has had impact events that no bunker would save us from. like the one that created the moon or the much smaller impact that created the Borealis Basin on mars would boil the oceans and melt the surface.

Th early solar system was very different with way more debris including large planetismals. The planetismals caused the big impacts you mentioned, and the smaller stuff caused the impacts can see on other bodies.

The solar system is much cleaner place now. All the planetismals and most of the asteroids have impacted or been kicked out. Big things are in stable orbits. There are a lot of dangerous asteroids but we track most of the large ones. There is a risk that something big will be kicked out of orbit but it is rare enough we don’t know how unlikely.

Large impacts, 5km or bigger, are every 20 million years.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#205

Post by camillomiller »

EA can be the scum of Earth and I wouldn’t be surprised that this kind of group could be as it sounds cultish and self-aggrandizing. But conflating their wrongdoings right away with the refusal of monogamy and the practice of polyamory is so annoying and conservative and plainly wrong. It also implies that these practices are one step removed from harassment, which is infuriating. It’s exactly like conflating homosexuality and pedophilia, just wrong and violent. Shame on TIME for using this story to immediately push their conservative agenda.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#206

Post by Mountain_Skies »

jfengel wrote: post #12

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. EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…

About fifteen years ago I got involved with the Skepticism movement. It was great to meet so many seemingly rational people and there was excitement that the movement seemed on the verge of growing large enough to make a paradigm shift in how society acts. But after about a year, I started to really sour on it as I could see more and more things becoming rational by decree and thus beyond question. These were supposed to be skeptics, but they were getting more and more into group think, especially on adopting woo-woo views on medical matters.

I had never been a core figure in the local group, so it was easy enough for me to melt away unnoticed but one of my friends was an organizer and regular lecturer. When she finally decided to leave over exhaustion from increasingly abrasive and hostile tone of the group to any dissent, she was harassed for months. The group was seemingly offended that she rejected their brilliance and become an apostate.

I think they eventually got subsumed by the Atheism+ movement, which then imploded.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#207

Post by lazyasciiart »

michaelt wrote: post #49
tablespoon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Effective Altruism is just a modern iteration of a thing that's been around for a very long time. Which you think is what, exactly? I'm under the impression that thing is warmed-over utilitarianism. > The fundamental idea is sound. I do not believe utilitarianism is sound, because its logic can be easily used to justify some obviously horrible things. However the framework appeals very strongly to "rationalist" typ…

The "10% of lifetime income to charity" pledge is pretty close to Christian tithing, Islamic zakat, and suchlike. Who also claim to be spending donations to help the poorest people in society, and with low waste. Of course, EA has a bunch of other weird stuff like AI safety, which isn't an idea that's been around for millennia.

When you make that juxtaposition, the idea that you must obey ridiculous rules in order to placate an invisible omnipotent being does seem to have religious analogs.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#208

Post by [deleted] »

Teever wrote: post #162
scarmig wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with Reddit is that the story is as likely as not to be fake. Particularly, here, I don't think people are at risk of serious withdrawal after only two weeks of heroin use. Though heroin use is obviously one of the dumbest things anyone can do.

It's amazing how you're like a prime example of what's being talked about here and you're totally unaware of that. I don't mean that to be a dick. I mean that because I care. Opiates are dangerous. Very dangerous.

[deleted]

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#209

Post by scaredginger »

With the apparent link between tech and EA, I think the article is correct in saying that this harrassment is a reflection of the same problem in broader tech circles. We still have a lot of work to do if we want everyone to feel comfortable in our spaces

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#210

Post by rejectfinite »

grafporno wrote: post #194
atdrummond wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has used opiates for well over a decade (for medical reasons), heroin and stronger synthetic opioids can absolutely cause an opioid naive individual to have withdrawal symptoms after even a week. This is why codeine OTC recommends no more than three consecutive days of use.

Wait, you've got over-the-counter opiates in the US (I assume it's the US)? What?

The UK has codeine OTC... you assume. Everyone on the internet is american. Its funny. ahha
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