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Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

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

#221

Post by cactusplant7374 »

thot_experiment wrote: post #198
theragra wrote: post #15

If there are less cases of abuse than among generic populace, it is weird to blame the movement. From the article, it is hard to understand that EA is somehow worse than most of the USA. Also, arguments for polyamory are just that, arguments. You certainly can press someone into it, but from the article, the impression that it is more like persuasion. Regarding cult dynamics - any tight knit community feels like this…

Having been part of the rat/EA community in the bay area for over a decade I can 100% confirm that the incidence of weird sex stuff happening is far far above of the baseline I've experienced with other groups of people, and i tend to keep odd company. Not some sort of scientific study but also the only set of people where I've been casually asked if I wanted a prostate massage at a house party. The norms around here…

Off topic: Your photogrammetry project is really cool!

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

#222

Post by refurb »

atdrummond wrote: post #135
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.

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.

That’s true, but the withdrawal after a week or two isnt going to be the “i just want to die” type.

Severe withdrawal comes after dose escaation and youre not going to develop that much tolerance after 2 weeks.

Im not saying it wouldnt be unpleasant, but its not goibg to be the Trainspotting version.

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

#223

Post by steveBK123 »

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…

aren't these all, at their root, postmodern re-implementations of religion?

with all the related problems & benefits.

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

#224

Post by strken »

gruez wrote: post #178
strken wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "don't go against conventional wisdom unless you have a good reason; the more conventional the wisdom, the better the reason needs to be"? Possibly combined with "be humble and give subject matter experts some credit, an hour on Google Scholar doesn't mean you've learned everything". If the conventional wisdom is "don't order research chemicals from a lab in China then self-inject them", then maybe a plan t…

> How about "don't go against conventional wisdom unless you have a good reason; the more conventional the wisdom, the better the reason needs to be"? Possibly combined with "be humble and give subject matter experts some credit, I have a feeling that this is basically the generic talking point to use when your opponent is more radical than you. The opposite would be you accusing your opponent as luddites or whatever…

> I have a feeling that this is basically the generic talking point to use when your opponent is more radical than you.

EA people would probably phrase it as something about how updating strong priors in response to weak evidence needs to happen slowly, but I feel the Bayesian formulation is a bit toothless when it comes to practical applications.

The broader point is that when your opponent is more radical than you on a factual issue[0], but they don't present any evidence for why, they're probably wrong. This isn't good enough in a debate but it's a fine heuristic for deciding whether to use opioids as performance enhancers.

> I think you're painting effective altruism with too broad a brush and giving them too little credit. I'm very skeptical that the typical effective altruist is ordering semaglutide from china

This is a fair criticism, but I didn't mean to apply it to the movement as a whole, only to the particular failure mode where some effective altruists (or more generally, rationalists) talk themselves into doing bizarre and harmful things that equivalently smart non-EAs would not. It's easy to talk about Chesterton's Fence but it's not so easy to remember it when you read about something cool on Wikipedia or HN.

> Hold on, all it takes to turn over "conventional wisdom" on nutrition is "many nutritionists" and "new research"?

I'm just looking for a heuristic that stops you doing weird rationalist stuff, not a population-wide set of dietary recommendations. It's okay if some low-risk experimentation slips through, even if it's not statistically rigorous and even if it's very slightly harmful.

The point is that there are two requirements being met: first, no strong expert consensus ("many nutritionists" was too weak a phrasing and I apologise), and second, if you ask a few random strangers (representing conventional wisdom) whether eating more vegetables and less bread is good for you they'll tell you to go for it if you want to, while if you ask about using non-prescription opioids they'll be against it.

[0] Values-driven stuff is different.

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #173
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits. They believed themselves to have a better…

I can't imagine what benefits they were looking for in opioid use/abuse. Like, most drugs have a very distinct use, ranging from "directly beneficial" like using stimulants to increase productivity, to "socially useful" like using alcohol or MDMA as a social lubricant. Opiates don't really fall into any of those boxes. They're not mechanistically useful: If you want euphoria, there are better drugs like MDMA or ketam…

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by jacquesm »

chasd00 wrote: post #137
haunter wrote: post #7

>Thousands have signed a pledge to tithe at least 10% of their income to high-impact charities. From college campuses to Silicon Valley startups, adherents are drawn to the moral clarity of a philosophy dedicated to using data and reason to shape a better future for humanity. Effective altruism has become something of a secular religion for the young and elite.

I was about to say, tithing 10% sounds like church. Heh the Catholic Church will send you a bill based on your taxes.

In some countries the government will even collect.

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

#227

Post by ninjaa »

teraflop wrote: post #86
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits. They believed themselves to have a better…

I'm reminded of a fascinating series of Reddit threads, starting back in 2009, from somebody who convinced himself he "could handle anything once" and decided to try heroin, only to rapidly spiral out of control: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/wef6...

Great story, I believe

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

#228

Post by anonymouskimmer »

WalterBright wrote: post #216
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer part 2 with just one example: The native life of Mars, if it still exists, would exist in a state of homeostasis with its environment. It would have to in order to still remain existent. If terrestrial organisms were capable of replicating under martian conditions, they could easily eat everything up and then die off. Never quite getting the time necessary to adapt to the ecological limits of their new habi…

2. They'd never eat all of it. Also, it the distribution of either form will never be even across the planet. There will be "islands" of one or the other. 3. Biologists are easily able to determine if they are new kingdoms are not. They're also able to estimate how long ago divergence from a common root happened. There are many, many examples of parallel evolution in terran biology, but none of them are confused with…

2) Localized sure, I wasn't arguing about the entire planet. But introduced life could drive the native life to a local extinction. And if it did so fast enough we would never know the local life had been there.

3) Yes, I know. While this isn't my specialty I work at an organization that does have people that specialize in this. The difficulty would be in definitively concluding whether this is a native divergence that we've just never seen before, or the result of Martian evolution.

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

#229

Post by cactusplant7374 »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #84
xchip wrote: post #65

This is a free article, and for the same reason in Photography Books, on the cover there is usually a naked lady, in these free articles the story is also always about sex or something that appeals to your instincts. Chances are this story was exaggerated up to a point to make it call your attention so you subscribe. If something is free, you are the product.

I waded through many, many paragraphs to discover that some of the crimes included people making comments that made others feel uncomfortable. I was kind of expecting more. So, yes, it looks like I was the product here. It made me feel uncomfortable!

The readers discovered that EA is mixing sex with charity. It’s pretty weird.

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

#230

Post by nonethewiser »

kazinator wrote: post #199
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…

[flagged]

It's OK as an analogy but I don't think actual smart people are more likely to trick themselves.
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