I wouldn't know anything about the thread, as it's impossible for me to read without a twitter account. Yet another reason why the site is trash.
But by all means, go on generating content for a bigoted fascist who will use everything you write to increase engagement with his platform and give it undeserved credibility and $$$.
(And no, I won't block you.)
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.
I'd really like to know the back story on this interview too. I realize weirdness isn't exactly distinctive when it comes to rationalists, but Zack is in a league of his own.
I'm probably not saying anything you didn't already know, but Vox's "Future Perfect" section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They've also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it's just taken for granted that he's some kind of visionary genius.
You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.
I used to be more sanguine about people's ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.
It's kind of fascinating how rotten the "New Atheist" movement turned out to be. Whether it's Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it's no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.
Glowfic feels like a writing format designed in a lab to be the perfect channel for Eliezer's literary diarrhea.
My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.
I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.
Until a month ago, TW was the long-time researcher for "Blocked and Reported", the podcast hosted by Katie 'TERF' Herzog and relentless sealion Jesse Singal.