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While snarky, this is indeed my impression of (current) EA movement. At the start, with the mosquito nets, this at least was practical, boots-on-the-ground charity and they could be forgiven for their slightly smug 'we're doing charidee right (unlike the mugs who went before we appeared fully-formed from the head of Zeus)' attitude because they were indeed helping the poor and deprived.
But helping the poor and deprived wasn't the full gamut of EA activity and philosophy, and the crank stuff (sorry, people, I do not care if insects suffer) was there from the start. However, it was a minor part. But AI risk was one of the Less Wrong and other rationalist/rationalist-adjacent bugbears, and because of the cross-over between EA and the rationalist bubble, that was there too.
And it was sexy! and modern! and interesting! in a way that plain, bread-and-butter, 'help the poor with an ongoing problem that, despite all the fancy technical attempts to solve it, looks to remain intractable: malaria by mosquito-borne transmission' wasn't, because all the former mugs had been doing 'missions to Africa' and the likes for decades, so what makes you so special?
And it involved flying around and going to conferences and hob-nobbing with Big Names and getting yourself known in those circles, and was way more appealing to the SF nerd in us all (c'mon, if we're hanging round these parts, even if we're not rationalists or EA, we're SF nerds).
So EA the movement seems, to me at least looking in from the outside, to have subtly but definitely transformed into 'making a living by taking in each other's washing' - going to conferences to network about getting an internship to get into a programme about signing people up to attend EA conferences.
(Here's where I mention the manor house in Oxford).
That's why, while I understand Scott doing an apologia for EA and appealing to all the lives it (presumably/allegedly) has saved, I don't think he still has entirely grappled with the criticisms from the outside about 'travelling around exotic locations and brainstorming for projects which are not practical, boots-on-the-ground, charity'. If (and it's one hell of a big if) AI is going to Doom Us All unless it's perfectly aligned with nice, liberal, 21st century middle-to-upper middle class San Franciscan values, then their work is important.
If AI screws us over because (deep breath) the free market capitalist system incentivises greed and the gold rush is on to get to market first and grab the majority share with your product, and just ignore that right now the product you're peddling makes shit up and is totally unreliable but people are being sold on the notion that it's super-ultra-mega-accurate, just believe all it says but the thing is never going to become self-aware and have its own goals and I highly doubt even smarter than human intelligence (exhale) - then all the fancy conferences mean nothing. Except pleasant trips to Oxfordshire manor houses for EA talking sessions where you pretend to be doing something meaningful - junkets, in other words.
And if you've reached the point of junkets, you are not "doing charidee right unlike those other mugs".
As for the rest of it? Sounds like the typical EA over-sensitivity/scrupulousness where small things get blown up into microaggressions, unfulfilled promises, and 'you said I'd get X and then I never got X' pouting where all kinds of accommodations for neurodiversity, gender diversity, I don't know what diversity, are expected implicitly.
EDIT:
I think, and this is only a vague impression so don't take it as Gospel, that it's a case of the pendulum over-correcting and swinging too far to the other side. There have been previous internal scandals among rationalist groups, and subsequent accusations of cover-ups and people in charge not taking the complaints seriously/not acting quickly enough/doing their best to hush it up.
So I think there's a sensitivity around being seen to 'victim blame' and not immediately strike while the iron is hot when you hear people accusing EA/EA-aligned groups of wrongdoing, and this perhaps led in this instance into jumping the gun. Fact-checking could be seen as denying the truth, trying to delay embarrassing revelations, and even a form of harassing the victims by making them respond to little, nit-picky details.
The whole "my vegan diet/my money that I was promised" and so on sounds exactly like what I've come to expect from these types, to be frank (and a little mean) about it. Wanting a whole specific vegan product from one place and kicking up about not getting it. If you're sick with Covid, you're likely not to be eating much anyway, and if you can eat to the point that you're fussy about "I only eat this not that", then you're not that sick. One of my siblings got Covid and couldn't even keep down water because she vomited everything she consumed straight back up, so I was genuinely worried about her getting dangerously dehydrated; that's not at all the same as "I didn't get my vegan din-dins".
EDIT EDIT: To be fair, if she was that sick, and her stomach was sensitive, it may well have been that she could only eat that one particular Burger King vegan burger; Mexican food does sound like it would be too much. But building it up into The Persecution of the Vegan Joan of Arc is the kind of overly dramatic, self-regarding, navel-gazing that a lot of the writing by EA and LessWrongers and lesser lights exhibits. That's one of the attractions of Scott's writing for me - he's never (or barely ever) indulged in that slightly whiny "I have this entire laundry list of Things wrong with me and I need and demand these special accommodations and I continuously gaze into the mirror of my soul and you lot get the reports from the frontier on that every five minutes and any criticism no matter how mild is hate speech".
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