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suy  2yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   Edited 2yr ago   4226 thread views

Scott Alexander on Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Effective Altruism

astralcodexten.substack.com

I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.

Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body

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Please provide justifications for the request that are at least as strong as the impetus of the request itself.

  1. Trivially, places that allow RPF tend to get unpleasant pretty fast, in ways far broader than the RPF itself. That might be a correlation sorta thing, but it's still the sorta correlation that winks-and-points.

  2. It is, almost by definition, not merely spam or meaningless spam, but high-word-count meaningless spam. Eg, the above is a 160 words of self-described shitpost, and even by rat-sphere standards low-information-density.

  3. Saying false (or knowingly made-up) things is bad epistemology in this sort of context. You and I might know that Sam Hyde hasn't committed the most recent mass shooting, or that this was a joke; but there is no level of drama parody that someone won't use in a We Got 'Em sense.

  4. I didn't need that mental image. Which is funny on its own, fair. But a broader community standard of seeing who can wreck the greatest psychic damage in paragraph form isn't a great way to encourage understanding and debate. I'm not gonna say that the weird furry side automatically wins, since I know what makes rDrama cheer, but it's the sort of arms race that leads to civilian casualties.

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