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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The interesting part is the people who jumped ship back before any of this came out, when Bankman-Fried was still being lionised as a genius and philanthropist. Some of them make vague allusions to being scared to say anything because Bankman-Fried was vindictive, and that's probably true: at the time, he had enough clout and good reputation that he could have make things uncomfortable for people who spoke out against him.

But that's a deficit of the EA crowd that I've noted (reading back the reports around sex pests and worse in the community, it struck me very much): nobody wants to be a nark. There's a real reluctance and indeed abhorrence of "going to the cops". Reading the various accounts of, and reactions to, that case about a harasser and abuser had me yelling all through it "For fuck's sake, he did that, why didn't you go to the cops???"

But, no. There's so much nuance, you see, and context, and grey areas, and that might be victim blaming, and this is not the community norm to be vindictive and punitive, and and and... so in several cases there were formal committees which set up and investigated and issued a report and said, in effect, 'we can't do anything about anything'.

Bankman-Fried got away with all this for so long because EA/Rationalist values are to be nice people and value community and not to engage with the state because of their non-traditional values and attitudes (I mean, cops are all part of the carceral state which has a monopoly on violence and and and).

So there were people who, back at the start, had an idea shady shit was going on but they didn't want to rock the boat especially not drag the other people still there into trouble, so they just left. It would be very, very interesting to track them down and find out what they knew; why did you resign as co-CEO of Alameda, for instance? Why did this set of people leave? What was going on, that they didn't like and didn't think was what they signed up to?

But we probably won't ever get that, because Bay Area Omertà.

because Bay Area Omertà.

Yeah I've heard some awful shit (like death threats to AI researchers from AI safety folks) but can never actually accuse anyone because the code of silence among that group is surprisingly strong.

There are some public accusations - such as stuff against leverage research here, here, drama in comments, commentary, potentially wrong initation of curzi post. Even there there's a sense it should've been public earlier. There's also the ziz stuff.

There are also periodic struggle sessions about being safe for women - in the comments specific people are called out for misconduct.

Any of these would make for great effortposts on the marsey site!

Yeah, but it's all within the group. Whisper campaigns. Nods and winks about "we can't invite so-and-so because, well, you know what he's like". But never going outside, never any suggestion that maybe if so-and-so is such a pest, it's not safe to be around him if you're a woman or trans or whatever, that this behaviour is at the level of "get the authorities involved". Lots of internal drama and struggle sessions, but dead silence around outsiders.

That "safe for women" link - and what did this delicate blossom do, apart from clenching fists and tears streaming down her face? Write a long blog post that will only be read by insiders, instead of (if there really is a genuine problem, instead of simply "you are not validating my lived experience and so I must stamp my foot!") doing anything concrete - even just going "hump this for a game of soldiers" and walking away.

Agreed! Those posts, including Ziz's blog and general craziness, are what I was thinking of. I've also heard some recent stuff said in confidence from a couple of friends in the space. At one AI Safety workshop apparently there was an older gentleman who owned an AI research company. In the anonymous 'ideas to save the world' spreadsheet, apparently someone wrote "kill X person (owner of the AI company, in that same workshop)."

My friend reported that the young event organizers just kind of nervously laughed and said don't do it again, without really addressing it or trying to find out who was responsible. That kind of behavior with kids in/just out of college who legitimately think the world will end soon is deeply troubling to me.

anonymous 'ideas to save the world' spreadsheet

My friend reported that the young event organizers just kind of nervously laughed and said don't do it again, without really addressing it or trying to find out who was responsible.

Trying to find out who was responsible for a specific post on a designed-to-be-anonymous spreadsheet would have been a massive breech of trust.

True... but that sort of death threat, even joking, should warrant immediately shutting down the workshop and severely scolding everyone in any remotely healthy group setting. Again, especially when dealing with impressionable and radicalized young folks. I see it as only a matter of time before AI safety terrorists start doing incredibly dumb things, shooting the movement in the foot.

Zounds am I sick of "Death Threats" discourse. What named person has ever actually been killed following an anonymous death threat from some extremely online dork? If you'd looked around the AI conference and seen the scrawny pale guys there, you wouldn't have worried about the death threat either. Death threats can't be used as some trump card of oppression, they're too easy to fake and too hard to verify.

It's also actually a good conversation starter. If X's work is going to destroy the world, don't we have a responsibility to restrain him if he won't restrain himself? There's a lot of good philosophical debate to be had there, it wouldn't surprise me if X threw it in the hat himself to start discussion.

On the forum in particular and in EA discourse in general, there is a tendency to give less weight/be more critical of posts that are more emotion-heavy and less rational

Boy oh boy. It's sad to see how much effort Scott et al. need to expend on defense in the comments for every post like this, and they can just post the same one each week until people are ground down and give in. The last one was demanding Title IX inquisitions for EA, right?

Struggle sessions about being safe for women, in particular, seem more like a null hypothesis than indication of anything actually wrong. If anything, I would expect it to be counter-associated with actually being an unsafe place for women.

Oh, agree - the above is evidence of EA publicly discussing 'awful shit', as opposed to evidence that EA is bad - as the comments go into, EA puts a lot of effort into 'safe place for women'.

IMO the crypto people are much more likely to be in the boat of "I know this is a scam but I won't say" than EA people SBF knew (besides people directly in FTX) since they're deeper on the process side of making that money.

But the crypto people know that imo because they themselves are running the same scam. Binance's CZ (who basically helped take down SBF) for example looks very shady. Ever since this FTX thing he's continually been saying they have no problems (like SBF did) while steadfastly refusing to do an audit.

Not only do they not want to out themselves, not only do they hold each other's funny money as (worthless) collateral, everyone has to worry about what happens to the entire space when large exchanges go down. (This is why SBF was cultivating the image of savior for failing exchanges)

Combine their shared complicity and interests with SBF being a booster for crypto and courting regulators and politicians I'm not surprised that the people most knowledgeable shut up.

All the crypto people I know weren't touching FTX with a 50 foot pole. Crypto people tend to mess around with decentralized exchanges.

Crypto people would also know that margin trading is bullshit.

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