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I shouldn't have closed these tabs, but have you noticed that most of the attacks on EA are coming from people affiliated with Oxford"? Like https://twitter.com/oxhcai
And this David Thorstad guy is from the Global Priorities Institute at Oxord, "Using academic research to drive positive change within and outside of the effective altruism movement." : https://twitter.com/IneffectiveAlt4 https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/david-thorstad
He's been heavily attacking people on the EA forum, after joining in 2021.
He protected his tweets and they weren't archived, but this is what he was saying to scott (dead twitter link):
You know, honeyed words about "growth and change," followed by the standard bullying commissar stuff as soon as he thinks he has power over someone.
Smells like an entryist clique to me. Somebody on EA really ought to call him out about this.
(Edit: noticed by Ilforte last month)
Some of the Twitter stuff was archived
As for his demand to repeat a mantra about "racist pseudoscience", the best substantive answer is probably along the lines of:
"If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are true, I wish to believe they are true. If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are not true, I wish to believe they are not true. Labeling an idea 'racist pseudoscience' does not affect its truth value".
But most of EA will likely prefer to stick with the cool kids over everything else, and so will be utterly subsumed into the progressive leviathan.
Thanks! I searched .is for the tweet URLs, but nothing came up. Guess the archived one was the top tweet.
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This strikes me as the opening blows in a conflict that EA will be unable to deal with. The activist community has seen a lot of money flowing to the Wrong kind of people, and now they are moving in to deal with a potential threat to their status and position. How exactly is the EA movement going to protect itself against an avalanche of bad-faith actors like the one you have identified, while also dealing with an equally withering barrage of negative stories from legacy media? They can't just attack the media without painting themselves as members of the Trump tribe, which would cause lots of people and donators to leave. Long-winded rationalist essays might be able to convince the core members of the group, but they are worse than useless when it comes to defending oneself against spurious accusations in the court of public opinion.
I really don't see how the movement survives if this continues - people like David Thorstad would (at least, in my reading of his statements and actions) prefer that the movement sink into irrelevancy and fail to have any noticeable positive impact on the world, instead becoming a den of comfortable sinecures that people like him and his friends can occupy without having to actually do any real work... and they have existing institutions (Oxford, the mainstream media, etc) putting a thumb on their end of the scale.
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