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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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My own impression is that this is a case of rationalist first-principles thinking gone awry and applied to a domain where it can do real damage. Journalism doesn't have the greatest reputation these days and for good reason, but his approach contrasts starkly with its aspiration to heavily prioritize accuracy and verify information before releasing it.

It seems like the opposite to me. Running with the baseless callout post to show how seriously you take wrongdoing in your community is extremely normal behavior. Normal people tend to assume accusations are true, without appreciating how easily they can be dominated by a small percentage of delusional or malicious people. Normal people tend to take a "if there's smoke there's fire" attitude rather than nitpicking individual claims to see if the accuser is credible. Normal people are more interested in punishing or warning about wrongdoers than the impact of false accusations, and don't think about the second-order consequences of incentivizing false accusations by taking even weak accusations seriously. Indeed, I wonder if one reason the claims weren't questioned enough is because those doing so wanted to act normally and being skeptical would have pattern-matched onto negative stereotypes about EAs: defending an EA organization accused of abusive behavior would be cult-like, while nitpicking the truth of individual claims by an alleged victim would be cold and emotionless. Now, normal people can be skeptical, especially after a response like the one Nonlinear has now posted, and obviously they aren't as bad as SJW-inclined communities with ideological antibodies against failing to "Believe Victims". But the behavior you're attributing to rationalism seems very typical. Sadly this includes large sections of mainstream journalism, regardless of what the SPJ ethical guidelines say they should be doing.