these guys should really stop using words they don’t understand. (i know, in case of the muppet quoted below it’s almost impossible.)
The net downvotes are the rest of the community frantically whispering “FFS Roko keep our racism on the down-low!”
Roko is also violating their rules of assuming charitably and good faith about everything and going meta whenever possible. Because defending racists and racism is fine, as long as your tone is careful enough and you go up a layer of meta to avoid discussing the object level claims.
“a hbd denial movement” sure is a hell of a turn of phrase for “oh fuck. maybe they don’t like our weird racist shit, quick everyone PANIC STATIONS”
him referring to lysenkoism in this context is extra weird; the scientific racists and lysenko are but another facets of the antiscientific ignorance
I said in a comment the other day that Roko’s view here is the natural consequence of Yudkowsky’s original naive physical-scientific reductionism. He proceeds from those (abysmally vague but superficially straightforward) premises here. In essence, if everything ultimately reduces to the physical, then when you perform the natural reduction on e.g. the status of black people in modern America, the causes must by physical-biological causes.
The reference to Lysenkoism is perfectly apt on this (stupid) model: attempts to thwart the reduction are merely ideologically driven cludges to the real theory, and the example of Lysenko demonstrates how easy it is for a whole discipline (in this case: biology in the USSR) to fall to that ideology. Liberal (read: communist) biologists are just pandering and making exceptions when they produce their own demonstrations that scientific racism is bunk.
It’s helpful that, for historical and political reasons, i.e. America and modern Europe’s original sins (colonialism and slavery) scientific racism is always waiting in the wings when the Rokos of the world reach their inevitable conclusions. Put it’s important not to conceive of scientific racism as a form of ignorance: it is, rather, an often highly organised political movement devoted to proving and promoting its claims by any means necessary - it is a knowing lie, with the caveat that insofar as scientific racists frequently show that they implicitly know that they lie (with absurd clandestine promotion strategies and revealing statistical sleights-of-hand), it’s rarely clear that they are wholeheartedly aware of it.
First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard
Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you’re “the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference.” How is that fair? :-(
The comments about the event are great over here. The initial poster talks about 8 invited racist speakers, but you could argue there were more like 10 or 12. The owners/organizers then talk about how the confrence had 60 speakers. They later say they would have backed off the “edginess” (i.e racism) by 5%.
So even by their own take, instead of having 15% racist invited speakers, they would prefer 10% invited racist speakers. We want 5 racists next time, not 8.
Fails to list SlateScott as a controversial guest.
Also, did he just use a bang path to refer to a racist dude’s Twitter persona? Seeing old school lore adopted by these mutants gives me heartburn.
Oh, and that bit at the end disclaiming it as an EA event despite it clearly being an EA event is classic “decoupler” (or, if you like, responsibility avoider.)
some commenters in those threads are talking about the New York EAs vs the Berkeley EAs - the former are rich liberals, the latter are rationalist cultists. there are several suggestions that EA needs to expel the rationalists.
the furious defenders of racism^Wfreedom of ideas in those threads don’t seem to figure out that they’re why the non-racist EAs are suggesting that expelling rationalism from EA is even possible
i mean, they should have done so about a decade ago, because they were only and ever a fucking embarrassment
but now they’re being a hugely racist embarrassment, not just a nerd-weird one, and it’s harder to spin that
i mean, not that liberals aren’t all for a bit of systemic racism, but you can’t make it personal like that
I don’t want to come and help “balance out” someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide.
Does anyone really think this, or are you just using hyperbole?
Not hyperbole. Hanania, Manifest promoted speaker, wrote “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?” in May 2022.
I just can’t, it’s like that one scene from Austin Powers.
And the comment was edited to add:
(sorry this was a bad example as discussed in the comments so I’ll stick with the pretty clear “has stated that black people are animals who need to be surveilled in mass to reduce crime”)
Which is the second or third time in this saga I’ve seen people back down from good points due to bad replies. Like someone needs to tell him he’s in the wrong crowd and this isn’t normal.
