Yes. It could just be a coincidence. But I don’t think it’s just a coincidence. I think the lack of critical thinking and lack of good norms you need to let a cult take over your movement is a bad sign, and may predict bad things to come. Particularly if there isn’t an adequately large post-mortem, an adequate attempt to reckon with such a catastrophic mistake, such a catastrophic failure, and learn deep lessons from it.
This risks going down a rabbit hole, but I think one of the systemic problems with the EA movement is a consistent failure to do good post-mortems. (And while we’re at it, good pre-mortems would probably help too.) Many movements, organizations, groups, individuals, etc. experience big failures. Sometimes they learn from them and turn things around. Sometimes they don’t. There are several instances such as the Leverage Research infiltration, the Manifest racism scandal, and even the collapse of FTX where I think EA had opportunities to learn hard lessons and do things better in the future, but didn’t.
But, of course, I can’t prove any of this. It’s all just my opinion.
Yes. It could just be a coincidence. But I don’t think it’s just a coincidence. I think the lack of critical thinking and lack of good norms you need to let a cult take over your movement is a bad sign, and may predict bad things to come. Particularly if there isn’t an adequately large post-mortem, an adequate attempt to reckon with such a catastrophic mistake, such a catastrophic failure, and learn deep lessons from it.
This risks going down a rabbit hole, but I think one of the systemic problems with the EA movement is a consistent failure to do good post-mortems. (And while we’re at it, good pre-mortems would probably help too.) Many movements, organizations, groups, individuals, etc. experience big failures. Sometimes they learn from them and turn things around. Sometimes they don’t. There are several instances such as the Leverage Research infiltration, the Manifest racism scandal, and even the collapse of FTX where I think EA had opportunities to learn hard lessons and do things better in the future, but didn’t.
But, of course, I can’t prove any of this. It’s all just my opinion.