For whatever reason, the EA Forum’s culture is to have a very friendly, kind of academic-ish / wikipedia-ish writing style, even in comments. Personally I think this goes too far. But when you are just spinning off random jokes and personal associations and offensive stuff, it becomes legitimately harder to understand:
- “Goyim”—I’m pretty sure this means non-jews but I don’t know the exact emotional connotations? I guess this is a reference to high Ashkenazi IQ and the idea that there are a lot of jews in EA? (Is it really the case that EA is overwhelmingly jewish? I feel like EA is less jewish, and more british, than LessWrong rationalism. Although that is just a gut impression and I don’t think people would understand me if I started making jokes referring to OpenPhil as “the crown” or “parliament” or whatever.) Anyways, what do you mean by this joke—are you just saying “there are a lot of smart people in EA” and using jewishness as a synonym for “smart people”? Or are you saying that EA has jewish values or is in some sense a fundamentally jewish project? (As an ethnically british/german guy, I disagree and don’t see what’s so jewish about EA??)
- Insulting everyone with sub-130 IQ—are you just trying to tell people how smart you are? Or are you trying to express a worldview where IQ is the dominant factor in whether someone can correctly recognize that longtermism is the best cause area? (As a longtermist myself, I am sad to report that I have a lot of very smart friends and coworkers who have yet to spontaneously convert to longtermism, or even to effective altruism broadly.) Or are you saying that high-IQ people are generally more interested in complex-multi-step plans, so longtermism appeals to their personalities more?
- Calling things cults or religions—famously, there are lots of different ways that things can be compared to cults or religions. I get the sense that you are insulting rationality, but what exactly are you trying to communicate? That rationality is too centralized around a few charismatic leaders? That its ideas are non-falsifiable?
- For someone interested in recruiting “less bright but still very nice and helpful people”, you seem pretty off-putting to that goal? For someone afraid of “persecution and state repression”, you seem pretty happy to fire off #nofilter hot takes? These layers of irony / dissonance make it unclear what your message is and where you are coming from.
Besides the above points of confusion, your writing style also pattern-matches onto “rantings of an internet rando who is probably ramming everything into one hedgehog-y worldview”. EAs are (as you say) smart people whose time is valuable; they don’t have time to engage with lots of people who seem belligerent and ideological on their off chance that their shitpost actually contains valuable insight, because even though it sometimes happens, the prior probability of encountering valuable insight is low.
Thanks so much… this brings a lot of clarity, I think I just levelled up. I have spent too much time being a mentally ill neet on the internet.
I did write a load of explanations, clarifications and answers to your questions, but it got long winded and beside the point and risks inflaming things more, which I seem to enjoy doing. I think it’s best I just acknowledge yes, I made an irresponsible joke at the expense of both groups, with no preference for either group and no intention except illustrating a point about me not trusting non eas to understand, in a tongue in cheek way with humour and edgelordery. Not a very wise choice of humour.
As for the sneering at <130 IQ, that was a mix of snobbery, humour and serious expression. Re cultishness my position is that EA must become far more cult-like to survive. These weren’t exactly the main point of my post, just distracting indulgences on the side.
I was writing each comment to respond directly to different paragraphs, one comment per op paragraph as requested by op. I was writing quickly without editing to maximize honesty, fluency of reading and writing, mutual empathy, intuitiveness, detail, and speed. And, doing that, I got into a stream of thought, disallowed usual conditioned social anxiety stop signs that suppress so much thought and action and usually paralyse, and really enjoyed doing something fluently without my usual superstitious fears sabotaging the whole process and resuming the usual torture that is my existence.
But this usually causes chaos. I should really keep that shit to somewhere that isn’t an important and serious place like ea forums. I told myself it was fine, hardly anyone would respond, people would take it as half-joking mirth and hand wave it off if it wasn’t their cup of tea. Maybe they did, but I guess I shouldn’t risk it if I can’t easily offset the harm. I guess I should go and write my stuff somewhere else.
Wow, this was much shorter in the rewrite. Anyhow, things make sense now so thanks again for your response.
For whatever reason, the EA Forum’s culture is to have a very friendly, kind of academic-ish / wikipedia-ish writing style, even in comments. Personally I think this goes too far. But when you are just spinning off random jokes and personal associations and offensive stuff, it becomes legitimately harder to understand:
- “Goyim”—I’m pretty sure this means non-jews but I don’t know the exact emotional connotations? I guess this is a reference to high Ashkenazi IQ and the idea that there are a lot of jews in EA? (Is it really the case that EA is overwhelmingly jewish? I feel like EA is less jewish, and more british, than LessWrong rationalism. Although that is just a gut impression and I don’t think people would understand me if I started making jokes referring to OpenPhil as “the crown” or “parliament” or whatever.) Anyways, what do you mean by this joke—are you just saying “there are a lot of smart people in EA” and using jewishness as a synonym for “smart people”? Or are you saying that EA has jewish values or is in some sense a fundamentally jewish project? (As an ethnically british/german guy, I disagree and don’t see what’s so jewish about EA??)
- Insulting everyone with sub-130 IQ—are you just trying to tell people how smart you are? Or are you trying to express a worldview where IQ is the dominant factor in whether someone can correctly recognize that longtermism is the best cause area? (As a longtermist myself, I am sad to report that I have a lot of very smart friends and coworkers who have yet to spontaneously convert to longtermism, or even to effective altruism broadly.) Or are you saying that high-IQ people are generally more interested in complex-multi-step plans, so longtermism appeals to their personalities more?
- Calling things cults or religions—famously, there are lots of different ways that things can be compared to cults or religions. I get the sense that you are insulting rationality, but what exactly are you trying to communicate? That rationality is too centralized around a few charismatic leaders? That its ideas are non-falsifiable?
- For someone interested in recruiting “less bright but still very nice and helpful people”, you seem pretty off-putting to that goal? For someone afraid of “persecution and state repression”, you seem pretty happy to fire off #nofilter hot takes? These layers of irony / dissonance make it unclear what your message is and where you are coming from.
Besides the above points of confusion, your writing style also pattern-matches onto “rantings of an internet rando who is probably ramming everything into one hedgehog-y worldview”. EAs are (as you say) smart people whose time is valuable; they don’t have time to engage with lots of people who seem belligerent and ideological on their off chance that their shitpost actually contains valuable insight, because even though it sometimes happens, the prior probability of encountering valuable insight is low.
Thanks so much… this brings a lot of clarity, I think I just levelled up. I have spent too much time being a mentally ill neet on the internet.
I did write a load of explanations, clarifications and answers to your questions, but it got long winded and beside the point and risks inflaming things more, which I seem to enjoy doing. I think it’s best I just acknowledge yes, I made an irresponsible joke at the expense of both groups, with no preference for either group and no intention except illustrating a point about me not trusting non eas to understand, in a tongue in cheek way with humour and edgelordery. Not a very wise choice of humour.
As for the sneering at <130 IQ, that was a mix of snobbery, humour and serious expression. Re cultishness my position is that EA must become far more cult-like to survive. These weren’t exactly the main point of my post, just distracting indulgences on the side.
I was writing each comment to respond directly to different paragraphs, one comment per op paragraph as requested by op. I was writing quickly without editing to maximize honesty, fluency of reading and writing, mutual empathy, intuitiveness, detail, and speed. And, doing that, I got into a stream of thought, disallowed usual conditioned social anxiety stop signs that suppress so much thought and action and usually paralyse, and really enjoyed doing something fluently without my usual superstitious fears sabotaging the whole process and resuming the usual torture that is my existence.
But this usually causes chaos. I should really keep that shit to somewhere that isn’t an important and serious place like ea forums. I told myself it was fine, hardly anyone would respond, people would take it as half-joking mirth and hand wave it off if it wasn’t their cup of tea. Maybe they did, but I guess I shouldn’t risk it if I can’t easily offset the harm. I guess I should go and write my stuff somewhere else.
Wow, this was much shorter in the rewrite. Anyhow, things make sense now so thanks again for your response.