Personally, I find the acronym frustrating because of how foreign all of it is me based on my own experience as a (fairly new — less than two years) EA in the DC area. I like to think I have an okay read on the community here, and the behaviors and beliefs described by “TESCREALism” just do not seem to map reliably onto how people I know actually think and behave, which has led me to believe that Torres’ criticisms are mostly bad faith or strawmen. I admittedly don’t interact very much with AI safety or what I sort of nebulously consider to be the “San Francisco faction” of EA (faction probably being too strong a word), so maybe all of y’all over there are justa bunch of weirdos (kidding (like 90%))!
Personally, I find the acronym frustrating because of how foreign all of it is me based on my own experience as a (fairly new — less than two years) EA in the DC area. I like to think I have an okay read on the community here, and the behaviors and beliefs described by “TESCREALism” just do not seem to map reliably onto how people I know actually think and behave, which has led me to believe that Torres’ criticisms are mostly bad faith or strawmen. I admittedly don’t interact very much with AI safety or what I sort of nebulously consider to be the “San Francisco faction” of EA (faction probably being too strong a word), so maybe all of y’all over there are just a bunch of weirdos (kidding (like 90%))!