Sadly I fear stories like this are lost on the devoted EA crowd here. We’re likely to see another round of rationalizing, distancing, downvoting, and flooding the forum with posts to drown out the stories of power being abused at the hands of tech industry elites at the expense of young idealistic women. I fully expect this comment to be downvoted to oblivion, if it is even approved. But I would love to see a real reckoning from this community about its chummy relationship with the powerful (abusers and exploiters of labor), and the cultish single-minded fixation on technological “solutions” at the expense of any sense of camaraderie and sympathy for the vulnerable and downtrodden. Not everything is a problem that you can solve on a whiteboard. Most issues require being a human being in the real world that we have right now.
Eugenics-Adjacent
Karma: −92
Point taken about the frontpage placement, although my comment mostly intended to point at a lost opportunity for meaningful engagement, self-reflection, and stepping outside the internal logic of groupthink, rationalizing, and defensiveness (which are the phenomena I have observed on previous posts of this nature) – not just the house metric of clicks.
My worry is that the EA mentality is capable of absorbing information publicly revealing increasingly puerile forms of abuse and using the high-level thinking so important to the valorization of the ideology as a tool to obfuscate the real, problematic power dynamics within the ranks of its movement. The article does explicitly address this.
This seems to be one of the most major pieces yet about EA for a mass audience, so I’m hoping it’s taken with a sense of gravity and thoughtfulness. I see no one else has commented, unfortunately. The account I’m replying to has now made accusations of journalistic dishonesty and bias, though, about which I’m interested to hear more.
I have made no such comment about marginalized groups, so I’m not sure what the warning was for.