Yes, this is brilliant.
Making this account""
Karma: −69
Well, Ben or another mod hit this with a −8 vote.
Anyhoo, the point that is being made is:
People (must) behave according to complex norms in very competitive (hostile) external environments
If they don’t, they don’t exist, and we’re just in an internet forum pretty much LARPing.
It’s difficult to draw bright lines—it’s impossible.
For the issue of Piper’s quoting, very adjacent worlds has other outcomes that are more negative
Clearly, sentiment about SBF and the consequent effects played a role in the acceptability of quoting him
Piper’s explanations are doing a lot of dancing here
While there’s probably relevance to “deontological” or “utilitarian” rules and philosophy, the quality of discussion about utilitarianism ha been really bad in the wake of the FTX crisis.
The EA forum and EA ability in general doesn’t really provide good ways to discuss this
To be precise, it’s something like, “high quality spanning vectors” for discussion don’t really exist here. Like, Parfit is not enough.
Don’t get me started on the “Sequences”
I think the above is a useful set of content.
There’s another relevant set of content:
EA thinks it looks bad because it discusses things, but I suspect if it was more competent and had greater intellectual depth, it wouldn’t need to do this awkward dance, and at least in this aspect, I strongly agree with Ollie (? I thought it was Oliver but maybe I’m not cool enough to use that name?)
It’s not Will or the “utilitarians” fault.
Unfortunately “walking in a straight line” to go deontological probably is counterproductive.
More to the heart of the matter, the blogs and “intellectual leaders” of EA are often second rate, and sometimes much worse, and this is pretty suffocating.
To be clear, Will is good or great
For the forum, IMO, Gertler pretty much just climbed the hill and hit a local max that looks presentable. He never understood the issues, and left Lizka and others with deep structural challenges.
To be fair, the skills involved are huge
I don’t have the spoons for this right now, even the outline above is low quality.
(inhales slowly)
Like, I think you guys don’t understand what this means. It’s extremely relevant and poetic to this thread developing.
Our virtues
Lie in th’interpretation of the time
...
One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail
Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
I appreciate your reply very much.
I think tension and anxiety is very high high now.
I want to reply to your comment. I believe that most paths in the consequent discussion contain ideas and content that would probably reduce tension a lot.
However, I need to take a pause for unrelated reasons. I don’t want this pause to extend tension (so I declare the above).
I also want to leave this TikTok here for everyone to enjoy:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fatimashalash/video/7098523079541935403
(This account is negative toward your aims but positive of you personally. It seems good to state things like this when using anonymous accounts).
I think this is a crucial time to be open, and to stop playing dumb PR games that are, in my current tentative assessment of the situation, one of the primary reasons why we got into this mess in the first place.
I don’t want to cooperate with a lot of the PR-focused storytelling...We will not figure out a new direction for EA behind closed doors.
Explore with us what wrong things happened. Figure out how we should change and what lessons we should learn.
We can address this by object-level discussion. You said this.
I had sat down my whole team, swore them to secrecy, and told them various pretty clearly illegal things that I heard Sam had done [sadly all unconfirmed, asking for confidentiality and only in rumors] that convinced me that we should avoid doing business with him as much as possible (this was when we were considering whether to do a bunch of community building in the Bahamas). Like, in my worldview, I did do my due diligence, and FTX completely failed my due diligence, and I just failed to somehow propagate that knowledge.
I think it is very unlikely that you knew of the level of outright theft of customer funds or observed actual criminality.My guess is that you probably observed:
Accounts of the chaotic organization and operational structure
Accounts by Tara and others who left SBF on terrible terms in the past
Accounts of dubious or predatory projects in cryptocurrency (SRM, MAPS), liquidation protected trading accounts, self dealing between Alameda and FTX
Is this correct, is the information you received similar in class or severity to the above?
I strongly agree with this post. Holden is choosing correctly here, in a difficult time.
In my personal opinion, he has many intelligent takes and is quite handsome. I look forward to Holden’s writing on AI risk.