One of the things that this post has most clearly demonstrated is that EA has a terrible habit of liking, praising, and selectively reading really long posts to compensate for not reading most of it.
And as a result of not actually reading the entire thing, they never actually see how whacked the thing is that they just upvoted.
Most of the content here is amalgamated from winning entries in the EA criticism contest last year, and it rarely cites the original authors.
There’s a fairly even mix of good-faith and bad-faith criticism here.
A lot of the good-faith criticism is almost a carbon copy of the winners of last year’s EA criticism contest.
Democratization changes the relative power distribution within EA. The people proposing it are usually power-seeking in some way and already have plans to capitalize off of a democratic shift.
This is actually not true at all. Emile Torres’s sockpuppet accounts on EAforum behave very differently from Emile Torres’s twitter account, and their primary audience in this mode is very much EA.
People should always use a throwaway email when communicating with an anonymous account.
If you are an actual anonymous committee of 10 people like you claim, please delete the anonymous email address prominently displayed at the bottom of this post. Mining EAforum for people’s contact information is behavior that is virtually identical to Emile Torres’s recent stalking activity, and contacting people through DMs instead of mining for personal email addresses is the best way to verify that this post was made in good faith.
DO NOT EMAIL THIS ADDRESS WITH YOUR MAIN EMAIL ACCOUNT.
This is a recently-created account on the forum and is reasonably likely to be a sockpuppet account by Emile Torres, who has a history of dishonesty, harrassment, and infiltrating networks in order to make false accusations against people. Even if you are not aware of or worried about the risks, other people in your network might be.
The standard and obvious practice here is to use a throwaway email address to contact the email address listed here, or to contact them via the forum’s DM service.
Especially because bad-faith actors in EA have a documented history of spending large amounts of time and effort posing as good-faith actors, including heavy use of anonymous sockpuppet accounts.
Hi,
There might currently be a security breach on EAforum. Please don’t share sensitive information, especially names or contact information, until the situation is resolved.
Hello all,
There might currently be a security breach on EAforum. Please do not share your contact information or that of anyone you know until the situation is resolved, tomorrow at the earliest.
And for the love of god, DO NOT GO TO THAT WEBSITE BECAUSE YOU’RE CURIOUS. CHROME WILL AUTOFILL INTO THE SITE BEFORE YOU CAN REACT AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT OR HOW MUCH.
This should be standard advice for any phishing warning, unless it’s on a forum where everyone already has tons of cybersecurity experience. Do not click it, do not type it in, don’t click any 80k link for a while without inspecting it first. This will probably target other links too, ASAP, so just make sure to check every link that you’re clicking.
Hello AffectiveEltruism,
Recently, EAforum has undergone DDoS attacks from an unknown source and we’re not capable of discussing sensitive material at all. I know it’s extremely inefficient, and believe me, you’re not the only one bearing the burden of the costs. However, it’s not a good idea to contact people right now for any career advice or networking unless it’s a 1-on-1 meeting and there’s proof of identity. Once EAforum goes back to normal, the chilling effect will stop and we’ll be able to exchange information the normal way.
For now, I recommend going to 80k’s career advisors. It is entirely free and by far the best place to go.
Please do not exchange information with any anonymous people unless you can verify their identity e.g. via a linkedin page.
Never in all my life have I seen someone go to so much trouble to disguise bad-faith criticism as good-faith criticism.