So a lab employee recently wrote a tweet about how they spent the night at Lighthaven and, surprisingly(!), not a single person threatened them with violence for working at a lab.

I asked if they were being tongue-in-cheek. They were not. This was noteworthy enough to them that it needed to be remarked upon, because they expected their x followers to doubt it if it weren't emphasized.

This feels related to the recent Oliver / Scott interaction... it seems pretty clear that something is going HORRIBLY WRONG and I can't figure out what it is.

edit: Do the downvotes mean this is actually an appropriate concern for lab employees to have? They should feel unwelcome at lighthaven? Maybe​ personal violence is not as obviously-net-negative as I thought the consensus treated it?

If the labs think that ours is a philosophy of tribal violence then... well, we're going to alienate people like Scott Alexander, whose Dwarkesh appearance I treated as a very positive event for the timeline and who I think really needs not to be alienated!

At first I thought the accelerationist ​folk were projecting weird tendencies onto the lesswrong crowd that weren't there. This post from Scott got me worrying that maybe I was wrong about this: https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/2043428604818989401 that maybe there was a real problem here.

Theoretically we don't need to bring around any actual lab employees to our way of thinking, I guess. We can just convince enough of the public to get legislation passed, and then leverage that into an international treaty. But it still feels like a dumb unforced error to negatively polarize anyone who works at a lab against the entire safety memeplex. If we burn the lightcone because some lab employee notices troubling signs during an RSI loop but decides not to speak up because they don't want to "side with Holly" or whatever... that does not feel like a very dignified way to go.