Jackson Silver

I see a response to my reply above saying "This seems to misunderstand the thing that it argues against". I wasn't arguing against anything specific - this was my attempt to understand why rationalists repeatedly fall into this pattern, but I must have missed something. 

I spent a few difficult hours today reading through the discussion on the Manifest allegations on the EA forum and Twitter (figured it's an appropriate way to spend Juneteenth) and my thoughts have converged to this tweet by Shakeel. 

I'm done with reading or posting on LW (like I ... (read more)

Thanks - appreciate the upvote and encouragement to discuss. I'll take this opportunity to point out some observations about rationalist communities:

• Your usage of "sensitive" points correctly towards an emotional underpinning to why the topics are never addressed well. It's worth asking - sensitive for whom? The crux of the article is rationalist organizations inviting people who are comfortable holding provocative opinions on topics that are extremely sensitive for many people. If discourse in a group is structurally accommodating to sensitivities of some

The response from Habryka points out several factual inaccuracies, but I don't see anything that directly refutes the core issue the article brings up. I recognize that engaging with the substance of the allegations might be awkward and difficult, not constituting "winning" in the rationalist sense. 

My experience and observations of the rationalist community have been completely resonant with this section:

Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sect

At least one of them has explicitly indicated they left because of AI safety concerns, and this thread seems to be insinuating some concern - Ilya Sutskever's conspicuous silence has become a meme, and Altman recently expressed that he is uncertain of Ilya's employment status. There still hasn't been any explanation for the boardroom drama last year.

If it was indeed run-of-the-mill office politics and all was well, then something to the effect of "our departures were unrelated, don't be so anxious about the world ending, we didn't see anything alarming at ... (read more)

I've been thinking about these allegations often in the context of Altman's firing circus a few months ago. I've known multiple people who suffered early childhood abuse/sexual trauma - and even dated one for a few tumultuous years a decade ago. I had a perfectly normal, happy childhood myself, and eventually came to learn that this disconnect between who they were most times vs times of high-stress was tremendously unintuitive (and initially intriguing) for me. It also seemed to facilitate an certain meticulousness in duplicity/compartmentalization of pre... (read more)