Back

@eARCwelder i understand the connection to roko's basilisk, and i agree with your assessment there, but what is the connection to effective altruism?

i only just now looked it up on wikipedia; the pitch seems harmless enough, but it seems the people involved in it twisted it into something else. i found this paragraph which is perhaps the connection you allude to?

@lritter @eARCwelder I agree with your question and assessment; EA has/had some subfactions that are weird but overall remains a sensible and good movement IMHO

@flancian @lritter @eARCwelder No. I can't believe there are folks on the fedi actually saying that.

@dalias @flancian @lritter @eARCwelder yeah, imagine not judging a group based on hot takes of their extremist fringe.

@michiel @flancian @lritter @eARCwelder Um, no, don't try to appropriate the language of social justice as an implement of fascism.

"A group" in the sense of people who have joined a movement/cult with fascist ideology is not the same thing as "a group" of people defined by the circumstances of their birth, the culture they grew up in, etc.

Effective Altruism is and always has been a technofascist futurist eugenicist cult. There is nothing altrusitic about any of it.

@dalias @michiel @lritter @eARCwelder sorry but this is just not true -- I know many people in the movement and I trust their intentions fully. I think statistically speaking, at the very least, most people who participated in mainstream EA activities (like thinking about causes, donating to them, etc.) are as far from 'racist eugenicists' or fascists as I could imagine -- and I say this as an anarchist and an anti-fascist.

@flancian @dalias @michiel @lritter @eARCwelder the techfash have been heavy in it for 15 years. i know a lot of people in EA too and this is still true. EA is three or four movements in a trenchcoat, but one of those is the AI doom cultists who are straight up tech fash race scientists. the rest of EA tries to pretend they somehow don't count, but also has not in 15 years lifted a finger to eject them.

please do not try to BS on this

@davidgerard @flancian @dalias @lritter @eARCwelder the techfash have been heavily into open source for far longer; a lot of the funding for it came from the same oligarchs that had front-row seats at 47's inauguration. Many of the foundations that have some kind of governance role are outright owned by big tech.

Like @lritter says, the reputation of any movement that's open to rich donors can be co-opted by them.

At the same time, they can't co-opt the motives and work of the members.

@michiel @flancian @dalias @lritter @eARCwelder@mastodon.EA is rather more rotten from them, however. Saying "but other unrelated things are good" is not evidence EA is good.

@davidgerard @flancian @dalias @lritter I'm saying "the evidence that supposedly "proves" EA is fascist can be applied to many other groups' (and don't get me started on that shitty TESCREAL paper). But I'm as tired of this discussion as you are.

@michiel @flancian@social.coop @dalias @lritter dude they're literally full of race scientists and neoreactionaries. at this point it's not clear what *would* convince you.