Effective Altruists should have spent their weirdness points on Effective Altruism, not on joining the current iteration of the Berkeley Sex Cult.
@WomanCorn Is this an oblique reference to something specific?
@zebrask Time magazine hit piece on EA, mostly focusing on sexual misconduct, mostly of the <become polyamorous, it's more rational than monogamy> pressure tactics.
@WomanCorn Ah, I suspect that EA not having a bunch of poly people in it would not stave off the hit pieces, just change their character a bit, so I guess I don't think they need to reallocate their weirdness points.
@zebrask I think it's easier to make normies think they're bad by portraying them as a hotbed of sexual abuse than trying to critique their decision theory.
@WomanCorn I don't think those are the two options though. I think they would just say they are associated with shady aspie tech billionaires or some other guilt by association thing.
In the limit where EA becomes basically a normie organization, they would just write the kinds of hit pieces that mainstream media writes about normie organizations.
@WomanCorn The fourth estate was supposed to keep us honest but they've abdicated that in favor of manufacturing drama. I feel like they've done a good job of convincing me that you shouldn't try to change in any way in response to the things they say.
@zebrask @WomanCorn
Daniel Boorstin's _The_Image_ is highly instructive about the appropriate level of cynicism you should maintain about journalistic media.
Key claims:
before steam engines made presses go brrr, the marginal costs of each news release were higher (such that you might go weeks without "news" in America);
after steam presses, the tempo of news began to fit the tempo of the print shop.
To fill the pages between the ads, newsmen started creating the "pseudo-events" that define us.
@zebrask Yeah.
I think there's _some_ value in not dangling low-hanging fruit for the media, but given that they're going to find _something_ to hit you with, it's not worth trying too hard.