• jax@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    these people can’t stop telling on themselves lmao

    There’s currently a loud minority of EAs saying that EA should ostracize people if they associate with people who disagree with them. That we should try to protect EAs from ideas that are not held by the majority of EAs.

    how fucking far are their heads up their own collective arses to not understand that you can’t have a productive, healthy discourse without drawing a line in the sand?

    they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

    how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?

    I swear these fuckers have never actually had to fight for or defend something that is actually important, or directly affects the day-to-day lived experience or material conditions of themselves or anyone they care about

    I hope we protect EA’s incredible epistemic norms

    lol, the norms that make it a-okay to spew batshit stuff like this? fuck off

    Also, it’s obvious that this isn’t actually EA cultiness really, but just woke ideology trying to take over EA


    1. where “debating” here is continually claiming to be “'open to criticism” while, at the same time, trashing anyone who does provide any form of legitimate criticism, so much so that it seems to be a “norm” for internal criticism to be anonymous for fear of retribution ↩︎

    • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

      how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?

      Adderall

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        nah. i have a proper adhd and am medicated to my ears with medikinet (yeah, so it’s metylphenidate, not adderall, but for the purpose of the reply it doesn’t make a difference), but it didn’t make me an adult debating club aficionado. can we please not medicalise gobshittery?

        • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          I’m saying they abuse adderall, an amphetamine, which class of drugs I can tell you from personal experience do turn you into a gibbering asshole if you abuse them, and it has bugger all to do with the appropriate use of ADHD medication

          But please, if you want to call me out, have the good grace to use the second-person pronoun, this “can we please not” shit is the single most disingenuous phrase that’s entered the language since “I’m not a racist, but”

          • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            adderall is an amphetamine (or a mix of its salts), but it is not the metamphetamine, and it’s not what makes the eas racist, cultish or even overly verbose debating club dropouts. (and neither would speed, fwiw.)

            (and i certainly hope that there’s no need to explain basic organic chemistry here, so please do not use the “the difference is just a methyl group” argument)

            also: what in “don’t medicalise gobshittery” is unclear?

            • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              Alright.

              Well I could be, and I really really want to be, incredibly sarcastic and dismissive, because I genuinely believe that you’ve missed the mark incredibly hard, and your eminently reasonably and good request that people not medicalise assholery in general would, in this case, imply not mentioning the fact that people abuse prescription drugs and act like assholes. Alcoholics act like assholes, so do cokeheads, and so do people who abuse prescription medications which are, at the appropriate dosage, a perfectly good and fine support and indeed lifeline for managing whatever condition they may have. And this is just the truth: one of the central reasons that you have alternatives to Adderall, such as the drug which you personally are prescribed, is that there are risks associated with Adderall even for patients with nothing but good intentions.

              But I also know it’s bad and counter-productive for me to both try to explain that I think I’m actually being quite reasonable and be sarcastic and dismissive like that.

              So instead, I’d like to ask you, first, for a little charity. I’m going to copy paste my original comment below, and point out that it does not say that Adderall is what “makes the eas racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts” (your words, my emphasis on “makes”). Then I’m going to point out what I think it does say:

              they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

              how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?

              Adderall

              So Jax isn’t here saying “what makes them racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts?” What she’s asking is how are they able to go around in circles amongst themselves talking about this shit, without acknowledging that the ideas they entertain have real world consequences. The joke I’m making focuses narrowly on this point: they’re able to waste all of this time (given that they’re already eas) going round in circles, and denying that words have effects, because they (very very famously!) have a cultural problem with prescription drug abuse. The joke categorically does not attribute their racism or cultishness to Adderall.

              Now, the joke does attribute their combined dissociation from real world consequences and their verbosity - specifically, their energy for verbosity - to abuse of Adderall. That’s a stretch, but it’s in the nature of a one-word joke to generalise a little! I need my reader to have a modicum of charity here, in imagining that I am aware that there are other things going on with these people. You, in fact, should be more than aware of this, because I replied to you in another context just the other day with three quite long paragraphs giving an analysis of Yudkowsky and scientific racism in LessWrong which didn’t once mention prescription drugs of any kind.

              And the joke is a little inter-textual: the word “abuse” does not appear next to “Adderall”. Again, I need a little charity from my reader to make the joke work, but I think it’s actually a really reasonable amount of charity. I think, personally, that on SneerClub at least, where I am a frequent commenter, people are generally aware that the abuse of prescription ADHD medication (and other, similar, drugs) is a famous problem amongst rationalists/EAs. At least on SneerClub, I think, people can be trusted to know the difference between attributing behaviours to Adderall outright, and attributing behaviours to its abuse. In this context, I think we can in this case safely skirt discourses of medicalisation that I wholeheartedly agree exist in lots of places.

              So this is where I think you’re just wrong: I think that you’re misusing the warning label we rightly put on discourses of medicalisation. And I think misusing those warning labels is generally not a good thing. I think that you do a disservice to me personally, and I think you do a disservice to people’s collective ability to communicate and socialise with one another if you call them out on bare associations between the names of drugs, bad behaviours, and discourses of medicalisation.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      how fucking far are their heads up their own collective arses to not understand that you can’t have a productive, healthy discourse without drawing a line in the sand?

      they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

      They discovered scope creep but for racism and made it into a religious obligation.