0·
2 days ago“Skepticism” that acts to cover for bad science that hurts people deserves a retraction, not a disapproving shrug.
- 10 Posts
- 293 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 27th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement’s decision that “no actually, being sexist is more fun” which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.
The sewer-deep Islamophobia from “luminaries” like Richard Dawkins didn’t help, either. One thing that is perhaps easy to miss now in looking back at “New Atheism” is how much it inhabited a shortly after 9/11 cultural space.
And regarding the point above that the analysis needs “Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures”, the term New Atheism itself was a branding gimmick imposed from outside (codified by and perhaps first used in Wired magazine, of all places, AFAIK). The people who were already “in” it looked around and asked, “OK, what exactly is new about it?”. As far as actual arguments went, there was little if anything that Paul Dirac had not already said in 1927.
Shermer is a “sociopath” in the GMS taxonomy. But he rose to prominence in the '90s, co-founding the Skeptics Society in 1991 and publishing Why People Believe Weird Things in 1997. He was considered the old guard by those who came to skepticism/atheism via the '00s blogosphere, who were some combination of “geeks” and “mops”. So, there’s not really the linear order to it that the neat and tidy GMS story calls for.
I know both Watson and Myers. Neither of them were interested in “being tastemakers”; both of them stood on the right side of trying to make the skeptic/atheist spaces less of a sexist waste dump, and both of them caught hell for it. Myers was the one who blew the lid off Shermer’s history of sexual harassment (and got blackballed from a lot of skeptics’ events because of it). He was also part of the effort to make Atheism Plus a thing, and Watson was in favor too.* Carrier sued Myers and others after being removed from FreethoughtBlogs on what we’d now call #MeToo reasons. The rage tsunami directed at Watson for saying “guys, don’t do that” was basically the trial run for GamerGate. More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement’s decision that “no actually, being sexist is more fun” which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.
Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.
*The McCreight mentioned in that blog post later chose the name “Jey” and uses they/he pronouns.
Reported for being too soon
:-P
That ramble fails to note the obvious: that the stills from Every Angel is Terrifying are Evangelion on ketamine.
T Kamal in the comments:
I mean, not to tar any groups with a broad brush, but like, if I had to be criticized by any one person, I’d prefer to be criticized by DAIR rather than EAs, because the EAs hang around the Rationalists, and the Rationalists birthed the Zizians, and those folks have murders attributed to them. Like, at least with Dr. Gebru I can be reasonably sure that no one’s gonna come at me with a katana.
Well, he does appear in the files that have been released so far, but only in the most banal way; an entire book by Goertzel and another by Brockman were included somehow.
Habryka in the comments:
I agree you should choose your standards to whatever is appropriate for a specific group, but clearly many groups should have standards that greatly exceed “are they a danger”. LessWrong is definitely one such place!
o rly
Yudkowsky : “I do not think attention should be a reward for crime” :: Siskind : “I’m not okay with giving [Kathy Forth] martyrdom”
Why did Yudkowsky choose to tweet about this now? Is there an article coming out suggesting that he’s had relations with underage women, and he’s trying to get ahead of it? Hmm.
There is a mention of something that might be what Yudkowsky is on about in this Wired story:
The group had become especially fixated on a particular rumor, namely that the nonprofit MIRI had potentially used donor money to pay off a former staffer. The ex-employee had launched a website accusing MIRI leaders of statutory rape and a coverup. Though the facts were never litigated in a courtroom, MIRI’s president wrote in 2019 that he had checked “some of the most serious allegations” and “found them to be straightforwardly false.” The website’s owner had agreed to retract the claims and take the site down, the president said, under conditions that were confidential. But what angered LaSota and Danielson was as much the idea—in their minds at least—that the nonprofit had succumbed to blackmail as the allegations themselves. In negotiating, they believed, the organization had violated one of its fundamental principles: “timeless decision theory,” a concept developed by MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Yudkowsky, who later renamed it “functional decision theory,” declined to comment for this story.)
This article doesn’t make it sound so much like a “FOUNDING BELIEF”; lots of weird shit like the brain hemispheres business appears to have come first. But the much more interesting thing is at the end of the story:
One of the last things LaSota seems to have written for public consumption was a comment she left on her own blog in July 2022, one month before she supposedly went overboard in San Francisco Bay. “Statists come threaten me to snitch whatever info I have on their latest missing persons,” she wrote, seemingly referring to deaths by suicide that had already happened among those who’d embraced her ideas. “Did I strike them down in a horrific act of bloody vengeance? Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod?”—a German phrase that translates as “come, sweet death.” “Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility?”
Below it was pasted a stock photo of two people wearing shirts that read, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
Hmm. Hm-hmmm.
It’s in the quote tweets.
And apparently, one of their FOUNDING BELIEFS, is that I had sex with somebody underage (mutually desired sex, according to the Zizians)… and then MIRI, a nonprofit I started, paid money (to a third-party extorter) to hush that up… which payment, according to the Zizians, is in violation of DECISION THEORY… and, therefore, for THAT EXACT REASON (like specifically the decision theory part), everything believed by those normie rationalists who once befriended them is IRRETRIEVABLY TAINTED… and therefore, the whole world is a lie and dishonest… and from this and OTHER PREMISES they recruit people to join their cult.
Yudkowsky is the first person I have ever seen describe this as a load-bearing belief of the Zizians. Offhand, I don’t recall the news stories about the murders even mentioning it.
Or maybe society would run a prediction market about whether ten years later the 24-year-old would think that it was a terrible terrible idea for them to have microdosed LSD as a kid. If society’s rules were that sensible
Wha’the fuuuuuck
The problem with writing a Harry Potter fanfic as your cult recruitment tool is that you end up having written a Harry Potter fanfic as your cult recruitment tool.
Was there ever, like, a push by Falun Gong to whitewash their articles? I seem to recall gossip from somebody (maybe in a skeptics’ group) about that, but I have no idea where in Wikipedia’s deep drama holes to look for evidence of it.
Hasn’t Falun Gong had beef with Wikipedia for a long time? I have a vague recollection of reading about that, but I do not know where.
Goertzel is a fan of Chris Langan.
Do you remember where Piper said that? Somewhere on Xitter? It sounds familiar. (Edit: here it is. I remembered the “James Damore was egregiously wronged” part but had mostly forgotten the rest.)
Damore’s memo blew up in 2017; ScienceBlogs was a shambling husk after most of the serious writers left in 2010, when management decided to offer Pepsi an advertorial disguised as a “nutrition” blog. (I left too, but I wasn’t a serious writer by any stretch of the imagination.) That capped off a long trend of the Seed Media Group management not listening to the bloggers, even though SB was the best thing they had going for them. Complaints on the back-channel forum were downplayed or ignored, etc. SB puttered along under National Geographic’s ownership through the Damore era, but the writing was on the wall in 2010 that the site couldn’t last.
The community that had formerly focused on SB got another nasty knock a few years later, when sexual harassment allegations came out about Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime organizers of the ScienceOnline conferences. That was a real betrayal that wounded a lot of people, and the organization only held on for one more conference before going belly-up.