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Do you really think “cult” is a useful category/descriptor here?
My view: things identified as “cults” have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they’re associated with the label “cult” or not.
Not only is this real, I think this is a paraphrase of a thing Yud wrote. Which makes it even cultier. (A reason why I called the Rationalismsphere a cult incubator, as their teachings make you more susceptible to getting into cults).
Edit: For example on his writing on cults, and more ‘Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult’. (Look Cade Metz is referenced, before they turned on him)
Nobody:
EA: Scientology has some good traits, we should copy them.
“Look, all I’m saying is that Scientology managed to scale massively, both in members and funding! There’s obviously something there that we can learn from!”
Fuck me…I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Effective Altruism, Dude. At least it’s an ethos!
It took me a few comments to realize that we were taking about Effective Altruists and not Electronic Arts. I read EA was becoming a cult and yelling at wokeism for all its troubles, ya, that sounds about right.
blaming your issues on a conspiracy is a great way to ensure your movement doesn’t become a cult!
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
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 ↩︎
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
This post is the worst Burma Shave roadside ad ever.
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?
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”
also, isn’t that the “nonlinear” thing co-founder?
Which, to recap for everyone, involved underpaying and manipulating employees into working as full time general purpose servants. Which is pretty up there on the scale of cult-like activity out of everything EA has done. So it makes sense she would be trying to pull a switcheroo as to who is responsible for EA being culty…
full time general purpose servant
and fucktoys on the side, this is EA after all
That’s actually a very common feature of cults, including a lot of the ones considered less extreme.
ding ding ding!
Honestly bonkers to hear “woke” used unironically
and with its original meaning! i.e., awareness of systemic racism
the indignant outrage at the mere suggestion that the cultists be slightly less visibly racist, maybe, is 10/10, no notes.
what the heck EA forum doesn’t have a block feature? That’s just… ew.
Also how long have all these people been obsessed with “woke” and “the left”? Because it’s been really obvious and over the top lately.
what the heck EA forum doesn’t have a block feature? That’s just… ew.
You don’t need a block feature if you’re as insufferable as the average EA /j
Because they’re the wealthy or at least believe in wealth’s ability to do good. A basic interpretation of EA would say that you should start a company, and maximize profit even at the expense of worker compensation so you have more to give to charity
They approximate by forming private companies that they then talk about as if they’re 501(c)3 charities and pay accordingly, or less - see our friends such as Kat Woods at Nonlinear here for a previous worked example.
Gamergate. Nuff said.
nah. under whatever name, the reactionary racists have been in the rationalist subculture since the '90s at latest
If we trace one ancestry path back to science-fiction fandom, well, there’s John W. Campbell.
yeah, I have posited previously that the California Ideology traces in a straight line through science fiction to Rudyard Kipling.
“And a waifu is only a waifu, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
Ah, I do believe I now see a bit of an extra in the reason for the makeup of the story in that one writer/writing episode of DS9
In the first Foundation story, there’s a weird mention of applying symbolic logic to human language that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Campbell insisted upon it because
he felt in our discussions that symbolic logic, further developed, would so clear up the mysteries of the human mind as to leave human actions predictable. The reason human beings are so unpredictable was we didn’t really know what they were saying and thinking because language is generally used obscurely. So what we needed was something that would unobscure the language and leave everything clear.
Clear being a fortuitous choice of wording on Asimov’s part there, given, well.
TESCREAL and Scientology don’t just share methodology; they both descend directly from “Golden Age” science fiction. In this essay I will
you’re so much more graciously subtle than I’m feeling tonight, but then I did clock my brain out after this fucker of a week
wut
The People Who Pray At Prompts are suddenly very worried about cults.
E: haha spoke too soon
from the replies:
Do you really think “cult” is a useful category/descriptor here?
My view: things identified as “cults” have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they’re associated with the label “cult” or not.
Wonder what went wrong there, did they just see the word EA and Cult and went 'people are calling Rationalism a cult again, time to deploy the Rationalist answer. A bot? Something else? (More edit, ah prob somethign else as this is prob a reaction to the whole line of tweets and not that specific tweet, a line of tweets which are doing the geek social fallacies there is a little bit more to being a cult than just ostracizing people)
I’ve been appreciating the term “high-control group” as an alternative, with reference to the BITE [1] model of thought control. People trapped in the group housing situation easily check all of those boxes.
[1] https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/ (note: Steven Hassan has done good work, but can be a little too profit-seeking himself imho)
good thing Nonlinear has never operated as high-control,
I’ve thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.
Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a “cult”, watch how much more they flip out at being called a “high-control group”. It’s a very good disarming technique.
btw, this is Kat Woods from our good friends Nonlinear:
https://awful.systems/post/220620
https://awful.systems/post/682110Ugh, I feel like I just gazed into the abyss on this one 🤮 . Also love (fucking hate) how the only output from these EA charities is galactic scale fraud and abuse of some poor volunteers. Just the other day I randomly stumbled upon her musing about chat bot suffering without knowing who she was. If only she would give the same consideration to her employees.
chat bot suffering
fuckin
of all fucking people, the audacity
oh god. these people are exhausting.
For a moment there I wanted to say, “ok hold on for a minute: you think EA doesn’t create cult-like behaviour, only woke creates cult-like behaviour, but even if I grant all that about woke, surely EVERY charitable enterprise in modern history has tended towards cult behaviour?”
“So what do you think makes EA so goddamn special?”
Then I realised it’s the “incredible epistemic norms” of EA, i.e. the strongest drivers of cult-like behaviour going almost worldwide at the moment, which are the primary bulwark against EA behaving like a cult
Can there be a rule about acronyms being defined on first usage? I spent way to long trying to figure out how Electronic Arts had some cult infestation in their upper management and how “wokeism” applied, especially since stuff like that has been in the game developer news cycle again. I started getting really confused when I saw some linked post conversation talking about some founder and their polyamorous relationship.
I’ve figured out that we’re talking about effective altruism, but at this point I’ve wasted my entire pre-bed shit time on people I couldn’t care less about.
Unfortunately in this case the problem is you (as a non-frequenter of this sub (which is explicitly about dunking on these fools)) coming in with no context, although I’d agree with you in principle otherwise
Also it sounds like that game-EA thing could do with a sneer on techtakes
(idly, didn’t mean that aggressively. wrote it pre-coffee, but, yeah)
I’m trying to think of a polite way to say “in short, no” and “the linked tweet having “effectivealtruism” in it twice should have been a clue”, because I’m not that mean, but I probably need more coffee too.
“I’ll take ‘cases where the wallpaper would have been a clue’ for $200, Alex”…
I mean in my defense I literally said I realized what was being talking about in my post.
What killed lurking before posting, and can we blame WOKE? (just kidding!)
I do wonder if seamless federation can be too seamless, since it clearly makes it easier for people to get a bit lost and wander into niche forums unintentionally.
Absolutely magnificent that this guy took a break from posting about OLED WLAN DNS SKU TCL and 800 ISO without bokah at like f/16 to come in here and chastise us for using in-group terms.
800 ISO without bokah at like f/16
on film, handheld, at night. for when you love grainy images and need every part of the frame to be blurry, but specifically not the kind of blur that looks good
fuck, now I have a hankering to grab a medium format camera and a fast (for medium format) lens and take some weird black and white closeups of whatever I see that’s lit interestingly
and even with multiple outs, they had to get indignant. some people…
Probably also to blame is whichever clients people end up using - sorta seems like most don’t make it easy to see the details of a sub (although I say that under correction, not having tried them all)
I’m using Arctic, I’m easily able to look at the community sidebar, which I did. It seemed like it was dedicated to just roasting shit, not anything in particular, which didn’t help my confusion. I was hoping it was a community dedicated to taking the piss out of something/someone specific. Looking at it now, I see that following the link in the first sentence kind of explains it, but if you’re just skimming the sidebar the note about AI shit being acceptable really makes it read like it’s not targeted towards whatever the fuck this effective altruism thing is.
I’m sorry I was browsing Lemmy by all while I took a shit, stumbled in to your community, and totally derailed the entire conversation and immeasurably ruined your day by making a post that somebody else commented functionally verbatim hours after me.
how are you this unable to shut the fuck up
Mastodon has Reply Guys. Lemmy has Cater To Me Whilst I Am Literally, Not Figuratively, Taking a Shit Guys.
mods, can we please have a rule so that only people who are shitting can post here. thanks in advance xoxo
same thing
mods, can we please have a rule so that only people who are shitting can post here. thanks in advance xoxo
The Rule of 2
5 posts and not a single sneer among them. dry out there today.
I’m going back to reddit, at least the idiots from /destiny /redscare and /stupidpol didn’t have this level of blown up self importance. ;)
banned for obnoxious not-pology
Also it sounds like that game-EA thing could do with a sneer on techtakes
Careful with that one, it might bring out the people who want to redo 2015, but worse.
it’s about the curse of ___ism
One objection is that “woke ideology hurts EA cause areas”.
There are many counters to that.
First off, are they actually “woke”? There is a ton of disagreement.
“kicking the racists out might mean less rich racists giving me money for Nonlinear”
“I just think it’s really unfair for my friends and donors to have to feel this uncomfortable because …”
aaaah, the language of the complicit and the vile. how I loathe thee.
now it got me wondering: how closely is chief shithead pete thiel involved in EA? that probably wouldn’t be much, unless indirectly via his fellowship and such?
not very visibly personally that i know ,but a lotta Thiel-adjacent people involved
by jingo!
why tf can’t she say the word “racist”? like is it supposed to be a dogwhistle insinuating similarity between “racist” and “leftist”??
it’s a dirty political word that only intellectual terrorists use. not only is it beneath her to acknowledge social facts, she wants to make it clear she won’t be intimidated into considering it.
Because the community has both racists, sexists and facists. None of whom are real nor should they be avoided or shunned!
they must be just great at conga crossbars, with that little spine
