This is all highly speculative. I know near-zero about biology, chemistry, or physiology.

epistemic status: my ass

"Dad, why is my sister's name Octavia George?"

"Because your mother loves the Roman Empire."

"Thanks Dad."

"No problem Industry Americus."

lmao this person writes a personal goodbye message, detailing their experience and motivations in what reads to be quite an important decision for them, and receives "15 disagrees" for their trouble, and this comment:

I gave this post a strong downvote because it merely restates some commonly held conclusions without speaking directly to the evidence or experience that supports those conclusions.

This is EA at its "open to criticism" peak.

gems from the comments:

Academics and Journalists could interview an arbitrary EA forum user on a particular area if they wanted to get up to speed quickly. The fact they seem not to do this, in addition to not giving a right to reply, makes me think they're not truth-seeking.

Why don't academics and journalists do their job properly and interview random forum members to inform their research?

NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? (archive.org)

lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? oh...

(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesn't exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).

You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.

Lucky souls haven't found sneerclub yet.

But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us...

rational_economist.webp

There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesn't actually engage with them at all):

The problem is that “E.A. grew up in an environment that doesn’t have much feedback from reality,” Wenar told me.

Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as “neo-colonial” in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors don’t reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.

tired: learning from others through the wealth of experiences and resources that are widely available

wired: taking a "first principles" approach to endangering and traumatising your own child

I was at the apartment pool chatting with a friend who is a very advanced swimmer - the type that swims laps seemingly endlessly - and she asked “have you ever seen what would happen if [your two year-old son] fell in the pool?”. I said no, and then she suggested I try it so that I would at least know. So I picked him up and with no warning tossed him in. He immediately froze under water, arms and legs outstretched in literally stunned silence. I counted to 5 and pulled him out and he was trembling with fear.

At that point I realized that the time it takes for a kid to drown is one breath. That may be 3 seconds, may be 10 seconds.

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^[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] 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

nsfw, and at a risk of beating a dead horse, but this article, although brief, does a decent job at connecting the dots between "silicon valley pronatalism" and regular ol' nationalism/white supremacy, while debunking some of their EA bullshit too

The Collinses are leading spokespeople for a movement called pronatalism, popular in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, a father of 11, is one of its leading proponents. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk tweeted.

Demographers disagree: there is no collapse, and one is not even predicted. Such evidence has not stopped the rise of pronatalism in response to an imagined “population bomb.”

In short, the problem for pronatalism is not declining reproduction, but who is reproducing. Pronatalism is inextricably tied to nationalism alongside race, class and ethnicity.... Here, nationalism tips into ethnonationalism and reproductive debates descend into violent racism.

hells yeah it's time for some action - Drew DeVault is organizing a sit-in protest of Jack Dorsey's keynote at FOSDEM 2025.

this is most certainly a clerical error

reporter: This AI development is a Big Deal™.

me: y tho?

reporter: Oh, I'm so glad you asked! The AI is IN the computer!

me: y tho?

reporter: To win the race to get AI everywhere the fastest!

me: sorry, y tho?

reporter: Oh my, you sure have a lot of questions! Look, let's not try to make any sense of this. After all, only our tech-daddies have the answers!

me: begins weeping

reporter: Don't cry! At least we're all in this together, right???

While AI being "in" a computer might sound as obvious as blue being "in" the sky, this is actually one of those things that is a Big Deal™. AI models are normally either downloaded or used online, but Microsoft has just announced an "AI computer", meaning the technology is in-built. It's the company's latest play in the overheated race to see which tech giant can get the most AI into the most places, fastest.

What does it mean? Hard to say! In case you haven't worked it out yet, this is all one big live experiment, and we're the rats. Perhaps there's some comfort in knowing we'll all find out together.

edit: oh no, this is the same author I sneered at for quirkwashing e/acc. nothing personal, I just die a little inside every time I read something like this, and a little death is always better shared!

Long time lurker, first time sneerer reporting for duty.

e/acc got the spotlight in an article on the Australian public broadcaster, and I couldn't help myself.

In many ways, he's a perfect fit for the movement. But despite sharing many e/acc values, he's not willing to call himself one. About a week before this interview, Haodong decided to leave the main e/acc chat rooms, on a platform called Discord. "First things first. It's a cesspit," he says. "They have a high tolerance towards, very, very far right people and trolls." The final straw came, he says, when someone was advancing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that an evil Jewish cabal was trying to wipe out western civilisation. It's true that sexism, racism and general bigotry are regular features in the forum. "I don't want to be associated with a lot of these guys. They're very extreme libertarian kooks."

a near 12,000 word anonymous hit piece on Émile Torres on the EA forum has some gems in the comments.

the top comment basically calls it out as someone airing their personal grievances.

next comment feels the need to call out Torres and Gebru are big bad bullies:

Broadly I think that both Torres and Gebru engage in bullying. They have big accounts and lots of time and will quote tweet anyone who disagrees with them, making the other person seem bad to their huge followings.

and my personal favorite, that Marx's drive was more akin to rationalists than current leftists, because leftists for the "last ten-fifteen years just [haven't] been very rational"

Karl Marx's whole work was based on economics and an attempt to create a sort of scientific theory of history, love it or hate it the man obviously had a drive more akin to those of current rationalists than of current leftists.

Sam and the truly talented team at OpenAI innately understand that for AI-powered search to be effective, it must be founded on the highest-quality, most reliable information furnished by trusted sources...

Robert Thomson, Chief Executive, News Corp

Mmm yes, I too turn to News corp for the highest quality, most reliable information.

my local community radio station is getting in on the act with a quality sneer in their annual magazine:

What if the Silicon Valley creeps who control huge swathes of our existence decided that they didn't want this to be their legacy? Well, one solution would be to guarantee the survival of the species by uploading our brains into computers and rocketing them into space. If a few people cark it in the climate catastrophe, it'll be fine as long as there's a big cyber noggin down the track... just google TESCREAL. We didn't make this up.

nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer

dude got fucking ratioed lol

My flight instructor talked to me like a child when I refused a parachute. Death from skydiving only causes a handful of deaths per year!

trailing-question-marks: the consensus bypassing trick anarchists don't want you to know?

news just in: orange site poster finds 2 and 2, struggles to come to terms with the fact that they add to 4:

Every time race comes up on HackerNews i am shocked at how horrifyingly racist (some) users of this site are. Not only did a user somehow think that this context would exonerate this very racist man, both you and I are getting immediately downvoted for disagreeing. There was a post last week or so that was so full of racist comments it just got taken down. I wonder what on earth brings together HackerNews and racism like this.

mmm I wonder what it could possible be?

Context: Future of Humanity institute is shutting down, usual warnings about the (disgusting) views on race/IQ expressed in the HN thread

In the land down under, the ABC continues to feed us with golden tech takes: Australia might be snoozing through the AI 'gold rush'

"This is the largest gold rush in the history of capitalism and Australia is missing out," said Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh, from the University of New South Wales.

It's even bigger than the actual gold rush! Buy your pans now folks!

One option Professor Van Den Hengel suggests is building our own Large Language Model like OpenAI's ChatGPT from the ground up, rather than being content to import the tech for decades to come.

lol, but also please god no

"The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant," he said.

mate, I think that ship might have already sailed