The Nonlinear Fund: A Microcosm of Dysfunction in Effective Altruism (Part 2)

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2 pointsJames_Henry4 comments

I am all for being effectively altruistic, but it seems like you have to be careful around Effective Altruism to do it right. (And I'm sure plenty of EAs think this way too.)

I can’t see anything effective about “x-risk” which is always ex-Climate Change to the extent that it makes me think: “is this primarily a climate denier organization?” Or is it more like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...

Whatever x-risk-style Effective Altruists' goals, if they run their organizations like The Nonlinear Fund, I wonder how long they are going to last.

The whole thing is a scam. “Less wrong” is more wrong than average, with all the spammy cross postings, trigger warnings, randomly inserted reverence for their leader, etc. Scott Alexander blabbers about Bayes Theorem and the replication crisis but then he announces that GPT-3 is a human level AI based on 5 queries he ran. (Far worse then the genre of frequently low-effort ‘zero shot’ learning papers from arXiv.)

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