[Linkpost] Guardian article covering Lightcone Infrastructure, Manifest and CFAR ties to FTX

Thanks - appreciate the upvote and encouragement to discuss. I'll take this opportunity to point out some observations about rationalist communities:

• Your usage of "sensitive" points correctly towards an emotional underpinning to why the topics are never addressed well. It's worth asking - sensitive for whom? The crux of the article is rationalist organizations inviting people who are comfortable holding provocative opinions on topics that are extremely sensitive for many people. If discourse in a group is structurally accommodating to sensitivities of some people but apathetic to sensitivities of others - how this is not explicitly unempathetic and clearly immoral?
• Specifically, I notice that shifting the discourse from object level ("do we have a race problem?") to meta-level ("are people alleging a race problem in the precisely correct manner according to our framing? no? I guess that's that.") enables avoiding the core issue. I pointed racism in rationalist communities on Twitter once, and only received a link to Scott Alexander's Black People Likely as a response, which moved the discussion from racial bias in rationalist communities to racism against black people in polyamory circles (interesting derailment in itself) to whether allegations of racism are being brought about correctly.
• It's not that rationalists are "bad" people; rather, the collective assumption/pretense that all their emotions (and emotional avoidance) in all contexts do and should stem from rational thought, while leading to success in mechanistic avenues like math, programming, and capitalism, and even benefiting others through (eg.) EA work, can cause disproportionate issues when dealing with highly emotionally sensitive topics.
• None of this implies that the rationalist way of thinking is worse than anything else - clearly, if I presume a group is racist/immoral, I can choose to walk away (I specifically did this many years ago, after attending my first and last SSC meetup), but this presumption of airtight moral virtue, coalescence of reasoning abilities and undervaluing empathy seems to be heading towards rationality quite literally facilitating human catastrophe [EA · GW]while amplifying the very worst aspects of humanity.

I don't think we can engage in much "community-wide introspection" without discussing the object-level issues in question, and I can't think of a single instance of an online discussion of that specific issue going particularly well. 

That's why I'm (mostly) okay tabooing these sorts of discussions. It's better to deal with the epistemic uncertainty than to risk converging on a false belief.

Fwiw this sort of thing was definitely a component of why I didn't go to Manifest and was initially on the fence about LessOnline. The number one factor was just how busy I am, but I would definitely feel more comfortable going to events like that if there were a stronger policy against racists/fascists/nazis/white supremacists/etc.