maol

u/maol@awful.systems
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If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be "retaliated against", that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I've had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven't always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.

Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.

From that post about Nonlinear:

I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn't want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.

I didn't feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don't want to use such a system.

This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.

Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting people's punctuation in the Hall of Shame.

Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they're poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.

I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author's inability to feel love.

Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says "brain damage" and "increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits"). I have to admit I did not know this.

...is the only reason EAs were ever into "malaria nets" because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?