• original post detailing mistreatment of employees
  • meta post about how a good rationalist should correctly epistemically assess the fairness of the post cataloguing and confirming the bad behaviour

tl;dr these fucking guys

  • Evinceo@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    I slogged through the article so you don’t have to.

    Basically, there’s a trio of very strange dotcom-wealthy folks who call themselves ‘nonlinear’ but really they’re a guy, his brother, and his partner. They claim to be doing ‘important work’ and hire/defraud interns who live in their house, clean up their messes and get groceries for them, drive without a license for them, score drugs for them and traffic the drugs across borders. Also they isolate them from their families and friends, and have sex with them. This is considered inside the Overton window in the EA community, evidenced by the lack of pushback and the fact that this trio has not been run out of EA on a rail.

    Does that help?

    • Mike Knell@blat.at
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      1 year ago

      @Evinceo They tick more or less all the boxes for being a cult, although fortunately for the world they’re far too crap at what they do to be able to attract enough followers to fill a heavily-armed compound somewhere in Kansas.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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        1 year ago

        the cult compounds have existed but they’re Bay Area share houses and with the rent so high they can’t afford guns

        • Mike Knell@blat.at
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          1 year ago

          @dgerard Yeah, the closest they get to a compound in the middle of nowhere full of explosives is an air-conditioned trailer at Burning Man

        • Evinceo@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          I maintain that the reason they haven’t gone full Waco isn’t that they aren’t deranged enough, but rather it would require them to confront the fact that they have nobody to blame but themselves for Clippy so they rationalize themselves into inaction.

          The ones that scare me the most are the ones that are no longer afraid of Clippy and replaced that fear with a fear of, like, minorities.