This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false representations optimized to move resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that this usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between different senses of _fraud_. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were qualitatively different from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.) I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.
+Looking back four years later, I still feel that way—but my desire for nuance itself demands nuance.
+
+[TODO— FTX and nuance epilogue—
+ * On the one hand, I think I'm right to worry about the "jump to evaluation" failure mode, where you substitute a compressed hostile description
+ * If Gloria does a crime and lies about it and you call her a fraud, people are going to correctly notice that your description failed to match reality; you're obscuring what's actually bad about it
+ * On the other hand, I want to give the posse's worldview credit
+ * In April 2019, Ben tried to describe the Blight to me, saying, "People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done"
+ * ordinary grown-up EAs would describe this as uncharitable, rude, &c.
+ * But look at the FTX blowup. This was, actually, one of the greatest financial frauds of our time, and it was made possible by EA: Lewis's book explains that early Alameda recruited from movement EAs, https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-infinite/
+ * Ordinary grown-ups say, "How could we have known?", but this is much less surprising on Ben's view of what EA is. (And doing good as a charity is even harder than running a crypto exchange, where the job you're doing for stakeholders is more legible; if a health intervention doesn't owrk)
+]
+
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On 12 and 13 November 2019, Ziz [published](https://archive.ph/GQOeg) [several](https://archive.ph/6HsvS) [blog](https://archive.ph/jChxP) [posts](https://archive.ph/TPei9) laying out [her](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) grievances against MIRI and CfAR. On the fifteenth, Ziz and three collaborators staged a protest at the CfAR reunion being held at a retreat center in the North Bay near Camp Meeker. A call to the police falsely alleged that the protesters had a gun, [resulting in a](http://web.archive.org/web/20230316210946/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/deputies-working-to-identify-suspects-in-camp-meeker-incident/) [dramatic police reaction](http://web.archive.org/web/20201112041007/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/authorities-id-four-arrested-in-westminster-woods-protest/) (SWAT team called, highway closure, children's group a mile away being evacuated—the works).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff