At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on [investigating us]. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time - it's just that they aren't, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. [...]

Even if it was just $1 million, that wipes out the yearly contribution of 200 hardworking earn-to-givers who sacrificed, scrimped and saved to donate $5,000 this year.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Come now, my solution would involve a catapult, or if we can find the budget a trebuchet, clearly im not the same. ;).

Joke aside, that is pretty sad that they actually wrote that. And those kind of arguments are so dubious imho that I would be more inclined to doubt any of their defenses are true. (If I was in any way involved). Esp as the argument also just assumes the accusations are unfounded.

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Think of how many souls could have been saved if you didn't waste the church's time investigating all those abusive priests! Truly the investigators are sinners on a staggering scale!

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 9 points 11 months ago

This is the natural extension of what I was trying to say. There’s no need for accountability because that spends money that could be better spent on saving the world. The opportunity cost of doing literally anything other than saving the world is more than one life so we’re fucked if we do anything else.

Every time I think I can comprehend stupid people with lots of money shit like this happens.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah but you also cannot let these priests go unpunished, so my solution involves everybody involved, the alleged priests, the alleged victims, everybody talking about it including us. All of them, biff zoom, right into the sun.

While this is a joke, there is an idea in here somewhere. If the accused really worried about the secondary effects of this on EA and the waste of time it all causes they should quickly settle with the people they hurt or even step down, EA has already decided that the people who bring in money are more important than the replaceable people who do the EA work (That is the whole idea behind how it is more effective to work for wallstreet and tithe than actually be a boot on the ground fixing things), and I highly doubt these people are the visionary math geniuses who do the AGI safety coding or whatever is needed to stop the paperclip bad ending. Like if you really worry about secondary effects and the risk for EA etc etc, just quit, pass the torch to some other ~~cultist~~ EA member, problem solved.