Hounding the president of Harvard out of a job because you think she’s a DEI hire is one thing, but going after a Billionaire’s wife? How dare these journalists! What big bullies.
Bonus downplaying of EA’s faults. He of course phrases the Bostrom affair as someone being “accused” of sending a racist email, as if there were any question as to who sent it, or if it was racist. And acts like it’s not just the cherry on top of a lifetime of Bostrom’s work.
I genuinely wonder if years of training one’s self to be “rational” makes you forget how fundamental stories are to the human experience. Journalists write stories about real life, for good or ill. If something happens in real life but isn’t a story, it doesn’t get printed. “Random lady plagiarized her thesis” is not a story, but “lady related to major plagiarism story also plagiarized her thesis” is a story.
His observation that EA suddenly got piled on is missing a more subtile point: lots of the coverage of EA was probably an extension of the tech beat and thus benefitted from the access journalism and rosey-glasses’d that was rampant in the early aughts before a more critical eye was cast in the last few years. Tech Won’t Save Us does a good job explaining the phenomenon (ctrl+f “access” in the transcript) in part of its Musk series.
also we just had a 2023 of Sam Bankman-Fried in the media as the extremely criminal public face of EA
His one good deed.