The Three Genders: Male, Female, and Venezuela

We must end this Vox on Vox violence.

December 14th, 2022

Headlines:

Speaking of which, Bloomberg’s Lindsey Rupp added up the charges and figured out that Bankman-Fried is looking at one hundred fifteen years in jail. It’s not “lightly touching miette with the side of my foot” time, but it would be enough to finish the prison Quickbooks course. The other fun fact from yesterday’s Congressional FTX hearing was that the polyamorous pyramid’s personnel were apparently saving the private keys to crypto wallets worth billions in, like, Notepad.

Vox-on-Vox Violence

The collapse of FTX has also set off a civil war within the SBF-adjacent castle-buying movement called “Effective Altruism,” particularly in the Effective Altruists’ house media organ, Vox.com. “Why do we keep believing things that are too good to be true?” asked Vox’s Rebecca Jennings a couple weeks ago:

Did anyone really think that a billionaire could be benevolent? Did anyone think Horizon was the future? Did people think Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover was going to proceed in any normal way? Probably. We lie to ourselves all the time.

She should ask her Vox colleague Dylan Matthews, who writes for the site’s Bankman-Fried funded Effective Altruism vertical “Future Perfect,” and who didn’t have any trouble lying to himself until very recently. Matthews gestured at wrestling with the implications of the premiere example of EA being a flagrant grifter:

Obviously, knowing what we know now, I wish we hadn’t taken the money. It proved the worst of both worlds: It didn’t actually help our reporting at all, and it put our reputation at risk.

…before deciding that, no! He couldn’t have known:

Based on what we knew at the time, there was also little reason to believe Bankman-Fried’s money was ill-gotten.

…and then just one paragraph later admitting that of course he knew all along:

…a common criticism I’ve gotten via email and Twitter is that I, and other EAs, should have known this guy was sketchy. And in some sense, the sense in which crypto as a whole is a kind of royal scam without much of a use case beyond paying for drugs, we all knew he was.

This is a prime example of Effective Altruist reasoning here, and I am both making fun of it and absolutely serious. This is the level of thinking the movement operates at: “Yes it’s a scam, but it’s our scam, so pass the castle keys.” Vox founder Ezra Klein is now ensconced in his cushy Times Opinion gig, but he also took a shot at arguing that EA is still Officially Good despite being a circus of grifters and a favorite moral excuse for wealth-hoarding, because his pet charity GiveWell (after a lot of effort) eventually managed to learn that poor countries are poor:

“At the very beginning, we had no conception how different the impact of working in a low-income country can be from a high-income country,” Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s co-founder and chief executive, told me. “We initially had a menu for working in low-income countries and high-income countries. But the most basic learning was the simple fact that a dollar goes so much further overseas.”

Incroyable. Who can ask for more than that?

An Important Message, From Your Wall:

Honestly, they’re probably not thinking about you at all. Wait, I mean—

NEED ART? SHOP HAL🎨MART.

Pics or GTFO

And ancient web photography archive Flickr is starting a foundation. I hear Stewart is free, maybe he’d be interested in coming back to run it.

Finally: I have a lot more links to really dumb stuff that happened but let’s skip it all and just laugh at genders.wtf instead.

Today’s Song: Paramore, “The News”

~ turn on, turn off, the tabs ~

One more day until Tabs holiday break! If I said I wasn’t ready for it I’d be lying. And if I’m lying I’m crying and if I’m crying I’m dying so don’t be sighing or scrying just hit the button and get to buying…

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