that was noticed by the gobshites and they're not happy about it, i think the tracingwoodgrains person really dislikes you:
I respect that and agree that those comments cross a line that should not be crossed. I'm sympathetic to the value of red lines and taboos, and I regularly put active effort into defending the sentiment that racism is bad and should be condemned (though I am extremely cautious about tabooing people as a whole based on specific bad sentiments).
It's more complicated for me here because as mentioned above, I find Hanania's commentary on other topics unusually valuable and think I have had valuable, worthwhile interactions with him such that I am glad for opportunities to do so.
More than that, I am conscious that many who most eagerly pursue the taboo, including the writers of the Guardian article and people like David Gerard who provided background for it openly despise you, me, and others in these spheres, and given taboo-crafting power would craft a set of norms emphatically disagreeable to me. I think parts of the EA community have themselves shown some susceptibility to similar impulses, throwing people like Nick Bostrom under the bus to do so. That post in particular actively made me more wary of EA spaces and left me wondering who else would be skewered.
The individual who wrote that post no longer works at CEA but openly demands that EA cut ties with the entire rationalist community. I like you and broadly trust your own instincts here, even where we might disagree about where to draw specific lines, but I am extremely wary of yielding norm-setting power to people who treat my approach (engaging seriously with anyone) as worthy of suspicion and condemnation, and I think when they succeed in setting the frame, it works against a lot of the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent community norms I value.
(i find it symptomatic, but not at all surprising that the person who criticised bostrom is not with the movement anymore, but scientific racists and hbd-curious fuckers like tracing… are.)
i'm not doing databases for living but the idea of stringifying a perfectly cromulent unique number in order to store it in the database comes as slightly weird to me.
don't be the annoying pedant; we're fully capable of understanding that the “national socialist german workers' party” was not a socialist party (and that a “nazi” is a pejorative and was from the start), that the phrase “marxist-leninist” is generally used to mean “left-authoritarian but want to pretend it isn't”, that the “communist party of the soviet union” was actually presiding over a project of building an authoritarian state capitalism, and that the “republican” party in the united states is trying to make the united states a theocratic dictatorship.
it's the type of the very dense cult jargon that you stop noticing only when you're ears-deep into the cult.