I mean, I’m pretty sure animosity towards rationalists on Hacker News is older than the existence of OpenAI and probably even DeepMind. Also most people on Hacker News don’t work in AI. So I don’t really know why this hypothesis is coming to mind, I don’t think it’s relevant for most of what’s gone on.
I’d be more inclined to put it down to Hacker News having many standard online pathologies for bullying easy targets, and rationalists historically being a lot of weird and outcast kinds of people, along with some strains of anti-intellectualism in the tech/startup world.
Interesting, the only recent irl aggression (verbal, not physical) I’ve received from the techie crowd in SF was related to the Sam Altman firing[1]. I’ve also gotten more standard leftist anger but I don’t think that anger is very centrally Hacker News-y, I’d guess those people would also be angry at Hacker News.
I have Hacker News blocked so I cannot pull up threads now, but what I have in mind (and I’m pretty confident is what DirectedEvolution had in mind) is many many threads on Hacker News where, when LessWrong is mentioned, it’s called a cult and has a bunch of other low-quality critical comments about it with a derisive tone.
(I believe I recalled it getting better in the few years after LessWrong 2.0 started, though I think I’ve seen an uptick again around AI threads.)
I mean, I’m pretty sure animosity towards rationalists on Hacker News is older than the existence of OpenAI and probably even DeepMind. Also most people on Hacker News don’t work in AI. So I don’t really know why this hypothesis is coming to mind, I don’t think it’s relevant for most of what’s gone on.
I’d be more inclined to put it down to Hacker News having many standard online pathologies for bullying easy targets, and rationalists historically being a lot of weird and outcast kinds of people, along with some strains of anti-intellectualism in the tech/startup world.
Interesting, the only recent irl aggression (verbal, not physical) I’ve received from the techie crowd in SF was related to the Sam Altman firing[1]. I’ve also gotten more standard leftist anger but I don’t think that anger is very centrally Hacker News-y, I’d guess those people would also be angry at Hacker News.
Oh I remember another time an ML person got mad at me for mentioning Bostrom’s Superintelligence.
I have Hacker News blocked so I cannot pull up threads now, but what I have in mind (and I’m pretty confident is what DirectedEvolution had in mind) is many many threads on Hacker News where, when LessWrong is mentioned, it’s called a cult and has a bunch of other low-quality critical comments about it with a derisive tone.
(I believe I recalled it getting better in the few years after LessWrong 2.0 started, though I think I’ve seen an uptick again around AI threads.)