If Professional Investors Missed this | Jeff Kaufman – Background: Last month, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed, because its founder Sam Bankman-Fried had apparently been dipping into customer funds.  Bankman-Fried had a lot of ties to the EA movement so I was curious what EA folks were saying about it.  EA is not happy about it, and in fact they are directly impacted, with many promised charity grants now gone.  There’s a question of whether EA ought to have seen the red flags, and the answer is maybe yes, maybe no.

From an external perspective, it looks like EA is being pretty naive about allowing billionaires to use their movement to launder their own reputations.  And Bankman-Fried should have been suspicious from the start, as a cryptogrifter who places a lot of focus on AI risk.  Perhaps it was impossible to foresee quite how far Bankman-Fried’s nefariousness extended, but it feels like this was a “reap what you sow” situation.

Penises, Privilege, and Feminist & LGBTQ+ Purity Politics | Julia Serano – Serano outlines a theory of how sex is seen as a contamination event, and describes its impact on bisexual and trans people.  I also appreciated the explanation of “cultural feminism”.

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I’ve been busy the past month!  The Ace Community Survey released its annual survey, and a 140 page report on an earlier survey.  I also wrote a long blog post about the intersection of asexuality and being a nerd, in which I complain about a certain fictional asexual physicist on a show I have never watched.

Google’s Caste-Bias Problem | The New Yorker – An interview with a former Google employee, who tried to organize a DEI event about caste discrimination.  Google got complaints from other employees about the event, and it got “postponed”, which seems to really mean it was cancelled.  Instead, the organizer of the event was given a warning, and then she resigned.  Apparently it’s a common stance among conservative (?) Hindus that caste discrimination just doesn’t exist and that to even speak of caste discrimination is anti-Hindu discrimination.  As a social justice activist, I learn to be humble about axes of marginalization that I am unfamiliar with–but I’m confidently unsympathetic with that point of view.  For members of a majority group to deny that the minority group experiences discrimination, that’s an all too common pattern, and presumably cross-cultural.

Why Queer TV is Getting Worse | verilybitchie (video, 45 min) – Verity Ritchie talks about “gaystreaming”, content that is gay but otherwise does everything it can to appeal to mainstream tastes.  There’s discussion of Heartstopper, contrasted with the work of Desiree Akhivan, topped with a discussion of the economics of streaming services like Netflix.  I love it.

As I pointed out in my review of Heartstopper, its gentle low-stakes story is common in the queer webcomic genre it comes from–but I don’t think that’s what makes it particularly amenable to being mainstreamed.  What makes it mainstreamable is that its author is clearly passionate about educating people about queer issues: modeling good behavior, denying stereotypes, and explaining relevant issues.  This is valuable to straight people who clearly need that education, and also for queer people, for whom learning about being queer is an important part of personal development.  But it also confines the webcomic to issues that are simple enough to be widely teachable, and the story may not reflect the messy realities of queer lives.  Following ace admiral I call this “checklist representation“, which is primarily concerned with checking off all the things required for a “good” representation.

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