All a flavor of lust for power and influence from very bitter, angry, and jealous people.

I don't think that's a very good description of the ethereum foundation document that we are discussing.

A great deal of the problems in the industry are systemic, not personal. If you rely on personalization to understand the problems of the world, you will always be frustrated, because there will always be people ready to step into the role of “evil” thanks to perverse incentives. You can only eliminate the evil by eliminating the incentives.

I have no power to do any such thing. I acknowledge that the system rewards sociopathy and seems to inspire it as well. These types seem to be the shepards of our industry and the world changing technologies its laborers develop, do you disagree?

I agree, but focusing on the personalities involved causes people to misdirect their efforts as a group, and they just end up with a different group of “bad guys” after getting rid of (or disempowering) the current batch.

The pattern that’s currently in tech already existed (and continues to exist) in the world of finance. Tech is just its latest expression.

Sure, for myself, the best I can do is make sure my day to day work does not involve these people, so I do focus on personalities regarding what companies/teams to work for.

To be fair, I find this weirdness much more interesting than the traditional "rapture will occur on X" or "I am Gods chosen fornicator". How cool would it be if there was still some fjord somewhere where they still sacrificed goats to Odin? Christianity really wiped out many the interesting cult themes, and new ones like Scientology have so far just been shameless cash grabs from the gullible and lost.

At least the AI death cults are offering a doomsday scenario which is somewhat plausible. A little more iffy on the details then straightforwards nuclear Armageddon perhaps, but not dismissable out of hand. And compared to traditional human perversions, afaik they haven't gotten much further than summer of love type stuff, just with a bit more of a pessimistic twist. They have nothing on an average crackhouse.

Overall, I think it all qualifies as a pretty fun and interesting weirdness on the scale of human experience, which regularly goes much...much darker than a bunch of kids living in sharehouses and worrying about the future.

If we could relegate effective altruism to the graveyard of terrible but well intentioned ideas to never rear its head ever again to haunt humanity that would be a small win.

  haunts Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley can be weird sometimes but this isn't Silicon Valley. Vitalik is based in Singapore but travels to Toronto, and European tech hubs like Berlin, Zug, and Prague.