Manifest 2024 is a festival that we organized last weekend in Berkeley. By most accounts, it was a great success. On our feedback form, the average response to “would you recommend to a friend” was a 9.0/10. Reviewers said nice things like “one of the best weekends of my life” and “dinners and meetings and conversations with people building local cultures so achingly beautiful they feel almost like dreams” and “I’ve always found tribalism mysterious, but perhaps that was just because I hadn’t yet found my tribe.”
Arnold Brooks running a session on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. More photos of Manifest here.
However, a recent post on The Guardian and review on the EA Forum highlight an uncomfortable fact: we invited a handful of controversial speakers to Manifest, whom these authors call out as “racist”. Why did we invite these folks?
First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard
Here’s the schedule for Manifest on Saturday:
(The largest & most prominent talks are on the left. Full schedule here.)
And here’s the full list of the 57 speakers we featured on our website: Nate Silver, Luana Lopes Lara, Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, Niraek Jain-sharma, Byrne Hobart, Aella, Dwarkesh Patel, Patrick McKenzie, Chris Best, Ben Mann, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Cate Hall, Paul Gu, John Phillips, Allison Duettmann, Dan Schwarz, Alex Gajewski, Katja Grace, Kelsey Piper, Steve Hsu, Agnes Callard, Joe Carlsmith, Daniel Reeves, Misha Glouberman, Ajeya Cotra, Clara Collier, Samo Burja, Stephen Grugett, James Grugett, Javier Prieto, Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins, Jay Baxter, Tracing Woodgrains, Razib Khan, Max Tabarrok, Brian Chau, Gene Smith, Gavriel Kleinwaks, Niko McCarty, Xander Balwit, Jeremiah Johnson, Ozzie Gooen, Danny Halawi, Regan Arntz-Gray, Sarah Constantin, Frank Lantz, Will Jarvis, Stuart Buck, Jonathan Anomaly, Evan Miyazono, Rob Miles, Richard Hanania, Nate Soares, Holly Elmore, Josh Morrison.
Judge for yourself; I hope this gives a flavor of what Manifest was actually like. Our sessions and guests spanned a wide range of topics: prediction markets and forecasting, of course; but also finance, technology, philosophy, AI, video games, politics, journalism and more. We deliberately invited a wide range of speakers with expertise outside of prediction markets; one of the goals of Manifest is to increase adoption of prediction markets via cross-pollination.
Okay, but there sure seemed to be a lot of controversial ones…
I was the one who invited the majority (~40/60) of Manifest’s special guests; if you want to get mad at someone, get mad at me, not Rachel or Saul or Lighthaven; certainly not the other guests and attendees of Manifest.
My criteria for inviting a speaker or special guest was roughly, “this person is notable, has something interesting to share, would enjoy Manifest, and many of our attendees would enjoy hearing from them”. Specifically:
- Richard Hanania — I appreciate Hanania’s support of prediction markets, including partnering with Manifold to run a forecasting competition on serious geopolitical topics and writing to the CFTC in defense of Kalshi. (In response to backlash last year, I wrote a post on my decision to invite Hanania, specifically)
- Simone and Malcolm Collins — I’ve enjoyed their Pragmatist’s Guide series, which goes deep into topics like dating, governance, and religion. I think the world would be better with more kids in it, and thus support pronatalism. I also find the two of them to be incredibly energetic and engaging speakers IRL.
- Jonathan Anomaly — I attended a talk Dr. Anomaly gave about the state-of-the-art on polygenic embryonic screening. I was very impressed that something long-considered science fiction might be close to viable, and thought that other folks would also enjoy learning about this topic.
- Brian Chau — I’ve followed Brian’s Substack since before he started Alliance for the Future. I’m quite uncertain whether AI Pause or e/acc is the right path forward for AI, and know folks on both sides. To get more clarity on the issue, I was specifically interested in setting up a debate between Brian and Holly Elmore, who runs PauseAI US (an organization which Manifund fiscally sponsors).
- Stephen Hsu and Razib Khan were invited by my cofounder at Manifold, Stephen Grugett; I’m less familiar with their work, but have enjoyed our interactions to date.
I obviously do not endorse all viewpoints held by all of our invited guests. For example, I find some things that Hanania has written on Twitter to be quite distasteful, and would not have asked him to come if Twitter!Hanania was the only point of reference I had. But my read of his Substack, as well as our professional interactions, led me to believe that there was more to him than simply being a provocateur.
In general, I think it’s much more important that a particular speaker has something to add, than that they have no skeletons in their closet. I stand behind every one of the speakers we asked to come; they have taught me much, and I am grateful they chose to attend our event. For more on this philosophy, see Scott Alexander on “Rule thinkers in, not out” or Tracing Woodgrains on engaging with your opponents.
Bringing people together with prediction markets
It’s not entirely an accident that a prediction market festival would draw in disagreeable folks. A functioning prediction market requires people with opposite views on an issue to get together and agree to place a bet. Many prediction markets, such as PredictIt and Polymarket, feature more right-wing than left-wing participants. While I consider myself approximately libertarian/liberal, I think such right-leaning presence is great; better than the siloed echo chambers that other online platforms produce.
One of my hopes with the Manifest event was to bring together people with opposing views on issues. Online discourse is very polarizing nowadays; I enjoy hosting in person events because meeting in meatspace reminds everyone that their ideological opponents are also human. The AI Pause vs Accelerate debate between Holly Elmore and Brian Chau is one organized example of this; I expect there were many more chances for ideological conflict over the course of the weekend.
We do take attendee safety seriously, and retained two different community contacts and full-time security guards at the front entrance. We also had a short list of do-not-admits: folks who would not have been permitted access to Manifest because of past infractions in the rationality and EA communities. If any attendees were made to feel unsafe, we would have expelled the offenders from our event.
Anyways, controversy bad
At one point a couple months before the event, Rachel, Saul and I discussed the concern that we’d invited too many controversial folks to Manifest. Contrary to what you might believe at this point, I don’t enjoy controversy for its own sake; I think it usually distracts from actual important work. I especially wanted to avoid an evaporative cooling effect, where a disproportionate ratio of edgy folks convinces reasonable people not to come.
My plan was then to invite & highlight folks who could balance this out — I was specifically looking for people who were “warm, kind and gracious”. Some of our invited guests, including Katja Grace, Misha Glouberman, and Joe Carlsmith, do a good job of embodying these virtues; I think I could have have pushed farther in this direction. I’m also extremely grateful for our attendees who hosted casual fun events for each other like wrestling in the park, conflict improv, and Blood on the Clocktower — their actions spoke much, much louder than the words of two journalists who didn’t even bother to come.
Despite all this controversy, I’m very heartened that the anonymous reviewer still found our attendees to be “extremely friendly”, and that they’re interested in coming back next year. We haven’t even decided yet if there will be a Manifest 2025, but if so, I’m hoping that it retains a spirit of festivity, of fun, and of friendly intellectual disagreement.
Aside: Is Manifest an Effective Altruism event?
Mostly not, I think.
- Manifest 2024 was jointly organized by Manifold Markets (a for-profit tech startup which runs a platform for prediction markets), and Manifund (a nonprofit philanthropy that makes grants and experiments with funding mechanisms).
- The core organizing team — Rachel, Saul, and I — are proudly EA. For example, we’ve all taken the GWWC pledge, and volunteered, attended, or spoken at past EA Globals. Rachel and Saul organized for their respective university’s EA groups.
- We’ve also invited many speakers who we respect for their work in EA areas, including Scott Alexander, Katja Grace, Ajeya Cotra and Joe Carlsmith; and expect that many EA folks would enjoy Manifest.
- However, we do not market Manifest specifically as “an EA event” — that is, insofar as there is a main subject, the subject is prediction markets & forecasting. I would guess that about 15-25% of attendees self-identify as EA.
- Manifest has not been sponsored by any EA funders; all funding to date has come from individual ticket sales or our corporate sponsorships. For what it’s worth, I do think the festival was quite good by EA lights, for the talks it produced, relationships it fostered and community it built.
(This comment is more of a general response to this post and others about Manifest than a response to what Austin has specifically said here)
I am a black person who attended Manifest, and I will say that I almost didn't attend because of Hanania, but decided to anyway because my interest in it outweighed my disagreements with his work.
I walked past a conversation he was having where he was asked why he thinks "minorities [black people] perform so poorly in so many domains," which did not feel great, but I also chatted to someone who runs a similar twitter as him and briefly told him my issues with it, which he was receptive to. I overall prefer cultures that give me space to have those sorts of conversations, but I do flinch a bit at the fact that my demographic is on the receiving end of so much of this. Many of the "edgy" people were super nice to me, I had fun conversations about other things with some of them, and their presence didn't take away from my overall experience. I felt fine after those interactions, but many people wouldn't. Perhaps they don’t “belong” at manifest, but that explanation isn’t very satisfying to me.
I think I'm much more tolerant of this sort of dynamic... (read more)
I very much appreciate you sharing your thoughts here. While I see a fair bit of personal value in engaging with eg Hanania, I agree that there's nothing dishonorable or shameful about not wanting to be in a place with the dynamic you describe. I agree that people who are skeptical towards speakers who have made edgy, offensive, or extreme statements should not be assumed to lack intellectual rigor or curiosity. I'm also glad to hear, and take it as a good sign, that many of the "edgy" people were nice to you and people were receptive when you raised the issues you saw at Manifest. Your comment touches on a lot of valuable points.
As for the path forward, I'm personally impressed by the call for "pluralist civility" in Folded Papers:
... (read more)That's not right: You listed these people as special guests — many of them didn't do a talk. Importantly, Hanania didn't. (According to the schedule.)
I just noticed this. And it makes me feel like "if someone rudely seeks out controversy, don't list them as a special guest" is such a big improvement over the status quo.
- Hanania was already not a speaker. (And Nathan Young suggests that last year, this was partly a conscious decision rather than him not just feeling like he wanted to give a talk.)
- If you just had open ticket sales and allowed Hanania to buy a ticket (or not) just like everyone else, then I think that would be a lot better in the eyes of most people who don't like that Hanania is listed as a special guest (including me). My guess would be that it's a common conference policy to "Have open ticket sales, and only refuse people if you think they might actively break-norms-and-harm-people during the events (not based on their views on twitter)". (Though I could be off-base here — I haven't actually read many conferences' policies.)
- I think people who are concerned about preserving the "open expression of
... (read more)My guess is that "special guest" status meant more than that. Special guests likely received a free ticket, worth $500.
It's also possible that special guests might have gotten travel or lodging subsidies in one form or another (e.g. free lodging at Lightcone). This is a guess, I don't know how common it is in general for billed guests at conferences to fund their own lodging and travel fully, but it seems possible.
If that's the case, it strengthens your point. It's very reasonable to not pay for someone who is rude and unnecessarily seeks out controversy to attend your conference.
I'm a pro forecaster. I build forecasting tools. I use forecasting in a very relevant day job running an AI think tank. I would normally be very enthusiastic about Manifest. And I think Manifest would really want me there.
But I don't attend because of people there who have "edgy" opinions that might be "fun" for others but aren't fun for me. I don't want to come and help "balance out" someone who thinks that ~using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide~ (sorry this was a bad example as discussed in the comments so I'll stick with the pretty clear "has stated that black people are animals who need to be surveilled in mass to reduce crime"). I want to talk about forecasting.
It's your right to have your conference your way, and it's others right to attend and have fun. But I think Manifest seriously underrates how much they are losing out on here by being "edgy" and "fun", and I really don't want to be associated with it.
Because others here are unlikely to do so, I feel like I ought to explicitly defend Hanania's presence on the merits. I don't find it "fun" that he's "edgy." I go out of my way, personally, to avoid being edgy. While I tread into heated territory at times, I have always made it my goal to do so respectfully, thoughtfully, and with consideration for others' values. No, it's not edginess or fun that makes me think he belongs there. He unquestionably belongs at a prediction market conference because he has been a passionate defender of prediction markets in the public sphere and because he writes to his predominantly right-leaning audience in ways that consistently emphasize and criticize the ways they depart from reality.
Let me be clear: I emphatically do not defend all parts of his approach and worldview. He often engages in a deliberately provocative way and says insensitive or offensive things about race, trans issues, and other hot-button topics on the right. But I feel the same about many people who you would have no problem seeing attend Manifest, and he brings specific unusual and worthwhile things to the table.
My first real interaction with Hanania, as I recall, came when he ... (read more)
I appreciate the main point you're making: that you’re someone we would value having at Manifest, and including people like Hanania causes you to not come.
However, I think there’s a miscommunication going on: as far as I can tell, not Austin, nor any of us organizers, nor any of the people defending Manifest’s choice of speakers nor those defending the speakers themselves, thinks that Manifest is “fun” because it’s “edgy”. I’ve noticed you tie these things together in a few comments in a way that feels to me like a straw man, like you think that we think it's "fun" to be "edgy", when we in fact do not.
The “fun” thing, which Austin is rightly proud of, refers to the festival part: Manifest hosts mostly serious talks during the day, but there is also e.g. a dance class, wrestling, karaoke, s’mores, etc. That all feels very wholesome and essential to what makes Manifest an exceptional event.
The “edgy” thing — attendees being purposefully inflammatory, using slurs, making others feel unwelcome, etc. — is totally unrelated. Not wholesome. Not a thing to be proud of. Not a thing we aspire to.
I think we could choose to kill the festival part of Manifest, and run a professional forecasting... (read more)
I want you to be able to come and just talk about forecasting too! I think people who wanted to do this (eg Ozzie Gooen by his self-report) were able to do this. Manifest is a big tent; if people want to just talk about forecasting, or AI, or board games, or polygenic screening, I want them to have that space.
It sounds like "serious forecasting conference" is a product that you and some others would be excited about. I hope that somebody runs one! But this wasn't ever the explicit goal of Manifest, which I'd describe as being closer to "fun forecasting-adjacent festival" -- I use "festival" instead of "conference" to denote that Manifest's aims are much more similar to a music festival or an anime convention, rather than an academic conference.
This reads to me like: "If you're bothered by the racism/sexism/etc, you're just not high-decoupling enough to just come and have a fun time... if you're bothered you're just un-fun, that's because you are too serious and you want to stifle free discourse... just let the racists be racists, and you can do your own thing too nearby".
Hi Peter,
Does anyone really think this, or are you just using hyperbole?
here and here.
I reached out to Hanania and this is what he said:
"“These people” as in criminals and those who are apologists for crimes. A coalition of bad people who together destroy cities. Yes, I know how it looks. The Penny arrest made me emotional, and so it was an unthinking tweet in the moment."
He also says it's quoted in the Blocked and Reported podcast episode, but it's behind a paywall and I can't for the life of me get Substack to accept my card, so I can't doublecheck. Would appreciate if anybody figured out how to do that and could verify.
I think generally though it's easy to misunderstand people, and if people respond to clarify, you should believe what they say they meant to say, not your interpretation of what they said.
While I don't follow Hanania or (the social media platform formerly known as) Twitter closely, it seems to me that this kind of ambiguity is strategic. He wants to expand what is acceptable to say publicly, and one way of doing this is to say things which can be read both in a currently-acceptable and a currently-unacceptable way. If challenged on any specific one you just give the acceptable interpretation and apologize for the misunderstanding, but this doesn't do much to diminish the window-pushing effect.
It's pretty interesting that Hanania just happens to frequently make these kinds of accidents, right?
I don't think you have remotely conclusively proved that this tweet wasn't racist.
Edit: I don't think TheAthenians should have to conclusively prove a tweet isn't racist. I think I more wished to say "I am pretty confident and you have done little to move that" since this discussion has started several other non-aligned people have reached out to say that they too didn't read the tweet as racist. I am now less confident.
Can you ask him to reply to his tweet with that clarification? I don't think that is the common sense understanding of the tweet, which is very racist. Until he publicly clarifies, I'm pretty happy to continue my common sense understanding of that tweet.
I don't know why he didn't delete it. I don't think it's particularly important to his main causes and points. If I were him, I'd totally delete it.
My guess is that he feels pretty constantly attacked and he probably has a set of principles/rules he follows for when to delete stuff, and it's not "delete it if a lot of people are mad at me online", since people on the left and the right are often quite mad at him online.
A meta- norm I'd like commentators[1] to have is to Be Kind, When Possible. Some subpoints that might be helpful for enacting what I believe to be the relevant norms:
- Try to understand/genuinely grapple with the awareness that you are talking to/about actual humans on the other side, not convenient abstractions/ideological punching bags.
- For example, most saliently to me, the Manifest organizers aren't an amorphous blob of bureaucratic institutions.
- They are ~3 specific people, all of whom are fairly young, new to organizing large events, and under a lot of stress as it is.
- Rachel in particular played a (the?) central role in organizing, despite being 7(?) months pregnant. Organizing a new, major multiday event under such conditions is stressful enough as it is, and I'm sure the Manifest team in general, and Rachel in particular, was hoping they can relax a bit at the end.
- It seems bad enough that a hit piece in the Guardian is written about them, but it's worse when "their" community wants to pile on, etc.
- I'm not saying that you shouldn't criticize people. Criticism can be extremely valuable! But there are constructive, human, ways to criticize, and then th
... (read more)Thanks Linch. I appreciate the chance to step back here. So I want to apologize to @Austin and @Rachel Weinberg and @Saul Munn if I stressed them out with my comments. (Tagging means they'll see it, right?)
I want to be very clear that while I disagree with some of the choices made, I have absolutely no ill will towards them or any other Manifest organizer, I very much want Manifold and Manifest to succeed, and I very much respect their rights to have their conference the way they want. If I see any of them I will be very warm and friendly and there's really no need from me to talk about this further if they don't want to. I hope we can be friends and engage productively in other areas - even if I don't attend Manifest or trade on Manifold, I'd be happy to interact with them in other ways that don't involve Hanania.
While I dislike Hanania's ideas greatly, and I still think inviting Hanania was a mistake, and I still will not attend events or participate in places where Hanania is given a platform... I don't want to practice guilt by association for those who do not hold Hanania's detestable ideas. Just because someone interacted with him does not make them also bad people. I apologize for not being clear about this from the beginning and I regret that I may have lead people to think otherwise.
There's a lot of good stuff here, but I think there's another side to "[c]onsider the virtue of silence." There is the belief/norm, quite common in the broader world, that qui tacet consentire videtur (often translated to "silence means consent" but apparently more literally to ~ "he who is silent is taken to agree"). Whether or not one thinks that should be a norm, it is a matter of social reality at this point in time.
I wish we had a magic button we could press that would contain any effects from the Manifest organizers' decisions to Manifest itself, preventing any reputational or other adverse effects from falling on anyone else. To me, it is the need to mitigate those third-party adverse effects that makes silence problematic here. After all, all of us have much better things to do with our lives than gripe about other people's choices that don't impose adverse effects onto other people (or other moral patients).
Fwiw I think that posts and comments on the EA Forum do a lot to create an association. If there wasn't any coverage of Hanania attending Manifest on the forum, I think something like 10x+ fewer EAs would know about the Hanania stuff, and it would be less likely to be picked up by journalists (a bit less relevant as it was already covered by the Guardian). It seems like there's a nearby world where less than 1% of weekly active forum users know that an EAish organisation at a commercial venue run by EAish people invited Hanania to attend an event - which I personally don't think creates much association between EA and Hanania (unlike the current coverage).
Of course, some people here might think that EA should be grappling with racism outside of this incident, in which case opportunities like this are helpful for creating discourse. But insofar as people think that Manifest's actions were ok-ish, it's mostly sad that they are associated with EA and make EA look bad, meaning they personally don't want to attend Manifest; I think debating the topic on the forum is pretty counterproductive. My impression is that the majority of people in the comments are in the latter camp.
If you think that it's important that Manifest knows why you personally aren't attending, emailing them seems like a very reasonable action to me (but of course, this doesn't achieve the goal of letting people who don't organise the event know why you aren't attending).
My recollection is that the recent major scandals/controversies were kickstarted by outsiders as well: FTX, Bostrom, Time and other news articles, etc. I don't think any of those needed help from the Forum for the relevant associations to form. The impetus for the Nonlinear situation was of inside origin, but (1) I don't think many on the outside cared about it, and (2) the motivation to post seemed to be protecting community members from perceived harm, not reputational injury.
In any event, this option potentially works only for someone's initial decision to post at all. Once something is posted, simply ignoring it looks like tacit consent to what Manifest did. Theoretically, everyone could simply respond with: "This isn't an EA event, and scientific racism is not an EA cause area" and move on. The odds of that happening are . . . ~0. Once people (including any of the organizers) start defending the decision to invite on the Forum, or people start defending scientific racism itself, it is way too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Criticism is the only viable way to mitigate reputational damage at that point.
... (read more)I think sort of the opposite. Even though I commented elsewhere that I think there's a strong racist/eugenicist element in EA, I think Manifest has little to do with EA and could probably be ignored here if it weren't for the guardian article.
But the problem is that once it came to be discussed here, the discussion itself proved much more damning to EA than that not-really-EA event was in the first place. This isn't the first time that has happened. I guess it's better to know than not to know, but it's really weird to need this outside trigger for it.
Good points! It seems good to take a break or at least move to the meta level.
I think one emotion that is probably quite common in discussions about what norms should be (at least in my own experience) is clinging. Quoting from Joe Carlsmith's post on it:
... (read more)I wasn't at Manifest, though I was at LessOnline beforehand. I strongly oppose attempts to police the attendee lists that conference organizers decide on. I think this type of policing makes it much harder to have a truth-seeking community. I've also updated over the last few years that having a truth-seeking community is more important than I previously thought - basically because the power dynamics around AI will become very complicated and messy, in a way that requires more skill to navigate successfully than the EA community has. Therefore our comparative advantage will need to be truth-seeking.
Why does enforcing deplatforming make truth-seeking so much harder? I think there are (at least) three important effects.
First is the one described in Scott's essay on Kolmogorov complicity. Selecting for people willing to always obey social taboos also selects hard against genuinely novel thinkers. But we don't need to take every idea a person has in board in order to get some value from them - we should rule thinkers in, not out.
Secondly, a point I made in this tweet: taboo topics tend to end up expanding, for structural reasons (you can easily appeal to taboos to win arguments). So ov... (read more)
I'm actually not sure about this logic. Can you expand on why EA having insufficient skill to "navigate power dynamics around AI" implies "our comparative advantage will need to be truth-seeking"?
One problem I see is that "comparative advantage" is not straightforwardly applicable here, because the relevant trade or cooperation (needed for the concept to make sense) may not exist. For example, imagine that EA's truth-seeking orientation causes it to discover and announce one or more politically inconvenient truths (e.g. there are highly upvoted posts about these topics on EAF), which in turn causes other less truth-seeking communities to shun EA and refuse to pay attention to its ideas and arguments. In this scenario, if EA also doesn't have much power to directly influence the development of AI (as you seem to suggest),... (read more)
The main alternative to truth-seeking is influence-seeking. EA has had some success at influence-seeking, but as AI becomes the locus of increasingly intense power struggles, retaining that influence will become more difficult, and it will tend to accrue to those who are most skilled at power struggles.
I agree that extreme truth-seeking can be counterproductive. But in most worlds I don't think that EA's impact comes from arguing for highly controversial ideas; and I'm not advocating for extreme truth-seeking like, say, hosting public debates on the most controversial topics we can think of. Rather, I think its impact will come from advocating for not-super-controversial ideas, but it will be able to generate them in part because it avoided the effects I listed in my comment above.
Thanks for the clarification. Why doesn't this imply that EA should get better at power struggles (e.g. by putting more resources into learning/practicing/analyzing corporate politics, PR, lobbying, protests, and the like)? I feel like maybe you're adopting the framing of "comparative advantage" too much in a situation where the idea doesn't work well (because the situation is too adversarial / not cooperative enough). It seems a bit like a country, after suffering a military defeat, saying "We're better scholars than we are soldiers. Let's pursue our comparative advantage and reallocate our defense budget into our universities."
This part seems reasonable.
Of course this is all a spectrum, but I don't believe this implication in part because I expect that impact is often heavy-tailed. You do something really well first and foremost by finding the people who naturally inclined towards being some of the best in the world at it. If a community that was really good at power struggles tried to get much better at truth-seeking, it would probably still not do a great job at pushing the intellectual frontier, because it wouldn't be playing to its strengths (and meanwhile it would trade off a lot of its power-seeking ability). I think the converse is true for EA.
What prominent left wing thinkers exhibited anti semitism recently?
The Labour Party comes to mind - though I have not verified the claims myself and idk if this is what Richard had in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_British_Labour_Party#2021–present
One person I was thinking about when I wrote the post was Medhi Hassan. According to Wikipedia:
Medhi has spoken several times at the Oxford Union and also in a recent public debate on antisemitism, so clearly he's not beyond the pale for many.
I personally also think that the "from the river to the sea" chant is pretty analogous to, say, white nationalist slogans. It does seem to have a complicated history, but in the wake of the October 7 attacks its association with Hamas should I think put it beyond the pale. Nevertheless, it has been defended by Rashida Tlaib. In general I am in favor of people being able to make arguments like hers, but I suspect that if Hanania were to make an argument for why a white nationalist slogan should be interpreted positively, it would be counted as a strong point against him.
I expect that either Hassan or Tlaib, were they interested in prediction markets, would have been treated in a similar way as Hanania by the Manifest organiz... (read more)
My claim is that the Manifest organizers should have the right to invite him even if he'd said that more recently. But appreciate you giving your perspective, since I did ask for that (just clarifying the "agree" part).
I have some object-level views about the relative badness but my main claim is more that this isn't a productive type of analysis for a community to end up doing, partly because it's so inherently subjective, so I support drawing lines that help us not need to do this analysis (like "organizers are allowed to invite you either way").
Most Israeli Jews would call the phrase "From the river to the see" antisemitic. Myself being relatively on the far left in that group, and having spoken a lot with Palestinians online before the war, I'd argue that it's antisemitic/calls for ethnic cleansing of Jews around 50% of the time. I would not prosecute or boycott someone based on it alone.
Edit: but most Israelis might choose not to come to a conference that would platform such a person, I guess. I think this is a different situation from the current real controversy, but make of it what you will.
For what it's worth, I'm 75% confident that Hanania didn't mean black people with the "animals" comment.
I think it's generally bad form to not take people at their word about the meaning of their statements, though I'm also very sympathetic to the possibility of provocateurs exploiting charity to get away with dogwhistles (and I think Hanania deserves more suspicion of this than most), so I feel mixed about you using it as an example here.
"Didn't mean" is fuzzy in this sort of case. I'd put "he expected a good number of readers would interpret the referent of 'animals' to be 'black people' and was positive on that interpretation ending up in their minds" at more likely than not.
I’d bet against that but not confident
I think many people are tricking themselves into being more intellectually charitable to Hanania than warranted.
I know relatively little about Hanania other than stuff that has been brought to my attention through EA drama and some basic “know thy enemy” reading I did on my own initiative. I feel pretty comfortable in my current judgment that his statements on race are not entitled charitable readings in cases of ambiguity.
Hanania by his own admission was deeply involved in some of the most vilely racist corners of the internet. He knows what sorts of messages appeal to and mobilize those people, and how such racists would read his messages. He “know[s] how it looks” not just to left-wing people but to racists.
More recently, he has admitted that he harbors irrational animus (mostly anti-LGBT stuff from what I know) that seems like a much better explanation for his policy positions rather than any attempt at beneficence from egalitarian first principles. If you just read his recent policy stances on racial issues, they are shot through with an underlying contempt, lack of empathy, and broad-strokes painting that are all consistent with what I think can fairly be called a racist disp... (read more)
Here's where I see this association coming from. People vary in many ways, some directly visible (height, facial structure, speed, melanin) and some less so (compassion, facility with mathematics, creativity, musicality). Most directly visible ones clearly have a genetic component: you can see the differences between populations, cross-group adoptees are visibly much more similar to their birth parents than their adoptive parents, etc. With the non-visible variation it's harder to tell how much is genetic, but evidence from situations like twins raised apart tells us that some is.
Getting closer to the edge, it's likely that there are population-level genetic differences on non-visible traits: different populations have been under different selection pressures in ways that impacted visible traits, and it would be surprising if these pressures didn't impact non-visible traits. One c... (read more)
The asymmetry that @Ben Millwood points to below is important, but it goes further. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they've found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they've been misinterpreting it. Except this doesn't work on taboo topics:
- Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing's perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don't know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
- You wrote essentially the opposite ("Those who perceive
... (read more)My view on this is that, unless there is some really strong argument against HBD type views that is not regularly being made by the people arguing that HBD type people are evil, we have in this case a dubious but plausible proposition (HBD) where the strength of the social consensus against it has gotten way, way stronger than the evidence against it.
People who are good at noticing holes in arguments are going to notice that the common arguments saying that HBD style ideas are obviously and completely false have lots of holes in them. Some of these people will then have a period where they think HBD is probably true before (possibly) they notice the holes that also exist in the arguments for HBD.
In this context it is pretty likely that 'being good at noticing holes in arguments that your social group strongly endorses' is going to associate with a tendency to 'racism'.
I also have a dislike for excluding people who have racist style views simply on that basis, with no further discussion needed, because it effectively is setting the prior for racism being true to 0 before we've actually looked at the data.
Make the argument on the merits for why they are bad scholars making prov... (read more)
This feels like a description of how you want reality to be rather than how it actually is. Prominent creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers generally don't find scientists, engineers or political scientists queuing up to debate them or intellectuals queuing up to hear them out either and not because the strength of the evidence favours them. More to the point: if a conference on an apparently unrelated subject like prediction markets announces a lineup with an unusually large number of creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers the discussion will definitely be around why those people were selected and whether they should have been rather than rehashing old arguments about whether they have a point.
Likewise, if Manifest chose for some reason to stack their attendee list with people who were unusually outspokenly 'woke' or raving Stalinists[!] and the feedback was that they didn't deserve a speaking slot on the basis of their social media obnoxiousness or their presence attracted the wrong sort of people,... (read more)
There are reasons why you might want to exclude HDBers that don't depend on any particular HDB view being false. And there are reasons why you might object to including some of the people at Manifest even if you don't think HDBers should be automatically excluded.
On the first point: The truth value of "most people who are into HDB are racist in the "dislike and are biased against Black people," sense and many are fascists or support gross human rights violations" is independent of the truth-value of HDB. Certainly Bryan Caplan, who no one would consider a dogmatic leftist seems to think something like this (at least the human rights bit): see the blog post by him Nathan Young's posted in another thread. The reports of slurs at the conference are evidence in favour of "invite HDB speakers, get bigots in the audience", as is the presence of Yarvin (a genuine fascist's) followers. (Even if Yarvin himself wasn't there.) It's not low integrity to prioritise not attracting slur-chucking bigots and fascists over having speakers with a particular viewpoint even IF we assume that viewpoint includes some true and controversial claims. It is plausible that many obnoxious ideological groupings... (read more)
Wait what? I can't think of many words that would be more central examples of slurs than that.
I am gay. At this point it’s a term of endearment. If someone called me a fag in an unfriendly way I’d just be a bit baffled. Of course, this is just me.
Yes, I agree it's used not-that-rarely within the gay community. This is very similar to the n-word situation, and I don't think is very material to whether it's a slur or not.
If a gay person called me a fag, I'd update that they were more edgy than me. If a straight person called me a fag, I'd update that they were a bigot (and/or very socially inept and in need of a talking to).
I have privately been told by someone I know who attended that they also heard slurs. (They didn't say what other than "not the n-word".) I'm not going to name them, because they have already said not to cite them on the forum about another thing they told me they was so my guess is they do not want to be dragged into the controversy on this.
I'd also say that I remember how certain neoreactionaries (not all of them) used to talk on SSC-these people of course eventually got banned. If that was a crowd attracted-which the Yarvin after party suggests it was-I am extremely unsurprised that people whose comments on SSC used to include things like rants about how "white gimmedats" and "white sluts" were teaming up with Black people to demand ruinous government spending, will also use racial slurs when they are not on a forum that will mod that out.
What is meant to be the non-central fallacy in this context? Are you just saying you doubt they are political supporters of Yarvin's ideas?
I can't confidently recall it was "fag" or "faggot" at this point anymore, but the term was definitely used.
I'm choosing to interpret this as you wondering if I used that collection of words as a representation of the kind of soft opens some of the attendees engaged in instead of real examples (as opposed to suggesting that I was lying), but "fag", "retarded", "based", and "cuck" were all used quite a bit.
The scientific proposition is "are there racial genetic differences related to intelligence" right, not "is racism [morally] right"?
I find it odd how much such things seem to be conflated; if I learned that Jews have an IQ an average of 5 points lower than non-Jews, I would... still think the Holocaust and violence towards and harassment of Jews was abhorrent and horrible? I don't think I'd update much/at all towards thinking it was less horrible. Or if you could visually identify people whose mothers had drank alcohol during pregnancy, and they were statistically a big less intelligent (as I understand them to be), enslaving them, genociding them, or subjecting them to Jim Crow style laws would seem approximately as bad as it seems to do to some group that's slightly more intelligent on average.
(The above comment makes no reference to racism, and seems to be arguing from general principles. You can object to the general principles, which Richard I think communicated pretty cogently and which presumably apply to opinions associated with racism, but I don't really understand your comment about the author "associating racism with truthseekingness" since the author does not mention racism.
In as much as Richard is advocating for tolerating controversial beliefs, like some stuff associated with racism, it's because of the general principles he outlines in his comment. But if that's what you mean by "associate racism with truthseeking" it seems appropriate to engage with the details of his comment, instead of just asking him to re-explain himself.)
This is a top-level comment on a post titled “Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”. That’s the topic of discussion, and the commenter seems to think that truth-seekingness is related to this topic. That’s what I’m challenging.
The Kolmogorov complicity essay presents numerous instances where individuals held accurate beliefs that their governments deemed heretical. The truthfulness of these beliefs is crucial to the argument. Certainly the essay would come across differently if the heretical beliefs were things like “the sky is green” or “this specific couple’s children are genetically dumb” (when they’re not). Therefore, I fail to understand how this essay pertains to our current discussion unless the contentious racist beliefs are also truthful, which the commenter has not substantiated.
For what it is worth, a core argument I made was that many attendees at these events said clearly racist and bigoted things, far beyond milquetoast "there might be group IQ differences". I am also disturbed by people jumping to the truth-seeking defence.
What were the clearly racist of bigoted things?
Hanania seems kinda racist but nonetheless great to invite to Manifest.
(This started out as an in-person diatribe to a friend, and he told me that it might be good if the EA forum heard it. Sorry Austin. I wanted to make it a Quick Take, but for some reason I'm not able to make those.)
tl;dr: tweets bad, blog good, books dunno. It's fine to advocate for various exclusions, but try reading more than a few sentences before joining the mob, lest you make unnecessary epistemic sacrifices.
I’m not too bothered by people’s objections to Hanania's invitation. Mostly I’m seeing people say that his presence makes them less interested in attending. Some amount of that seems pretty much guaranteed to happen at any event with sufficiently interesting attendees and consequential topics. We all can and will advocate for our own preferences and the Overton window we think is best[1]. I think concerns about Hanania attracting edgelords are valid, but given how good his blog is, I think he is still net positive for Manifest.
(EDIT for clarification: my own Overton window is not infinitely permissive, but it is permissive enough for Richard Hanania to be inside it.)
Hanania's twitter repulses... (read more)
> My plan was then to invite & highlight folks who could balance this out
I think this is basically a misconception of how the social dynamics at play work. People aren't worried about the relative number of "racists", they're worried about the absolute number. The primary concern is not that they will exposed to racism at the conference itself, but rather that attending a conference together will be taken as a signal of support for the racists, saying that they are welcome in the community.
To pick Hanania as an example, since he has the most clearly documented history of racist statements, I have peers who would absolutely see me choosing to attend the same conference as him as a sign that I don't think he's too bad. And if I know that expectation and chose to go anyway, there would be additional merit to that reading.
To an extent, the more that Manifest is focused on discussions of prediction, the more leeway there is to invite controversial speakers. You can say make a case for ignoring views that are not relevant to the topic at hand. But as Saul says in his other post "although manifest is nominally about prediction markets, it's also about all the ideas that folks who like prediction markets are also into — betting, philosophy, mechanism design, writing, etc". In other words, it's about forming a broader intellectual community. And people are obviously going to be uncomfortable identifying with an intellectual community that includes people that they, and the broader world, consider to be racist.
And even if it were possible to "balance out", the examples given don't exactly fill me with confidence this was given serious consideration. Someone known primarily[1] for being an angry culture warrior like Hanania isn't "balanced out" by the presence of "gracious" longtermists who are unlikely to have written anything racist,[2] he'd "balanced out" by getting a culture warrior from the other side, whether in open debate or purely speaking about markets but making it clear the organizers definitely weren't endorsing a particular side...
- ^
- ^
... (read more)The Guardian may not always capture the nuance, but there's a difference between inviting someone known primarily for his controversial views who incidentally also favours prediction markets and inviting, say, notable prediction market proponent Robin Hanson who incidentally also said questionable things in the past
Indeed if I wanted to organize a conference with the explicit purpose of covertly promoting fringe views to a largely unrelated audience (which I don't think was actually the case here FWIW), this is exactly how I'd stack the speakers for faux balance: a few people on my side to insinuate the fringe views and a bunch of harml
I agree. I think we have to understand that "balancing out" Hanania plays into his game. He's an intentional provocateur - he says edgy things for attention.
And then he uses that attention to build a platform.
And his explicit intention with that platform is to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
I don't want to play any part in enabling that and that's what "balancing out" does.
Yeah I dislike being part of something that rewards Hanania for the worst of his behaviour, which on balance I would guess Manifest currently does.
Well put.
It's been a long time since AP Chemistry, but to deploy an imperfect metaphor: Adding water to a strong acid merely makes the solution somewhat less acidic; it does not make it balanced in pH.
Mm, what you're describing sounds consistent, but do you think that your peers are right to have that expectation? Like, is society a better place if we enforce a norm that attending a conference constitutes support for the others in attendance?
In general, I'm much less concerned about the optics of the event "how does Manifest look", and much more concerned about the concrete question, "how did it feel to attend Manifest"? For this reason, the Guardian article didn't bother me very much, but the attendee's report on Manifest did prompt some soul-searching among our team and led me to write this post.
We don't get to decide what society's norms are, though. To be clear, nor do members of the ideological left with their demands for an ideological purity culture.
Looking at ~the middle 75% of society, [1]I think it's clear that (metaphorically) breaking bread with a group of people has some social meaning. "Support" is too strong, but it does convey a sense of toleration, non-condemnation, and minimum acceptability of the group's views. I can't speak to non-Western cultures, but my understanding is this view is of long standing in places like classical Greece and Rome.
If one is interested in cross-pollination with diverse sectors of society, I submit that failing to reckon with commonly-accepted cultural norms like the breaking-bread norm would be an excellent way to ensure that one remains in a limited bubble.
I'm in the US, so this does have a US flavor. But I don't have any reason to think things are different in Western Europe. I'd defer to those with more relevant knowledge and experience to discuss other cultures.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think we do get to decide society's norms! We do so in explicit discussions like this one, for example. Or hypothetically if a friend asks "why did you go to that event with all the racists", you could let them know of your disapproval of the stances of some of the invited guests, while also highlighting that you attended because of specific talks or events or other friends you were excited for.
We collectively (the members of the society) get to decide society's norms. But it's also true that U.S. citizens collectively get to decide who the President is, and look where that gets tens of millions of people each election cycle. People individually or in small groups ordinarily have only a slight influence on society's norms., and I think what you're suggesting is sufficiently far afield from current norms for small movements to make a material difference.
Of course, it's possible for social norms to shift considerably. But it takes a lot of both time and concentrated effort. The end objective would presumably be a mass social movement engaged in advocacy for that interpretation of free speech and free association. I don't see that kind of theory of change being worked toward, so I don't see any reason to believe isolated, less systematic attempts to change norms will have much overall effect.
I think my peers would factually right, at least directionally, in that attending with someone who has controversial views is evidence of favoring those views.
As for whether society is a better place if we enforce the norm, I think there's a couple relevant considerations. The first is the degree of abhorrence. To pull Godwin's Law, I think that knowingly attending a conference with literal neo-Nazis should be seen as support for their views. The second is the degree of focus. Where it should be fine to attend an academic conference with subject matter experts talking about their work, choosing to attend a "fun forecasting-adjacent festival" where attendees are encouraged to pal around with each other is more deserving of judgment.
I would also like to clarify, when I talk about peer judgments, I'm not making a point about how Manifest looks to those people. I'm making a point about how it would feel for them to attend. While I understand there are tradeoffs involved and you can't make the event welcoming to arbitrary potential attendees, I would say by the time you've lost Peter Wildeford you've gone too far. I would also throw my hat in the ring as someone who works on prediction science and would be hesitant to attend the next Manifest if it had a similar invitee list.
I don't like to post a whole blog here, but I think probably it's better here than as a separate post which will possibly reignite the discussion.
I think Bryan Caplan's comment on race and IQ is just a really good take on these issues. It acknowledges his views and then why people reasonably might not like him for those views and then an admonishment for bad apples to do better. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/iq_with_conscie.html
Here it is in full.
Bryan says:
I’m an IQ realist, all the way. IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.” A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success. Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence.
Yet I’ve got to admit: My fellow IQ realists are, on average, a scary bunch. People who vocally defend the power of IQ are vastly more likely than normal people to advocate extreme human rights violations. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a One-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists adv... (read more)
The obvious reason to not put too much weight on positive survey results from attendees: the selection effect.
There are surely people (e.g. Peter Wildeford, as he mentioned) who would have contributed to and benefited from Manifest but don't attend because of past and present speaker choices. As others have mentioned, being maximally inclusive will end up excluding people who (justifiably!) don't want to share space with racists. By including people like Hanania, you're making an implicit vote that you'd rather have people with racist views than people who wouldn't attend because of those people. Not a trade I would make.
Insofar as they were trying to make Manifest a conference for exploring interesting ideas, I would argue for including Hanania as one of the most effective critics of conservatism, ie. see this article where he tells conservatives to stop believing misinformation/running scams.
Insofar as the focus was on growing the prediction market community, I think it is important to conduct outreach both to the left and to the right. And Hanania is one of the figures on the right who can draw the smarter conservatives to a conference like this.
Sorry, this isn't a very strong analogy.
Hanania doesn't criticise anything specific about the bills directly or offer a clear thesis for why they led to a rise in crime. There's no analogy to clubbing seals here. The strong implication imo is that giving more freedom to black people itself led to bad things happening because black people (according to Hanania) have a bad culture. Which is a different and much more offensive (to many) thesis.
(I agree that this is then used as a segue to a pretty insightful and biting critique of conservatives, which is the main point of the article. And I can see the pragmatic value of his argumentative approach for reaching racist conservatives. But I don't think that does much to defend against a charge of racism here.)
As a right-wing person sympathetic to many EA ideals, I'm surprised when I read these posts about how we need to exclude these people to make attendees comfortable. In fact, excluding these people - who I find incredibly smart, reasonable, and valuable - would make me (and I'm sure many of my friends on the Right) extremely uncomfortable.
To be clear - the exact problem is that you are proposing excluding specific speakers (Hanania, Hsu, Hanson, the Collinses, etc) - who I find valuable to various degrees, not ideas. If Manifest issued a notice that it was not a venue to discuss IQ or heritability, that seems much more reasonable than excluding these thinkers.
(Why do Hanson and Hanania need to be speakers? They are the foremost advocates of prediction markets on the Right. Their support would be incredibly important in building a cross-party coalition).
I don't think Hanania is exactly well-positioned to build support on the right; he constantly talks about how much contempt he has for conservatives.
I understand how it may be weird given how much he trolls them, but he is among the most influential writers on the Right.
Yarvin didn't attend.
Also, my sense for Chau is that one of the top reasons he was invited was because he was up for doing a debate with Holly. I personally think one should extend something like "diplomatic immunity" to people from opposing communities if they are participating in a kind of diplomatic role. Facilitating any kind of high-bandwidth negotation between e/acc people and AI-x-risk concerned people seems quite valuable to me, and I e.g. think Manifest should probably invite Sam Altman to debate others on safety if he is up for it for similar reasons, despite me finding him otherwise quite despicable.
(I don't have a strong take on Hanania. It seems pretty plausible to me based on things other people have said that he should be excluded, but I have learned to take things like that with a grain of salt without checking myself)
Just for the record, I actually invited Brian a few days before he launched AFTF; I proposed a debate afterwards. I would have enjoyed listening to his explanation of the e/acc position even outside a debate context; I think his past background as being solidly EA, eg organizing his university's EA group, means that he has a unique perspective on this. (And he did end up giving a separate talk, which was very on theme for Manifest - "The Economics of Envy".) So from my perspective it was less of a case of "diplomatic immunity" and more me genuinely wanting to hear from him.
Props for saying this when you didn't have to.
That people keep insinuating that Yarvin attended speaks to the issues with this whole discussion
BTW I want to add -- to all those who champion Hanania because they think free speech should mean that anyone should be able to be platformed without criticism or condemnation, Hanania is no ally to those principles:
Here's Hanania:
(Source)
Has anyone said he should be platformed without criticism? The point of contention seems to be that many people think he shouldn't have been a speaker at all and that everyone who interacts with him is tainted. That is not a subtle difference.
As HL Mencken famously said, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
If principles only apply to the people that uphold them, then they're not principles: they're just another word for tribalism. Lovely conflict theory you've got there.
This is a bit self-indulgent of me, but I'm going to quote myself from the comments of the other post, because I think it's relevant here too:
(To the extent you want to upvote / downvote this sentiment, maybe go do that on the original comment and not this one, unless that feels... (read more)
It seems to me like the people with exclusionary beliefs here are the ones demanding that people be excluded, not the racists.
I agree, but I don't think anyone involved here has advocated for excluding people from Manifest or ~anything else based on "genetics or other immutable characteristics"?
It just seems Orwellian to describe "person A doesn't want to associate with person B because of person B's beliefs" as "person B has exclusionary beliefs". Person A may or may not be justified, but obviously they are the one being exclusionary.
Agreed. There is a major difference between thinking someone should be deplatformed just because they have opposing views (e.g., pause AI vs. accelerationist, libertarian vs. communist) and thinking someone should be deplatformed because they promote discriminatory views.
There's nothing inherently wrong with being controversial or outside of the Overton window. Many important ideas were once controversial, and many still are. But it is wrong to actively promote views that are racist, transphobic or sexist and to platform those who do. Not because these views are controversial, but because they go against creating a safe and welcoming environment for all.
That being said, I am not familiar with most of the speakers being discussed here, so I can't say whether the organizers made the right call or not with them. And I understand not every case is clear cut. But with Richard Hanania they clearly made a bad call in my opinion.
I think people who would be hurt would be quite hesitant to contact community health personnel at the event, since the event organisers were the ones who invited the controversial guests, and a hurt person could be afraid that whoever they'd contact might hold bigoted views themselves (I feel bad for having to say this out loud. Rest assured I am not accusing you or anyone else in the organiser team of anything here, Austin).
Anyone who might hear such discourse will understandably be discouraged from seeking recourse.
I'm afraid that there really were quite a few toxic people present, and I have to say that I am a bit surprised to see you say otherwise.
I haven't seen the feedback form answers, and as far as I can recall didn't highlight these issues when I filled it, but I am also surprised that there were few to no complaints. Is this assessment based on a quick skim, or is it a result of more thorough processing?
For your next event, I encourage you to adopt an anonymous community health contact person contact form, where people can air out their grievances with much less anxiety.
Thanks -- I think an anonymous contact person might make sense. Would you have contacted such a person during the course of your attendance at Manifest?
Here's our feedback form categories for what people said was the best and worst about Manifest. People really liked the conversations, other people, and speakers that were there; and generally disliked the overcrowding, lack of bathrooms, and difficulty of meeting new folks.
For worst things, here's the full list of what people said was worst in the categories of "people", "edgy people", and "gender ratio/demographics", along with their NPS score ("would you recommend Manifest to a friend with similar interests?"). There were 15 responses in these categories, out of 234 feedback form respondants (at an event with ~600 total attendees)
A couple of these responses did make me feel like we missed the mark -- especially 11 and 14. On one hand, I want to keep in mind that with a 600 person event, it's near impossible to satisfy everyone, and trying to do so often invokes other tradeoffs; on the other, knowing that even a couple attendees felt this way makes me incredibly sad, and I want to provide a better experience in the future. I'm gla... (read more)
Thanks for taking the time to make a thorough reply.
I probably would have. Some of the edgy takes were far beyond the pale, and I haven't really experienced such things in an in-person context. Having an anonymous form would increase a sense of trust if it is otherwise lacking.
I do suspect that you would be able to get a lot more data on this by asking about experiencing bigotry directly. I do get that it is probably too late for that now, and doing an extra survey for the attendees on this would be costly and would likely make this whole situation more stressful for everyone, but it is an option that can be taken.
It is very human to fail to mention something like this on a feedback form, especially if a typical experience with bigotry for this event is something like hanging out with an edgelord for an hour on day 2 and continuing with the rest of the conference perhaps slightly avoiding them (I'm only guessing this is what a typical experience would look like, since we don't really have too much data to go on with when it comes to people who experienced bigotry at the events).
My opinions about Manifest are obvious from my linked article, but I think it's worth explicitly reiterating that you as organizers of the conference have my full confidence and support for how you handled decisions around invitations, organization, and hosting. Part of this is self-interested, I confess: I was a bit of an odd duck at the conference, invited by @Saul Munn despite my lack of particular focus on prediction markets in what struck me as part of an extraordinarily successful decision to prioritize "interesting to the conference organizers and potential attendees" over "safe". I loved Manifest, loved the chance to present on an off-the-wall topic there, and have never been to a conference where so many sessions felt like must-attends.
I don't think Manifest did anything to signal edginess, nor do I think its presenters leaned into edginess. Some have controversial views, but I attended many of the sessions under scrutiny and saw nobody who aimed to be edgy for edginess's sake. Razib gave a fascinating speculative presentation on where the future of biology might go, Jonathan Anomaly's talk on polygenic screening was compelling and timely, and the Collinses are always grac... (read more)
So I have time for some of the arguments made here, but I worry that I could be frog-in-a-pot-boiled into accepting anything. It feels like there should be some things that one should say that are worthy of cancellation or very high costs.
Eg when Hanania tweets, without apology: "Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits."
I really like our taboo around racism. That people just don't say things like that. And so it feels to me likely that breaking the taboo should be $10,000 - $1,000,000 expensive.
I don't like many orange lines, I like a few very clear red ones. Don't insult people with reference to their sex, sexuality or race. Don't dehumanise people or groups of people. If Hanania had just not said a few things he has said, I wouldn't have much problem, but he doesn't just tiptoe up to my red lines, he steps over them.
And at that point I feel obliged to kick up a stink, otherwise we really do end up in the world where Manifest is full of edgy racists, who actually do think that some races are morally worse and should be deported or whatever. And that's a conference I don't really want to go to.
This is my sort of steelman of my procancellation position. i don't think it applies to almost anyone but Hanania and there is a way back even for him, but I think if it doesn't apply here, I'm not sure I would actually hold the view, which I do.
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 ... (read more)
Oh yeah, no I agree with that. I have lost at least one EA friend partly because I wasn't willing enough to condemn Hanania (despite saying that he said racist stuff and I didn't want him to speak and pushing for discussion that lead to him being removed as a speaker). People pretty get annoyed at me for what I consider to be milquetoast takes or for trying to reach consensus on difficult discussion[1], I have received an angry screed for criticism of an EA leader. I don't think EA is particularly safe for me[2]. My instincts here aren't that this is good.
But I claim that there are lines that shouldn't be crossed and if that empowers people I don't like, in the short term, so be it. It's what I think.
I think there is a line that Hanania can cross and (until he uncrosses it, with some cost) I will push for large costs to be imposed on him. For me, he has crossed that line and I am pretty confused how much value he should create before I say it's more than the harm but I don't think he's done enough so far.
- ^
- ^
... (read more)I imagine they would characterise it differently.
Though this is part of the issue, we're all scared and so fragile. I imagine that some minority EAs feels
Great comment and overview of the event, which I very much enjoyed.
Was anyone there who had ever uttered a previous phrase or sentence with which I might disgree, even firmly so? Almost certainly.
I mean, Eliezer was there, and he has suggested that human infants might be susceptible to killing up to 18 months (https://x.com/antoniogm/status/1632162012229693440), which I regard as unbelievably monstrous.
But even if someone said something monstrous, I'm still willing to hear them out, to attend a conference with them, and to attempt to persuade them otherwise (if it comes up). And who knows, maybe some belief of mine might turn out to seem monstrous to other people. I should hope they'd try to engage with me.
Trying to cancel folks because they spoke at an event but another speaker said a bad thing 15 years ago---that's an absurd level of guilt by association.
This is a very uncharitable, bordering on dishonest, interpretation of the critics of this event.
Like, even if you're talking about the guardian article, which definitely has an anti-EA stance, I would describe their main "cancellation" (not a fan of how this word is used) targets as Lightcone and manifest. The charge is that lightcone hosted a conference filled with racist speakers at the lighthaven campus, and that manifest invited said speakers to the conference.
I don't see them cancelling, say, nate silver, who fills your description of "spoke at the event but another speaker said a bad thing 15 years ago".
Also, "said a bad thing 15 years ago" is an absurd twisting of the accusations. Hanania said some really, really racist things under a pseudonym up to 2012 (12 years ago, not 15) that he apologises for, but even the OP admits that he still says "distasteful" things today on twitter, and I personally think he's still pretty racist. And most of the other controversial speakers have never apologised... (read more)
Hanania has said racist things last year
For context, Daniel Penny (white) killed Jordan Neely, a homeless black man, who had been shouting at penny on the subway. Hanania is generally supportive of harsher measures against crime and this tweet (and Hanania's history) make it likely to me that he is describing black people as animals, rather than Penny, who wasn't harassing someone in the subway or to my knowledge wearing a suit and who Hanania probably supports. This is a gross thing to say[1]. And if Hanania wanted to clarify it, he could, but hasn't.
In Hanania's defence, he hasn't said anything this racist more recently. But that's a low bar.
There is some kind of clarification here that we are all animals and that being an animal isn't bad, but Hanania isn't doing some "all people are animals and that's good" bit, he's probably being very racist.
The main debate here is whether people who ever aid controversial things should be allowed to attend an event at all, and/or to give a talk about unrelated issues.
I think that characterization collapses some nuances that I think are relevant, in a way that takes some of the heat off of Manifest.
We can envision a continuum of potential organizer actions with respect to individuals with problematic views; the example I gave had the lower end of the continuum in mind while Manifest organizers took actions further along the continuum. I'm keeping "problematic views" pretty vague at most levels here because I'm trying to expose some cruxes at a high level.
The first levels involve ordinary invitees:
Above that, we have special invitees an... (read more)
You say you had 57 speakers (or i guess more that weren't featured?). An attendee estimates that 8 speakers in lessonline and manifest had scientific racism controversies (with 2 more debatebly adjacent). Obviously this isn't an exact estimate, but it looks like something on the order of 5-10% of the speakers had scientific racism ties.
What percentage of speakers were African American (or african anything else)? I did not see any of the 30 with pictures on the site, so i'd guess something on the order of 0-3%.
Do you see a problem with a conference that has something like twice or three times as many scientific racist speakers as it does black people speakers?
These speakers are not a representative slice of society. Scientific racists are much, much more rare, and black people are much, much more common. If your goal is a free exchange of ideas, the ideas you are recieving here are vastly skewed in one direction.
The actual effect of this type of speaker list is to push out anti-racists, and encourage more people sympathetic to scientific racism to join your community. I think this is bad!
Just to note, many unrelated communities underrepresent black people eg, to quote Scott Alexander,
and manifest likely heavily overrepresented queer and neurodivergent people. It's unclear to me that every single minority group should be represented perfectly in every single community (do we hold EA to this standard? what % of EA talks are given by black people?).
I think it's pretty hard to have your community be about even 1 thing, let alone 1 thing + perfect representation of every group. The sectors that Manifest draws from (forecasting, crypto, heterodoxy, rationalism, EA, tech) probably all have low black representation, so it seems a lot to ask manifest alone to improve this.
To state the obvious, I don't expect manifest ever to have 50/50 gender representation (though I think it would be better if it were, say, 80/20[1] than like 95/5). To give another example in the forecasting spac... (read more)
I think we're missing the dynamic though where there's a very clear theory for why Manifest would be dramatically less appealing to black people or to women, when you have a platformed and promoted speaker(!!) who think we need mass surveillance of black people to reduce crime or think that intellectual debate is an inherently male activity that women are less well suited to. It's not a mystery here. Why would it be fun to "balance out" that?
I am very confident that the variance explained by speaker choice is vastly less than the variance explained by the demographics of the forecasting community, compared to a US population baseline.
I would be happy to bet on this, since I am sure we will have events that have different speaker line up but drawing from the same community, and I am sure that from a US population baseline, they will differ relatively little (my best guess is there will be a small directional effect for gender for Manifest, since the event feels a bit more masculine than other community events, but no measurable directional effect for race).
I would guess that even without Hanania the event would have had ~the same black attendance. I don't think Hanania was at LessOnline and that event wasn't notably more black. I don't like Hanania either, but I don't think your theory predicts what we see. Given the lack of black people in basically all the constituent communities of Manifest I wouldn't expect much.
If we wanted manifest to have black attendees then probably the way to do it would be to invite some influencers with large black followings. If I recall correctly there are a number of debate streamers who are black.
Fair, although it is also fair to characterize the controversial content as fairly substantial and not isolated. Looking at RSVPs on the Saturday schedule for content appears to be controversial:
[For purposes of this exercise, I did not code Robin Hanson or Scott Alexander as "controversial," in part because their sessions seemed to clearly focus on non-controversial content.]
In my view, a neutral observer who reviewed the schedule and RSVP numbers would likely conclude that eugenics was a major topic/focus of the conference relative to most topics (but behind forecasting/prediction). The platforming of people with problematic views on race should be considered in that context.
- ^
... (read more)I haven't found much information about Smith, so the coding of that session as controversial is tentative. I preliminarily coded that way because the post I found clearly advocated for practical eugenics, and so at least thematically fit
Some further data: even though I took part in some of these sessions, I didn't RSVP to them since RSVP status was public through the schedule website.
For context, the total number of RSVPs on the conference schedule was around 14,000 (edit: this is for the whole conference season, for Manifest in-particular it was closer to 7000). So by "substantial" you mean something like 279/14,000 = ~2% (edit: or 4% limiting it to just Manifest).
I think I would take that bet, in the sense that if you actually ranked all clusters (including overlapping clusters) of content at this level of coherence of a cluster, that it probably wouldn't rank in the top 10. This is of course not a great operationalization, and it would take a lot of work to get to an actual bet, but as someone who attended the event, my current best guess is we disagree on a relatively concrete object-level claim.
I made a small poll to try and figure out what consensus and disagreeing views are. You can add your own statements.
I'll post it on both articles, please only vote once. Likewise please take the results with a pinch of salt because I can't gate to one vote per user.
Results here: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-and-manifest/results
(If you want more people to answer this poll consider upvoting it)
Yeah, because there's such a geographically clustered dichotomy in views between the London set and the SF set, it seems pretty important to me to give it 24 hours yeah.
Also just a general generic caution: we should know that this poll will mainly be seen by only the most active and most engaged people, which may not be representative enough to generalize.
John Arnold made what I thought was a really good point the other day:
https://x.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1782401129252372651
I think if Manifest really wants to succeed at being bipartisan, this is the path to take.
Instead of focusing on the crowd you will/won't affiliate with, or the cost/benefit ratio for individual participants, focus on what is and isn't acceptable behavior.
Document your rules in advance. Enforce them consistently. Change them slowly and deliberately. Try to avoid retroactive enforcement of new changes.
If you're really serious about this, put together a 3-person commission (one person on the left, one person on the right, one person in the middle) to scrutinize potential attendees against your written rules, and decide who's in compliance. When you announce speakers in advance of the event, you could invite anyone who wants to challenge a speaker to privately contact the commis... (read more)
Checking if we actually disagree: Do you believe it is usually correct to excommunicate an innocent person if they become sufficiently unpopular?
Do you believe there are situations where people become unpopular online for fairly capricious reasons? Perhaps this situation?
Do you believe this has happened with EA in the past? Do we deserve all the backlash we got derived from SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres?
I'm not sure what "uproars contain information" is supposed to mean. It seems almost tautologically true that uproars related to Dylan Mulvaney, SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres "contain information". There is information stored on servers related to those uproars. The Dylan Mulvaney uproar "informs" me that lots of Budweiser customers dislike trans influencers. So?
It's hard to create a good set of rules. You won't do it perfectly. And yes, uproars might correlate with weaknesses in your rules. The point is to try to avoid mob rule, and create a situation where stakeholders can feel confident that decisions are being made in a considered way.
Suppose Manifest was to publish a set of rules they're going to follow and ask for community feedback, and the commun... (read more)
It's true that people with abhorrent views in one area might have interesting or valuable things to say in other areas - Richard Hanania, for example, has made insightful criticisms of the modern American right.
However, if you platform/include people with abhorrent views (e.g. "human biodiversity", the polite euphemism for the fundamentally racist view some racial groups have lower IQ than others - which is a view held by a number of Manifest speakers), you run into the following problem - that the bad chases out the good.
The net effect of inviting in people with abhorrent views is that it turns off most decent people, either because they morally object to associating with such abhorrent views, or because they just don't want the controversy. You end up with a community with an even smaller percentage of decent people and a higher proportion of bigots and cranks, which in turn turns off even more decent people, and so on and so forth. Scott Alexander himself says it best in his article on witches:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consi... (read more)
I do want to make the point that how tied to EA you are isn’t really your choice. The reason it’s really easy for media outlets to tie EA to scientific racism is that there’s a lot of interaction with scientific racists and nobody from the outside really cares if events like this explicitly market themselves as EA events or not. Strong free speech norms enabling scientific racism have always been a source of tension for this community, and you can’t just get around that by not calling yourselves EA.
One thing Manifest could do is stop actively associating with EA — promoting their events and funding platforms on this forum, etc. etc.
Of course, EA entities (e.g., CEA) could also make that happen.
Austin, I'm gathering there might be a significant and cruxy divergence in how you conceptualize Manifold's position in and influence on the EA community and how others in the community conceptualize this. Some of the core disagreements discussed here are relevant regardless, but it might help clarify the conversation if you describe your perspective on this.
Yeah, I think that's a great observation. I think of Manifold as a small player in the EA space -- it's a team of ~8 people, and not an explicitly EA org (I think I'm the only person on the team who explicitly identified as EA, a few of my coworkers are sympathetic). We've received some EA funding, but most of our funding comes from venture capital sources. Meanwhile Manifund is approximately an EA org, but we're also small players so far (I'd guess like half or more of the attendees of EAG London have not even heard of Manifund).
I also think of Manifest as something like, a scaled up house party, rather than an arbiter of who is good or notable in forecasting/EA. It's an event we created from scratch, and primarily serves the audience of "fans of Manifold", which makes me feel a bit defensive about my ability to invite who I please. If I have more influence in the EA community than this, that's a bit of a surprise -- I'd like to use that influence well because I care about EA, but I don't feel especially beholden to the community at large (a very formless and difficult to parse entity, in the first place)
Forecasting is young, and in putting on Manifest you have quite a lot of influence on how the field grows and matures.
To the extent that you have (and I think that you should have) goals around the kind of field you want to build, who you invite to your conference seems much more consequential to me than who you invite to a house party.
(I am not saying anything either way on the choices you've made with invites etc, only on how I'd encourage you to think about them)
Yeah -- in practice, I know that conference invites are consequential (and we discussed this as a team, eg very abbreviated Apr 22 meeting notes). I use the words "scaled up house party" to try to implant a bit of how bizarre it feels to me that, like, something that was just an idea in my head 1.5 years ago, now has attracted many of my favorite writers in the world, received multiple major media mentions, and is viewed as consequential. I also think that there's something special about our invite process which leads to the feeling of "how it feels to attend Manifest", and I and many attendees are overall quite happy with the outcome -- TracingWoodgrains talks more about this here. While I want to continue to improve on how we shape who comes to Manifest, I also don't want to kill the golden goose.
While Manifest is a forecasting festival, I'm not sure I'm really trying to build up the field of forecasting in general, rather than something more specific and tautological like "the Manifest community". Even more than EA, forecasting is a formless vague entity, without a clear leader or in/out distinction.
Appreciate Manifold's quantitative transparency because Manifold's qualitatively misleading. Public data may be slightly outdated but seeing ~$2.4M EA funding to Manifold for Charity and ~$2.4M EA funding and <$2M in non-EA VC funding to Manifold:
https://www.notion.so/manifoldmarkets/Manifold-Finances-0f9a14a16afe4375b67e21471ce456b0#d13406b6b26a43178d09609135aa38c6
Grants are funding, and Manifold seems mostly EA-funded, even excluding Manifold for Charity
Note that SFF explicitly does not identify as an EA Funder. I think there are of course still social ties here, and I don't want to police people's internal categories, but it seems like a relevant thing to bring up. I remember Critch clarifying this at some point in a comment somewhere, but I can't find it, but I am reasonably confident that Critch and Jaan would both say something like "SFF is not an 'EA funder', please do not try to hold us to EA standards" if explicitly asked.
I think what to do here is a bit messy, since of course SFF is similar to EA funders in important ways, but I think the specific way it is being invoked here, where funding by SFF tries to somehow police people as therefore being members of a community, is something that SFF has reasonable right to object to, and as far as I know, does indeed object to.
Thanks for spelling this out.
I think to give some color to how this affects my work in particular (speaking strictly for myself as I haven't discussed this with others on my team):
One of our organization priorities is ensuring we are creating a welcoming and hopefully safe community for people to do good better, regardless of people's identities. A large part of our work is familiarizing people with and connecting them to organizations and resources, including ones that aren't explicitly EA-branded. We are often one of their first touch points within EA and its niches, including forecasting. Many factors shape whether people decide to continue and deepen their involvement, including how positive they find these early touch points. When we're routing people toward organizations and individuals, we know that their perception of our recommendations in turn affects their perception of us and of EA as a whole.
Good, smart, ambitious people usually have several options for professional communities to spend their time within. EA and its subcommunities are just one option and an off-putting experience can mean losing people for good.
With this in mind, I will feel much more reluctant to dire... (read more)
Thanks; I also appreciate you sharing your rationale here. I think this makes sense from your perspective, and while I think Manifest and Manifold in fact would be great experiences for people of all kinds, including underrepresented folks, I totally understand if we haven't proven this to you at this point. Next time I'm in NYC, I'd enjoy speaking with you or other members of EA NYC, if you'd like that!
(I also want to note that my views shouldn't reflect on "forecasting" any more than they reflect on "EA"; see Ozzie and Peter Wildeford's comments for what forecasting more broadly is like. I'm in the awkward position of having run a platform for many forecasters, but not participating much as a forecaster myself.)
I do also want to clarify that I have no desire to "control which ideas and people [anyone] is exposed to." It is more so, "If I am recommending 3 organizations I think someone should connect with, are there benefits or risks tied to those recommendations."
I've made a similar point in other comments, but this framing makes things worse. Then it's not that Richard Hanania has relevant expertise in spite of his controversial statements, it's that you think he's a fun guy that you'd like to hang out with. Where people are willing to stomach unsavory co-attendees at a conference in their field, they're more than happy to skip out on a scaled up house party with them.
As a relevant information source, some people might think that rationalism has a lot of discussion on race, but it just.. doesn't. Here are all the articles published in the human genetics tag (the closest I could find) in the last 18 months ish (everything with a tag more recent than 2 years).
That's 11 articles, or about 1 every month and a half.
As I understand it, some of the fear around these topics is that they will grow and come to dominate the discourse (eg the Nazi in a bar analogy) and tire minority members out and cause them to leave. Unless I have not searched well (plausible) these topics aren't regularly discussed on LessWrong. I am honestly surprised how rare these articles seem to be[1].
I searched for 5 minutes for some more relevant tag and even ended up tagging 1 extra post.
I strongly object to putting GeneSmith's "Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence with Gene Editing" into anything even remotely associated with racism.
Like, in my completely normal and boring german high-school we discussed designer babies and the complicated ethical tradeoffs around them, with the class being quite split on how humanity should handle these technologies. The vast majority of discussions of human genetics and intelligence have nothing to do with racism or race, and implying that a prevalence of those topics would be indicative of some broader cultural trend in a direction of racism is something I really dislike.
I'm not upset, but thanks for checking.
Wait, isn't this pretty important evidence? Like isn't it good that one of the key rationalist spaces seems to have handled this pretty well?
To me this feels very relevant to a discussion of whether rationalists are allowing racism/sexism to ferment.
The fact that racists is in quotes in the title of this post (“Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”) when there have been multiple, first-hand accounts of people experiencing/overhearing racist exchanges strikes me as wrongly dismissive, since I can only interpret the quotation marks as implying that there weren’t very many racists. (Perhaps relevantly, I have never overheard this kind of exchange at any conference I have ever attended, so the fact that multiple people are reporting these exchanges makes Manifest a big outlier in this regard, in my view.)
No... (read more)
Sorry, I still can't seem to find any of these, can you link me to such an account? I have seen one report that might be a second-hand account, though it could have been a non-racial slur.
Meta level question:
How does Manifest have anything to do with Effective Altruism, and why is this on the EA forum?
Shouldn't this post be on some other other channel internal to Manifest and the forecasting community?
It get there are some people that went to Manifest that are also in the EA movement, but it seems like the communities are quite distinct and have different goals. From comments and conversations, it seems pretty clear to me that this Manifest community has a strong hostility towards even considering the reputational risks platforming racist s... (read more)
I broadly agree with this, though I perhaps think you slightly do court controversy a little for its own sake (as do I). When I think "does Austin ever court controversy" I don't think "Gosh, no never". (or even the title of this article seems at least slightly needlessly controversial - it could easily have been "Why we run manifest how we do")
I think your involvement with Manifest does give me comfort - if It were run by the median manifest attendee, I feel much less excited about going.
Can you think of a line at which you would think Manifest had gone too far in this regard and what you might do? eg, can you imagine some events after which you'd think you invited far too many controversial speakers or where the community had become, in your opinion, racist. Where do you draw that line and what might you do if this happened?
So several people n = 2.5 have reached out to me to say that they did not read Hanania's animals tweet as being about black people despite having the same context I do. I am now therefore less confident that most people read it in this way, (like 60% not 95%)
I think this probably warrants some kind of apology on expectation. So I am a bit sorry Richard on the chance that your tweet is not generally understood how I understand it.
If there are willing volunteers, I would like to see an adversarial collaboration. Reading through the comments, it is tricky to dis-entangle what people mean, what are the fundamental disagreements, what are the facts of the matter, whether somebody (accidentally) mis-represented somebody else or even themselves, etc.
Some disagreements I see are:
- To what extent are the particular individuals 'bad people / racist / eugenicists'
- How much should the EA community influence the norms of and/or associate with the rationality/forecasting community
- Where the l... (read more)
I am grateful and impressed that you didn't cave to public pressure.
I am also happy to see how much karma your post has gotten.
Gives me hope for the community.
One of the things that makes the rationalist and EA space special is its willingness to consider out-there ideas and to have a thriving market place of ideas. To judge ideas based on their merits, not based on who said them. To explore ideas widely and be willing to go to intellectual places that nobody has gone to before.
AI safety would never have become a cause area if peopl... (read more)
Super strong disagree here.
Platforming racist / sexist / antisemetic / transphobic / etc. views -- what you call "bad" or "kooky" with scare quotes -- doesn't do anything to help other out-there ideas, like RCTs. It does the exact opposite! It associates good ideas with terrible ones.
The point of suggesting and platforming "kooky" ideas is for them to be heard and then evaluated. If these ideas had never been heard before, I think you'd have a point. But I have heard these ideas and I want no part of them.
Staying true to your epistemic should not mean that anything goes and we should platform anyone and everyone who has an idea, no matter how bad. Staying true to your epistemics requires a degree of quality control!
I would like to say that
This should be a line we do not cross.
I disagree.
Firstly, you're totally welcome to read, listen, or say what you want. I have never aimed to harm anyone through "cancel culture", I have never called for anyone to lose their job, etc. My point is simple: if you're thing involves calling black people animals, I don't want that to happen anywhere near me. I'm not trying to control you, I'm trying to control my own surroundings. I think nearly all communities are better with some degree of moderation. But maybe you disagree. I'm fine for you to go your own way.
I've personally left Manifold over this after being a daily active user and putting a few thousand real dollars on the site. I'm fine to learn that Manifold is not for me. It's sad, but I'll move on. It would be really sad to learn that EA or the EA Forum is not for me. But I think we can exercise some degree of control as a community here about what we are and are not okay with. That's a very normal thing for communities to do.
I was not at Manifest. And I'd like to be very clear that I totally respect Manifest's right to host Hanania and make him a speaker.
I disagree with the decision and I would never do such a thing if I were King of Manifest, but I'm not King of Manifest and I am not trying to control anything about it. Notably, Manifest came and went, Hanania was there just fine and nothing happened, and all I did was exercise my right to not go and to complain about it to some friends. At no point did I ever do anything to attempt to cancel Manifest.
But since people took the conversation here to the EA Forum which I like and are trying to tell people that Hanania is fine actually, I'm now also going to complain about it here on my Forum.
This is presupposing the conclusion.
Many people disagree about whether any of the speakers and their views are racist / sexist / ____ist.
EAs have already been deplatformed over things like this.
I think what's going on is that your definition of racist is different than many other people's.
You would just consider them to have been rightly deplatformed for being racist, whereas I would consider them to have been silenced due to things where reasonable people can disagree.
I assure you, if Emile Torres ever turns their eyes on you, they'll be able to find something in your writing history to make you look awful and you won't be able to give talks at EAGs anymore.
I really don't think -- at all -- that one's ability to give talks at EAG is at all centrally based on whether Emile Torres has denounced you on Twitter or whatever. As I understand it Torres has gone after a long list of prominent EA figures for various reasons (including Nick Bostrom, Will, Toby, etc.) who continue to be quite involved.
(Disclaimer: I worked for CEA some years ago but was not involved with managing the admissions process for EAG, selecting EAG keynote speakers, etc. -- indeed I am not even sure who all is on that team at present.)
Good question!
I think there are plenty of things where reasonable people can't disagree on.
Like, if somebody said we should kill all of the people of ______ race/gender/____ist. Or committing actual physical acts of violence against somebody simply because of their race/gender/____ist.
The question of deplatforming is a separate thing. I think we should have a very strong prior towards letting people say whatever they want, wherever they want, unless there's a very direct link between the words and causing physical violence.
It shouldn't be based on whether the words are incorrect (because that's an impossible standard and would silence almost all discourse) and it shouldn't be based on whether it hurts people's feelings (because that would incentivize using feelings as a way to censor people, and it would mean almost all political discussion would be banned).
Seems like these threads have fewer women commenting than typical EA forum threads. I would be curious if similar populations are voting as usual.
Hypothetically, Aruna Khilanani (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/nyregion/yale-psychiatrist-aruna-khilanani.html) starts a prediction market blog, gets Hanania-tier famous, and someone suggests she be invited to Manifest 202X.
A) Would you offer an invite?
B) If yes, do you think it would spark this kind of backlash?