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)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".
That’s fair - you’re right to make this distinction where I failed and I’m sorry. I think I have a good point but I got heated in describing it and strayed further from charitableness than I should. I regret that.
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)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 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)