My experience at the recently controversial conference/festival on prediction markets
Background
I recently attended the triple whammy of rationalist-adjacent events of LessOnline, Summer Camp, and Manifest 2024. For the most part I had a really great time, and had more interesting conversations than I can count. The overlap between the attendees of each event was significant, and the topics discussed were pretty similar.
The average attendee for these events is very smart, well-read, and most likely working in tech, consulting, or finance. People were extremely friendly, and in general the space initially felt like a high-trust environment approaching that of an average EAGlobal conference (which also has overlap with the rational-ish communities, especially when it comes to AI risks), even if the number of EA people there was fairly low–the events were very rationalist-coded.
Nominally, Manifest was about prediction markets. However, the organizers had selected for multiple quite controversial speakers and presenters, who in turn attracted a significant number of attendees who were primarily interested in these controversial topics, most prominent of which was eugenics.
This human biodiversity (HBD) or “scientific racism” curious crowd engaged in a tiring game of carefully trying the waters with new people they interacted with, trying to gauge both how receptive their conversation partner is to racially incendiary topics and to which degree they are “one of us”. The ever-changing landscape of euphemisms for I-am-kinda-racist-but-in-a-high-IQ-way have seemed to converge to a stated interest in “demographics”–or in less sophisticated cases the use of edgy words like “based”, “fag”, or “retarded” is more than enough to do the trick. If someone asks you what you think of Bukele, you can already guess where he wants to steer the conversation to.
The Guardian article
I
While I was drafting this post, The Guardian released a flawed article on Lightcone, who own the event venue Lighthaven, that a certain lawsuit claims was partially bought with FTX money (which Oliver Habryka from Lightcone denies). The article detailed some of the scientific racism special guests these past three events had.
In the past, The Guardian has released a couple of articles on EA that were a bit hit-piece-y, or tried to connect nasty things that are not really connected to EA at all to EA, framing them as representative of the entire movement. Sometimes the things presented were relevant to other loosely EA-connected communities, or some of the people profiled had tried to interact with the EA community at some point (like in the case of the Collinses, who explicitly do not identify as EA despite what The Guardian says. Collinses attempt to present their case for pro-natalism on the EA Forum was met mostly with downvotes), but a lot of the time the things presented were non-central at best, and I haven't seen strong evidence that would suggest that the Lightcone team is guilty of any wrongdoing.
Despite this, I think the core claim of "the event platformed a lot of problematic people" holds true. Some of the things in it I might object to (describing Robin Hanson as misogynistic in particular registers a bit unfair to me, even if he has written some things in bad taste), but for the most part I agree with how it describes Manifest. What is up with all the racists?
II
The article names some people who are quite connected to eugenics, HBD, or are otherwise highly controversial. They missed quite a few people, including a researcher who has widely collaborated with the extreme figure Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, the personal assistant of the anti-democracy, anti-equality figure Curtis Yarvin (Yarvin himself wasn't attending, although he did organize an afterparty at his house for Manifest attendees), and the highly controversial excommunicated rationalist Michael Vassar, who has been described as “a cult leader” involved in some people having a psychotic breaks due to heavy psychedelics use (according an organiser Vassar did not end up coming to the event, but there were people involved with him that were present who said he might be dropping by and that he had bought a ticket). Manifest co-organiser Saul expanding on the Vassar situation here.
Among the people listed as special guests for LessOnline and Manifest I would be comfortable putting a total of eight people under the eugenics/HBD label. There might be more, but I am not an expert. In addition to those eight there were multiple prominent people taking part in the three events as attendees who clearly fall under this umbrella. I am not tallying Scott Alexander or Steve Hsu here, although both of them seemed and do seem at least sympathetic to some subset of HBD beliefs (I do get that this might be a controversial opinion to express here, and if you feel offended by this feel free to ignore this aside).
The race science people were fairly welcoming. As long as you didn’t react to their hot takes with a strong emotional outburst, didn't use too many leftie shibboleths, and had a modicum of social skills, you could, like, hang out. If you were fun to hang around with, you probably were also invited to the Curtis Yarvin afterparty as well. The party featured almost every single person from the three events that fell under the category "vaguely racist" (the more cringy or overtly racist ones weren’t invited), along with many people who were there probably just out of sheer curiosity (these included some pretty famous people within the community, but I am not naming names). Newbies thought that the party was kind of lame, and the amount of controversial things being said was only about half a notch worse than what was already being said after midnight during Manifest when people didn’t have as many social guards up. Anti-trans sentiment, however, appeared to be way higher during the Yarvin party, even if race stuff was not much worse. And wow, some people really do idolize this Yarvin dude.
Takeaways
I do not live in the Bay Area. I do not know how representative of the Bay Area rationalism these events were. But I do think that these events featured a very problematic undercurrent in the rationalism community.
It is probably wise to have a stronger separation between EA and rationalism. Many people attend both rationalist meetups and EA meetups. Out of all the communities that have an overlap with the EA community, the rationalist community has the largest intersection. I think the EA community should strive to hold itself to a higher standard, and to the degree where we can affect what goes on with the rationalist community, we should at least demand them not to platform highly controversial figures with ideas way outside the Overton window.
Yes, it is true that these events weren't EA events per se, but they featured prominent EAs, forecasting is sometimes considered to be a niche EA cause area, and rationalists and AI safety people are extremely intertwined. EA will be associated with what happens at events like these. If we don't want these things to be associated with EA, add some distance. Some of the more good things that might come out of strong interest in genetics can be presented in a way that does not invite controversy. A hyperbolic example not strictly about anyone specific in particular: want to create healthier and smarter babies? Great! Having speakers who choose to express opinions on the Holocaust as an eugenic event during that presentation? Not so great! And now a non-insignificant portion of the audience is people who were attracted to the controversy. Even the good parts of a controversial idea are ruined if you have the wrong person talking about it.
[Edit: People have begun to object to this part of the text, since it was quite clear who I was loosely referring to here. I regret using this as an example, and I think the presence of the person holding this specific talk was way more justified and less likely to attract a bad crowd than many other controversial speakers. I do not think this speaker is an anti-semite. I'm leaving this reference in the text for posterity in a slightly edited form that I hope makes my point a little bit clearer.]
Closing words with some extra ramblings and loose thoughts about vibes
I am releasing this post under a pseudonym, because I really don’t know how much talking about this topic with my real name and face might hurt my future interactions with the rationalist community. It might turn out to have zero effect, but I dunno maybe the Manifest people and Lightcone would kind of dislike me or something.
LessWrong was where I first came across EA, and both communities have been important to me at different points in my life. In general I do identify more with the EA movement, and the vibes of both communities feel like they have diverged quite a bit. If I’d have to vaguely point to a specific difference in the vibes of an EAs and those of rats, I would say EAs feel more innocent whereas rats might, with possibly a little bit too much generalization, feel like they’d rank higher in some dark triad traits and feature more of chuunibyou tendencies sprinkled with a dash of narrative addiction.
I don’t really feel like many people in the rationalist community communicate very openly or honestly, even though non-deception is often thought to be one of their core tenets. I’m not sure how much this vibe can be explained by being exposed to the older iterations of LessWrong, where high-decouplers would discuss pick-up-artistry way beyond the bar for manipulation, where people might commit to naive utilitarianism at the expense of common sense, and where a small sub-community would obsess over scientific racism and group IQ differences (a sub-community which arguably gave rise to the modern alt-right, even though this honor might not be something they hold in high regard).
Anyways, those were some of my grievances about some of the special guests and a non-insignificant portion of the attendee base. In general I did have a good time at these events, even if some of the attendees did bum me out. I would probably go again, especially if whoever is responsible for choosing the speakers tones it down with the controversial special guests. But who knows, maybe next time half the people there will consist of Republicans and the Thielosphere. Let me know what you think, but I won't promise to reply in the comments.
One aspect of the framing here that annoyed me, both in the OP and in some of the comments: the problem is not controversial beliefs, it is exclusionary beliefs. Here are some controversial beliefs that I think would pose absolutely no problem at this event or any other:
The problem with racism and transphobia is not that people disagree about them! The problem is that these beliefs, in their content on the object level, hurt people and exclude people from the discussion.
Let's avoid using "controversial" as a euphemism for "toxic and exclusionary". Let's celebrate the debate and discussion of all controversies that threaten no-one and exclude no-one. Suggesting any of that is at stake is totally unnecessary.
I think this concept of an "exclusionary belief" is incoherent. If Alice is a speaker at an event, and holds belief X, and Bob is very put off by belief X and is therefor less interested in attending, that is never just about X. That is always an interaction between Bob and X, it is a function of both. And for any X, there will exist a Bob. There are many anti-nuclear and green energy activists who would not attend a conference with a speaker who has advocated nuclear energy as a necessary part of the transition away from fossil fuels. There are surely researchers who do gain of function research, or who view it as essential to protecting against future pandemics, who would not attend a conference with a speaker advocating against gain of function research. I can certainly think of people in the world, on both sides of the political spectrum, who, had they been invited to Manifest, that would have given me pause. The question is how should we respond when we find ourselves in Bob's shoes? And I think we should definitely not demand that Alice be deplatformed. Asking for someone else to be deplatformed, because of our own feelings about them or their beliefs, is controlling behavior. It is a heckler's veto, and therefor contrary to ideals of free expression and intellectual inquiry. Ultimately each of us is responsible for our own feelings. Each of us can weigh the features of an event that we like against the features we dislike and decide for ourselves whether it is worth our time and energy and money to attend. Either choice is fine. But nobody owes us an event with any particular speakers or ideas included or excluded, and to act as though they do is just poor, controlling behavior.
To be honest, I didn't intend to focus primarily on what an exclusionary belief is, as much as highlight that many controversial beliefs are not exclusionary. If we want to get more precise about it, I'm saying something like: all the objectionable beliefs here are beliefs about people who are also (perhaps prospectively) participating in the discussion, and this is a key thing that distinguishes them from like 95% of controversial (in the sense of heated disagreement) beliefs, and that's a whole lot of baby that we risk throwing out with the bathwater if we keep saying "controversial" like the controversy itself is the problem.
I think this is mostly just arguing over hypotheticals, so it's pretty impossible to adjudicate, but I want to highlight a difference between "I'm not going to this conference because it's a waste of time, because they are discussing ideas that are obviously (to me) wrong", and "I'm not going to this conference because it's supporting and strengthening people who are actively hostile towards me, on the basis of characteristics that I can't change, and is thereby either hostile to me itself or at least indifferent to hostility towards me".
As a light thought experiment, what if Alice's belief X was "People called Bob are secret evil aliens who I should always try to physically attack and maim if I get the opportunity" ?
Bob would understandably be put off by this belief, and have a pretty valid reason to not attend an event if he knew someone who believed it were present. Does it seem reasonable that Bob would ask that Alice (or people who hold the attack-secret-alien-Bobs belief) not be invited as speakers? Is that a heckler's veto, and contrary to free expression and intellectual enquiry? Is Bob's decision not to attend just a matter of his own feelings?
If answers to the above questions are 'no', it suggests it's possible for a belief to be an 'exclusionary belief', on your terms.
In this case, I think the "physically attack and maim" part makes it much more than just a belief. So far as I am aware, nobody thinks anyone under discussion in relation to Manifest was ever likely to physically attack anybody.
Yes I'm not saying anyone was - this is a thought experiment to see if exclusionary beliefs can be a coherent concept. We can stipulate that Alice has this sincere belief, but no history of such attacks (she's never met a Bob), and hasn't made any specific threats against Bob. It's just a belief - a subjective attitude about the world. If Bob does not attend due to knowing about Alice's belief, is that reasonable in your view?
Bob can attend or not attend for whatever reasons he wishes. I'm not trying to judge that at all. The question seems to be whether Bob can reasonably ask the organizers to deplatform or uninvite or ban Alice. In your scenario, I think the answer is "yes", though I would frame that as being about Alice's likely future criminal behavior, not directly about the belief that precipitates that behavior.
Thanks. Given Alice has committed no crime, and everything else about her is 'normal', I think organizers would need to point to her belief to justify uninviting or banning her. That would suggest that an individual's beliefs can (in at least one case) justify restricting their participation, on the basis of how that belief concerns other (prospective) attendees.
I think you'd be a lot more successful with a hypothetical that wasn't about whether someone would follow the law and/or conference rules.
I would also expect, for example, a conference under Chatham House Rules to reject participants who believed this kind of rule did not bind them. Even if the organizers otherwise were quite committed to free expression. Organizers can and should be willing to consider expressed beliefs even without a history of acting on them.
I also think it being about "people named Bob" messes with our intuitions, since it's so silly, but ok.
Perhaps better hypothetical would be if Alice believed people named Bob were not moral patients (that had a bunch of nasty views downstream from this on what law and social norms should be) but still confirmed (and organizers trusted) that she would follow the law and treat him respectfully at the conference?
The point wasn’t to motivate intuitions on the broader issue, but demonstrate that exclusionary beliefs could be a coherent concept. I agree your version is better for motivating broader intuitions
Does advocating the anti-Bob position in any way constitute not "treat[ing] him respectfully," even if he is not in earshot? As a practical reality, very few people would feel psychologically safe attending a conference at which people were having anti-Bob conversations after checking the participants' comfort level with euphemisms and/or slurs, or inviting people to an off-site anti-Bob party.
Also: While I think the Alice hypo is too related to non-speech actions, I think the anti-Bob hypo is too divorced from them in the abstract. We'd need to consider a context in which anti-Bobism and adjacent thoughts -- at a minimum -- had been used to deny fundamental human rights to Bobs over an extended period of time. And where (at least) a number of people preaching anti-Bobism would favor rights denial against Bob and other Bobs (e.g., prohibition/restriction on procreation, deportation) should they come into power.
Let's say that Alice is going to advocate for her anti-Bob position even when Bob is in the discussion. And that this is a carve out from "treat Bob respectfully".
Bonus questions: Is the answer the same in this related hypo -- Charlie thinks Delana Dixon, and only her among all human beings, is not a moral patient. In other words, does it matter if the belief and advocacy are targeted at an individual person vs. a group based on an immutable characteristic?
Also, does the organizer's assessment of Alice and Charlie's reasons for holding their beliefs matter here? Should they give less tolerance to the extent they conclude a belief is based on bigotry, delusion, a bad breakup with a Bob or with Delana Dixon, etc?
I think the problem with making the hypo more concrete in the ways you suggest is that then whether the hypo represents reality becomes highly contestable, and we devolve into object level debates. To take one example, despite being very pro-immigration myself, I find your suggestion that deportation of non-citizens somehow violates fundamental human rights to be absolutely ridiculous. If you set up a hypothetical about Alice wanting to deport non-citizen Bobs, you won't convince me of anything. I'm guessing a lot of the disagreement here is less about event norms and more about people in the EA community being intolerant of those they disagree with politically. One reason for choosing such an abstract hypothetical was to try to separate out the two.
Note that I didn't actually say "deportation of non-citizens somehow violates fundamental human rights" as you assert. The reference to fundamental rights was in the past tense: "had been used to deny fundamental human rights." Certainly slavery involves the denial of a fundamental human right. The e.g. that references deportation follows the broader term "rights denial."
That being said, I would characterize at least severe discriminatory treatment by the government on the basis of race as denial of a fundamental human right.
In any event, I recognize the concern you identify -- but using only abstract hypotheticals is going to systematically bias the hypo in favor of the scientific racists by stripping away important context. If adding certain context changes the results of the hypo, then we're stuck with an object-level debate on which hypo better reflects reality.
I was a bit confused by this comment. I thought "controversial" commonly meant something more than just "causing disagreement", and indeed I think that seems to be true. Looking it up, the OED defines "controversial" as "giving rise or likely to give rise to controversy or public disagreement", and "controversy" as "prolonged public disagreement or heated discussion". That is, a belief being "controversial" implies not just that people disagree over it, but also that there's an element of heated, emotional conflict surrounding it.
So it seems to me like the problem might actually be controversial beliefs, and not exclusionary beliefs? For example, antinatalism, communism, anarcho-capitalism, vaccine skepticism, and flat earthism are all controversial, and could plausibly cause the sort of controversy being discussed here, while not being exclusionary per se. (There are perhaps also some exclusionary beliefs that are not that controversial and therefore accepted, e.g., some forms of credentialism, but I'm less sure about that.)
Of course I agree that there's no good reason to exclude topics/people just because there's disagreement around them -- I just don't think "controversial" is a good word to fence those off, since it has additional baggage. Maybe "contentious" or "tendentious" are better?
Yeah I just don't think that what people are objecting to is that these beliefs are the subject of even heated disagreement. I'm not saying "disagreement is fine, as long as it's not heated", I'm saying "even heated disagreement is fine, but there's some other distinction that makes it potentially a problem", and while I'm not quite precise about what that other distinction is, it's something like, is this topic directly about some of the people in the conversation, and does it implicitly or explicitly threaten the legitimacy of their presence or their contribution?
I think vaccine skepticism is an interesting example, as I do tend to think conferences shouldn't invite vaccine skeptics. But that's more out of a sense that vaccine skeptics in practice are grifters / dishonest (which is no coincidence, in that the genuinely curious have mostly had their curiosity satisfied). I would be very happy to see someone speak about how the new malaria vaccines aren't effective enough to be worth it, if they had good reasons for thinking that.
I don't think people object to these topics being heated either. I think there are probably (at least) two things going on:
Either way, I don't think the problem is centrally about exclusionary beliefs, and I also don't think it's centrally about disagreement. But anyway, it sounds like we mostly agree on the important bits.
I like what this is getting at, and also I personally disprefer many of the specific "controversial/exclusionary" speakers at manifest being discussed (and would expect things be better if some had not attended), but I think this proposal might need revision to really work more broadly.
First, I'm pretty sure it is common lingo to have "controversial" be used in the way it is in this article. If this were a news story in The New York Times, I'd expect it would be much more likely to use the word "controversial" than the word "exclusionary".
If the New York Times and WSJ both had front-page stories about "Conference draws attention for controversial speakers", I'd expect this to be more about radical right-wing or left-wing beliefs than I would the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Second, I'm nervous that in practice that "exclusionary" is not as clean a concept as we'd like it to be. It's arguably too low a bar in many cases, and too high in others. I understand this to be arguing that there are some beliefs are disliked by others, enough to convince others to attend the event.
But I could imagine many ideas in this category. If there were a speaker talking about how to secure Taiwan, arguably Chinese nationalists would feel uncomfortable attending and argue that that is exclusionary. Many people are uncomfortable with basic ideas in effective altruism and might not attend conferences with prominent EAs - they might argue that that EA is exclusionary.
I'm not sure if one could argue that many beliefs themselves lead to people being uncomfortable - this seems more like a function of both the belief and the culture at some moment in time.
For example, say that we did live in some world where all discussion of "the value of nuclear research" was highly coupled with hateful takes against some group or other. In that case, this might then become exclusionary, in a way that could, in many cases, subsequently make sense to draw less attention to.
All that said, personally, I agree with what the post is grappling with, I'm just nervous about the idea of trying to change terminology without thinking it through.
Yeah, and I mostly think this is a mixture of confusion and cowardice on their part, frankly. To the extent that they really believe the controversy is itself the problem, I think they're wrong. To the extent that they're saying "controversial" because it's unarguably literally true and allows them to imply "bad" without having to actually say it, I think it's an attempt to project a false neutrality, to take a side without appearing to take a side. Some react to that by saying "let our neutrality not be false", some by "let us not project neutrality". Either way has more respect from me.
Yeah, for sure I expect disagreement about what's exclusionary, and when we should stand by something even though it's exclusionary. My main point was to point out that lots of disagreements aren't exclusionary, and choosing how we handle potentially-exclusionary discourse doesn't need to put any of that at stake. (There's room to disagree with this distinction, but that's the distinction I was trying to draw.)
If I am in support of designer babies, does that fall in under your "toxic and exclusionary" label?
Or would you perhaps want to make that taboo, due to "guilt by association"? (If so, I ask rhetorically: At what degree of separation does the guilt by association stop?)
From my perspective, there is significant truth/wisdom in your comment here. But also some degree of not acknowledging genuine tradeoffs. (How much "collateral damage" are you ok accepting as you try to make it taboo to spread opinions that mean-spirited or hurtful?)
As an added comment: I feel unsure myself about what the right balance is for this sort of thing.