It feels like in the past, more considerateness might have led to less hard discussions about AI or even animal welfare.

Could you say more about why you feel that way?

Certainly lots of people would have concluded that WAW and AI as subjects of inquiry and action were weird, pointless, stupid, etc. But that's quite different from the reactions to scientific racism.

.I don't really think it's this. I think it is "I don't want people associating me with people or ideas like that so I'd like you to stop please".

It might be what you say for some people, but that doesn't ring true for my case (at all). (But also, compared to all the people who complained about stuff at Manifest or voiced negative opinions from the sidelines as forum users, I'm pretty sure I'm in the 33% that felt the least strongly and had fewer items to pick at.)

But let's take your case, that means you think that on the margin some notion of considerateness/kindness/agreeableness is more important than truth-seeking. Is that right? 

I don't like this framing/way of thinking about it.

For one thing, I'm not sure if I want to concede the point that it is the "maximally truth-seeking" thing to risk that a community evaporatively cools itself along the lines we're discussing.

 Secondly, I think the issues around Manifest I objected to weren't directly about "what topics are people allowed to talk about?." 

If some person with a history of considerateness and thoughtfulness wanted to do a presentation on HBD at Manifest, or (to give an absurd example) if Sam Harris (who I think is better than average at handling delicate conversations like that) wanted to interview Douglas Murray again in the context of Manifest, I'd be like "ehh, not sure that's a good idea, but okay..." And maybe also "Well, if you're going to do this, at least think very carefully about how to communicate about why you're talking about this/what the goal of the session is." (It makes a big difference whether the framing of the session is "We know this isn't a topic most people are interested in, but we've had some people who are worried that if we cannot discuss every topic there is, we might lose what's valuable about this community, so this year, we decided to host a session on this; we took steps x, y, and z to make sure this won't become a recruiting ground for racists;" or whether the framing is "this is just like every other session.") [But maybe this example is beside the point, I'm not actually sure whether the objectionable issue was sessions on HBD/intelligence differences among groups, or whether it was more just people talking about it during group conversations.]

By contrast, if people with a history of racism or with close ties to racists attend the conference and it's them who want to talk about HBD, I'm against it. Not directly because of what's being discussed, but because of how and by whom. (But again, it's not my call to make and I'm just stating what I would do/what I think would lead to better outcomes.)

(I also thought people who aren't gay using the word "fag" sounded pretty problematic. Of course, this stuff can be moderated case-by-case and maybe a warning makes more sense than an immediate ban. Also, in fairness, it seems like the conference organizers would've agreed with that and they simply didn't hear the alleged incident when it allegedly happened.)
 

It feels like in the past, more considerateness might have led to less hard discussions about AI or even animal welfare.

I think factory farmed animals is the better example here. It can be pretty hurtful to tell someone you think a core facet of their life (meat eating) has been a horrendous moral error, just as was slavery or genocide. It seems we all feel fine putting aside the considerateness consideration when the stakes are high enough.

I feel like the controversy over the conference has become a catalyst for tensions in the involved communities at large (EA and rationality).

It has been surprisingly common for me to make what I perceive to be totally sensible point that isn't even particularly demanding (about, e.g., maybe not tolerating actual racism) and then the "pro truth-seeking faction" seem to lump me together with social justice warriors and present analogies that make no sense whatsoever. It's obviously not the case that if you want to take a principled stance against racism, you're logically compelled to have also objected to things that were important to EA (like work by Singer, Bostrom/Savulescu human enhancement stuff, AI risk, animal risk [I really didn't understand why the latter two were mentioned], etc.). One of these things is not like the others. Racism is against universal compassion and equal consideration of interests (also, it typically involves hateful sentiments). By contrast, none of the other topics are like that.

To summarize, it seems concerning if the truth-seeking faction seems to be unable to understand the difference between, say, my comments, and how a social justice warrior would react to this controversy. (This isn't to say that none of the people who criticized aspects of Manifest were motivated by further-reaching social justice concerns; I readily admit that I've seen many comments that in my view go too far in the direction of cancelling/censorship/outrage.)

Ironically, I think this is very much an epistemic problem. I feel like a few people have acted a bit dumb in the discussions I've had here recently, at least if we consider it "dumb" when someone repeatedly fails at passing Ideological Turing Tests or if they seemingly have a bit of black-and-white thinking about a topic. I get the impression that the rationality community has suffered quite a lot defending itself against cancel culture, to the point that they're now a bit (low-t) traumatized. This is understandable, but that doesn't change that it's a suboptimal state of affairs.

Offputting to whom?

If it bothers me, I can assume that some others will react similarly.

You don't have to be a member of the specific group in question to find it uncomfortable when people in your environment say things that are riling up negative sentiments against that group. For instance, twelve-year-old children are unlikely to attend EA or rationality events, but if someone there talked about how they think twelve-year olds aren't really people and their suffering matters less, I'd be pissed off too.

All of that said, I'm overall grateful for LW's existence; I think habryka did an amazing job reviving the site, and I do think LW has overall better epistemic norms than the EA forum (even though I think most of the people who I intellectually admire the most are more EAs than rationalists, if I had to pick only one label, but they're often people who seem to fit into both communities).

That might technically be correct but saying that appears to minimize the importance of influence

I would more frame it like we might only need to tradeoff 10 percent of truth seeking to have minimal impact on influence.

So I'm not sure if I agree or don't but this seems surprisingly like arguing that EA should bend it's values to whoever is willing to give resources. I see you argue in favour of flexing away from "ugly" views. Would you argue in favour of flexing towards them if there was a donor in that direction?

What i currently take from this is you think that if we start some work which seems unpopular or controversial we should stop because we can discover it later?

If not, how much work should we do before we decide it’s not worth the reputation cost to discuss it carefully?