Austin Chen on "Winning" and SBF

TimothyTelleenLawton

Last year Elizabeth Van Nostrand and I recorded a podcast episode debating whether EA is headed for Renaissance or Diaspora.

We have recorded a new episode of our podcast with Austin Chen of Manifund (formerly of Manifold, behind the scenes at Manifest).

The start of the conversation was contrasting each of our North Stars- Winning (Austin), Truthseeking (Elizabeth), and Flow (me). We eventually got into a discussion of Sam Bankman-Fried, where Austin very bravely shared his position that SBF has been unwisely demonized and should be “freed and put back to work”. He by no means convinced Elizabeth or me of this, but we deeply appreciate the chance for a public debate.

Episode:

Transcript (this time with filler words removed by AI)

For bonus content from Elizabeth and me, check out our second episode (Austin's is our third), in which we start to sketch a road map for an EA Renaissance we would both endorse: Audio recording; Transcript

Editing policy we allow guests (and hosts) to redact things they said, on the theory that this is no worse than not saying them in the first place. We aspire but don’t guarantee to note serious redactions in the recording. Elizabeth also edits for interest and time.

Thanks to our listeners and commenters, and especially our Manifund donors, EAIF, and Elizabeth's Patreon patrons for funding our work on this.

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huwApr 1012

A few quotes I wanna speak on:

Richard Hanania specifically was coming, and Hanania was one of the several speakers cited in the Guardian article as like a, person who had like a troubled background.

I just think Hanania himself as a person has been, growing. He recently voiced strong support for the Shrimp welfare project.

I think it’s heavy downplaying—potentially even disingenuous—to leave racism out of the discussion when talking about Hanania. It’s a demonstrable fact that he wrote for neo-Nazi and white supremacist organisations in the past, but when Austin talks about him ‘growing’, it’s not that he has denounced this work (FWIW, he has), but that he now supports animal welfare. It’s a bit of a non sequitur, nobody is arguing he used to be racist against shrimp?

it is the case that we care a lot about things that are outside the traditional overton window, you might say, like modifying, genetics of, embryos, for example, or like doing screening on embryos. It's like a kind of thing that we had people come and talk about, and sometimes it's very controversial

The same goes for the other speakers. They aren’t controversial because of their opinions on embryo selection. They are controversial because they routinely endorse human biodiversity. Austin knows this, because all of the controversy around Manifest was about the topic of human biodiversity.

I think it is probably the case that like, because of the speakers, we chose some people who are more on the, oh, I want to like, argue about race. thought oh, this is the conference for me

I'm worried actually about something like an evaporative cooling effect where people who are more sensitive to this, stop showing up to manifests and people who feel like, oh yeah, I want to argue about, I do, things do show up.

Evidently, Austin understands something about the dynamics here. But the language such as ‘people who are more sensitive to this’ feels indicative that he doesn’t believe that the racism is the problem; rather, it is the reactions of a particular profile of person.

I don’t feel like Austin has internalised that people aren’t merely offended or sensitive to racism; they are harmed by it, and want to both avoid spaces that cause them harm, and prevent future harm caused by spreading those ideas. The difference is that offence is a reaction that you can behaviourally train yourself out of, but harm is a thing that is done to you.

More broadly, Austin repeatedly speaks about trade-offs between ‘winning’ (success, sometimes framed as harmony) and ‘standing up for what’s right’, which is sometimes framed as a form of truth-seeking. But this implicitly frames inquiry into and discussion of human biodiversity as a form of truth-seeking. David Thorstad has already written at length about why that’s harmful, so I’ll defer to his work on that.

AustinApr 108

Hey! Thanks for the thoughts. I'm unfortunately very busy these days (including, with preparing for Manifest 2025!) so can't guarantee I'll be able to address everything thoroughly, but a few quick points, written hastily and without strong conviction:

re non sequitor, I'm not sure if you've been on a podcast before but one tends to just, like, say stuff that comes to mind; it's not an all-things-considered take. I agree that Hanania denouncing his past self is a great and probably more central example of growth, I just didn't reference it because the SWP stuff was more top of mind (interesting, unexpected).
I know approximately nothing about HBD fwiw; like I'm not even super sure what the term refers to (my guess without checking: the controversial idea that certain populations/races have higher IQs?). It's not the case that I've looked a bunch into HBD and decided I'll invite these 6 speakers because of their HBD beliefs; I outlined the specific reasons I invited them, which is that they each had an interesting topic to talk about (none of which were HBD afaik). You could accuse me of dereliction of duty wrt researching the downstream effects of inviting speakers with controversy? idk, maybe, I'm open to that criticism, it's just there's a lot of stuff to juggle and it feels a bit like an isolated demand on my time.
I agree that racism directly harms people, beyond being offensive, and this can be very bad. It's not obvious to me where and how of racism is happening in my local community (broadly construed, ie the spaces I spend time in IRL and online), or what specific bad things that are caused by this racism? Like, I think my general view of racism is that it's an important cause area, alongside many other important causes to work on like AI safety, animal welfare, GHD, climate change, progress, etc -- but it happens to be not very neglected or tractable, for me personally to address.