I basically see this election as a choice between a man who's willing to subvert democracy, and a party that is willing to subvert democracy [...] It's reasonable to think that the risk Trump poses outweighs that, but it's also reasonable to lean the other way
Which things that Democrats have done are as bad as the following actions from the GOP ticket?
It's plausible to worry that if Trump wins in 2024, and then a Democrat wins the 2028 election, Vance will simply not certify the election results until states send illegitimate Republican electors, which Republican members of the House would then have the opportunity of choosing.[1] This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's what Vance said on TV that he would've done in 2020.
So we could be in a situation in 4 years in which only one party is allowed to win major elections. I believe the technical term for this is "dictatorship."
I believe the examples of undemocratic activity by Democrats that you've listed in your comment pale in comparison to those actions and statements. But even if they don't, it's unclear why they're relevant to your argument, when Republicans have done approximately all of the things you listed. For example:
massively biased media coverage
Have you read Breitbart or watched One America News Network? Can you name one media company whose staff is largely right-wing which produces better and less biased content than the NYT? If not, why does "massively biased media coverage" count against Democrats but not Republicans?
lawfare against opponents
Do you actually expect Trump to be better on that front? As the WP reported, "In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. [...] In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office. [...] To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations."
coordinated social media censorship (I've seen particularly egregious examples on Reddit, but I expect that Facebook and Instagram are just as bad)
Trump has called for "a Senate investigation into news outlets for publishing unflattering stories about him" and for journalists to be jailed.
I also wanted to address this sentence from your comment:
RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has evolved a lot over time. And a meaningful change that occurred in the last few decades is that conspiracy theorists are much less common in the party now. Both Richard Hanania and Matthew Yglesias recently wrote about how, whereas conspiracy theorists used to be roughly equally divided between the two major parties just a few decades ago, educational polarization booted Democratic conspiracy theorists into the GOP. RFK Jr is an example of this phenomenon.
This could happen even if Democrats control the House, since the Constitution says that each state should count equally were such vote to be held:
The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote
I disagree with most of your points.[1] But even if I didn't, it would be unclear to me how those considerations outweigh Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which you barely address.
What Trump and his supporters did in the wake of the 2020 election is a pretty central example of an attempted self-coup. To recap, Trump filed hundreds of lawsuits in all of the swing states to attempt to get ballots thrown out. He asked on Twitter for votes not to be counted. He begged and pleaded the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn Biden's victory in the state. He successfully got fake Electoral College certificates in seven different states. He urged Mike Pence to overturn the election for him, and after that didn't work, he chose a running mate this year that said he would have overturned the election if he were in Pence's place.
This is not the kind of thing that has ever happened before in a national election in a democratic country (that remained democratic afterward).
So, unless you have a counter-example in mind, we have to confront the fact that the United States is in a reference class with a very real risk of transitioning to an autocracy. And, notwithstanding some unfree, anti-market policies promoted by the Democratic party and the existence of woke journalists, the United States under Democratic rule is still a much better place to pursue EA projects (or pretty much any kind of large-scale enterprise) than any existing autocratic or hybrid regime.
[1] Here are some of my disagreements, in no particular order:
On immigration, Trump has said he will do STEM degree visas, and has put forward point systems before for increasing high-skill immigration.
I think you're misremembering an offhand comment he made on a podcast in June. He said that he would give green cards automatically to foreign graduates of US colleges, which does sound great, but then his campaign walked back on that promise after the (predictable) backlash from his supporters.
Trump's last administration definitely cracked down on high-skilled legal immigration; it's unclear why he'd do a 180 in his next administration.
On natalism: humans evolved and are not happiness machines in a vacuum: we should expect people will have higher wellbeing when they have healthy kids than when they don't. More happy productive people is good, and sustainable fertility lowers the pressure for AI as a deus ex machina to save/sustain everyone in the future.
If you want people to have more children, it's unclear why you'd support a candidate whose primary policy goal is to prevent immigrants from providing affordable services to Americans.
Trump is also more willing to fire people whether for competence or personal loyalty, but the net result is more competence in decision making relative to the incentives provided by not firing people for anything other than scandals.
Trump once hired his personal bodyman (literally the guy who carried his bags around, John McEntee) as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who then performed a witch hunt in federal agencies, targeting everyone who wasn't MAGA enough or who made the mistake of liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post and replacing them with zealots. Trump seems to hire people on the basis of sycophancy rather than merit; many of his appointees had no expertise in the areas they were supposed to lead and even denied scientific consensus (e.g. Scott Pruitt).
In his next administration, Trump plans to fire tens of thousands of non-political federal government workers (including scientists and experts) and replace them with loyalists. This is a very clear indication that he values zealotry over expertise and merit. So I don't think it makes sense to claim that Trump would hire more competent people, when he transparently cares way less about competence than Democrats do.
while I don't think the change in abortion rights was great, Sam is right that it is a sunk cost.
This is very much not true. JD Vance has hinted that he'd support federal surveillance of interstate travel to prevent women from getting abortions; the federal government could ban mifepristone nationally if Trump is elected (which Project 2025 recommends), and Republican trifecta could, of course, pass a national abortion ban.
V-Dem indicators seem to take into account statements made by powerful politicians, not only their policies or other deeds. For example, I found this in one of their annual reports:
The V-Dem indicator of government attacks on the judiciary, which reveals government rhetoric calling into question the integrity of the judiciary, dropped precipitously in 2010, likely reflecting President Barack Obama's State of the Union address in which he criticized the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. President Donald Trump has sharply increased the pointedness of verbal attacks on the judiciary, referring to one of the judges who blocked his first executive order on immigration as a "so-called judge." Public criticism of the judiciary can be a healthy part of maintaining the balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. Yet it can also be part of an unraveling of core checks on power. Coupled with the politicization of the judicial nominations process and the dismantling of super-majoritarian rules of appointing all Article Ill judges, supporters of democracy would be wise to pay close attention to executive -judicial relations in the United States.
My guess is that statements made by Trump were extreme outliers in how they betrayed little respect to democratic institutions, compared to statements made by earlier US presidents, and that affected their model.
I think that's reasonable. It might not be fully reflective of lived reality for US citizens at the moment the statements are made, but it sure captures the beliefs and motives of powerful people, which is predictive of their future actions.
Indeed, one way to see the drop in 2017 is that it was able to predict a major blow to American democracy (Trump refusing to concede an election) 4 years in advance.
It's unclear what your specific disagreements with my comment are.
Take what I think is the most crucial point I made: that there doesn't seem to be a democratic country in which a major candidate refused to accept defeat in a national election.
Which of these 4 best represents your position?
Trump won the 2020 election
Trump did not refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election or try to subvert it, that's just a leftist media narrative. If you talk to him, he'll say he accepts that Biden won fair and square.
Trump did try to subvert the election or refuse to accept defeat, but it's not a big deal (despite the lack of precedent in democratic countries)
Trump did do those things and they are a big deal, but things that similarly powerful Democrats have done are just as bad or worse.
If it's the latter, can you show that those actions from powerful Democrats are unprecedented in democratic countries?
I would urge you to try much harder to develop a less partisan analysis of these issues. This essay comes across (to me, as a libertarian centrist with some traditionalist tendencies) as a very elaborate rationalization for 'Stop Trump at all costs!', based on the commonly-repeated claim that 'Trump is an existential threat to democracy'.
Threats to democracy aren’t always distributed evenly across party lines. It’s unclear why that should be your prior.
You can see from this that the two sides aren’t equal.
Purely definitionally, it seems pretty uncontroversial to say that a presidential candidate who’s tried to steal an election is a threat to democracy. Like, it’s unclear what a “threat to democracy” would even mean, if it doesn’t include “president trying to steal an election”.
I’m a libertarian myself and understand the negative reaction towards seemingly hysterical statements. I spent late 2015 and all of 2016 disregarding people who were scared of a Trump presidency.
But, just as a matter of base rates, it’s reasonable to consider that hysteria is justified. Many countries have voted themselves out of a democracy before. It’s not a rare phenomenon. And if a presidential candidate who did not accept defeat, plus a vice presidential candidate who’s openly said he would have stolen an election and defied the Supreme Court, isn’t grounds for worry, it’s unclear what would be.
I asked GPT-4 to list democracies in which a major candidate refused to accept defeat in a national election. GPT-4 was unable to list any democracy other than the US. (Instead, it misunderstood the question and included countries like Kenya, Venezuela and Belarus, which obviously don’t count). So this is a pretty unprecedented situation.
…
Your comment contains many policies that conservatives dislike because they’re associated with the left — not because they’re authoritarian. You phrase them in a way to make them sound maximally authoritarian, but one could do the same about the opposite policies. For example:
undermining states' autonomy to pass their own laws regarding controversial social and sexual issues, such as abortion
I could equally say that conservatives are authoritarian for limiting women’s autonomy to make decisions that affect their health and reproductive choices. In fact, this is much closer to the central meaning of the term “authoritarian” than your usage in this bullet point.
AOC threatening to impeach SCOTUS justices
The Constitution clearly states that Justices ”shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” It’s perfectly constitutional to remove SCOTUS justices. The allegations against Alito and Thomas seem to make a good case that their behavior hasn’t been “good.” In fact, one of the most common features of authoritarian governments worldwide is corruption. Enforcing a norm against it is good for maintaining the integrity of democratic institutions. Were AOC trying to remove Coney Barret, the situation would be different.
promoting pro-Jihadist, pro-Hamas, anti-semitic protests on college campuses
Suppressing protests is generally considered repressive and antidemocratic.
Other points in your comment sound like standard conservative grievances with liberal policies, with tenuous connections to authoritarianism or with the risk of democratic backsliding. E.g. “promoting racially and sexually divisive identity politics in public K-12 schools and universities.”
This post is timely, given the recent selection of J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP.
J.D. Vance said that he would not have certified the 2020 election results if he were in Pence’s place.
As Trump’s VP pick, he has about a two-thirds chance of being the President of the Senate when the 2028 election results are certified. If the Democratic candidate wins that presidential election, it doesn’t seem implausible that he’ll refuse to certify the election results.
The Electoral Count Act was overhauled after January 6 to give the VP a less ambiguous and discretionary role in the certification process. But there’s reason to think Vance could maximally adversarially exploit any remaining discretion or ambiguity. Or worse, he may not even respect the law. After all, Vance has previously said that there are cases in which the president should defy the Supreme Court[1]
Vance has once “called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.” It could be reasonable to conclude from this that the freedom of the press might be at risk.
To make matters worse, Vance is young. He’s not even 40 yet. He graduated from Yale Law School, so he’s extremely smart. He has a lot of time, and a lot of competence, to achieve his antidemocratic aims.
Trump is approaching his 80s. Optimistically, Vance may have made his antidemocratic statements to (successfully) get Trump’s attention and advance his career, and those ideas will retreat after Trump’s death, taking the Republican Party back to the ideals of people like Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley. But it’s not obvious that this will happen. Trump’s example may instead empower more politicians domestically and abroad to challenge democratic institutions and accumulate power, as we already started seeing with Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Many countries have voted themselves out of a real democracy. Turkey, Hungary, Russia and Venezuela have all done so in recent decades. The base rate isn’t that low.
For non-Americans: this claim is legally incorrect, and very worrying coming from a likely future VP. It directly counteracts Marbury v. Madison, regarded as “the single most important decision in American constitutional law,” which asserts that the Supreme Court has the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. If the President and the Supreme Court disagree on something, the Supreme Court’s opinion is the only legal one.
This list includes many people that, despite being well-known as very smart people in the EA/rationalist community, are not really “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses.”
Taylor, Garrabrant and Demski publish articles on topics related to AI primarily, but as far as I could tell, none of them have NeurIPS or ICML papers. In comparison, the number of unique authors with papers featured on NeurIPS is more than 10,000 each year. Taylor and Demski have fewer than 4,000 Twitter followers, and Garrabrant does not seem to use Twitter. The three researchers have a few hundred academic citations each.
I find it hard to justify describing them as “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses” when they seem, at a glance, not much more professionally impressive than great graduate students at top math or CS graduate programs (though such students are very impressive).
A better example of an EA-adjacent publicly-legible intellectual powerhouse in the ML area is Dan Hendrycks, who had a NeurIPS paper published in college and has at least 60 times more citations than those MIRI or former MIRI researchers you mentioned.
It's just a symbolic gesture of "we think this person is cool, and we think that you should choose whether to go to our event partly based on whether you also think this person is cool".
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.
Which things that Democrats have done are as bad as the following actions from the GOP ticket?
It's plausible to worry that if Trump wins in 2024, and then a Democrat wins the 2028 election, Vance will simply not certify the election results until states send illegitimate Republican electors, which Republican members of the House would then have the opportunity of choosing.[1] This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's what Vance said on TV that he would've done in 2020.
So we could be in a situation in 4 years in which only one party is allowed to win major elections. I believe the technical term for this is "dictatorship."
I believe the examples of undemocratic activity by Democrats that you've listed in your comment pale in comparison to those actions and statements. But even if they don't, it's unclear why they're relevant to your argument, when Republicans have done approximately all of the things you listed. For example:
Have you read Breitbart or watched One America News Network? Can you name one media company whose staff is largely right-wing which produces better and less biased content than the NYT? If not, why does "massively biased media coverage" count against Democrats but not Republicans?
Do you actually expect Trump to be better on that front? As the WP reported, "In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. [...] In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office. [...] To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations."
Trump has called for "a Senate investigation into news outlets for publishing unflattering stories about him" and for journalists to be jailed.
I also wanted to address this sentence from your comment:
This isn’t good evidence of issues with the Democratic Party. First of all, RFK Jr is a prolific, long-time conspiracy theorist. He claimed that the 2004 election was stolen, that vaccines cause autism, that it’s not conclusive that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, that hydroxychloroquine is an effective COVID-19 treatment, that the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe, that secret unidentified participants were involved in both JFK's and RFK's assassinations, and so on. I wouldn’t rely on his opinion about which party is better for democracy.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has evolved a lot over time. And a meaningful change that occurred in the last few decades is that conspiracy theorists are much less common in the party now. Both Richard Hanania and Matthew Yglesias recently wrote about how, whereas conspiracy theorists used to be roughly equally divided between the two major parties just a few decades ago, educational polarization booted Democratic conspiracy theorists into the GOP. RFK Jr is an example of this phenomenon.
This could happen even if Democrats control the House, since the Constitution says that each state should count equally were such vote to be held:
I disagree with most of your points.[1] But even if I didn't, it would be unclear to me how those considerations outweigh Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which you barely address.
What Trump and his supporters did in the wake of the 2020 election is a pretty central example of an attempted self-coup. To recap, Trump filed hundreds of lawsuits in all of the swing states to attempt to get ballots thrown out. He asked on Twitter for votes not to be counted. He begged and pleaded the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn Biden's victory in the state. He successfully got fake Electoral College certificates in seven different states. He urged Mike Pence to overturn the election for him, and after that didn't work, he chose a running mate this year that said he would have overturned the election if he were in Pence's place.
This is not the kind of thing that has ever happened before in a national election in a democratic country (that remained democratic afterward).
So, unless you have a counter-example in mind, we have to confront the fact that the United States is in a reference class with a very real risk of transitioning to an autocracy. And, notwithstanding some unfree, anti-market policies promoted by the Democratic party and the existence of woke journalists, the United States under Democratic rule is still a much better place to pursue EA projects (or pretty much any kind of large-scale enterprise) than any existing autocratic or hybrid regime.
[1] Here are some of my disagreements, in no particular order:
I think you're misremembering an offhand comment he made on a podcast in June. He said that he would give green cards automatically to foreign graduates of US colleges, which does sound great, but then his campaign walked back on that promise after the (predictable) backlash from his supporters.
Trump's last administration definitely cracked down on high-skilled legal immigration; it's unclear why he'd do a 180 in his next administration.
If you want people to have more children, it's unclear why you'd support a candidate whose primary policy goal is to prevent immigrants from providing affordable services to Americans.
Trump once hired his personal bodyman (literally the guy who carried his bags around, John McEntee) as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who then performed a witch hunt in federal agencies, targeting everyone who wasn't MAGA enough or who made the mistake of liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post and replacing them with zealots. Trump seems to hire people on the basis of sycophancy rather than merit; many of his appointees had no expertise in the areas they were supposed to lead and even denied scientific consensus (e.g. Scott Pruitt).
In his next administration, Trump plans to fire tens of thousands of non-political federal government workers (including scientists and experts) and replace them with loyalists. This is a very clear indication that he values zealotry over expertise and merit. So I don't think it makes sense to claim that Trump would hire more competent people, when he transparently cares way less about competence than Democrats do.
This is very much not true. JD Vance has hinted that he'd support federal surveillance of interstate travel to prevent women from getting abortions; the federal government could ban mifepristone nationally if Trump is elected (which Project 2025 recommends), and Republican trifecta could, of course, pass a national abortion ban.
I was using the categorization of the Economist Group as a reference. Kenya is listed as a hybrid regime
V-Dem indicators seem to take into account statements made by powerful politicians, not only their policies or other deeds. For example, I found this in one of their annual reports:
My guess is that statements made by Trump were extreme outliers in how they betrayed little respect to democratic institutions, compared to statements made by earlier US presidents, and that affected their model.
I think that's reasonable. It might not be fully reflective of lived reality for US citizens at the moment the statements are made, but it sure captures the beliefs and motives of powerful people, which is predictive of their future actions.
Indeed, one way to see the drop in 2017 is that it was able to predict a major blow to American democracy (Trump refusing to concede an election) 4 years in advance.
It's unclear what your specific disagreements with my comment are.
Take what I think is the most crucial point I made: that there doesn't seem to be a democratic country in which a major candidate refused to accept defeat in a national election.
Which of these 4 best represents your position?
If it's the latter, can you show that those actions from powerful Democrats are unprecedented in democratic countries?
Threats to democracy aren’t always distributed evenly across party lines. It’s unclear why that should be your prior.
Let’s see what Manifold markets think about this.
https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-trump-is-elected-will-the-us-sti
https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-a-democrat-is-elected-president
You can see from this that the two sides aren’t equal.
Purely definitionally, it seems pretty uncontroversial to say that a presidential candidate who’s tried to steal an election is a threat to democracy. Like, it’s unclear what a “threat to democracy” would even mean, if it doesn’t include “president trying to steal an election”.
I’m a libertarian myself and understand the negative reaction towards seemingly hysterical statements. I spent late 2015 and all of 2016 disregarding people who were scared of a Trump presidency.
But, just as a matter of base rates, it’s reasonable to consider that hysteria is justified. Many countries have voted themselves out of a democracy before. It’s not a rare phenomenon. And if a presidential candidate who did not accept defeat, plus a vice presidential candidate who’s openly said he would have stolen an election and defied the Supreme Court, isn’t grounds for worry, it’s unclear what would be.
I asked GPT-4 to list democracies in which a major candidate refused to accept defeat in a national election. GPT-4 was unable to list any democracy other than the US. (Instead, it misunderstood the question and included countries like Kenya, Venezuela and Belarus, which obviously don’t count). So this is a pretty unprecedented situation.
…
Your comment contains many policies that conservatives dislike because they’re associated with the left — not because they’re authoritarian. You phrase them in a way to make them sound maximally authoritarian, but one could do the same about the opposite policies. For example:
I could equally say that conservatives are authoritarian for limiting women’s autonomy to make decisions that affect their health and reproductive choices. In fact, this is much closer to the central meaning of the term “authoritarian” than your usage in this bullet point.
The Constitution clearly states that Justices ”shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” It’s perfectly constitutional to remove SCOTUS justices. The allegations against Alito and Thomas seem to make a good case that their behavior hasn’t been “good.” In fact, one of the most common features of authoritarian governments worldwide is corruption. Enforcing a norm against it is good for maintaining the integrity of democratic institutions. Were AOC trying to remove Coney Barret, the situation would be different.
Suppressing protests is generally considered repressive and antidemocratic.
Other points in your comment sound like standard conservative grievances with liberal policies, with tenuous connections to authoritarianism or with the risk of democratic backsliding. E.g. “promoting racially and sexually divisive identity politics in public K-12 schools and universities.”
This post is timely, given the recent selection of J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP.
J.D. Vance said that he would not have certified the 2020 election results if he were in Pence’s place.
As Trump’s VP pick, he has about a two-thirds chance of being the President of the Senate when the 2028 election results are certified. If the Democratic candidate wins that presidential election, it doesn’t seem implausible that he’ll refuse to certify the election results.
The Electoral Count Act was overhauled after January 6 to give the VP a less ambiguous and discretionary role in the certification process. But there’s reason to think Vance could maximally adversarially exploit any remaining discretion or ambiguity. Or worse, he may not even respect the law. After all, Vance has previously said that there are cases in which the president should defy the Supreme Court[1]
Vance has once “called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.” It could be reasonable to conclude from this that the freedom of the press might be at risk.
To make matters worse, Vance is young. He’s not even 40 yet. He graduated from Yale Law School, so he’s extremely smart. He has a lot of time, and a lot of competence, to achieve his antidemocratic aims.
Trump is approaching his 80s. Optimistically, Vance may have made his antidemocratic statements to (successfully) get Trump’s attention and advance his career, and those ideas will retreat after Trump’s death, taking the Republican Party back to the ideals of people like Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley. But it’s not obvious that this will happen. Trump’s example may instead empower more politicians domestically and abroad to challenge democratic institutions and accumulate power, as we already started seeing with Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Many countries have voted themselves out of a real democracy. Turkey, Hungary, Russia and Venezuela have all done so in recent decades. The base rate isn’t that low.
For non-Americans: this claim is legally incorrect, and very worrying coming from a likely future VP. It directly counteracts Marbury v. Madison, regarded as “the single most important decision in American constitutional law,” which asserts that the Supreme Court has the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. If the President and the Supreme Court disagree on something, the Supreme Court’s opinion is the only legal one.
This list includes many people that, despite being well-known as very smart people in the EA/rationalist community, are not really “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses.”
Taylor, Garrabrant and Demski publish articles on topics related to AI primarily, but as far as I could tell, none of them have NeurIPS or ICML papers. In comparison, the number of unique authors with papers featured on NeurIPS is more than 10,000 each year. Taylor and Demski have fewer than 4,000 Twitter followers, and Garrabrant does not seem to use Twitter. The three researchers have a few hundred academic citations each.
I find it hard to justify describing them as “publicly-legible intellectual powerhouses” when they seem, at a glance, not much more professionally impressive than great graduate students at top math or CS graduate programs (though such students are very impressive).
A better example of an EA-adjacent publicly-legible intellectual powerhouse in the ML area is Dan Hendrycks, who had a NeurIPS paper published in college and has at least 60 times more citations than those MIRI or former MIRI researchers you mentioned.
Was Hanania among that group?
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.