Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
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 than many super reasonable people, including other black people. I’m personally fine engaging with critiques about how the Civil Rights Act has ushered in some not-so-great policy decisions over the last half century. “Woke Institutions” might just be civil rights law in action (according to Hanania) but the civil rights law is also, like, the reason why I have basic rights. I think it’s completely reasonable for a black person to see arguments like that and think to themselves “what the actual fuck? The person who wrote that book is probably racist, and a conference hosting him might be racist too.” I think it is good to be curious about the world and interested in exploring unanswered questions so long as this is the true motivation. I take most people’s self-reports about their intentions at face value. I’m happy that Hanania has made his self-described Journey Out of Extremism, but I don’t fault anyone for being deeply skeptical about his intentions and whether or not he actually has made that journey given his current/past work.
I don’t know what the right path forward is wrt allowing certain speakers at Manifest, but I want to encourage people not to dismiss that “wtf” feeling many people have towards him and other speakers as lacking some kind of intellectual rigor or curiosity about the world.
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:
My own impression is that Manifest strikes a good balance for its goals. In the context of prediction markets, it’s uncommonly valuable to have people with a wide range of assumptions, some of whom are willing to go against consensus, even if that leads some into hot water. I don’t think controversial speakers should be sought out for their own sake, but if someone who has worthwhile, relevant things to say has also courted controversy, I think in the context of Manifest it would be a mistake not to invite them as a result. This seems to be the approach Manifest has taken. I don’t think those norms are appropriate everywhere, but I do think they’re appropriate somewhere, and Manifest has built something successful, rewarding, and compelling as a result, something that fits a niche other spaces do not.
I think it’s possible to assert that the approach Manifest takes is not the only appropriate approach to take, that inviting and excluding people always carry trade-offs and that some good people may not want to be in every environment, and that as it stands the conference accomplishes something wholly worth doing. That’s where I land.
Glad to see this perspective represented, everything I’ve read about this makes me think it’d have been a poor experience and the consistent arguments I see in favor of flavors of scientific racism in this community. It’s one thing to have opinions, it’s another to just ignore the amount of scholarship done on the topics folks like him spout off about, generally uninformed.
It’s most objectionable from a policy perspective, as I do not think folks like this need to be anywhere near policy making, nor should they be given platforms to influence malleable people on these topics without some kind of informed counterweight.
The consistent commentary here seems to imply there is no black person who would fit this bill, but given the rampant diversity of black folks across the spectrum in other political and academic spaces, it’s less that there aren’t people, and more that this siloed community seems hostile that sort of participation.
I was assigned female at birth and have been in tons of conversations where people talk about IQ differences between men and women and why that might explain why there are less women in STEM.
I never thought “wtf, they must secretly be sexist”.
I thought “Huh, interesting. I wonder if the evidence backs that up.”
Because I know I’m incredibly smart. The evidence is abundantly clear. And I know that people talking about group differences doesn’t say much about individual differences.
Women are also on average shorter than men, but I’m taller than most men. I don’t get offended or think that people are secretly saying I’m actually short.
Averages are different than individuals.
You can talk about differences between groups without it being sexist / racist / _____ist and thinking people are talking about you.
I think your reply misses the point of what I’ve said. I am not saying that “averages = individuals” or that you “can’t talk about differences between groups without it being sexist…. and thinking people are talking about you.”
My claim is that many people are skeptical about the intentions of people who spend their entire careers talking about those differences and how they should shape healthcare, policy, etc. I find some of that skepticism to be super reasonable (especially on the policy end), and I find it frustrating when that is reduced to what you’re saying above even though I default to a different approach personally.
I think I’m skeptical of people’s intentions too sometimes, but this seems to me more to apply to the person who asked Hanania a question than Hanania. I don’t like Hananai’s behaviour, but it doesn’t feel like he spends his whole time talking about group difference, here is a screenshot of his blog homepage. Perhaps there is some race discussion in the “dissident right” piece, but that seems like a pretty small percentage.
The upshot here is I’m not sure “people who spend their entire careers talking about those differences” is a good characterisation of the people who were speakers at manifest.
The anecdote from the conference was more about how those conversations made me feel which I should have been more clear about. This was prompted by Austin’s comments about how Manifest made people feel. I should have (maybe?) also said that Hanania answered in a way that made me uncomfortable, but I don’t think the details of that matter as I’m not advocating for something to change based on my discomfort. I’m unsure about my views on this, so I want to emphasize that this is (presently) not the case.
The statement about “people who spend their entire careers…” was a general statement about the “edgy” people and not necessarily about him (though I do think his book falls into the “reasonably skeptical” camp) which was also not super clear.
I appreciate it, thank you.
Appreciate it. I wish more people thought this way.
Why are you suspicious of their intentions?
Have you considered all of the other intentions they might have and compared the probabilities of various hypotheses?
My top hypothesis is that for most of the prominent HBD intellectuals, their motivation is the usual “ooh, shiny, what an interesting idea” combined with some contrarian urges.
Like, when somebody censors a book, readership goes up.
I know the moment I hear that a book has been banned, I go download it. What don’t people want me to know?
Many people have the urge to talk about things if it’s been deemed taboo by society.
I really do not understand why you are asking me to explain a suspicion that I clearly said I don’t have. I mentioned in the original comment and in the reply that I do engage and consider the other possibilities that you mentioned. I read the books and blogs unless they are overtly racist and I have the time. I am saying that I don’t fault people people who don’t do that or have those defaults/reflexes.
Oh you’re right. My bad. So many threads going on here and I got mixed up. Sorry about that.
Glad you’re not suspicious of them!
Glad to hear it! But I think a little compassion is due here to the very common experience in this community of not being confident about one’s own intellect or abilities, or among people who are confident about themselves, very much not being confident that they will be perceived as capable and taken seriously by their peers.
But they are not talking about you or perceiving you as less intelligent.
They are talking about averages.
Just because you feel like people are talking about you does not mean that they are.
This feels unnecessary. This topic is hard enough without snideness.
It wasn’t intended as snide. I think it’s probably just hard to convey tone and emotions over text, especially in a heated conversation.
Sorry if it came across that way. I should definitely try to err more on the side of speaking extra nicely when commenting on the forum, to make up for all of the psychological forces pushing against it being interpreted that way.
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 boosted and praised my affirmative defense of surrogacy, a topic very personal to me and one online public figures are much more likely to attack or stay silent on than defend when I speak about it. Later, I went on his podcast to discuss my path out of Mormonism and my sexuality, my essay on how the Republican Party is doomed, the importance of a spirited defense of liberalism in the public sphere, and other ideas that would challenge his right-leaning audience and encourage norms I believe the EA sphere would approve of. This is also true of some areas where I can’t claim to be as emphatically EA-aligned as he is, as with his treatise against factory farming and animal suffering.
Someone below pointed out that you misrepresented his pronouns/genocide essay, which I saw as an unusually self-reflective look at why he and others have, as he puts it, “deranged” priorities in getting the most animated not about objectively the most important ideas but about emotionally salient topics close to home. The point of the essay is not “they/them pronouns are worse than genocide,” but “it is in one sense deranged, but human and important to understand, that people get so much more emotionally invested in issues like they/them pronouns than about genocide.”
I understand perfectly well why people dislike him and I have no problem with robust criticism and even condemnation of much of what he says. But while his actions look from your angle like mainstreaming far-right ideas, they look to the far-right like mainstreaming animal suffering concerns, prediction markets, abortion and surrogacy, open borders, and rather a lot more. You may discount those as trivial, but the people in his audience certainly do not.
You seem smart, capable, and knowledgeable about prediction markets. I think Manifest would benefit from having you in attendance. But my own intellectual life is richer for the opportunity to read, engage with, and argue with people like Hanania. I’m glad he was there, I’m glad I had the chance to say hi to him and chat a bit, and if a precondition for your engagement is that it’s either you or him, I would rather you not attend than that you use your reputational sway to prevent me from having those interactions.
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 conference at some generic conference hotel, and still choose to invite Hanania. Alternatively, we could invite only the kindest, most welcoming, least offensive people we know, to come hang out and sing songs and chat about forecasting by the fire at Lighthaven. The former might be edgy and not fun, while the latter might be fun and not edgy. These are unrelated.
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”.
I am glad you are interacting here and giving your honest opinions, thanks for that, I found some of your comments helpful, even though I don’t agree or resonate with some of them.
However, note that I find this interpretation as a pretty uncharitable reading.
I see a big distinction between “I want to create a space where people can talk about different and not so controversial stuff” (I believe that “polygenic screening is not racism” is a useful and important distinction) vs. telling people “you are bad and unfun for not being fine with racist talking about racism and sexism next to you”.
I have seen this for a second time from you when replying to Austin (e.g. here), and I think it’s worse for the discussion discourse. Take what you want from it, of course.
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?
Edit: This thread is now kind of confusing because Peter shared this article too, but more forcefully and on closer reading it is more thoughtful than the title suggests, leading to Peter’s comment being downvoted. Most of the discussion is under peter’s comment and my comment here is basically irrelevant.
This feels like an unfairly harsh comeback but:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-do-i-hate-pronouns-more-than
(If I recall correctly, @Austin said Hanania had changed his opinion slightly on trans people since talking to some at manifest last year—manifest probably has a large trans overrepresentation—and this is good, I want a way back for Hanania. LIkewise I have seen less overt racism from him in the last year, but I’m not yet at the state where I want him as a lauded speaker. He could at least write an article saying he’s changed his mind on this and the racist tweet about Jordan Neely)
Edit: While this is what Peter was referring to, on closer reading, I think it’s kind of inaccurate to say that Hanania is really endorsing his title. Therefore my original comment was not the level of accuracy I aspire to. Sorry.
Not hyperbole. Hanania, Manifest promoted speaker, wrote “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?” in May 2022.
(EDIT: I misunderstood this, but I don’t think I misunderstood that Hanania is generally a provacateur who says pretty “edgy” things, like that black people are animals and that we need mass surveillance of black people to lower crime.)
I still think this is hyperbole. Hanania isn’t saying he things they/them pronouns are worse than genocide, he says he gets more upset about they/them pronouns than about genocide, just as (according to him) people on the left get more upset about racial slurs than about genocide:
You could reasonably object that Hanania should be more accepting of nonbinary people (I would agree), but I think you’re meaningfully misstating his position.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
I would like to disagree and say that I would be excited to attend an event where Hanania was attending.
He makes a lot of really interesting points, writes engagingly, and is an independent thinker.
All of the times I’ve seen somebody saying “he’s super racist!” have turned out to be not actually racist, taken out of context, or the definition of racism where talking about any racial differences is racist, etc.
For example, the whole “he called black people animals” thing.
He was calling woke activists animals, not black people.
Which, yeah, I’m generally against calling people animals, but is very different from the narrative of him saying all black people are animals.
Wait, I do not think that is the natural reading of that tweet. He is supportive of Penny elswhere. I discussed this with someone yesterday—he seems to be on Penny’s side in these tweets saying it will become clear to people that blacks are a danger to whites. Given his history I do think he was calling blacks animals (which is gross) and were he not to be he could easily have corrected it, which he hasn’t.
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.
He didn’t say that blacks are danger to whites
He said that woke rhetoric makes it sound like white people kill more black people, and actually, more black people kill white people. (I don’t know if this is true, but it is a matter of looking into the data and is different from how you portrayed what he said)
He corrected the blacks being animals in a Blocked and Reported podcast episode. He was not calling black people animals. He was calling woke activists animals.
It almost seems rude to ask but… did you actually read the post you linked? It says the exact opposite of what you claim it does:
This seems at best quite negligent of you—to assume a person is saying something bad just because you dislike them. At worst it seems like you were hoping people would just take your word for it and not actually click the link.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
I would hold a tighter grip on your horses. The article does not contravene the headline. Hanania talks at length about how much he hates wokeness.[1] He doesn’t mention his views on genocide. He notes that some issues are more important than being anti-woke (as an example, he mentions anti-aging research). So in sum, this article suggests:
he hates wokeness vehemently
he thinks some issues are more important than wokeness.
It seems entirely consistent with the article that Hanania hates wokeness more than genocide, and a straightforward reading of the headline and context would support this. We don’t know whether Hanania puts genocide as one of the ‘5-10’ more important issues.
So we have mildly positive, at best neutral evidence on how Hanania rates genocide compared to wokeness. ‘Thinks is worse’ could mean different things. One reading is that ‘worse = rates as a more important problem’ (on which we should be unsure). Another reading is ‘worse = hates more’ (on which we have positive evidence). Either reading is reasonable.
E.g. “I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it.”
The entire article is about how he hates wokeness the most but recognizes that objectively there are other bigger problems; genocide is an example he mentions of an objectively worse problem.
Could you point me to where he does so? I only see mentions of genocide in the title (which he does not contradict), and in the context of liberals’ relative hatred. And where he says “Emotionally, I don’t identify with the tribe of ‘people who don’t commit genocide.’”
The article reads to me as straightforwardly saying “I know [wokeness] is nowhere near the most important issue I could be focusing on [but I find myself doing it anyways]” and reflecting on why he (and others) feel so much more passionate and outraged about topics like pronouns (for him) and racial slurs (for people on the left), when there are so many things that from a system 2 perspective are much bigger deals that he and others feel much less passionate about when they come up (like genocide).
This feels like an interesting point (though I have disagreements with some of the writing in the essay). I have failed to find a literal sentence with “I think genocide is more important than X”, since he mostly invokes the term when talking about how he is surprised how dispassionate other people are about that topic, but the overall content of the post is the opposite of what I thought he was going to say when Peter linked to it.
He says wokeness is in the “top 5-10, depending how you count”. That doesn’t seem to be ‘nowhere near’?
The text in quotes is a quote:
It agree he also says it might be in the top 5-10, which I agree seems somewhat incongruent, though like, the whole point of the post is to explore internal cognitive dissonance in him and others, so some inconsistency doesn’t seem inappropriate (though yeah, I think it makes the post worse and the meaning less clear, which is still bad).
Eh, I personally think of some things in the top 10 as “nowhere near” the most important issues, because of how heavy-tailed cause prioritization tends to be.
Yeah, I was thinking about that as well. Seems plausible for something to be top 5-10 and also “nowhere near”.
That’s reasonable. My point is that it’s much less clear and open to contestation that Hanania’s article says the opposite of what the headline is, but given the example is ~retracted anyway my point is not important
Thanks for the context. I think both your initial comment and reply, without further context (I personally did not have more context; I have not been following these discussions), lead to an innacurate picture of Hanania’s views. The title is provocatory, but my understanding based solely on skimming that post would be that Hanania is not “someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide”. Hanania thinks genocide is worse, but then focusses on pronouns due to personal fit considerations? From the post:
Hanania is a frequent and intentional provocateur. He knows exactly what he’s doing with this article. He has made clear explicit intent to use outrage towards himself to build a platform to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
“I’ll tell you a secret to success. Always be pushing the envelope. As soon as you’ve done or said something that gets attention, resist the temptation to go rest on your laurels and become risk averse. Keep pushing, always give them a twist.”—Richard Hanania
This appears to be the source of the ‘pushing the envelope’ quote if anyone is interested:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1699223634349629771
What’s your source for that? Is the original quote the same as the one I wrote about in this comment?
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.
There is some possibility that this is strategic.
But I think the hypothesis that he unthikingly posted an ambiguous tweet while he was feeling emotional is more likely.
Your prior should be on people occasionally posting unthinking emotional tweets.
Your prior should be that he has a strong dislike of crime apologists, which is one of his big hobby horses.
Especially if you’ve read more of his work, like I have.
He doesn’t hate black people.
He definitely strongly dislikes crime apologists.
He used to publish racist stuff under a pseudonym, right? Calling for deportations based on skin colour iirc correctly. Why shouldn’t I think he probably dislikes black people, given this track record?
He responded to that.
He says he now finds the ideas he had when he was younger repulsive. Here are some quotes from it:
I judge things on track records. If I post a load of racist things, then apologise then post another probably racist thing, I think you should think I’m racist, not that the apology was like a magic spell that made all the previous bad behaviour disappear.
I am willing for hanania to do some work and convince me he isn’t racist, but he has to actually convince me. You seem to think I should just believe him. I don’t believe him.
I’ve actually read probably over 100 of his articles, and that’s what’s convinced me he’s not racist.
How much of his original content have you actually read? You can just check if you want. His writing is out there.
I think most of people thinking he’s racist have looked at one or two cherry-picked tweets and read articles written by other people about him and what he said, instead of looking at what he actually said.
I think the other thing that makes people think he’s racist is that he does talk about differences in outcomes between racial groups and talks about alternative theories to “it’s just because certain racial groups are oppressed”.
Some people think that considering that is racist itself. I doubt you’re one of those people, but if you are, then you’ll totally think he’s racist.
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.
He publicly clarified on the Blocked and Reported podcast.
I got his permission to publicly share the quote I shared with you.
He’s already been asked a million times to clarify on Twitter, so I doubt he’ll listen to me.
Yeah but why not. The least he could do is delete it.
If he is only doing cheap actions and not costly ones.. maybe he in fact does mean the thing it looks like he means.
Or maybe he really likes annoying people. But I don’t like annoying edgy “maybe I’m being racist maybe not” either.
Edit: I do get why he doesn’t delete things in general. I feel that way too. But if I said anything that unclear I’d delete it.
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.
FWIW, I immediately assumed he was talking about woke activists (and apparently he was talking about crime apologists, a subset of woke activists).
The context makes total sense to me. A person he thinks was just preventing crime is being sent to prison for life. He’d obviously be talking about the people who did that to the person
I have no opinion on the particular event. I’d never heard of it till just yesterday and I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Just purveying how Hanania likely saw the situation.
I’ve also read a lot of Hanania’s stuff, so it’s even more clear to me than to somebody who hasn’t. He’s an anti-speciesist who equally angers the right and the left. It’d be pretty surprising to me if he hated black people. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he felt a lot of anger towards woke activists.
It’s pretty interesting that Hanania just happens to frequently make these kinds of accidents, right?
I’m surprised. You just found out that one of the worst things you thought he said was wrong.
Are you not going to update and maybe think that maybe he’s not the villain you originally thought?
I know you’re usually quite good at updating based on new evidence. It’s hard to convey over text, but I genuinely recommend taking a step back from this and reflecting on your views.
I’ve seen in one other thread as well you realizing that what you’d heard about Hanania was wrong, so that’s twice in one day. Consider that maybe the other things were also not as bad as you originally thought.
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.
The claim is that the tweet said he called all black people animals.
It’s a separate but overlapping claim about whether the tweet was racist.
For the first claim, shouldn’t it update you massively that he said he was talking about specific other people, that totally make sense in the context?
What do you think is more likely:
Person who consistently criticizes crime apologists, criticizes crime apologists
Person says he dislikes crime apologists, but secretly hates all black people and is lying
Assuming people don’t mean what they say and that your interpretation of their internal state is more accurate than their explanation of it seems pretty suboptimal to me.
I think our community would be better off if they updated based on misunderstandings, rather than insisting that people have hidden bad intentions and are liars about their own lived experience.
We have already followed the rest of this line of argument here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest?commentId=gj53zXi5k4SEdh3Rh
Again, I’m willing to change my mind, but it would actually involve some behaviour change on his part, which so far I haven’t seen.
Neither were accidents? It was just people misinterpreting what he was saying or interpreting things uncharitably.
People interpret people uncharitably all the time on the internet, especially if you ever mention race.
The first one he wasn’t calling black people animals. He was calling woke activists animals.
Which, you know, not great. But very very different from calling black people animals.
The second one is him saying that if we were to genuinely reduce crime, it would involve increasing policing of black people, which he thinks would be politically infeasible given the current climate.
This seems like the sort of thing where reasonable people could disagree. Like, does policing and surveillance actually reduce crime? Are black people disproportionately likely to commit crimes or is that over-reporting due to racism?
If somebody said the exact same thing but said it about men in general (who do commit more violent crime) I don’t think most people would call that sexist and vile.
“But very very different“.
I think this is not true, at least not in my view. Dehumanising people is really bad, (mostly) independent of which group you’re dehumanising. I think that’s an extremely good social norm to have, and it should be costly to break.
(You seem to argue this specific point a lot, which repeatedly gets downvoted. I thought I’d explain my perspective on why I think that’s the case. I don’t believe your counterpoint works well. “Not great“ is also a serious euphemism for dehumanisation.)
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 ideas” should basically not care who gets to be listed as a “special guest”. This has roughly no consequence on their ability to express their ideas. 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”. It’s just so reasonable to exclude someone from a list like that even just on the basis of “this person is rude and unnecessarily seeks out controversy and angering people”. (Which I think basically everyone agrees is true for e.g. Hanania.)
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’m generally not a fan of this much meta, but I consider the fact that this was strong downvoted by someone to be egregious. Most of the comment is reasonable speculation that turned out to be right, and the last sentence is a totally normal opinion to have, which might justify a disagree vote at worst.)
Indeed, I spoke loosely and the sentence would have been more accurate if I had replaced “57 speakers” with “57 special guests”, for which I apologize. I don’t consider this to be a major distinction, however, and have used these terms fairly interchangeably throughout event planning. It’s a quirk of how we run Manifest, where there are many blurry boundaries.
Most, but not all of our “special guests” presented a session[1]. Not all of the sessions were presented by special guests: Manifest allowed any attendee to book a room to run a talk/session/workshop/event of their choice (though, we the organizers did arrange many of the largest sessions ourselves.) Most special guests did not receive housing or travel assistance; I think we provided this to 10-15 of them. Not all of our special guests even received complimentary tickets: some, such as Eliezer, Katja, Nate and Sarah, paid for their tickets before we reached out to them; we’re very grateful for this! And we also issued complimentary tickets to many folks, without listing them as special guests.
What is true about all our special guests is that we chose them for being notable people, who we imagined our attendees would like to meet. They were listed on our website and received a differently-colored badge. They were also all offered a spot at a special (off campus) dinner on Saturday night, in addition to those who bought supporter tickets.
Off the top of my head, these special guests did not give talks: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Katja Grace, Joe Carlsmith, Clara Collier, Max Tabarrok, Sarah Constantin, Rob Miles, Richard Hanania, Nate Soares
Was Hanania among that group?
He was not.
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 over time it becomes more and more costly to quarantine specific topics.
Thirdly, it selects against people who are principled in defense of truth-seeking. My sense is that the people who organized Manifest are being very principled, and would also be willing to have left-wing people who have potentially-upsetting views. For example, there’s been a lot of anti-semitism from prominent left-wing thinkers lately. If one of them wanted to attend Manifest, I think it would be reasonable for Jews to be upset. But I also expect that they’d be treated pretty similarly to Hanania (e.g. allowed to come and host sessions, name used in promotional materials). I’m curious what critics of Manifest think should be done in these cases.
To be clear, I’m not saying all events should take a stance like Manifest’s. I’m just saying that I strongly support their right to do so.
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), then how does EA’s truth-seeking benefit the world?
(There are worlds in which it takes even less for EA to be shunned, e.g., if EA merely doesn’t shun others hard enough. For example there are currently people pushing for EA to “decouple” from LW/rationality, even though there is very little politically incorrect discussions happening on LW.)
My own logic suggests that too much truth-seeking isn’t good either. Would love to see how to avoid this conclusion, but currently can’t. (I think the optimal amount is probably a bit higher than the current amount, so this is not meant to be an argument against more truth-seeking at the current margin.)
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.
I mean, why not? Less-wrong “rationality” isn’t foundational to EA, it’s not even the accepted school of criticial thinking.
For example, I personally come from the “scientific skepticism” tradition (think Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Steven Novella, James Randi, etc...), and in my opinion, since EA is simply scientific skepticism applied to charity, scientific skepticism is the much more natural basis for criticial thinking in the EA movement than LW.
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
To put Garrison’s comment a bit more bluntly, I challenge you to name 1 left-winger who might feasibly be invited to speak at Manifold and has said anything about Jews as a group comparable to Hanania saying “these people are animals” about Black people*. That’s not a dogwhistle, or a remark that reflects stereotypes, or applies double-standards, or cheering for one side in a violent conflict because you think their the aggressors it’s just explicit open racism.
*(The claim made below that Hanania really meant woke people not Black people, strains credulity. He was talking about not just the lawyer who prosecuted a man for violence towards a black man who was harrassing people on the subway, but also the . The full quote was “these people are animals, whether harassing people in the subway or walking around in suits”. There is no reason to think the harasser was woke or shared any other characteristic with the lawyer except being Black. And your prior on “man who was a neo-Nazi for years, and never apologised till he got caught actually meant the racist reading when he said something that sounded racist” should be high.)
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 organizers.
I don’t have more examples off the top of my head because I try not to follow this type of politics too much. I would be pretty surprised if an hour of searching didn’t turn up a bunch more though.
Hassan: Those comments were indeed egregious, but they were not about Jews specifically. Indeed much more recently (although still a while ago) Hassan has harshly criticised antisemitism in the British Muslim community. I can’t link on my phone but google “the sorry truth is that the virus of antisemitism has infected the British Muslim community”. I grant that this was comparably egregious to what Hanania said (I do think it is slightly less bad to attack literally everyone outside your small community than to target a vulnerable minority, but I wouldn’t rest much on that.*) If Hassan had said that more recently or I was convinced he still thought that, then I would agree he should not be invited to Manifest. But it’s not actually an example of prejudice against Jews specifically except to the extent that Jews are also not Muslim.
Tlaib: Well I wouldn’t use that phrase, and I’m inclined to say using it is antisemitic yes, because at the very least it creates an ambiguity about whether you mean it in the genocidal way. Having said that, given that there is a very clear non-genocidal reading, I do not think it is a clear example of hate speech in quite the same sense as Hanania’s animals remark. I’d also say that my strength of feeling against Hanania is influenced by the fact that he was an out and out white nationalist for years, and that he remains hostile to the civil rights act that ended Jim Crow and democratised the South.. If you can show me that Tlaib is or was a Hamas supporter, then yes, I’d say her saying “from the river to the sea” is at least as bad as Hanania’s animals comment. (Worse inherently, since that would make it a call for violence and genocide/ethnic cleansing. But I do think Palestinians are subject to forces that make resisting bigotry harder vis-a-vis Israelis, than it is for white Americans to resist white nationalism.)
*For example, I think the NYT should have fired Sarah Jeong even though her racist comments were “only” about whites, if you know that incident.you
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 disposition towards Black people in particular.
Charitable interpretation of statements can be a sensible disposition in many settings. But giving charitable interpretations to people with this sort of history seems both morally and epistemically unwise.
The prior on “person with a white supremacist history still engaged in right wing racial politics still has a racist underlying psychology” should be very high. Right-wing racists also frequently engage in dogwhistles to signal to each other while maintaining plausible deniability. Reading that statement (and others of his) with those priors+facts in mind, I feel very comfortable not giving Hanania any benefit of the doubt here.
There’s also a textual case that I think supports the racist reading. Woke people walking around “in suits” is not at all a common trope—I’ve literally never heard of someone talking about a woke person wearing a suit as some sort of significant indicator of anything. But racists judging Black people by what they wear—e.g., purporting to be willing to be nicer to Black people if only they dressed more appropriately—is a huge trope in American race discourse. This sort of congruence between racist tropes and Hanania’s language similarly applies to “in subways” and “animals.” These are racist tropes consistently used about Black people, not woke people.
He explicitly said that he sent an emotional and unthinking tweet.
That seems much more likely than he’s playing an elaborate game of secretly communicating hate.
This seems to me like also what you do if you’re in an elaborate game of secretly communicating hate. I think a sensible prior is that more people are emotional and unthinking than playing an elaborate game, but I don’t think his claims about his own intentions are strong evidence here.
Also, while “elaborate game of secretly communicating hate” is a pretty weird and specific hypothesis, I think we’ve also seen evidence from time to time that some people are very much doing it, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to suspect it (e.g. I think of the things Lee Atwater said about switching from being openly racist to covertly racist in US politics).
Could you elaborate on why you’re so quick to associate racism with truthseekingness? You’re at least the third person to do so in this discussion and I think this demands an explanation. What’s the relationship between the two? Have you investigated racist assertions and concluded they are truthful?
You could say that lack of censorship, even of false ideas, is important for truth seeking in a community. But I don’t think you’d agree with a policy to allow everyone to say what they think is true without social consequences. Suppose a community of people are fixated on the intelligence of your children specifically, and they think that your children are genetically dumb. They post about this often on Twitter/X, and endorse eugenic policies to prevent future people from being like your children in particular. How would you feel about one of those people being a top billed guest to a conference? Would you approve of it because it demonstrates a strong commitment to truthseekingness?
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 could go looking into this, try to figure out what is actually true, and if so what those differences are. If I did this I might find that some common racist stereotypes are backed up by reality, or I might find that they were not. Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was, and I don’t see much value in learning these answers, however, I’m not going to look into this. A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question. I think a lot of people reason this way about low-payoff controversial areas and avoid them.
Say someone does value seeking truth so highly that they’re willing to go into these areas despite the risk of social censure should they end up with politically difficult beliefs. If they encounter strong evidence that this aspect of reality has seriously unfortunate implications, they have two main options: delude themselves into thinking reality is otherwise or accept reality and with it the implications. Biting the bullet, the same good epistemic norms we need elsewhere for handling a messy world mean that if someone really does find themselves in that situation, I think they should do the latter.
Of course someone can also end up with racist beliefs through garden variety stereotyping, close mindedness, and bigotry. Since these are relatively common, most people saying racist things didn’t get there via an unusually strong commitment to seeking truth regardless of the social consequences. And even someone who has a scientific-sounding justification for their claims may have done a poor job (or not even attempted) to find out what’s really true, instead poking through some papers and ending up with their initial stereotypes strengthened through confirmation bias. So I think it’s generally incorrect to go from learning that a person has racist beliefs to increasing your sense of how truth-seeking they are, though it may still make sense if (a) your priors on reality being unfortunate here are high enough and (b) you know enough other things about this person that this path seems much more likely than the more common path.
I love this comment, it really helped me think about this.
To explore a little more, I had a small issue with this sentiment.
”Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was, and I don’t see much value in learning these answers, however, I’m not going to look into this. A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question. I think a lot of people reason this way about low-payoff controversial areas and avoid them.”
I completely agree with this as a guiding principle, and think it should probably usually be the default option for most people. “A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question.”
I think however that sticking to talking about every truth we find may not be a good idea, and I would bet you probably don’t actually talk about every uncomfortable finding you have com accross. “Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was”
I get the general principle of talking about what we discover along the rather than staying quiet, but I think there can be exceptions. If we do stumble across meaningful uncomfortable outcomes in either through our own research or on the internet or whatever, I think the best option might be to avoid talking about the issue at all. I’m not sure we ever “need” to talk about a research finding.
I agree with this statement “they have two main options: delude themselves into thinking reality is otherwise or accept reality and with it the implications.” but think that in some cases we can accept reality and still choose not to talk about it, oreven think about it very much, especially if talking about it is unlikely to lead to any helpful outcome.
I think the world in general is extremely unfair and there are quite a number of “unfortunate” and awkward truths even outside the realm of genetics, some of which might best to avoid talking about.
You’re right that I don’t have to talk about everything that I find. To take an uncontroversial example, if in my day job I find an easy way to make a bioweapon, I’m not going to blog how to do that.
But if you’re not going to talk about it if you conclude X, are you also not going to talk about it if you conclude not-X? If not then you’re making it much harder for other people to figure out what is true (more).
I feel one is always allowed not to speak about what they don’t want to, but that if one does decide to speak about something, they should never make a statement they know is a lie. This is sad, because depending on the issue and how it relates to your career and other stuff, you might not be able to just keep quiet, and besides, your silence is going to be interpreted uncharitably. People who have shown to consistently value and practice truth-saying should be allowed some sort of leeway, like ‘I will only answer n randomly chosen questions today (n also randomized) and you are not entitled to press further on anything I don’t answer’.
I 100 percent agree with that, which is where the wisdom comes in to choose not speak about many things.
>If we do stumble across meaningful uncomfortable outcomes in either through our own research or on the internet or whatever, I think the best option might be to avoid talking about the issue at all.
You can’t ignore reality this selectively and expect reasonable outcomes. If I have two health problems, but I’m only allowed to treat one because the other is socially unacceptable, the other will get worse and worse. To be clear- I think there’s little value in discussing the whole genetic thing. But I think most people outraged by it are ignoring why it comes up.
If you want to avoid talking about the issue, then you have to move that removal up a level. So we refuse to consider that there are racial differences in genetics- okay, then you need to move that up a level and racial differences in anything are unacceptable topics. No more concern about statistical differences in, say, homeownership, graduation rates, or crime rates. To make certain causes verboten means the symptoms cannot be properly addressed either.
I believe this kind of absolute and strict colorblindness would be an improvement for society. But I suspect that most of the people complaining about Hanania would not agree.
For what it’s worth, I find Hanania an irritating troll and I don’t get the appeal to the Manifest crowd, except in the most cynical manner that he’s a right-winger who mostly shits on other right-wingers. A sort of guilty indulgence, like a comedian who makes jokes mostly about people you already don’t like.
oThis isn’t directly responsive to your comment but- I’ve gone to that particular edge of the map and poked around a bit. I think people who avoid looking into the question for the above reason typically sound like they expect that there plausibly be dragons. This is a PSA that I saw no dragons, so the reader should consider the dragons less plausible.
There certainly are differences in individual intelligence due to genetics. And at the species level, genes are what cause humans to be smarter than, say, turtles. It’s also true that there’s no law of reality that prevents unfortunate things like one group of sapients being noticeably smarter than another due to genetics. However, I’m pretty sure that this is not a world where that happened with continent-scale populations of homo sapiens[1]. I think it’s more likely that the standard evidence presented in favor instead indicates psychiatrists’ difficulty in accounting for all non-genetic factors.
I don’t mean to argue for spending time reading about this. The argument against checking every question still applies, and I don’t expect to update anyone’s expectations of what they’d find by a huge amount. But my impression is people sound like their expectations are rather gloomy[2]. I’d like to stake some of my credibility to nudge those expectations towards “probably fine”.
I feel like I ought to give a brief and partial explanation of why: Human evolutionary history shows an enormous “hunger” for higher intelligence. Mutations that increase intelligence with only a moderate cost would tend to rapidly spread across populations, even relatively isolated ones, much like lactose tolerance is doing. It would be strange this pressure dropped off in some locations after human populations diverged.
It’s possible that there were differing environmental pressures that pushed different tradeoffs over aspects of intelligence. Eg, perhaps at very high altitudes it’s more favorable to consider distant dangers with very thorough system-2 assessments, and in lowlands it’s better to make system-2 faster but less careful. However at the scale corresponding to the term “race” (ie roughly continent-scale), I struggle to think of large or moderate environmental trends that would affect optimal cognition style. Whereas continent-scale trends that affect optimal skin pigments are pretty clear.
Adding to this, our understanding of genetics is rapidly growing. If there was a major difference in cognition-affecting mutations corresponding to racial groupings, I’d have bet a group of scientists would have stumbled on them by now & caused an uproar I’d hear about. As time goes on the lack of uproars is becoming stronger evidence.
I suspect this is due to a reporting bias by non-experts that talk about this question. Those who perceive “dragons on the map” will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up. So people who calmly state facts on the matter instead of shouting about bias are disproportionately the ones convinced of the genetic differences, which heuristically over-weights their position.
The asymmetry that @Ben Millwood points to below is important, but it goes further. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they’ve found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they’ve been misinterpreting it. Except this doesn’t work on taboo topics:
Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing’s perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don’t know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
You wrote essentially the opposite (“Those who perceive ‘dragons on the map’ will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up.”) and I agree some people will think this way, but I think this is many fewer people than are willing to publicly argue for generally-accepted-as-good positions but not generally-accepted-as-evil ones.
Many people really do or don’t want dragons to exist, and so will argue for/against them without much real engagement with the evidence.
Good faith participation in a serious debate on the existence of dragons risks your reputation and jeopardizes your ability to contribute in many places.
So I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
This is a bit discourteous here.
I am not claiming that A is convincing to me in isolation. I am claiming that after a hundred similarly smart people fit different evidence together, there’s so much model uncertainty that I’m conservatively downgrading A from “overwhelmingly obvious” to “pretty sure”. I am claiming that if we could somehow make a prediction market that would resolve on the actual truth of the matter, I might bet only half my savings on A, just in case I missed something drastic.
You’re free to dismiss this as overconfidence of course. But this isn’t amateur hour, I understand the implications of what I’m saying and intend my words to be meaningful.
I think this largely depends on whether a given forum is anonymous or not. In an alternate universe where the dragon scenario was true, I think I’d end up arguing for it anonymously at some point, though likely not on this forum.
I was not particularly tracking my named-ness as a point of evidence, except insofar as it could be used to determine my engagement with EA & rationality and make updates about my epistemics & good faith.
Sure. I understand it’s epistemically rude to take debate pot-shots when an opposing team would be so disadvantaged, and there’s a reason to ignore one-sided information. There’s no obligation to update or engage if this comes across as adversarial.
But I really am approaching this as cooperatively communicating information. I found I had nonzero stress about the perceived possibility of dragons here, and I expect others do as well. I think a principled refusal to look does have nonzero reputational harm. There will be situations where that’s the best we can manage, but there’s also such a thing as a p(dragon) low enough that it’s no longer a good strategy. If it is the case that there are obviously no dragons somewhere, it’d be a good idea for a high-trust group to have a way to call “all clear”.
So this is my best shot. Hey, anyone reading this? I know this is unilateral and all, but I think we’re good.
Thanks. There’s an asymmetry, though, where you can either find out that what everyone already thinks is true (which feels like a bit of a waste of time), or you can find out something deeply uncomfortable. Even if you think the former is where most of the probability is, it’s still not a very appealing prospect.
(I’m not sure what the rhetorical import of this or what conclusions we should draw from it, just felt like explaining why a lot of people find investigating distasteful even if they think it won’t change their mind.)
Agreed.
I think I wasn’t entirely clear; the recommendation was that if my claim sounded rational people should update their probability, not that people should change their asymmetric question policy. Edited a bit to make it more clear.
My view on this is that, unless there is some really strong argument against HBD type views that is not regularly being made by the people arguing that HBD type people are evil, we have in this case a dubious but plausible proposition (HBD) where the strength of the social consensus against it has gotten way, way stronger than the evidence against it.
People who are good at noticing holes in arguments are going to notice that the common arguments saying that HBD style ideas are obviously and completely false have lots of holes in them. Some of these people will then have a period where they think HBD is probably true before (possibly) they notice the holes that also exist in the arguments for HBD.
In this context it is pretty likely that ‘being good at noticing holes in arguments that your social group strongly endorses’ is going to associate with a tendency to ‘racism’.
I also have a dislike for excluding people who have racist style views simply on that basis, with no further discussion needed, because it effectively is setting the prior for racism being true to 0 before we’ve actually looked at the data.
Make the argument on the merits for why they are bad scholars making provably false arguments, like we do with creationists, anti-vaxxers, and 9-11 truthers, or let them talk. Trying to convince me to not listen to Hanania without establishing that what he says is not connected to reality feels to me like you are trying to make me have stupider beliefs because it is politically convenient for you.
That feeling, like you are treating me as a child who needs to be given false stories so I do the right thing, is probably behind a huge portion of the rationalist communities commitment to not excluding people.
Of course the story in the head of the anti racist is that they are stopping bad things from happening, and they are acting to prevent things like slavery, the holocaust, and Jim Crow from occurring, and that by excluding racists they are working to create a world where current systematic injustices get corrected.
It is possible that this consequentialist argument is correct, but it has nothing to do with epistemics, and simply making it means that you are (at this location) valuing consequences over truth.
Which of course (almost) everyone does sometimes. There are groups (both hypothetical and real) whose speech I’d like to suppress. This is a paradox in my thinking that I feel uncomfortable about, but it is there.
This feels like a description of how you want reality to be rather than how it actually is. Prominent creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers generally don’t find scientists, engineers or political scientists queuing up to debate them or intellectuals queuing up to hear them out either and not because the strength of the evidence favours them. More to the point: if a conference on an apparently unrelated subject like prediction markets announces a lineup with an unusually large number of creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers the discussion will definitely be around why those people were selected and whether they should have been rather than rehashing old arguments about whether they have a point.
Likewise, if Manifest chose for some reason to stack their attendee list with people who were unusually outspokenly ‘woke’ or raving Stalinists[!] and the feedback was that they didn’t deserve a speaking slot on the basis of their social media obnoxiousness or their presence attracted the wrong sort of people, it wouldn’t say anything either way about the validity of their arguments. Nor does the fact they chose not to platform those sort of people.
You don’t pick truth when you pick your speaker lineup, you pick your audience.
In the case of someone like Hanania he’s not actually producing scientific research related to his political targets anyway, and I doubt the attendees who allegedly spent the social hours of the conference testing reactions to the word ‘fag’, looking for opportunities to bring up race and IQ in the conversation and inviting people to Curtis Yarvin’s afterparty if they like what they hear are behaving that way because they’re unusually good at following the evidence rather than the herd.
There are reasons why you might want to exclude HDBers that don’t depend on any particular HDB view being false. And there are reasons why you might object to including some of the people at Manifest even if you don’t think HDBers should be automatically excluded.
On the first point: The truth value of “most people who are into HDB are racist in the “dislike and are biased against Black people,” sense and many are fascists or support gross human rights violations” is independent of the truth-value of HDB. Certainly Bryan Caplan, who no one would consider a dogmatic leftist seems to think something like this (at least the human rights bit): see the blog post by him Nathan Young’s posted in another thread. The reports of slurs at the conference are evidence in favour of “invite HDB speakers, get bigots in the audience”, as is the presence of Yarvin (a genuine fascist’s) followers. (Even if Yarvin himself wasn’t there.) It’s not low integrity to prioritise not attracting slur-chucking bigots and fascists over having speakers with a particular viewpoint even IF we assume that viewpoint includes some true and controversial claims. It is plausible that many obnoxious ideological groupings believe some true and controversial things. For all I know, Stalinists are nuch more likely to believe some true and controversial things about the US’s role in the Maidan rebellion and its influence on the later Russian decision to invade. But I would still be wary of inviting five people with that view to a prediction festival if it meant a high Stalinist attendance. I might be more inclined to invite them to an academic conference explicitly about the origins of the war in Ukraine. This is also not an all-or-nothing matter. You can think it is possible for there to be some circumstances in which inviting some HDBers and still think these sort of considerations make it a bad idea to invite multiple people with scientific racism controversies to a fun conference on prediction.
On the second point:
Belief in HDB is not in fact the only objection to several of the the speakers and attendees. Hanania is a former white nationalist who called Black people animals. Chau seems to have made generically disparaging about women’s academic ability on twitter, and to have a general history of race/gender edgelording. Hanson said controversial (and in my view misogynistic) things about rape. The Yarvinites are followers of someone who openly supports dictatorship and praises slavery and 19th century defenses of slavery. (It’s not clear the organisers can be blamed for the Yarvinites attendance in fairness: they didn’t explicitly invite them or Yarvin.) It’s perfectly consistent to think some or all of that is ban worthy even if you also believe being a HDBer is not. If people defending HDB and/or HDBers eant to argue all that stuff is not THAT bad, I personally think that supports the previous reason for excluding them.
(Not engaging with your central point, instead locally engaging with a bunch of sub-claims you make)
To be clear, I haven’t heard of actually anyone citing any slurs (and don’t really know what you are referring to hear). I definitely did not hear any. Maybe someone mentioned this somewhere in the two comment threads numbering over 500+ comments. The closest I can find is this section of the “My experiences [...]” post, which says:
But that doesn’t really sound like slurs in the usual sense, or at least a stretch of the word (I use the words “based” and “retarded” occasionally. “fag” feels weirder to me, though I still wouldn’t describe it as a slur (and I am also not sure whether the author actually heard that term).
Hanania seems to deny this in a public podcast and multiple people who have dug into this a good amount disagree with you on this. I think it’s bad form to cite it as a undisputed fact despite that.
I think you are engaging in speculation about the type of person who attended here, or are engaging in the noncentral fallacy. My guess is there were some people at the event who liked some things about Yarvin. I am highly doubtful that your statements about “The Yarvinites” has much predictive power about what those people do or believe.
Wait what? I can’t think of many words that would be more central examples of slurs than that.
I am gay. At this point it’s a term of endearment. If someone called me a fag in an unfriendly way I’d just be a bit baffled. Of course, this is just me.
It’s a famously “reclaimed” slur: Dan Savage used it positively for decades. But there is some dispute- in particular, it seems that many older gay men still have a strongly negative view of it, whereas younger crowds seem generally more accepting. As a Millennial, but not really in “the community,” I still find it off-putting when it’s used positively.
I’ve heard that there’s some queer vs gay tension as well that people that ID as queer are turning “fag” back into a slur, but I have no clue to what extent this is an actual phenomenon instead of outrage-bait.
Yes, I agree it’s used not-that-rarely within the gay community. This is very similar to the n-word situation, and I don’t think is very material to whether it’s a slur or not.
If a gay person called me a fag, I’d update that they were more edgy than me. If a straight person called me a fag, I’d update that they were a bigot (and/or very socially inept and in need of a talking to).
I mean, I think there are many racist-associated slurs that seem much more like central examples to me. I feel like I see random Youtubers of streamers or people in live chats use words like “fag” reasonably frequently, whereas there are many slurs that would indeed peak my ears much more than that. But like, IDK, I haven’t heard it used much, so I don’t have super strong intuitions here.
FYI fag is a pretty central example of a slur in America imo.
It gets used and normalized in some edgy cultures but I think that’s sort of like how the n-word gets used in some subcultures. (When I was growing up at least it was probably in the top 5 ‘worst’ words to say, at least weighted by ‘anyone ever actually said them’)
There’s also a thing where ‘retarded’ went from ‘not that bad’ to ‘particularly bad in some circles’, although I’m not sure how that played out since it was ‘after my time’.
All of this is sort of anti-inductive and evolving and makes sense to not be very obvious to a foreigner.
Eh, I’ve been living in the U.S. for a full decade, so I think the “foreigner excuse” doesn’t really work here, I think I was mostly just wrong in a kind of boring way.
My guess is I just happened to have not heard this specific term used very much where I could see people’s social reaction to it, which I guess is a weird attribute of slurs. Reading more about it in other contexts definitely made me convinced it qualifies as a slur (but also, relatedly, would honestly be quite surprised if people used it in any kind of real way during Manifest).
I’m not sure what you mean by “real way”. One of the central ways it’s culturally understood that that word and certain uses of “gay” are bad to use is to be contemptuous about things one doesn’t like or are insufficiently masculine. That seems like an important and real way it can be used for harm, not only literally meaning to call a gay person a slur.
Some ways to use a slur in a non-real way:
You use it in quotes to refer to how other people use it (as we’ve been doing in this discussion).
You use it in a clearly light-hearted ironic way (this is dicier, but clearly sometimes possible. For example, if the slur is directed at a clearly non-applicable inanimate object in an ironic way, like, if someone were to list profanities in an exaggerated and joking way against a chair they just stubbed their toe against.)
You use it in a very non-central way (like, someone talks about the historical use of the word faggot, or like, somehow uses it for it’s other meaning “a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel.”)
You have a substantially different cultural background (like, among Australians, friendly insults appear much more common, and calling each other “cunt” or “fag” seems not too rare)
There are probably some more ways I can think of, but these four seem like reasonably common causes of people using slurs with it being “real”.
I’m not aware of “fag” being a common term of endearment among Australians the way “cunt” is, though I might be wrong about that. I think it and “cunt” are in pretty different categories as far as obscene words go, at least in commonwealth countries.
I briefly googled it and it seems at least somewhat common: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-Australian-men-like-to-use-faggot
Also, I guess Australian’s call cigarettes “fags” which I think guess is some evidence of the word being used more casually.
Not confident of this though, I’ve never been to Australia.
In my experience of being an Australian, “fag” is not a common term of endearment I’ve encountered, except in the sense that general insults are used as terms of endearment (like “shit-for-brains” etc).
Fair enough re the link!
Cigarettes are called fags in the UK and other commonwealth countries, yeah. I don’t think it has any direct connection to the slur.
I have privately been told by someone I know who attended that they also heard slurs. (They didn’t say what other than “not the n-word”.) I’m not going to name them, because they have already said not to cite them on the forum about another thing they told me they was so my guess is they do not want to be dragged into the controversy on this.
I’d also say that I remember how certain neoreactionaries (not all of them) used to talk on SSC-these people of course eventually got banned. If that was a crowd attracted-which the Yarvin after party suggests it was-I am extremely unsurprised that people whose comments on SSC used to include things like rants about how “white gimmedats” and “white sluts” were teaming up with Black people to demand ruinous government spending, will also use racial slurs when they are not on a forum that will mod that out.
What is meant to be the non-central fallacy in this context? Are you just saying you doubt they are political supporters of Yarvin’s ideas?
I can’t confidently recall it was “fag” or “faggot” at this point anymore, but the term was definitely used.
I’m choosing to interpret this as you wondering if I used that collection of words as a representation of the kind of soft opens some of the attendees engaged in instead of real examples (as opposed to suggesting that I was lying), but “fag”, “retarded”, “based”, and “cuck” were all used quite a bit.
Yep, that’s how I interpreted it, especially given that the other two seemed to me quite different (again, “based” really has no connotation with a slur to me and is just like a weird word that people on the Internet use, if anything it’s a compliment).
Not that Wikipedia is authoritative for anything, but it describes one of those words as “a term, usually considered a slur, used to refer to gay men.” I would personally characterize the r-word as a slur if referring to an individual with an intellectual disability (and at least as in poor taste otherwise). I’m over 40 so do not understand “based.” Of course, one can disagree with these opinions, but it would not be unreasonable for David to have characterized some of these words as slurs.
Hanania didn’t call black people animals. I reached out to him 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.
Also, when I first read the tweet it was clear from the context that he wasn’t referring to black people.
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.
I agree with this diagnosis of the situation. At the same time, I feel like it’s the wrong approach to make it a scientific proposition whether racism is right or not. It should never be right, no matter the science. (I know this is just talking semantics, but I think it adds a bunch of moral clarity to frame it in this way, that science can never turn out to support racism.) As I said here, the problem I see with the HBD crowd is that they think their opinions on the science justifies certain other things or that it’s a very important topic.
The scientific proposition is “are there racial genetic differences related to intelligence” right, not “is racism [morally] right”?
I find it odd how much such things seem to be conflated; if I learned that Jews have an IQ an average of 5 points lower than non-Jews, I would… still think the Holocaust and violence towards and harassment of Jews was abhorrent and horrible? I don’t think I’d update much/at all towards thinking it was less horrible. Or if you could visually identify people whose mothers had drank alcohol during pregnancy, and they were statistically a big less intelligent (as I understand them to be), enslaving them, genociding them, or subjecting them to Jim Crow style laws would seem approximately as bad as it seems to do to some group that’s slightly more intelligent on average.
Well said.
I meant to say the exact same thing, but seem to have struggled at communicating.
I want to point out that my comment above was specifically reacting to the following line and phrasing in timunderwood’s parent comment:
My point (and yours) is that this quoted passage would be clearer if it said “genetic group differences” instead of “racism.”
(The above comment makes no reference to racism, and seems to be arguing from general principles. You can object to the general principles, which Richard I think communicated pretty cogently and which presumably apply to opinions associated with racism, but I don’t really understand your comment about the author “associating racism with truthseekingness” since the author does not mention racism.
In as much as Richard is advocating for tolerating controversial beliefs, like some stuff associated with racism, it’s because of the general principles he outlines in his comment. But if that’s what you mean by “associate racism with truthseeking” it seems appropriate to engage with the details of his comment, instead of just asking him to re-explain himself.)
This is a top-level comment on a post titled “Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”. That’s the topic of discussion, and the commenter seems to think that truth-seekingness is related to this topic. That’s what I’m challenging.
The Kolmogorov complicity essay presents numerous instances where individuals held accurate beliefs that their governments deemed heretical. The truthfulness of these beliefs is crucial to the argument. Certainly the essay would come across differently if the heretical beliefs were things like “the sky is green” or “this specific couple’s children are genetically dumb” (when they’re not). Therefore, I fail to understand how this essay pertains to our current discussion unless the contentious racist beliefs are also truthful, which the commenter has not substantiated.
Thanks! This feels like a more substantive response that seems potentially productive to engage with. Your previous comment felt to me like it was more just kind of ignoring the details of Richard’s comment.
I broadly endorse Jeff’s comment above. To put it another way, though: I think many (but not all) of the arguments from the Kolmogorov complicity essay apply whether the statements which are taboo to question are true or false. As per the quote at the top of the essay:
That is: good scientists will try to break a wide range of conventional wisdom. When the conventional wisdom is true, then they will fail. But the process of trying to break the conventional wisdom may well get them in trouble either way, e.g. because people assume they’re pushing an agenda rather than “just asking questions”.
For what it is worth, a core argument I made was that many attendees at these events said clearly racist and bigoted things, far beyond milquetoast “there might be group IQ differences”. I am also disturbed by people jumping to the truth-seeking defence.
What were the clearly racist of bigoted things?
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 there are...other ways.
Try to make your critiques as minimally personal as possible. Engage with arguments, don’t attack individual people if at all possible.
For example, I really appreciate Isa’s comments. Judging by upvotes and karma, many other people did as well.
It’s reasonable if you disagree with her comments. But you can engage with them on the merits, rather than making comments personal, as some of the replies seem to.
Some of the replies implied that Isa said things they did not say. Some of the other replies implied that Isa’s critiques are borne out of projection or unnecessarily taking things personally
On the object-level, I read her comments and I think that reading is just wrong. On the meta-level, even if that reading is correct, this is the type of thing that you should handle delicately, not harshly try to package it in an attack to make it harder to argue against you.
Relatedly, try to have decent theory of mind.
People you argue with likely have different beliefs, values, and preferences from you. They are also likely to have different beliefs, values, or preferences than what a caricature of them will have, especially caricatures of the tier that you see in political cartoons, or on Twitter.
If you find yourself arguing with implausibly stereotyped caricatures, rather than real people, you should a) consider trying to flesh out enough details about the people you’re arguing with to be at all plausible and/or b) take a step back and rethink your life choices.
I know this is difficult for some people, but you should at least try.
Try not to be ideologically captured, or at least notice when you are and don’t take yourself too seriously.
One of my greater failures as a internet commentator/dispassionate observer is during the whole SSC/NYT thing, where I failed to notice myself becoming increasingly tribal/using arguments as soldiers, etc.
The level of outrage was made worse by just how petty the underlying disputes were.
I do not think I thought or acted honorably according to my own values, and I’d prefer to minimize such tribalism going forwards
If you notice yourself in the grips of white-hot, rage, consider logging off and then do something take a shower, watch Netflix, go back to work, touch grass, crochet, or something else that’s not as corrosive to either your own soul or that of the community.
One dynamic I haven’t seen other people mention so far is the prevalence of what my friend calls “Rationality Justice Warriors,” people who (at least online) seem to champion a fairly uncompromising and aggressive stance on defending and evoking the norms and cultures of the rationality community whenever it appears to be under attack.
This comes across as fairly childish and frankly irrational to me, and I suspect most people acting under such attitudes will not reflectively endorse them.
Of course their opponents hardly do better.
Model the effects of your sentences on other people.
I’m worried that many comments will predictably push away valuable contributors to the community, or be very costly in other ways (eg wasted time/emotions).
If you expect your sentences to predictably cause more heat than light, consider rephrasing what you said. Or perhaps, again, consider logging off.
This is not to say you can’t ever offer harsh criticism, or you need to always be nice. Being kind is not the same as being nice, and sometimes even true kindness have to be sacrificed for higher goals.
But you should be careful about what trades you make, and maybe don’t sell out your kindness for too cheap a price (like the short-lived approval of your not-very-kind peers, or the brief euphoria of righteous rage)
It might be the case that what “needs to be said” can’t be said nicely, or rephrasing things in a diplomatic way takes more skill with the language than you have, or more time than you can afford. Under those circumstances, it is usually (not always) better to leave such criticisms than to leave them unsaid.
But you ought to be consciously making those tradeoffs, not falling into them blindly.
Effects include epistemic effects. If you say technically true things that makes people dumber, or worse, obviously wrong and/or illogical arguments in pursuit of a “higher” purpose, you are at least a little bit responsible for poisoning the discourse, and you should again ask yourself whether it’s worth it.
Consider the virtue of silence[2]
We are all busy people, and some of us have very high opportunity costs.
There are times to speak up, and times to stay silent, and let us all pray for the wisdom to know the difference.
I’m far from flawless on these grounds, myself. But I try my best. Or at least, I mostly try to try.
This is a virtue I’m personally exceedingly bad at practicing.
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.
To clarify my own position, one can think Manifest’s actions were very much not okay and yet be responding with criticism only because of the negative effects on EA. Also, I would assert that the bad effects here are not limited to “mak[ing] EA look bad.”
There’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the world, and each of us have only a tiny amount of attention and bandwidth in relation to the scope of bad stuff in the world. If there’s no relationship to one of my communities, I don’t have a principled reason for caring more about what happens at Manifest than I do about what happens in the (random example) Oregon Pokemon Go community. I wouldn’t approve if they invited some of these speakers to their Pokemon Go event to speak, but I also wouldn’t devote the energy to criticizing.
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:
In the midst of feeling like a lot is at stake and one’s values are being threatened, we may often try to push the social pendulum in our desired direction as hard as possible. However, that will have an aggravating and polarizing effect on the debate because the other side will see your attitude and think, “this person is not making any concessions whatsoever, and it seems like even though the social pendulum is already favorable to them, they’ll keep pushing against us!”
So, to de-escalate these dynamics, it seems valuable to acknowledge the values that are at stake for both sides, even just to flag that you’re not in favor of pushing the pendulum as far as possible.
For instance, maybe this would already feel more relaxed if the side that is concerned about losing what’s valuable regarding “truth-seeking” can acknowledge that there is a bar also for them, that, if they thought they were dealing with people full of hate or people who advocate for views that predictably cause harm to others (while being aware of this but advocating for those views because of a lack of concern for the affected others), the “truth-seeking” proponents will indeed step in and not tolerate it. Likewise, the other side could maybe acknowledge that it’s bad when people get shunned just based on superficial associations/vibes (to give an example of something that I think is superficial: saying “sounds like they’re into eugenics” as though this should end the discussion, without pointing out any way in which what the person is discussing is hateful, lacks compassion, or is otherwise likely to cause harm). This is bad not just for well-intentioned individuals who might get unfairly ostracized, but also bad for discourse in general because people won’t speak their minds any longer.
I disagree with much of this, but I edited my very-downvoted comment to make clear that it wasn’t about the Manifest team, whom I know basically nothing about.
(I didn’t think your comment was primarily referring to them fwiw)
> My plan was then to invite & highlight folks who could balance this out
I think this is basically a misconception of how the social dynamics at play work. People aren’t worried about the relative number of “racists”, they’re worried about the absolute number. The primary concern is not that they will exposed to racism at the conference itself, but rather that attending a conference together will be taken as a signal of support for the racists, saying that they are welcome in the community.
To pick Hanania as an example, since he has the most clearly documented history of racist statements, I have peers who would absolutely see me choosing to attend the same conference as him as a sign that I don’t think he’s too bad. And if I know that expectation and chose to go anyway, there would be additional merit to that reading.
To an extent, the more that Manifest is focused on discussions of prediction, the more leeway there is to invite controversial speakers. You can say make a case for ignoring views that are not relevant to the topic at hand. But as Saul says in his other post “although manifest is nominally about prediction markets, it’s also about all the ideas that folks who like prediction markets are also into — betting, philosophy, mechanism design, writing, etc”. In other words, it’s about forming a broader intellectual community. And people are obviously going to be uncomfortable identifying with an intellectual community that includes people that they, and the broader world, consider to be racist.
And even if it were possible to “balance out”, the examples given don’t exactly fill me with confidence this was given serious consideration. Someone known primarily[1] for being an angry culture warrior like Hanania isn’t “balanced out” by the presence of “gracious” longtermists who are unlikely to have written anything racist,[2] he’d “balanced out” by getting a culture warrior from the other side, whether in open debate or purely speaking about markets but making it clear the organizers definitely weren’t endorsing a particular side...
The Guardian may not always capture the nuance, but there’s a difference between inviting someone known primarily for his controversial views who incidentally also favours prediction markets and inviting, say, notable prediction market proponent Robin Hanson who incidentally also said questionable things in the past
Indeed if I wanted to organize a conference with the explicit purpose of covertly promoting fringe views to a largely unrelated audience (which I don’t think was actually the case here FWIW), this is exactly how I’d stack the speakers for faux balance: a few people on my side to insinuate the fringe views and a bunch of harmless intellectuals talking about unrelated subject matter to lend the fringe views an air of respectability.
I agree. I think we have to understand that “balancing out” Hanania plays into his game. He’s an intentional provocateur—he says edgy things for attention.
And then he uses that attention to build a platform.
And his explicit intention with that platform is to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
I don’t want to play any part in enabling that and that’s what “balancing out” does.
Yeah I dislike being part of something that rewards Hanania for the worst of his behaviour, which on balance I would guess Manifest currently does.
Well put.
It’s been a long time since AP Chemistry, but to deploy an imperfect metaphor: Adding water to a strong acid merely makes the solution somewhat less acidic; it does not make it balanced in pH.
Mm, what you’re describing sounds consistent, but do you think that your peers are right to have that expectation? Like, is society a better place if we enforce a norm that attending a conference constitutes support for the others in attendance?
In general, I’m much less concerned about the optics of the event “how does Manifest look”, and much more concerned about the concrete question, “how did it feel to attend Manifest”? For this reason, the Guardian article didn’t bother me very much, but the attendee’s report on Manifest did prompt some soul-searching among our team and led me to write this post.
We don’t get to decide what society’s norms are, though. To be clear, nor do members of the ideological left with their demands for an ideological purity culture.
Looking at ~the middle 75% of society, [1]I think it’s clear that (metaphorically) breaking bread with a group of people has some social meaning. “Support” is too strong, but it does convey a sense of toleration, non-condemnation, and minimum acceptability of the group’s views. I can’t speak to non-Western cultures, but my understanding is this view is of long standing in places like classical Greece and Rome.
If one is interested in cross-pollination with diverse sectors of society, I submit that failing to reckon with commonly-accepted cultural norms like the breaking-bread norm would be an excellent way to ensure that one remains in a limited bubble.
I’m in the US, so this does have a US flavor. But I don’t have any reason to think things are different in Western Europe. I’d defer to those with more relevant knowledge and experience to discuss other cultures.
Maybe I’m naive, but I think we do get to decide society’s norms! We do so in explicit discussions like this one, for example. Or hypothetically if a friend asks “why did you go to that event with all the racists”, you could let them know of your disapproval of the stances of some of the invited guests, while also highlighting that you attended because of specific talks or events or other friends you were excited for.
We collectively (the members of the society) get to decide society’s norms. But it’s also true that U.S. citizens collectively get to decide who the President is, and look where that gets tens of millions of people each election cycle. People individually or in small groups ordinarily have only a slight influence on society’s norms., and I think what you’re suggesting is sufficiently far afield from current norms for small movements to make a material difference.
Of course, it’s possible for social norms to shift considerably. But it takes a lot of both time and concentrated effort. The end objective would presumably be a mass social movement engaged in advocacy for that interpretation of free speech and free association. I don’t see that kind of theory of change being worked toward, so I don’t see any reason to believe isolated, less systematic attempts to change norms will have much overall effect.
On the merits, I think I’m more open to informal societal pressure as a manner of social control (as opposed to censorship by governments or big corporations). I think it’s good that people incur serious social costs from attending (e.g.) neo-Nazi or KKK events. For some particularly dangerous ideas, social pressure is a fairly modest way of mitigating that harm without giving any entity a concentrated and/or too-strong censorship power. Moreover, I think failing to socially stigmatize certain types of speech sends a problematic message to groups who are the target of the particularly problematic speech. If one reaches that conclusion, then we have a line-drawing exercise about whether any given event is problematic enough to justify a social sanction on attendees.
If we decide that attendance at some events should be stigmatized, then that raises the question about what to do about mixed events (with significant objectionable and significant non-objectionable content.) My view is that we would stigmatize attendance at such events. Doing so would likely cause events to unmix quickly, so we wouldn’t lose the social value of content we didn’t want to stigmatize. And I think any other answer gives plausible deniability to people seeking to avoid the social pressure that we had decided was warranted.
I think my peers would factually right, at least directionally, in that attending with someone who has controversial views is evidence of favoring those views.
As for whether society is a better place if we enforce the norm, I think there’s a couple relevant considerations. The first is the degree of abhorrence. To pull Godwin’s Law, I think that knowingly attending a conference with literal neo-Nazis should be seen as support for their views. The second is the degree of focus. Where it should be fine to attend an academic conference with subject matter experts talking about their work, choosing to attend a “fun forecasting-adjacent festival” where attendees are encouraged to pal around with each other is more deserving of judgment.
I would also like to clarify, when I talk about peer judgments, I’m not making a point about how Manifest looks to those people. I’m making a point about how it would feel for them to attend. While I understand there are tradeoffs involved and you can’t make the event welcoming to arbitrary potential attendees, I would say by the time you’ve lost Peter Wildeford you’ve gone too far. I would also throw my hat in the ring as someone who works on prediction science and would be hesitant to attend the next Manifest if it had a similar invitee list.
(separate comment for separate thought to allow agree/disagree voting)
How much weight would you give to the following question: “how did it feel for some people to feel unwelcome at Manifest, and not attend, because of the controversial attendees—either due to reputational risk issues or discomfort at sharing space with those attendees?”
The obvious reason to not put too much weight on positive survey results from attendees: the selection effect.
There are surely people (e.g. Peter Wildeford, as he mentioned) who would have contributed to and benefited from Manifest but don’t attend because of past and present speaker choices. As others have mentioned, being maximally inclusive will end up excluding people who (justifiably!) don’t want to share space with racists. By including people like Hanania, you’re making an implicit vote that you’d rather have people with racist views than people who wouldn’t attend because of those people. Not a trade I would make.
Insofar as they were trying to make Manifest a conference for exploring interesting ideas, I would argue for including Hanania as one of the most effective critics of conservatism, ie. see this article where he tells conservatives to stop believing misinformation/running scams.
Insofar as the focus was on growing the prediction market community, I think it is important to conduct outreach both to the left and to the right. And Hanania is one of the figures on the right who can draw the smarter conservatives to a conference like this.
Bear in mind the Johnson bills Hanania is criticising in the opening sentence of that article include the bills that finally allowed Black Americans to be able to vote in the US and outlawed racial discrimination. Can you really not see why a former secret white nationalist at the very least edging close to “bans on explicit discrimination against Black people and letting Black people vote causes crime and is therefore bad” might disgust a lot of people?
Bear in mind that none of this legislation was about crime. Some of it was facially race neutral anti-poverty stuff. But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 just outlaws explicit discrimination against people on the basis of their race or gender, and creates some bureaucracy to enforce this. (Look it up if you don’t believe me.)
Sorry, this isn’t a very strong argument.
I could write a law that bans some kind of discrimination and also mandates the clubbing of baby seals.
And whenever anyone criticises the latter element, I could self-righteously proclaim, “How can you criticise this bill, surely you’re against discrimination?”
Sorry, this isn’t a very strong analogy.
Hanania doesn’t criticise anything specific about the bills directly or offer a clear thesis for why they led to a rise in crime. There’s no analogy to clubbing seals here. The strong implication imo is that giving more freedom to black people itself led to bad things happening because black people (according to Hanania) have a bad culture. Which is a different and much more offensive (to many) thesis.
(I agree that this is then used as a segue to a pretty insightful and biting critique of conservatives, which is the main point of the article. And I can see the pragmatic value of his argumentative approach for reaching racist conservatives. But I don’t think that does much to defend against a charge of racism here.)
I am not maintaining it is impossible for anyone to criticise any law that includes an anti-discrimination portion. If, say, Jason Brennan criticised anti-discrimination law on the grounds that it generated inefficient bureaucracy that did more harm than good, I wouldn’t be offended.What I am claiming is that people are rightfully suspicious when someone with Hanania’s overall track record makes the particular criticism of it he did.
I don’t like to post a whole blog here, but I think probably it’s better here than as a separate post which will possibly reignite the discussion.
I think Bryan Caplan’s comment on race and IQ is just a really good take on these issues. It acknowledges his views and then why people reasonably might not like him for those views and then an admonishment for bad apples to do better. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/iq_with_conscie.html
Here it is in full.
Bryan says:
I’m an IQ realist, all the way. IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.” A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success. Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence.
Yet I’ve got to admit: My fellow IQ realists are, on average, a scary bunch. People who vocally defend the power of IQ are vastly more likely than normal people to advocate extreme human rights violations. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a One-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a No-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forced sterilization for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forcible exile of people with low IQs – fellow citizens, not just immigrants. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate murdering people with low IQs.
When I say, “I’ve heard…” I’m not just talking about stuff I’ve read on the Internet. I’m talking about what IQ realists have told me to my face. In my experience, if a stranger brings up low IQ in Africa, there’s about a 50⁄50 chance he casually transitions to forced sterilization or mass murder of hundreds of millions of human beings as an intriguing response. You can protest that they’re just trolling, but these folks seemed frighteningly sincere to me.
Don’t such policies flow logically from IQ realism? No way. If someone says, “I’m more intelligent than other people, so it’s acceptable for me to murder them,” the sensible response isn’t, “Intelligence is a myth.” The sensible response is, “Are you mad? That doesn’t justify murder.” Advocating brutality in the name of your superior intellect is the mark of a super-villain, not a logician.
But don’t low-IQ people produce negative externalities – negative externalities that well-intentioned consequentialists will want to address? I’m no consequentialist, but the consistent consequentialist position is: Not if the “solution” is worse than the problem! And if your “solution” involves gross human rights violations, there’s every reason to think it is worse than the problem. We should be especially wary of self-styled consequentialists who rush toward maximal brutality instead of patiently searching for cheap, humane ways to cope with the social costs of low IQ.
Why do IQ realists go so wrong? Stigma is part of the story: If IQ realists face grave social disapproval, sensible IQ realists will tend to keep their views quiet. Remaining spokesmen for IQ realism therefore lean crazy. But stigma aside, IQ realists tend to be smart – and self-consciously smart people are often attracted to what I call high-IQ misanthropy. If you marinate in your own misanthropy long enough, common decency fades away.
To repeat, I’m an IQ realist myself. As a result, I’m tempted to deny ugly generalizations about my tribe. But I won’t. As I’ve said before:
So here’s what I say to every IQ realist who forgets common decency: You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself. You embarrass intelligence itself. Teaching IQ with conscience probably won’t end the stigma against the science of intelligence. But if we teach IQ without conscience, we deserve that stigma.
As a right-wing person sympathetic to many EA ideals, I’m surprised when I read these posts about how we need to exclude these people to make attendees comfortable. In fact, excluding these people—who I find incredibly smart, reasonable, and valuable—would make me (and I’m sure many of my friends on the Right) extremely uncomfortable.
Which ideas are it that you find valuable that you think we’re proposing be excluded?
To be clear—the exact problem is that you are proposing excluding specific speakers (Hanania, Hsu, Hanson, the Collinses, etc) - who I find valuable to various degrees, not ideas. If Manifest issued a notice that it was not a venue to discuss IQ or heritability, that seems much more reasonable than excluding these thinkers.
(Why do Hanson and Hanania need to be speakers? They are the foremost advocates of prediction markets on the Right. Their support would be incredibly important in building a cross-party coalition).
I don’t think Hanania is exactly well-positioned to build support on the right; he constantly talks about how much contempt he has for conservatives.
I understand how it may be weird given how much he trolls them, but he is among the most influential writers on the Right.
I second that. He does a pretty good job of making all sides angry.
This raises an interesting point—I think the objectionability of a speaker depends on part on the context of the broader event. For example, Hanania at an event with a bunch of prediction market/forecasting folks and without anyone linked to white nationalism, eugenics, etc. has a meaningfully different feel than Hanania with the lineup that was actually there. (I’m not expressing an opinion about whether I would find any particular speaker lineup to cross the line or not, only that I don’t think evaluating speakers individually without any context is the right mode of analysis.)
There is a difference, though, between “excluding” people who happen to buy a ticket and choosing not to recruit them, elevate them to the status of special guest, and use their attendance to advertise the event. Manifest did not, e.g., exclude holders of various problematic views by failing to recruit any of them or promote them to featured status. To justify this inaction, organizers did not need to first issue a notice that discussion of topics related to those problematic views at Manifest.
To be clear I think I would personally only aim to exclude Hanania, Chau, and Yarvin.
Yarvin didn’t attend.
Also, my sense for Chau is that one of the top reasons he was invited was because he was up for doing a debate with Holly. I personally think one should extend something like “diplomatic immunity” to people from opposing communities if they are participating in a kind of diplomatic role. Facilitating any kind of high-bandwidth negotation between e/acc people and AI-x-risk concerned people seems quite valuable to me, and I e.g. think Manifest should probably invite Sam Altman to debate others on safety if he is up for it for similar reasons, despite me finding him otherwise quite despicable.
(I don’t have a strong take on Hanania. It seems pretty plausible to me based on things other people have said that he should be excluded, but I have learned to take things like that with a grain of salt without checking myself)
Just for the record, I actually invited Brian a few days before he launched AFTF; I proposed a debate afterwards. I would have enjoyed listening to his explanation of the e/acc position even outside a debate context; I think his past background as being solidly EA, eg organizing his university’s EA group, means that he has a unique perspective on this. (And he did end up giving a separate talk, which was very on theme for Manifest—“The Economics of Envy”.) So from my perspective it was less of a case of “diplomatic immunity” and more me genuinely wanting to hear from him.
Props for saying this when you didn’t have to.
I know that I, as a random nobody do not get to police who is EA, but I find myself really quite upset that we are attracting people who say the sort of stuff Chau is recorded saying here. Maybe that is an irrational reaction, and I should celebrate our ability to get people involved in doing good stuff even if they have bad views, which after all is the point. (On balance I think that is wrong, but I’m not being flat out sarcastic when I say it.) But I find these sort of attitudes straightforwardly bigoted.
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/alliance-for-the-future-director
Yeah though this seems more of an EA problem than a manifest one right? Like this kind of seems unrelated to the problem in hand?
I was under the impression that the original intent with Hanania at Manifest 2023 was a similar sort of diplomatic-relations thing: he was going to debate Destiny, but that debate was cancelled because of political pressure.
Damn. I would have loved to have seen that debate happen.
That people keep insinuating that Yarvin attended speaks to the issues with this whole discussion
I would take that deal if it were the difference between you coming and not.
This is a bit self-indulgent of me, but I’m going to quote myself from the comments of the other post, because I think it’s relevant here too:
(To the extent you want to upvote / downvote this sentiment, maybe go do that on the original comment and not this one, unless that feels inappropriate somehow? idk, maybe I’m overthinking this; I removed my own upvote from this post)
It seems to me like the people with exclusionary beliefs here are the ones demanding that people be excluded, not the racists.
Can you expand a little more on “not the racists”? Why not both?
I’m happy to concede that thinking some people should be excluded is an exclusionary belief. If this comes down to excluding one set of people or the other, I feel much better about excluding people based on their beliefs and actions than I do about excluding people based on their genetics or other immutable characteristics.
I agree, but I don’t think anyone involved here has advocated for excluding people from Manifest or ~anything else based on “genetics or other immutable characteristics”?
It just seems Orwellian to describe “person A doesn’t want to associate with person B because of person B’s beliefs” as “person B has exclusionary beliefs”. Person A may or may not be justified, but obviously they are the one being exclusionary.
Nobody’s excluding people based on their genetics or immutable characteristics
I was assigned to female at birth and I happily go to conferences where there are people who have discussed the IQ differences between women and men.
People are deciding to not go to a place because somebody said something they disagreed about about their group.
That is people deciding not to attend an event based on beliefs, not genetics.
Agreed. There is a major difference between thinking someone should be deplatformed just because they have opposing views (e.g., pause AI vs. accelerationist, libertarian vs. communist) and thinking someone should be deplatformed because they promote discriminatory views.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being controversial or outside of the Overton window. Many important ideas were once controversial, and many still are. But it is wrong to actively promote views that are racist, transphobic or sexist and to platform those who do. Not because these views are controversial, but because they go against creating a safe and welcoming environment for all.
That being said, I am not familiar with most of the speakers being discussed here, so I can’t say whether the organizers made the right call or not with them. And I understand not every case is clear cut. But with Richard Hanania they clearly made a bad call in my opinion.
I agree that hurting people and excluding people is bad. As I wrote in the post, we take attendee safety seriously; if an attendee was acting to hurt another attendee, eg by making fun of a trans person for their choice of gender identity, we would not have sanctioned that at Manifest. We also try to make it clear that Manifest itself is inclusionary, open to anyone to attend, unlike conferences which aim for prestige such as EA Global.
I don’t think that our attendees were toxic or exclusionary at Manifest; eg looking through the feedback form, we see few to no complaints of this sort. To the degree people use swear words as alluded to in the EA Forum post, it’s the first I’m hearing about it; I imagine they’re accurately representing what they encountered, but I think it may not paint a very accurate picture to those who were not in attendance.
I think people who would be hurt would be quite hesitant to contact community health personnel at the event, since the event organisers were the ones who invited the controversial guests, and a hurt person could be afraid that whoever they’d contact might hold bigoted views themselves (I feel bad for having to say this out loud. Rest assured I am not accusing you or anyone else in the organiser team of anything here, Austin).
Anyone who might hear such discourse will understandably be discouraged from seeking recourse.
I’m afraid that there really were quite a few toxic people present, and I have to say that I am a bit surprised to see you say otherwise.
I haven’t seen the feedback form answers, and as far as I can recall didn’t highlight these issues when I filled it, but I am also surprised that there were few to no complaints. Is this assessment based on a quick skim, or is it a result of more thorough processing?
For your next event, I encourage you to adopt an anonymous community health contact person contact form, where people can air out their grievances with much less anxiety.
Thanks—I think an anonymous contact person might make sense. Would you have contacted such a person during the course of your attendance at Manifest?
Here’s our feedback form categories for what people said was the best and worst about Manifest. People really liked the conversations, other people, and speakers that were there; and generally disliked the overcrowding, lack of bathrooms, and difficulty of meeting new folks.
For worst things, here’s the full list of what people said was worst in the categories of “people”, “edgy people”, and “gender ratio/demographics”, along with their NPS score (“would you recommend Manifest to a friend with similar interests?”). There were 15 responses in these categories, out of 234 feedback form respondants (at an event with ~600 total attendees)
A couple of these responses did make me feel like we missed the mark—especially 11 and 14. On one hand, I want to keep in mind that with a 600 person event, it’s near impossible to satisfy everyone, and trying to do so often invokes other tradeoffs; on the other, knowing that even a couple attendees felt this way makes me incredibly sad, and I want to provide a better experience in the future. I’m glad that both respondents also highlighted that other people we invited were also some of the best parts of Manifest to them.
Thanks for taking the time to make a thorough reply.
I probably would have. Some of the edgy takes were far beyond the pale, and I haven’t really experienced such things in an in-person context. Having an anonymous form would increase a sense of trust if it is otherwise lacking.
I do suspect that you would be able to get a lot more data on this by asking about experiencing bigotry directly. I do get that it is probably too late for that now, and doing an extra survey for the attendees on this would be costly and would likely make this whole situation more stressful for everyone, but it is an option that can be taken.
It is very human to fail to mention something like this on a feedback form, especially if a typical experience with bigotry for this event is something like hanging out with an edgelord for an hour on day 2 and continuing with the rest of the conference perhaps slightly avoiding them (I’m only guessing this is what a typical experience would look like, since we don’t really have too much data to go on with when it comes to people who experienced bigotry at the events).
My opinions about Manifest are obvious from my linked article, but I think it’s worth explicitly reiterating that you as organizers of the conference have my full confidence and support for how you handled decisions around invitations, organization, and hosting. Part of this is self-interested, I confess: I was a bit of an odd duck at the conference, invited by @Saul Munn despite my lack of particular focus on prediction markets in what struck me as part of an extraordinarily successful decision to prioritize “interesting to the conference organizers and potential attendees” over “safe”. I loved Manifest, loved the chance to present on an off-the-wall topic there, and have never been to a conference where so many sessions felt like must-attends.
I don’t think Manifest did anything to signal edginess, nor do I think its presenters leaned into edginess. Some have controversial views, but I attended many of the sessions under scrutiny and saw nobody who aimed to be edgy for edginess’s sake. Razib gave a fascinating speculative presentation on where the future of biology might go, Jonathan Anomaly’s talk on polygenic screening was compelling and timely, and the Collinses are always gracious and earnest in-person. Is it “safer” to avoid inviting people who dive at time into more heated topics? Absolutely. Does it lead to a more meaningful, more compelling, or more productive conference for attendees? Absolutely not. My impression is that the same approach that led Saul to invite me led you guys to invite and attract a lot of interesting, passionate people who create a remarkably fruitful space to talk about ideas.
Manifest exists at a peculiar intersection of communities that happens to come closer to the spaces I personally spend time than, frankly, anywhere else I have been in person. The tone it struck and its inclusive approach left me feeling like I belonged there in a way almost unattainable in other spaces, and urges to restrict it further towards a particular set of professional-left norms in the name of inclusivity make me wary. There are plenty of conferences that do just that, but there is only one Manifest.
I think it’s unfortunate that an error-riddled article written with an explicit intent to create a mess where none existed, by and in consultation with people who openly hate EA, rationalism, and almost every community that could be said to be part of the Manifest audience, has had the net effect of making people refer to the conference as “controversial” and pushing you as organizers to carefully scrutinize every decision you made in organizing the conference. It was a good event, the world was better for you guys having run it, and restricting its scope to be more “safe” and avoid speakers who Guardian writers are inclined to object to would make it feel—to me and, I suspect, to many like me—meaningfully less inclusive and safe as a place to explore worthwhile ideas around intellectually curious people.
So I have time for some of the arguments made here, but I worry that I could be frog-in-a-pot-boiled into accepting anything. It feels like there should be some things that one should say that are worthy of cancellation or very high costs.
Eg when Hanania tweets, without apology: “Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”
I really like our taboo around racism. That people just don’t say things like that. And so it feels to me likely that breaking the taboo should be $10,000 - $1,000,000 expensive.
I don’t like many orange lines, I like a few very clear red ones. Don’t insult people with reference to their sex, sexuality or race. Don’t dehumanise people or groups of people. If Hanania had just not said a few things he has said, I wouldn’t have much problem, but he doesn’t just tiptoe up to my red lines, he steps over them.
And at that point I feel obliged to kick up a stink, otherwise we really do end up in the world where Manifest is full of edgy racists, who actually do think that some races are morally worse and should be deported or whatever. And that’s a conference I don’t really want to go to.
This is my sort of steelman of my procancellation position. i don’t think it applies to almost anyone but Hanania and there is a way back even for him, but I think if it doesn’t apply here, I’m not sure I would actually hold the view, which I do.
I respect that and agree that those comments cross a line that should not be crossed. I’m sympathetic to the value of red lines and taboos, and I regularly put active effort into defending the sentiment that racism is bad and should be condemned (though I am extremely cautious about tabooing people as a whole based on specific bad sentiments).
It’s more complicated for me here because as mentioned above, I find Hanania’s commentary on other topics unusually valuable and think I have had valuable, worthwhile interactions with him such that I am glad for opportunities to do so.
More than that, I am conscious that many who most eagerly pursue the taboo, including the writers of the Guardian article and people like David Gerard who provided background for it openly despise you, me, and others in these spheres, and given taboo-crafting power would craft a set of norms emphatically disagreeable to me. I think parts of the EA community have themselves shown some susceptibility to similar impulses, throwing people like Nick Bostrom under the bus to do so. That post in particular actively made me more wary of EA spaces and left me wondering who else would be skewered.
The individual who wrote that post no longer works at CEA but openly demands that EA cut ties with the entire rationalist community. I like you and broadly trust your own instincts here, even where we might disagree about where to draw specific lines, but I am extremely wary of yielding norm-setting power to people who treat my approach (engaging seriously with anyone) as worthy of suspicion and condemnation, and I think when they succeed in setting the frame, it works against a lot of the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent community norms I value.
Oh yeah, no I agree with that. I have lost at least one EA friend partly because I wasn’t willing enough to condemn Hanania (despite saying that he said racist stuff and I didn’t want him to speak and pushing for discussion that lead to him being removed as a speaker). People pretty get annoyed at me for what I consider to be milquetoast takes or for trying to reach consensus on difficult discussion[1], I have received an angry screed for criticism of an EA leader. I don’t think EA is particularly safe for me[2]. My instincts here aren’t that this is good.
But I claim that there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed and if that empowers people I don’t like, in the short term, so be it. It’s what I think.
I think there is a line that Hanania can cross and (until he uncrosses it, with some cost) I will push for large costs to be imposed on him. For me, he has crossed that line and I am pretty confused how much value he should create before I say it’s more than the harm but I don’t think he’s done enough so far.
I imagine they would characterise it differently.
Though this is part of the issue, we’re all scared and so fragile. I imagine that some minority EAs feels this way. I talked and read things from some around the bostrom stuff that felt this way.
Do you really like our taboo around racism, or do you like our socially-popular taboo around a narrowly-defined subset of racism (likewise, sex, sexuality, and other class traits)?
I’m no fan of Hanania but I think most people make these broad statements about taboos that they don’t really mean in practice. For certain cultural reasons, those come up less here than the Hanania type despite being right at the “cultural borders,” which could be an interesting anthropological study of its own.
BTW I want to add—to all those who champion Hanania because they think free speech should mean that anyone should be able to be platformed without criticism or condemnation, Hanania is no ally to those principles:
Here’s Hanania:
(Source)
Has anyone said he should be platformed without criticism? The point of contention seems to be that many people think he shouldn’t have been a speaker at all and that everyone who interacts with him is tainted. That is not a subtle difference.
As HL Mencken famously said, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
If principles only apply to the people that uphold them, then they’re not principles: they’re just another word for tribalism. Lovely conflict theory you’ve got there.
One of the reasons I’ve been distancing myself from EA in the last year or so is that it feels like the much celebrated ‘openness to all new ideas’ is a fake cover for the fact that many EAs are racists/euginicists and want to have such opinions around them. In other words, they don’t really champion free speech, but rather just pretend to in order to keep the eugenics talk going.
Edit: while there are some forum users that I’m sure are in the group I described, I don’t know any of the Manifest team and am not ascribing them in particular any beliefs or intentions.
I think this is both rather uncharitable and implausible
I maintain that it’s neither, but I’m particularly curious to hear why you think it’s implausible.
The movement that quite famously spends 2⁄3 of its funding on improving health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa is too racist?
Alas, big movements do struggle to maintain purity, don’t they?
I don’t think the movement can be ascribed a stance on this. What I said, rather, is:
And I stand behind this. They just aren’t the people responsible for the interventions you mentioned.
I don’t think anyone heavily involved in global health stuff has ever said they endorse scientific racism. But I don’t think this is true about eugenics. Of the two people most associated with the founding of GWWC, you’ve criticized Will yourself here on the grounds that you thought some of the stuff he says in WWOTF about cloning scientific geniuses is too eugenicist. And Toby Ord was Bostrom’s co-author on a paper defending attempts to increase the average IQ, through genetic engineering, that I’m guessing you would oppose: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/statusquo.pdf
(As I’ve said elsewhere, I have more complicated feelings about genetic enhancement. I think it is potentially beneficial, but also tends to be correlated with bad politics, and it could be the negative social effects of allowing it outweigh the benefits.)
I appreciate you keeping on open mind on genetic enhancement (i.e., not grouping it with racism and fascism, or immediately calling for it to be banned). Nevertheless, it fills me with a sense of hopelessness to consider that one of the most thoughtful groups of people on Earth (i.e., EAs) might still realistically decide to ban the discussion of human genetic enhancement (I’m assuming that’s the implied alternative to “allowing it”), on the grounds that it “tends to be correlated with bad politics”.
When I first heard about the idea of greater than human intelligence (i.e., superintelligence), I imagined that humanity would approach it as one of the most important strategic decision we’ll ever face, and there would be worldwide extensive debates about the relative merits of each possible route to achieving that, such as AI and human genetic enhancement. Your comment represents such a divergence from that vision, and occurring in a group like this...
If even we shy away from discussing a potentially world-altering technology simply because of its political baggage, what hope is there for broader society to engage in nuanced, good-faith conversations about these issues?
Thanks for correcting me. I do believe they’re much less involved in these things nowadays, but I might be wrong.
I indeed haven’t seen any expression of racism from either, but I chose carefully to write “racist/euginicist” before for this kind of reason exactly. I personally believe even discussing such interventions in the way that they have been in EA has risks (of promoting racist policies by individuals, organizations, governments) that far outweigh any benefits. Such a discussion might be possible privately between people who all know each other very well and can trust each other’s good intentions, but otherwise it is too dangerous.
I agree people are too open to racism, but I don’t think most of them are consciously deceiving people in the manner suggested by calling one thing a cover for another.
Maybe not consciously. Does that make it any better?
Yes I think. Conscious strategic deception is shady regardless of the goal being served, whereas a certain amount of self-deception is kind of inevitable.
I also do think most rationalists would object to demands that some other group didn’t invite left-wing speakers. (Maybe I’m too generous.) Like I think if there was some very left-wing speaker at an EA-adjacent animal activism conference, (edit:) and people wanted them disinvited as too controversial I think rationalists would mostly oppose that. I think they’d oppose a professor being deplatformrd from an academic conference for Black Power-style attacks on white people.
More generally, I think they have a genuinely content-neutral dislike of people being told they can’t say true (as they see it) things because they are offensive. Maybe I am typical-minding here, but my experience growing up with autism in a neurotypical world is that a distates for white lies, and people fooling themselves about what is true to avoid non-conformity, or upsetting group bonding, or just to avoid feeling bad about themselves, is a central experience for people with a broadly autistic type personality. (Never mind whether they are autistic enough to be diagnosable.) I think this far predates people forming their specific political views, rather than being a post-hoc excuse for them. (Actually I also suspect a lot of the incredibly high value rationalists put on “rationality” as they understand is them compensating psychologically for feelings of social inferiority people with this sort of personality type often grow up with. But maybe that’s just me!).
Where I do think they are being (unconsciously) a bit disingenuous is when they imply that the presence of far-right views in their community is just a product of their commitment to openess or imply that they are just as open to radical left or super woke ideas. (Maybe that’s not quite the way to put it: I feel like they’d say something directionally like that but milder and more plausible.)
I appreciate you sharing your experience. It’s different from mine and so it can be that I’m judging too many people too harshly based on this difference.
That said, I suspect that it’s not enough to have this aversion. The racism I often see requires a degree of indifference to the consequences of one’s actions and discourse, or maybe a strong naivety that makes one unaware of those consequences.
I know I can’t generalize from one person, but if you see yourself as an example of the different mindset that might lead to the behaviour I observed—notice that you yourself seem to be very aware of the consequences of your actions, and every bit of expression from you I’ve seen has been the opposite of what I’m condemning.
Edit: for those downvoting, I would appreciate feedback on this comment, either here or in a PM.
Great comment and overview of the event, which I very much enjoyed.
Was anyone there who had ever uttered a previous phrase or sentence with which I might disgree, even firmly so? Almost certainly.
I mean, Eliezer was there, and he has suggested that human infants might be susceptible to killing up to 18 months (https://x.com/antoniogm/status/1632162012229693440), which I regard as unbelievably monstrous.
But even if someone said something monstrous, I’m still willing to hear them out, to attend a conference with them, and to attempt to persuade them otherwise (if it comes up). And who knows, maybe some belief of mine might turn out to seem monstrous to other people. I should hope they’d try to engage with me.
Trying to cancel folks because they spoke at an event but another speaker said a bad thing 15 years ago—that’s an absurd level of guilt by association.
This is a very uncharitable, bordering on dishonest, interpretation of the critics of this event.
Like, even if you’re talking about the guardian article, which definitely has an anti-EA stance, I would describe their main “cancellation” (not a fan of how this word is used) targets as Lightcone and manifest. The charge is that lightcone hosted a conference filled with racist speakers at the lighthaven campus, and that manifest invited said speakers to the conference.
I don’t see them cancelling, say, nate silver, who fills your description of “spoke at the event but another speaker said a bad thing 15 years ago”.
Also, “said a bad thing 15 years ago” is an absurd twisting of the accusations. Hanania said some really, really racist things under a pseudonym up to 2012 (12 years ago, not 15) that he apologises for, but even the OP admits that he still says “distasteful” things today on twitter, and I personally think he’s still pretty racist. And most of the other controversial speakers have never apologised for anything, and plenty of the things they said were recent, like the comments of brian chau.
Hanania has said racist things last year
For context, Daniel Penny (white) killed Jordan Neely, a homeless black man, who had been shouting at penny on the subway. Hanania is generally supportive of harsher measures against crime and this tweet (and Hanania’s history) make it likely to me that he is describing black people as animals, rather than Penny, who wasn’t harassing someone in the subway or to my knowledge wearing a suit and who Hanania probably supports. This is a gross thing to say[1]. And if Hanania wanted to clarify it, he could, but hasn’t.
In Hanania’s defence, he hasn’t said anything this racist more recently. But that’s a low bar.
There is some kind of clarification here that we are all animals and that being an animal isn’t bad, but Hanania isn’t doing some “all people are animals and that’s good” bit, he’s probably being very racist.
I’d bet that he didn’t mean black people here.
Ah, that is a fair point!
He wasn’t referring to black people. 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.
I recommend editing your comment to update it based on new information.
Signal boosting incorrect and damaging information about somebody is bad for discourse.
And there’s a real difference between—for example—inviting someone to talk about AI safety and inviting someone to talk about their belief that human infants might be susceptible to killing up to 18 months.
To me, whether to deplatform someone due to unrelated speech or conduct that is sufficiently objectionable is a much more difficult question than whether to allow them to present said objectionable views at one’s conference (or views that are adjacent to said views).
The main debate here is whether people who ever aid controversial things should be allowed to attend an event at all, and/or to give a talk about unrelated issues.
I think that characterization collapses some nuances that I think are relevant, in a way that takes some of the heat off of Manifest.
We can envision a continuum of potential organizer actions with respect to individuals with problematic views; the example I gave had the lower end of the continuum in mind while Manifest organizers took actions further along the continuum. I’m keeping “problematic views” pretty vague at most levels here because I’m trying to expose some cruxes at a high level.
The first levels involve ordinary invitees:
Organizers hold a ~open-admission event with no speakers or promotion targeted to problematic views; people with problematic views decide to buy tickets. Organizers do not create a special exception to their generally-applicable rules to exclude them.
Organizers hold a selective-admission event with no speakers or promotion targeted to problematic views; people with problematic views decide to apply without organizer encouragement. Organizers decide to admit them.
Organizers directly or indirectly recruit people with problematic views to attend (e.g., individual outreach, promoting the event in certain places).
Above that, we have special invitees and presenters:
4. Organizers give individuals with problematic views public special guest status and use their attendance to promote the event. In addition to making the event more attractive to people with problematic views more, this may reasonably cause people in the groups targeted by the problematic views to feel emotionally unwelcome at the event.
5. Organizers platform individuals with problematic views on topics clearly unrelated to their problematic views. Having someone with problematic views about race talk about prediction markets will often fall into this category. We might split it into 5A or 5B, depending on whether pre-event publicity makes the specific topic on which the person will be speaking very clear.
6. Organizers platform individuals with problematic views on topics that are potentially or somewhat related to their problematic views. Having someone with problematic views about race talk about biology in the next century will often fall into this category. I’d have to hear the individual’s presentation to know how related it was to the problematic views. Of course, a potential Manifest attendee who is a person of color won’t have this luxury.
7. Organizers platform individuals with problematic views on topics that are related to their problematic views.
In general, my view of how problematic is too problematic will tighten as we move across the continuum. In contrast, I see “whether people who ever aid controversial things should be allowed to attend an event at all” as grounded at levels 1 and 2, and “unrelated” doesn’t address that there’s a continuum of relatedness that separates my 5th and 6th levels.
OK, fair enough, what I said was perhaps a bit overstated. It is even more overstated to refer to a “conference filled with racist speakers” etc.
You say you had 57 speakers (or i guess more that weren’t featured?). An attendee estimates that 8 speakers in lessonline and manifest had scientific racism controversies (with 2 more debatebly adjacent). Obviously this isn’t an exact estimate, but it looks like something on the order of 5-10% of the speakers had scientific racism ties.
What percentage of speakers were African American (or african anything else)? I did not see any of the 30 with pictures on the site, so i’d guess something on the order of 0-3%.
Do you see a problem with a conference that has something like twice or three times as many scientific racist speakers as it does black people speakers?
These speakers are not a representative slice of society. Scientific racists are much, much more rare, and black people are much, much more common. If your goal is a free exchange of ideas, the ideas you are recieving here are vastly skewed in one direction.
The actual effect of this type of speaker list is to push out anti-racists, and encourage more people sympathetic to scientific racism to join your community. I think this is bad!
Just to note, many unrelated communities underrepresent black people eg, to quote Scott Alexander,
and manifest likely heavily overrepresented queer and neurodivergent people. It’s unclear to me that every single minority group should be represented perfectly in every single community (do we hold EA to this standard? what % of EA talks are given by black people?).
I think it’s pretty hard to have your community be about even 1 thing, let alone 1 thing + perfect representation of every group. The sectors that Manifest draws from (forecasting, crypto, heterodoxy, rationalism, EA, tech) probably all have low black representation, so it seems a lot to ask manifest alone to improve this.
To state the obvious, I don’t expect manifest ever to have 50⁄50 gender representation (though I think it would be better if it were, say, 80⁄20[1] than like 95⁄5). To give another example in the forecasting space Metaculus is very polite, online, and doesn’t allow controversial questions and for a long time had a female CEO. Even then I don’t think that more than 1 in 20 metaculus forecasters were women. That suggests to me that there is something going on more than purely “unwelcomeness”.
That said, I would appreciate if “strong racism not being common” was a pretty important goal, because if it isn’t, I imagine I’ll stop attending.
Strangely, of all the large events I saw over the LessOnline/Manifest 9 days the Scott Alexander meetup was the one that seemed to contain the most women. I have no idea what that implies.
I think we’re missing the dynamic though where there’s a very clear theory for why Manifest would be dramatically less appealing to black people or to women, when you have a platformed and promoted speaker(!!) who think we need mass surveillance of black people to reduce crime or think that intellectual debate is an inherently male activity that women are less well suited to. It’s not a mystery here. Why would it be fun to “balance out” that?
I am very confident that the variance explained by speaker choice is vastly less than the variance explained by the demographics of the forecasting community, compared to a US population baseline.
I would be happy to bet on this, since I am sure we will have events that have different speaker line up but drawing from the same community, and I am sure that from a US population baseline, they will differ relatively little (my best guess is there will be a small directional effect for gender for Manifest, since the event feels a bit more masculine than other community events, but no measurable directional effect for race).
I think it is likely that a perception of sympathy or ambivalence to racism reduces the number of black people interested in being part of the rationalism / Effective Altruism communities.
I doubt the signal from a single event like this is strong enough to be detectable, but I’d be surprised if media coverage like the Guardian’s write-up didn’t have an effect on demographic compositions of the community in the aggregate.
I’d grant that specific invite list of a given event are smaller drivers than the general popularity as important intellectuals of figures like Hanania who explicitly or implicitly endorse human biodiversity.
I would guess that even without Hanania the event would have had ~the same black attendance. I don’t think Hanania was at LessOnline and that event wasn’t notably more black. I don’t like Hanania either, but I don’t think your theory predicts what we see. Given the lack of black people in basically all the constituent communities of Manifest I wouldn’t expect much.
If we wanted manifest to have black attendees then probably the way to do it would be to invite some influencers with large black followings. If I recall correctly there are a number of debate streamers who are black.
But if Manifest really is wide-open as to subject matter, one would expect this kind of effect to be less pronounced than for narrower subject matter. For example, I’d be concerned if the speakers in a TED speaker series in the U.S. were only 2% were African-American (or African). My default level of concern would be much less in a bird-watching speaker series.
I’d note that the small percentage for some of those groups memberships are affected by systemic racism (Wall Street executives), by cultural factors (having parents who practice a religion is a major factor as to whether someone will do the same), by socioeconomic factors (running marathons is correlated with income, as is race).
Moreover, Manifest had control over the diversity of invitees, so “few African-Americans were interested in actually coming” wouldn’t be a great explanation of a very low percentage rate for invitees. This is particularly true where the organizers assert that they were trying to bring together diverse perspectives.
Right now, for me, removing speakers who say racist things is a much higher priority than seeking racial balance in attendees. And probably higher than either is having an event which pushes towards the truth, since I generally think this is so hard. But I agree that there are lots of black intellectuals and streamers I’d love to listen to.
I can imagine thinking that it would be good to push slightly on speakers in the representation direction. The problem is it can quite quickly shift away from having the speakers the community most wants to hear. Probably I’d have a big poll and then anyone can nominate speakers, anyone can vote. In that world, representative speakers can be bumped up if everyone wants that but that has a cost to attendees themselves.
Hanania seems kinda racist but nonetheless great to invite to Manifest.
(This started out as an in-person diatribe to a friend, and he told me that it might be good if the EA forum heard it. Sorry Austin. I wanted to make it a Quick Take, but for some reason I’m not able to make those.)
tl;dr: tweets bad, blog good, books dunno. It’s fine to advocate for various exclusions, but try reading more than a few sentences before joining the mob, lest you make unnecessary epistemic sacrifices.
I’m not too bothered by people’s objections to Hanania’s invitation. Mostly I’m seeing people say that his presence makes them less interested in attending. Some amount of that seems pretty much guaranteed to happen at any event with sufficiently interesting attendees and consequential topics. We all can and will advocate for our own preferences and the Overton window we think is best[1]. I think concerns about Hanania attracting edgelords are valid, but given how good his blog is, I think he is still net positive for Manifest.
(EDIT for clarification: my own Overton window is not infinitely permissive, but it is permissive enough for Richard Hanania to be inside it.)
Hanania’s twitter repulses me, and I am consciously annoyed every time his blog links to it. (I pay to read his blog.) He has supposedly claimed that his “animals” tweet did not have racist intent. I am not personally willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one, but I think the stakes are low. Good thinkers say ugly and provocative things on Twitter all the time and are rewarded with engagement; this is nothing new or special. I think some people’s twitter accounts do cause outsized material harm, but Hanania’s probably does not.
If you’re curious about the less twitterized version of Hanania, you could read Critical Age Theory, Interracial Crime and “Perspective”, and Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide? Here are his forecasting articles. And here is Scott Alexander’s review of his book The Origins of Woke. Each of those posts gave me something to ponder (and I wish it went without saying that this is not an endorsement of their conclusions).
You may have seen people sharing the first paragraph of the following quotation from his blog (emphasis added):
I have a hard time interpreting this passage. In any case, here is a link to him interviewing a socialist, and here is a link to him interviewing a feminist transwoman. That’s not proof that Hanania wouldn’t exclude your own favorite blogger from a conference if he could. But I have seen other commenters treat that first paragraph as some kind of indisputably anti-enlightenment smoking gun, which I find annoyingly sloppy and incurious.
I’ve seen one or two comments giving Hanania’s book against civil rights law as a reason[2] to shun him. Sadly, it seems like a much larger number of people want to exclude him on the basis of the racist tweet and a couple of decontextualized quotations. Again, people can advocate for whatever they want, on whatever basis makes sense to them—I just gotta voice my disappointment in the apparent illiteracy[3].
In addition to promoting prediction markets, Richard Hanania writes in favor of allowing euthanasia, increasing market freedom, reducing animal suffering, and deinstitutionalizing childhood[4]. In his white nationalist days, he wrote that all latinos who entered the country after 1965 should be deported, but now he writes against immigration restrictions in general....It seems like the guy thinks for himself and is able to sharply change his mind. That weighs more heavily on my moral scales than some racist tweets.
I don’t think I am going to change many minds about Richard Hanania’s invitation to Manifest. I think that different people just have highly divergent Overton windows, and will have to agree to disagree, and will occasionally be excluded or alienated from one another’s events. But I think that my friend was right that the small amount I can tug on this discourse is probably worth the effort of writing this.
The stuff about Republicans being unsuited to EA was surprising and sad, but I am in favor of people honestly expressing their opinions, however parochial or distorted they seem to me.
I haven’t read Hanania’s Origins of Woke but I have read Thomas Sowell’s Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? which I consider to be Huge If True, not obviously false, and presumably not motivated by racial hatred. If you think Hanania should be excluded due to his book, would you think the same thing if instead it was Sowell who took an interest in prediction markets and wanted to attend Manifest? Genuinely curious.
Hanania thinks that Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV. I think that EAs skim twitter :(
In fact, Hanania is one of very few bloggers who has humane opinions about schooling and childhood. For this and other reasons, I would prefer to see him influence policy than a randomly selected EA Forum user (setting aside AI).
Your comment seems reasonable, but I’m not sure there’s a world where I’m ever OK with this
“Hanania seems kinda racist but nonetheless great to invite to Manifest.”
We think someone is probably racist from public facing materials
We actively invite them to an event
I think you had reasonable reasons why you were ok with Hananiah, but didn’t directly outline your reasons for why you think the racism isn’t a deal breaking problem.
Would be interested what other people are good with this, and how they square this.
I like the above a lot, though I’m not sure whether I agree with it. On this specific quote:
I guess, the question here is how valuable a norm against racism is. I dunno, it seems pretty valuable to me. Like imagine he’d killed someone and was on the run. How bad does some random behavior have to be to get one thrown out of the club. My sense is there is a line somewhere.
I guess I also have some sense that irreversible behaviour is especially bad. Breaking good norms (such as tweeting racist things) is especially harmful perhaps.
I don’t really know, I’m trying to figure out norms like everyone else, but the idea that there are no lines that one can cross to lose status—that interesting ideas are all that matters—seems misguided to me.
I certainly agree with you about that. Maybe I want to edit my initial comment to make that more apparent.
I do have a red line that falls between murder and the “animals” tweet. I expect that if we tried really hard to figure out our red lines, some of them would be close but some of them would be pretty far off. That’s what I meant to say with the final paragraph:
I was deliberately vague when I said “low stakes” and “material harm”, and I think it’s good that you pointed that out while still keeping it vague (“pretty valuable”). I did think about being specific instead, but an object-level discussion of the costs and benefits of the racism taboo would probably be a derail in this thread, even though they would indeed be crucial (cruxy, I mean) to a lot of the commenters arguing here. It might be pretty clarifying if you or someone else held that discussion in the right (perhaps highly gatekept) place—it could help people update their own Overton windows, or it could just help you understand the psychology of an incorrigible racist, either of which could make for good epistemic lessons.
I also think Not Just a Mere Political Issue is a helpful post in figuring these things out.
Fair, although it is also fair to characterize the controversial content as fairly substantial and not isolated. Looking at RSVPs on the Saturday schedule for content appears to be controversial:
Collins and Collins had 57 RSVPs, second in the timeslot
Anomaly had 60 RSVPs, second in the timeslot
G. Smith had 86 RSVPs, first in the timeslot[1]
Khan had 76 RSVPs, second in the timeslot
[For purposes of this exercise, I did not code Robin Hanson or Scott Alexander as “controversial,” in part because their sessions seemed to clearly focus on non-controversial content.]
In my view, a neutral observer who reviewed the schedule and RSVP numbers would likely conclude that eugenics was a major topic/focus of the conference relative to most topics (but behind forecasting/prediction). The platforming of people with problematic views on race should be considered in that context.
I haven’t found much information about Smith, so the coding of that session as controversial is tentative. I preliminarily coded that way because the post I found clearly advocated for practical eugenics, and so at least thematically fit in with the rest of the “eugenics / eugenics-adjacent track.”
Some further data: even though I took part in some of these sessions, I didn’t RSVP to them since RSVP status was public through the schedule website.
For context, the total number of RSVPs on the conference schedule was around 14,000 (edit: this is for the whole conference season, for Manifest in-particular it was closer to 7000). So by “substantial” you mean something like 279⁄14,000 = ~2% (edit: or 4% limiting it to just Manifest).
Given that the quote was “our,” was written by Austin, and was in a post about Manifest, I don’t see the argument for including non-Manifest RSVPs in the denominator. Indeed, my sample was events on Saturday (the day’s schedule that Austin screenshotted in the post), although it does appear that the eugenics content was concentrated on that day,
I would probably exclude RSVPs to things like “dinner,” “party,” social events, etc. as non-substantive. I also have no way to discern how much “scientific” racism was going on at dinner or parties. Removing these from the denominator implicitly sets their racism percentage as equal to the racism percentage of the substantive sessions, which seems more likely than assuming they were at 0%. Stated differently, dinner is just dinner; it does not dilute the relative concentration of any particular substantive content.
Admittedly, the percentage of these RSVPs over the entire adjusted Manifest event RSVPs as denominator will presumably be in the single digits. Is that “fairly significant” (I used the qualifier in my comment)? I would say yes:
“Fairly significant” is a flexible term, and I think the necessary quantum is ordinarily lower when we’re talking about objectionable content. To take an extreme example, suppose you don’t like your child hearing a certain word that appears 50 times in a two-hour movie. That’s only ~50 seconds out of 7200, or 0.694 percent. But most parents would call far less than 50 uses of a particular word in a movie fairly significant! I don’t mean to suggest that 0.694 percent is per se significant, only that this kind of percentage analysis can miss the mark when objectionable content is involved.
I expect that conducting a similar percentage analysis on other topics would show the eugenics/controversial cluster fairly high on the list of clusters. This is a form of relative significance; the topic drew a relatively high amount of interest when compared to various other topics at hand. Moreover, in the examples I mentioned, the talk was first or second out of perhaps five or six options. Sometimes the most-RSVP’d event was something expected to be very popular (like a Robin Hanson talk), and the other options were generally not weak. I think that provides some support for a conclusion that the content was fairly significant in context.
I think I would take that bet, in the sense that if you actually ranked all clusters (including overlapping clusters) of content at this level of coherence of a cluster, that it probably wouldn’t rank in the top 10. This is of course not a great operationalization, and it would take a lot of work to get to an actual bet, but as someone who attended the event, my current best guess is we disagree on a relatively concrete object-level claim.
Agree! I just accidentally looked up the wrong number in my comment, and then didn’t want to stealth-edit it.
It’s true that people with abhorrent views in one area might have interesting or valuable things to say in other areas—Richard Hanania, for example, has made insightful criticisms of the modern American right.
However, if you platform/include people with abhorrent views (e.g. “human biodiversity”, the polite euphemism for the fundamentally racist view some racial groups have lower IQ than others—which is a view held by a number of Manifest speakers), you run into the following problem—that the bad chases out the good.
The net effect of inviting in people with abhorrent views is that it turns off most decent people, either because they morally object to associating with such abhorrent views, or because they just don’t want the controversy. You end up with a community with an even smaller percentage of decent people and a higher proportion of bigots and cranks, which in turn turns off even more decent people, and so on and so forth. Scott Alexander himself says it best in his article on witches:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
At the end of the day, platforming anyone whatsoever will leave you only with people rejected by polite society, and being open to all ideas will leave you with only the crank ones.
I think there probably is a solution here, which is to give status to people who are either generative or have good forecasting track records. If that doesn’t work, plausibly limiting open tickets to manifold users and forecasters with a small pool of other tickets.
I think I prefer rate limits over bans—so allowing some percentage of possibly racist attendees rather than having it be none but with a fundamentally different event.
Could you explain more of what you mean by “generative”?
People who come up with surprising ideas.
My models is that relatively few people are both very generative and very well calibrated. It’s hard to be the sort of person who comes up with many novel theories or connections (Robin Hanson) and who is generally right about whatever they say (Peter Wildeford).
John Arnold made what I thought was a really good point the other day:
https://x.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1782401129252372651
I think if Manifest really wants to succeed at being bipartisan, this is the path to take.
Instead of focusing on the crowd you will/won’t affiliate with, or the cost/benefit ratio for individual participants, focus on what is and isn’t acceptable behavior.
Document your rules in advance. Enforce them consistently. Change them slowly and deliberately. Try to avoid retroactive enforcement of new changes.
If you’re really serious about this, put together a 3-person commission (one person on the left, one person on the right, one person in the middle) to scrutinize potential attendees against your written rules, and decide who’s in compliance. When you announce speakers in advance of the event, you could invite anyone who wants to challenge a speaker to privately contact the commission with their concerns.
The goal is, if there’s an uproar, you’ve already considered all the relevant info, you know your decision, and you can stick by it. You don’t want to fall into the trap of being easily influenced by an uproar, because that incentivizes uproar, and partisans of all stripes have noticed. People will notice if you’re easily swayed by uproar, or if you instinctively resist it, and either way it hurts the credibility of your judgement.
I would guess that putting up a fence like this is the best way to prevent a slide into partisanship of one form or another.
The trouble is that an uproar is often also what you get when you fucked up badly. Uproars really do contain information, and you ignore that information at your peril.
Big doubt from me that uproars are particularly sensitive to whether you in particular have displayed receptiveness to uproars in the past. It seems especially implausible when you note that the original post had a call to action at least as much for the EA community (“It is probably wise to have a stronger separation between EA and rationalism”) as for Manifest, so how much notice Manifest takes is arguably only peripherally important to the goals of the post.
Checking if we actually disagree: Do you believe it is usually correct to excommunicate an innocent person if they become sufficiently unpopular?
Do you believe there are situations where people become unpopular online for fairly capricious reasons? Perhaps this situation?
Do you believe this has happened with EA in the past? Do we deserve all the backlash we got derived from SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres?
I’m not sure what “uproars contain information” is supposed to mean. It seems almost tautologically true that uproars related to Dylan Mulvaney, SBF, the OpenAI Board, and Émile Torres “contain information”. There is information stored on servers related to those uproars. The Dylan Mulvaney uproar “informs” me that lots of Budweiser customers dislike trans influencers. So?
It’s hard to create a good set of rules. You won’t do it perfectly. And yes, uproars might correlate with weaknesses in your rules. The point is to try to avoid mob rule, and create a situation where stakeholders can feel confident that decisions are being made in a considered way.
Suppose Manifest was to publish a set of rules they’re going to follow and ask for community feedback, and the community says the rules look good. Then 6 months later the Guardian or Fox News writes a hit piece on Manifest, and their hit piece accuses a Manifest attendee of something within the agreed-upon rules, and some people in the community are up in arms. Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious? Perhaps in this hypothetical, the uproar is more of a preference cascade than a considered judgement?
I’m not claiming this is true for this particular uproar, but I think it helps explain e.g. why university administrators received so much flak for their handling of Israel/Palestine protests, and why certain controversial figures such as Dave Chappelle and Jordan Peterson eventually acquire resilience.
I happen to think Richard Hanania crossed a line with this tweet. I think Manifest should refrain from inviting him to future events, but not because he’s unpopular or because he would bring reputation risks or because he’s good or bad at forecasting. I think he violated an important social norm, of the sort that can be operationalized in writing and upheld in the future. And btw, I predict that if Hanania is excluded on these grounds, as opposed to “he has the wrong vibes” or “he’s unpopular” grounds, the risk of a right-wing backlash against Manifest will be decreased. And if their goal is bipartisanship, I think their fear of backlash should be symmetric.
I recommend taking comments like these and making them two separate comments.
I really wanted to upvote one section and downvote another, and now I’m just not voting at all.
Generally speaking, it’s good to break your long comments into shorter ones where each makes a particular point.
I very much believe “uproars contain information” and don’t believe “uproars are always directionally correct”. I’m not sure where I’d stand on “uproars are usually directionally correct”, but in any case they are often enough directionally wrong that I don’t think you’re obligated to accept their conclusions just because they happened.
I guess I just don’t believe that people are capable of assembling decision-making committees that are so robust to making misjudgements that people trying to attack your decisions from outside can be safely assumed to be in error and ignored. Whatever you think you’ve done to come up with good rules and a good process, sometimes you’ll have missed something big or not appreciated the importance of some angle, and people being upset with you will be how you find that out. If you want the best shot you can get at achieving your own goals, you notice all that stuff, and you take it into consideration, and you ask questions like “am I making a mistake here?” and “is it possible I have a blind spot that’s clouding my judgement on this?”. Importantly, also, you’ll ask “even if I think all these people are being unreasonable in many ways, are there nevertheless kernels of truth to take away here? Is there something to learn from how this unfolded?”. Sometimes even then the answer will be no! As long as you made a genuine best effort to look for the truth in what people said, that’s enough for me.
My take is that for every outrage that’s basically a restatement of the culture war (and thereby ~useless), there’s another that’s basically someone overlooking something that is obviously correct in retrospect, that they wish they’d thought of six months ago, but somehow slipped through. And there’s, of course, a spectrum in between. This stuff is hard, and I believe in the collaborative process of developing our knowledge and experience around it.
I think if someone believed either that committees and structures are much more effective than I think they are, or that outrages are much less often right than I think they are, then that would be a good reason to disagree with this take. Though I would caution against an availability bias that makes incorrect outrages more noticeable than correct ones, both because you are likely to have a stronger reaction to the incorrect ones and because the correct ones are more quickly resolved.
FWIW I have not actually read the Guardian article and made all my judgements based on the direct reported experiences and attitudes of people on the Forum. I think (though not confidently) that most people are overstating the importance of the Guardian article in what happened here. I think most of the people who are now objecting to (say) Richard Hanania at Manifest would have objected just as much if they’d heard about it sooner, and only didn’t because they didn’t notice (or didn’t think there was a good opportunity to be heard about it).
I made a small poll to try and figure out what consensus and disagreeing views are. You can add your own statements.
I’ll post it on both articles, please only vote once. Likewise please take the results with a pinch of salt because I can’t gate to one vote per user.
Results here: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-and-manifest/results
(If you want more people to answer this poll consider upvoting it)
Early poll results (take with a pinch of salt)
The two most cruxy seem to be
Most consensus—there is a lot we agree on
Most conflict—seems to be around whether manfold did enough and whether there should be a split been EA and rationalism
Most confusion - lots of confusion about the manifest financial situation, it’s aims and what the events was actually like.
I feel like you should give it more time than just three hours before posting results. At least 24 hours sounds reasonable. The results for me already looked quite different from what you posted.
For example:
Hmmm i intended to keep updating them
Yeah, because there’s such a geographically clustered dichotomy in views between the London set and the SF set, it seems pretty important to me to give it 24 hours yeah.
Also just a general generic caution: we should know that this poll will mainly be seen by only the most active and most engaged people, which may not be representative enough to generalize.
This is also a reason to exercise great caution in interpreting early results; I would expect this statement to be even more true as applied to the first 6-48ish hours than it it is at a week.
I do want to make the point that how tied to EA you are isn’t really your choice. The reason it’s really easy for media outlets to tie EA to scientific racism is that there’s a lot of interaction with scientific racists and nobody from the outside really cares if events like this explicitly market themselves as EA events or not. Strong free speech norms enabling scientific racism have always been a source of tension for this community, and you can’t just get around that by not calling yourselves EA.
One thing Manifest could do is stop actively associating with EA — promoting their events and funding platforms on this forum, etc. etc.
Of course, EA entities (e.g., CEA) could also make that happen.
Austin, I’m gathering there might be a significant and cruxy divergence in how you conceptualize Manifold’s position in and influence on the EA community and how others in the community conceptualize this. Some of the core disagreements discussed here are relevant regardless, but it might help clarify the conversation if you describe your perspective on this.
Yeah, I think that’s a great observation. I think of Manifold as a small player in the EA space—it’s a team of ~8 people, and not an explicitly EA org (I think I’m the only person on the team who explicitly identified as EA, a few of my coworkers are sympathetic). We’ve received some EA funding, but most of our funding comes from venture capital sources. Meanwhile Manifund is approximately an EA org, but we’re also small players so far (I’d guess like half or more of the attendees of EAG London have not even heard of Manifund).
I also think of Manifest as something like, a scaled up house party, rather than an arbiter of who is good or notable in forecasting/EA. It’s an event we created from scratch, and primarily serves the audience of “fans of Manifold”, which makes me feel a bit defensive about my ability to invite who I please. If I have more influence in the EA community than this, that’s a bit of a surprise—I’d like to use that influence well because I care about EA, but I don’t feel especially beholden to the community at large (a very formless and difficult to parse entity, in the first place)
Forecasting is young, and in putting on Manifest you have quite a lot of influence on how the field grows and matures.
To the extent that you have (and I think that you should have) goals around the kind of field you want to build, who you invite to your conference seems much more consequential to me than who you invite to a house party.
(I am not saying anything either way on the choices you’ve made with invites etc, only on how I’d encourage you to think about them)
Yeah—in practice, I know that conference invites are consequential (and we discussed this as a team, eg very abbreviated Apr 22 meeting notes). I use the words “scaled up house party” to try to implant a bit of how bizarre it feels to me that, like, something that was just an idea in my head 1.5 years ago, now has attracted many of my favorite writers in the world, received multiple major media mentions, and is viewed as consequential. I also think that there’s something special about our invite process which leads to the feeling of “how it feels to attend Manifest”, and I and many attendees are overall quite happy with the outcome—TracingWoodgrains talks more about this here. While I want to continue to improve on how we shape who comes to Manifest, I also don’t want to kill the golden goose.
While Manifest is a forecasting festival, I’m not sure I’m really trying to build up the field of forecasting in general, rather than something more specific and tautological like “the Manifest community”. Even more than EA, forecasting is a formless vague entity, without a clear leader or in/out distinction.
Appreciate Manifold’s quantitative transparency because Manifold’s qualitatively misleading. Public data may be slightly outdated but seeing ~$2.4M EA funding to Manifold for Charity and ~$2.4M EA funding and <$2M in non-EA VC funding to Manifold:
https://www.notion.so/manifoldmarkets/Manifold-Finances-0f9a14a16afe4375b67e21471ce456b0#d13406b6b26a43178d09609135aa38c6
Grants are funding, and Manifold seems mostly EA-funded, even excluding Manifold for Charity
Note that SFF explicitly does not identify as an EA Funder. I think there are of course still social ties here, and I don’t want to police people’s internal categories, but it seems like a relevant thing to bring up. I remember Critch clarifying this at some point in a comment somewhere, but I can’t find it, but I am reasonably confident that Critch and Jaan would both say something like “SFF is not an ‘EA funder’, please do not try to hold us to EA standards” if explicitly asked.
I think what to do here is a bit messy, since of course SFF is similar to EA funders in important ways, but I think the specific way it is being invoked here, where funding by SFF tries to somehow police people as therefore being members of a community, is something that SFF has reasonable right to object to, and as far as I know, does indeed object to.
Interpret data semantics as desired. At least I linked data my claims were based on upon, especially considering original claims still seem untrue regardless if SFF is considered EA:
Yep, I wasn’t intending to disagree with all the stuff you said. Overall your complaint seems quite reasonable to me, I just had one local comment (which did seem relevant to the overall conclusion).
To preface, I don’t think this point is load-bearing/cruxy to the question of “is Manifold EA?” or “is Manifold a large player in the EA space?”, which itself is also something of a side point.
I was referring specifically to Manifold Markets as the we in “We’ve received some EA funding, but most of our funding comes from venture capital sources.”—right afterwards I agree that Manifund (aka Manifold for Charity) is an EA org.
Manifold Markets has received ~2.9M in investment and ~1.5M in grants, which were the figures I had in mind when I said “most of our funding comes from VC”. One complicating factor is that of the investment, 1M came from a FTX Future Fund regrant, structured as an equity investment through Alameda Research. Does that count as EA funding or VC? Idk, I think that counts in both categories, but if you characterize that as exclusively EA funding I agree it would be fair to say “Manifold has received more in EA funding than in venture capital”.
To my knowledge, Manifold for Charity grants did not only fund Manifund; Manifold for Charity grants seemingly funded Manifold’s currency donation platform too
Once debating if:
* Manifold for Charity should be excluded
* Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) funding is EA
* FTX Future Fund funding is EA
The original comment feels reductive and I’d rather data be linked upfront rather than feeling dragged into revealing data and motte-and-bailey-esque threads
I agree the comment is reductive; many sentences are, due to the fractal nature of information. I generally wrote trying to balance correctness with informativeness with “actually publishing the damn post, rather than being maximally defensive”.
In any case, I appreciate that you linked to our finances, and that you like how we publish our numbers openly to the world!
This feels important to me and I hope we get a reply
Thanks for spelling this out.
I think to give some color to how this affects my work in particular (speaking strictly for myself as I haven’t discussed this with others on my team):
One of our organization priorities is ensuring we are creating a welcoming and hopefully safe community for people to do good better, regardless of people’s identities. A large part of our work is familiarizing people with and connecting them to organizations and resources, including ones that aren’t explicitly EA-branded. We are often one of their first touch points within EA and its niches, including forecasting. Many factors shape whether people decide to continue and deepen their involvement, including how positive they find these early touch points. When we’re routing people toward organizations and individuals, we know that their perception of our recommendations in turn affects their perception of us and of EA as a whole.
Good, smart, ambitious people usually have several options for professional communities to spend their time within. EA and its subcommunities are just one option and an off-putting experience can mean losing people for good.
With this in mind, I will feel much more reluctant to direct community members to Manifold in particular and (EA-adjacent) forecasting spaces more broadly, especially if the community member is an underrepresented group in EA. I think Manifold brings a lot of value, but I can’t in good conscience recommend they plug into communities I believe most people I am advising would find notably morally off-putting.
This is of course a subjective judgement call, I understand there are strong counterarguments here, and what repels one person also attracts another. But I hope this gives a greater sense of the considerations/trade-offs I (and probably many others) will have to spend time thinking about and reaching decisions around as a result of Manifest.
Thanks; I also appreciate you sharing your rationale here. I think this makes sense from your perspective, and while I think Manifest and Manifold in fact would be great experiences for people of all kinds, including underrepresented folks, I totally understand if we haven’t proven this to you at this point. Next time I’m in NYC, I’d enjoy speaking with you or other members of EA NYC, if you’d like that!
(I also want to note that my views shouldn’t reflect on “forecasting” any more than they reflect on “EA”; see Ozzie and Peter Wildeford’s comments for what forecasting more broadly is like. I’m in the awkward position of having run a platform for many forecasters, but not participating much as a forecaster myself.)
Just for your information, as a non-binary person who was assigned female at birth (so definitely under-represented in EA), I would find it very upsetting if I knew you were trying to control which ideas and people I was exposed to.
I find speciesist attitudes morally offputting, but if you would keep events from me because some people there were speciesist, I’d consider you to be being a bad friend.
People are different. Some people consider what you’re suggesting to be helpful. I do not. I just want you to be aware about the differences in preferences there, and not think that all “underrepresented groups” would feel uncomfortable going to events with speakers they deeply disagree with.
I do also want to clarify that I have no desire to “control which ideas and people [anyone] is exposed to.” It is more so, “If I am recommending 3 organizations I think someone should connect with, are there benefits or risks tied to those recommendations.”
Do you not see how that’s controlling what ideas and people they are exposed to?
They can’t make the choice on their own. You’re keeping information from them because you’ve decided what’s good for them.
I think the more robustly good thing to do is find out what your friends’ preferences are and follow their expressed preferences.
Oh, it sounds like you might be confused about the context I’m talking about this occurring in, and I’m not sure that explaining it more fully is on-topic enough for this post. I’m going to leave this thread here for now to not detract from the main conversation. But I’ll consider making a separate post about this and welcome feedback there.
I really appreciate you sharing your perspective on this. I think these are extremely hard calls, as evidenced by the polarity of the discussion on this post, and to some extent it feels like a lose-lose situation. I don’t think these decisions should be made in a vacuum and want other people’s input, which is one reason I’m flagging how this affects my work and the larger involvement funnels in EA.
I’ve made a similar point in other comments, but this framing makes things worse. Then it’s not that Richard Hanania has relevant expertise in spite of his controversial statements, it’s that you think he’s a fun guy that you’d like to hang out with. Where people are willing to stomach unsavory co-attendees at a conference in their field, they’re more than happy to skip out on a scaled up house party with them.
As a relevant information source, some people might think that rationalism has a lot of discussion on race, but it just.. doesn’t. Here are all the articles published in the human genetics tag (the closest I could find) in the last 18 months ish (everything with a tag more recent than 2 years).
That’s 11 articles, or about 1 every month and a half.
As I understand it, some of the fear around these topics is that they will grow and come to dominate the discourse (eg the Nazi in a bar analogy) and tire minority members out and cause them to leave. Unless I have not searched well (plausible) these topics aren’t regularly discussed on LessWrong. I am honestly surprised how rare these articles seem to be[1].
I searched for 5 minutes for some more relevant tag and even ended up tagging 1 extra post.
I strongly object to putting GeneSmith’s “Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence with Gene Editing” into anything even remotely associated with racism.
Like, in my completely normal and boring german high-school we discussed designer babies and the complicated ethical tradeoffs around them, with the class being quite split on how humanity should handle these technologies. The vast majority of discussions of human genetics and intelligence have nothing to do with racism or race, and implying that a prevalence of those topics would be indicative of some broader cultural trend in a direction of racism is something I really dislike.
This feels a bit misleading (or an attempt at damage control?), as I am sure you have come across race topics in the past a lot due your high level of engagement in these communities over the years.
The conversation is mostly happening on Substack, Twitter, various chats, and in-person. I have a vague memory that it was a conscious decision by LessWrong moderators many years ago to not allow inflammatory race talk on LessWrong, and most of the most inflammatory people have been long banned.
There is a chance that this is a bit an overreaching analysis, as I do not personally know you very well: you do feel genuine in your defence of communities that are important to you, but I do suspect that you might have a major blind spot for various forms of non-overt bigotry, and you you might assume good intentions of everyone to a fault. Again, I apologise if this is out of line. I might be completely wrong on this as well.
I’m not upset, but thanks for checking.
Wait, isn’t this pretty important evidence? Like isn’t it good that one of the key rationalist spaces seems to have handled this pretty well?
To me this feels very relevant to a discussion of whether rationalists are allowing racism/sexism to ferment.
Happy to hear that I didn’t overreach too much, I debated posting that comment for a while.
I do consider it an important piece of evidence, but for example ACX comments sections, open threads, and culture war sections of the ACX Reddit are still often quite nasty, and frequently feature some notorious bigots (most notoriously HBD people) who have been long banned from LessWrong. For example, Steven Sailer and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard are not all too uncommon commenters in ACX comment sections.
I think LessWrong itself is not very likely to allow bigoted content compared to many other platforms where rationalist congregate. This is not enough in my view, and it would be wise to hold a harder line.
For simplicity I’ll put aside some disagreements about which spaces are rationalist, and assume we’d agree on what lines we’d like to draw.
I think you’re assuming a higher level of control among rationalists than what actually exists. “Must” requires “can”, and I don’t think we have much of that.
If he wanted to, Scott could take a harsher moderation policy on his substack. I’d like it if he did. Frankly, some of the commenters are mindkilled morons, and my impression is there were less of those in the SSC days. But at the end of the day it’s his decision, and there’s no organization within the rationality community that could even say “he’s wrong to leave it like that” without it being a huge overreach. Similarly for whoever controls the ACX subreddit- I suppose you could try to convince the mods to run it like LW, but they’d be unlikely to change their mind, and if they did the most likely result would be the mindkilled types going off to make an “ACX 2″ subreddit.
Even more so with Twitter and in-person communications. Indicating or pattern-matching an association with rationalists does not give other rationalists any say over a misbehaving person.
Ehh I like this sentiment but feel like you overstate it a bit. We can’t control Scott and that’s good and normal and how things should be. But we sure can express our opinions about it, and he sure does listen to those opinions to some extent, and even if he doesn’t, spectators from other communities will draw conclusions from what we tend to vocally like or dislike.
I think it would be an improvement if we pushed out all the worst, most mindkilled commentators to an ACX 2 subreddit. I think it’s pretty silly to suggest that wouldn’t be a significant change in terms of what message we project about our norms and what spaces we make available for people to use.
I broadly agree with this, though I perhaps think you slightly do court controversy a little for its own sake (as do I). When I think “does Austin ever court controversy” I don’t think “Gosh, no never”. (or even the title of this article seems at least slightly needlessly controversial—it could easily have been “Why we run manifest how we do”)
I think your involvement with Manifest does give me comfort—if It were run by the median manifest attendee, I feel much less excited about going.
Can you think of a line at which you would think Manifest had gone too far in this regard and what you might do? eg, can you imagine some events after which you’d think you invited far too many controversial speakers or where the community had become, in your opinion, racist. Where do you draw that line and what might you do if this happened?
I chose the article title somewhat for humor/tongue-in-cheek; it was also a response to a direct question on the other EA Forum post, of “What’s up with all the racists”? I also didn’t want to avoid confronting the topic or mince words, because I think there is a real and important question to address. I am still unsure if this was a good call on net.
I do think Manifest might already be a bit beyond the line (see also Rachel’s thoughts here); if we run Manifest again, I expect we’ll try much harder to deliberately bring in the kindest and most wholesome people we know.
I don’t dislike your style, i’m saying that when you say you don’t court controversy i don’t think that’s fully accurate, you are in like the 90th percentile, as am I.
I think some others have pointed out that adding water to an acid doesn’t make it neutral. Seems pretty plausible that bringing in more wholesome people won’t affect the situation here that much. My personal suggestion is not to have really edgy people as special guests unless they have great track records.
The fact that racists is in quotes in the title of this post (“Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”) when there have been multiple, first-hand accounts of people experiencing/overhearing racist exchanges strikes me as wrongly dismissive, since I can only interpret the quotation marks as implying that there weren’t very many racists. (Perhaps relevantly, I have never overheard this kind of exchange at any conference I have ever attended, so the fact that multiple people are reporting these exchanges makes Manifest a big outlier in this regard, in my view.)
Nothing in the post seems to refute that the reported exchanges occurred among attendees, just that the organizers didn’t go out of their way to invite controversial/racist speakers or incite these exchanges. In other words, I think everything in the post is compatible with there having been “so many” racists at Manifest, but the quotation marks in the title seem to imply otherwise.
This isn’t so much a stylistic critique as it is a substantive one, since I think the title implies that not a lot of racist stuff went down, which feels importantly different from acknowledging that it did, but, say, disputing that the organizers caused this or suggesting that Hanania’s presence justified it.
Sorry, I still can’t seem to find any of these, can you link me to such an account? I have seen one report that might be a second-hand account, though it could have been a non-racial slur.
Meta level question:
How does Manifest have anything to do with Effective Altruism, and why is this on the EA forum?
Shouldn’t this post be on some other other channel internal to Manifest and the forecasting community?
It get there are some people that went to Manifest that are also in the EA movement, but it seems like the communities are quite distinct and have different goals. From comments and conversations, it seems pretty clear to me that this Manifest community has a strong hostility towards even considering the reputational risks platforming racist speakers has on the rest of the EA movement. Part of being a big tent movement means caring about not stinking up the tent for everyone else.
Let’s please firewall the Manifest community from EA?
If you have any good ideas on how to build a reputational firewall, I think most of us would be all ears. I think most of the discussants would be at least content with a world in which organizations/people could platform whoever they wanted but any effects of those decisions would not splash over to everyone else. Unfortunately, I think this is ~impossible given the current structure and organization of EA. There is no authoritative arbiter of what is/isn’t EA, or is/isn’t consistent with EA. Even if the community recognized such an arbiter, the rest of the world probably wouldn’t.
If there are willing volunteers, I would like to see an adversarial collaboration. Reading through the comments, it is tricky to dis-entangle what people mean, what are the fundamental disagreements, what are the facts of the matter, whether somebody (accidentally) mis-represented somebody else or even themselves, etc.
Some disagreements I see are:
- To what extent are the particular individuals ‘bad people / racist / eugenicists’
- How much should the EA community influence the norms of and/or associate with the rationality/forecasting community
- Where the line is between absolute free speech vs moderation for different events (e.g. manifest, or eags, or …).
Additionally, I would be interested in some kind of prediction markets to resolve some of the empirical questions. E.g. What percentage of EAs would say ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ to the statement ‘person X should not have been an invited speaker to manifest’. Note I am new to prediction markets so am not comfortable setting up a question like this which does not have an objective resolution.
I am grateful and impressed that you didn’t cave to public pressure.
I am also happy to see how much karma your post has gotten.
Gives me hope for the community.
One of the things that makes the rationalist and EA space special is its willingness to consider out-there ideas and to have a thriving market place of ideas. To judge ideas based on their merits, not based on who said them. To explore ideas widely and be willing to go to intellectual places that nobody has gone to before.
AI safety would never have become a cause area if people who were considered “bad” or “kooky” were deplatformed. Heck, even just doing RCTs in global poverty wouldn’t have become standard practice either.
I am glad you’re staying true to your values and your epistemics, and I hope more organizations follow your example.
Super strong disagree here.
Platforming racist / sexist / antisemetic / transphobic / etc. views—what you call “bad” or “kooky” with scare quotes—doesn’t do anything to help other out-there ideas, like RCTs. It does the exact opposite! It associates good ideas with terrible ones.
The point of suggesting and platforming “kooky” ideas is for them to be heard and then evaluated. If these ideas had never been heard before, I think you’d have a point. But I have heard these ideas and I want no part of them.
Staying true to your epistemic should not mean that anything goes and we should platform anyone and everyone who has an idea, no matter how bad. Staying true to your epistemics requires a degree of quality control!
I would like to say that
EA is obviously not a cult and
If we start trying to control what information people are allowed to read or listen to or say, and threaten ostracism if people don’t comply, and say that you’re not allowed to associate with people who’ve read/listened/said the wrong things, then we are very much in danger of becoming a cult.
This should be a line we do not cross.
I disagree.
Firstly, you’re totally welcome to read, listen, or say what you want. I have never aimed to harm anyone through “cancel culture”, I have never called for anyone to lose their job, etc. My point is simple: if you’re thing involves calling black people animals, I don’t want that to happen anywhere near me. I’m not trying to control you, I’m trying to control my own surroundings. I think nearly all communities are better with some degree of moderation. But maybe you disagree. I’m fine for you to go your own way.
I’ve personally left Manifold over this after being a daily active user and putting a few thousand real dollars on the site. I’m fine to learn that Manifold is not for me. It’s sad, but I’ll move on. It would be really sad to learn that EA or the EA Forum is not for me. But I think we can exercise some degree of control as a community here about what we are and are not okay with. That’s a very normal thing for communities to do.
You weren’t at Manifest, right?
You aren’t controlling your environment.
You’re trying to control their environment.
Boycotting somebody because of who they hang out with is harming somebody to try to control their actions. It’s one of the key features of cancel culture (but you’re right, it’s not asking for them to be fired)
I was not at Manifest. And I’d like to be very clear that I totally respect Manifest’s right to host Hanania and make him a speaker.
I disagree with the decision and I would never do such a thing if I were King of Manifest, but I’m not King of Manifest and I am not trying to control anything about it. Notably, Manifest came and went, Hanania was there just fine and nothing happened, and all I did was exercise my right to not go and to complain about it to some friends. At no point did I ever do anything to attempt to cancel Manifest.
But since people took the conversation here to the EA Forum which I like and are trying to tell people that Hanania is fine actually, I’m now also going to complain about it here on my Forum.
But why stop making predictions on Manifold?
And publicly say you’re not working with them anymore because of who they associate with?
That isn’t trying to control your environment.
That’s boycotting and encouraging others to do that same.
This is not just trying to control Manifund, but all other EA orgs that you might work with. They will know that Peter Wildeford will stop working with them if they associate with people that Peter disagrees with.
It is using shunning and boycotting as an attempt to control people’s behavior in environments you’re not even a part of.
To be clear, I haven’t cut ties with anyone other than Manifold (and Hanania). Manifold is a very voluntary use of my non-professional time and I found the community to be exhausting. I have a right to decline to participate there, just as much as you have a right to participate there. There’s nothing controlling about this.
If you had simply stopped using Manifold privately and it had nothing to do with who they associate, that’s one thing.
But if you 1) publicly stop 2) because of who they associate with and 3) imply that you’ll do that to others who associate with the “wrong” people (see quote below), then that’s boycotting and trying to encourage other people to boycott and telling everybody who’s watching that you’ll boycott them too if they associate with the wrong people.
Ergo, trying to control who people can hang out with.
Imagine I go to a conference, and a guy poops himself deliberately on stage as performance art. It smells a lot and is very unpleasant and I have a sensitive nose.
I announce, publically, that “I don’t like it when deliberately people poop themself on stage. If other places have deliberate pants pooping, I won’t go to them”.
I am 1.) publically stopping going, 2) because of who they associate with (pants poopers) and 3) implying I’ll do that to other people who associate with the same group (pants poopers).
Ergo, according to your logic, I am boycotting, encouraging others to boycott, and “trying to control who people can hang out with”, even if, yknow, I just don’t want to go to conferences where I don’t smell poop.
I have free association, as does everyone else. I don’t like pants shitters, and I don’t like scientific racists (who are on about the same level of odiousness), and I’m free to not host them or hang around them if I want to.
The more relevant comparison would be that if you went to said conference, somebody pooped, and then you decided to stop doing business with an unrelated arm of the organization that has nothing to do with conferences and pooping.
Or it would be like not going to a conference, where one of the speakers at a previous conference had done a pooping thing, and then you decided that you would publicly say you were not doing business with that company again. And that you will not do business with anybody who hosts a pooping performance. That pooping performances are vile and you want nothing to do with them, no matter how indirect.
You did not attend the conference. There was no pooping done at the conference. There had just been pooping at a previous conference. And the business you are doing with them has nothing to do with pooping, and you have never interacted with anybody who did any pooping performance.
Hanania didn’t call black people animals.
He was calling woke activists animals.
Which, honestly, I wouldn’t do, because I think that’s over the top. But it is Twitter, and it’s very different from saying that black people are animals.
The precise quote for others to assess is “Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”
Why do you think that’s referring to all black people?
It makes way more sense to interpret it as him talking about woke activists, which is the general group he’s fighting against.
Apparently he confirms that he’s talking about woke activists in a Blocked and Reported podcast episode, but it’s behind a paywall and I can’t get my card to work.
This feels like interpreting an ambiguous sentence in the maximally uncharitable way.
When the context is the indictment of Daniel Penny for the murder of a black panhandler who was “harassing people in subways” by a suit-wearing black district attorney who also doesn’t fit the description of “woke activist” particularly well, it feels like interpreting a not-particularly-ambiguous sentence in a maximally disingenuous way to suggest that the race the people referenced had in common was a non factor and Hanania clearly meant the “woke activism” they didn’t. That’s even before considering the compatibility of the “animals” label with Hanania’s longstanding overt white supremacist beliefs.
“These people [...] harassing people in subways” clearly refers to Daniel Penny’s victim, Jordan Neely, so surely it refers to a group Jordan Neely is a part of. Jordan Neely isn’t a woke activist. There’s nothing in the tweet that connects “these people” and “woke activism”; note also that “walking around in suits” is hardly a stereotypical woke activist behaviour.
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.
Depends on context. Not (e.g.) if someone has a pattern of using plausible deniability to get away with things (I actually don’t know if this applies to Hanania) or if we have strong priors for suspecting that this is what they’re doing (arguably applies here for reasons related to his history; see next paragraph).
If someone has a history of being racist, but they say they’ve changed, it’s IMO on them to avoid making statements that are easily interpreted as incredibly racist. And if they accidentally make such an easily misinterpretable statement, it’s also on them to immediately clarify what they did or didn’t mean.
Generally, in contexts that we have strong reason to believe that they might be adversarial, incompetence/stupidity cannot be counted continuously as a sufficient excuse, because adversaries will always try to claim it as their excuse, so if you let it go through, you give full coverage to all malefactors. You need adversarial epistemology. Worst-case scenario, you’ll judge harshly some people who happen to merely be incompetent in ways that, unfortunately, exactly help provide cover to bad actors. But [1] even though many people make mistakes or can seem incompetent at times, it’s actually fairly rare that incompetence looks exactly the same as what a bad actor would do for more sinister, conscious reasons (and then claim incompetence as an excuse), and [2], sadly enough, a low rate of false positives seems the lesser evil here for the utilitarian calculus because we’re in an adversarial context where harms conditional on being right are asymmetrically larger than harms on being wrong. (Of course, there’s also an option like “preserve option value and gather further info,” which is overall preferable, and I definitely like that you reached out to Hanania in that spirit. I’m not saying we should all have made up our minds solely based on that tweet; I’m mostly just saying that I find it pretty naive to immediately believe the guy just because he said he didn’t mean it in a racist way.)
“Woke activist” was not my first, second, or third interpretation of that quote fwiw. (In decreasing order I would’ve said “mentally ill/crazy people”, “black people”, “people Hanania generically doesn’t like” when I first read the tweet). I did remember flagging to myself at the time I first saw the tweet/it blew up that people went to the racism interpretation too quickly, but decided it was not a battle I was particularly excited to fight. I don’t find this type of exegesis particularly fun in the majority of contexts, even aside from the unpleasant source material. (I do find the self-censorship mildly regrettable). Now that I’ve learned greater context re: his past writings, I’d lean towards the racism interpretation being the most plausible.
Separately, I also don’t think interpreting that statement as racism towards Black people is the maximally uncharitable interpretation.
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.
Thanks. I agree here that “criminals” seem a more plausible interpretation of what he said than “woke activists.” I also definitely sympathize with an unthinking tweet written in the moment being misinterpreted, especially by people on the EA Forum.
I agree this is true in general. I think we might have different underlying probabilities of how accurate that model is however. In particular, I find it rather plausible that people pushing for “edgy” political beliefs will intentionally backtrack when challenged. I also have a cached view that this type of strategic ambiguity is particularly popular among the alt-right (not saying that other political factions are innocent here).
And in this particular case, I’d note that the incentive for falsifying what he meant is massive.
Again, I don’t know Richard and how strong his desire is to always be consistently candid about what he means. It’s definitely possible that he’s unusually truth-seeking (my guess is that some of his defenders will point to that as one of his chief virtues). I’m just saying that you should not exclude deception from the hypothesis space in situations similar to this one.
It’s certainly possible he’s lying.
But given what I’ve read of his other work, I’d be very surprised if he was referring to all black people.
However, being pissed off at criminals and criminal apologists is completely in his wheelhouse, and makes way more sense.
This is presupposing the conclusion.
Many people disagree about whether any of the speakers and their views are racist / sexist / ____ist.
And some people heard the ideas and thought they made interesting and/or valid points and didn’t make them think that the people or the ideas were dangerous.
You can not listen to them or read their content if you don’t want to.
But let other people come to their own conclusions.
Don’t try to force other people to come the conclusions you came to by trying to deplatform and ostracize people who you disagree with.
What percentage of EA thinkers do you think would be deplatformed according to this standard?
My guess is that it would be over 70%, and it would even include yourself.
And it would end up being 100% over time, as what counts as racist / sexist / ____ist changes.
FWIW I’m quite confident it would be ~0%.
There’s some view here where anything from the slightest bit racist to the most overtly racist is all the same. I think we can create distinctions and I hope we can avoid the most overtly racist things.
EAs have already been deplatformed over things like this.
I think what’s going on is that your definition of racist is different than many other people’s.
You would just consider them to have been rightly deplatformed for being racist, whereas I would consider them to have been silenced due to things where reasonable people can disagree.
I assure you, if Emile Torres ever turns their eyes on you, they’ll be able to find something in your writing history to make you look awful and you won’t be able to give talks at EAGs anymore.
I really don’t think—at all—that one’s ability to give talks at EAG is at all centrally based on whether Emile Torres has denounced you on Twitter or whatever. As I understand it Torres has gone after a long list of prominent EA figures for various reasons (including Nick Bostrom, Will, Toby, etc.) who continue to be quite involved.
(Disclaimer: I worked for CEA some years ago but was not involved with managing the admissions process for EAG, selecting EAG keynote speakers, etc. -- indeed I am not even sure who all is on that team at present.)
I don’t think there’s any equivalence between any of the things I have ever said and the most vile things that Hanania / Chau / Yarvin has said. I don’t think it’s a matter of finding quotes and misinterpreting them. They’re pretty blatant. I’m quite confident you could audit my entire writing history and I’d stand by that.
And people don’t have a right to a platform near me. It’s not like they’re losing their job. Or even their blog or their book deal or their platform somewhere else. I just don’t want them to be near me.
~
I’m curious—is there anything for you that reasonable people couldn’t disagree? Anything someone could say that would make them worth deplatforming, in your mind?
Good question!
I think there are plenty of things where reasonable people can’t disagree on.
Like, if somebody said we should kill all of the people of ______ race/gender/____ist. Or committing actual physical acts of violence against somebody simply because of their race/gender/____ist.
The question of deplatforming is a separate thing. I think we should have a very strong prior towards letting people say whatever they want, wherever they want, unless there’s a very direct link between the words and causing physical violence.
It shouldn’t be based on whether the words are incorrect (because that’s an impossible standard and would silence almost all discourse) and it shouldn’t be based on whether it hurts people’s feelings (because that would incentivize using feelings as a way to censor people, and it would mean almost all political discussion would be banned).
According to you, what are the vile things Hanania / Chau / Yarvin have said?
So several people n = 2.5 have reached out to me to say that they did not read Hanania’s animals tweet as being about black people despite having the same context I do. I am now therefore less confident that most people read it in this way, (like 60% not 95%)
I think this probably warrants some kind of apology on expectation. So I am a bit sorry Richard on the chance that your tweet is not generally understood how I understand it.
Seems like these threads have fewer women commenting than typical EA forum threads. I would be curious if similar populations are voting as usual.
Hypothetically, Aruna Khilanani (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/nyregion/yale-psychiatrist-aruna-khilanani.html) starts a prediction market blog, gets Hanania-tier famous, and someone suggests she be invited to Manifest 202X.
A) Would you offer an invite?
B) If yes, do you think it would spark this kind of backlash?
If the Effective Altruism movement turns into a human biodiversity denial movement that will definitely outstrip all the potential good it could do, with the possible exception of AI alignment.
Human biodiversity and human capital is the hidden variable that drives almost all outcomes in our world. It’s not really something that you can adopt beliefs about in an unrigorous, signaling-driven manner and expect to be right about the world. I would encourage people to read about Lysenkoism to see what happens when ideology overrides science as the basis for epistemology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
I’m personally very turned off by the HBD crowd.
[Edit: To be clear, by “HBD crowd” I don’t mean people who believe and say things like “intelligence is heritable” or “embryo selection towards smarter babies seems potentially very good if implemented well.” I thought this was obvious, but someone pointed out that people might file different claims under the umbrella “HBD”.]
For me, it’s not necessarily because I think they’re wrong about most factual claims that they’re making.
Instead, I’m turned off by the attitude of these being important questions to focus intellectual pursuits on. The existence and origin of group differences seem to me obviously not of great practical importance, so I feel like when people obsess over this, I’m suspicious that it’s coming either from a place of edginess/wanting to feel superior to those who “cannot face the truth”, or (worse) a darker place of entitlement and wanting to externalize bad feelings about one’s own life by blaming some outgroup that has received “undeserved” support.
When thinking about how to make the world better for humans (excluding non-human animals for the moment), I see basically three major cause areas (very simplified):
(1) Evidence-based, immediate-outcome-focused interventions that improve things on some legible metric, like school attendance, medicines successfully administered, etc.
(2) Longer-term structural reform via politics.
(3) Focusing on technological breakthroughs and risks that either improve or worsen things for everyone.
If someone is interested in (1), HBD doesn’t change anything about evidence-based progress on legible metrics. We’d continue to want to support evidence-based interventions in all kinds of contexts that make things better for individuals on some concrete variables. (The focus on evidence-based metrics is great because it helps us sideline a lot of politics-inspired storytelling that turns out to be wrong, such as the claim that poor people will make poor choices if you give them money [GiveDirectly example].)
If someone is interested in (3), they’ll hopefully understand that a lot of things that are pressing problems today will either no longer matter in 1-20 years because we’re all dead, or they’ll be more easily solvable with the help of aligned powerful AIs and radical technologically-aided re-structuring of society.
Lastly, if someone is interested in (2), then good luck: It seems like the EA community has failed to find convincing interventions in this area. If you know of some intervention that would be extremely cost-effective, but in-your-opinion false beliefs about HBD are the only crux that stands in the way from us doing the intervention, then that would sound interesting to talk about. But this isn’t the case, is it? I think structural reform is intrinsically hard.
I can see how HBD questions might have some tangential relevance for policy reform, but emphasis on tangential, and I also think that we’re so far away from doing sensible things under (2) that this seems unlikely to be an important crux. (Also, if I were to prioritize something in this space, it would be meta-level interventions like improving the news landscape.)
In this context of structural reform, I should flag that I’m also very much against wokeism, and I agree that there are parallels to Lysenkoism. But I don’t think “being against wokeism” implies “we should be interested in HBD questions.” In fact, I think I am against both of these for related reasons. I think it’s often not productive to view everything in terms of “group vs group.” I think we should spend resources on causes where we can point to concrete benefits for individuals, no matter their group. There’s so much to do on that front already so that other things feel like a bit of a distraction, both in general, but also especially when considering the mind-killing effects of political controversies.
So, to summarize, your comment about HBD being important seems very wrong to me.
Edit: I guess a steelman of your point is that you’re not necessarily saying HBD is in itself important, you’re just saying it would be bad to actively deny it (presumably because this would lend momentum to wokeism or new types of Lyssenkoism). I have more sympathies with that, but the way I see it, it’s more like maybe HBD and wokeism are two sides of a toxic dynamic where it would be better if we could get back to other concerns.
Actually I think that people’s thinking about AI has become somewhat broken and I’m starting to see the same dark-side epistemology that gave us HBD-denialism seep into the AI community.
But, take a step back.
Suppose you have a community of biologists who all believe in Lysenkoism. Then, despite their repeated failures to improve crop yields, the country is bailed out by a large external food source.
Would you be willing to overlook their belief in Lysenkoism and have these people start working on cancer biology, aging and other areas?
Or, look at another example. You ask a self-professed mathematician whether he thinks that all continuous functions are differentiable. He says they are, and it’s so obvious that it requires no proof. Do you trust this mathematician to generally provide good advice?
My point is that process matters in science and epistemology. You can’t sweep the bad process of creationists under the carpet and expect them to continue to produce good results on other issues. Their process is broken.
I made the following edit to my comment above-thread:
I’m not sure this changes anything about your response, but my perspective is that a policy of “let’s not get obsessed over mapping out all possible group differences and whether they’re genetic” is (by itself) unlikely to start us down a slippery slope that ends in something like Lyssenkoism.
For illustration, I feel like my social environment has tons of people with whom you can have reasonable discussions about e.g., applications of embryo selection, but they mostly don’t want to associate with people who talk about IQ differences between groups a whole lot and act like it’s a big deal if true. So, it seems like these things are easy to keep separate (at least in some environments).
Also, I personally think the best way to make any sort of dialogue saner is NOT by picking the most controversial true thing you can think of, and then announcing with loudspeakers that you’re ready to die on that hill. (In a way, that sort of behavior would even send an “untrue” [in a “misdirection” sense discussed here] signal: Usually people die on hills that are worthy causes. So, if you’re sending the signal “group differences discourse is worth dying over,” you’re implicitly signalling that this is an important topic. But, as I argued, I don’t think it is, and creating an aura of it being important is part of what I find objectionable and where I think the label “racist” can be appropriate, if that’s the sort of motivation that draws people to these topics. So, even in terms of wanting to convey true things, I think it would be a failure of prioritization to focus on this swamp of topics.)
Human group differences is probably the most important topic in the world outside of AI/Singularity. The reason people are so keen to censor the topic is because it is important.
Making dialogue saner is a nice goal, but people can unilaterally make dialogue insane by demanding that a topic is banned, or that certain opinions are immoral, etc.
Personally, I would trust an AI researcher even if they weren’t racist.
Would you trust an AI alignment researcher who supported Lysenkoism in the era when it was popular in the soviet union?
[not trying to take a position on the whole issue at hand in this post here] I think I would trust an AI alignment researcher who supported Lysenkoism almost as much as an otherwise-identical seeming one who didn’t. And I think this is related to a general skepticism I have about some of the most intense calls for the highest decoupling norms I sometimes see from some rationalists. Claims without justification, mostly because I find it helpful to articulate my beliefs aloud for myself:
I don’t think people generally having correct beliefs on irrelevant social issues is very correlated with having correct beliefs on their area of expertise
I think in most cases, having unpopular and unconventional beliefs is wrong (most contrarians are not correct contrarians)
A bunch of unpopular and unconventional things are true, so to be maximally correct you have to be a correct contrarian
Some people aren’t really able to entertain unpopular and unconventional ideas at all, which is very anticorrelated with the ability to have important insights and make huge contributions to a field
But lots of people have very domain-specific ability to have unpopular and unconventional ideas while not having/not trusting/not saying those ideas in other domains.
A large subset of the above are both top-tier in terms of ground-breaking insights in their domain of expertise, and put off by groups that are maximally open to unpopular and unconventional beliefs (which are often shitty and costs to associate with)
I think people who are top-tier in terms of ability to have ground-breaking insights in their domain disproportionately like discussing unpopular and unconventional beliefs from many different domains, but I don’t know if, among people who are top-tier in terms of ground-breaking insights in a given domain, the majority prefer to be in more or less domain-agnostically-edgy crowds.
I think this is kind of funny because I (directionally) agree with a lot of your list, at least within the observed range of human cognitive ability, but think that strong decoupling norms are mostly agnostic to questions like trusting AI researchers who supported Lysenkoism when it was popular. Of course it’s informative that they did so, but can be substantially screened off by examining the quality of their current research (and, if you must, its relationship to whatever the dominant paradigms in the current field are).
How far are you willing to go with this?
What about a researcher who genuinely believes all the most popular political positions:
- gender is a social construct and you can change your gender just by identifying differently
- affirmative action and diversity makes companies and teams more efficient and this is a solid scientific fact
- there are no heritable differences in cognitive traits, all cognitive differences in humans are 100% exclusively the result of environment
- we should abolish the police and treat crime exclusively with unarmed social workers and better government benefits—
there’s a climate emergency that will definitely kill most people on the planet in the next 10 years if we don’t immediately change our lifestyles to consume less energy
- all drugs should be legal and ideally available for free from the state
Do you think that people who genuinely believe these things will create an intellectual environment that is conducive to solving hard problems?
Two points:
(1) I don’t think “we should abolish the police and treat crime exclusively with unarmed social workers and better government benefits” or “all drugs should be legal and ideally available for free from the state” are the most popular political positions in the US, nor close to them, even for D-voters.
(2) your original question was about supporting things (e.g. Lysenkoism), and publicly associating with things, not about what they “genuinely believe”
But yes, per my earlier point, if you told me for example “there are three new researchers with PhDs from the same prestigious university in [field unrelated to any of the above positions, let’s say virology], the only difference I will let you know about them is one (A) holds all of the above beliefs, one (B) holds some of the above beliefs, and one (C) holds none of the above beliefs, predict which one will improve the odds of their lab making a bacteriology-related breakthrough the most” I would say the difference between them is small i.e. these differences are only weakly correlated with odds of their lab making a breakthrough and don’t have much explanatory power. And, assuming you meant “support” not “genuinely believe” and cutting the two bullets I claim aren’t even majority positions among for example D-voters, and B>A>C but barely
Unfortunately I think that a subject like bacteriology is more resistant to bad epistenics than something like AI alignment or effective altruism.
And I think this critique just sort of generalizes to a fairly general critique of EA: if you want to make a widget that’s 5% better, you can specialize in widget making and then go home and believe in crystal healing and diversity and inclusion after work.
But if you want to make impactful changes to the world and you believe in crystal healing and so on, you will probably be drawn away from correct strategies because correct strategies for improving the world tend to require an accurate world model including being accurate about things that are controversial.
Communism is perhaps the prime example of this from the 20th century: many people seriously believed that communism was good, and they believed that so much that they rejected evidence to the contrary. Entire continents have been ravaged as a result.
HBD denial (race communism) is the communism of the present.
I agree with
and
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A crux seems to be that I think AI alignment research is a fairly narrow domain, more akin to bacteriology than e.g. “finding EA cause X” or “thinking about if newly invented systems of government will work well”. This seems more true if I imagine for my AI alignment researcher someone trying to run experiments on sparse autoencoders, and less true if I imagine someone trying to have a end-to-end game plan for how to make transformative AI as good as possible for the lightcone, which is obviously a more interdisciplinary topic more likely to require correct contrarianism in a variety of domains. But I think most AI researchers are more in the former category, and will be increasingly so.
If you mean some parts of technical alignment, then perhaps that’s true, but I mean alignment in the broad sense of creating good outcomes.
> AI researchers are more in the former category
Yeah but people in the former category don’t matter much in terms of outcomes. Making a better sparse autoencoder won’t change the world at the margin, just like technocrats working to make soviet central planning better ultimately didn’t change the world because they were making incremental progress in the wrong direction.
Unfortunately this “toxic dynamic” is also known as truth-based versus consequences-based epistemology and that is a dynamic that you absolutely cannot escape because the ability to alter social consensus beliefs for the benefits of special interests is just a generic problem. It will also pop up in the AI debate.
How is HBD action-relevant for EA in a pre-AGI world? Do you think getting people accept HBD is one of the top 50 interventions for making progress on AI safety and governance?
I don’t think it is, because I think AI will replace humans in all economic roles within 5-15 years. But I think the same dark-side intellectual tactics that gave rise to HBD-denialism will contaminate our thinking about AI, just in different ways.