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.
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.