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
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.