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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 themto 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 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 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.
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.