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.
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, [ . . . .]
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.
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
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.
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.