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.
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.