I’m a pro forecaster. I build forecasting tools. I use forecasting in a very relevant day job running an AI think tank. I would normally be very enthusiastic about Manifest. And I think Manifest would really want me there.
But I don’t attend because of people there who have “edgy” opinions that might be “fun” for others but aren’t fun for me. I don’t want to come and help “balance out” someone who thinks that ~using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide~ (sorry this was a bad example as discussed in the comments so I’ll stick with the pretty clear “has stated that black people are animals who need to be surveilled in mass to reduce crime”). I want to talk about forecasting.
It’s your right to have your conference your way, and it’s others right to attend and have fun. But I think Manifest seriously underrates how much they are losing out on here by being “edgy” and “fun”, and I really don’t want to be associated with it.
Because others here are unlikely to do so, I feel like I ought to explicitly defend Hanania’s presence on the merits. I don’t find it “fun” that he’s “edgy.” I go out of my way, personally, to avoid being edgy. While I tread into heated territory at times, I have always made it my goal to do so respectfully, thoughtfully, and with consideration for others’ values. No, it’s not edginess or fun that makes me think he belongs there. He unquestionably belongs at a prediction market conference because he has been a passionate defender of prediction markets in the public sphere and because he writes to his predominantly right-leaning audience in ways that consistently emphasize and criticize the ways they depart from reality.
Let me be clear: I emphatically do not defend all parts of his approach and worldview. He often engages in a deliberately provocative way and says insensitive or offensive things about race, trans issues, and other hot-button topics on the right. But I feel the same about many people who you would have no problem seeing attend Manifest, and he brings specific unusual and worthwhile things to the table.
My first real interaction with Hanania, as I recall, came when he boosted and praised my affirmative defense of surrogacy, a topic very personal to me and one online public figures are much more likely to attack or stay silent on than defend when I speak about it. Later, I went on his podcast to discuss my path out of Mormonism and my sexuality, my essay on how the Republican Party is doomed, the importance of a spirited defense of liberalism in the public sphere, and other ideas that would challenge his right-leaning audience and encourage norms I believe the EA sphere would approve of. This is also true of some areas where I can’t claim to be as emphatically EA-aligned as he is, as with his treatise against factory farming and animal suffering.
Someone below pointed out that you misrepresented his pronouns/genocide essay, which I saw as an unusually self-reflective look at why he and others have, as he puts it, “deranged” priorities in getting the most animated not about objectively the most important ideas but about emotionally salient topics close to home. The point of the essay is not “they/them pronouns are worse than genocide,” but “it is in one sense deranged, but human and important to understand, that people get so much more emotionally invested in issues like they/them pronouns than about genocide.”
I understand perfectly well why people dislike him and I have no problem with robust criticism and even condemnation of much of what he says. But while his actions look from your angle like mainstreaming far-right ideas, they look to the far-right like mainstreaming animal suffering concerns, prediction markets, abortion and surrogacy, open borders, and rather a lot more. You may discount those as trivial, but the people in his audience certainly do not.
You seem smart, capable, and knowledgeable about prediction markets. I think Manifest would benefit from having you in attendance. But my own intellectual life is richer for the opportunity to read, engage with, and argue with people like Hanania. I’m glad he was there, I’m glad I had the chance to say hi to him and chat a bit, and if a precondition for your engagement is that it’s either you or him, I would rather you not attend than that you use your reputational sway to prevent me from having those interactions.
I appreciate the main point you’re making: that you’re someone we would value having at Manifest, and including people like Hanania causes you to not come.
However, I think there’s a miscommunication going on: as far as I can tell, not Austin, nor any of us organizers, nor any of the people defending Manifest’s choice of speakers nor those defending the speakers themselves, thinks that Manifest is “fun” because it’s “edgy”. I’ve noticed you tie these things together in a few comments in a way that feels to me like a straw man, like you think that we think it’s “fun” to be “edgy”, when we in fact do not.
The “fun” thing, which Austin is rightly proud of, refers to the festival part: Manifest hosts mostly serious talks during the day, but there is also e.g. a dance class, wrestling, karaoke, s’mores, etc. That all feels very wholesome and essential to what makes Manifest an exceptional event.
The “edgy” thing — attendees being purposefully inflammatory, using slurs, making others feel unwelcome, etc. — is totally unrelated. Not wholesome. Not a thing to be proud of. Not a thing we aspire to.
I think we could choose to kill the festival part of Manifest, and run a professional forecasting conference at some generic conference hotel, and still choose to invite Hanania. Alternatively, we could invite only the kindest, most welcoming, least offensive people we know, to come hang out and sing songs and chat about forecasting by the fire at Lighthaven. The former might be edgy and not fun, while the latter might be fun and not edgy. These are unrelated.
I want you to be able to come and just talk about forecasting too! I think people who wanted to do this (eg Ozzie Gooen by his self-report) were able to do this. Manifest is a big tent; if people want to just talk about forecasting, or AI, or board games, or polygenic screening, I want them to have that space.
It sounds like “serious forecasting conference” is a product that you and some others would be excited about. I hope that somebody runs one! But this wasn’t ever the explicit goal of Manifest, which I’d describe as being closer to “fun forecasting-adjacent festival”—I use “festival” instead of “conference” to denote that Manifest’s aims are much more similar to a music festival or an anime convention, rather than an academic conference.
This reads to me like: “If you’re bothered by the racism/sexism/etc, you’re just not high-decoupling enough to just come and have a fun time… if you’re bothered you’re just un-fun, that’s because you are too serious and you want to stifle free discourse… just let the racists be racists, and you can do your own thing too nearby”.
I am glad you are interacting here and giving your honest opinions, thanks for that, I found some of your comments helpful, even though I don’t agree or resonate with some of them.
However, note that I find this interpretation as a pretty uncharitable reading.
I see a big distinction between “I want to create a space where people can talk about different and not so controversial stuff” (I believe that “polygenic screening is not racism” is a useful and important distinction) vs. telling people “you are bad and unfun for not being fine with racist talking about racism and sexism next to you”.
I have seen this for a second time from you when replying to Austin (e.g. here), and I think it’s worse for the discussion discourse. Take what you want from it, of course.
That’s fair—you’re right to make this distinction where I failed and I’m sorry. I think I have a good point but I got heated in describing it and strayed further from charitableness than I should. I regret that.
Edit: This thread is now kind of confusing because Peter shared this article too, but more forcefully and on closer reading it is more thoughtful than the title suggests, leading to Peter’s comment being downvoted. Most of the discussion is under peter’s comment and my comment here is basically irrelevant.
(If I recall correctly, @Austin said Hanania had changed his opinion slightly on trans people since talking to some at manifest last year—manifest probably has a large trans overrepresentation—and this is good, I want a way back for Hanania. LIkewise I have seen less overt racism from him in the last year, but I’m not yet at the state where I want him as a lauded speaker. He could at least write an article saying he’s changed his mind on this and the racist tweet about Jordan Neely)
Edit: While this is what Peter was referring to, on closer reading, I think it’s kind of inaccurate to say that Hanania is really endorsing his title. Therefore my original comment was not the level of accuracy I aspire to. Sorry.
(EDIT: I misunderstood this, but I don’t think I misunderstood that Hanania is generally a provacateur who says pretty “edgy” things, like that black people are animals and that we need mass surveillance of black people to lower crime.)
I still think this is hyperbole. Hanania isn’t saying he things they/them pronouns are worse than genocide, he says he gets more upset about they/them pronouns than about genocide, just as (according to him) people on the left get more upset about racial slurs than about genocide:
I’m sure if you asked most liberals “which is worse, genocide or racial slurs?”, they would invoke System 2 and say genocide is worse. If forced to articulate their morality, they will admit murderers and rapists should go to jail longer than racists. Yet I’ve been in the room with liberals where the topic of conversation has been genocide, and they are always less emotional than when the topic is homophobia, sexual harassment, or cops pulling over a disproportionate number of black men.
[...]
When I arrived at my last academic conference at the American Political Science Association in 2019, I stopped at the check-in table and picked up this pin [with non-binary pronouns written on it]. [...] The pronoun pin represented everything I hated about leftists, “experts,” and intellectuals, and I keep it around where I work for motivation. I’m looking at it as I write this.
Of course, this is deranged. Of all the things that can motivate me, why did I pick a stupid gesture that has close to zero direct impact on human flourishing and wellbeing?
I think the answer goes something like this. Our System 2 morality works in a way such that if you put me and an SJW in a room, we would agree that society should punish murder more severely than either using racial slurs or announcing your pronouns. This is despite the fact that emotionally, neither of us has that strong of a reaction when it comes to murder. An exception for an SJW is when say a white racist or a cop murders a black person, while for me it might be mass murder committed by communists.
You could reasonably object that Hanania should be more accepting of nonbinary people (I would agree), but I think you’re meaningfully misstating his position.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
I would like to disagree and say that I would be excited to attend an event where Hanania was attending.
He makes a lot of really interesting points, writes engagingly, and is an independent thinker.
All of the times I’ve seen somebody saying “he’s super racist!” have turned out to be not actually racist, taken out of context, or the definition of racism where talking about any racial differences is racist, etc.
Wait, I do not think that is the natural reading of that tweet. He is supportive of Penny elswhere. I discussed this with someone yesterday—he seems to be on Penny’s side in these tweets saying it will become clear to people that blacks are a danger to whites. Given his history I do think he was calling blacks animals (which is gross) and were he not to be he could easily have corrected it, which he hasn’t.
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.
He said that woke rhetoric makes it sound like white people kill more black people, and actually, more black people kill white people. (I don’t know if this is true, but it is a matter of looking into the data and is different from how you portrayed what he said)
He corrected the blacks being animals in a Blocked and Reported podcast episode. He was not calling black people animals. He was calling woke activists animals.
It almost seems rude to ask but… did you actually read the post you linked? It says the exact opposite of what you claim it does:
Deep down, I know wokeness is not the most important issue facing humanity.
...
Regardless, wokeness is probably not as important as, for example, advancing anti-aging research.
… Of all the things that can motivate me, why did I pick a stupid gesture that has close to zero direct impact on human flourishing and wellbeing?
...
From my perspective, wokeness is very important, I have something new and original to say about it, and the topic inspires me like practically nothing else. But again, I know it’s nowhere near the most important issue I could be focusing on.
This seems at best quite negligent of you—to assume a person is saying something bad just because you dislike them. At worst it seems like you were hoping people would just take your word for it and not actually click the link.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
I would hold a tighter grip on your horses. The article does not contravene the headline. Hanania talks at length about how much he hates wokeness.[1] He doesn’t mention his views on genocide. He notes that some issues are more important than being anti-woke (as an example, he mentions anti-aging research). So in sum, this article suggests:
he hates wokeness vehemently
he thinks some issues are more important than wokeness.
It seems entirely consistent with the article that Hanania hates wokeness more than genocide, and a straightforward reading of the headline and context would support this. We don’t know whether Hanania puts genocide as one of the ‘5-10’ more important issues.
So we have mildly positive, at best neutral evidence on how Hanania rates genocide compared to wokeness. ‘Thinks is worse’ could mean different things. One reading is that ‘worse = rates as a more important problem’ (on which we should be unsure). Another reading is ‘worse = hates more’ (on which we have positive evidence). Either reading is reasonable.
E.g. “I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it.”
The entire article is about how he hates wokeness the most but recognizes that objectively there are other bigger problems; genocide is an example he mentions of an objectively worse problem.
Could you point me to where he does so? I only see mentions of genocide in the title (which he does not contradict), and in the context of liberals’ relative hatred. And where he says “Emotionally, I don’t identify with the tribe of ‘people who don’t commit genocide.’”
The article reads to me as straightforwardly saying “I know [wokeness] is nowhere near the most important issue I could be focusing on [but I find myself doing it anyways]” and reflecting on why he (and others) feel so much more passionate and outraged about topics like pronouns (for him) and racial slurs (for people on the left), when there are so many things that from a system 2 perspective are much bigger deals that he and others feel much less passionate about when they come up (like genocide).
This feels like an interesting point (though I have disagreements with some of the writing in the essay). I have failed to find a literal sentence with “I think genocide is more important than X”, since he mostly invokes the term when talking about how he is surprised how dispassionate other people are about that topic, but the overall content of the post is the opposite of what I thought he was going to say when Peter linked to it.
It agree he also says it might be in the top 5-10, which I agree seems somewhat incongruent, though like, the whole point of the post is to explore internal cognitive dissonance in him and others, so some inconsistency doesn’t seem inappropriate (though yeah, I think it makes the post worse and the meaning less clear, which is still bad).
Eh, I personally think of some things in the top 10 as “nowhere near” the most important issues, because of how heavy-tailed cause prioritization tends to be.
That’s reasonable. My point is that it’s much less clear and open to contestation that Hanania’s article says the opposite of what the headline is, but given the example is ~retracted anyway my point is not important
Thanks for the context. I think both your initial comment and reply, without further context (I personally did not have more context; I have not been following these discussions), lead to an innacurate picture of Hanania’s views. The title is provocatory, but my understanding based solely on skimming that post would be that Hanania is not “someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide”. Hanania thinks genocide is worse, but then focusses on pronouns due to personal fit considerations? From the post:
Hearing about what the Current Thing in South Korea was [“a man had molested a little girl, a judge gave him a light sentence, and society was outraged”] gave me an idea for an article. I would talk about how deformed liberal morality is. Deep down, leftists care about racial slurs more than genocide, misgendering more than cancer, fake gender income gaps more than factory farms and torturing children. But it didn’t take long for me to realize I’m not all that different. As Scott Alexander recently wrote,
“sometimes pundits will, for example, make fun of excessively woke people by saying something like “in a world with millions of people in poverty and thousands of heavily-armed nuclear missiles, you’re really choosing to focus on whether someone said something slightly silly about gender?” Then they do that again. Then they do that again. Then you realize these pundits’ entire brand is making fun of people who say silly things (in a woke direction) about gender, even though there are millions of people in poverty and thousands of nuclear missiles. So they ought to at least be able to appreciate how strong the temptation can be. As Horace puts it, “why do you laugh? Change the name, and the joke’s on you!””
Deep down, I know wokeness is not the most important issue facing humanity. I would contend it’s more important than most people think, say top 5-10 depending on how you count. Twice this year, there have been stories of women’s tears bringing down male scientists of unusual ability, one who had been working at MIT, the other running the “cancer moonshot” at the White House. I suspect that there might be some correlation between unique male talent and the likelihood of inspiring a PC mob to come after you (see also Roland Fryer). Regardless, wokeness is probably not as important as, for example, advancing anti-aging research. Part of my choice to write about it is that I feel like I have something unique and original to say on the topic. That means I can be most effective when talking about it, but that’s partly by design. I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it. If I’d studied anti-aging research or space travel as much, I would probably have something interesting and useful to say about those topics.
Hanania is a frequent and intentional provocateur. He knows exactly what he’s doing with this article. He has made clear explicit intent to use outrage towards himself to build a platform to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
“I’ll tell you a secret to success. Always be pushing the envelope. As soon as you’ve done or said something that gets attention, resist the temptation to go rest on your laurels and become risk averse. Keep pushing, always give them a twist.”—Richard Hanania
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.
While I don’t follow Hanania or (the social media platform formerly known as) Twitter closely, it seems to me that this kind of ambiguity is strategic. He wants to expand what is acceptable to say publicly, and one way of doing this is to say things which can be read both in a currently-acceptable and a currently-unacceptable way. If challenged on any specific one you just give the acceptable interpretation and apologize for the misunderstanding, but this doesn’t do much to diminish the window-pushing effect.
He used to publish racist stuff under a pseudonym, right? Calling for deportations based on skin colour iirc correctly. Why shouldn’t I think he probably dislikes black people, given this track record?
He says he now finds the ideas he had when he was younger repulsive. Here are some quotes from it:
“My posts and blog comments in my early twenties encouraged racism, misogyny, misanthropy, trolling, and overall bad faith. Phrases like “racism” and “misogyny” get thrown around too easily, but I don’t believe there’s any doubt many of my previous comments crossed the line, regardless of where one thinks that line should be. Below, I’ll offer an explanation for why I wrote such things, and why I no longer hold such views.”
People know that what I think is reflected in my corpus of work over the last several years, rather than embarrassing takes in my early 20s about the 2008 election. Fifteen years is long enough to graduate junior high, go through all of high school and college, earn a PhD, and get a third of the way towards being a tenured professor. If that’s not a long enough time to be beyond the statute of limitations for holding repugnant views one later renounces, then there’s really no hope for us ever moving beyond cancel culture.
We appear to be moving past the worst of the cancellation trend. Most outside of a certain echo chamber realize this kind of reporting is contemptible. The goal is not to engage with ideas, but to simply silence a person and remove them from polite company. To not have to discuss their ideas on account of other ideas they put forward at a different time of their life and which they may no longer even believe in.
which is why such a large portion of my current work involves attacking right-wing collectivism and illiberal beliefs (see here and here). The truth is that part of it is self-loathing towards my previous life. I all too clearly notice the kind of sloppy thinking, emotional immaturity, and moral shortcomings that can lead one to adopt a quasi-fascist ideology, and am hard on others because I’m hard on myself for once holding such views.
One of the most dishonest parts of the Huffington Post hitpiece is the argument that I maintain “a creepy obsession with so-called race science” and talk about blacks being inherently more prone to crime. I do no such thing, and ultimately believe that what the sources of such disparities are doesn’t matter.
Should you think less of me for my previous writing? I can definitely see the argument for that. Many are tempted into becoming political extremists at an early age, but those who never feel that pull, or who refuse to succumb to it, should probably get some credit for that. At the same time, if you think my writing now shows any degree of wisdom or good judgment, consider what a miracle it is that I’ve come this far.
I judge things on track records. If I post a load of racist things, then apologise then post another probably racist thing, I think you should think I’m racist, not that the apology was like a magic spell that made all the previous bad behaviour disappear.
I am willing for hanania to do some work and convince me he isn’t racist, but he has to actually convince me. You seem to think I should just believe him. I don’t believe him.
I’ve actually read probably over 100 of his articles, and that’s what’s convinced me he’s not racist.
How much of his original content have you actually read? You can just check if you want. His writing is out there.
I think most of people thinking he’s racist have looked at one or two cherry-picked tweets and read articles written by other people about him and what he said, instead of looking at what he actually said.
I think the other thing that makes people think he’s racist is that he does talk about differences in outcomes between racial groups and talks about alternative theories to “it’s just because certain racial groups are oppressed”.
Some people think that considering that is racist itself. I doubt you’re one of those people, but if you are, then you’ll totally think he’s racist.
I’m surprised. You just found out that one of the worst things you thought he said was wrong.
Are you not going to update and maybe think that maybe he’s not the villain you originally thought?
I know you’re usually quite good at updating based on new evidence. It’s hard to convey over text, but I genuinely recommend taking a step back from this and reflecting on your views.
I’ve seen in one other thread as well you realizing that what you’d heard about Hanania was wrong, so that’s twice in one day. Consider that maybe the other things were also not as bad as you originally thought.
I don’t think you have remotely conclusively proved that this tweet wasn’t racist.
Edit: I don’t think TheAthenians should have to conclusively prove a tweet isn’t racist. I think I more wished to say “I am pretty confident and you have done little to move that” since this discussion has started several other non-aligned people have reached out to say that they too didn’t read the tweet as racist. I am now less confident.
The claim is that the tweet said he called all black people animals.
It’s a separate but overlapping claim about whether the tweet was racist.
For the first claim, shouldn’t it update you massively that he said he was talking about specific other people, that totally make sense in the context?
What do you think is more likely:
Person who consistently criticizes crime apologists, criticizes crime apologists
Person says he dislikes crime apologists, but secretly hates all black people and is lying
Assuming people don’t mean what they say and that your interpretation of their internal state is more accurate than their explanation of it seems pretty suboptimal to me.
I think our community would be better off if they updated based on misunderstandings, rather than insisting that people have hidden bad intentions and are liars about their own lived experience.
Can you ask him to reply to his tweet with that clarification? I don’t think that is the common sense understanding of the tweet, which is very racist. Until he publicly clarifies, I’m pretty happy to continue my common sense understanding of that tweet.
I don’t know why he didn’t delete it. I don’t think it’s particularly important to his main causes and points. If I were him, I’d totally delete it.
My guess is that he feels pretty constantly attacked and he probably has a set of principles/rules he follows for when to delete stuff, and it’s not “delete it if a lot of people are mad at me online”, since people on the left and the right are often quite mad at him online.
FWIW, I immediately assumed he was talking about woke activists (and apparently he was talking about crime apologists, a subset of woke activists).
The context makes total sense to me. A person he thinks was just preventing crime is being sent to prison for life. He’d obviously be talking about the people who did that to the person
I have no opinion on the particular event. I’d never heard of it till just yesterday and I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Just purveying how Hanania likely saw the situation.
I’ve also read a lot of Hanania’s stuff, so it’s even more clear to me than to somebody who hasn’t. He’s an anti-speciesist who equally angers the right and the left. It’d be pretty surprising to me if he hated black people. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he felt a lot of anger towards woke activists.
The first one he wasn’t calling black people animals. He was calling woke activists animals.
Which, you know, not great. But very very different from calling black people animals.
The second one is him saying that if we were to genuinely reduce crime, it would involve increasing policing of black people, which he thinks would be politically infeasible given the current climate.
This seems like the sort of thing where reasonable people could disagree. Like, does policing and surveillance actually reduce crime? Are black people disproportionately likely to commit crimes or is that over-reporting due to racism?
If somebody said the exact same thing but said it about men in general (who do commit more violent crime) I don’t think most people would call that sexist and vile.
I think this is not true, at least not in my view. Dehumanising people is really bad, (mostly) independent of which group you’re dehumanising. I think that’s an extremely good social norm to have, and it should be costly to break.
(You seem to argue this specific point a lot, which repeatedly gets downvoted. I thought I’d explain my perspective on why I think that’s the case. I don’t believe your counterpoint works well. “Not great“ is also a serious euphemism for dehumanisation.)
I’m a pro forecaster. I build forecasting tools. I use forecasting in a very relevant day job running an AI think tank. I would normally be very enthusiastic about Manifest. And I think Manifest would really want me there.
But I don’t attend because of people there who have “edgy” opinions that might be “fun” for others but aren’t fun for me. I don’t want to come and help “balance out” someone who thinks that ~using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide~ (sorry this was a bad example as discussed in the comments so I’ll stick with the pretty clear “has stated that black people are animals who need to be surveilled in mass to reduce crime”). I want to talk about forecasting.
It’s your right to have your conference your way, and it’s others right to attend and have fun. But I think Manifest seriously underrates how much they are losing out on here by being “edgy” and “fun”, and I really don’t want to be associated with it.
Because others here are unlikely to do so, I feel like I ought to explicitly defend Hanania’s presence on the merits. I don’t find it “fun” that he’s “edgy.” I go out of my way, personally, to avoid being edgy. While I tread into heated territory at times, I have always made it my goal to do so respectfully, thoughtfully, and with consideration for others’ values. No, it’s not edginess or fun that makes me think he belongs there. He unquestionably belongs at a prediction market conference because he has been a passionate defender of prediction markets in the public sphere and because he writes to his predominantly right-leaning audience in ways that consistently emphasize and criticize the ways they depart from reality.
Let me be clear: I emphatically do not defend all parts of his approach and worldview. He often engages in a deliberately provocative way and says insensitive or offensive things about race, trans issues, and other hot-button topics on the right. But I feel the same about many people who you would have no problem seeing attend Manifest, and he brings specific unusual and worthwhile things to the table.
My first real interaction with Hanania, as I recall, came when he boosted and praised my affirmative defense of surrogacy, a topic very personal to me and one online public figures are much more likely to attack or stay silent on than defend when I speak about it. Later, I went on his podcast to discuss my path out of Mormonism and my sexuality, my essay on how the Republican Party is doomed, the importance of a spirited defense of liberalism in the public sphere, and other ideas that would challenge his right-leaning audience and encourage norms I believe the EA sphere would approve of. This is also true of some areas where I can’t claim to be as emphatically EA-aligned as he is, as with his treatise against factory farming and animal suffering.
Someone below pointed out that you misrepresented his pronouns/genocide essay, which I saw as an unusually self-reflective look at why he and others have, as he puts it, “deranged” priorities in getting the most animated not about objectively the most important ideas but about emotionally salient topics close to home. The point of the essay is not “they/them pronouns are worse than genocide,” but “it is in one sense deranged, but human and important to understand, that people get so much more emotionally invested in issues like they/them pronouns than about genocide.”
I understand perfectly well why people dislike him and I have no problem with robust criticism and even condemnation of much of what he says. But while his actions look from your angle like mainstreaming far-right ideas, they look to the far-right like mainstreaming animal suffering concerns, prediction markets, abortion and surrogacy, open borders, and rather a lot more. You may discount those as trivial, but the people in his audience certainly do not.
You seem smart, capable, and knowledgeable about prediction markets. I think Manifest would benefit from having you in attendance. But my own intellectual life is richer for the opportunity to read, engage with, and argue with people like Hanania. I’m glad he was there, I’m glad I had the chance to say hi to him and chat a bit, and if a precondition for your engagement is that it’s either you or him, I would rather you not attend than that you use your reputational sway to prevent me from having those interactions.
I appreciate the main point you’re making: that you’re someone we would value having at Manifest, and including people like Hanania causes you to not come.
However, I think there’s a miscommunication going on: as far as I can tell, not Austin, nor any of us organizers, nor any of the people defending Manifest’s choice of speakers nor those defending the speakers themselves, thinks that Manifest is “fun” because it’s “edgy”. I’ve noticed you tie these things together in a few comments in a way that feels to me like a straw man, like you think that we think it’s “fun” to be “edgy”, when we in fact do not.
The “fun” thing, which Austin is rightly proud of, refers to the festival part: Manifest hosts mostly serious talks during the day, but there is also e.g. a dance class, wrestling, karaoke, s’mores, etc. That all feels very wholesome and essential to what makes Manifest an exceptional event.
The “edgy” thing — attendees being purposefully inflammatory, using slurs, making others feel unwelcome, etc. — is totally unrelated. Not wholesome. Not a thing to be proud of. Not a thing we aspire to.
I think we could choose to kill the festival part of Manifest, and run a professional forecasting conference at some generic conference hotel, and still choose to invite Hanania. Alternatively, we could invite only the kindest, most welcoming, least offensive people we know, to come hang out and sing songs and chat about forecasting by the fire at Lighthaven. The former might be edgy and not fun, while the latter might be fun and not edgy. These are unrelated.
I want you to be able to come and just talk about forecasting too! I think people who wanted to do this (eg Ozzie Gooen by his self-report) were able to do this. Manifest is a big tent; if people want to just talk about forecasting, or AI, or board games, or polygenic screening, I want them to have that space.
It sounds like “serious forecasting conference” is a product that you and some others would be excited about. I hope that somebody runs one! But this wasn’t ever the explicit goal of Manifest, which I’d describe as being closer to “fun forecasting-adjacent festival”—I use “festival” instead of “conference” to denote that Manifest’s aims are much more similar to a music festival or an anime convention, rather than an academic conference.
This reads to me like: “If you’re bothered by the racism/sexism/etc, you’re just not high-decoupling enough to just come and have a fun time… if you’re bothered you’re just un-fun, that’s because you are too serious and you want to stifle free discourse… just let the racists be racists, and you can do your own thing too nearby”.
I am glad you are interacting here and giving your honest opinions, thanks for that, I found some of your comments helpful, even though I don’t agree or resonate with some of them.
However, note that I find this interpretation as a pretty uncharitable reading.
I see a big distinction between “I want to create a space where people can talk about different and not so controversial stuff” (I believe that “polygenic screening is not racism” is a useful and important distinction) vs. telling people “you are bad and unfun for not being fine with racist talking about racism and sexism next to you”.
I have seen this for a second time from you when replying to Austin (e.g. here), and I think it’s worse for the discussion discourse. Take what you want from it, of course.
That’s fair—you’re right to make this distinction where I failed and I’m sorry. I think I have a good point but I got heated in describing it and strayed further from charitableness than I should. I regret that.
Hi Peter,
Does anyone really think this, or are you just using hyperbole?
Edit: This thread is now kind of confusing because Peter shared this article too, but more forcefully and on closer reading it is more thoughtful than the title suggests, leading to Peter’s comment being downvoted. Most of the discussion is under peter’s comment and my comment here is basically irrelevant.
This feels like an unfairly harsh comeback but:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-do-i-hate-pronouns-more-than
(If I recall correctly, @Austin said Hanania had changed his opinion slightly on trans people since talking to some at manifest last year—manifest probably has a large trans overrepresentation—and this is good, I want a way back for Hanania. LIkewise I have seen less overt racism from him in the last year, but I’m not yet at the state where I want him as a lauded speaker. He could at least write an article saying he’s changed his mind on this and the racist tweet about Jordan Neely)
Edit: While this is what Peter was referring to, on closer reading, I think it’s kind of inaccurate to say that Hanania is really endorsing his title. Therefore my original comment was not the level of accuracy I aspire to. Sorry.
Not hyperbole. Hanania, Manifest promoted speaker, wrote “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?” in May 2022.
(EDIT: I misunderstood this, but I don’t think I misunderstood that Hanania is generally a provacateur who says pretty “edgy” things, like that black people are animals and that we need mass surveillance of black people to lower crime.)
I still think this is hyperbole. Hanania isn’t saying he things they/them pronouns are worse than genocide, he says he gets more upset about they/them pronouns than about genocide, just as (according to him) people on the left get more upset about racial slurs than about genocide:
You could reasonably object that Hanania should be more accepting of nonbinary people (I would agree), but I think you’re meaningfully misstating his position.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
I would like to disagree and say that I would be excited to attend an event where Hanania was attending.
He makes a lot of really interesting points, writes engagingly, and is an independent thinker.
All of the times I’ve seen somebody saying “he’s super racist!” have turned out to be not actually racist, taken out of context, or the definition of racism where talking about any racial differences is racist, etc.
For example, the whole “he called black people animals” thing.
He was calling woke activists animals, not black people.
Which, yeah, I’m generally against calling people animals, but is very different from the narrative of him saying all black people are animals.
Wait, I do not think that is the natural reading of that tweet. He is supportive of Penny elswhere. I discussed this with someone yesterday—he seems to be on Penny’s side in these tweets saying it will become clear to people that blacks are a danger to whites. Given his history I do think he was calling blacks animals (which is gross) and were he not to be he could easily have corrected it, which he hasn’t.
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.
He didn’t say that blacks are danger to whites
He said that woke rhetoric makes it sound like white people kill more black people, and actually, more black people kill white people. (I don’t know if this is true, but it is a matter of looking into the data and is different from how you portrayed what he said)
He corrected the blacks being animals in a Blocked and Reported podcast episode. He was not calling black people animals. He was calling woke activists animals.
It almost seems rude to ask but… did you actually read the post you linked? It says the exact opposite of what you claim it does:
This seems at best quite negligent of you—to assume a person is saying something bad just because you dislike them. At worst it seems like you were hoping people would just take your word for it and not actually click the link.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
I would hold a tighter grip on your horses. The article does not contravene the headline. Hanania talks at length about how much he hates wokeness.[1] He doesn’t mention his views on genocide. He notes that some issues are more important than being anti-woke (as an example, he mentions anti-aging research). So in sum, this article suggests:
he hates wokeness vehemently
he thinks some issues are more important than wokeness.
It seems entirely consistent with the article that Hanania hates wokeness more than genocide, and a straightforward reading of the headline and context would support this. We don’t know whether Hanania puts genocide as one of the ‘5-10’ more important issues.
So we have mildly positive, at best neutral evidence on how Hanania rates genocide compared to wokeness. ‘Thinks is worse’ could mean different things. One reading is that ‘worse = rates as a more important problem’ (on which we should be unsure). Another reading is ‘worse = hates more’ (on which we have positive evidence). Either reading is reasonable.
E.g. “I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it.”
The entire article is about how he hates wokeness the most but recognizes that objectively there are other bigger problems; genocide is an example he mentions of an objectively worse problem.
Could you point me to where he does so? I only see mentions of genocide in the title (which he does not contradict), and in the context of liberals’ relative hatred. And where he says “Emotionally, I don’t identify with the tribe of ‘people who don’t commit genocide.’”
The article reads to me as straightforwardly saying “I know [wokeness] is nowhere near the most important issue I could be focusing on [but I find myself doing it anyways]” and reflecting on why he (and others) feel so much more passionate and outraged about topics like pronouns (for him) and racial slurs (for people on the left), when there are so many things that from a system 2 perspective are much bigger deals that he and others feel much less passionate about when they come up (like genocide).
This feels like an interesting point (though I have disagreements with some of the writing in the essay). I have failed to find a literal sentence with “I think genocide is more important than X”, since he mostly invokes the term when talking about how he is surprised how dispassionate other people are about that topic, but the overall content of the post is the opposite of what I thought he was going to say when Peter linked to it.
He says wokeness is in the “top 5-10, depending how you count”. That doesn’t seem to be ‘nowhere near’?
The text in quotes is a quote:
It agree he also says it might be in the top 5-10, which I agree seems somewhat incongruent, though like, the whole point of the post is to explore internal cognitive dissonance in him and others, so some inconsistency doesn’t seem inappropriate (though yeah, I think it makes the post worse and the meaning less clear, which is still bad).
Eh, I personally think of some things in the top 10 as “nowhere near” the most important issues, because of how heavy-tailed cause prioritization tends to be.
Yeah, I was thinking about that as well. Seems plausible for something to be top 5-10 and also “nowhere near”.
That’s reasonable. My point is that it’s much less clear and open to contestation that Hanania’s article says the opposite of what the headline is, but given the example is ~retracted anyway my point is not important
Thanks for the context. I think both your initial comment and reply, without further context (I personally did not have more context; I have not been following these discussions), lead to an innacurate picture of Hanania’s views. The title is provocatory, but my understanding based solely on skimming that post would be that Hanania is not “someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide”. Hanania thinks genocide is worse, but then focusses on pronouns due to personal fit considerations? From the post:
Hanania is a frequent and intentional provocateur. He knows exactly what he’s doing with this article. He has made clear explicit intent to use outrage towards himself to build a platform to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
“I’ll tell you a secret to success. Always be pushing the envelope. As soon as you’ve done or said something that gets attention, resist the temptation to go rest on your laurels and become risk averse. Keep pushing, always give them a twist.”—Richard Hanania
This appears to be the source of the ‘pushing the envelope’ quote if anyone is interested:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1699223634349629771
What’s your source for that? Is the original quote the same as the one I wrote about in this comment?
here and here.
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.
While I don’t follow Hanania or (the social media platform formerly known as) Twitter closely, it seems to me that this kind of ambiguity is strategic. He wants to expand what is acceptable to say publicly, and one way of doing this is to say things which can be read both in a currently-acceptable and a currently-unacceptable way. If challenged on any specific one you just give the acceptable interpretation and apologize for the misunderstanding, but this doesn’t do much to diminish the window-pushing effect.
There is some possibility that this is strategic.
But I think the hypothesis that he unthikingly posted an ambiguous tweet while he was feeling emotional is more likely.
Your prior should be on people occasionally posting unthinking emotional tweets.
Your prior should be that he has a strong dislike of crime apologists, which is one of his big hobby horses.
Especially if you’ve read more of his work, like I have.
He doesn’t hate black people.
He definitely strongly dislikes crime apologists.
He used to publish racist stuff under a pseudonym, right? Calling for deportations based on skin colour iirc correctly. Why shouldn’t I think he probably dislikes black people, given this track record?
He responded to that.
He says he now finds the ideas he had when he was younger repulsive. Here are some quotes from it:
I judge things on track records. If I post a load of racist things, then apologise then post another probably racist thing, I think you should think I’m racist, not that the apology was like a magic spell that made all the previous bad behaviour disappear.
I am willing for hanania to do some work and convince me he isn’t racist, but he has to actually convince me. You seem to think I should just believe him. I don’t believe him.
I’ve actually read probably over 100 of his articles, and that’s what’s convinced me he’s not racist.
How much of his original content have you actually read? You can just check if you want. His writing is out there.
I think most of people thinking he’s racist have looked at one or two cherry-picked tweets and read articles written by other people about him and what he said, instead of looking at what he actually said.
I think the other thing that makes people think he’s racist is that he does talk about differences in outcomes between racial groups and talks about alternative theories to “it’s just because certain racial groups are oppressed”.
Some people think that considering that is racist itself. I doubt you’re one of those people, but if you are, then you’ll totally think he’s racist.
It’s pretty interesting that Hanania just happens to frequently make these kinds of accidents, right?
I’m surprised. You just found out that one of the worst things you thought he said was wrong.
Are you not going to update and maybe think that maybe he’s not the villain you originally thought?
I know you’re usually quite good at updating based on new evidence. It’s hard to convey over text, but I genuinely recommend taking a step back from this and reflecting on your views.
I’ve seen in one other thread as well you realizing that what you’d heard about Hanania was wrong, so that’s twice in one day. Consider that maybe the other things were also not as bad as you originally thought.
I don’t think you have remotely conclusively proved that this tweet wasn’t racist.
Edit: I don’t think TheAthenians should have to conclusively prove a tweet isn’t racist. I think I more wished to say “I am pretty confident and you have done little to move that” since this discussion has started several other non-aligned people have reached out to say that they too didn’t read the tweet as racist. I am now less confident.
The claim is that the tweet said he called all black people animals.
It’s a separate but overlapping claim about whether the tweet was racist.
For the first claim, shouldn’t it update you massively that he said he was talking about specific other people, that totally make sense in the context?
What do you think is more likely:
Person who consistently criticizes crime apologists, criticizes crime apologists
Person says he dislikes crime apologists, but secretly hates all black people and is lying
Assuming people don’t mean what they say and that your interpretation of their internal state is more accurate than their explanation of it seems pretty suboptimal to me.
I think our community would be better off if they updated based on misunderstandings, rather than insisting that people have hidden bad intentions and are liars about their own lived experience.
We have already followed the rest of this line of argument here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest?commentId=gj53zXi5k4SEdh3Rh
Again, I’m willing to change my mind, but it would actually involve some behaviour change on his part, which so far I haven’t seen.
Neither were accidents? It was just people misinterpreting what he was saying or interpreting things uncharitably.
People interpret people uncharitably all the time on the internet, especially if you ever mention race.
Can you ask him to reply to his tweet with that clarification? I don’t think that is the common sense understanding of the tweet, which is very racist. Until he publicly clarifies, I’m pretty happy to continue my common sense understanding of that tweet.
He publicly clarified on the Blocked and Reported podcast.
I got his permission to publicly share the quote I shared with you.
He’s already been asked a million times to clarify on Twitter, so I doubt he’ll listen to me.
Yeah but why not. The least he could do is delete it.
If he is only doing cheap actions and not costly ones.. maybe he in fact does mean the thing it looks like he means.
Or maybe he really likes annoying people. But I don’t like annoying edgy “maybe I’m being racist maybe not” either.
Edit: I do get why he doesn’t delete things in general. I feel that way too. But if I said anything that unclear I’d delete it.
I don’t know why he didn’t delete it. I don’t think it’s particularly important to his main causes and points. If I were him, I’d totally delete it.
My guess is that he feels pretty constantly attacked and he probably has a set of principles/rules he follows for when to delete stuff, and it’s not “delete it if a lot of people are mad at me online”, since people on the left and the right are often quite mad at him online.
FWIW, I immediately assumed he was talking about woke activists (and apparently he was talking about crime apologists, a subset of woke activists).
The context makes total sense to me. A person he thinks was just preventing crime is being sent to prison for life. He’d obviously be talking about the people who did that to the person
I have no opinion on the particular event. I’d never heard of it till just yesterday and I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Just purveying how Hanania likely saw the situation.
I’ve also read a lot of Hanania’s stuff, so it’s even more clear to me than to somebody who hasn’t. He’s an anti-speciesist who equally angers the right and the left. It’d be pretty surprising to me if he hated black people. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he felt a lot of anger towards woke activists.
The first one he wasn’t calling black people animals. He was calling woke activists animals.
Which, you know, not great. But very very different from calling black people animals.
The second one is him saying that if we were to genuinely reduce crime, it would involve increasing policing of black people, which he thinks would be politically infeasible given the current climate.
This seems like the sort of thing where reasonable people could disagree. Like, does policing and surveillance actually reduce crime? Are black people disproportionately likely to commit crimes or is that over-reporting due to racism?
If somebody said the exact same thing but said it about men in general (who do commit more violent crime) I don’t think most people would call that sexist and vile.
“But very very different“.
I think this is not true, at least not in my view. Dehumanising people is really bad, (mostly) independent of which group you’re dehumanising. I think that’s an extremely good social norm to have, and it should be costly to break.
(You seem to argue this specific point a lot, which repeatedly gets downvoted. I thought I’d explain my perspective on why I think that’s the case. I don’t believe your counterpoint works well. “Not great“ is also a serious euphemism for dehumanisation.)