Itâs true that people with abhorrent views in one area might have interesting or valuable things to say in other areasâRichard Hanania, for example, has made insightful criticisms of the modern American right.
However, if you platform/âinclude people with abhorrent views (e.g. âhuman biodiversityâ, the polite euphemism for the fundamentally racist view some racial groups have lower IQ than othersâwhich is a view held by a number of Manifest speakers), you run into the following problemâthat the bad chases out the good.
The net effect of inviting in people with abhorrent views is that it turns off most decent people, either because they morally object to associating with such abhorrent views, or because they just donât want the controversy. You end up with a community with an even smaller percentage of decent people and a higher proportion of bigots and cranks, which in turn turns off even more decent people, and so on and so forth. Scott Alexander himself says it best in his article on witches:
The moral of the story is: if youâre against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
At the end of the day, platforming anyone whatsoever will leave you only with people rejected by polite society, and being open to all ideas will leave you with only the crank ones.
I think there probably is a solution here, which is to give status to people who are either generative or have good forecasting track records. If that doesnât work, plausibly limiting open tickets to manifold users and forecasters with a small pool of other tickets.
I think I prefer rate limits over bansâso allowing some percentage of possibly racist attendees rather than having it be none but with a fundamentally different event.
My models is that relatively few people are both very generative and very well calibrated. Itâs hard to be the sort of person who comes up with many novel theories or connections (Robin Hanson) and who is generally right about whatever they say (Peter Wildeford).
Itâs true that people with abhorrent views in one area might have interesting or valuable things to say in other areasâRichard Hanania, for example, has made insightful criticisms of the modern American right.
However, if you platform/âinclude people with abhorrent views (e.g. âhuman biodiversityâ, the polite euphemism for the fundamentally racist view some racial groups have lower IQ than othersâwhich is a view held by a number of Manifest speakers), you run into the following problemâthat the bad chases out the good.
The net effect of inviting in people with abhorrent views is that it turns off most decent people, either because they morally object to associating with such abhorrent views, or because they just donât want the controversy. You end up with a community with an even smaller percentage of decent people and a higher proportion of bigots and cranks, which in turn turns off even more decent people, and so on and so forth. Scott Alexander himself says it best in his article on witches:
The moral of the story is: if youâre against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
At the end of the day, platforming anyone whatsoever will leave you only with people rejected by polite society, and being open to all ideas will leave you with only the crank ones.
I think there probably is a solution here, which is to give status to people who are either generative or have good forecasting track records. If that doesnât work, plausibly limiting open tickets to manifold users and forecasters with a small pool of other tickets.
I think I prefer rate limits over bansâso allowing some percentage of possibly racist attendees rather than having it be none but with a fundamentally different event.
Could you explain more of what you mean by âgenerativeâ?
People who come up with surprising ideas.
My models is that relatively few people are both very generative and very well calibrated. Itâs hard to be the sort of person who comes up with many novel theories or connections (Robin Hanson) and who is generally right about whatever they say (Peter Wildeford).