Make the argument on the merits for why they are bad scholars making provably false arguments, like we do with creationists, anti-vaxxers, and 9-11 truthers, or let them talk
This feels like a description of how you want reality to be rather than how it actually is. Prominent creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers generally don’t find scientists, engineers or political scientists queuing up to debate them or intellectuals queuing up to hear them out either and not because the strength of the evidence favours them. More to the point: if a conference on an apparently unrelated subject like prediction markets announces a lineup with an unusually large number of creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers the discussion will definitely be around why those people were selected and whether they should have been rather than rehashing old arguments about whether they have a point.
Likewise, if Manifest chose for some reason to stack their attendee list with people who were unusually outspokenly ‘woke’ or raving Stalinists[!] and the feedback was that they didn’t deserve a speaking slot on the basis of their social media obnoxiousness or their presence attracted the wrong sort of people, it wouldn’t say anything either way about the validity of their arguments. Nor does the fact they chose not to platform those sort of people.
You don’t pick truth when you pick your speaker lineup, you pick your audience.
In the case of someone like Hanania he’s not actually producing scientific research related to his political targets anyway, and I doubt the attendees who allegedly spent the social hours of the conference testing reactions to the word ‘fag’, looking for opportunities to bring up race and IQ in the conversation and inviting people to Curtis Yarvin’s afterparty if they like what they hear are behaving that way because they’re unusually good at following the evidence rather than the herd.
This feels like a description of how you want reality to be rather than how it actually is. Prominent creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers generally don’t find scientists, engineers or political scientists queuing up to debate them or intellectuals queuing up to hear them out either and not because the strength of the evidence favours them. More to the point: if a conference on an apparently unrelated subject like prediction markets announces a lineup with an unusually large number of creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers the discussion will definitely be around why those people were selected and whether they should have been rather than rehashing old arguments about whether they have a point.
Likewise, if Manifest chose for some reason to stack their attendee list with people who were unusually outspokenly ‘woke’ or raving Stalinists[!] and the feedback was that they didn’t deserve a speaking slot on the basis of their social media obnoxiousness or their presence attracted the wrong sort of people, it wouldn’t say anything either way about the validity of their arguments. Nor does the fact they chose not to platform those sort of people.
You don’t pick truth when you pick your speaker lineup, you pick your audience.
In the case of someone like Hanania he’s not actually producing scientific research related to his political targets anyway, and I doubt the attendees who allegedly spent the social hours of the conference testing reactions to the word ‘fag’, looking for opportunities to bring up race and IQ in the conversation and inviting people to Curtis Yarvin’s afterparty if they like what they hear are behaving that way because they’re unusually good at following the evidence rather than the herd.