Also, my sense for Chau is that one of the top reasons he was invited was because he was up for doing a debate with Holly. I personally think one should extend something like “diplomatic immunity” to people from opposing communities if they are participating in a kind of diplomatic role. Facilitating any kind of high-bandwidth negotation between e/acc people and AI-x-risk concerned people seems quite valuable to me, and I e.g. think Manifest should probably invite Sam Altman to debate others on safety if he is up for it for similar reasons, despite me finding him otherwise quite despicable.
(I don’t have a strong take on Hanania. It seems pretty plausible to me based on things other people have said that he should be excluded, but I have learned to take things like that with a grain of salt without checking myself)
Just for the record, I actually invited Brian a few days before he launched AFTF; I proposed a debate afterwards. I would have enjoyed listening to his explanation of the e/acc position even outside a debate context; I think his past background as being solidly EA, eg organizing his university’s EA group, means that he has a unique perspective on this. (And he did end up giving a separate talk, which was very on theme for Manifest—“The Economics of Envy”.) So from my perspective it was less of a case of “diplomatic immunity” and more me genuinely wanting to hear from him.
I know that I, as a random nobody do not get to police who is EA, but I find myself really quite upset that we are attracting people who say the sort of stuff Chau is recorded saying here. Maybe that is an irrational reaction, and I should celebrate our ability to get people involved in doing good stuff even if they have bad views, which after all is the point. (On balance I think that is wrong, but I’m not being flat out sarcastic when I say it.) But I find these sort of attitudes straightforwardly bigoted.
I was under the impression that the original intent with Hanania at Manifest 2023 was a similar sort of diplomatic-relations thing: he was going to debate Destiny, but that debate was cancelled because of political pressure.
Yarvin didn’t attend.
Also, my sense for Chau is that one of the top reasons he was invited was because he was up for doing a debate with Holly. I personally think one should extend something like “diplomatic immunity” to people from opposing communities if they are participating in a kind of diplomatic role. Facilitating any kind of high-bandwidth negotation between e/acc people and AI-x-risk concerned people seems quite valuable to me, and I e.g. think Manifest should probably invite Sam Altman to debate others on safety if he is up for it for similar reasons, despite me finding him otherwise quite despicable.
(I don’t have a strong take on Hanania. It seems pretty plausible to me based on things other people have said that he should be excluded, but I have learned to take things like that with a grain of salt without checking myself)
Just for the record, I actually invited Brian a few days before he launched AFTF; I proposed a debate afterwards. I would have enjoyed listening to his explanation of the e/acc position even outside a debate context; I think his past background as being solidly EA, eg organizing his university’s EA group, means that he has a unique perspective on this. (And he did end up giving a separate talk, which was very on theme for Manifest—“The Economics of Envy”.) So from my perspective it was less of a case of “diplomatic immunity” and more me genuinely wanting to hear from him.
Props for saying this when you didn’t have to.
I know that I, as a random nobody do not get to police who is EA, but I find myself really quite upset that we are attracting people who say the sort of stuff Chau is recorded saying here. Maybe that is an irrational reaction, and I should celebrate our ability to get people involved in doing good stuff even if they have bad views, which after all is the point. (On balance I think that is wrong, but I’m not being flat out sarcastic when I say it.) But I find these sort of attitudes straightforwardly bigoted.
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/alliance-for-the-future-director
Yeah though this seems more of an EA problem than a manifest one right? Like this kind of seems unrelated to the problem in hand?
I was under the impression that the original intent with Hanania at Manifest 2023 was a similar sort of diplomatic-relations thing: he was going to debate Destiny, but that debate was cancelled because of political pressure.
Damn. I would have loved to have seen that debate happen.