My recollection is that the recent major scandals/controversies were kickstarted by outsiders as well: FTX, Bostrom, Time and other news articles, etc. I don’t think any of those needed help from the Forum for the relevant associations to form. The impetus for the Nonlinear situation was of inside origin, but (1) I don’t think many on the outside cared about it, and (2) the motivation to post seemed to be protecting community members from perceived harm, not reputational injury.
In any event, this option potentially works only for someone’s initial decision to post at all. Once something is posted, simply ignoring it looks like tacit consent to what Manifest did. Theoretically, everyone could simply respond with: “This isn’t an EA event, and scientific racism is not an EA cause area” and move on. The odds of that happening are . . . ~0. Once people (including any of the organizers) start defending the decision to invite on the Forum, or people start defending scientific racism itself, it is way too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Criticism is the only viable way to mitigate reputational damage at that point.
But insofar as people think that Manifest’s actions were ok-ish, it’s mostly sad that they are associated with EA and make EA look bad, [ . . . .]
To clarify my own position, one can think Manifest’s actions were very much not okay and yet be responding with criticism only because of the negative effects on EA. Also, I would assert that the bad effects here are not limited to “mak[ing] EA look bad.”
There’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the world, and each of us have only a tiny amount of attention and bandwidth in relation to the scope of bad stuff in the world. If there’s no relationship to one of my communities, I don’t have a principled reason for caring more about what happens at Manifest than I do about what happens in the (random example) Oregon Pokemon Go community. I wouldn’t approve if they invited some of these speakers to their Pokemon Go event to speak, but I also wouldn’t devote the energy to criticizing.
My recollection is that the recent major scandals/controversies were kickstarted by outsiders as well: FTX, Bostrom, Time and other news articles, etc. I don’t think any of those needed help from the Forum for the relevant associations to form. The impetus for the Nonlinear situation was of inside origin, but (1) I don’t think many on the outside cared about it, and (2) the motivation to post seemed to be protecting community members from perceived harm, not reputational injury.
In any event, this option potentially works only for someone’s initial decision to post at all. Once something is posted, simply ignoring it looks like tacit consent to what Manifest did. Theoretically, everyone could simply respond with: “This isn’t an EA event, and scientific racism is not an EA cause area” and move on. The odds of that happening are . . . ~0. Once people (including any of the organizers) start defending the decision to invite on the Forum, or people start defending scientific racism itself, it is way too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Criticism is the only viable way to mitigate reputational damage at that point.
To clarify my own position, one can think Manifest’s actions were very much not okay and yet be responding with criticism only because of the negative effects on EA. Also, I would assert that the bad effects here are not limited to “mak[ing] EA look bad.”
There’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the world, and each of us have only a tiny amount of attention and bandwidth in relation to the scope of bad stuff in the world. If there’s no relationship to one of my communities, I don’t have a principled reason for caring more about what happens at Manifest than I do about what happens in the (random example) Oregon Pokemon Go community. I wouldn’t approve if they invited some of these speakers to their Pokemon Go event to speak, but I also wouldn’t devote the energy to criticizing.