Does this mean I think Hanania should be permanently shunned? No—he’s an interesting guy
That’s a pretty low-bar for interesting.
The people at Manifest weren’t even disproportionately right-wing
And how many left-wingers were there? To the left’s credit, they are a bit more socially-intelligent as to not mix & mingle with the crowd of tired cranks with the same tired ideas, but I assure you there are plenty of desperate cranks on the left who are “down bad”.
If you really want fresh thinkers with controversial ideas, have some actually controversial left wing speakers who’s ideas—unlike “controversial” right-wingers—actually are controversial and have the chance to change the world.
You kid yourself if you think the guestlist of libertarian & right-wing speakers at Manifest weren’t themselves also conformist.
EA began as an intellectual movement, and over the years it has watered this down to let in any and all contrarian rejects from other movements. And it shows. EA’s crypto-exchange psoter boy couldn’t grasp probability concepts like the Kelly Criterion, and our conferences are full of cranks, the alt-right, & pseudoscience. Being contrarian should not be mixed up with being EA.
I do think Hanania is interesting. He’s a pro immigration conservative, for instance, and constantly writes about things the right is wrong about. In particular, I found his much-maligned essay about pronouns and genocide pretty fascinating—a shockingly honest look into the unflattering bits of his own psychology.
I think a lot of the people there were prototypical gray tribe members—a bit left of center but with lots of weird heterodox views. Scott, for instance, is left of center, so is Nate Silver, so is Kelsey Piper. I also got an invite and I’m thoroughly left of center—albeit a bix heterodox—having praised Chomsky at some length, written critically about U.S. foreign policy on about a dozen different occasions, and written in support of open borders.
I don’t think that Hanania is a conformist, for instance. This shtick of “actually the non-conformists are the real conformists,” is silly.
Worth noting that Manifest wasn’t an EA conference. It just had some EA people there who wanted to go to a cool conference. Not sure what EA is supposed to do about that.
Scott, for instance, is left of center, so is Nate Silver, so is Kelsey Piper.
So… people who are neoliberal to centrist, with Scott (as others on this forum have pointed out on this forum) partial to race pseudoscience. Wow, what confronting fresh ideas.
Have some anarchists, socialists, communists. Have some actually brave thinkers. Be challenged. What are y’all afraid of?
We want people to learn new things, so we have conferences where people can present their research. But who to invite? There are so many people, many of whom have never done any studies. Luckily for us, we have a body of people that spend their lives researching and checking each other’s research: Academia. Still, there are many academics, and there’s only so many time slots you can assign before you’re filled up; ideally, we’d be representative. So now the question becomes: why was the choice made to spend so many of the limited time slots on “scientific racists”, which is a position that’s virtually universally rejected by professional researchers, while topics like “socialism”, which has a ton of support in academia (e.g., the latest philpapers survey found that when asked about their politics, a majority of philosophers selected “socialism” and only a minority selected “capitalism” or “other”), tend to get little to no time allotted to them at these conferences?
I agree with the point your actually making here-namely that people invite racists but not socialists because they like racism better than socialism or other alternative viewpoints that they could invite people with, but I do have a nitpick:
While I’d much rather have (most, non-Stalinist) socialists than scientific racists, I’d say economists are the most relevant experts for economics, and they seem to be down on socialism, except maybe some non-mainstream market variants. Although I guess other social scientists also have relevant expertise and more of them are socialists I think? Insofar as philosophers are expressing reasonably high confidence in socialism by picking it in the philpapers survey even when “don’t know” is also an option, yet among economists socialism is (I think?) quite fringe, I feel like this is the kind of anti science/empiricism arrogance that philosophers are often accused of, usually quite unfairly. But then I am not a socialist.
and they seem to be down on socialism, except maybe some non-mainstream market variants.
I did try to find a survey for sociology, political science, and economics, not only today but also when I was writing my post on market socialism (I too wondered whether economists are more in favor of market socialism), but I couldn’t really find one. My guess is that the first two would be more pro-socialism and the last more anti, although it probably also differs from country to country depending on their history of academia (e.g. whether they had a red scare in academia or not).
I feel like this is the kind of anti science/empiricism arrogance that philosophers are often accused of
This is probably partly because of the different things they’re researching. Economics tends to look at things that are easier to quantify, like GDP and material goods created, which capitalism is really good at, while philosophers tend to look at things that capitalism seems to be less good at, like alienation, which is harder to quantify (though proxies like depression, suicide and loneliness do seem to be increasing).
Not to mention, they might agree on the data but disagree on what to value. Rust & Schwitzgebel (2013) did a survey of philosophy professors specializing in ethics, philosophy professors not specializing in ethics, and non-philosophy professors. 60% of ethicists felt eating meat was wrong, while just under 45% of non-ethicists agreed, and only 19.6% of non-philosophers thought so. I personally think one of the strongest arguments against capitalism is the existence of factory farms. With such numbers, it seems plausible that while an average economist might think of the meat industry as a positive, the average philosopher might think of it as a negative (thinking something akin to this post).
I don’t see why we’d expect less factory farms under socialism, except via us being poorer in general. And I feel like “make everything worse for humans to make things better for animals” feels a bit “cartoon utilitarian super-villain”, even if I’m not sure what is wrong with it. It’s also not why socialists support socialism, even if many are also pro-animal. On the other hand, if socialism worked as intended, why would factory farming decrease?
I don’t see why we’d expect less factory farms under socialism
The comment was about how factory farms are an argument against capitalism; not about why it is an argument for other economic philosophies, so one can’t conclude from this that some other specific economic philosophy (e.g., socialism) doesn’t have that argument against them. It could be that, e.g. factory farms are an argument against capitalism and socialism, but not mutualism.
It’s also not why socialists support socialism
There was no claim that this is why socialists support socialism, but even if there was, it doesn’t really matter for the argument. Even if we could conclude from “factory farms are an argument against capitalism” that “socialism is good for animal welfare”, why would the motivation of socialists matter? Even if socialists created better animal welfare only unintentionally, wouldn’t that still be one reason to support them? (Assuming you care about the consequences of policy more than the virtues of the participants)
except via us being poorer in general
Lastly, I want to talk about this claim. But less so to address you, and more so to address the forum users.
I don’t think that socialism would make us poorer, at least not in the long run. The dynamics of capitalism are very destructive (e.g. negative externalities, regulatory capture, planned obsolescence...) and countries like the Nordic countries, with more socialist policies, tend to do better. Socialist firms were shown in meta analyses to not be less productive than capitalist firms, while being vastly moreresilient (among many other beneficialattributes), so they would help the economy grow more in the long run, making us richer. This is not all there is to say; there are many more arguments and there are many more other factors to consider, but in the end, why bother?
You could spend time and energy crafting long chains of arguments with lots of citations and data on unpopular positions (even if you weren’t the person who made an assertion, like in this case) only to get vastly less karma/voting power than people who just assert the popular opinion. I.e., in this case, the assertion “socialism would make us poorer” without any sources or arguments. Which btw is fine, this is an internet comment not an academic paper, but I’ve experienced the dynamics on this forum for years; if one were to reply that it wouldn’t make us poorer, also without sources, or even with some sources, you would lose karma/voting power. And then another person would jump in and point out that the reply didn’t cover literally every aspect of the economy, and it avoided talking about this or that part, which is fine, demands for rigor are good, but the forum as a whole more often than not makes isolated demands for rigor, and the original anti-socialism assertion rarely if ever gets such a demand.
Case in point, the comment you’re replying to. It didn’t even make the assertion that socialism is better, just posted some studies and data from which one could infer that he is pro-socialism, and that’s enough to make him lose karma/voting power, while your stronger assertion without any studies/data (which, again, is fine) get lots of karma.
(Again, while the first two points are aimed at your reply, this last point is aimed at the broader EA forum user base.)
Well half of you do and half of you don’t. The OP for example is defending the Manifest guestlist.
And for people like him who want defend these conferences for having interesting controversial people, why not actually have some confronting controversial people? Instead it’s always libertarians and neoliberals spouting the same tired old race psuedoscience.
That’s a pretty low-bar for interesting.
And how many left-wingers were there? To the left’s credit, they are a bit more socially-intelligent as to not mix & mingle with the crowd of tired cranks with the same tired ideas, but I assure you there are plenty of desperate cranks on the left who are “down bad”.
If you really want fresh thinkers with controversial ideas, have some actually controversial left wing speakers who’s ideas—unlike “controversial” right-wingers—actually are controversial and have the chance to change the world.
You kid yourself if you think the guestlist of libertarian & right-wing speakers at Manifest weren’t themselves also conformist.
EA began as an intellectual movement, and over the years it has watered this down to let in any and all contrarian rejects from other movements. And it shows. EA’s crypto-exchange psoter boy couldn’t grasp probability concepts like the Kelly Criterion, and our conferences are full of cranks, the alt-right, & pseudoscience. Being contrarian should not be mixed up with being EA.
I do think Hanania is interesting. He’s a pro immigration conservative, for instance, and constantly writes about things the right is wrong about. In particular, I found his much-maligned essay about pronouns and genocide pretty fascinating—a shockingly honest look into the unflattering bits of his own psychology.
I think a lot of the people there were prototypical gray tribe members—a bit left of center but with lots of weird heterodox views. Scott, for instance, is left of center, so is Nate Silver, so is Kelsey Piper. I also got an invite and I’m thoroughly left of center—albeit a bix heterodox—having praised Chomsky at some length, written critically about U.S. foreign policy on about a dozen different occasions, and written in support of open borders.
I don’t think that Hanania is a conformist, for instance. This shtick of “actually the non-conformists are the real conformists,” is silly.
Worth noting that Manifest wasn’t an EA conference. It just had some EA people there who wanted to go to a cool conference. Not sure what EA is supposed to do about that.
So… people who are neoliberal to centrist, with Scott (as others on this forum have pointed out on this forum) partial to race pseudoscience. Wow, what confronting fresh ideas.
Have some anarchists, socialists, communists. Have some actually brave thinkers. Be challenged. What are y’all afraid of?
Let me try to steelman this:
We want people to learn new things, so we have conferences where people can present their research. But who to invite? There are so many people, many of whom have never done any studies.
Luckily for us, we have a body of people that spend their lives researching and checking each other’s research: Academia. Still, there are many academics, and there’s only so many time slots you can assign before you’re filled up; ideally, we’d be representative.
So now the question becomes: why was the choice made to spend so many of the limited time slots on “scientific racists”, which is a position that’s virtually universally rejected by professional researchers, while topics like “socialism”, which has a ton of support in academia (e.g., the latest philpapers survey found that when asked about their politics, a majority of philosophers selected “socialism” and only a minority selected “capitalism” or “other”), tend to get little to no time allotted to them at these conferences?
I agree with the point your actually making here-namely that people invite racists but not socialists because they like racism better than socialism or other alternative viewpoints that they could invite people with, but I do have a nitpick:
While I’d much rather have (most, non-Stalinist) socialists than scientific racists, I’d say economists are the most relevant experts for economics, and they seem to be down on socialism, except maybe some non-mainstream market variants. Although I guess other social scientists also have relevant expertise and more of them are socialists I think? Insofar as philosophers are expressing reasonably high confidence in socialism by picking it in the philpapers survey even when “don’t know” is also an option, yet among economists socialism is (I think?) quite fringe, I feel like this is the kind of anti science/empiricism arrogance that philosophers are often accused of, usually quite unfairly. But then I am not a socialist.
I did try to find a survey for sociology, political science, and economics, not only today but also when I was writing my post on market socialism (I too wondered whether economists are more in favor of market socialism), but I couldn’t really find one. My guess is that the first two would be more pro-socialism and the last more anti, although it probably also differs from country to country depending on their history of academia (e.g. whether they had a red scare in academia or not).
This is probably partly because of the different things they’re researching. Economics tends to look at things that are easier to quantify, like GDP and material goods created, which capitalism is really good at, while philosophers tend to look at things that capitalism seems to be less good at, like alienation, which is harder to quantify (though proxies like depression, suicide and loneliness do seem to be increasing).
Not to mention, they might agree on the data but disagree on what to value. Rust & Schwitzgebel (2013) did a survey of philosophy professors specializing in ethics, philosophy professors not specializing in ethics, and non-philosophy professors. 60% of ethicists felt eating meat was wrong, while just under 45% of non-ethicists agreed, and only 19.6% of non-philosophers thought so. I personally think one of the strongest arguments against capitalism is the existence of factory farms. With such numbers, it seems plausible that while an average economist might think of the meat industry as a positive, the average philosopher might think of it as a negative (thinking something akin to this post).
I don’t see why we’d expect less factory farms under socialism, except via us being poorer in general. And I feel like “make everything worse for humans to make things better for animals” feels a bit “cartoon utilitarian super-villain”, even if I’m not sure what is wrong with it. It’s also not why socialists support socialism, even if many are also pro-animal. On the other hand, if socialism worked as intended, why would factory farming decrease?
The comment was about how factory farms are an argument against capitalism; not about why it is an argument for other economic philosophies, so one can’t conclude from this that some other specific economic philosophy (e.g., socialism) doesn’t have that argument against them. It could be that, e.g. factory farms are an argument against capitalism and socialism, but not mutualism.
There was no claim that this is why socialists support socialism, but even if there was, it doesn’t really matter for the argument. Even if we could conclude from “factory farms are an argument against capitalism” that “socialism is good for animal welfare”, why would the motivation of socialists matter? Even if socialists created better animal welfare only unintentionally, wouldn’t that still be one reason to support them? (Assuming you care about the consequences of policy more than the virtues of the participants)
Lastly, I want to talk about this claim. But less so to address you, and more so to address the forum users.
I don’t think that socialism would make us poorer, at least not in the long run. The dynamics of capitalism are very destructive (e.g. negative externalities, regulatory capture, planned obsolescence...) and countries like the Nordic countries, with more socialist policies, tend to do better.
Socialist firms were shown in meta analyses to not be less productive than capitalist firms, while being vastly more resilient (among many other beneficial attributes), so they would help the economy grow more in the long run, making us richer. This is not all there is to say; there are many more arguments and there are many more other factors to consider, but in the end, why bother?
You could spend time and energy crafting long chains of arguments with lots of citations and data on unpopular positions (even if you weren’t the person who made an assertion, like in this case) only to get vastly less karma/voting power than people who just assert the popular opinion. I.e., in this case, the assertion “socialism would make us poorer” without any sources or arguments. Which btw is fine, this is an internet comment not an academic paper, but I’ve experienced the dynamics on this forum for years; if one were to reply that it wouldn’t make us poorer, also without sources, or even with some sources, you would lose karma/voting power. And then another person would jump in and point out that the reply didn’t cover literally every aspect of the economy, and it avoided talking about this or that part, which is fine, demands for rigor are good, but the forum as a whole more often than not makes isolated demands for rigor, and the original anti-socialism assertion rarely if ever gets such a demand.
Case in point, the comment you’re replying to. It didn’t even make the assertion that socialism is better, just posted some studies and data from which one could infer that he is pro-socialism, and that’s enough to make him lose karma/voting power, while your stronger assertion without any studies/data (which, again, is fine) get lots of karma.
(Again, while the first two points are aimed at your reply, this last point is aimed at the broader EA forum user base.)
We’re afraid of people writing hit pieces about us and then boycotting and shunning us because of who we associate with.
Well half of you do and half of you don’t. The OP for example is defending the Manifest guestlist.
And for people like him who want defend these conferences for having interesting controversial people, why not actually have some confronting controversial people? Instead it’s always libertarians and neoliberals spouting the same tired old race psuedoscience.