You’d expect having a wider range of speakers to increase intellectual diversity — but only as long as hosting Speaker A doesn’t lead Speakers B and C to avoid talking to you
As an aside, if hosting Speaker A is a substantial personal risk to the people who need to decide whether to host Speaker A, I expect the decision process to be biased against hosting Speaker A (relative to an ideal EA-aligned decision process).
Had EA Munich hosted Hanson and then been attacked by people using language similar to that of the critics in Hanson’s Twitter thread, I may well have written a post excoriating those people for being uncharitable. I would prefer if we maintained a strong norm of not creating personal risks for people who have to handle difficult questions about speech norms (though I acknowledge that views on which questions are “difficult” will vary, since different people find different things obviously acceptable/unacceptable).
As an aside, if hosting Speaker A is a substantial personal risk to the people who need to decide whether to host Speaker A, I expect the decision process to be biased against hosting Speaker A (relative to an ideal EA-aligned decision process).
I agree with this.
Had EA Munich hosted Hanson and then been attacked by people using language similar to that of the critics in Hanson’s Twitter thread, I may well have written a post excoriating those people for being uncharitable. I would prefer if we maintained a strong norm of not creating personal risks for people who have to handle difficult questions about speech norms (though I acknowledge that views on which questions are “difficult” will vary, since different people find different things obviously acceptable/unacceptable).