[Minor edits—I posted this after seeing the main post and one of the comments about similar experiences, and figured that this experience was much more common. Since then I haven’t seen many other similar experiences listed, but there have been some on the other side. I’d be curious to get a better read on how many people wound up feeling uncomfortable at the event. That’s something I don’t want to see, and it’s something the organizers don’t want to see.]
Thanks for bringing this up, and I feel really bad about a lot of this.
My impression is that some decent forecasters / financial traders online are more interested in some of this than I’d like or expect. There’s definitely some edgy vibes in the territory. I think the conference played heavily to the interests of some of the community that enjoys forecasting (much more than the community of professional forecasters or forecasting researchers), whatever these interests might be.
I attended for most of Manifest, but I was very focused on the forecasting parts, and (thankfully) think I missed almost all of what you’re describing. There was definitely a decent crowd of professionals there focused on forecasting / EA (and among these, I’d expect much less of the above) but perhaps one would have had to know who they were.
If there are future Manifest events, I’d encourage changes here.
Personally, I’m really hoping that we later get separate, serious forecasting/epistemics events that are much more targeted at professionals / researchers, and are really just about that work. I think some assume that Manifest is this, but I don’t think that’s what it’s trying to be. It’s arguably more of a festival for forecasting enthusiasts—which is also a good thing to have, just a different thing.
Thinking about this more—at first I was confused on why all of these people (Curtis Yarvin? Michael Vassar?) were interested in forecasting. Some of the individuals listed were people I’ve never known to be interested in the area.
I think one issue might have been that this was just an unusual event in that it rejected very few people for controversial beliefs, and was (generally) well put together. I suspect that this could have attracted people with controversial beliefs, even though that was likely not really the main intention.
So, “not excluding controversial people” quickly becomes, partially, “a gathering for controversial people.”
I think Scott Alexander wrote about this sort of pattern with online communities.
This is the Scott Alexander summation of it that sticks in my memory most: “if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.”
I imagine a bit of investigation/survey work would be really good here. It’s a clear empirical question, and I’d hope that if it is true, data would be very convincing to the relevant decision-makers.
Personally I’d hope and expect that it’s true (I’m not very excited about some of these people either, and it would be great to have the conference have better attendees), but expect that the Manifold team isn’t yet convinced.
I think that I’m a bit nervous that claims like “lots of great people who are interested and talented at forecasting don’t go” might actually be, or be treated as, vague points in favor of a side, rather than a real empirical belief.
I’d suspect people on the other side would assume that this is is meant more as a value statement.
But given the specific people in this conversation, I think it’s possible and perhaps preferable for it to be more of an empirical statement—and if that is true, that would be great because it could be studied and the corresponding point would stand.
Here’s one data point; I was consistently in the top 25 on metaculus for a couple years. I would never attend a conference where a “scientific racist” gave a talk.
Yeah and while I don’t think that people should be banned from attending based on most controversial views (I am open to a discussion on Yarvin) I think that special guests should be much more carefully handed out. But I think that’s better argued internally rather than using the kind of blackmail that so many commuities seem to use on one another these days.
Regardless of the tone here, I think EA is much less pushy than most communities in this regard.
I’m surprised at all the negative votes I was getting above. I felt like I was trying to understand the problem, not recommend solutions.
If it is the case that “not excluding controversial people” lead to it becoming unintentionally popular with some crowd, I imagine there are various ways this could be handled. Like, have discussions with some of these people first, and try to get to some agreement people are all happy with.
Oh yeah i bet that not excluding controversial people had this effect. I think several people really liked it because they felt able to be themselves. But i imagine that this led to some of what we see discussed here.
[Minor edits—I posted this after seeing the main post and one of the comments about similar experiences, and figured that this experience was much more common. Since then I haven’t seen many other similar experiences listed, but there have been some on the other side. I’d be curious to get a better read on how many people wound up feeling uncomfortable at the event. That’s something I don’t want to see, and it’s something the organizers don’t want to see.]
Thanks for bringing this up, and I feel really bad about a lot of this.
My impression is that some decent forecasters / financial traders online are more interested in some of this than I’d like or expect. There’s definitely some edgy vibes in the territory. I think the conference played heavily to the interests of some of the community that enjoys forecasting (much more than the community of professional forecasters or forecasting researchers), whatever these interests might be.
I attended for most of Manifest, but I was very focused on the forecasting parts, and (thankfully) think I missed almost all of what you’re describing. There was definitely a decent crowd of professionals there focused on forecasting / EA (and among these, I’d expect much less of the above) but perhaps one would have had to know who they were.
If there are future Manifest events, I’d encourage changes here.
Personally, I’m really hoping that we later get separate, serious forecasting/epistemics events that are much more targeted at professionals / researchers, and are really just about that work. I think some assume that Manifest is this, but I don’t think that’s what it’s trying to be. It’s arguably more of a festival for forecasting enthusiasts—which is also a good thing to have, just a different thing.
Thinking about this more—at first I was confused on why all of these people (Curtis Yarvin? Michael Vassar?) were interested in forecasting. Some of the individuals listed were people I’ve never known to be interested in the area.
I think one issue might have been that this was just an unusual event in that it rejected very few people for controversial beliefs, and was (generally) well put together. I suspect that this could have attracted people with controversial beliefs, even though that was likely not really the main intention.
So, “not excluding controversial people” quickly becomes, partially, “a gathering for controversial people.”
I think Scott Alexander wrote about this sort of pattern with online communities.
This is the Scott Alexander summation of it that sticks in my memory most: “if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.”
And lots of great people who are interested and talented at forecasting don’t go, because they don’t want to be “balancing out”.
I imagine a bit of investigation/survey work would be really good here. It’s a clear empirical question, and I’d hope that if it is true, data would be very convincing to the relevant decision-makers.
Personally I’d hope and expect that it’s true (I’m not very excited about some of these people either, and it would be great to have the conference have better attendees), but expect that the Manifold team isn’t yet convinced.
I think that I’m a bit nervous that claims like “lots of great people who are interested and talented at forecasting don’t go” might actually be, or be treated as, vague points in favor of a side, rather than a real empirical belief.
I’d suspect people on the other side would assume that this is is meant more as a value statement.
But given the specific people in this conversation, I think it’s possible and perhaps preferable for it to be more of an empirical statement—and if that is true, that would be great because it could be studied and the corresponding point would stand.
Here’s one data point; I was consistently in the top 25 on metaculus for a couple years. I would never attend a conference where a “scientific racist” gave a talk.
Yeah and while I don’t think that people should be banned from attending based on most controversial views (I am open to a discussion on Yarvin) I think that special guests should be much more carefully handed out. But I think that’s better argued internally rather than using the kind of blackmail that so many commuities seem to use on one another these days.
Regardless of the tone here, I think EA is much less pushy than most communities in this regard.
I’m surprised at all the negative votes I was getting above. I felt like I was trying to understand the problem, not recommend solutions.
If it is the case that “not excluding controversial people” lead to it becoming unintentionally popular with some crowd, I imagine there are various ways this could be handled. Like, have discussions with some of these people first, and try to get to some agreement people are all happy with.
Oh yeah i bet that not excluding controversial people had this effect. I think several people really liked it because they felt able to be themselves. But i imagine that this led to some of what we see discussed here.