I don’t think they were trying in any way to “cultivate a home for racists”.
I think one way you can read this situation is: racists are looking for an “intellectual home” in some sense, and since they don’t find one in most of the mainstream, they look for places that they can parasitically occupy and use for their own ends. The warning here is: the forecasting community need not only to avoid cultivating a home for racists, but also to proactively defend against racists cultivating a home for themselves. And if the forecasting community can’t build walls against this kind of parasitism, then the rationalist community needs to protect themselves from the forecasting community. And if they can’t do that, then EA needs to protect itself from the rationalist community.
The core of much of this thinking is that racists (and fascists, the alt-right generally) don’t play fair in the marketplace of ideas, and they will manipulate and exploit your welcome if you extend them one. I’m not sure how well I can defend this idea (might write a top-level comment about it if I can feel confident enough about it), but I think that’s often what people are getting at with these kinds of concerns.
Yeah, to be clear, I think this is a real dynamic (as Scott Alexander has I think cogently written about here[1]). I think in as much as this is the concern, I am pretty into thinking about the dynamics here, and strongly agree that defenses for this kind of stuff are important.
I also think similar things are true about people on the far left and a bunch of other social clusters with a history of trying to establish themselves in places with attack surface like this.
I think a reasonable thing would definitely be to see whether any specific subculture is growing at a very disproportionate rate in terms of attendance for events like Manifest, as well as to think about good ways of defending against this kind of takeover. My model of Manifest is probably not doing enough modeling about this kind of hostile subculture growth, though my guess is they’ll learn quickly as it becomes a more apparent problem.
The moral of the story is: 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.
The warning here is: the forecasting community need not only to avoid cultivating a home for racists, but also to proactively defend against racists cultivating a home for themselves. And if the forecasting community can’t build walls against this kind of parasitism, then the rationalist community needs to protect themselves from the forecasting community. And if they can’t do that, then EA needs to protect itself from the rationalist community.
I understand what you’re getting at, but would flag that all these categories are pretty coarse.
The “forecasting community” sounds similar to the “finance community”. In finance, there are tons of subcommunities. Chicago economists are nothing like wolf-of-wallstreet salesmen.
Similarly, I don’t see there being a coherent “forecasting” community now. There’s a bunch of very different clusters of people.
Arguably this conference was more about the “Manifold community”, which is large and diverse in a similar way to the “Reddit community”.
I’m not 100% sure I endorse either, to be fair. I’ve heard this story from many people and I think it’s a useful story to have in mind, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen enough concrete evidence and thought enough about alternative explanations to really vouch that it’s right.
I think one way you can read this situation is: racists are looking for an “intellectual home” in some sense, and since they don’t find one in most of the mainstream, they look for places that they can parasitically occupy and use for their own ends. The warning here is: the forecasting community need not only to avoid cultivating a home for racists, but also to proactively defend against racists cultivating a home for themselves. And if the forecasting community can’t build walls against this kind of parasitism, then the rationalist community needs to protect themselves from the forecasting community. And if they can’t do that, then EA needs to protect itself from the rationalist community.
The core of much of this thinking is that racists (and fascists, the alt-right generally) don’t play fair in the marketplace of ideas, and they will manipulate and exploit your welcome if you extend them one. I’m not sure how well I can defend this idea (might write a top-level comment about it if I can feel confident enough about it), but I think that’s often what people are getting at with these kinds of concerns.
Yeah, to be clear, I think this is a real dynamic (as Scott Alexander has I think cogently written about here [1]). I think in as much as this is the concern, I am pretty into thinking about the dynamics here, and strongly agree that defenses for this kind of stuff are important.
I also think similar things are true about people on the far left and a bunch of other social clusters with a history of trying to establish themselves in places with attack surface like this.
I think a reasonable thing would definitely be to see whether any specific subculture is growing at a very disproportionate rate in terms of attendance for events like Manifest, as well as to think about good ways of defending against this kind of takeover. My model of Manifest is probably not doing enough modeling about this kind of hostile subculture growth, though my guess is they’ll learn quickly as it becomes a more apparent problem.
I understand what you’re getting at, but would flag that all these categories are pretty coarse.
The “forecasting community” sounds similar to the “finance community”. In finance, there are tons of subcommunities. Chicago economists are nothing like wolf-of-wallstreet salesmen.
Similarly, I don’t see there being a coherent “forecasting” community now. There’s a bunch of very different clusters of people.
Arguably this conference was more about the “Manifold community”, which is large and diverse in a similar way to the “Reddit community”.
Yeah this is well put. Not sure I endorse, but equally, i don’t want forecasting to be a home for racists.
I’m not 100% sure I endorse either, to be fair. I’ve heard this story from many people and I think it’s a useful story to have in mind, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen enough concrete evidence and thought enough about alternative explanations to really vouch that it’s right.