“You can do better at displaying openness by explicitly denying access to certain gerrymandered ideas” is certainly a take. Not necessarily a wrong one, but a fragile knife to walk, to mix metaphors.
One might distinguish de jure openness (“We let everyone in!”) with de facto (“We attract X subgroups, and repel Y!”). The homogeneity and narrowness of the recent conference might suggest the former approach has not been successful at intellectual openness.
The homogeneity and narrowness of the conference might also suggest various limits and pipeline problems like narrowing from general population to “the demographics of blogging” to “the demographics of EA in general” to “the demographics of forecasting” to “the demographic willing and able to attend a conference about these things.”
Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it, to clearly and loudly dismiss a noticeable and direly hated minority. My prediction is doing so will not actually improve openness, but it could be an interesting experiment and at least it won’t generate stupid Grauniad hit pieces (a competing fluff piece, maybe). Anti-Manifest when and where?
“You can do better at displaying openness by explicitly denying access to certain gerrymandered ideas” is certainly a take. Not necessarily a wrong one, but a fragile knife to walk, to mix metaphors.
One might distinguish de jure openness (“We let everyone in!”) with de facto (“We attract X subgroups, and repel Y!”). The homogeneity and narrowness of the recent conference might suggest the former approach has not been successful at intellectual openness.
The homogeneity and narrowness of the conference might also suggest various limits and pipeline problems like narrowing from general population to “the demographics of blogging” to “the demographics of EA in general” to “the demographics of forecasting” to “the demographic willing and able to attend a conference about these things.”
Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it, to clearly and loudly dismiss a noticeable and direly hated minority. My prediction is doing so will not actually improve openness, but it could be an interesting experiment and at least it won’t generate stupid Grauniad hit pieces (a competing fluff piece, maybe). Anti-Manifest when and where?