I mean, I don’t really see the paradox in this case. I am totally OK attending a conference with people who I strongly disagree with or who I think are generally being harmful for the world in a bunch of different ways (and I think this is also true for the vast majority of attendees at Manifest).
I feel like the solution to this paradox is to just have a conference for people who are fine with attending an event with that disagreement present, which Manifest is IMO pretty clearly signaling it is trying to be. People don’t have to attend, but where is the paradox?
The paradox IMO only applies if for some reason the different groups actually start competing or interfering with each other, but I had no run-ins with any of these people, and nobody seemed to do any kind of bullying or threaten violence or anything else that seems like it would actually pose a fundamental conflict here.
I again think it’s valuable and important to sign-post that this is the kind of event where people with strong disagreements and drastically different beliefs and moral perspectives will attend, but I feel like overall Manifund and Manifest have been pretty consistent in that messaging (though still not perfect, and I expect future years to have less of an issue here, since people can see how the previous years were).
The paradox is that openness to these kinds of speakers makes the conference much less attractive and acceptable to the large swathe of people interested in forecasting but not interested in engaging with racists. The conference does not need to literally bar this swathe from attending to effectively dissuade them from doing so. Consider how a similar selection of blatant homophobes would affect LGBT+ folks’ decision to attend. (edit: some cool voting patterns happening huh)
If you cancel speakers from attending a future Manifest, won’t that also make the conference less attractive and acceptable to a large swathe of people interested in forecasting?
Consider the relative sizes of the groups, and their respective intellectual honesty and calibre. Manifest can be intellectually open, rigorous, and not deliberately platform racists—it really is possible. And to be clear, I’m not saying ban people who agree with XYZ speaker with racist ties—I’m saying don’t seek to deliberately invite those speakers. Manifest has already heard from them, do they really need annual updates?
It seems like you are referring to Richard Hanania—who has been invited twice. I suspect that he was invited because Hanania has been an outspoken advocate of prediction markets. I find it highly doubtful that Hanania has, on net, pushed more people away from Manifest (and prediction markets) than been a draw to them attending.
It’s not just a matter of a speaker’s net effect on attendance/interest. Alex Jones would probably draw lots of new people to a Manifest conference, but are they types of people you want to be there? Who you choose to platform, especially at a small, young conference, will have a large effect on the makeup and culture of the related communities.
Additionally, given how toxic these views are in the wider culture, any association between them and prediction markets are likely to be bad for the long-term health of the prediction community.
Fwiw, I think this is precisely why you don’t want to invite people solely on popularity. Jones is popular and charismatic but epistemically not someone I want to benefit.
The views of the race science guys on race or Hanson’s edgelording about rape strike me as far more tolerated in (West Coast) EA culture than I would guess they would be in mainstream US conservatism. (Despite EAs no doubt being anti-conservative in many other ways.)
I am strongly in favor of having more forecasting conferences! I think having a more orthodox and professional forecasting conference could be great and I would love to host it. I agree there is somewhat of a limited resource in terms of conference-bandwidth here, but I think on the margin there is just space for multiple events with different priorities here.
I claim Manifest would do better by it’s own lights (i.e. openness to many ideas) if they were more accomodating to people who find racism distasteful than to those who find it acceptable. But also, as one of very few conferences on a niche topic, Manifest holds some responsibility to the current and future forecasting community. On a moral and intellectual basis, barring explicit racists seems much more reasonable than cultivating a home for racists. There is no necessary connection between forecasting and racism—it is a relationship contingent upon particular histories and internet groups. Manifest can decide to continue that relationship or disrupt it.
I feel sympathy for the “cultivating a home for racists” comparison, but like, my sense is just that Manifest just invited anyone who wanted to come with any reasonably large following of any kind. I don’t think they were trying in any way to “cultivate a home for racists”.
I feel hesitant to put more complicated reputational burdens on conference organizers. It is already an enormously thankless job, and while I agree there is conference fatigue and so that means there are some commons to be allocated here, I think on the margin it’s more productive to encourage people to run their own conferences instead of putting more constraints on existing organizers.
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.
Yes ‘cultivate’ is too strong—but the rate of speakers of this kind is way above what one would expect just from the happenstance crossover of interests. Like my guess here is that some subset of the organisers has significant interest in those communities and proactively seeks to add speakers from them. There are speakers/panellists whose connection to any of the Manifest topics are tenuous, and there are other fields with tenuous connections which are not drawn on much by Manifest—e.g. formal risk analysis, actuarial studies, safety engineering, geopolitics, statistics. All that to say there appears to be at least some predilection for edgelordism, above and beyond any coinciding of interests.
Like my guess here is that some subset of the organisers has significant interest in those communities and proactively seeks to add speakers from them.
As far as I can tell, this isn’t true. My model of Austin, Saul and Rachel did indeed invite tons of people from different fields, and it happened to be that these people developed an interest in prediction markets and wanted to come.
I guess I don’t super have a feeling of edgelordism, though I do see a pretty extreme commitment to openness. To be clear, I am not like “these people aren’t at all edgy for the sake of edgy”, but there are people for which I get that vibe much more. It feels much more like a deep commitment to something that happens to give rise to an intense openness to stuff here.
“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?
Have you considered that the reason you don’t see a paradox here is because you are not one of the minorities targeted by the abhorrent views you and your organisation seek to platform?
I have considered it, though most of my staff (which I of course recognize is a biased sample, but it’s what I have) and a large fractions of my friends who I talked to about this are in a bunch of the obviously targeted demographics (most relevantly many of them are jewish), and I don’t think they feel differently. Indeed, there was literally a Shabbat service at the event.
I am pretty confident that is not the reason for my belief, and if I was jewish or black, which seem like the obvious demographics, I would not believe something different here, though it’s of course hard to know with such a substantial counterfactual.
As a side note: I would like to flag that a common meme in the HBD crowd seemed to be that Ashkenazim are the best and the most intelligent race, and that Jewish people were overrepresented among them.
I mean, I don’t really see the paradox in this case. I am totally OK attending a conference with people who I strongly disagree with or who I think are generally being harmful for the world in a bunch of different ways (and I think this is also true for the vast majority of attendees at Manifest).
I feel like the solution to this paradox is to just have a conference for people who are fine with attending an event with that disagreement present, which Manifest is IMO pretty clearly signaling it is trying to be. People don’t have to attend, but where is the paradox?
The paradox IMO only applies if for some reason the different groups actually start competing or interfering with each other, but I had no run-ins with any of these people, and nobody seemed to do any kind of bullying or threaten violence or anything else that seems like it would actually pose a fundamental conflict here.
I again think it’s valuable and important to sign-post that this is the kind of event where people with strong disagreements and drastically different beliefs and moral perspectives will attend, but I feel like overall Manifund and Manifest have been pretty consistent in that messaging (though still not perfect, and I expect future years to have less of an issue here, since people can see how the previous years were).
The paradox is that openness to these kinds of speakers makes the conference much less attractive and acceptable to the large swathe of people interested in forecasting but not interested in engaging with racists. The conference does not need to literally bar this swathe from attending to effectively dissuade them from doing so. Consider how a similar selection of blatant homophobes would affect LGBT+ folks’ decision to attend.
(edit: some cool voting patterns happening huh)
If you cancel speakers from attending a future Manifest, won’t that also make the conference less attractive and acceptable to a large swathe of people interested in forecasting?
Consider the relative sizes of the groups, and their respective intellectual honesty and calibre. Manifest can be intellectually open, rigorous, and not deliberately platform racists—it really is possible. And to be clear, I’m not saying ban people who agree with XYZ speaker with racist ties—I’m saying don’t seek to deliberately invite those speakers. Manifest has already heard from them, do they really need annual updates?
It seems like you are referring to Richard Hanania—who has been invited twice. I suspect that he was invited because Hanania has been an outspoken advocate of prediction markets. I find it highly doubtful that Hanania has, on net, pushed more people away from Manifest (and prediction markets) than been a draw to them attending.
It’s not just a matter of a speaker’s net effect on attendance/interest. Alex Jones would probably draw lots of new people to a Manifest conference, but are they types of people you want to be there? Who you choose to platform, especially at a small, young conference, will have a large effect on the makeup and culture of the related communities.
Additionally, given how toxic these views are in the wider culture, any association between them and prediction markets are likely to be bad for the long-term health of the prediction community.
In the left-wing EA culture. Most of these people have been widely published in magazines, featured on major TV programs, etc.
Fwiw, I think this is precisely why you don’t want to invite people solely on popularity. Jones is popular and charismatic but epistemically not someone I want to benefit.
The views of the race science guys on race or Hanson’s edgelording about rape strike me as far more tolerated in (West Coast) EA culture than I would guess they would be in mainstream US conservatism. (Despite EAs no doubt being anti-conservative in many other ways.)
There are other examples, and I do not share your doubt.
I am strongly in favor of having more forecasting conferences! I think having a more orthodox and professional forecasting conference could be great and I would love to host it. I agree there is somewhat of a limited resource in terms of conference-bandwidth here, but I think on the margin there is just space for multiple events with different priorities here.
I claim Manifest would do better by it’s own lights (i.e. openness to many ideas) if they were more accomodating to people who find racism distasteful than to those who find it acceptable. But also, as one of very few conferences on a niche topic, Manifest holds some responsibility to the current and future forecasting community. On a moral and intellectual basis, barring explicit racists seems much more reasonable than cultivating a home for racists. There is no necessary connection between forecasting and racism—it is a relationship contingent upon particular histories and internet groups. Manifest can decide to continue that relationship or disrupt it.
I feel sympathy for the “cultivating a home for racists” comparison, but like, my sense is just that Manifest just invited anyone who wanted to come with any reasonably large following of any kind. I don’t think they were trying in any way to “cultivate a home for racists”.
I feel hesitant to put more complicated reputational burdens on conference organizers. It is already an enormously thankless job, and while I agree there is conference fatigue and so that means there are some commons to be allocated here, I think on the margin it’s more productive to encourage people to run their own conferences instead of putting more constraints on existing organizers.
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.
Yes ‘cultivate’ is too strong—but the rate of speakers of this kind is way above what one would expect just from the happenstance crossover of interests. Like my guess here is that some subset of the organisers has significant interest in those communities and proactively seeks to add speakers from them. There are speakers/panellists whose connection to any of the Manifest topics are tenuous, and there are other fields with tenuous connections which are not drawn on much by Manifest—e.g. formal risk analysis, actuarial studies, safety engineering, geopolitics, statistics. All that to say there appears to be at least some predilection for edgelordism, above and beyond any coinciding of interests.
As far as I can tell, this isn’t true. My model of Austin, Saul and Rachel did indeed invite tons of people from different fields, and it happened to be that these people developed an interest in prediction markets and wanted to come.
I guess I don’t super have a feeling of edgelordism, though I do see a pretty extreme commitment to openness. To be clear, I am not like “these people aren’t at all edgy for the sake of edgy”, but there are people for which I get that vibe much more. It feels much more like a deep commitment to something that happens to give rise to an intense openness to stuff here.
“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?
Have you considered that the reason you don’t see a paradox here is because you are not one of the minorities targeted by the abhorrent views you and your organisation seek to platform?
I have considered it, though most of my staff (which I of course recognize is a biased sample, but it’s what I have) and a large fractions of my friends who I talked to about this are in a bunch of the obviously targeted demographics (most relevantly many of them are jewish), and I don’t think they feel differently. Indeed, there was literally a Shabbat service at the event.
I am pretty confident that is not the reason for my belief, and if I was jewish or black, which seem like the obvious demographics, I would not believe something different here, though it’s of course hard to know with such a substantial counterfactual.
As a side note: I would like to flag that a common meme in the HBD crowd seemed to be that Ashkenazim are the best and the most intelligent race, and that Jewish people were overrepresented among them.