above all, thank you for writing this up. i recognize how difficult writing something like this might be, and i endorse the reflex to click “publish” anyway.
“I am releasing this post under a pseudonym, because I really don’t know how much talking about this topic with my real name and face might hurt my future interactions with the rationalist community. It might turn out to have zero effect, but I dunno maybe the Manifest people and Lightcone would kind of dislike me or something.”
i’m not sure exactly what you mean by “dislike;” i do think we disagree, but i definitely don’t think you’re an evil person or something. i would love to have you back at future manifests!
i was pretty disappointed at the quality of the journalism in the guardian hitpiece; see @Habryka ’s thread pointing out a number factual errors. there were definitely some nuggets of fair criticism, which made me even more disappointed in the guardian piece. but that also makes me even more glad that you wrote up what is (IMO) a much more coherent criticism.
…however, i think that “error-riddled guardian hitpiece” is a pretty low bar to clear. i do still think that there are some worrying/bad parts of this piece, which i think @jacobjacob gets at quite well in his comment. i won’t get at them here, but i encourage readers to read jacob’s comment before mine.
i think that there is a lot here that i could write a lot about, but i’m not currently planning to write out all of my thoughts here. this is particularly because, in my experience, it’s vastly more productive to have these sorts of dialogues over a video call or face-to-face. so:
if folks would like to talk to me IRL, i usually bounce between SF, LA, and Boston. contact me when you’re in any of those cities and i’ll buy you a coffee.
alternatively, we can talk over videocall, which you can do here. i’ve already had videocalls of a similar nature with e.g. @Catherine Low and @ChanaMessinger (among others), and intend to do so with @David Thorstad (among others). i’d also politely urge those with whom i’ve already talked to reply to this comment about their experience of chatting with me, so as to calibratedly {en,dis}courage other folks {to talk,from talking} with me.
@Mananio, i’m particularly eager to chat with you; if you feel comfortable doxxing yourself to me, i’d be delighted to meet with you, either in-person or over videocall.
i wrote this in just a couple hours. which, for me, is “quite quickly.” on priors, it seems likely that there are at least a couple points in here that i’ll change my mind about later on.
i write this as one of the co-leads of manifest, though this doesn’t (necessarily) reflect the opinions of @Austin or @Rachel Weinberg. you can read austin’s thoughts here. [edit june19-2024: you can read rachel’s thoughts here.]
what is manifest about? what ought manifest be about?
although manifest is nominally about prediction markets, it’s also about all the ideas that folks who like prediction markets are also into — betting, philosophy, mechanism design, writing, etc. i’d recommend readers look through our special guest list and come to their own opinion about manifest; we had about sixty such special guests, and i think some aggregation of all of them probably amounts to a much more accurate read of the intellectual vibe at manifest than any selected subset of guests.
and i want to note that some edge is fine (and good!) — but it’s fine & good as a byproduct of a good event-building process, not as a goal at which i’d like to intentionally aim.
i don’t want manifest to be a conference for edgelords, and i don’t want manifest to be known as such. if it is, i’ve failed.
…but i don’t think i’ve failed! my guess is that most people can attend manifest and never interact with someone who they consider racist. the average response on the feedback form was a 9⁄10, and of the negative responses, the vast majority were about long lines for the bathrooms, not about racists. this was also true of qualitative reactions i heard during the event; @Nathan Young ’s comment gets into this really well.[1]
my guess is that, on the margin, i’d have liked to have a bunch more folks at manifest who’re sorta unrelated to discussions about race. some specific people i invited and who weren’t able to make it include andy matsuschak, judea pearl, jason matheny, and many others. i don’t think we hit this balance perfectly, but i also don’t think we were off-base. i’ll touch on this more in a moment, but i wanted to make on thing really clear:
separate “attended” from “invited”
manifest is not an application-based or invite-only event. you buy a ticket, and you show up.
two exceptions to that general rule:
we sometimes subsidize particular people who we particularly want to attend by giving them a free or reduced-price ticket. for instance, i did this for tracing woodgrains (one of my favorite writers), madhu sriram (founder of fractal university), and keri warr (organized a 2 hour session of wrestling in the park, and gave a talk on anthropic’s internal prediction markets). in general, i endorse subsidizing things of which i want to see more, and this is a pretty straightforward application of that general rule.
(rarely,) we ban folks. when we do, it’s because we think they are or are likely to be in violation of our rules — mostly, these are folks who we think are likely to cause our attendees physical harm. this particular subpoint has been probably the single most difficult part of event organizing, and the part that i dislike most. it’s really draining, both on time and on energy. and it’s a totally thankless task that’s only noticed if you do it poorly.
we have a high bar for banning people from the event, and we also have a pretty high bar for giving people free tickets. the vast majority (~4/5?) of the attendees at manifest fell into the category of “bought a ticket, showed up.”
again: the vast majority of attendees simply bought a ticket and showed up.
i think that nonhuman animal suffering is an atrocious blight on humanity’s moral track record. but if the person who most strongly endorsed nonhuman animal suffering bought a ticket to manifest and showed up, i would’ve let them into the event — and for context on that statement, i’ve taken the pledge and donated ~all of my pledged funds thus far to various animal welfare organizations.
and this framework extends more broadly, to folks who hold views that you might consider abhorrent: e.g. we did not give curtis yarvin a free ticket to attend manifest, but if he had bought a ticket and showed up, i would’ve let him in. (however, yarvin didn’t buy a ticket, and didn’t attend.)
…but we’re also responsible for who buys tickets.
if we invite a bunch of edgy speakers, and then a bunch of edgelords buy tickets, we can’t reasonably claim that we’re not responsible for creating an edgy vibe.
i think that, on balance, we were like ~5% too edgy or something — but the way that i’d aim to correct this is by having the makeup of speakers more accurately represent my internal set of beliefs and interests (which happens to be like ~5% less edgy), and not by intentionally cutting our average edginess. anodynity is a really bad goal to aim for. you can see in one of our notes docs on april 22 that we explicitly wanted to invite more “warm/kind/gracious” people, and this was directly to have the speaker makeup more accurately reflect our interests.
like, c’mon — we had fifty seven speakers! look through them, and evaluate for yourself if the 8 that this article describes is an accurate representation of our speakers overall.
a few specific corrections
Lightcone [...] hosted these events at Lighthaven
this is technically true, but a bit misleading. Lightcone owns & operates the venue (Lighthaven), so by a stretched interpretation of “host,” this is true of every event that occurs at Lighthaven. but more realistically:
the LessOnline team hosted all of LessOnline, including running operations & controlling finances
the LessOnline team controlled most of the finances for Summer Camp, but the Manifest team ran most of the operations
the Manifest team controlled both the finances and the operations of Manifest proper
and, more specifically:
the LessOnline team (and not the Manifest team) had ~full authority to kick folks out of LessOnline
any of the LessOnline or Manifest teams had ~full, independent authority to kick folks out of Summer Camp
the Manifest team (and not the LessOnline team) had ~full authority to kick folks out of Manifest
i can clarify further if you’d find it helpful, but this is the gist of the split.
[…] anti-equality figure Curtis Yarvin […], and the highly controversial rationalist Michael Vassar […]
yarvin didn’t attend, and although you clarified that later on, it looks like many folks in the comment section were confused by your phrasing. also, the afterparty that yarvin organized was hosted at yarvin’s house (not at the manifest venue), and was unaffiliated with manifest. i’d appreciate if you made those points clear in each of the portions of text in your article in which you reference yarvin or his party. (if you’d like, you can also make it clear that, based on my current knowledge of his behavior, had yarvin bought a ticket and showed up to manifest, i would have let him in; but that’s up to you.)
michael vassar did not attend any of the events; i further clarify in this thread. i think your phrasing is worded in a way that seems to imply that he did attend, and i’d appreciate if you edited your article to reflect that.
Having speakers who have strong opinions on the Holocaust […]? Not so great!
uh, so, my guess is that you mean something like “it’s bad to invite speakers who think the holocaust is {fake, good, etc}.” i agree with this take, but the way that you’ve currently phrased this is pretty ambiguous in a way that seems quite unhelpful. to take an obviously hyperbolic example, i myself have pretty strong opinions on the holocaust: my grandparents survived torture & starvation in various death camps, and my opinions are, roughly, “the holocaust was (strongly) bad.”
i’d like to understand your wording better, and i’d encourage you to edit your original wording to reflect what you actually mean as well as the thing that you’re actually critiquing. e.g., did such a speaker come to manifest? what was the view that they actually endorsed? what norm do you think that violates? etc.
independently, i’d also like to know if any special guests explicitly endorsed the holocaust as being good or fake — i’d probably be a lot less interested in giving them a free ticket next time.
to repeat:
i think that there is a lot here that i could write a lot about. in my experience, it’s vastly more productive to have these sorts of dialogues over a video call or face-to-face. so:
if folks would like to talk to me IRL, i usually bounce between SF, LA, and Boston. contact me when you’re in any of those cities and i’ll buy you a coffee :)
alternatively, we can talk over videocall, which you can do here.
if you’re actually interested in improving community dynamics, talking to me (or the other organizers) IRL or over video call is probably the most effective way to do so; and i’d actively encourage it.
i do think there’s a bit of a selection effect, where those most hurt by a racist vibe would probably have not come (or would have left early, etc). again, if this prevented great folks who would otherwise have attended the event from coming, i think i’ve failed them, and i’d seek to do better for the next event.
Thank you for this message Saul Munn. It feels honest and I do notice myself feeling relieved seeing that one of the main organisers isn’t angry at me or something. I’ll make every edit and clarification that you suggested. I would like to point out that I had said that I am unsure if Vassar himself attended the events or not, but I have been told that he did buy a ticket. I believe you that he did not attend, but I will leave a mention about the ticket (unless of course I have been misinformed, but I do get it if you can’t divulge in who specifically has or has not bought a ticket). [Edit: Saul on Vassar attendance]
I do regret using the holocaust example. The example was loosely based on one speaker who appeared to be defending eugenics by saying that the holocaust was actually considered a dysgenic event by top nazi officials. Many other examples I could have used would have narrowed my identity down quite a bit, as many of the sessions had just a handful people in the audience. What I was going for was “even the good parts of a controversial idea are ruined if you have the wrong person talking about it”. I edited this in the text to make it more clear. Please take a look to see if makes more sense now!
I appreciate your invite to grab a coffee or have a video call, but I’m afraid I’m already finding writing about this extremely stressful. If you have a couple of specific questions you’d like to ask me, feel free to send me a DM, but I can’t promise an answer.
I do regret using the holocaust example. The example was loosely based on one speaker who appeared to be defending eugenics by saying that the holocaust was actually considered a dysgenic event by top nazi officials
That sounds like an obviously invalid argument! Now, a) I didn’t attend that talk, b) many people are bad at making arguments, and c) I’ve long suspected that poor reasoning especially is positively correlated with racism (and this is true even after typical range restriction). So it’s certainly possible that the argument they made was literally that bad.
But I think it’s more likely that you misunderstood their argument.
Yeah I have now heard two people say that this was more a historical quibble than some sort of discussion of eugenics in relation to the holocaust. I imagine I could find the actual argument if people thought it was load bearing.
If it were my event, i would like it to be free speechy without giving status mainly for edginess. So attendees can do what they like, but i’d prefer guests were people with good forecasting track records or something interesting to say—people who we want to grow up to be, in some sense. I think this would remove a lot of the incentive for edgy people to come, which i’m fine with.
The post complains about “scientific racists” at the conference, with there being a minimum of eight:
I would be comfortable putting a total of eight people under the eugenics/HBD label. There might be more, but I am not an expert.
We can debate whether it’s closer to eight or closer to twelve but let’s take eight as the conservative estimate. You say:
we had about sixty such special guests
And:
i think that, on balance, we were like ~5% too edgy or something — but the way that i’d aim to correct this is by having the makeup of speakers more accurately represent my internal set of beliefs and interests (which happens to be like ~5% less edgy)
So 8 out of 60 means that 13.333% of the speakers were “scientific racists” and if we decrease that by 5 percent we end up with five “scientific racists”. So is this correct? Will you invite five “scientific racists” as speakers next time?
meta
above all, thank you for writing this up. i recognize how difficult writing something like this might be, and i endorse the reflex to click “publish” anyway.
“I am releasing this post under a pseudonym, because I really don’t know how much talking about this topic with my real name and face might hurt my future interactions with the rationalist community. It might turn out to have zero effect, but I dunno maybe the Manifest people and Lightcone would kind of dislike me or something.”
i’m not sure exactly what you mean by “dislike;” i do think we disagree, but i definitely don’t think you’re an evil person or something. i would love to have you back at future manifests!
i was pretty disappointed at the quality of the journalism in the guardian hitpiece; see @Habryka ’s thread pointing out a number factual errors. there were definitely some nuggets of fair criticism, which made me even more disappointed in the guardian piece. but that also makes me even more glad that you wrote up what is (IMO) a much more coherent criticism.
…however, i think that “error-riddled guardian hitpiece” is a pretty low bar to clear. i do still think that there are some worrying/bad parts of this piece, which i think @jacobjacob gets at quite well in his comment. i won’t get at them here, but i encourage readers to read jacob’s comment before mine.
i think that there is a lot here that i could write a lot about, but i’m not currently planning to write out all of my thoughts here. this is particularly because, in my experience, it’s vastly more productive to have these sorts of dialogues over a video call or face-to-face. so:
if folks would like to talk to me IRL, i usually bounce between SF, LA, and Boston. contact me when you’re in any of those cities and i’ll buy you a coffee.
alternatively, we can talk over videocall, which you can do here. i’ve already had videocalls of a similar nature with e.g. @Catherine Low and @ChanaMessinger (among others), and intend to do so with @David Thorstad (among others). i’d also politely urge those with whom i’ve already talked to reply to this comment about their experience of chatting with me, so as to calibratedly {en,dis}courage other folks {to talk,from talking} with me.
@Mananio, i’m particularly eager to chat with you; if you feel comfortable doxxing yourself to me, i’d be delighted to meet with you, either in-person or over videocall.
i wrote this in just a couple hours. which, for me, is “quite quickly.” on priors, it seems likely that there are at least a couple points in here that i’ll change my mind about later on.
i write this as one of the co-leads of manifest, though this doesn’t (necessarily) reflect the opinions of @Austin or @Rachel Weinberg. you can read austin’s thoughts here. [edit june19-2024: you can read rachel’s thoughts here.]
what is manifest about? what ought manifest be about?
although manifest is nominally about prediction markets, it’s also about all the ideas that folks who like prediction markets are also into — betting, philosophy, mechanism design, writing, etc. i’d recommend readers look through our special guest list and come to their own opinion about manifest; we had about sixty such special guests, and i think some aggregation of all of them probably amounts to a much more accurate read of the intellectual vibe at manifest than any selected subset of guests.
and i want to note that some edge is fine (and good!) — but it’s fine & good as a byproduct of a good event-building process, not as a goal at which i’d like to intentionally aim.
i don’t want manifest to be a conference for edgelords, and i don’t want manifest to be known as such. if it is, i’ve failed.
…but i don’t think i’ve failed! my guess is that most people can attend manifest and never interact with someone who they consider racist. the average response on the feedback form was a 9⁄10, and of the negative responses, the vast majority were about long lines for the bathrooms, not about racists. this was also true of qualitative reactions i heard during the event; @Nathan Young ’s comment gets into this really well.[1]
my guess is that, on the margin, i’d have liked to have a bunch more folks at manifest who’re sorta unrelated to discussions about race. some specific people i invited and who weren’t able to make it include andy matsuschak, judea pearl, jason matheny, and many others. i don’t think we hit this balance perfectly, but i also don’t think we were off-base. i’ll touch on this more in a moment, but i wanted to make on thing really clear:
separate “attended” from “invited”
manifest is not an application-based or invite-only event. you buy a ticket, and you show up.
two exceptions to that general rule:
we sometimes subsidize particular people who we particularly want to attend by giving them a free or reduced-price ticket. for instance, i did this for tracing woodgrains (one of my favorite writers), madhu sriram (founder of fractal university), and keri warr (organized a 2 hour session of wrestling in the park, and gave a talk on anthropic’s internal prediction markets). in general, i endorse subsidizing things of which i want to see more, and this is a pretty straightforward application of that general rule.
(rarely,) we ban folks. when we do, it’s because we think they are or are likely to be in violation of our rules — mostly, these are folks who we think are likely to cause our attendees physical harm. this particular subpoint has been probably the single most difficult part of event organizing, and the part that i dislike most. it’s really draining, both on time and on energy. and it’s a totally thankless task that’s only noticed if you do it poorly.
we have a high bar for banning people from the event, and we also have a pretty high bar for giving people free tickets. the vast majority (~4/5?) of the attendees at manifest fell into the category of “bought a ticket, showed up.”
again: the vast majority of attendees simply bought a ticket and showed up.
i think that nonhuman animal suffering is an atrocious blight on humanity’s moral track record. but if the person who most strongly endorsed nonhuman animal suffering bought a ticket to manifest and showed up, i would’ve let them into the event — and for context on that statement, i’ve taken the pledge and donated ~all of my pledged funds thus far to various animal welfare organizations.
and this framework extends more broadly, to folks who hold views that you might consider abhorrent: e.g. we did not give curtis yarvin a free ticket to attend manifest, but if he had bought a ticket and showed up, i would’ve let him in. (however, yarvin didn’t buy a ticket, and didn’t attend.)
…but we’re also responsible for who buys tickets.
if we invite a bunch of edgy speakers, and then a bunch of edgelords buy tickets, we can’t reasonably claim that we’re not responsible for creating an edgy vibe.
i think that, on balance, we were like ~5% too edgy or something — but the way that i’d aim to correct this is by having the makeup of speakers more accurately represent my internal set of beliefs and interests (which happens to be like ~5% less edgy), and not by intentionally cutting our average edginess. anodynity is a really bad goal to aim for. you can see in one of our notes docs on april 22 that we explicitly wanted to invite more “warm/kind/gracious” people, and this was directly to have the speaker makeup more accurately reflect our interests.
like, c’mon — we had fifty seven speakers! look through them, and evaluate for yourself if the 8 that this article describes is an accurate representation of our speakers overall.
a few specific corrections
this is technically true, but a bit misleading. Lightcone owns & operates the venue (Lighthaven), so by a stretched interpretation of “host,” this is true of every event that occurs at Lighthaven. but more realistically:
the LessOnline team hosted all of LessOnline, including running operations & controlling finances
the LessOnline team controlled most of the finances for Summer Camp, but the Manifest team ran most of the operations
the Manifest team controlled both the finances and the operations of Manifest proper
and, more specifically:
the LessOnline team (and not the Manifest team) had ~full authority to kick folks out of LessOnline
any of the LessOnline or Manifest teams had ~full, independent authority to kick folks out of Summer Camp
the Manifest team (and not the LessOnline team) had ~full authority to kick folks out of Manifest
i can clarify further if you’d find it helpful, but this is the gist of the split.
yarvin didn’t attend, and although you clarified that later on, it looks like many folks in the comment section were confused by your phrasing. also, the afterparty that yarvin organized was hosted at yarvin’s house (not at the manifest venue), and was unaffiliated with manifest. i’d appreciate if you made those points clear in each of the portions of text in your article in which you reference yarvin or his party. (if you’d like, you can also make it clear that, based on my current knowledge of his behavior, had yarvin bought a ticket and showed up to manifest, i would have let him in; but that’s up to you.)
michael vassar did not attend any of the events; i further clarify in this thread. i think your phrasing is worded in a way that seems to imply that he did attend, and i’d appreciate if you edited your article to reflect that.
uh, so, my guess is that you mean something like “it’s bad to invite speakers who think the holocaust is {fake, good, etc}.” i agree with this take, but the way that you’ve currently phrased this is pretty ambiguous in a way that seems quite unhelpful. to take an obviously hyperbolic example, i myself have pretty strong opinions on the holocaust: my grandparents survived torture & starvation in various death camps, and my opinions are, roughly, “the holocaust was (strongly) bad.”
i’d like to understand your wording better, and i’d encourage you to edit your original wording to reflect what you actually mean as well as the thing that you’re actually critiquing. e.g., did such a speaker come to manifest? what was the view that they actually endorsed? what norm do you think that violates? etc.
independently, i’d also like to know if any special guests explicitly endorsed the holocaust as being good or fake — i’d probably be a lot less interested in giving them a free ticket next time.
to repeat:
i think that there is a lot here that i could write a lot about. in my experience, it’s vastly more productive to have these sorts of dialogues over a video call or face-to-face. so:
if folks would like to talk to me IRL, i usually bounce between SF, LA, and Boston. contact me when you’re in any of those cities and i’ll buy you a coffee :)
alternatively, we can talk over videocall, which you can do here.
if you’re actually interested in improving community dynamics, talking to me (or the other organizers) IRL or over video call is probably the most effective way to do so; and i’d actively encourage it.
i do think there’s a bit of a selection effect, where those most hurt by a racist vibe would probably have not come (or would have left early, etc). again, if this prevented great folks who would otherwise have attended the event from coming, i think i’ve failed them, and i’d seek to do better for the next event.
Thank you for this message Saul Munn. It feels honest and I do notice myself feeling relieved seeing that one of the main organisers isn’t angry at me or something. I’ll make every edit and clarification that you suggested. I would like to point out that I had said that I am unsure if Vassar himself attended the events or not, but I have been told that he did buy a ticket. I believe you that he did not attend, but I will leave a mention about the ticket (unless of course I have been misinformed, but I do get it if you can’t divulge in who specifically has or has not bought a ticket). [Edit: Saul on Vassar attendance]
I do regret using the holocaust example. The example was loosely based on one speaker who appeared to be defending eugenics by saying that the holocaust was actually considered a dysgenic event by top nazi officials. Many other examples I could have used would have narrowed my identity down quite a bit, as many of the sessions had just a handful people in the audience. What I was going for was “even the good parts of a controversial idea are ruined if you have the wrong person talking about it”. I edited this in the text to make it more clear. Please take a look to see if makes more sense now!
I appreciate your invite to grab a coffee or have a video call, but I’m afraid I’m already finding writing about this extremely stressful. If you have a couple of specific questions you’d like to ask me, feel free to send me a DM, but I can’t promise an answer.
That sounds like an obviously invalid argument! Now, a) I didn’t attend that talk, b) many people are bad at making arguments, and c) I’ve long suspected that poor reasoning especially is positively correlated with racism (and this is true even after typical range restriction). So it’s certainly possible that the argument they made was literally that bad.
But I think it’s more likely that you misunderstood their argument.
Yeah I have now heard two people say that this was more a historical quibble than some sort of discussion of eugenics in relation to the holocaust. I imagine I could find the actual argument if people thought it was load bearing.
I believe Vassar did buy a ticket to Summer Camp, but it was refunded as he wasn’t allowed into that event.
True, but he was allowed to attend Manifest, even though he didn’t end up coming in the end. Saul on Vassar attendance: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MHenxzydsNgRzSMHY/my-experience-at-the-controversial-manifest-2024?commentId=vWLJo6GQ5sFbbbxch
If it were my event, i would like it to be free speechy without giving status mainly for edginess. So attendees can do what they like, but i’d prefer guests were people with good forecasting track records or something interesting to say—people who we want to grow up to be, in some sense. I think this would remove a lot of the incentive for edgy people to come, which i’m fine with.
The post complains about “scientific racists” at the conference, with there being a minimum of eight:
We can debate whether it’s closer to eight or closer to twelve but let’s take eight as the conservative estimate. You say:
And:
So 8 out of 60 means that 13.333% of the speakers were “scientific racists” and if we decrease that by 5 percent we end up with five “scientific racists”. So is this correct? Will you invite five “scientific racists” as speakers next time?