Observe that it is here, on the EA forum, that a substantial fraction of commenters are calling for conference organizers to avoid inviting people for reasons that explicitly trade off against truth-seeking considerations.
I have mostly observed people who don’t see the controversial speakers as a problem claim that excluding them would go against truth-seeking principles. People who’d prefer to not have them platformed at an event somewhat connected to EA don’t seem to think this is a trade off.
Separately, if someone avoided attending Manifest because they anticipated unpleasantness stemming from the presence of these attendees, they either had wildly miscalibrated expectations about what Manifest would be like, or (frankly) they might benefit from asking themselves what is different about attending Manifest vs. attending any other similarly large social event (nearly all of which have invited people with similarly unpalatable views)
Anecdotally, a major reason I created this post was because the amount of very edgy people was significantly higher than the baseline for non-EA large events. I can’t think of another event that I have attended where people would’ve felt comfortable saying the stuff that was being said. I didn’t particularly seek these types of interactions either.
The fact is that we have multiple people who would have been a positive contribution to the event, multiple people who have had similar experiences, and at least one person who said they would not have come or volunteered if they would have known that race science is a topic that would continue to come up (and I myself was on the fence on whether or not I’d come again, but I probably would, especially if some actions are taken to make things more comfortable for everyone). To be fair, at least one person has said that they did not see anything like this happening during the events, so it is unclear how many people were actually left upset by these things (Austin’s feedback form suggests not many).
People who’d prefer to not have them platformed at an event somewhat connected to EA don’t seem to think this is a trade off.
Optimizing for X means optimizing against not-X. (Well, at the pareto frontier, which we aren’t at, but it’s usually true for humans, anyways.) You will generate two different lists of people for two different values of X. Ergo, there is a trade off.
Anecdotally, a major reason I created this post was because the amount of very edgy people was significantly higher than the baseline for non-EA large events. I can’t think of another event that I have attended where people would’ve felt comfortable saying the stuff that was being said.
Note that these two sentences are saying very different things. The first one is about the percentage of attendees that have certain views, and I am pretty confident that it is false (except in a trivial sense, where people at non-EA events might have different “edgy” views). If you think that percentage of the general population that holds views at least as backwards as “typical racism” is less than whatever it was at Manifest (where I would bet very large amounts of money the median attendee was much more egalitarian than average for their reference class)...
The second one is about what was said at the event, and so far I haven’t seen anyone describe an explicit instance of racism or bigotry by an attendee (invited speaker or not). There were no sessions about “race science”, so I am left at something of a loss to explain how that is a subject that could continue to come up, unless someone happened to accidentally wander into multiple ongoing conversations about the subject. Absent affirmative confirmation of such an event, my current belief is that much more innocous things are being lumped in under a much more disparaging label.
I have mostly observed people who don’t see the controversial speakers as a problem claim that excluding them would go against truth-seeking principles. People who’d prefer to not have them platformed at an event somewhat connected to EA don’t seem to think this is a trade off.
Anecdotally, a major reason I created this post was because the amount of very edgy people was significantly higher than the baseline for non-EA large events. I can’t think of another event that I have attended where people would’ve felt comfortable saying the stuff that was being said. I didn’t particularly seek these types of interactions either.
The fact is that we have multiple people who would have been a positive contribution to the event, multiple people who have had similar experiences, and at least one person who said they would not have come or volunteered if they would have known that race science is a topic that would continue to come up (and I myself was on the fence on whether or not I’d come again, but I probably would, especially if some actions are taken to make things more comfortable for everyone). To be fair, at least one person has said that they did not see anything like this happening during the events, so it is unclear how many people were actually left upset by these things (Austin’s feedback form suggests not many).
Optimizing for X means optimizing against not-X. (Well, at the pareto frontier, which we aren’t at, but it’s usually true for humans, anyways.) You will generate two different lists of people for two different values of X. Ergo, there is a trade off.
Note that these two sentences are saying very different things. The first one is about the percentage of attendees that have certain views, and I am pretty confident that it is false (except in a trivial sense, where people at non-EA events might have different “edgy” views). If you think that percentage of the general population that holds views at least as backwards as “typical racism” is less than whatever it was at Manifest (where I would bet very large amounts of money the median attendee was much more egalitarian than average for their reference class)...
The second one is about what was said at the event, and so far I haven’t seen anyone describe an explicit instance of racism or bigotry by an attendee (invited speaker or not). There were no sessions about “race science”, so I am left at something of a loss to explain how that is a subject that could continue to come up, unless someone happened to accidentally wander into multiple ongoing conversations about the subject. Absent affirmative confirmation of such an event, my current belief is that much more innocous things are being lumped in under a much more disparaging label.