Could you help us understand some of your fears better? Although various positions have been expressed, the common core seems to be ~ we object to extending special-guest and/or speaker status to certain individuals at an EA-adjacent conference. I’m struggling to understand how that assertion strongly implies stuff like “pushing society in a direction that leads to” McCarthyism, embracing “cancel culture” norms more generally, or not “allow[ing adults] to read whichever arguments they are interested in about controversial topics . . . .” For example, I don’t recall seeing anyone here say that Hanania et al. should get canceled by whoever is hosting their websites, that they should lose their jobs, etc. (although I don’t recall every single comment).
To me, cancel culture is more “I find this offensive, and I desire and aim to shut down the person’s ability to communicate that offensive message” while the response here has been more “I find this offense, and do not want it associated with me or my community. While this may have the incidental effect of making it somewhat harder for the speaker to convey his message or would-be listeners to hear it, that is not the aim of the objection).” I could see a few possible cruxes here: one could think there is no practical difference between these positions, or one could think that the objectors are actually in the first camp. Do either of these potential cruxes ring true to you?
“the common core seems to be ~ we object to extending special-guest and/or speaker status to certain individuals at an EA-adjacent conference. I’m struggling to understand how that assertion strongly implies stuff like “pushing society in a direction that leads to” McCarthyism, embracing “cancel culture” norms more generally, or not “allow[ing adults] to read whichever arguments they are interested in about controversial topics . . . .” For example, I don’t recall seeing anyone here say that Hanania et al. should get canceled by whoever is hosting their websites, that they should lose their jobs, etc. (although I don’t recall every single comment).”
So I certainly pattern match the things being said in this discussion as the things said by people who want to get Substack to remove Hanania, want people with his opinions who have a normal employer to lose their jobs, and then after they have lost their jobs, they want to have the financial system refuse to process payments to them by someone who wants to help them survive now that they’ve lost their job, since after all it is important to stop people from funneling money to Nazis.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think the crux is that I tend to think the objectors are actually in the first camp, and that they need to be fought on that basis. And so moving forward towards agreement would creating trust that the objectors actually aren’t.
But I think there is also an important difference on the question of what it means to invite someone as a speaker—ie does it mean that you are endorsing in some sense what they say, or are you just saying that they are someone that enough attendees will find interesting to make it worth giving them a speaking slot.
A culture in which we try to stop people from getting a chance to listen to people who they find interesting, because we dislike things they believe, seems to me to be the essence of the thing I think is bad. Giving someone an opportunity to speak is not endorsement in my head, and it is a very bad norm to treat it like it is.
This also, incidentally, is where the people running Manifest were coming from: They fundamentally don’t see inviting Hanania as endorsing his most controversial views, and they certainly don’t see it as endorsing the views he held in his twenties that he now loudly claims to reject.
While the deplatforming side seems to think that a culture where people who believe bad things are given platforms to speak just because the people deciding who will speak think they are interesting is terrible because it is implicitly endorsing the bad things they believe.
To give a different example, if I was running a major EA event, and I could get Emile Torres to speak at it, I definitely would, even though I think he is often arguing in bad faith, and even though I vehemently disagree with both much of his model of the world and the values he seems to espouse. I think enough people would find him interesting enough to be worth listening to, so it makes sense to ‘extend him special-guest/or speaker status’.
I would be sad to see Emile Torres offered a speaking slot at an EA conference as this would reward bad faith criticism. I wouldn’t join a social pressure campaign to cancel him—sometimes people will make decisions I consider unwise and I’ll make decisions that they consider unwise—but I would caution someone considering doing this that they were making an unwise decision by inviting someone who often acts in bad faith and I would strongly recommend that they consider alternate names before resorting to Emile (I don’t think it would be hard to find equally interesting critics without the bad faith, his mind just immediately springs to mind due to availability bias).
I suppose I don’t see listening to him as a reward to him, but something I do or don’t do because it is good for me. The relevance of him saying things in bad faith is that it means you have to be more careful about trusting anything he says, and thus listening him is unusually likely to leave you with more inaccurate beliefs than you started with.
I suppose to explore the difference further, do you think it would be a bad idea to read something he wrote or to subscribe to his Twitter (which I do). Or is it specifically that you don’t want to invite him to talk.
And in the case of invitation, is it because you are worried that people will get bad beliefs from listening to him, or primarily because you dislike that it would seem like a positive thing for him?
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think the crux is that I tend to think the objectors are actually in the first camp, and that they need to be fought on that basis. And so moving forward towards agreement would creating trust that the objectors actually aren’t.
I think that’s going to make it significantly harder to make progress here. An assertion that people who have asserted X, and denied Y, actually believe Y implies that those people are misrepresenting their position for tactical advantage. Few people who actually believe X and not Y are going to be receptive to an expectation that they move toward W to prove they don’t believe Y. I get that there are in fact individuals in society on these issues who actually cloak their belief in Y by asserting only X, but it doesn’t follow that the particular X-believers in front of you are doing that.
This goes for both sides, by the way—I believe there are individuals in society who defend platforming speech I find to be vile because they like the contents of the speech rather than out of free-speech principles as they claim. There may (or may not) be such individuals on the Forum. But: it wouldn’t be fair or helpful for me to assume that any particular person was attempting to deceive me about the reasons for their support of Manifund’s decision.
Moreover, the proffered reasons for the various positions either have merit, or they lack merit, irrespective of the subjective motivations of the people offering those positions.
But I think there is also an important difference on the question of what it means to invite someone as a speaker—ie does it mean that you are endorsing in some sense what they say, or are you just saying that they are someone that enough attendees will find interesting to make it worth giving them a speaking slot.
Yeah, that’s a critical crux here. I think there are at least a couple of axes going on here:
I think one difference is the extent to which we think of norms as something we rationally work out within this community, and the extent to which we think they exist apart from this community. It might well be true that waving a magic wand to get everyone to follow a no-inference norm would be ideal if we had that power. But it might also be true that we actually have ~zero influence on meanings that people outside the relevant communities ascribe to certain actions, and lack the ability to rewire deeply-engrained reactions many people have from being born and raised in broader society.
For instance, some (probably most!) people are going to feel unwelcomed at a conference at which people are presenting about how their ethnic group is less intelligent than others, and some will feel unwelcomed in the broader community and associated communities. Saying that people “shouldn’t” feel that way doesn’t address those harms.
There exists a wide range of potential meanings that can be ascribed to action in relation to a speaker. While “no meaning whatsoever” and “whole-hearted endorsement of all of the speaker’s most controversial ideas” are the poles, there is a continuum of potential meanings. For instance: “this person has serious ideas worth listening to.” I think both sides need to be careful to specify with more precision what meaning(s) they think are reasonable/unreasonable.
For instance, someone suggesting “endorsement” by a conference organizer should be clear on what exactly they think is being endorsed. My guess is that many bald references to endorsement actually refer to endorsement that the person has a serious idea worth listening to, rather than that the person is correct.
Likewise, my guess is that at least some people stating “no endorsement” positions may actually accept a very limited view of endorsement. For example, they might view it as worthy of criticism to platform (e.g.) someone who favored the death penalty for sex outside of heterosexual marriage, blasphemy, and other things the speaker considered immoral. (Sadly, these people actually exist.) In other words, we should not merely assume no-endorsement advocates are biting the bullet all the way unless they specifically endorse that position.
For some of us, the appropriate meaning to ascribe depends on context. For instance, many people would assign a much lower level of meaning (if any) to a payment processor than to [edit: Manifest, not Manifold] than to an issue-advocacy group or a political party. The broader context of the entity’s platforming decisions may also play a role—e.g., if an entity platforms a range of speakers on X issue, then certain meanings become logically incoherent or at least much less plausible.
The previous two points suggest to me that this is at least a little bit about Manifest. “What is the purpose of Manifest?” seems somewhat relevant to this discussion. If the purpose of Manifest is bring speakers “that enough attendees will find interesting to make it worth giving them a speaking slot,” then that’s one thing. If it’s to have important conversations worth having, then that does imply something more about speaker selection to me. In a sense, this is judging platforming decisions by the standard the platform has set for itself.
I don’t assume that (e.g.) executives at most US TV networks endorse anything about the speakers they platform beyond being not-abhorrent and being profitable. On the other hand, there’s a flipside to that. I expect them to own up to their predominately profit-seeking as opposed to truth-seeking / socially valuable mission, and not claim to be more than primarily the bread-and-circuses delivery services they are.
Finally, for most viewpoints, some degree of object-level assessment of the speech is going to be necessary. For a silly example, platforming speakers who believe the world is flat and carried around on a turtle isn’t consistent with a platform’s professed goal of hosting important conversations that matter. Neither is platforming speakers who make speeches about how terrible an entity the New England Patriots are (no matter how true this is!)
For what it’s worth, I was one of the most anti-Hanania/Manifest people in the original big thread, and I don’t think I’m all that “cancel-y” overall. I’m opposed to people being fired from universities for edgy right-wing opinions on empirical matters, and I’m definitely opposed to them being cut off from all jobs. I do think people should not hire open neo-Nazis (or for that matter left-wingers who believe in genuinely deranged antisemitic conspiracy theories) for normal jobs, but I don’t think any of the Manifest speakers fell in that category. But I see a difference between the role of universities-find out the truth no matter what by permitting very broad debate-and the role of a group like EA that has a particular viewpoint and no obligation to invite in people who disagree with it.
For what it’s worth, calling for deplatforming people based on thinking they’re racist based on what they wrote from when they were younger and uncharitable interpretations of a couple of tweets feels pretty “cancel-y” to me.
I feel sad that you’re getting downvoted. Whether or not your position is correct (I personally disagree more than I agree), it seems to me that this is content which will be helpful for moving people towards mutual understanding of where the disagreements are.
I think it’s fine to have a narrower idea of what views should be platformed within your own community than in society at large. Different communities have different purposes, and different purposes will point to different sets of ideas and speakers to be platformed. That is as it should be. I want to suggest two other possible cruxes which do seem somewhat cruxy to me: 1. deplatforming these particular speakers is not what the ideals of EA dictate. The core thing that EA is about is creating an intellectually open space to explore strange fringe ideas about how to make the world better, and these speakers fit that purpose. 2. Manifest is not an EA event. That is part of what attracted me to it. It belongs to the forecasting community, which is a distinct thing, even if the membership is overlapping. So when EAs try to deplatform speakers at Manifest, they are reaching out beyond their own community and trying to dictate what can be said in someone elses community, which sure makes it look a lot more like your idea of cancel culture.
The core thing that EA is about is creating an intellectually open space to explore strange fringe ideas about how to make the world better [ . . .]
I would not agree with that. I view the core idea as actually making the world better (i.e., as conducting altruism effectively), and exploring ideas as an instrumental goal toward that end. I do not think focus on an idea that in my view has—at best—a very tenuous link to any plausible theory of doing good in the world is actually instrumental toward the core idea. Too much emphasis on free-expression ideology risks making freedom of expression an end in itself, similar to how scratching the ideological itches of traditional charity donors and executives became an end in itself. And while I think free expression is intrinsically valuable to human beings, I do not think it intrinsically valuable to EA in the same way.
2. Manifest is not an EA event. That is part of what attracted me to it. It belongs to the forecasting community, which is a distinct thing, even if the membership is overlapping. So when EAs try to deplatform speakers at Manifest, they are reaching out beyond their own community and trying to dictate what can be said in someone elses community, which sure makes it look a lot more like your idea of cancel culture.
The organizers advertised here; I think that makes it our business to criticize what they advertised where warranted.
I find the criticism “this wasn’t in your community” and the criticism “you’re trying to dictate to another community” to be somewhat at odds here. I, like most commenters here, have zero power in the forecasting community. Trying to “dictate” what people do in a community over which I have zero power sounds like a colossal waste of time. My lack of power also implies that my criticism would not cause any concrete injury to the forecasting community. To the extent that individual commenters do have some power or influence in the forecasting community, that’s a hint that they are in fact associated with that community to some extent.
I also don’t agree more generally that criticizing actions of another community is “dictating” anything to them. Under a broad definition where expressing disapproval of decisions relating to speech constitutes dictating, I think there are a number of communities to which the vast majority of EAs would like to “dictate” things!
To your first point, fair. I think the crux is just very object level assessments of the individual speakers and the ideas they hold, and I don’t want to go down that road here.
To your second point, your argument seems to imply that it is ok to exercise influence by calling people “racist” anywhere you can. That seems to imply that literally nothing would be “cancel culture” to you, which is not where you started a couple of comments ago.
Could you help us understand some of your fears better? Although various positions have been expressed, the common core seems to be ~ we object to extending special-guest and/or speaker status to certain individuals at an EA-adjacent conference. I’m struggling to understand how that assertion strongly implies stuff like “pushing society in a direction that leads to” McCarthyism, embracing “cancel culture” norms more generally, or not “allow[ing adults] to read whichever arguments they are interested in about controversial topics . . . .” For example, I don’t recall seeing anyone here say that Hanania et al. should get canceled by whoever is hosting their websites, that they should lose their jobs, etc. (although I don’t recall every single comment).
To me, cancel culture is more “I find this offensive, and I desire and aim to shut down the person’s ability to communicate that offensive message” while the response here has been more “I find this offense, and do not want it associated with me or my community. While this may have the incidental effect of making it somewhat harder for the speaker to convey his message or would-be listeners to hear it, that is not the aim of the objection).” I could see a few possible cruxes here: one could think there is no practical difference between these positions, or one could think that the objectors are actually in the first camp. Do either of these potential cruxes ring true to you?
So I certainly pattern match the things being said in this discussion as the things said by people who want to get Substack to remove Hanania, want people with his opinions who have a normal employer to lose their jobs, and then after they have lost their jobs, they want to have the financial system refuse to process payments to them by someone who wants to help them survive now that they’ve lost their job, since after all it is important to stop people from funneling money to Nazis.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think the crux is that I tend to think the objectors are actually in the first camp, and that they need to be fought on that basis. And so moving forward towards agreement would creating trust that the objectors actually aren’t.
But I think there is also an important difference on the question of what it means to invite someone as a speaker—ie does it mean that you are endorsing in some sense what they say, or are you just saying that they are someone that enough attendees will find interesting to make it worth giving them a speaking slot.
A culture in which we try to stop people from getting a chance to listen to people who they find interesting, because we dislike things they believe, seems to me to be the essence of the thing I think is bad. Giving someone an opportunity to speak is not endorsement in my head, and it is a very bad norm to treat it like it is.
This also, incidentally, is where the people running Manifest were coming from: They fundamentally don’t see inviting Hanania as endorsing his most controversial views, and they certainly don’t see it as endorsing the views he held in his twenties that he now loudly claims to reject.
While the deplatforming side seems to think that a culture where people who believe bad things are given platforms to speak just because the people deciding who will speak think they are interesting is terrible because it is implicitly endorsing the bad things they believe.
To give a different example, if I was running a major EA event, and I could get Emile Torres to speak at it, I definitely would, even though I think he is often arguing in bad faith, and even though I vehemently disagree with both much of his model of the world and the values he seems to espouse. I think enough people would find him interesting enough to be worth listening to, so it makes sense to ‘extend him special-guest/or speaker status’.
I would be sad to see Emile Torres offered a speaking slot at an EA conference as this would reward bad faith criticism. I wouldn’t join a social pressure campaign to cancel him—sometimes people will make decisions I consider unwise and I’ll make decisions that they consider unwise—but I would caution someone considering doing this that they were making an unwise decision by inviting someone who often acts in bad faith and I would strongly recommend that they consider alternate names before resorting to Emile (I don’t think it would be hard to find equally interesting critics without the bad faith, his mind just immediately springs to mind due to availability bias).
I suppose I don’t see listening to him as a reward to him, but something I do or don’t do because it is good for me. The relevance of him saying things in bad faith is that it means you have to be more careful about trusting anything he says, and thus listening him is unusually likely to leave you with more inaccurate beliefs than you started with.
I suppose to explore the difference further, do you think it would be a bad idea to read something he wrote or to subscribe to his Twitter (which I do). Or is it specifically that you don’t want to invite him to talk.
And in the case of invitation, is it because you are worried that people will get bad beliefs from listening to him, or primarily because you dislike that it would seem like a positive thing for him?
I think we should use talk invitations to nudge people towards acting in good faith.
I think that’s going to make it significantly harder to make progress here. An assertion that people who have asserted X, and denied Y, actually believe Y implies that those people are misrepresenting their position for tactical advantage. Few people who actually believe X and not Y are going to be receptive to an expectation that they move toward W to prove they don’t believe Y. I get that there are in fact individuals in society on these issues who actually cloak their belief in Y by asserting only X, but it doesn’t follow that the particular X-believers in front of you are doing that.
This goes for both sides, by the way—I believe there are individuals in society who defend platforming speech I find to be vile because they like the contents of the speech rather than out of free-speech principles as they claim. There may (or may not) be such individuals on the Forum. But: it wouldn’t be fair or helpful for me to assume that any particular person was attempting to deceive me about the reasons for their support of Manifund’s decision.
Moreover, the proffered reasons for the various positions either have merit, or they lack merit, irrespective of the subjective motivations of the people offering those positions.
Yeah, that’s a critical crux here. I think there are at least a couple of axes going on here:
I think one difference is the extent to which we think of norms as something we rationally work out within this community, and the extent to which we think they exist apart from this community. It might well be true that waving a magic wand to get everyone to follow a no-inference norm would be ideal if we had that power. But it might also be true that we actually have ~zero influence on meanings that people outside the relevant communities ascribe to certain actions, and lack the ability to rewire deeply-engrained reactions many people have from being born and raised in broader society.
For instance, some (probably most!) people are going to feel unwelcomed at a conference at which people are presenting about how their ethnic group is less intelligent than others, and some will feel unwelcomed in the broader community and associated communities. Saying that people “shouldn’t” feel that way doesn’t address those harms.
There exists a wide range of potential meanings that can be ascribed to action in relation to a speaker. While “no meaning whatsoever” and “whole-hearted endorsement of all of the speaker’s most controversial ideas” are the poles, there is a continuum of potential meanings. For instance: “this person has serious ideas worth listening to.” I think both sides need to be careful to specify with more precision what meaning(s) they think are reasonable/unreasonable.
For instance, someone suggesting “endorsement” by a conference organizer should be clear on what exactly they think is being endorsed. My guess is that many bald references to endorsement actually refer to endorsement that the person has a serious idea worth listening to, rather than that the person is correct.
Likewise, my guess is that at least some people stating “no endorsement” positions may actually accept a very limited view of endorsement. For example, they might view it as worthy of criticism to platform (e.g.) someone who favored the death penalty for sex outside of heterosexual marriage, blasphemy, and other things the speaker considered immoral. (Sadly, these people actually exist.) In other words, we should not merely assume no-endorsement advocates are biting the bullet all the way unless they specifically endorse that position.
For some of us, the appropriate meaning to ascribe depends on context. For instance, many people would assign a much lower level of meaning (if any) to a payment processor than to [edit: Manifest, not Manifold] than to an issue-advocacy group or a political party. The broader context of the entity’s platforming decisions may also play a role—e.g., if an entity platforms a range of speakers on X issue, then certain meanings become logically incoherent or at least much less plausible.
The previous two points suggest to me that this is at least a little bit about Manifest. “What is the purpose of Manifest?” seems somewhat relevant to this discussion. If the purpose of Manifest is bring speakers “that enough attendees will find interesting to make it worth giving them a speaking slot,” then that’s one thing. If it’s to have important conversations worth having, then that does imply something more about speaker selection to me. In a sense, this is judging platforming decisions by the standard the platform has set for itself.
I don’t assume that (e.g.) executives at most US TV networks endorse anything about the speakers they platform beyond being not-abhorrent and being profitable. On the other hand, there’s a flipside to that. I expect them to own up to their predominately profit-seeking as opposed to truth-seeking / socially valuable mission, and not claim to be more than primarily the bread-and-circuses delivery services they are.
Finally, for most viewpoints, some degree of object-level assessment of the speech is going to be necessary. For a silly example, platforming speakers who believe the world is flat and carried around on a turtle isn’t consistent with a platform’s professed goal of hosting important conversations that matter. Neither is platforming speakers who make speeches about how terrible an entity the New England Patriots are (no matter how true this is!)
FYI: Emile Torres is using they/them pronouns. I think you should edit your comment to use their preferred pronouns.
For what it’s worth, I was one of the most anti-Hanania/Manifest people in the original big thread, and I don’t think I’m all that “cancel-y” overall. I’m opposed to people being fired from universities for edgy right-wing opinions on empirical matters, and I’m definitely opposed to them being cut off from all jobs. I do think people should not hire open neo-Nazis (or for that matter left-wingers who believe in genuinely deranged antisemitic conspiracy theories) for normal jobs, but I don’t think any of the Manifest speakers fell in that category. But I see a difference between the role of universities-find out the truth no matter what by permitting very broad debate-and the role of a group like EA that has a particular viewpoint and no obligation to invite in people who disagree with it.
For what it’s worth, calling for deplatforming people based on thinking they’re racist based on what they wrote from when they were younger and uncharitable interpretations of a couple of tweets feels pretty “cancel-y” to me.
I feel sad that you’re getting downvoted. Whether or not your position is correct (I personally disagree more than I agree), it seems to me that this is content which will be helpful for moving people towards mutual understanding of where the disagreements are.
I think it’s fine to have a narrower idea of what views should be platformed within your own community than in society at large. Different communities have different purposes, and different purposes will point to different sets of ideas and speakers to be platformed. That is as it should be. I want to suggest two other possible cruxes which do seem somewhat cruxy to me:
1. deplatforming these particular speakers is not what the ideals of EA dictate. The core thing that EA is about is creating an intellectually open space to explore strange fringe ideas about how to make the world better, and these speakers fit that purpose.
2. Manifest is not an EA event. That is part of what attracted me to it. It belongs to the forecasting community, which is a distinct thing, even if the membership is overlapping. So when EAs try to deplatform speakers at Manifest, they are reaching out beyond their own community and trying to dictate what can be said in someone elses community, which sure makes it look a lot more like your idea of cancel culture.
I would not agree with that. I view the core idea as actually making the world better (i.e., as conducting altruism effectively), and exploring ideas as an instrumental goal toward that end. I do not think focus on an idea that in my view has—at best—a very tenuous link to any plausible theory of doing good in the world is actually instrumental toward the core idea. Too much emphasis on free-expression ideology risks making freedom of expression an end in itself, similar to how scratching the ideological itches of traditional charity donors and executives became an end in itself. And while I think free expression is intrinsically valuable to human beings, I do not think it intrinsically valuable to EA in the same way.
The organizers advertised here; I think that makes it our business to criticize what they advertised where warranted.
I find the criticism “this wasn’t in your community” and the criticism “you’re trying to dictate to another community” to be somewhat at odds here. I, like most commenters here, have zero power in the forecasting community. Trying to “dictate” what people do in a community over which I have zero power sounds like a colossal waste of time. My lack of power also implies that my criticism would not cause any concrete injury to the forecasting community. To the extent that individual commenters do have some power or influence in the forecasting community, that’s a hint that they are in fact associated with that community to some extent.
I also don’t agree more generally that criticizing actions of another community is “dictating” anything to them. Under a broad definition where expressing disapproval of decisions relating to speech constitutes dictating, I think there are a number of communities to which the vast majority of EAs would like to “dictate” things!
To your first point, fair. I think the crux is just very object level assessments of the individual speakers and the ideas they hold, and I don’t want to go down that road here.
To your second point, your argument seems to imply that it is ok to exercise influence by calling people “racist” anywhere you can. That seems to imply that literally nothing would be “cancel culture” to you, which is not where you started a couple of comments ago.