People can and should read whoever and whatever they want! But who a conference chooses to platform/invite reflects on the values of the conference organizers, and any funders and communities adjacent to that conference.
Ultimately, I think that almost all of us would agree that it would be bad for a group we’re associated with to platform/invite open Nazis. I.e. almost no one is an absolutist on this issue. If you agree, then you’re not in principle opposed to exlcuding people based on the content of their beliefs, so the question just becomes: where do you draw the line? (This is not a claim that anyone at Manifest actually qualifies as an open Nazi, more just a reductio to illustrate the point.)
Answering this question requires looking at the actual specifics: what views do people hold? Were those views legible to the event organizers? I fear that a lot of the discourse is getting bogged down in euphemism, abstraction, and appeals to “truth-seeking,” when the debate is actually: what kind of people and worldviews do we give status to and what effects does that have on related communities.
If you think that EA adjacent orgs/venues should platform open Nazis, as long as they use similar jargon, then I simply disagree with you, but at least you’re being consistent.
“I fear that a lot of the discourse is getting bogged down in euphemism, abstraction, and appeals to “truth-seeking,” when the debate is actually: what kind of people and worldviews do we give status to and what effects does that have on related communities.”
This is precisely the sort of attitude which I see as fundamentally opposed to my own view that truth seeking actually happens, and that we should be rewarding status to people and worldviews that are better at getting us closer to the truth, according to our best judgement.
It also I think is a very clear example of what I was talking about in my original post, where someone arguing for one side ignores the fears and actual argument of the other side when expressing their position. You put ‘truth seeking’, in quotations, because it has nothing to do with what you are claiming yourself to care about. You are caring about status shifts amongst communities, and then you are trying to say I don’t actually care about ‘truth seeking’—not arguing I don’t, because that is obviously ridiculous—but insinuating that I actually want to make racists higher status and more acceptable by the way you wrote this sentence.
Obviously this does nothing to convince me, whatever impact it may have on the general audience. Which based on the four agree votes, and three disagree votes that I see right now, is that it gets people to think what they already thought about the issue.
Part 2
I suppose through trying to think through how I’d reply to your underlying fear, I found that I am not actually really sure what the bad thing that you think will happen if an open Nazi is platformed by an EA adjacent organization/venue is.
To give context to my confusion, I was imagining a thought experiment where the main platforms for sharing information about AI safety topics at a professional level was supported by an AI org. Further in this thought experiment there is a brilliant ai safety researcher, who happens to also be openly a Nazi—in fact he went into alignment research because he thought that untrammelled AI capabilities was being driven by Jewish scientists, and he wanted to stop them from killing everyone. If this man comes up with an important alignment advance, that will actually reduce the odds of human extinction meaningfully, it seems to me transparently obvious that his alignment research should be platformed by EA adjacent organizations.
I’m confident that you will have something say about why this is a bad thought experiment that you disagree with, but I’m not quite sure what you would say, while also taking the idea seriously.
The idea that important researchers who actually make useful advances in one area might also believe stupid and terrible things in other fields is something that has happened far too often for you to say that the possibility should be ignored.
Perhaps the policy I’m advocating, of simply looking at the value of the paper in its field, and ignoring everything else would impose costs from outside observers attacking the organization doing this that are too high to justify publishing the man who has horrible beliefs, since we can’t be certain that his advance actually is important ahead of time.
But I’d say in this case the outside observers are acting to damage the future of mankind, and should be viewed as enemies, not as reasonable people.
Of course their own policy probably also makes sense in act utilitarian terms.
So maybe you just are saying that a blanket policy of this sort, without ever looking at the specifics of the case, is the best act utilitarian policy, and should not be understood as saying there are not cases where your heuristic fails catastrophically.
But I feel as though the discussion I just engaged in is far too bloodless to capture what you actually think is bad about publishing a scientist who made an advance that will make the world better if it is published, and who is also an open Nazi.
Anyways the general possibility that open Nazis might be right about something very important that is relevant to us is sufficient to explain why I would not endorse a blanket ban of the sort you are describing.
(On the dog walk, I realized, what I’d forgotten, that the obvious answer was that doing this will raise the status of Nazis, which would actually be bad)
I suppose through trying to think through how I’d reply to your underlying fear, I found that I am not actually really sure what the bad thing that you think will happen if an open Nazi is platformed by an EA adjacent organization/venue is.
Really? I imagine the first negative consequence is that many Jews and other minorities would withdraw from the event, because a “safe space” for non-judgementally listening to Nazis is a very dangerous space for Jewish people. I also imagine a number of people who are not Jews or directly threatened by the Nazis would also withdraw, particularly if they were doing somewhat adjacent work. If I was a researcher into, say transhumanism, trying to argue that my controversial innovations weren’t about dangerous experimentation or engineering certain races out of existence, the last person I’d want to see on the speaker list next to me would be a disciple of Josef Mengele. Or I might just not like hanging out with neo-Nazis socially.
Of course, if you see the participation of Jews and people that find Nazis repugnant to be of very low value compared with the participation of people who are Nazis or enthusiastic about hearing from them, this might still not be a net bad, but I strongly suspect that it isn’t the case. When the world wanted to make use of significant scientific advances developed by people who had actually been members of the Nazi party, they generally did it by actually using the research, not by naming them as “special guests” at events to attract likeminded people.
This is precisely the sort of attitude which I see as fundamentally opposed to my own view that truth seeking actually happens, and that we should be rewarding status to people and worldviews that are better at getting us closer to the truth, according to our best judgement.
It also I think is a very clear example of what I was talking about in my original post, where someone arguing for one side ignores the fears and actual argument of the other side when expressing their position.
In this case, we’re talking about the selection of a conference lineup where organisers promoted the status of an angry culture warrior notable mainly for expressing his enthusiasm for suppressing minorities in an intemperate manner, and apparently didn’t select anyone particularly associated with opposing those politics, never mind listen to their previously-expressed fears and arguments against granting Hanania special status. I think that conference organizers are well within their rights to promote people whose views they like and not platform people whose views they don’t, but deserve to be judged by the types of echo-chambers they create. On the other hand it’s unclear why you would associate platforming Hanania and fringe geneticists and apparently not extending the same platform to even fairly uncontroversial mainstream representatives of the political left or academic genetics with “truth seeking”
I mean, I am pretty sure you don’t have a terribly clear idea of what Hanania actually talks about.
So I am in fact someone who actually reads Hanania regularly, and I’ve been paying attention to the posts I read from him while this conversation was going on to see if what he was saying in it actually matches the way he is described as being in the anti platforming Hanania posts here.
And it simply does not. He is not talking about minorities at all most of the time. And when he does, he is usually actually talking about the way the politics of the far right groups he dislikes think about them, and not about the minorities themselves.
I strongly suspect that an underappreciated difference between the organizers and their critics is that the organizers who invited him actually read Hanania, and are thus judging him on their experience of his work, ie on 99% of what he writes. Everyone else who does not read him is judging him on either things he has disavowed from when he was in his early twenties, or on the worst things he’s said lately, usually a bit divorced from their actual context.
“Of course, if you see the participation of Jews and people that find Nazis repugnant to be of very low value compared with the participation of people who are Nazis or enthusiastic about hearing from them, this might still not be a net bad, but I strongly suspect that it isn’t the case.”
Anyways [insert strong insult here questioning your moral character]. My wife is Jewish. My daughter is Jewish. My daughter’s great grandparents had siblings who died in the Holocaust. [insert strong insult questioning your moral character here].
I evidently don’t read Hanania as regularly as you do. On the other hand, it hasn’t escaped my notice that the first of his two books, called “the Origins of Woke”, is an extended argument in favour of the abolition of civil rights laws citing “wokeness” as the problem they caused that must be eliminated. Or that even many people who enjoy his long form reads agree that his Tweets—how he promotes himself to a wider audience—are frequently obnoxious and culture warr-y.
As for his Substack, that’s been widely discussed elsewhere, and when the defence of an article entitled “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide” containing lines like “I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it” is that he acknowledges this preoccupation might not be entirely rational and genocide might actually be worse, I think we can safely say he belongs in the culture warrior category.[1]
So whilst I agree that not everything Hanania has ever written is concerned with culture wars, I don’t think it’s at all accurate to suggest that 99% of what Hanania writes is unconnected with culture wars or to imply he’s actually some truth-seeking intellectual who’s said a few things that are taken out of context. On the contrary, “hating wokeness”—to use his own terms—seems to be central to his public persona, and certainly central to why his name on the poster makes some people who would actually enjoy an event about prediction markets less likely to attend.
Of course, he also writes relatively nonpartisan stuff about prediction markets which might be interesting to the organizers but so do lots of people who don’t blog or tweet about their hatred of gender expression or the alleged innate intellectual inferiority of black people. So I’m not sure there’s any essential truth being lost by not putting Hanania’s name on the poster, particularly as there were numerous other relatively or entirely uncontroversial figures giving actual talks on prediction markets from a pro-market, right-leaning perspective there already.
If you’re really worried that people might not discover certain truths or be deterred from speaking them by the Manifest lineup selection criteria, it’s really not Hanania’s quadrant of the political spectrum that’s lacking representation. I don’t actually think people’s willingness to seek truth is governed by their chances of headlining Manifest or that the organizers have any obligation to provide a platform to anyone if they don’t want to, but the flip side of that is in a world with free speech and free association, the quality of the lineup and compatibility of it with a movement that seeks to do the most good is open to debate too. “Too boring” and “not particularly positive about prediction markets” seem like perfectly good reasons not to promote people on their poster, but so does “extremely offensive towards numerous people who might otherwise enjoy our event” .
Anyways [insert strong insult here questioning your moral character]. My wife is Jewish. My daughter is Jewish. My daughter’s great grandparents had siblings who died in the Holocaust. [insert strong insult questioning your moral character here].
In that case, I find it all the more extraordinary that you wrote the sentence “I am not actually really sure what the bad thing that you think will happen if an open Nazi is platformed by an EA adjacent organization/venue is”
If you have trouble believing that any harm could come from promoting an actual open Nazi at a conference coming from me, perhaps you will find some of your family members more convincing.[2] Even if you have strong safeguards in place to stop the open Nazi or the people they attract talking about specifically Nazi stuff and don’t care at all about the external reputation of the organization or wider movement, it seems almost certain to deter a lot of other people from participating, which strikes me as a very bad thing except in the unlikely event that none of their contributions are as valuable.
[I’m not really sure why you would want to insert a strong insult questioning my moral character. For the avoidance of doubt I’m not questioning the moral character of your posts earlier in this subthread, I’m questioning the judgement][3]
Similarly, his Stop Talking About Race and IQ article sometimes cited as an indication that his white supremacist days are long behind him starts off not by questioning whether the theory that black people are innately intellectually inferior might not be settled science, but by expressing concern that if they succeed in converting leftists to the importance of IQ gaps, they might actually take action to try to close them!
Your family probably has as wide a range of views on politics as anyone else’s family, but I’d imagine at least some members don’t struggle to see any downsides to putting Nazis on pedestals...
People can and should read whoever and whatever they want! But who a conference chooses to platform/invite reflects on the values of the conference organizers, and any funders and communities adjacent to that conference.
Ultimately, I think that almost all of us would agree that it would be bad for a group we’re associated with to platform/invite open Nazis. I.e. almost no one is an absolutist on this issue. If you agree, then you’re not in principle opposed to exlcuding people based on the content of their beliefs, so the question just becomes: where do you draw the line? (This is not a claim that anyone at Manifest actually qualifies as an open Nazi, more just a reductio to illustrate the point.)
Answering this question requires looking at the actual specifics: what views do people hold? Were those views legible to the event organizers? I fear that a lot of the discourse is getting bogged down in euphemism, abstraction, and appeals to “truth-seeking,” when the debate is actually: what kind of people and worldviews do we give status to and what effects does that have on related communities.
If you think that EA adjacent orgs/venues should platform open Nazis, as long as they use similar jargon, then I simply disagree with you, but at least you’re being consistent.
Part 1
“I fear that a lot of the discourse is getting bogged down in euphemism, abstraction, and appeals to “truth-seeking,” when the debate is actually: what kind of people and worldviews do we give status to and what effects does that have on related communities.”
This is precisely the sort of attitude which I see as fundamentally opposed to my own view that truth seeking actually happens, and that we should be rewarding status to people and worldviews that are better at getting us closer to the truth, according to our best judgement.
It also I think is a very clear example of what I was talking about in my original post, where someone arguing for one side ignores the fears and actual argument of the other side when expressing their position. You put ‘truth seeking’, in quotations, because it has nothing to do with what you are claiming yourself to care about. You are caring about status shifts amongst communities, and then you are trying to say I don’t actually care about ‘truth seeking’—not arguing I don’t, because that is obviously ridiculous—but insinuating that I actually want to make racists higher status and more acceptable by the way you wrote this sentence.
Obviously this does nothing to convince me, whatever impact it may have on the general audience. Which based on the four agree votes, and three disagree votes that I see right now, is that it gets people to think what they already thought about the issue.
Part 2
I suppose through trying to think through how I’d reply to your underlying fear, I found that I am not actually really sure what the bad thing that you think will happen if an open Nazi is platformed by an EA adjacent organization/venue is.
To give context to my confusion, I was imagining a thought experiment where the main platforms for sharing information about AI safety topics at a professional level was supported by an AI org. Further in this thought experiment there is a brilliant ai safety researcher, who happens to also be openly a Nazi—in fact he went into alignment research because he thought that untrammelled AI capabilities was being driven by Jewish scientists, and he wanted to stop them from killing everyone. If this man comes up with an important alignment advance, that will actually reduce the odds of human extinction meaningfully, it seems to me transparently obvious that his alignment research should be platformed by EA adjacent organizations.
I’m confident that you will have something say about why this is a bad thought experiment that you disagree with, but I’m not quite sure what you would say, while also taking the idea seriously.
The idea that important researchers who actually make useful advances in one area might also believe stupid and terrible things in other fields is something that has happened far too often for you to say that the possibility should be ignored.
Perhaps the policy I’m advocating, of simply looking at the value of the paper in its field, and ignoring everything else would impose costs from outside observers attacking the organization doing this that are too high to justify publishing the man who has horrible beliefs, since we can’t be certain that his advance actually is important ahead of time.
But I’d say in this case the outside observers are acting to damage the future of mankind, and should be viewed as enemies, not as reasonable people.
Of course their own policy probably also makes sense in act utilitarian terms.
So maybe you just are saying that a blanket policy of this sort, without ever looking at the specifics of the case, is the best act utilitarian policy, and should not be understood as saying there are not cases where your heuristic fails catastrophically.
But I feel as though the discussion I just engaged in is far too bloodless to capture what you actually think is bad about publishing a scientist who made an advance that will make the world better if it is published, and who is also an open Nazi.
Anyways the general possibility that open Nazis might be right about something very important that is relevant to us is sufficient to explain why I would not endorse a blanket ban of the sort you are describing.
(On the dog walk, I realized, what I’d forgotten, that the obvious answer was that doing this will raise the status of Nazis, which would actually be bad)
Really? I imagine the first negative consequence is that many Jews and other minorities would withdraw from the event, because a “safe space” for non-judgementally listening to Nazis is a very dangerous space for Jewish people. I also imagine a number of people who are not Jews or directly threatened by the Nazis would also withdraw, particularly if they were doing somewhat adjacent work. If I was a researcher into, say transhumanism, trying to argue that my controversial innovations weren’t about dangerous experimentation or engineering certain races out of existence, the last person I’d want to see on the speaker list next to me would be a disciple of Josef Mengele. Or I might just not like hanging out with neo-Nazis socially.
Of course, if you see the participation of Jews and people that find Nazis repugnant to be of very low value compared with the participation of people who are Nazis or enthusiastic about hearing from them, this might still not be a net bad, but I strongly suspect that it isn’t the case. When the world wanted to make use of significant scientific advances developed by people who had actually been members of the Nazi party, they generally did it by actually using the research, not by naming them as “special guests” at events to attract likeminded people.
In this case, we’re talking about the selection of a conference lineup where organisers promoted the status of an angry culture warrior notable mainly for expressing his enthusiasm for suppressing minorities in an intemperate manner, and apparently didn’t select anyone particularly associated with opposing those politics, never mind listen to their previously-expressed fears and arguments against granting Hanania special status. I think that conference organizers are well within their rights to promote people whose views they like and not platform people whose views they don’t, but deserve to be judged by the types of echo-chambers they create. On the other hand it’s unclear why you would associate platforming Hanania and fringe geneticists and apparently not extending the same platform to even fairly uncontroversial mainstream representatives of the political left or academic genetics with “truth seeking”
I mean, I am pretty sure you don’t have a terribly clear idea of what Hanania actually talks about.
So I am in fact someone who actually reads Hanania regularly, and I’ve been paying attention to the posts I read from him while this conversation was going on to see if what he was saying in it actually matches the way he is described as being in the anti platforming Hanania posts here.
And it simply does not. He is not talking about minorities at all most of the time. And when he does, he is usually actually talking about the way the politics of the far right groups he dislikes think about them, and not about the minorities themselves.
I strongly suspect that an underappreciated difference between the organizers and their critics is that the organizers who invited him actually read Hanania, and are thus judging him on their experience of his work, ie on 99% of what he writes. Everyone else who does not read him is judging him on either things he has disavowed from when he was in his early twenties, or on the worst things he’s said lately, usually a bit divorced from their actual context.
“Of course, if you see the participation of Jews and people that find Nazis repugnant to be of very low value compared with the participation of people who are Nazis or enthusiastic about hearing from them, this might still not be a net bad, but I strongly suspect that it isn’t the case.”
Anyways [insert strong insult here questioning your moral character]. My wife is Jewish. My daughter is Jewish. My daughter’s great grandparents had siblings who died in the Holocaust. [insert strong insult questioning your moral character here].
I evidently don’t read Hanania as regularly as you do. On the other hand, it hasn’t escaped my notice that the first of his two books, called “the Origins of Woke”, is an extended argument in favour of the abolition of civil rights laws citing “wokeness” as the problem they caused that must be eliminated. Or that even many people who enjoy his long form reads agree that his Tweets—how he promotes himself to a wider audience—are frequently obnoxious and culture warr-y.
As for his Substack, that’s been widely discussed elsewhere, and when the defence of an article entitled “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide” containing lines like “I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it” is that he acknowledges this preoccupation might not be entirely rational and genocide might actually be worse, I think we can safely say he belongs in the culture warrior category.[1]
So whilst I agree that not everything Hanania has ever written is concerned with culture wars, I don’t think it’s at all accurate to suggest that 99% of what Hanania writes is unconnected with culture wars or to imply he’s actually some truth-seeking intellectual who’s said a few things that are taken out of context. On the contrary, “hating wokeness”—to use his own terms—seems to be central to his public persona, and certainly central to why his name on the poster makes some people who would actually enjoy an event about prediction markets less likely to attend.
Of course, he also writes relatively nonpartisan stuff about prediction markets which might be interesting to the organizers but so do lots of people who don’t blog or tweet about their hatred of gender expression or the alleged innate intellectual inferiority of black people. So I’m not sure there’s any essential truth being lost by not putting Hanania’s name on the poster, particularly as there were numerous other relatively or entirely uncontroversial figures giving actual talks on prediction markets from a pro-market, right-leaning perspective there already.
If you’re really worried that people might not discover certain truths or be deterred from speaking them by the Manifest lineup selection criteria, it’s really not Hanania’s quadrant of the political spectrum that’s lacking representation. I don’t actually think people’s willingness to seek truth is governed by their chances of headlining Manifest or that the organizers have any obligation to provide a platform to anyone if they don’t want to, but the flip side of that is in a world with free speech and free association, the quality of the lineup and compatibility of it with a movement that seeks to do the most good is open to debate too. “Too boring” and “not particularly positive about prediction markets” seem like perfectly good reasons not to promote people on their poster, but so does “extremely offensive towards numerous people who might otherwise enjoy our event” .
In that case, I find it all the more extraordinary that you wrote the sentence “I am not actually really sure what the bad thing that you think will happen if an open Nazi is platformed by an EA adjacent organization/venue is”
If you have trouble believing that any harm could come from promoting an actual open Nazi at a conference coming from me, perhaps you will find some of your family members more convincing.[2] Even if you have strong safeguards in place to stop the open Nazi or the people they attract talking about specifically Nazi stuff and don’t care at all about the external reputation of the organization or wider movement, it seems almost certain to deter a lot of other people from participating, which strikes me as a very bad thing except in the unlikely event that none of their contributions are as valuable.
[I’m not really sure why you would want to insert a strong insult questioning my moral character. For the avoidance of doubt I’m not questioning the moral character of your posts earlier in this subthread, I’m questioning the judgement][3]
Similarly, his Stop Talking About Race and IQ article sometimes cited as an indication that his white supremacist days are long behind him starts off not by questioning whether the theory that black people are innately intellectually inferior might not be settled science, but by expressing concern that if they succeed in converting leftists to the importance of IQ gaps, they might actually take action to try to close them!
Your family probably has as wide a range of views on politics as anyone else’s family, but I’d imagine at least some members don’t struggle to see any downsides to putting Nazis on pedestals...
and FWIW I’m not among the people who downvoted your post either