Your comment seems a bit light on citations, and didn’t match my impression of Hanania after spending 10s of hours reading his stuff. I’ve certainly never seen him advocate for an authoritarian government as a means of enforcing a “natural” racial hierarchy. This claim stood out to me:
Hannania called for trying to get rid of all non-white immigrants in the US
Hanania wrote this post in 2023. It’s the first hit on his substack search for “immigration”. This apparent lack of fact-checking makes me doubt the veracity of your other claims.
It seems like this is your only specific citation:
a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people
This appears to be a falsified quote. [CORRECTION: The quote appears here on Hanania’s Twitter. Thanks David. I’m leaving the rest of my comment as originally written, since I think it provides some valuable context.] Search for “we need more” on Wikipedia’s second citation. The actual quote is as follows:
...actually solving our crime problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government. Whether you want to focus on guns or the criminals themselves, it would involve heavily policing, surveilling, and incarcerating more black people. If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take.
This paragraph, from the same post, is useful context:
As I argue in my articles on El Salvador, any polity that has a high enough murder rate needs to make solving crime its number one priority. This was true for that nation before Bukele came along, as it is for major American cities today. It’s not a big mystery how to do this, it’s just politically difficult, because literally everything that works is considered racist. You need more cops, more prisons, and more use of DNA databases and facial recognition technology. You can’t have concerns about disparate impact in a world where crime is so overwhelmingly committed by one group.
Hanania has stated elsewhere that he’s a fan of Bukele and his policies. Hanania’s position appears to be that since St Louis has a murder rate comparable to El Salvador when Bukele took power, St Louis could benefit from Bukele-style policies, but that would require stuff that liberals don’t like. Wikipedia makes it sound like antipathy towards Black people is his explicit motive, but that’s not how I understood him. It might be his implicit motive, but that could be true for anyone—maybe liberals prefer soft-on-crime policies because high crime keeps Black people in poverty. Who knows.
If you want to convince me that Hanania is a current-Nazi, let’s discuss the single worst thing he said recently under his real name, and we can see if the specific quote holds up to scrutiny in context.
[EDIT: To be clear, if you want to exclude Hanania because you think he is kinda sketchy, or was a bad person in the past, or is too willing to make un-PC factual claims, that may be a reasonable position. I’m arguing against excluding him on the basis that he’s a Nazi, because I don’t think that is currently true. His 2023 post advocating for racially diverse immigration to the US seems like a very straightforward disproof. If you manage to get Wikipedia to cite it, I’ll be impressed, by the way.]
I think the comments here are ignoring a perfectly sufficient reason to not, eg, invite him to speak at an EA adjacent conference. If I understand correctly, he consistently endorsed white supremacy for several years as a pseudonymous blogger.
Effective Altruism has grown fairly popular. We do not have a shortage of people who have heard of us and are willing to speak at conferences. We can afford to apply a few filtering criteria that exclude otherwise acceptable speakers.
“Zero articles endorsing white supremacy” is one such useful filter.
I predict that people considering joining or working with us would sometimes hear about speakers who’d once endorsed white supremacy, and be seriously concerned. I’d put not-insignificant odds that the number that back off because of this would reduce the growth of the movement by over 10%. We can and should prefer speakers who don’t bring this potential problem.
A few clarifications follow:
-Nothing about this relies on his current views. He could be a wonderful fluffy bunny of a person today, and it would all still apply. Doesn’t sound like the consensus in this thread, but it’s not relevant.
-This does not mean anyone needs to spurn him, if they think he’s a good enough person now. Of course he can reform! I wouldn’t ask that he sew a scarlet letter into his clothing or become unemployable or be cast into the outer darkness. But, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that past actions as a public thinker can impact your future as a public thinker. I sure hope he wouldn’t hold it against people that he gets fewer speaking invitations despite reforming.
-I don’t see this as a slippery slope towards becoming a close-minded community. The views he held would have been well outside the Overton window of any EA space I’ve been in, to the best of my knowledge. There were multiple such views, voiced seriously and consistently. Bostrom’s ill-advised email is not a good reason to remove him from lists of speakers, and Hanania’s multi-year advocacy of racist ideas is a good reason. There will be cases that require careful analysis, but I think both of these cases are extreme enough to be fairly clear-cut.
Manifold invited people based on having advocated for prediction markets, which is a much stricter criterion than being a generic public speaker that feels positively about your organization. With a smaller pool of speakers, it is not trivially cheap to apply filters, so it is not as clear cut as I claimed. (I could have found out this detail before writing, and I feel embarrassed that I didn’t.)
Despite having an EA in a leadership role and ample EA-adjacent folks that associate with it, Manifold doesn’t consider itself EA-aligned. It sucks that potential EA’s will sometimes mistake non-EA’s for EA’s, but it is important to respect it when a group tells the wider EA community that we aren’t their real dad and can’t make requests. (This does not appear to have been common knowledge so I feel less embarrassed about this one.)
Thank you. Is your thought that “revolution in our culture or system of government” is supposed to be a call for some kind of fascist revolution? My take is, like a lot of right-leaning people, Hanania sees progressive influence as deep and pervasive in almost all American institutions. From this perspective, a priority on fighting crime even when it means heavily disparate impact looks like a revolutionary change.
Hanania has been pretty explicit about his belief that liberal democracy is generally the best form of government—see this post for example. If he was crypto-fash, I think he would just not publish posts like that.
BTW, I don’t agree with Hanania on everything… for example, the “some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans” line from the post I just linked sketches me out some—it seems to conflate moral value with ability. I find Hanania interesting reading, but the idea that EA should distance itself from him on the margin seems like something a reasonable person could believe. I think it comes down to your position in the larger debate over whether EA should prioritize optics vs intellectual vibrancy.
Here is another recent post (titled “Shut up About Race and IQ”) that I struggle to imagine a crypto-Nazi writing. E.g. these quotes:
The fact that individuals don’t actually care all that much about their race or culture is why conservatives are always so angry and trying to pass laws to change their behavior… While leftists often wish humans were more moral than they actually are, right-wing identitarians are unique in wishing they were worse.
...
People who get really into group differences and put it at the center of their politics don’t actually care all that much about the science. I think for the most part they just think foreigners and other races are icky. They therefore latch on to group differences as a way to justify what they want for tribal or aesthetic reasons.
Your comment seems a bit light on citations, and didn’t match my impression of Hanania after spending 10s of hours reading his stuff. I’ve certainly never seen him advocate for an authoritarian government as a means of enforcing a “natural” racial hierarchy. This claim stood out to me:
Hanania wrote this post in 2023. It’s the first hit on his substack search for “immigration”. This apparent lack of fact-checking makes me doubt the veracity of your other claims.
It seems like this is your only specific citation:
This appears to be a falsified quote. [CORRECTION: The quote appears here on Hanania’s Twitter. Thanks David. I’m leaving the rest of my comment as originally written, since I think it provides some valuable context.] Search for “we need more” on Wikipedia’s second citation. The actual quote is as follows:
This paragraph, from the same post, is useful context:
Hanania has stated elsewhere that he’s a fan of Bukele and his policies. Hanania’s position appears to be that since St Louis has a murder rate comparable to El Salvador when Bukele took power, St Louis could benefit from Bukele-style policies, but that would require stuff that liberals don’t like. Wikipedia makes it sound like antipathy towards Black people is his explicit motive, but that’s not how I understood him. It might be his implicit motive, but that could be true for anyone—maybe liberals prefer soft-on-crime policies because high crime keeps Black people in poverty. Who knows.
If you want to convince me that Hanania is a current-Nazi, let’s discuss the single worst thing he said recently under his real name, and we can see if the specific quote holds up to scrutiny in context.
[EDIT: To be clear, if you want to exclude Hanania because you think he is kinda sketchy, or was a bad person in the past, or is too willing to make un-PC factual claims, that may be a reasonable position. I’m arguing against excluding him on the basis that he’s a Nazi, because I don’t think that is currently true. His 2023 post advocating for racially diverse immigration to the US seems like a very straightforward disproof. If you manage to get Wikipedia to cite it, I’ll be impressed, by the way.]
Regarding the last paragraph, in the edit:
I think the comments here are ignoring a perfectly sufficient reason to not, eg, invite him to speak at an EA adjacent conference. If I understand correctly, he consistently endorsed white supremacy for several years as a pseudonymous blogger.
Effective Altruism has grown fairly popular. We do not have a shortage of people who have heard of us and are willing to speak at conferences. We can afford to apply a few filtering criteria that exclude otherwise acceptable speakers.
“Zero articles endorsing white supremacy” is one such useful filter.
I predict that people considering joining or working with us would sometimes hear about speakers who’d once endorsed white supremacy, and be seriously concerned. I’d put not-insignificant odds that the number that back off because of this would reduce the growth of the movement by over 10%. We can and should prefer speakers who don’t bring this potential problem.
A few clarifications follow:
-Nothing about this relies on his current views. He could be a wonderful fluffy bunny of a person today, and it would all still apply. Doesn’t sound like the consensus in this thread, but it’s not relevant.
-This does not mean anyone needs to spurn him, if they think he’s a good enough person now. Of course he can reform! I wouldn’t ask that he sew a scarlet letter into his clothing or become unemployable or be cast into the outer darkness. But, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that past actions as a public thinker can impact your future as a public thinker. I sure hope he wouldn’t hold it against people that he gets fewer speaking invitations despite reforming.
-I don’t see this as a slippery slope towards becoming a close-minded community. The views he held would have been well outside the Overton window of any EA space I’ve been in, to the best of my knowledge. There were multiple such views, voiced seriously and consistently. Bostrom’s ill-advised email is not a good reason to remove him from lists of speakers, and Hanania’s multi-year advocacy of racist ideas is a good reason. There will be cases that require careful analysis, but I think both of these cases are extreme enough to be fairly clear-cut.
Un-endorsed for two reasons.
Manifold invited people based on having advocated for prediction markets, which is a much stricter criterion than being a generic public speaker that feels positively about your organization. With a smaller pool of speakers, it is not trivially cheap to apply filters, so it is not as clear cut as I claimed. (I could have found out this detail before writing, and I feel embarrassed that I didn’t.)
Despite having an EA in a leadership role and ample EA-adjacent folks that associate with it, Manifold doesn’t consider itself EA-aligned. It sucks that potential EA’s will sometimes mistake non-EA’s for EA’s, but it is important to respect it when a group tells the wider EA community that we aren’t their real dad and can’t make requests. (This does not appear to have been common knowledge so I feel less embarrassed about this one.)
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1657541010745081857?lang=en. There you go for the quote in the form Wikipedia gives it.
Thank you. Is your thought that “revolution in our culture or system of government” is supposed to be a call for some kind of fascist revolution? My take is, like a lot of right-leaning people, Hanania sees progressive influence as deep and pervasive in almost all American institutions. From this perspective, a priority on fighting crime even when it means heavily disparate impact looks like a revolutionary change.
Hanania has been pretty explicit about his belief that liberal democracy is generally the best form of government—see this post for example. If he was crypto-fash, I think he would just not publish posts like that.
BTW, I don’t agree with Hanania on everything… for example, the “some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans” line from the post I just linked sketches me out some—it seems to conflate moral value with ability. I find Hanania interesting reading, but the idea that EA should distance itself from him on the margin seems like something a reasonable person could believe. I think it comes down to your position in the larger debate over whether EA should prioritize optics vs intellectual vibrancy.
Here is another recent post (titled “Shut up About Race and IQ”) that I struggle to imagine a crypto-Nazi writing. E.g. these quotes:
(Well not quite, Wiki edit out “or our culture” as an alternative to “form of government”).