Well, your original statement was: “White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!” I suppose I must’ve misinterpreted you—I interpreted it to mean that you thought Hanania would be disrespectful to non-white conference attendees in a conference social setting.
Ebenezer Dukakis
Karma: 643
As far as I can tell, there’s no disagreement in this thread that Hanania held some repugnant views in the early 2010s. In terms of deciding whether to shun him in the present, it seems like the key issues are
(a) what the statue of limitations should be
and
(b) whether he said something repugnant recently enough that the statue of limitations would not apply
Perhaps you believe that Hanania’s early-2010s comments somehow reveal a “more authentic” version of his beliefs that he’s hiding from the public nowadays. That seems unlikely to me, given the more recent posts of his that I linked elsewhere in this thread. If he still held his early-2010s beliefs secretly, I don’t think he would argue against them so explicitly now.
This line of reasoning is implausible. If having a single nonwhite person over on a podcast without being rude is strong evidence against white supremacy, trusting nonwhite people enough to ally with you in a war is surely even better evidence.
The literal historical Nazis allied in a literal war with literal historical Imperial Japan (a country which is mostly nonwhite). While I don’t personally like to throw around phrases like “white supremacy” very often, I think reasonable people can agree that Nazis are white supremacists.
I think you must have missed the “If” clause at the beginning of my comment, or the reference to ‘your definition’ in my sentence.
I’m not sure how much simpler I can make this, but I’ll give it a try.
Either disrespect towards non-white people is characteristic of white supremacy, or it is not. (Law of the excluded middle.)
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If it is, then by conservation of expected evidence, respect towards non-white people is limited evidence against white supremacy.
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If it is not, then Yarrow’s original claim “White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!” would appear to be false.
So, it sounds like maybe you’re trying to argue against Yarrow’s original claim that “White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!”, by giving the concrete example of Nazis respecting their Imperial Japanese allies? That’s the simplest way for me to read what you wrote.
This entire thread just demonstrates how confused and useless it is to argue “by definition”, or argue about term definitions. Set aside all word-definition disputes for a minute: The relevant question was whether Richard Hanania is a bad person to invite to conferences because he’ll be disrespectful to non-white people. Respectful interactions with a non-white podcast guest are perfectly good, if limited, evidence pertaining to that question. Can we agree on that, at least?
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If white supremacists are by definition non-respectful to non-white people, and Hanania appears fairly respectful to non-white people, perhaps that allows us to conclude that Hanania does not, in fact, qualify for your definition of “white supremacist”?
Alternatively, see Scott’s post The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?
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:
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 actually did change my mind recently about free trade after reading this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/
I wish more EAs would read it, it affected my thinking about development economics a lot. However, it’s not an anti-capitalist book, just pro-government-intervention.
As for radically reworking capitalism—I’m excited about this and have some ideas for doing it (example idea: citizen assemblies that attempt to measure externalities of individual Fortune 500 companies and set their corporate tax rate accordingly, then perhaps a prediction market for the decision of the citizen’s assembly). But I think the thing to do is to prove the idea works on a small scale and then gradually increase the scale. Do it in a town. When it works in a town, do it in a district. When it works in a district, do it in a province. When it works in a province, do it in a country. When it works in a country, do it all over the world.
Thanks for the comment!
The party organizations (DNC / RNC) and surrounding infrastructure (think tanks, NGOs, etc), of the democrats and republicans will still exist—these party organizations will want to preserve their own existence (after all, they have to keep fighting for all the downballot races, and they have to be ready to run another more-partisian presidential election in 2028!), so they’ll want to punish these No-Labels-dominant-assurance-scheme defectors by ostracising them, refusing to fund their campaigns, funding primary challengers, etc.
One of the points I was thinking about making in the post, but ended up cutting, is that enforcement mechanisms like the ones I propose for a “contract” already seem to exist in practice. That’s essentially the point you’re making in this paragraph — political parties have informal endorsement mechanisms to keep their candidates in line, even if those enforcement mechanisms aren’t specified in writing. Hence this section from my post:
… It seems possible that offering a campaign donation, conditional on agreeing to make an endorsement under certain circumstances, would constitute a violation? Or maybe it would basically be fine-in-practice as long as the agreement is not made in writing? In any case, it might be necessary to abandon the donation strategy, and instead convince some high-profile people to offer their endorsement to congresspeople who agree to the deal, as an alternative “sweetener” if the deal doesn’t go through.
Basically you can think of my post as making a 2-step argument: (1) outline a theoretical mechanism for fixing the situation and (2) speculating about how said mechanism might actually be put into practice. As you say, perhaps a “whisper network” is a better way to think about the operationalization here.
If parties can implicitly deny candidates funds if they endorse a third-party challenger, what’s to stop No Labels (which is well-funded) from implicitly offering funds for the same? Granted, perhaps the way to do this would be for a group to just start funding reasonable centrists for a few campaign cycles, in order to build the sort of implicit quid pro quo that parties already have with their candidates.
My basic mental model here is that being a politician involves a mix of doing the right thing, and doing the thing that gets you re-elected, and you have to choose which objective to prioritize on a case-by-case basis. A lot of congresspeople saw their lives on the line during January 6, and it seems fairly plausible to me that they will be willing to choose “do the right thing” in this particular circumstance, especially if they’re doing it as part of a large group, a group that’s too large for punishing every ‘defector’ to be practical. And if the scheme works and the alternative candidate gets elected, thereby keeping both Trump and Biden out of office, punishing the people responsible for causing this (presumably fairly desirable) outcome seems a bit incongruous.
Furthermore, the candidates most in need of election funds are vulnerable candidates in swing districts, and those vulnerable candidates in swing districts are exactly those candidates who most need to “move to the center” in the general election in order to capture swing voters. So the benefit of a centrist endorsement might even outweigh the cost of losing some party funds.
Probably a better idea would be to just try and get EITHER democrats OR republicans to pull off a smaller-scale realignment WITHIN their party—ie, getting a cabal of democrats to agree to switch their endorsement (and their electors at the party convention) from Biden to some more-electable figure like Gavin Newsom (or ideally, someone more centrist than Newsom), or getting a cabal of republicans to switch from Trump to Haley (or, again, someone more centrist).
My proposal is compatible with this. The Republican convention is in July, and the Democratic convention is in August. These are natural venues for intra-party coordination. Prior to the late 1960s, I understand that conventions were where the major-party candidates got picked. I see no reason not to aim for three shots on goal, and at least test the waters for a bipartisan ticket before the conventions start a few months from now.
Democrats especially have been discussing the possibility of replacing Biden a lot. A major fear has been that replacing Biden with someone like Kamala Harris might not actually improve their odds of winning the general election. So, I expect Democrats would be especially eager to replace Biden in a way that also pulled in Republican endorsements. On the Republican side, Republicans tried to resist Trump early on, but basically learned that opposing him was electoral suicide. In the context of the GOP electorate, I think that is basically true — see Nikki Haley. In the context of the electorate as a whole, it seems quite possible to me that endorsing a centrist could produce a landslide victory. But perhaps more importantly, the idea of this centrist proposal is that the Republicans wouldn’t be opposing Trump, they’d be opposing Biden. They should work with the grain of negative polarization, not against it.
I think the GOP replacing Trump with an alternative Republican candidate is just a nonstarter given Nikki Haley’s election results.
Thus, even when trying to implement some kind of idealized poli-sci scheme, I think it’s important to pay attention to the detailed politics of the situation and try to craft a hybrid approach, to build something with the best chance of winning.
I think we basically agree here. In my mind, the political equivalent of “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is “if you’re so good at institutions and game theory and policy innovation, why aren’t you able to leverage the existing system as it works here and now?”
Using game theory to elect a centrist in the 2024 US Presidential Election
Habryka seems to think there was significant underreaction to shady info: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b83Zkz4amoaQC5Hpd/time-article-discussion-effective-altruist-leaders-were?commentId=nGxkHbrikGeTxrLjZ
I think you have to balance cost of false negatives against cost of false positives.
To be clear, what I’m saying is that SBF would just flat out win, and really easily too, I wouldn’t expect a war. The people who had criticized him would be driven out of EA on various grounds; I wouldn’t expect EA as a whole to end up fighting SBF; I would expect SBF would probably end up with more control over EA than he had in real life, because he’d be able to purge his critics on various grounds.
What would it take for EA to become the kind of movement where SBF would’ve lost?
I don’t think that’s enough; you’d need to not only fund some investigators anonymously, you’d also need to (a) have good control over selecting the investigators, and (b) ban anybody from paying or influencing investigators non-anonymously, which seems unenforceable. (Also, in real life, I think the investigators would eventually have just assumed that they were being paid by SBF or by Dustin Moskovitz.)
I agree that the ideal proposal would have answers here. However, this is also starting to sound like a proof that there’s no such thing as a clean judicial system, quality investigative journalism, honest scientific research into commercial products like drugs, etc. Remember, it’s looking like SBF is going to rot in jail despite all of the money he gave to politicians. The US judicial system is far from perfect, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
If EA just isn’t capable of trustworthy institutions for some reason, maybe there’s some clever way to outsource to an entity with a good track record? Denmark, Finland, and Norway seem to do quite well in international rankings based on a quick Google: 1, 2. Perhaps OpenAI should’ve incorporated in Denmark?
(1) The fraud wouldn’t have become publicly known under this norm, so I don’t think this actually helps.
If EA disavowed SBF, he wouldn’t have been able to use EA to launder his reputation.
(2) I don’t think it would be correct for EA to react strongly in response to the rumors about SBF- there are similar rumors or conflicts around a very substantial number of famous people, e.g. Zuckerberg vs. the Winklevoss Twins.
In this case it would’ve been correct, because the rumors were pointing at something real. We know that with the benefit of hindsight. One has to weigh false positives against false negatives.
I’m not saying rumors alone are enough for a disavowal, I’m saying rumors can be enough to trigger investigation.
(3) Most importantly, how we get from “see something? say something?” to “the billionaire sending money to everybody, who has a professional PR firm, somehow ends up losing out” is just a gigantic question mark here. To me, the outcome here is that SBF now has a mandate to drive anybody he can dig up or manufacture dirt on out of EA. (I seem to recall that the sources of the rumors about him went to another failed crypto hedge fund that got sued; I can’t find a source, but even if that didn’t actually happen it would be easy him to make that happen to Lantern Ventures.) (Similarly, I expect that such an “EA investigative journalist” would have probably been directly paid by SBF, had one existed.)
I think a war between SBF and EA would have been good for FTX users—the sooner things come to a head, the fewer depositors lose all their assets. It also would’ve been good for EA in the long run, since it would be more clear to the public that fraud isn’t what we’re about.
Your point about conflict of interest for investigative journalists is a good one. Maybe we should fund them anonymously so they don’t know which side their bread is buttered on. Maybe the ideal person is a freelancer who’s confident they can find other gigs if their relationship with EA breaks down.
I feel like we should also be discussing FTX here. My model of the Lightcone folks is something like:
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They kinda knew SBF was sketchy.
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They didn’t do anything because of diffusion of responsibility (and maybe also fear of reputation warring).
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FTX fraud was uncovered.
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They resolved to not let diffusion of responsibility/fear of reputation warring stop them from sharing sketchiness info in the future.
If you grant that the Community Health Team is too weak to police the community (they didn’t catch SBF), and also that a stronger institution may never emerge (the FTX incident was insufficient to trigger the creation of a stronger institution, so it’s hard to imagine what event would be sufficient), there’s the question of what “stopgap norms” to have in place until a stronger institution hypothetically emerges.
Even if you think Lightcone misfired here—If you add FTX in your dataset too, then the “see something? say something!” norm starts looking better overall.
With regard to explicit agreements: One could also argue from the other direction. No one in EA explicitly agreed to safeguard the reputation of other EAs. You say: “If individuals want to give a company a bad review, they can do so publicly online or privately to whomever they want.” Do the ethics of “giving Nonlinear a bad review” change depending on whether the person writing the bad review is a person in the EA community or outside of it? Depending on whether the bad review is written on the EA Forum vs some other website?
Suppose someone raised their hand and offered to work as an investigative journalist funded by and for the EA community. It seems fairly absurd to tell e.g. an investigative journalist from ProPublica that they’re only allowed to cover subjects who explicitly agreed to be covered. Why would such a hypothetical EA-funded investigative journalist be any different?
The best argument I can think of against such an EA investigative journalist is that it seems unfair to pick on people who are putting so much time and money towards doing good. However, insofar as EAs involve themselves in public issues, public scrutiny will often be warranted. I think the best policy would be: the journalist’s job is to cover people both inside and outside the EA community, who are working in areas of public and EA interest. They aspire to neutrality in their coverage, so the valence of their stories isn’t affected by a person’s EA affiliation.
We should also discuss what “stopgap norms” to have in place until something actually happens, because if FTX is any guide, nothing will ever happen. (Perhaps the simplest stopgap norm is: If Ben Pace is concerned with Nonlinear, he should hire a pro investigative journalist on the spot to look into it. This looks like a straightforward arbitrage anyway, since Ben says he values his time at $800K/year.)
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IIRC, Truman said something at the United Nations like “we need to keep the world free from war”, right after having fought one of the largest wars in history (WW2). Doesn’t seem that weird to me.
So you endorse “always cooperate” over “tit-for-tat” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
Seems to me there are 2 consistent positions here:
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The thing is bad, in which case the person who did it first is worse. (They were the first to defect.)
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The thing is OK, in which case the person who did it second did nothing wrong.
I don’t think it’s particularly blameworthy to both (a) participate in a defect/defect equilibrium, and (b) try to coordinate a move away from it.
EDIT: A couple other points
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I know the payoff structure here might not be an actual Prisoner’s Dilemma, but I think my point still stands.
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David’s consistent use of “doing X” seems important here. If someone does X (e.g. blows the whistle on unethical practices), and someone else does Y in response (e.g. fires the person who blew the whistle), that’s a different situation.
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In my experience, observing someone getting dogpiled and getting dogpiled yourself feel very different. Most internet users have seen others get dogpiled hundreds of times, but may never have been dogpiled themselves.
Even if you have been dogpiled yourself, there’s a separate skill in remembering what it felt like when you were dogpiled, while observing someone else getting dogpiled. For example, every time I got dogpiled myself, I think I would’ve greatly appreciated if someone reached out to me via PM and said “yo, are you doing OK?” But it has never occurred to me to do this when observing someone else getting dogpiled—I just think to myself “hm, seems like a pretty clear case of unfair dogpiling” and close the tab.
In any case, I’ve found getting dogpiled myself to be surprisingly stressful, relative to the experience of observing it—and I usually think of myself as fairly willing to be unpopular. (For example, I once attended a large protest as the only counter-protester, on my own initiative.)
It’s very easy say in the abstract: “If I was getting dogpiled, I would just focus on the facts. I would be very self-aware and sensitive, I wouldn’t dismiss anyone, I wouldn’t say anything bad about my accusers (even if I had serious negative information about them), I wouldn’t remind people about scout mindset or anything like that.” I think it takes an unusual person to maintain that sort of equanimity when it feels like all of their friends are abandoning them and their career is falling apart. It’s not something most of us have practice with. And I hesitate to draw strong inferences about someone’s character from their behavior in this situation.
[Note: I’m using the term “dogpiled” because unlike terms like “cancelled”, “called out”, “scapegoated”, “brought to justice”, “mobbed”, “harassed”, etc. it doesn’t have any valence WRT whether the person/group is guilty or innocent, and my point is orthogonal to that.]
Another possibility is that Sam came to see EA as an incredibly flawed movement, to the point where he wanted EAs like Toner off his board, and just hasn’t elaborated the details of his view publicly. See these tweets from 2022 for example.
I think Sam is corrupted by self-interest and that’s the primary explanation here, but I actually agree that EA is pretty flawed. (Better than the competition, but still pretty flawed.) As a specific issue OpenAI might have with EA, I notice that EA seems significantly more interested in condemning OpenAI publicly than critiquing the technical details of their alignment plans. It seems like EAs historically either want to suck up to OpenAI or condemn them, without a lot of detailed technical engagement in between.
I was watching the recent DealBook Summit interview with Elon Musk, and he said the following about OpenAI (emphasis mine):
the reason for starting OpenAI was to create a counterweight to Google and DeepMind, which at the time had two-thirds of all AI talent and basically infinite money and compute. And there was no counterweight. It was a unipolar world. And Larry Page and I used to be very close friends, and I would stay at his house, and I would talk to Larry into the late hours of the night about AI safety. And it became apparent to me that Larry [Page] did not care about AI safety. I think perhaps the thing that gave it away was when he called me a speciest for being pro-humanity, as in a racist, but for species. So I’m like, “Wait a second, what side are you on, Larry?” And then I’m like, okay, listen, this guy’s calling me a speciest. He doesn’t care about AI safety. We’ve got to have some counterpoint here because this seems like we could be, this is no good.
I’m posting here because I remember reading a claim that Elon started OpenAI after getting bad vibes from Demis Hassabis. But he claims that his actual motivation was that Larry Page is an extinctionist. That seems like a better reason.
(Agreed that I wouldn’t want EA endorsing this style of politics)