Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
Nathan Young
Karma: 17,818
Other comments aside, I kind of like long form, easy to follow discussions posted in the appropriate community location, so thanks David!
But there are limits to the degree of acceptable antagonism against public opinion, and a willingness to send costly signals against public opinion for relatively moderate organization gain is not to the credit of Manifold.
Isn’t this ‘just having principles’? Like isn’t this what principles are? To take costly stands which are not pragmatic? I don’t really take a view on hiring Caroline (except to say that funders should vote with their feet) but I like organisations being run according to taste if they aren’t hugely powerful. And Manifund isn’t hugely powerful, so Austin is being principled. And I guess I tend to like that, even if I disagree with the principles.
I do know this, but I think if we are going to use talking points we should get to the bottom of them. So I wonder if “repeatedly platforming racists is accurate”.
Hanania has disavowed previously racist positions. I would agree in 2023, hence I spent a lot of work pushing against him being a speaker.
Anomaly is voluntary eugenicist. Not clear to me he is racist as that word is typically used. Does he advocate for animus towards people on the basis of race?
Chau plausibly is. I don’t particularly enjoy being the racism police, but I dislike Chau enough that I can’t be bothered to defend him
Khan, Hsu, I can’t find anything racist. Hsu is a voluntary eugenicist, I think.
I am not going to deal with unofficial afterparties.
I don’t love how Cremiux talks, but has he published anything racist? Looks like another volunatry eugencist to me. Mother Jones claims he has a racist reddit account, he claims not.
So is “repeatedly platforming racists” accurate? I tend to think no.
To me this looks more “genetic differences between races” and “parents should be able to genetically select their children”. I think that’s pretty meaningfully different to racism and if you want to make Manifest the racism conference you can try but personally I like there being a line between the two. I prefer for people to be able to discuss genetics, but not advocate for animus or lazy thinking about races, genders, etc. Hence I worked hard (and lost friends) pushing for Hanania not to be a speaker in 2023.
I am a bit sensitive about this, but I think it’s such a misplay from people close to EA to act as if any non-orthodox view on eugenics/crime/immigration is identical to racism. Personally, I think it’s not helpful for seeing the world as it is and makes it harder to push back actual racial abuse in spaces I care about. I think that this view has largely caused the right to act as if racism isn’t (and perhaps never was) real. And I think that’s probably bad.
This conference has attracted significant controversy for repeatedly platforming racists.
I know we like to launder this point here, but is the underlying point accurate? Hanania did not, to my recollection, speak at Manifest and which racists have later been platformed?
This talking point annoys me because it usually bottoms out at a few anecdotes or that bad guardian article. Is that what “repeatedly platforming racists” implies?
For those that may not know this, I was in conflict with Austin over the Hanania thing, probably one of the most in conflict, and I pushed pretty hard on Manifold to for him not to be a speaker, and wrote a blog about it at the time. I spent quite a lot of social capital on it.
Two points:
I agree that Hanania’s output has improved a lot and that you are largely vindicated in my eyes here
I think Hanania is pretty open about doing whatever it takes to get views and subscribers. He has improved, but I don’t know how to engage with someone who seems so self-evidently pragmatic in their public positioning. It troubles me.
Naaah come on. You could always say this had he done anything less than respond to all 9. He responded to what he thought was a high priority, is his response good, or bad?
Glad to hear it. I am curious if that is common here, or not (though I guess you can’t answer that).
Do you mean good to think about PR in general or or engage on forum posts about it?
I also think it’s brave of Austin to do this, and in general I like bravery, even if it causes people do things I don’t like. Doesn’t seem like a huge or secret kind of bravery either, which are sometimes time bad kinds.
As I read this comment section, the story my mind generates is a people want to express ‘this is bad and I want people to see that I think it’s bad’. Is that how people who are writing the negative comments feel?
Or do you feel like you could be convinced this is fine/none of your business?
Cos personally I think I could be convinced this is a bad idea, or that Manifund should not be considered an org in good standing[1]. I don’t think it would destroy me to come to that conclusion.
- ^
I probably do think that Manifund is not an easy safe org for your sweet friend who is new to EA, though I guess I think that of CEA and CG and Nonlinear too
- ^
I guess I am curious if the debt you feel brought her to your attention or changed your decision. I think I weakly endorse the former and weakly to moderately unendorse the latter.
That said, I think this paragraph is kind of notable:
I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund. They provided seed funding for Manifold. They funded the retreat which drew me into the EA community, and the conference where I met my wife. Much of Manifund’s work today is directly inspired by the Future Fund’s approach.
I also feel a debt to the Future Fund, they gave me my first grant for the work I now do. But I don’t feel much debt towards Caroline there. Plus, perhaps, if i am to forgive her her debts, perhaps that should also cancel out benefits?
I weakly think that Austin can hire who he likes.
I moderately think that EA could do with caring a less about reputation and more about good work. Does Caroline do good work? Seems like the org will internalise that, so it’s probably up to donors and other orgs to decide.
Do you know how this compares to 80ks similar metric? I dunno, seems a bit weak (only counts careers, not how they differ, no attempt at attribution)
Hey, elsewhere someone pointed out that the community seems more interested in engaging with criticism than I previously thought so here are some thoughts:
Here growth seems to be about more people engaging with CEA. I am unsure that is the main component of impact regarding EA. I prefer 80k’s notion of trajectory changes and going back over time and updating those. Surely CEA succeeds when EA does a lot of what we think of as good.
Commmunity healthiness is also a key part of this. Does the community feel able to take on struggles, does it have integrity? I guess all this feels a bit divorced from what is discussed in this piece.
Personally, I have found CEA’s recent output pretty uninspiring and corporate. And I think maybe that lines up with a real focus on growth metrics, like when a company has been sold from it’s previous owners and is run by a conglomerate. Numbers are easy to track so they get tracked. Is EA well? And perhaps my model of CEA takes a lot of flack in return and so just wants to get on with the job, but that isn’t gonna fix the relationship between us (and maybe that’s fine)
I don’t particularly like being on the forum these days so I am rarely here. I guess I think if the community felt more alive/capable of disagreement/self-assured etc then I would be, but the whole place just smells of things that can’t be said and there are far too many topics without a shared knoweldge base so its hard to engage with the factual stuff.
As I’ve said elsewhere I imagine most people at CEA work hard and really want to help. I am sure the authors of this piece do. And I know posting on the forum can be a gruelling experience. But maybe there is a reason for this. A fundamental thing about this community that isn’t well such that this is the case. And maybe it’s worth focusing more on that rather than just ever more members.
Yeah that’s a fair point. I don’t come on here much. So maybe I am wrong on how receptive people would be. But this doesn’t sound great.
I am pretty happy with my EA circles, for what it’s worth. I have come here to say somethings about this place and to some extent about the powerful organisation that runs it.
But I’d hear more about your EA in the Lakes thing. Which lakes?
If I might engage you sort of conflicty, what do you think of the other comments on this post. Like many of them seem to be saying that actually EA probably is worse or that my sums are bad?
And isn’t there some value in pinning down some sense of where we are?
To me this feels a bit like whack a mole. A big chunk of people are arguing (and then never responding afterwards) that my sums are bad. Another chunk are saying ‘sure you might be right but shouldn’t we do better’ and another chunk are saying that I am not really arguing the thing I claim to be arguing.
Can’t you see how all of this taxes me making the point? Can you see how it seems to me that everyone wants to make a different point about why it’s bad but no one wants to disagree with each other? Isn’t that strange?
My theory there is a large shape that most of you don’t wish to turn your focus on and that in this post I am forcing your attention to it, so you all know deep down that it must be bad and that you must disagree. And of course you don’t need to disagree with each other because the real disagreement is that I am forcing your attention to it. And that doesn’t sound very healthy or very EA.I would take a top level comment saying that on the substance I am right but that you disagree with the framing or for you to disagree with some other comments as evidence against this theory.
A personal reflection:
When I was a Christian, I led a lot of Bible study groups. Christians care a lot about Truth. In theory any question was askable but in practise it was clear that some questions were not. If somebody asked them I maybe allowed some kind of response, and then moved the discussion on. Discussions about the historicity of the Bible often created a mess so you didn’t really want to have them. In practise I recall having them very rarely, if at all.
To me the EA forum often has the smell of the same kind of thing where many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’. Below, James links CEA’s growth discusison. Do I really want to engage with that? Not really. I think I’ll feel like someone who is grumpy at a wedding. But also, from a quick scroll, do I think that CEA getting it’s engagement numbers up is the central thing it should be tracking? Not really. How many career changes are there? What is some notion of total impact?
And, sure, these are hard questions and I am not sure there are good answers. But when I came on here 7 years ago, this felt like a place to have those discussions. And now.. it doesn’t.
Sure though I feel like you have generally been weakly pro SBF in the meantime. And doesn’t it cause some question of judgement if it took you 3+ years to come to the same conclusion that most people reached in 7 days?