Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
Nathan Young
Karma: 17,839
I would like to have some clarity on Community Health’s processes:
How many things are reported of what level of concern?
Can they give an example case and how it might be handled?
What are behaviours that might be responded to in different ways.
I think it’s reasonable that even if a community doesn’t know specific cases, we could know some numbers and a general sense of how things work and what is and isn’t acceptable. The fear/inability to have these discussions as a community has, in my view, been a key fracture down the middle of EA for about 5 years.
If you dislike some Berkeley sex norms, you can say so
This feels like a request for the reader to have a specific opinion on how Community Health behaved.
It would make it easier for me to judge here if I knew more about the unpaid work claim. Winning in court doesn’t hugely convince me without more details, but if the claim was fair this seems bad and and if it wasn’t it seems fine.
Regardless I guess this has been horrible for you.
Having run lots of events, a sense that someone is going to be a pain is a perfectly reasonable reason to exclude them. I generally like event organisers to be able to invite who they want and not who they don’t.
I guess to speak briefly as a person who has been in a number of sort of inner circle type things (I have been to some really good EA-adjacent parties, some very exclusive group chats, I have had a long public argument with Amanda Askell), it is in fact pretty fun (well except the argument). It seems silly to pretend otherwise. Cool things are cool.
But I guess it generally moved the needle between 95% and 97% of my cool experiences bar and there are other bars that I want to fill. Do I do good work (kind of)? Do I have a community that likes and respects me (yes, though it has taken a lot of work)? Do I have a romantic relationship that I find satisfying and a family I long for (no)?
I think the above piece is wrong in that it acts as if these things aren’t nice or attainable. But I think they are both. But I am not sure they are actually value for effort for most people, especially at this point. Year on year it gets harder to be in the inner circle and staying comes with its own complexity and drama unless one is really fricking great at doing good work (my work is fine, but few think it excellent). And there is always the risk that in trying to be popular one will become a version of oneself that one hates.So I am not gonna pretend that these things aren’t nice (they are) or attainable (they are) but I wonder if they are things you actually want to put most of your effort into attaining. At some point I found something like satisfacton—I wanted to fill other bars rather than ensure I was keeping pace with the cool.
And do we want there to be status hierarchies? I dunno, yes? Surely we want them as long as they are actually aligned with virtue? I hope that Ryan Greenblatt and Nate Soares are going to the great parties. What are the parties for if not to encourage poeple to do great work or write bestselling books. And yes that kind of sucks for those of us less clever than Ryan and less charismatic than Nate, but we are not in some liberal fantasy, we are in the real world.
So yes, you can peraps have this if you choose to, but maybe consider if you actually want it. Is it a good system? I dunno, probably? If you do good work, I shall vote for your elections to the halls of the cool people though hopefully your life will already be rich and fun enough as it is.
My take on your opener:
Somewhere out there, there are the cool, high-impact effective altruists who are really having a positive effect on the world.
Not having a positive effect with certainty, no.
They are all invited to lots of awesome parties with other cool, high-impact effective altruists.
More yes than no.
They know all kinds of secrets that us normal people don’t know, and they laugh at us for our out-of-touch takes.
I don’t think they think about others like that but they do know secrets you’d like to. I know secrets you’d like to, there are a lot of secrets to know. Many of the “cool” people are in fact really fricking fun, though I only know most from a distance. But basically all of the EA big names I have hung out with, have been brilliant, fun people with great chat.
They can get jobs and grants by having a fifteen-minute conversation with a friend or a friend of a friend.
Probably, though they have earned the trust of grant funders. Would you invest in Zuckerberg if he said he was starting a new business? So yeah, there are some people grant funders would love to give more money.
They don’t have to slog through endless and dispiriting job applications, throwing out a hundred apps to get nothing back but “we had a very strong pool this time.”
They don’t, no. Though many seem to work a lot of hours.
They never sit at home alone on weekends scrolling TikTok and contemplating doing their laundry.
They also do that, though maybe some don’t. The group seems a mix of functional and very dysfuctional.
They can go to all the coolest co-working spaces AND EA Global.
They can, though sometimes EAGs can be a bit annoying, I hear.
So basically I think this isn’t true.
It’s not like one needs to have spicy views on the impossibility of racial equality (and conformance with the ultraconservative right in most other views) to be interested in biohacking, markets or altruism … if anything quite the opposite.
Yeah this feels kind of a solid point. I’ll think about it.
I tend to, on balance, be pretty grateful to community health. I am glad to be part of a community that actually takes responsibility for the things that a reasonable observer would expect them to be responsible for.
I tend to think many companies and communities are cowardly here. And sure, recently I think EA has acted like women are made of glass and that there is no joy to be had in any kind of romance at all, but at least the team aren’t cowards. Any community that is like “we don’t take responsibility for what people do at our events” I want to spit them out of my mouth. I am glad that if someone is having a bad time there is a place to report that too while neither do nothing, nor just throw the accused out.
So thanks folks.
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?
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 have been excluded from events and not told why. It sucks. But I feel like explaining to everyone is a big cost. And only explaining to the easy cases makes the hard cases more obvious. In a world where there are too few events (in my view) I would like event organisers to do as they want without me claiming they have broken some big norm.
But I’m sad exclusions happen, then generally suck, especially for those excluded, but sometimes for the organisers too.