Owen Lawson

Karma: 40

Owen Lawson Jun 30, 2024, 1:15 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
I think my reply to Nathan Young fully addresses what you’re saying here.
Specifically:
I was deliberately vague when I said “low stakes” and “material harm”, and I think it’s good that [Nathan] pointed that out while still keeping it vague (“pretty valuable”). I did think about being specific instead, but an object-level discussion of the costs and benefits of the racism taboo would probably be a derail in this thread, even though they would indeed be crucial (cruxy, I mean) to a lot of the commenters arguing here.
Even though that object-level discussion might be good to have (in some other thread, probably not here), I don’t really expect anyone to change their mind from it. Seems like I should reiterate this part again:
I think that different people just have highly divergent Overton windows, and will have to agree to disagree, and will occasionally be excluded or alienated from one another’s events.

Owen Lawson Jun 24, 2024, 11:16 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
the idea that there are no lines that one can cross to lose status—that interesting ideas are all that matters—seems misguided to me.
I certainly agree with you about that. Maybe I want to edit my initial comment to make that more apparent.
I do have a red line that falls between murder and the “animals” tweet. I expect that if we tried really hard to figure out our red lines, some of them would be close but some of them would be pretty far off. That’s what I meant to say with the final paragraph:
I think that different people just have highly divergent Overton windows, and will have to agree to disagree, and will occasionally be excluded or alienated from one another’s events.
I was deliberately vague when I said “low stakes” and “material harm”, and I think it’s good that you pointed that out while still keeping it vague (“pretty valuable”). I did think about being specific instead, but an object-level discussion of the costs and benefits of the racism taboo would probably be a derail in this thread, even though they would indeed be crucial (cruxy, I mean) to a lot of the commenters arguing here. It might be pretty clarifying if you or someone else held that discussion in the right (perhaps highly gatekept) place—it could help people update their own Overton windows, or it could just help you understand the psychology of an incorrigible racist, either of which could make for good epistemic lessons.
I also think Not Just a Mere Political Issue is a helpful post in figuring these things out.
What links here?
- Owen Lawson's comment on Why so many “racists” at Manifest? by Austin (Jun 30, 2024, 1:15 AM; 1 point)

Owen Lawson Jun 24, 2024, 9:42 PM
38 points
7 ∶ 12
on: Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
Hanania seems kinda racist but nonetheless great to invite to Manifest.
(This started out as an in-person diatribe to a friend, and he told me that it might be good if the EA forum heard it. Sorry Austin. I wanted to make it a Quick Take, but for some reason I’m not able to make those.)
tl;dr: tweets bad, blog good, books dunno. It’s fine to advocate for various exclusions, but try reading more than a few sentences before joining the mob, lest you make unnecessary epistemic sacrifices.
I’m not too bothered by people’s objections to Hanania’s invitation. Mostly I’m seeing people say that his presence makes them less interested in attending. Some amount of that seems pretty much guaranteed to happen at any event with sufficiently interesting attendees and consequential topics. We all can and will advocate for our own preferences and the Overton window we think is best^[1]. I think concerns about Hanania attracting edgelords are valid, but given how good his blog is, I think he is still net positive for Manifest.
(EDIT for clarification: my own Overton window is not infinitely permissive, but it is permissive enough for Richard Hanania to be inside it.)
Hanania’s twitter repulses me, and I am consciously annoyed every time his blog links to it. (I pay to read his blog.) He has supposedly claimed that his “animals” tweet did not have racist intent. I am not personally willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one, but I think the stakes are low. Good thinkers say ugly and provocative things on Twitter all the time and are rewarded with engagement; this is nothing new or special. I think some people’s twitter accounts do cause outsized material harm, but Hanania’s probably does not.
If you’re curious about the less twitterized version of Hanania, you could read Critical Age Theory, Interracial Crime and “Perspective”, and Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide? Here are his forecasting articles. And here is Scott Alexander’s review of his book The Origins of Woke. Each of those posts gave me something to ponder (and I wish it went without saying that this is not an endorsement of their conclusions).
You may have seen people sharing the first paragraph of the following quotation from his blog (emphasis added):
“[...] I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.”
I have a hard time interpreting this passage. In any case, here is a link to him interviewing a socialist, and here is a link to him interviewing a feminist transwoman. That’s not proof that Hanania wouldn’t exclude your own favorite blogger from a conference if he could. But I have seen other commenters treat that first paragraph as some kind of indisputably anti-enlightenment smoking gun, which I find annoyingly sloppy and incurious.
I’ve seen one or two comments giving Hanania’s book against civil rights law as a reason^[2] to shun him. Sadly, it seems like a much larger number of people want to exclude him on the basis of the racist tweet and a couple of decontextualized quotations. Again, people can advocate for whatever they want, on whatever basis makes sense to them—I just gotta voice my disappointment in the apparent illiteracy^[3].
In addition to promoting prediction markets, Richard Hanania writes in favor of allowing euthanasia, increasing market freedom, reducing animal suffering, and deinstitutionalizing childhood^[4]. In his white nationalist days, he wrote that all latinos who entered the country after 1965 should be deported, but now he writes against immigration restrictions in general....It seems like the guy thinks for himself and is able to sharply change his mind. That weighs more heavily on my moral scales than some racist tweets.
I don’t think I am going to change many minds about Richard Hanania’s invitation to Manifest. I think that different people just have highly divergent Overton windows, and will have to agree to disagree, and will occasionally be excluded or alienated from one another’s events. But I think that my friend was right that the small amount I can tug on this discourse is probably worth the effort of writing this.
1. ^
  The stuff about Republicans being unsuited to EA was surprising and sad, but I am in favor of people honestly expressing their opinions, however parochial or distorted they seem to me.
2. ^
  I haven’t read Hanania’s Origins of Woke but I have read Thomas Sowell’s Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? which I consider to be Huge If True, not obviously false, and presumably not motivated by racial hatred. If you think Hanania should be excluded due to his book, would you think the same thing if instead it was Sowell who took an interest in prediction markets and wanted to attend Manifest? Genuinely curious.
3. ^
  Hanania thinks that Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV. I think that EAs skim twitter :(
4. ^
  In fact, Hanania is one of very few bloggers who has humane opinions about schooling and childhood. For this and other reasons, I would prefer to see him influence policy than a randomly selected EA Forum user (setting aside AI).