I’m a former data scientist with 5 years industry experience now working in Washington DC to bridge the gap between policy and emerging technology. AI is moving very quickly and we need to help the government keep up!
I work at IAPS, a think tank of aspiring wonks working to understand and navigate the transformative potential of advanced AI. Our mission is to identify and promote strategies that maximize the benefits of AI for society and develop thoughtful solutions to minimize its risks.
I’m also a professional forecaster with specializations in geopolitics and electoral forecasting.
Peter Wildeford
Karma: 19,620
I think the diurnal effect is real and is based on there being a lot of people in both the UK and the SF Bay Area that have opposite and geographically correlated views on this topic.
It’s pretty interesting that Hanania just happens to frequently make these kinds of accidents, right?
To be clear, I haven’t cut ties with anyone other than Manifold (and Hanania). Manifold is a very voluntary use of my non-professional time and I found the community to be exhausting. I have a right to decline to participate there, just as much as you have a right to participate there. There’s nothing controlling about this.
The precise quote for others to assess is “Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”
I was not at Manifest. And I’d like to be very clear that I totally respect Manifest’s right to host Hanania and make him a speaker.
I disagree with the decision and I would never do such a thing if I were King of Manifest, but I’m not King of Manifest and I am not trying to control anything about it. Notably, Manifest came and went, Hanania was there just fine and nothing happened, and all I did was exercise my right to not go and to complain about it to some friends. At no point did I ever do anything to attempt to cancel Manifest.
But since people took the conversation here to the EA Forum which I like and are trying to tell people that Hanania is fine actually, I’m now also going to complain about it here on my Forum.
I don’t think there’s any equivalence between any of the things I have ever said and the most vile things that Hanania / Chau / Yarvin has said. I don’t think it’s a matter of finding quotes and misinterpreting them. They’re pretty blatant. I’m quite confident you could audit my entire writing history and I’d stand by that.
And people don’t have a right to a platform near me. It’s not like they’re losing their job. Or even their blog or their book deal or their platform somewhere else. I just don’t want them to be near me.
~
You would just consider them to have been rightly deplatformed for being racist, whereas I would consider them to have been silenced due to things where reasonable people can disagree.
I’m curious—is there anything for you that reasonable people couldn’t disagree? Anything someone could say that would make them worth deplatforming, in your mind?
I disagree.
Firstly, you’re totally welcome to read, listen, or say what you want. I have never aimed to harm anyone through “cancel culture”, I have never called for anyone to lose their job, etc. My point is simple: if you’re thing involves calling black people animals, I don’t want that to happen anywhere near me. I’m not trying to control you, I’m trying to control my own surroundings. I think nearly all communities are better with some degree of moderation. But maybe you disagree. I’m fine for you to go your own way.
I’ve personally left Manifold over this after being a daily active user and putting a few thousand real dollars on the site. I’m fine to learn that Manifold is not for me. It’s sad, but I’ll move on. It would be really sad to learn that EA or the EA Forum is not for me. But I think we can exercise some degree of control as a community here about what we are and are not okay with. That’s a very normal thing for communities to do.
To be clear I think I would personally only aim to exclude Hanania, Chau, and Yarvin.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
Ok, I’ll state for the record that I misunderstood that particular Hanania post. I’m sorry for that. But I still stand by Hanania being a provocateur who I do not want in any community I am a part of.
FWIW I’m quite confident it would be ~0%.
There’s some view here where anything from the slightest bit racist to the most overtly racist is all the same. I think we can create distinctions and I hope we can avoid the most overtly racist things.
And lots of great people who are interested and talented at forecasting don’t go, because they don’t want to be “balancing out”.
Which ideas are it that you find valuable that you think we’re proposing be excluded?
Super strong disagree here.
Platforming racist / sexist / antisemetic / transphobic / etc. views—what you call “bad” or “kooky” with scare quotes—doesn’t do anything to help other out-there ideas, like RCTs. It does the exact opposite! It associates good ideas with terrible ones.
The point of suggesting and platforming “kooky” ideas is for them to be heard and then evaluated. If these ideas had never been heard before, I think you’d have a point. But I have heard these ideas and I want no part of them.
Staying true to your epistemic should not mean that anything goes and we should platform anyone and everyone who has an idea, no matter how bad. Staying true to your epistemics requires a degree of quality control!
This reads to me like: “If you’re bothered by the racism/sexism/etc, you’re just not high-decoupling enough to just come and have a fun time… if you’re bothered you’re just un-fun, that’s because you are too serious and you want to stifle free discourse… just let the racists be racists, and you can do your own thing too nearby”.
Hanania is a frequent and intentional provocateur. He knows exactly what he’s doing with this article. He has made clear explicit intent to use outrage towards himself to build a platform to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
“I’ll tell you a secret to success. Always be pushing the envelope. As soon as you’ve done or said something that gets attention, resist the temptation to go rest on your laurels and become risk averse. Keep pushing, always give them a twist.”—Richard Hanania
Here’s how I interpret your response:
Manifest is cool and open; EA is snooty and closed.
Manfiest values free discourse; EA is stifling.
EAG and Manifest are equally controversial because EA has leftists and Manifest has rightists.
Manifest is just getting flak from the left because Manifest has some right-leaning people.
Sure some bright, ambitious, kind people turn away, but that’s just because they’re too leftist and an equally large amount of bright, ambitious, kind people would bounce off if Manifest were more leftist as well.
Turning away people is never the right thing to do unless they pose a physical threat.
Manifest faces trade-offs and these trade-offs go in equal directions.
I think this response is a false equivalence and feels dismissive of the concerns being expressed.
My issue is not that I’m leftist and don’t like right-wing opinions and just want to toe the “party line”. I am actually quite moderate, attend right-wing conferences, and share a lot of misgivings with left-wing culture + cancel culture + progressives.
My issue is that I don’t like having platformed speakers who think that trans people are mentally ill, that black professionals are easily dismissed affirmative action hires (or worse: animals). I don’t like cancel culture but I do think there needs to be some sort of “line” established of acceptable conduct and I think this goes way beyond right vs. left and into something very dark and different.
Not hyperbole. Hanania, Manifest promoted speaker, wrote “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?” in May 2022.
(EDIT: I misunderstood this, but I don’t think I misunderstood that Hanania is generally a provacateur who says pretty “edgy” things, like that black people are animals and that we need mass surveillance of black people to lower crime.)
Yeah, because there’s such a geographically clustered dichotomy in views between the London set and the SF set, it seems pretty important to me to give it 24 hours yeah.
Also just a general generic caution: we should know that this poll will mainly be seen by only the most active and most engaged people, which may not be representative enough to generalize.