Sure—but a debate over one guest last year says little about the reception of the conference as a whole. The New York Times paid much more attention to the presence of an orgy and Aella than to Hanania, glossing him over in a single line.
Most conferences—not least EAG—wind up with debates like that on the margins.
The suggestion of “My experience at Manifest 2024” seems like a maximally neutral one, if information-light. “Issues with controversial guests at Manifest 2024″, perhaps, if you want to be more direct.
I meant “public” in a broad sense of examining reactions to the conference, inclusive of “public within EA.” I agree that many disputes tend to lurk beneath the surface, but not that there was any discussion sufficient to justify the title prior to OP encouraging it. In the same way that I imagine you wouldn’t be thrilled with a label of “Ben Stewart, who works for the controversial Open Philanthropy” or “Ben Stewart, adherent to the controversial philosophy effective altruism”—even though both OpenPhil and EA have plenty of controversies that bubble up here and there—I think it’s better to raise this sort of discussion around Manifest without proactively centering controversy as its most salient feature.
I very much appreciate you sharing your thoughts here. While I see a fair bit of personal value in engaging with eg Hanania, I agree that there’s nothing dishonorable or shameful about not wanting to be in a place with the dynamic you describe. I agree that people who are skeptical towards speakers who have made edgy, offensive, or extreme statements should not be assumed to lack intellectual rigor or curiosity. I’m also glad to hear, and take it as a good sign, that many of the “edgy” people were nice to you and people were receptive when you raised the issues you saw at Manifest. Your comment touches on a lot of valuable points.
As for the path forward, I’m personally impressed by the call for “pluralist civility” in Folded Papers:
There is no universal safe space, nor should we try to make one. To do so would be to engage in a new version of the fallacy that made the old “rules of debate” so infuriating. “If you can’t make your point in this safe space, then it must be hateful and wrong” is just as false as “If your viewpoint can’t survive these debate rules, then it must be irrational.”
The only way out is to allow multiple sets of rules. That way, truths that are unsayable in one context can still be said in another. Other people can then respond, and the ideas can have the opportunity to be refined or critiqued from the local viewpoint. If we have multiple fora, we can have a system where pretty much anything can be said somewhere. [...]
Respect that discussion norms are local. Don’t try to make them universal.
Be part of the overlap. Belong to more than one community.
Encourage other people to recognise that discussion norms can and should differ from place to place.
Encourage other people to recognise that broad discussion norms are incredibly valuable and should be nurtured wherever they are compatible with community aims.
My own impression is that Manifest strikes a good balance for its goals. In the context of prediction markets, it’s uncommonly valuable to have people with a wide range of assumptions, some of whom are willing to go against consensus, even if that leads some into hot water. I don’t think controversial speakers should be sought out for their own sake, but if someone who has worthwhile, relevant things to say has also courted controversy, I think in the context of Manifest it would be a mistake not to invite them as a result. This seems to be the approach Manifest has taken. I don’t think those norms are appropriate everywhere, but I do think they’re appropriate somewhere, and Manifest has built something successful, rewarding, and compelling as a result, something that fits a niche other spaces do not.
I think it’s possible to assert that the approach Manifest takes is not the only appropriate approach to take, that inviting and excluding people always carry trade-offs and that some good people may not want to be in every environment, and that as it stands the conference accomplishes something wholly worth doing. That’s where I land.
“Basic human decency”? Jeez, mate. I understand not wanting to engage with right-wingers personally, but treating it as a deep affront when others choose to do so is off-putting, to say the least.
My comment was in response to OP’s explicit note that the controversy around the Guardian article is what made him change the title.
I believe you, but “Ben Stewart dislikes it” is not typically the standard for declaring a conference controversial. Was there public controversy around the conference not connected to the article?
I’m not particularly happy to see people within this community immediately present and accept the framing that Manifest was controversial because people reacted harshly to an article explicitly aimed at smearing a community I belong to with reckless disregard for truth and bizarrely sinister framing of mundane decisions, written by people who proceeded simply by reading a guest list without even bothering to attend the event they were writing about. In that regard, Manifest is only controversial in the same sense Scott Alexander was controversial when the New York Times wrote about him.
To name something is often to make it so; to lead with the framing that Manifest was controversial is to encourage other people to see it that way, yielding to the frame of people who treat EA itself as controversial. That has an impact on everyone who attends, organizes, and puts effort into it. I recognize that your own experience was mixed and have no problem with you sharing that and exploring it, but I think it’s worth being cautious about frame-setting in the title in that way, particularly given its potential impact on early-career organizers or guests.
I was excited and honored to be invited to Manifest. It’s the first conference that went out of its way to invite me as a special guest, more-or-less the first place I spoke openly under my own name, and a place that gave me the opportunity to meet and speak with people I have read and admired for years. It was an extraordinarily valuable experience for me, one where I seized the opportunity to give a light-hearted presentation on a niche topic, chat with and learn from many of my role models, and generally enjoy meeting people in person who I have only had the chance to interact with online.
I am extremely confident that an article aimed not at attacking the conference but at presenting an even-handed, cohesive picture of the experience as a whole would read very differently to the Guardian article and would include many more stories like my own and like the descriptions provided by other attendees.
Were some guests controversial? Yes, though I am happy to defend their inclusion on the merits. Does the presence of a few controversial guests or a harsh reaction against an article aimed at creating a mess merit framing the conference as a whole as controversial? I’m not at all convinced that’s fair, accurate, or helpful.
I respect that and agree that those comments cross a line that should not be crossed. I’m sympathetic to the value of red lines and taboos, and I regularly put active effort into defending the sentiment that racism is bad and should be condemned (though I am extremely cautious about tabooing people as a whole based on specific bad sentiments).
It’s more complicated for me here because as mentioned above, I find Hanania’s commentary on other topics unusually valuable and think I have had valuable, worthwhile interactions with him such that I am glad for opportunities to do so.
More than that, I am conscious that many who most eagerly pursue the taboo, including the writers of the Guardian article and people like David Gerard who provided background for it openly despise you, me, and others in these spheres, and given taboo-crafting power would craft a set of norms emphatically disagreeable to me. I think parts of the EA community have themselves shown some susceptibility to similar impulses, throwing people like Nick Bostrom under the bus to do so. That post in particular actively made me more wary of EA spaces and left me wondering who else would be skewered.
The individual who wrote that post no longer works at CEA but openly demands that EA cut ties with the entire rationalist community. I like you and broadly trust your own instincts here, even where we might disagree about where to draw specific lines, but I am extremely wary of yielding norm-setting power to people who treat my approach (engaging seriously with anyone) as worthy of suspicion and condemnation, and I think when they succeed in setting the frame, it works against a lot of the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent community norms I value.
Because others here are unlikely to do so, I feel like I ought to explicitly defend Hanania’s presence on the merits. I don’t find it “fun” that he’s “edgy.” I go out of my way, personally, to avoid being edgy. While I tread into heated territory at times, I have always made it my goal to do so respectfully, thoughtfully, and with consideration for others’ values. No, it’s not edginess or fun that makes me think he belongs there. He unquestionably belongs at a prediction market conference because he has been a passionate defender of prediction markets in the public sphere and because he writes to his predominantly right-leaning audience in ways that consistently emphasize and criticize the ways they depart from reality.
Let me be clear: I emphatically do not defend all parts of his approach and worldview. He often engages in a deliberately provocative way and says insensitive or offensive things about race, trans issues, and other hot-button topics on the right. But I feel the same about many people who you would have no problem seeing attend Manifest, and he brings specific unusual and worthwhile things to the table.
My first real interaction with Hanania, as I recall, came when he boosted and praised my affirmative defense of surrogacy, a topic very personal to me and one online public figures are much more likely to attack or stay silent on than defend when I speak about it. Later, I went on his podcast to discuss my path out of Mormonism and my sexuality, my essay on how the Republican Party is doomed, the importance of a spirited defense of liberalism in the public sphere, and other ideas that would challenge his right-leaning audience and encourage norms I believe the EA sphere would approve of. This is also true of some areas where I can’t claim to be as emphatically EA-aligned as he is, as with his treatise against factory farming and animal suffering.
Someone below pointed out that you misrepresented his pronouns/genocide essay, which I saw as an unusually self-reflective look at why he and others have, as he puts it, “deranged” priorities in getting the most animated not about objectively the most important ideas but about emotionally salient topics close to home. The point of the essay is not “they/them pronouns are worse than genocide,” but “it is in one sense deranged, but human and important to understand, that people get so much more emotionally invested in issues like they/them pronouns than about genocide.”
I understand perfectly well why people dislike him and I have no problem with robust criticism and even condemnation of much of what he says. But while his actions look from your angle like mainstreaming far-right ideas, they look to the far-right like mainstreaming animal suffering concerns, prediction markets, abortion and surrogacy, open borders, and rather a lot more. You may discount those as trivial, but the people in his audience certainly do not.
You seem smart, capable, and knowledgeable about prediction markets. I think Manifest would benefit from having you in attendance. But my own intellectual life is richer for the opportunity to read, engage with, and argue with people like Hanania. I’m glad he was there, I’m glad I had the chance to say hi to him and chat a bit, and if a precondition for your engagement is that it’s either you or him, I would rather you not attend than that you use your reputational sway to prevent me from having those interactions.
My opinions about Manifest are obvious from my linked article, but I think it’s worth explicitly reiterating that you as organizers of the conference have my full confidence and support for how you handled decisions around invitations, organization, and hosting. Part of this is self-interested, I confess: I was a bit of an odd duck at the conference, invited by @Saul Munn despite my lack of particular focus on prediction markets in what struck me as part of an extraordinarily successful decision to prioritize “interesting to the conference organizers and potential attendees” over “safe”. I loved Manifest, loved the chance to present on an off-the-wall topic there, and have never been to a conference where so many sessions felt like must-attends.
I don’t think Manifest did anything to signal edginess, nor do I think its presenters leaned into edginess. Some have controversial views, but I attended many of the sessions under scrutiny and saw nobody who aimed to be edgy for edginess’s sake. Razib gave a fascinating speculative presentation on where the future of biology might go, Jonathan Anomaly’s talk on polygenic screening was compelling and timely, and the Collinses are always gracious and earnest in-person. Is it “safer” to avoid inviting people who dive at time into more heated topics? Absolutely. Does it lead to a more meaningful, more compelling, or more productive conference for attendees? Absolutely not. My impression is that the same approach that led Saul to invite me led you guys to invite and attract a lot of interesting, passionate people who create a remarkably fruitful space to talk about ideas.
Manifest exists at a peculiar intersection of communities that happens to come closer to the spaces I personally spend time than, frankly, anywhere else I have been in person. The tone it struck and its inclusive approach left me feeling like I belonged there in a way almost unattainable in other spaces, and urges to restrict it further towards a particular set of professional-left norms in the name of inclusivity make me wary. There are plenty of conferences that do just that, but there is only one Manifest.
I think it’s unfortunate that an error-riddled article written with an explicit intent to create a mess where none existed, by and in consultation with people who openly hate EA, rationalism, and almost every community that could be said to be part of the Manifest audience, has had the net effect of making people refer to the conference as “controversial” and pushing you as organizers to carefully scrutinize every decision you made in organizing the conference. It was a good event, the world was better for you guys having run it, and restricting its scope to be more “safe” and avoid speakers who Guardian writers are inclined to object to would make it feel—to me and, I suspect, to many like me—meaningfully less inclusive and safe as a place to explore worthwhile ideas around intellectually curious people.
I broadly endorse your judgment on this topic inasmuch as I’ve observed it, for whatever that is worth. I do want to add the specific note that one of the most serious problems with the process issues is that they led to such an adversarial launching point to the topic that the response was in an unreasonably difficult position from the beginning. Ozy’s article (while being on the whole a defensible view) criticizes the approach of the response quite harshly, but speaking with precision and grace in high-pressure, intensely adversarial situations with an audience primed to distrust you is a specific, rare skill with only limited bearing on someone’s approach in regular times.
You are likely right that a mistrial is unrealistic at this point, but inasmuch as people take the approach you advocate, it’s worth emphasizing the reasons process concerns make putting things together so complicated.
I found this post in the wake of the recent Nonlinear situation and my own response to it. I think it’s worth stating at least briefly in light of all of that that it seems extremely unwise to me to take serious adverse actions against anyone, or spread rumors from any sort of official position about them, if they do not have the opportunity to hear and understand the allegations against them. There is little more unpleasant than having the people around you suddenly treat you as suspect or evil without any apparent reason, particularly if every attempt to learn the reason is rebuffed.
“EA is not the legal system” isn’t a good response here: the legal system has evolved due process for good reason, and allowing a norm of confidential-from-accused allegations that lead to concrete action will almost necessarily replicate every harm that led to the evolution of due process in the legal system, given enough time. I recognize the complications of victims fearing retribution, but everyone in adversarial situations fears retribution, whether they are a victim, a false accuser, or (as is perhaps most common) someone interpreting an ambiguous situation in a negative light. I think the policy you outline dramatically downplays the harm of restrictive actions taken based on partial, one-sided views of adversarial situations; if confidential-to-the-accused accusations should be acted on at all, they should be acted on with immense restraint and caution.
I meant nothing of the sort. “They’ve had” is present perfect tense, and it’s in a section where he is referring to Nonlinear in the present tense as of 7 September 2023 as he outlines the basics of their structure and history.
EDIT:
which to me reads as clearly talking about how many employees a company has simultaneously.
This reading would make sense in isolation; as we have all been talking about the same fact pattern for a week, I admit it makes rather less sense to me. Either you read my statement as a general hypothetical to demonstrate what an unambiguous falsehood looks like, in which case there’s no issue, or you read it as referring to the Nonlinear situation, in which common sense dictates it should be read as sloppy shorthand for the “has had 21 employees” fact pattern that’s been under discussion.
I’m baffled. What do you mean “during the relevant period”? The relevant period as explicitly written into Ben’s post is the company’s entire history.
Chloe and Alice were in no position to know the company’s historical employee count as of September 7, 2023, which is the only thing that matters at all in determining whether Ben’s claim was accurate.
If you go and check the primary sources, and they definitely confirm that during the relevant period [presumably you mean: while Chloe/Alice were employed there] Nonlinear did not have 21 employees (and had much closer to the number of employees that Ben listed), it will update me further towards the conclusion that you are straining at gnats to defend obvious inaccuracies.
I absolutely do not admit that Ben’s post substantially got the number of Nonlinear employees during the relevant period wrong. As far as I can tell it is still accurate.
His precise sentence was this:
My current understanding is that they’ve had around ~4 remote interns, 1 remote employee, and 2 in-person employees (Alice and Chloe).
He did not say “At the time Alice and Chloe were working there, they’d had...”. He used the present tense! It is simple revisionism to act as if the sentence says anything else. Anyone reading that sentence would and should come to the conclusion that he was speaking about the company as a whole, providing background context for who they are, not anchoring it to some unspecified point in the past.
This is a strange claim to litigate in this way.
By “has” I meant “has had a total of”, in line with their consistent claim of past count. I think that should have been clear given context and am unsure why you’re acting as if I would be claiming something different to that.
It was simple to fact-check. Trivial, really:
They wanted to tell you. They were ready to answer questions and had the information immediately on hand. They knew exactly how many employees they’d had. You could have asked; they would have told you. If you wanted more specifics to ensure you had an accurate count, I suspect that a week would be plenty of time for them to pull up records.
You wouldn’t need to take their word for it; most companies keep records of past employees and have some form of evidence to back their claims. You would have needed to go to a source that had the info available, and such a source was there and begging to speak with you.
I think it’s worth pointing to the specifics of each, because I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to gloss as “all of whom disagreed.”
I would delay publication.
This goes without saying.
I think it depends a lot on the group’s ability to provide evidence the investigators’ claims are wrong. In a situation like that I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence fairly quickly. You don’t want a libel suit but you also don’t want to let them indefinitely delay the publication of an article that will be damaging to them. It is a tricky situation!
“I would really press them on the specifics. They should be able to provide evidence very quickly. You don’t want a libel suit...”
They were very clearly offering to provide specific, hard evidence in a short time span, not asking for an indefinite delay. Some of that specific, hard evidence came in two hours before publication. Ben and Oliver did not press them on the specifics, they said they had a hard deadline and that was that.
This feels like a good example of why you shouldn’t over-promise to your sources—you want a cordial relationship with them but you need boundaries too. I can definitely see a situation where you would agree to give a source a heads up once you’d decided to publish — if it was a story where they’d recounted a violent incident or sexual assault, or if they needed notice to stay somewhere else or watch out for hacking attempts. But I would be very wary of agreeing in advance when I would publish an investigation—it isn’t done until it’s done.
In the end the story is going out under your name, and you will face the legal and ethical consequences, so you can’t publish until you’re satisfied. If the sources are desperate to make the information public, they can make a statement on social media. Working with a journalist involves a trade-off: in exchange for total control, you get greater credibility, plausible deniability and institutional legal protection. If I wasn’t happy with a story against a ticking clock, I wouldn’t be pressured into publication. That’s a huge risk of libelling the subjects of the piece and trashing your professional reputation.
On the request for more time for right to reply, that’s a judgement call—is this a fair period for the allegations involved, or time wasting? It’s not unknown for journalists to put in a right to reply on serious allegations, and the subject ask for more time, and then try to get ahead of the story by breaking it themselves (by denying it).
I’ve bolded the parts that present the most emphatic disagreement. A lot of the problems around the deadline were created by promising sources a hard deadline, something that she would not do. As a result of that promised hard deadline, they got into a situation where, with two hours to go, they looked at new information they received that complicated things and said “Sorry, story goes up as-is.” This seems clearly incompatible with the advice in those two paragraphs. The third paragraph mentions a judgment call, and there of course my own judgment call would be different (a week to gather evidence against the results of six months of investigation seems like the minimum for a fair period, certainly not time-wasting) but I recognize there’s a bit more flex there. The rest, though? “Disagreed” is the most straightforward read by far.
If a company has 21 employees and someone says it has 7, I’m not going to call the situation ambiguous just because someone disagrees with me. That is the sense I am using the term. The lines contained clear errors that I would expect a serious outlet to correct; I think people who disagree they are errors do so without good reason.
I’m not retreating to “I personally feel that way.” Those lines are wrong either for strict factual inaccuracies or for framing and tones that leads people to a substantially false picture and should be corrected. There is no bailey here—I meant what I said.
Speaking of unpleasant framing, I’m wholly unimpressed by the framing of me “trying to turn [your] objection into an object-level debate.” It matters whether, on the object level, things I said were unambiguous are.
It’s inevitable that some people are going to dislike the way I chose to frame my reply, but I did so carefully and with an eye towards serious, charitable, direct engagement with the topic on its merits. “Epistemically toxic” is strong phrasing that I wholly reject.
This post feels structurally misleading to me. You spend most of it diving into reasonably common but useful technical critiques before, in the final paragraphs, shifting abruptly to what appears to be the substance of your dispute: that you would prefer to exclude some people from events connected to it. In contrast to your data-driven, numbers-heavy analysis of its predictive power, you assert in brief and without evidence that “neoliberal ideology” and the participation of people you consider bigots has meaningfully reduced its accuracy as a market.
I think both topics in isolation are worth discussing, and perhaps there would be a productive way to combine the technical and cultural critique, but a response to your first fifteen paragraphs looks dramatically different to a response to your last two paragraphs, such that combining the two clouds more than it elucidates.