Why so many “racists” at Manifest?

(This comment is more of a general response to this post and others about Manifest than a response to what Austin has specifically said here)

I am a black person who attended Manifest, and I will say that I almost didn't attend because of Hanania, but decided to anyway because my interest in it outweighed my disagreements with his work.

I walked past a conversation he was having where he was asked why he thinks "minorities [black people] perform so poorly in so many domains," which did not feel great, but I also chatted to someone who runs a similar twitter as him and briefly told him my issues with it, which he was receptive to. I overall prefer cultures that give me space to have those sorts of conversations, but I do flinch a bit at the fact that my demographic is on the receiving end of so much of this. Many of the "edgy" people were super nice to me, I had fun conversations about other things with some of them, and their presence didn't take away from my overall experience. I felt fine after those interactions, but many people wouldn't. Perhaps they don’t “belong” at manifest, but that explanation isn’t very satisfying to me.

I think I'm much more tolerant of this sort of dynamic than many super reasonable people, including other black people. I'm personally fine engaging with critiques about how the Civil Rights Act has ushered in some not-so-great policy decisions over the last half century. “Woke Institutions” might just be civil rights law in action (according to Hanania) but the civil rights law is also, like, the reason why I have basic rights. I think it's completely reasonable for a black person to see arguments like that and think to themselves "what the actual fuck? The person who wrote that book is probably racist, and a conference hosting him might be racist too.” I think it is good to be curious about the world and interested in exploring unanswered questions so long as this is the true motivation. I take most people's self-reports about their intentions at face value. I'm happy that Hanania has made his self-described Journey Out of Extremism, but I don't fault anyone for being deeply skeptical about his intentions and whether or not he actually has made that journey given his current/past work.

I don't know what the right path forward is wrt allowing certain speakers at Manifest, but I want to encourage people not to dismiss that "wtf" feeling many people have towards him and other speakers as lacking some kind of intellectual rigor or curiosity about the world.

I'm a pro forecaster. I build forecasting tools. I use forecasting in a very relevant day job running an AI think tank. I would normally be very enthusiastic about Manifest. And I think Manifest would really want me there.

But I don't attend because of people there who have "edgy" opinions that might be "fun" for others but aren't fun for me. I don't want to come and help "balance out" someone who thinks that ~using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide~ (sorry this was a bad example as discussed in the comments so I'll stick with the pretty clear "has stated that black people are animals who need to be surveilled in mass to reduce crime"). I want to talk about forecasting.

It's your right to have your conference your way, and it's others right to attend and have fun. But I think Manifest seriously underrates how much they are losing out on here by being "edgy" and "fun", and I really don't want to be associated with it.

TracingWoodgrains @ 2024-06-18T19:53 (+166)

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.

Rachel Weinberg @ 2024-06-20T06:44 (+65)

I appreciate the main point you're making: that you’re someone we would value having at Manifest, and including people like Hanania causes you to not come.

However, I think there’s a miscommunication going on: as far as I can tell, not Austin, nor any of us organizers, nor any of the people defending Manifest’s choice of speakers nor those defending the speakers themselves, thinks that Manifest is “fun” because it’s “edgy”. I’ve noticed you tie these things together in a few comments in a way that feels to me like a straw man, like you think that we think it's "fun" to be "edgy", when we in fact do not.

The “fun” thing, which Austin is rightly proud of, refers to the festival part: Manifest hosts mostly serious talks during the day, but there is also e.g. a dance class, wrestling, karaoke, s’mores, etc. That all feels very wholesome and essential to what makes Manifest an exceptional event.

The “edgy” thing — attendees being purposefully inflammatory, using slurs, making others feel unwelcome, etc. — is totally unrelated. Not wholesome. Not a thing to be proud of. Not a thing we aspire to.

I think we could choose to kill the festival part of Manifest, and run a professional forecasting conference at some generic conference hotel, and still choose to invite Hanania. Alternatively, we could invite only the kindest, most welcoming, least offensive people we know, to come hang out and sing songs and chat about forecasting by the fire at Lighthaven. The former might be edgy and not fun, while the latter might be fun and not edgy. These are unrelated.

Austin @ 2024-06-18T16:12 (+20)

I want you to be able to come and just talk about forecasting too! I think people who wanted to do this (eg Ozzie Gooen by his self-report) were able to do this. Manifest is a big tent; if people want to just talk about forecasting, or AI, or board games, or polygenic screening, I want them to have that space.

It sounds like "serious forecasting conference" is a product that you and some others would be excited about. I hope that somebody runs one! But this wasn't ever the explicit goal of Manifest, which I'd describe as being closer to "fun forecasting-adjacent festival" -- I use "festival" instead of "conference" to denote that Manifest's aims are much more similar to a music festival or an anime convention, rather than an academic conference.

Peter Wildeford @ 2024-06-18T17:55 (+50)

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".

hnykda @ 2024-06-22T07:44 (+7)

I am glad you are interacting here and giving your honest opinions, thanks for that, I found some of your comments helpful, even though I don't agree or resonate with some of them.

However, note that I find this interpretation as a pretty uncharitable reading.

I see a big distinction between "I want to create a space where people can talk about different and not so controversial stuff" (I believe that "polygenic screening is not racism" is a useful and important distinction) vs. telling people "you are bad and unfun for not being fine with racist talking about racism and sexism next to you".

I have seen this for a second time from you when replying to Austin (e.g. here), and I think it's worse for the discussion discourse. Take what you want from it, of course.

Peter Wildeford @ 2024-06-22T09:04 (+10)

That’s fair - you’re right to make this distinction where I failed and I’m sorry. I think I have a good point but I got heated in describing it and strayed further from charitableness than I should. I regret that.

Vasco Grilo @ 2024-06-18T14:47 (+19)

Hi Peter,

I don't want to come and help "balance out" someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide.

Does anyone really think this, or are you just using hyperbole?

Nathan Young @ 2024-06-18T14:55 (+8)

Edit: This thread is now kind of confusing because Peter shared this article too, but more forcefully and on closer reading it is more thoughtful than the title suggests, leading to Peter's comment being downvoted. Most of the discussion is under peter's comment and my comment here is basically irrelevant.

This feels like an unfairly harsh comeback but:

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-do-i-hate-pronouns-more-than 

(If I recall correctly, @Austin said Hanania had changed his opinion slightly on trans people since talking to some at manifest last year - manifest probably has a large trans overrepresentation - and this is good, I want a way back for Hanania. LIkewise I have seen less overt racism from him in the last year, but I'm not yet at the state where I want him as a lauded speaker. He could at least write an article saying he's changed his mind on this and the racist tweet about Jordan Neely)

Edit: While this is what Peter was referring to, on closer reading, I think it's kind of inaccurate to say that Hanania is really endorsing his title. Therefore my original comment was not the level of accuracy I aspire to. Sorry.

Ebenezer Dukakis @ 2024-06-19T05:36 (+6)

has stated that black people are animals who need to be surveilled in mass to reduce crime

What's your source for that? Is the original quote the same as the one I wrote about in this comment?

Peter Wildeford @ 2024-06-19T05:39 (+11)

here and here.

TheAthenians @ 2024-06-19T12:39 (+13)

I reached out to Hanania and this is what he said:

"“These people” as in criminals and those who are apologists for crimes. A coalition of bad people who together destroy cities. Yes, I know how it looks. The Penny arrest made me emotional, and so it was an unthinking tweet in the moment."

He also says it's quoted in the Blocked and Reported podcast episode, but it's behind a paywall and I can't for the life of me get Substack to accept my card, so I can't doublecheck. Would appreciate if anybody figured out how to do that and could verify. 

I think generally though it's easy to misunderstand people, and if people respond to clarify, you should believe what they say they meant to say, not your interpretation of what they said. 

Jeff Kaufman @ 2024-06-19T14:22 (+95)

While I don't follow Hanania or (the social media platform formerly known as) Twitter closely, it seems to me that this kind of ambiguity is strategic. He wants to expand what is acceptable to say publicly, and one way of doing this is to say things which can be read both in a currently-acceptable and a currently-unacceptable way. If challenged on any specific one you just give the acceptable interpretation and apologize for the misunderstanding, but this doesn't do much to diminish the window-pushing effect.

Peter Wildeford @ 2024-06-19T13:30 (+13)

It's pretty interesting that Hanania just happens to frequently make these kinds of accidents, right?

TheAthenians @ 2024-06-19T13:41 (+4)

I'm surprised. You just found out that one of the worst things you thought he said was wrong. 

Are you not going to update and maybe think that maybe he's not the villain you originally thought? 

I know you're usually quite good at updating based on new evidence. It's hard to convey over text, but I genuinely recommend taking a step back from this and reflecting on your views. 

I've seen in one other thread as well you realizing that what you'd heard about Hanania was wrong, so that's twice in one day. Consider that maybe the other things were also not as bad as you originally thought. 

Nathan Young @ 2024-06-19T15:49 (+42)

I don't think you have remotely conclusively proved that this tweet wasn't racist.

Edit: I don't think TheAthenians should have to conclusively prove a tweet isn't racist. I think I more wished to say "I am pretty confident and you have done little to move that" since this discussion has started several other non-aligned people have reached out to say that they too didn't read the tweet as racist. I am now less confident. 

TheAthenians @ 2024-06-20T00:35 (+6)

The claim is that the tweet said he called all black people animals. 

It's a separate but overlapping claim about whether the tweet was racist. 

For the first claim, shouldn't it update you massively that he said he was talking about specific other people, that totally make sense in the context? 

What do you think is more likely: 

1. Person who consistently criticizes crime apologists, criticizes crime apologists
2. Person says he dislikes crime apologists, but secretly hates all black people and is lying

Assuming people don't mean what they say and that your interpretation of their internal state is more accurate than their explanation of it seems pretty suboptimal to me. 

I think our community would be better off if they updated based on misunderstandings, rather than insisting that people have hidden bad intentions and are liars about their own lived experience. 

Nathan Young @ 2024-06-20T01:10 (+8)

We have already followed the rest of this line of argument here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest?commentId=gj53zXi5k4SEdh3Rh

Again, I'm willing to change my mind, but it would actually involve some behaviour change on his part, which so far I haven't seen.

TheAthenians @ 2024-06-19T13:33 (+1)

Neither were accidents? It was just people misinterpreting what he was saying or interpreting things uncharitably. 

People interpret people uncharitably all the time on the internet, especially if you ever mention race. 

Nathan Young @ 2024-06-19T15:47 (+12)

Can you ask him to reply to his tweet with that clarification? I don't think that is the common sense understanding of the tweet, which is very racist. Until he publicly clarifies, I'm pretty happy to continue my common sense understanding of that tweet.

TheAthenians @ 2024-06-20T00:47 (+3)

He publicly clarified on the Blocked and Reported podcast.

I got his permission to publicly share the quote I shared with you.

He's already been asked a million times to clarify on Twitter, so I doubt he'll listen to me. 

Nathan Young @ 2024-06-20T01:08 (+8)

Yeah but why not. The least he could do is delete it. 

If he is only doing cheap actions and not costly ones.. maybe he in fact does mean the thing it looks like he means. 

Or maybe he really likes annoying people. But I don't like annoying edgy "maybe I'm being racist maybe not" either. 

Edit: I do get why he doesn't delete things in general. I feel that way too. But if I said anything that unclear I'd delete it.

TheAthenians @ 2024-06-20T01:38 (+11)

I don't know why he didn't delete it. I don't think it's particularly important to his main causes and points. If I were him, I'd totally delete it. 

My guess is that he feels pretty constantly attacked and he probably has a set of principles/rules he follows for when to delete stuff, and it's not "delete it if a lot of people are mad at me online", since people on the left and the right are often quite mad at him online. 

A meta- norm I'd like commentators^[1] to have is to Be Kind, When Possible. Some subpoints that might be helpful for enacting what I believe to be the relevant norms:

• Try to understand/genuinely grapple with the awareness that you are talking to/about actual humans on the other side, not convenient abstractions/ideological punching bags. 
  • For example, most saliently to me, the Manifest organizers aren't an amorphous blob of bureaucratic institutions. 
    • They are ~3 specific people, all of whom are fairly young, new to organizing large events, and under a lot of stress as it is.
    • Rachel in particular played a (the?) central role in organizing, despite being 7(?) months pregnant. Organizing a new, major multiday event under such conditions is stressful enough as it is, and I'm sure the Manifest team in general, and Rachel in particular, was hoping they can relax a bit at the end. 
    • It seems bad enough that a hit piece in the Guardian is written about them, but it's worse when "their" community wants to pile on, etc. 
  • I'm not saying that you shouldn't criticize people. Criticism can be extremely valuable! But there are constructive, human, ways to criticize, and then there are...other ways.
• Try to make your critiques as minimally personal as possible. Engage with arguments, don't attack individual people if at all possible. 
  • For example, I really appreciate Isa's comments. Judging by upvotes and karma, many other people did as well. 
  • It's reasonable if you disagree with her comments. But you can engage with them on the merits, rather than making comments personal, as some of the replies seem to.
  • Some of the replies implied that Isa said things they did not say. Some of the other replies implied that Isa's critiques are borne out of projection or unnecessarily taking things personally
    • On the object-level, I read her comments and I think that reading is just wrong. On the meta-level, even if that reading is correct, this is the type of thing that you should handle delicately, not harshly try to package it in an attack to make it harder to argue against you.  
• Relatedly, try to have decent theory of mind. 
  • People you argue with likely have different beliefs, values, and preferences from you. They are also likely to have different beliefs, values, or preferences than what a caricature of them will have, especially caricatures of the tier that you see in political cartoons, or on Twitter.
  • If you find yourself arguing with implausibly stereotyped caricatures, rather than real people, you should a) consider trying to flesh out enough details about the people you're arguing with to be at all plausible and/or b) take a step back and rethink your life choices.
  • I know this is difficult for some people, but you should at least try.
• Try not to be ideologically captured, or at least notice when you are and don't take yourself too seriously. 
  • One of my greater failures as a internet commentator/dispassionate observer is during the whole SSC/NYT thing, where I failed to notice myself becoming increasingly tribal/using arguments as soldiers, etc. 
    • The level of outrage was made worse by just how petty the underlying disputes were.
    • I do not think I thought or acted honorably according to my own values, and I'd prefer to minimize such tribalism going forwards
  • If you notice yourself in the grips of white-hot, rage, consider logging off and then do something take a shower, watch Netflix, go back to work, touch grass, crochet, or something else that's not as corrosive to either your own soul or that of the community.
  • One dynamic I haven't seen other people mention so far is the prevalence of what my friend calls "Rationality Justice Warriors," people who (at least online) seem to champion a fairly uncompromising and aggressive stance on defending and evoking the norms and cultures of the rationality community whenever it appears to be under attack.
    • This comes across as fairly childish and frankly irrational to me, and I suspect most people acting under such attitudes will not reflectively endorse them.
    • Of course their opponents hardly do better.  
• Model the effects of your sentences on other people. 
  • I'm worried that many comments will predictably push away valuable contributors to the community, or be very costly in other ways (eg wasted time/emotions).  
  • If you expect your sentences to predictably cause more heat than light, consider rephrasing what you said. Or perhaps, again, consider logging off. 
  • This is not to say you can't ever offer harsh criticism, or you need to always be nice. Being kind is not the same as being nice, and sometimes even true kindness have to be sacrificed for higher goals. 
    • But you should be careful about what trades you make, and maybe don't sell out your kindness for too cheap a price (like the short-lived approval of your not-very-kind peers, or the brief euphoria of righteous rage) 
  • It might be the case that what "needs to be said" can't be said nicely, or rephrasing things in a diplomatic way takes more skill with the language than you have, or more time than you can afford. Under those circumstances, it is usually (not always) better to leave such criticisms than to leave them unsaid.
  • But you ought to be consciously making those tradeoffs, not falling into them blindly.  
  • Effects include epistemic effects. If you say technically true things that makes people dumber, or worse, obviously wrong and/or illogical arguments in pursuit of a "higher" purpose, you are at least a little bit responsible for poisoning the discourse, and you should again ask yourself whether it's worth it. 
• Consider the virtue of silence^[2]
  • We are all busy people, and some of us have very high opportunity costs.
  • There are times to speak up, and times to stay silent, and let us all pray for the wisdom to know the difference.

1. ^{^}

   I'm far from flawless on these grounds, myself. But I try my best. Or at least, I mostly try to try. 

2. ^{^}

   This is a virtue I'm personally exceedingly bad at practicing.

And here’s the full list of the 57 speakers we featured on our website

That's not right: You listed these people as special guests — many of them didn't do a talk. Importantly, Hanania didn't. (According to the schedule.)

I just noticed this. And it makes me feel like "if someone rudely seeks out controversy, don't list them as a special guest" is such a big improvement over the status quo.

• Hanania was already not a speaker. (And Nathan Young suggests that last year, this was partly a conscious decision rather than him not just feeling like he wanted to give a talk.)
• If you just had open ticket sales and allowed Hanania to buy a ticket (or not) just like everyone else, then I think that would be a lot better in the eyes of most people who don't like that Hanania is listed as a special guest (including me). My guess would be that it's a common conference policy to "Have open ticket sales, and only refuse people if you think they might actively break-norms-and-harm-people during the events (not based on their views on twitter)". (Though I could be off-base here — I haven't actually read many conferences' policies.)
• I think people who are concerned about preserving the "open expression of ideas" should basically not care who gets to be listed as a "special guest". This has roughly no consequence on their ability to express their ideas. It's just a symbolic gesture of "we think this person is cool, and we think that you should choose whether to go to our event partly based on whether you also think this person is cool". It's just so reasonable to exclude someone from a list like that even just on the basis of "this person is rude and unnecessarily seeks out controversy and angering people". (Which I think basically everyone agrees is true for e.g. Hanania.)

I wasn't at Manifest, though I was at LessOnline beforehand. I strongly oppose attempts to police the attendee lists that conference organizers decide on. I think this type of policing makes it much harder to have a truth-seeking community. I've also updated over the last few years that having a truth-seeking community is more important than I previously thought - basically because the power dynamics around AI will become very complicated and messy, in a way that requires more skill to navigate successfully than the EA community has. Therefore our comparative advantage will need to be truth-seeking.

Why does enforcing deplatforming make truth-seeking so much harder? I think there are (at least) three important effects.

First is the one described in Scott's essay on Kolmogorov complicity. Selecting for people willing to always obey social taboos also selects hard against genuinely novel thinkers. But we don't need to take every idea a person has in board in order to get some value from them - we should rule thinkers in, not out.

Secondly, a point I made in this tweet: taboo topics tend to end up expanding, for structural reasons (you can easily appeal to taboos to win arguments). So over time it becomes more and more costly to quarantine specific topics.

Thirdly, it selects against people who are principled in defense of truth-seeking. My sense is that the people who organized Manifest are being very principled, and would also be willing to have left-wing people who have potentially-upsetting views. For example, there's been a lot of anti-semitism from prominent left-wing thinkers lately. If one of them wanted to attend Manifest, I think it would be reasonable for Jews to be upset. But I also expect that they'd be treated pretty similarly to Hanania (e.g. allowed to come and host sessions, name used in promotional materials). I'm curious what critics of Manifest think should be done in these cases.

To be clear, I'm not saying all events should take a stance like Manifest's. I'm just saying that I strongly support their right to do so.

> My plan was then to invite & highlight folks who could balance this out  

I think this is basically a misconception of how the social dynamics at play work. People aren't worried about the relative number of "racists", they're worried about the absolute number. The primary concern is not that they will exposed to racism at the conference itself, but rather that attending a conference together will be taken as a signal of support for the racists, saying that they are welcome in the community.

To pick Hanania as an example, since he has the most clearly documented history of racist statements, I have peers who would absolutely see me choosing to attend the same conference as him as a sign that I don't think he's too bad. And if I know that expectation and chose to go anyway, there would be additional merit to that reading.

To an extent, the more that Manifest is focused on discussions of prediction, the more leeway there is to invite controversial speakers. You can say make a case for ignoring views that are not relevant to the topic at hand. But as Saul says in his other post "although manifest is nominally about prediction markets, it's also about all the ideas that folks who like prediction markets are also into — betting, philosophy, mechanism design, writing, etc". In other words, it's about forming a broader intellectual community. And people are obviously going to be uncomfortable identifying with an intellectual community that includes people that they, and the broader world, consider to be racist.
 

The obvious reason to not put too much weight on positive survey results from attendees: the selection effect.

There are surely people (e.g. Peter Wildeford, as he mentioned) who would have contributed to and benefited from Manifest but don't attend because of past and present speaker choices. As others have mentioned, being maximally inclusive will end up excluding people who (justifiably!) don't want to share space with racists. By including people like Hanania, you're making an implicit vote that you'd rather have people with racist views than people who wouldn't attend because of those people. Not a trade I would make. 

I don't like to post a whole blog here, but I think probably it's better here than as a separate post which will possibly reignite the discussion. 

I think Bryan Caplan's comment on race and IQ is just a really good take on these issues. It acknowledges his views and then why people reasonably might not like him for those views and then an admonishment for bad apples to do better. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/iq_with_conscie.html 

Here it is in full. 

Bryan says:

I’m an IQ realist, all the way.  IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.”  A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success.  Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence. 

Yet I’ve got to admit: My fellow IQ realists are, on average, a scary bunch.  People who vocally defend the power of IQ are vastly more likely than normal people to advocate extreme human rights violations.  I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a One-Child Policy for people with low IQs.  I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a No-Child Policy for people with low IQs.  I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forced sterilization for people with low IQs.  I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forcible exile of people with low IQs – fellow citizens, not just immigrants.  I’ve heard IQ realists advocate murdering people with low IQs. 

When I say, “I’ve heard…” I’m not just talking about stuff I’ve read on the Internet.  I’m talking about what IQ realists have told me to my face.  In my experience, if a stranger brings up low IQ in Africa, there’s about a 50/50 chance he casually transitions to forced sterilization or mass murder of hundreds of millions of human beings as an intriguing response.  You can protest that they’re just trolling, but these folks seemed frighteningly sincere to me.

Don’t such policies flow logically from IQ realism?  No way.  If someone says, “I’m more intelligent than other people, so it’s acceptable for me to murder them,” the sensible response isn’t, “Intelligence is a myth.”  The sensible response is, “Are you mad?  That doesn’t justify murder.”  Advocating brutality in the name of your superior intellect is the mark of a super-villain, not a logician.

But don’t low-IQ people produce negative externalities – negative externalities that well-intentioned consequentialists will want to address?  I’m no consequentialist, but the consistent consequentialist position is: Not if the “solution” is worse than the problem!  And if your “solution” involves gross human rights violations, there’s every reason to think it is worse than the problem.  We should be especially wary of self-styled consequentialists who rush toward maximal brutality instead of patiently searching for cheap, humane ways to cope with the social costs of low IQ.

Why do IQ realists go so wrong?  Stigma is part of the story: If IQ realists face grave social disapproval, sensible IQ realists will tend to keep their views quiet.  Remaining spokesmen for IQ realism therefore lean crazy.  But stigma aside, IQ realists tend to be smart – and self-consciously smart people are often attracted to what I call high-IQ misanthropy.  If you marinate in your own misanthropy long enough, common decency fades away.

To repeat, I’m an IQ realist myself.  As a result, I’m tempted to deny ugly generalizations about my tribe.  But I won’t.  As I’ve said before:

If you really want to improve your group’s image, telling other groups
to stop stereotyping won’t work. The stereotype is based on the
underlying distribution of fact. It is far more realistic to turn your
complaining inward, and pressure the bad apples in your group to stop
pulling down the average.

So here’s what I say to every IQ realist who forgets common decency: You embarrass me.  You embarrass yourself.  You embarrass intelligence itself.  Teaching IQ with conscience probably won’t end the stigma against the science of intelligence.  But if we teach IQ without conscience, we deserve that stigma.

As a right-wing person sympathetic to many EA ideals, I'm surprised when I read these posts about how we need to exclude these people to make attendees comfortable. In fact, excluding these people - who I find incredibly smart, reasonable, and valuable - would make me (and I'm sure many of my friends on the Right) extremely uncomfortable. 

This is a bit self-indulgent of me, but I'm going to quote myself from the comments of the other post, because I think it's relevant here too:

One aspect of the framing here that annoyed me, both in the OP and in some of the comments: the problem is not controversial beliefs, it is exclusionary beliefs. Here are some controversial beliefs that I think would pose absolutely no problem at this event or any other:

• The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
• Virus gain-of-function research creates more risk than it prevents.
• Nuclear energy is a necessary part of the transition away from fossil fuels.

The problem with racism and transphobia is not that people disagree about them! The problem is that these beliefs, in their content on the object level, hurt people and exclude people from the discussion.

Let's avoid using "controversial" as a euphemism for "toxic and exclusionary". Let's celebrate the debate and discussion of all controversies that threaten no-one and exclude no-one. Suggesting any of that is at stake is totally unnecessary.

(To the extent you want to upvote / downvote this sentiment, maybe go do that on the original comment and not this one, unless that feels inappropriate somehow? idk, maybe I'm overthinking this; I removed my own upvote from this post)

Jonathan Paulson @ 2024-06-18T22:29 (+23)

It seems to me like the people with exclusionary beliefs here are the ones demanding that people be excluded, not the racists.

Ben Millwood @ 2024-06-19T10:01 (+5)

Can you expand a little more on "not the racists"? Why not both?

I'm happy to concede that thinking some people should be excluded is an exclusionary belief. If this comes down to excluding one set of people or the other, I feel much better about excluding people based on their beliefs and actions than I do about excluding people based on their genetics or other immutable characteristics.

Jonathan Paulson @ 2024-06-19T11:18 (+21)

I agree, but I don't think anyone involved here has advocated for excluding people from Manifest or ~anything else based on "genetics or other immutable characteristics"?

It just seems Orwellian to describe "person A doesn't want to associate with person B because of person B's beliefs" as "person B has exclusionary beliefs". Person A may or may not be justified, but obviously they are the one being exclusionary.

TheAthenians @ 2024-06-19T10:06 (+5)

Nobody's excluding people based on their genetics or immutable characteristics

I was assigned to female at birth and I happily go to conferences where there are people who have discussed the IQ differences between women and men.

People are deciding to not go to a place because somebody said something they disagreed about about their group.

That is people deciding not to attend an event based on beliefs, not genetics.

Jeroen Willems @ 2024-06-18T21:50 (+15)

Agreed. There is a major difference between thinking someone should be deplatformed just because they have opposing views (e.g., pause AI vs. accelerationist, libertarian vs. communist) and thinking someone should be deplatformed because they promote discriminatory views.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being controversial or outside of the Overton window. Many important ideas were once controversial, and many still are. But it is wrong to actively promote views that are racist, transphobic or sexist and to platform those who do. Not because these views are controversial, but because they go against creating a safe and welcoming environment for all. 

That being said, I am not familiar with most of the speakers being discussed here, so I can't say whether the organizers made the right call or not with them. And I understand not every case is clear cut. But with Richard Hanania they clearly made a bad call in my opinion. 

Austin @ 2024-06-18T16:30 (+4)

I agree that hurting people and excluding people is bad. As I wrote in the post, we take attendee safety seriously; if an attendee was acting to hurt another attendee, eg by making fun of a trans person for their choice of gender identity, we would not have sanctioned that at Manifest. We also try to make it clear that Manifest itself is inclusionary, open to anyone to attend, unlike conferences which aim for prestige such as EA Global.

I don't think that our attendees were toxic or exclusionary at Manifest; eg looking through the feedback form, we see few to no complaints of this sort. To the degree people use swear words as alluded to in the EA Forum post, it's the first I'm hearing about it; I imagine they're accurately representing what they encountered, but I think it may not paint a very accurate picture to those who were not in attendance.

Maniano @ 2024-06-18T18:41 (+36)

I think people who would be hurt would be quite hesitant to contact community health personnel at the event, since the event organisers were the ones who invited the controversial guests, and a hurt person could be afraid that whoever they'd contact might hold bigoted views themselves (I feel bad for having to say this out loud. Rest assured I am not accusing you or anyone else in the organiser team of anything here, Austin). 

Anyone who might hear such discourse will understandably be discouraged from seeking recourse.

I'm afraid that there really were quite a few toxic people present, and I have to say that I am a bit surprised to see you say otherwise.

I haven't seen the feedback form answers, and as far as I can recall didn't highlight these issues when I filled it, but I am also surprised that there were few to no complaints. Is this assessment based on a quick skim, or is it a result of more thorough processing?

For your next event, I encourage you to adopt an anonymous community health contact person contact form, where people can air out their grievances with much less anxiety.

Austin @ 2024-06-18T19:05 (+15)

Thanks -- I think an anonymous contact person might make sense. Would you have contacted such a person during the course of your attendance at Manifest?

Here's our feedback form categories for what people said was the best and worst about Manifest. People really liked the conversations, other people, and speakers that were there; and generally disliked the overcrowding, lack of bathrooms, and difficulty of meeting new folks.

For worst things, here's the full list of what people said was worst in the categories of "people", "edgy people", and "gender ratio/demographics", along with their NPS score ("would you recommend Manifest to a friend with similar interests?"). There were 15 responses in these categories, out of 234 feedback form respondants (at an event with ~600 total attendees)

A couple of these responses did make me feel like we missed the mark -- especially 11 and 14. On one hand, I want to keep in mind that with a 600 person event, it's near impossible to satisfy everyone, and trying to do so often invokes other tradeoffs; on the other, knowing that even a couple attendees felt this way makes me incredibly sad, and I want to provide a better experience in the future. I'm glad that both respondents also highlighted that other people we invited were also some of the best parts of Manifest to them.

Maniano @ 2024-06-18T20:39 (+19)

Thanks for taking the time to make a thorough reply.

Would you have contacted such a person during the course of your attendance at Manifest?

I probably would have. Some of the edgy takes were far beyond the pale, and I haven't really experienced such things in an in-person context. Having an anonymous form would increase a sense of trust if it is otherwise lacking.

I do suspect that you would be able to get a lot more data on this by asking about experiencing bigotry directly. I do get that it is probably too late for that now, and doing an extra survey for the attendees on this would be costly and would likely make this whole situation more stressful for everyone, but it is an option that can be taken.

It is very human to fail to mention something like this on a feedback form, especially if a typical experience with bigotry for this event is something like hanging out with an edgelord for an hour on day 2 and continuing with the rest of the conference perhaps slightly avoiding them (I'm only guessing this is what a typical experience would look like, since we don't really have too much data to go on with when it comes to people who experienced bigotry at the events).

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.

BTW I want to add -- to all those who champion Hanania because they think free speech should mean that anyone should be able to be platformed without criticism or condemnation, Hanania is no ally to those principles:

Here's Hanania:

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 [pre-Musk] 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.

(Source)

Great comment and overview of the event, which I very much enjoyed. 

Was anyone there who had ever uttered a previous phrase or sentence with which I might disgree, even firmly so? Almost certainly.  

I mean, Eliezer was there, and he has suggested that human infants might be susceptible to killing up to 18 months (https://x.com/antoniogm/status/1632162012229693440), which I regard as unbelievably monstrous. 

But even if someone said something monstrous, I'm still willing to hear them out, to attend a conference with them, and to attempt to persuade them otherwise (if it comes up). And who knows, maybe some belief of mine might turn out to seem monstrous to other people. I should hope they'd try to engage with me. 

Trying to cancel folks because they spoke at an event but another speaker said a bad thing 15 years ago---that's an absurd level of guilt by association. 

You say you had 57 speakers (or i guess more that weren't featured?). An attendee estimates that 8 speakers in lessonline and manifest had scientific racism controversies (with 2 more debatebly adjacent). Obviously this isn't an exact estimate, but it looks like something on the order of 5-10% of the speakers had scientific racism ties. 

What percentage of speakers were African American (or african anything else)? I did not see any of the 30 with pictures on the site, so i'd guess something on the order of 0-3%. 

Do you see a problem with a conference that has something like twice or three times as many scientific racist speakers as it does black people speakers?

These speakers are not a representative slice of society. Scientific racists are much, much more rare, and black people are much, much more common. If your goal is a free exchange of ideas, the ideas you are recieving here are vastly skewed in one direction. 

The actual effect of this type of speaker list is to push out anti-racists, and encourage more people sympathetic to scientific racism to join your community. I think this is bad!

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).

our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard

Fair, although it is also fair to characterize the controversial content as fairly substantial and not isolated. Looking at RSVPs on the Saturday schedule for content appears to be controversial:

• Collins and Collins had 57 RSVPs, second in the timeslot
• Anomaly had 60 RSVPs, second in the timeslot
• G. Smith had 86 RSVPs, first in the timeslot^[1]
• Khan had 76 RSVPs, second in the timeslot

[For purposes of this exercise, I did not code Robin Hanson or Scott Alexander as "controversial," in part because their sessions seemed to clearly focus on non-controversial content.]

In my view, a neutral observer who reviewed the schedule and RSVP numbers would likely conclude that eugenics was a major topic/focus of the conference relative to most topics (but behind forecasting/prediction). The platforming of people with problematic views on race should be considered in that context.

1. ^{^}

   I haven't found much information about Smith, so the coding of that session as controversial is tentative. I preliminarily coded that way because the post I found clearly advocated for practical eugenics, and so at least thematically fit in with the rest of the "eugenics / eugenics-adjacent track."

It's true that people with abhorrent views in one area might have interesting or valuable things to say in other areas - Richard Hanania, for example, has made insightful criticisms of the modern American right.

However, if you platform/include people with abhorrent views (e.g. "human biodiversity", the polite euphemism for the fundamentally racist view some racial groups have lower IQ than others - which is a view held by a number of Manifest speakers), you run into the following problem - that the bad chases out the good.

The net effect of inviting in people with abhorrent views is that it turns off most decent people, either because they morally object to associating with such abhorrent views, or because they just don't want the controversy. You end up with a community with an even smaller percentage of decent people and a higher proportion of bigots and cranks, which in turn turns off even more decent people, and so on and so forth. Scott Alexander himself says it best in his article on witches:

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

At the end of the day, platforming anyone whatsoever will leave you only with people rejected by polite society, and being open to all ideas will leave you with only the crank ones.

John Arnold made what I thought was a really good point the other day:

The lesson of late for cities and colleges is to be very deliberate during quiet times to define what behavior is not allowed and the repurcussions and stick to it. Once violations get selectively overlooked, it's almost impossible to reset standards while maintaining legitimacy.

https://x.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1782401129252372651

I think if Manifest really wants to succeed at being bipartisan, this is the path to take.

Instead of focusing on the crowd you will/won't affiliate with, or the cost/benefit ratio for individual participants, focus on what is and isn't acceptable behavior.

Document your rules in advance. Enforce them consistently. Change them slowly and deliberately. Try to avoid retroactive enforcement of new changes.

If you're really serious about this, put together a 3-person commission (one person on the left, one person on the right, one person in the middle) to scrutinize potential attendees against your written rules, and decide who's in compliance. When you announce speakers in advance of the event, you could invite anyone who wants to challenge a speaker to privately contact the commission with their concerns.

The goal is, if there's an uproar, you've already considered all the relevant info, you know your decision, and you can stick by it. You don't want to fall into the trap of being easily influenced by an uproar, because that incentivizes uproar, and partisans of all stripes have noticed. People will notice if you're easily swayed by uproar, or if you instinctively resist it, and either way it hurts the credibility of your judgement.

I would guess that putting up a fence like this is the best way to prevent a slide into partisanship of one form or another.

I made a small poll to try and figure out what consensus and disagreeing views are. You can add your own statements. 

I'll post it on both articles, please only vote once. Likewise please take the results with a pinch of salt because I can't gate to one vote per user.

Results here: https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-and-manifest/results

(If you want more people to answer this poll consider upvoting it)

Nathan Young @ 2024-06-20T01:17 (+4)

Early poll results (take with a pinch of salt) 

The two most cruxy seem to be 

Most consensus - there is a lot we agree on 

Most conflict - seems to be around whether manfold did enough and whether there should be a split been EA and rationalism 

Most confusion  - lots of confusion about the manifest financial situation, it's aims and what the events was actually like. 

Maniano @ 2024-06-20T06:09 (+7)

I feel like you should give it more time than just three hours before posting results. At least 24 hours sounds reasonable. The results for me already looked quite different from what you posted.

For example:

Nathan Young @ 2024-06-20T11:16 (+1)

Hmmm i intended to keep updating them

Peter Wildeford @ 2024-06-20T11:32 (+20)

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.

Jason @ 2024-06-20T11:45 (+3)

this poll will mainly be seen by only the most active and most engaged people [ . . .]

This is also a reason to exercise great caution in interpreting early results; I would expect this statement to be even more true as applied to the first 6-48ish hours than it it is at a week.

I do want to make the point that how tied to EA you are isn’t really your choice. The reason it’s really easy for media outlets to tie EA to scientific racism is that there’s a lot of interaction with scientific racists and nobody from the outside really cares if events like this explicitly market themselves as EA events or not. Strong free speech norms enabling scientific racism have always been a source of tension for this community, and you can’t just get around that by not calling yourselves EA.

Austin, I'm gathering there might be a significant and cruxy divergence in how you conceptualize Manifold's position in and influence on the EA community and how others in the community conceptualize this. Some of the core disagreements discussed here are relevant regardless, but it might help clarify the conversation if you describe your perspective on this.

As a relevant information source, some people might think that rationalism has a lot of discussion on race, but it just.. doesn't. Here are all the articles published in the human genetics tag (the closest I could find) in the last 18 months ish (everything with a tag more recent than 2 years). 

That's 11 articles, or about 1 every month and a half. 

As I understand it, some of the fear around these topics is that they will grow and come to dominate the discourse (eg the Nazi in a bar analogy) and tire minority members out and cause them to leave. Unless I have not searched well (plausible) these topics aren't regularly discussed on LessWrong. I am honestly surprised how rare these articles seem to be^[1].

1. ^{^}

   I searched for 5 minutes for some more relevant tag and even ended up tagging 1 extra post.

I broadly agree with this, though I perhaps think you slightly do court controversy a little for its own sake (as do I). When I think "does Austin ever court controversy" I don't think "Gosh, no never". (or even the title of this article seems at least slightly needlessly controversial - it could easily have been "Why we run manifest how we do")

I think your involvement with Manifest does give me comfort - if It were run by the median manifest attendee, I feel much less excited about going.

Can you think of a line at which you would think Manifest had gone too far in this regard and what you might do? eg, can you imagine some events after which you'd think you invited far too many controversial speakers or where the community had become, in your opinion, racist. Where do you draw that line and what might you do if this happened?

The fact that racists is in quotes in the title of this post (“Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”) when there have been multiple, first-hand accounts of people experiencing/overhearing racist exchanges strikes me as wrongly dismissive, since I can only interpret the quotation marks as implying that there weren’t very many racists. (Perhaps relevantly, I have never overheard this kind of exchange at any conference I have ever attended, so the fact that multiple people are reporting these exchanges makes Manifest a big outlier in this regard, in my view.)

Nothing in the post seems to refute that the reported exchanges occurred among attendees, just that the organizers didn’t go out of their way to invite controversial/racist speakers or incite these exchanges. In other words, I think everything in the post is compatible with there having been “so many” racists at Manifest, but the quotation marks in the title seem to imply otherwise.

This isn’t so much a stylistic critique as it is a substantive one, since I think the title implies that not a lot of racist stuff went down, which feels importantly different from acknowledging that it did, but, say, disputing that the organizers caused this or suggesting that Hanania’s presence justified it.

Meta level question:

How does Manifest have anything to do with Effective Altruism, and why is this on the EA forum?

Shouldn't this post be on some other other channel internal to Manifest and the forecasting community?

It get there are some people that went to Manifest that are also in the EA movement, but it seems like the communities are quite distinct and have different goals. From comments and conversations, it seems pretty clear to me that this Manifest community has a strong hostility towards even considering the reputational risks platforming racist speakers has on the rest of the EA movement. Part of being a big tent movement means caring about not stinking up the tent for everyone else.

Let's please firewall the Manifest community from EA?

I am grateful and impressed that you didn't cave to public pressure. 

I am also happy to see how much karma your post has gotten. 

Gives me hope for the community. 

One of the things that makes the rationalist and EA space special is its willingness to consider out-there ideas and to have a thriving market place of ideas. To judge ideas based on their merits, not based on who said them. To explore ideas widely and be willing to go to intellectual places that nobody has gone to before. 

AI safety would never have become a cause area if people who were considered "bad" or "kooky" were deplatformed. Heck, even just doing RCTs in global poverty wouldn't have become standard practice either. 

I am glad you're staying true to your values and your epistemics, and I hope more organizations follow your example. 

If there are willing volunteers, I would like to see an adversarial collaboration. Reading through the comments, it is tricky to dis-entangle what people mean, what are the fundamental disagreements, what are the facts of the matter, whether somebody (accidentally) mis-represented somebody else or even themselves, etc.

Some disagreements I see are:
- To what extent are the particular individuals 'bad people / racist / eugenicists'
- How much should the EA community influence the norms of and/or associate with the rationality/forecasting community
- Where the line is between absolute free speech vs moderation for different events (e.g. manifest, or eags, or ...).

Additionally, I would be interested in some kind of prediction markets to resolve some of the empirical questions. E.g. What percentage of EAs would say 'agree' or 'strongly agree' to the statement 'person X should not have been an invited speaker to manifest'.  Note I am new to prediction markets so am not comfortable setting up a question like this which does not have an objective resolution.

So several people n = 2.5 have reached out to me to say that they did not read Hanania's animals tweet as being about black people despite having the same context I do. I am now therefore less confident that most people read it in this way, (like 60% not 95%)

I think this probably warrants some kind of apology on expectation. So I am a bit sorry Richard on the chance that your tweet is not generally understood how I understand it. 

Seems like these threads have fewer women commenting than typical EA forum threads. I would be curious if similar populations are voting as usual.