Against the Guardian's hit piece on Manifest

Certainly the Guardian article had a lot of mistakes and issues, but I don't at all buy that there's nothing meaningfully different between someone like Hanania and most interesting thinkers, just because forcing consistency of philosophical views will inevitably lead to some upsetting conclusions somewhere. If I was to "corner someone in a dark alleyway" about population ethics until I caught them in a gotcha that implied they would prefer the world was destroyed, this updates me ~0 about the likelihood of this person actually going out and trying to destroy the world or causing harm to people. If I see someone consistently tweet and write in racist ways despite a lot of criticism and push-back, this shows me important things about what they value on reflection, and provides fairly strong evidence that this person will act in exclusionary and hateful ways. Trying to say that such racist comments are fine because of impossibility theorems showing everyone has to be committed to some weird views doesn't at all engage with the empirical track record of how people who write like Hanania tend to act.

I think posts like this exhibit the same thought terminating cancel culture behaviour that you are supposedly complaining about, in a way that is often inaccurate or uncharitable. 

For example, take the mention of scott alexander:

It reports, for example, that Scott Alexander attended the conference, and links to the dishonest New York Times smear piece criticizing Scott, as well as a similar hitpiece calling Robin Hanson creepy. 

Now, compare this to the actual text of the article:

Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).

Billed speakers from the broader tech world included the Substack co-founder Chris Best and Ben Mann, co-founder of AI startup Anthropic.

Now, I get the complaint about the treatment of robin hanson here, and I feel that "accused of misogyny" would be more appropriate (outside of an oped). But with regards to scott alexander, there was literally no judgement call included. 

When it comes to the NYT article, very few people outside this sphere know who he is. Linking to an article about him in one of the most well known newspapers in the world does not seem like a major crime! People linking to articles you don't like is not cancel culture. Or if it is, then I guess I'm pro cancel culture, because the word has lost all meaning. 

It feels like you want to retreat into a tiny, insular bubble where people can freely be horribly unpleasant to each other without receiving any criticism at all from the outside world. And I'm happy for those bubbles to exist, but I have no obligation to host your bubble or hide out there with you. 

I am surprised by some of the things written here, and this line especially stood out to me:

The people at Manifest weren’t even disproportionately right-wing

Based on the discussions had at the Yarvin afterparty (which was organised by Curtis Yarvin, not Manifest), I'd say there was a significant overrepresentation of very very right-wing people at Manifest (as in the right-wing tail of the political distribution was overrepresented. Not making a statement on more moderate right-wingers or left-wingers.). This sentence felt especially surprising since you were there at the afterparty.^[1] To be fair, there were also people there who weren't right-wing at all, and when I reached out to you to ask about this you said that you didn't find many to say right-wing things, and that only a small percentage of Manifest attendees were invited to the afterparty.

There is a chance that people around me said non-representatively many bigoted things, but I think it is more likely that your experience is explained by people avoiding more incendiary topics around an in-group famous, non-right wing blogger such as yourself. I am not very confident on this, though.

1. ^{^}

   I asked Omnizoid for his permission to mention this.

The article was obviously terrible, and I hope the listed mistakes get corrected, but I haven't seen a request for correction on the claim that CFAR/Lightcone has $5 million of FTX money and isn't giving it back. Is there any more information on whether this is true and, if so, what their reasoning is?

I agree the article was pretty bad and unfair, and I agree with most things you say about cancel culture.

But then you lose me when you imply that racism is no different than taking one of the inevitable counterintuitive conclusions in philosophy thought experiments. (I've previously had a lengthy discussion on this topic in this recent comment thread.)

If I were an organizer of a conference where I wanted having interesting and relevant ideas being discussed, I'd still want there to be a bar for attendees to avoid the problem Scott Alexander pointed out (someone else recently quoted this in this same context, so hat tip to them, but I forget the name of the person): 

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.

I'd be in favor of having the bar be significantly lower than many outrage-prone people are going to be comfortable with, but I don't think it's a great idea to have a bar that is basically "if you're interesting, you're good, no matter what else."

In any case, that's just how I would do it. There are merits to having groups with different bars.

(In the case of going for a very low one, I think it could make sense to think about the branding and whether it's a good idea to associate forecasting in particular with a low filter.)

Basically, what I'm trying to say is I'd like to be on your side here because I agree with many things you're saying and see where you're coming from, but you're making it impossible for me to side with you if you think there's no difference between biting inevitable bullets in common EA thought experiments vs "actually being racist" or "recently having made incredibly racist comments."

I don't think I'm using the adjective 'racist' here in a sense that is watered down or used in an inflationary sort of way; I think I'm trying to be pretty careful about when I use that word. FWIW, I also think that the terminology "scientific racism" that some people are using is muddling the waters here. There's a lot of racist pseudoscience going around, but it's not the case that you can say that every claim about group differences is definitely pseudoscience (it would be a strange coincidence if all groups of all kinds had no statistical differences in intelligence-associated genes). However, the relevant point is group differences don't matter (it wouldn't make a moral difference no matter how things shake out because policies should be about individuals and not groups) and that a lot of people who get very obsessed with these questions are actually racist, and the ones who aren't (like Scott Alexander, or Sam Harris when he interviewed Charles Murray on a podcast) take great care to distance themselves from actual racists in what they say about the topic and what conclusions they want others to draw from discussion of it. So, I think if someone were to call Scott Alexander and Sam Harris "scientifically racist," then that seems like it's watering down racism discourse because I don't think those people's views are morally objectionable, even though it is the case that many people's views in that cluster are morally objectionable.

is filled with bizarre factual errors, one of which was so egregious that it merited a connection.

Small nitpick; this is a typo or 'connection' is something I'm not familiar with in this context.