David Mathers's Quick takes

I'd just like to clarify that my blogroll should not be taken as a list of "worthy figure[s] who [are] friend[s] of EA"!  They're just blogs I find often interesting and worth reading. No broader moral endorsement implied!

fwiw, I found TracingWoodgrains' thoughts here fairly compelling.

ETA, specifically:

I have little patience with polite society, its inconsistencies in which views are and are not acceptable, and its games of tug-of-war with the Overton Window. My own standards are strict and idiosyncratic. If I held everyone to them, I'd live in a lonely world, one that would exclude many my own circles approve of. And if you wonder whether I approve of something, I'm always happy to chat.

Your comment seems a bit light on citations, and didn't match my impression of Hanania after spending 10s of hours reading his stuff. I've certainly never seen him advocate for an authoritarian government as a means of enforcing a "natural" racial hierarchy. This claim stood out to me:

Hannania called for trying to get rid of all non-white immigrants in the US

Hanania wrote this post in 2023. It's the first hit on his substack search for "immigration". This apparent lack of fact-checking makes me doubt the veracity of your other claims.

It seems like this is your only specific citation:

a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people

This appears to be a falsified quote. [CORRECTION: The quote appears here on Hanania's Twitter. Thanks David. I'm leaving the rest of my comment as originally written, since I think it provides some valuable context.] Search for "we need more" on Wikipedia's second citation. The actual quote is as follows:

...actually solving our crime problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government. Whether you want to focus on guns or the criminals themselves, it would involve heavily policing, surveilling, and incarcerating more black people. If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take.

This paragraph, from the same post, is useful context:

As I argue in my articles on El Salvador, any polity that has a high enough murder rate needs to make solving crime its number one priority. This was true for that nation before Bukele came along, as it is for major American cities today. It’s not a big mystery how to do this, it’s just politically difficult, because literally everything that works is considered racist. You need more cops, more prisons, and more use of DNA databases and facial recognition technology. You can’t have concerns about disparate impact in a world where crime is so overwhelmingly committed by one group.

Hanania has stated elsewhere that he's a fan of Bukele and his policies. Hanania's position appears to be that since St Louis has a murder rate comparable to El Salvador when Bukele took power, St Louis could benefit from Bukele-style policies, but that would require stuff that liberals don't like. Wikipedia makes it sound like antipathy towards Black people is his explicit motive, but that's not how I understood him. It might be his implicit motive, but that could be true for anyone -- maybe liberals prefer soft-on-crime policies because high crime keeps Black people in poverty. Who knows.

If you want to convince me that Hanania is a current-Nazi, let's discuss the single worst thing he said recently under his real name, and we can see if the specific quote holds up to scrutiny in context.

[EDIT: To be clear, if you want to exclude Hanania because you think he is kinda sketchy, or was a bad person in the past, or is too willing to make un-PC factual claims, that may be a reasonable position. I'm arguing against excluding him on the basis that he's a Nazi, because I don't think that is currently true. His 2023 post advocating for racially diverse immigration to the US seems like a very straightforward disproof. If you manage to get Wikipedia to cite it, I'll be impressed, by the way.]

I have very mixed views on Richard Hannania.

On one hand, some of his past views were pretty terrible (even though I believe that you've exaggerated the extent of these views).

On the other hand, he is also one of the best critics of conservatives. Take for example, this article where he tells conservatives to stop being idiots who believe random conspiracy theories and another where he tells them to stop scamming everyone. These are amazing, brilliant articles with great chutzpah. As someone quite far to the right, he's able to make these points far more credibly than a moderate or liberal ever could.

So I guess I feel he's kind of a necessary voice, at least at this particular point in time when there are few alternatives.

I think it's pretty unreasonable to call him a Nazi--he'd hate Nazis, because he loves Jews and generally dislikes dumb conservatives.

I agree that he seems pretty racist.

I'd like to give some context for why I disagree.

Yes, Richard Hanania is pretty racist. His views have historically been quite repugnant, and he's admitted that "I truly sucked back then". However, I think EA causes are more important than political differences. It's valuable when Hanania exposes the moral atrocity of factory farming and defends EA to his right-wing audience. If we're being scope-sensitive, I think we have a lot more in common with Hanania on the most important questions than we do on political issues.

I also think Hanania has excellent takes on most issues, and that's because he's the most intellectually honest blogger I've encountered. I think Hanania likes EA because he's willing to admit that he's imperfect, unlike EA's critics who would rather feel good about themselves than actually help others.

More broadly, I think we could be doing more to attract people who don't hold typical Bay Area beliefs. Just 3% of EAs identify as right wing. I think there are several reasons why, all else equal, it would be better to have more political diversity:

• In this era of political polarization, It would be a travesty for EA issues to become partisan.
• All else equal, political diversity is good for community epistemics. In that regard, it should be encouraged for much the same reason that cultural and racial diversity are encouraged.
• If we want EA to be a global social movement, we need to show that one can be EA even if they hold beliefs on other issues we find repugnant. I live in Panama for my job. When I arrived here, I had a culture shock from how backwards many people's views are on racism and sexism. If we can't be friends with the person next door with bad views, how are we going to make allies globally?

When someone makes the accusation that transhumanism or effective altruism or longtermism or worries about low birth rates is a form of thinly veiled covert racism, I generally think they don’t really understand the topic and are tilting at windmills.

But then I see people who are indeed super racist talking about these topics and I can’t really say the critics are fully wrong. Particularly if communities like the EA Forum or the broader online EA community don’t vigorously repudiate the racism.

I don't think it makes any sense to punish people for past political or moral views they have sincerely recanted. There is some sense in which it shows bad judgement but ideology is a different domain from most. I am honestly quite invested in something like 'moral progress'. Its a bit of a naive position to have to defend philosophically but I think most altruists are too. At least if they are being honest with themselves. Lots of people are empirically quite racist. Very few people grew up with what I would consider to be great values. If someone sincerely changes their ways Im happy to call them brother or sister. Have a party. Slaughter the uhhhhh fattest pumpkin and make vegan pumpkin pie. 

However mr Hanania is stil quite racist. He may or may not still be more of a Nazi than he lets on but even his professed views are quite bad. Im not sure what the policy should be on cooperating with people with opposing value sets. Or on Hanania himself. I just wanted to say something in support of being truly welcoming to anyone who real deal rejects their past harmful ideology. 

I have been extremely unimpressed with Richard Hanania and I don't understand why people find his writing interesting. But I think that the modern idea that it's good policy to "shun" people who express wrong (or heartless, or whatever) views is totally wrong, and is especially inappropriate for EA in practice, the impact of which has largely been due to unusual people with unusual views.

Whether someone speaks at Manifest (or is on a blogroll, or whatever) should be about whether they are going to give an interesting talk to Manifest, not because of their general moral character. Especially not because of the moral character of their beliefs, rather than their actions. And really especially not because of the moral character of things they used to believe.

Given his past behavior, I think it's more likely than not that you're right about him. Even someone more skeptical should acknowledge that the views he expressed in the past and the views he now expresses likely stem from the same malevolent attitudes.

But about far-left politics being 'not racist', I think it's fair to say that far-left politics discriminates in favor or against individuals on the basis of race. It's usually not the kind of malevolent racial discrimination of the far-right - which absolutely needs to be condemned and eliminated by society. The far-left appear primarily motivated by benevolence towards racial groups perceived to be disadvantaged or are in fact disadvantaged, but it is still racially discriminatory (and it sometimes turns into the hateful type of discrimination). If we want to treat individuals on their own merits, and not on the basis of race, that sort of discrimination must also be condemned.

(I haven't read the full comment here and don't want to express opinions about all its claims. But for people who saw my comments on the other post, I want to state for the record that based on what I've seen of Richard Hanania's writing online, I think Manifest next year would be better without him. It's not my choice, but if I organised it, I wouldn't invite him. I don't think of him as a "friend of EA".)

This is such a common-sense take, that it worries me it needs writing. I assume this is happening over on twitter (where I don't have an account)? The average non-EA would consider this take to be extremely obvious and is partly why I think we should be considered about the composition of the movement in general.

Given the Guardian piece, inviting Hannania to Manifest seems like an unforced error on the part of Manifold and possibly Lightcone. This does not change because the article was a hitpiece with many inaccuracies. I might have more to say later.

To clarify, I think when you say "sterilization of everyone under 90" you mean that he favored the "forcible sterilization of everyone with an IQ below 90" (quoting Wikipedia here)?

"Fishing," said the old man "is at least as complicated as any other industry". 

I was sitting in a meeting of representatives of the other end of the fishing industry: fleets of North Sea trawlers turning over >£1million each per year, fishing in probably the world's most studied at-risk fishing ecosystem. They were fuming because in the view of the scientists studying North Sea fish, cod stocks had reached dangerously low levels and their quotas needed reducing, but in the view of the fishermen actually catching the fish, cod stocks off the east coast of England were at such high levels they hit their month's cod quota in a day whilst actively trying to avoid catching cod. (I have no reason to believe that either view was uninformed or deceptive). "What they're probably not factoring in," he closed on, "is that cod populations in different regions are cyclical"

The point of that waffly anecdote is that factoring in the effects of mosquito nets on local fish ecosystems would actually be really hard, because an RCT in one area over one year really isn't going to tell you much about the ecosystems in other areas, or in other years. Even more so in isolated African watercourses. (I think we can largely rule out the hypothesis that amateurs with free 2x2m malaria nets instead of proper nets and boats are depleting the seas more than foreign factory ships with nets hundreds of metres long...)

Like you, I don't find the idea that ~80% of distributed nets are appropriately used (at least for the first year) to have settled the debate, but quite a few things have to be the case for AMF's distribution programs to be the major factor in ecosystem harm caused by overfishing:

• the level of fishing with relatively small mosquito nets is sufficient to destroy fish stocks in the immediate area 
• other areas are unable to replenish the fish stocks depleted in the local area
• in the absence of a continuing supply of free mosquito nets, people wouldn't nevertheless use mosquito nets - which are also available for sale at a relatively low cost - for fishing
• the most likely alternatives to mosquito nets for local fishermen - potentially including other fabrics which also don't allow smaller fish to pass through - don't have the same impact on the ecosystem

for the program to be net negative for humans, you've also got to assume

• avoidable future falls in fishing stocks actually kill people. Or at least that the net economic loss from them is so great it outweighs the lives saved and malaria cases averted (and short term positive impact on availability of nutritious fish!). For the overall programme to be net negative we're looking at ~24k deaths per year...

Plus of course many of the nets are distributed in regions where fishing wasn't viable in the first place...

there have been a few "EA" responses to this issue but TBF they can be a bit hard to find

https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/

As an aside, I'm pretty underwhelmed by concerns about using LLINs as fishing nets. These concerns are very media-worthy, but I'm more worried about things like "People just never bother to hang up their LLIN," which I'd guess is a more common issue. The LLIN usage data we use would (if accurate) account for both.

https://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/05/putting-the-problem-of-bed-nets-used-for-fishing-in-perspective/

Besides the harm caused by some people contracting malaria because they don’t sleep under their nets, which we already account for in our cost-effectiveness analysis, the article warns that fishing with insecticide treated nets may deplete fish stocks. In making this case, the article cites only one study, which reports that about 90% of households in villages along Lake Tanganyika used bed nets to fish. It doesn’t cite any studies examining the connection between bed nets and depleted fish stocks more directly. The article states that “Recent hydroacoustic surveys show that Zambia’s fish populations are dwindling” and “recent surveys show that Madagascar’s industrial shrimp catch plummeted to 3,143 tons in 2010 from 8,652 tons in 2002,” but declines in fish populations and shrimp catch may have causes other than mosquito net-fishing.

1. you do bring up an interesting point that this should be factored into where nets are distributed.
2. (this is a very draft-stage idea) maybe if the nets weren't that water-proof, this issue would be solved? (cons: flooding, rain, potential pollution if, in the water, it dissipates, and less durability)
3. Maybe mention this to someone at givewell? idk tho

Some (or all?) Lightspeed grants are part of SFF: https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2023-h2-recommendations

Thanks for doing that and I look forward to hopefully publishing your findings. It would be valuable at least to me for the doc to show clearly, if you have time for that, if there might be biases in funding - it might be as important what is not funded as what is funded. For example, if some collection of smaller donors put 40% of funding towards considering slowing down AI, while a larger donor spends less than 2%, that might might be interesting at least as a pointer towards investigating such disparities in more detail (I noticed that Pause AI was a bit higher up in the donation election results, for example).

I didn't read all the comments, but Order's are obvious nonsense, of the "(a+b^n)/n = x, therefore God exists" tier. Eg take this comment:

But something like 5 OOMs seems very much in the realm of possibilities; again, that would just require another decade of trend algorithmic efficiencies (not even counting algorithmic gains from unhobbling).

Here he claims that 100,000x improvement is possible in LLM algorithmic efficiency, given that 10x was possible in a year. This seems unmoored from reality - algorithms cannot infinitely improve, you can derive a mathematical upper bound. You provably cannot get better than Ω(n log n) comparisons for sorting a randomly distributed list. Perhaps he thinks new mathematics or physics will also be discovered before 2027?

This is obviously invalid. The existence of a theoretical complexity upper bound (which incidentally Order doesn't have numbers of) doesn't mean we are anywhere near it, numerically. Those aren't even the same level of abstraction! Furthermore, we have clear theoretical proofs for how fast sorting can get, without AFAIK any such theoretical limits for learning. "algorithms cannot infinitely improve" is irrelevant here, it's the slightly more mathy way to say a deepity like "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet," without actual relevant semantic meaning^[1]. 

Numerical improvements happen all the time, sometimes by OOMs. No "new mathematics or physics" required.

Frankly, as a former active user of Metaculus, I feel pretty insulted by his comment. Does he really think no one on Metaculus took CS 101? 

1. ^{^}

   It's probably true that every apparently "exponential" curve become a sigmoid eventually, knowing this fact doesn't let you time the transition. You need actual object-level arguments and understanding, and even then it's very very hard (as people arguing against Moore's Law or for "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet" found out).

The Metaculus timeline is already highly unreasonable given the resolution criteria,^[1] and even these people think Aschenbrenner is unmoored from reality.

1. ^{^}

   Remind me to write this up soon