This is obvious in one way, but I think forgotten in a lot of the details about these arguments: People do not actually care very much about whether Manifest invited Hanania, they care about the broader trend.
And what I mean by that is specifically that the group that argues that people like Hanania should not be invited to events like Manifest are scared of things like:
- They care about whether minorities are being excluded and made unwelcome in EA spaces.
- They care about an identity they view as very important being connected to racists
- More broadly, they are ultimately scared about the world returning to the sort of racism that led to the Holocaust, to segregation, and they are scared that if they do not act now, to stop this they will be part of maintaining the current system of discrimination and racial injustice.
- They feel like they don't belong in a place where people like Hanania are accepted
I apologize if I did not characterize the fears correctly, I am part of the other group, and my model of what motivates the people I disagree with is almost always going to be worse than my model of what motivates me. I am scared of things like:
- Making a policy that people like Hanania should never be invited to speak is pushing society in a direction that leads to things like Maoist struggle sessions, McCarthyism (I think we are currently at the level of badness that McCarthyism represented), and at an actual extreme, the thought police from 1984.
- The norms cancel culture embraces functionally involve powerful groups being allowed to silence those they dislike. This is still the case no matter what the details of the arguments for the positions are.
- Assuming a priori that we know that a certain person's policy arguments or causal model is false leads us to have stupider opinions on average.
- I don't belong in a place where adults are not be allowed to read whichever arguments they are interested in about controversial topics, and then form their own opinions, even if those opinions disagree with social orthodoxy.
The biggest point I want to make is that none of these things are arguments against each other.
Cancel culture norms might be creating a tool for power, and make minorities more welcome.
This might push society to be more like a McCarthyist or Maoist place where people are punished for thinking about the wrong questions and having the wrong friends, and at the same time it might prevent backsliding on racial justice, and lead to improvements in equality between racial groups.
Perhaps McCarthy actually made the US meaningfully safer from communist takeover. Most of the arguments that McCarthy was terrible that I recall from university seemed to just take as a given that there was no real risk of a communist takeover, but even if the odds of that were low, making those odds even lower was worth doing things that had costs elsewhere (unless, of course, you think that a communist revolution would have been a good thing).
If we are facing a situation where the policy favored by side A leads to costs that side B is very conscious of, and vice versa, it is likely that if instead of arguing with each other, we attempted to build ideas that addressed each others core concerns, we might come up with ideas that let each side get more of what they want at a smaller cost to what the other side wants.
The second point I'd like to make, is that arguing passionately, with better and better thought experiments that try to trigger the intuitions underlying your position, while completely ignoring the things that actually led the people you are arguing with to the positions they hold, is unlikely to be productive.
Engage with their actual fears if you want to convince, even though it is very hard to think yourself into a mindset that takes [ridiculous thing your conversational opponent is worried about] seriously.
I think you didn't. My fear isn't, first and foremost, about some theoretical future backsliding, creating safe spaces, or protecting reputations (although given the TESCREAL discourse, I think these are issues). My fear is:
I am bolstered by the fact that Manifest is not Rationalism and Rationalism is not EA. But I am frustrated that articulating the above position is seen as even remotely in the realm of "pushing society in a direction that leads to things like... the thought police from 1984." This strikes me as uncharitable pearl-clutching, given that organizers have an easy, non-speech-infringing way of reducing the likelihood that their events elicit and incite racism: not listing Hanania, who wasn't even a speaker, as a special guest on their website, while still allowing him to attend if he so chooses.
I think if you had a person invited who is known at events to get drunk and go to to people and comment negatively about their least flattering physical feature (e.g. your pimples are gross) it would not be a worry if that person was not invited. This is not about politics but about inappropriate behaviour.
I believe this is not a valid analogy. If you uninvite someone from events for making rude comments about other attendees' appearances, that only applies to that one rude person, or to people who behave rudely. If you disinvite someone for holding political views you're uncomfortable with, that has a chilling effect on all uncommon political views, and is harmful to everyone's epistemics.
Yeah, to be clear, I think inappropriate interpersonal behavior can absolutely warrant banning people from attending events, and this whole situation has given me more respect for how CEA strikes this balance with respect to EAGs.
I was mainly responding to the point that "we might come up with ideas that let each side get more of what they want at a smaller cost to what the other side wants," by suggesting that, at a minimum, the organizers could've done things that would've involved ~no costs.
The inappropriate behavior here is being a person who holds particular political beliefs about the world and expresses them.
It is definitely also about politics.
Fair point. Where to draw the line between what is and isn't politics isn't clear cut or as Thomas Mann put it: "Everything is politics." Perhaps pimples is less political than comments that relate to e.g. religion or something else "structural". I guess where I feel like there is something in my comment is one then concludes something like "it is ok to offend someone as long as the offence ties into power structures". I guess this would theoretically mean then that it is ok for someone to comment on someone with lower income on e.g. their cheap clothing (or pick your physical proxy for class). That does not seem right so I still think I think that people acting offensively regarding race should be encouraged to change their behavior to be less offensive. And if there is a need to discuss something offensive (e.g. in nuclear weapons discussions discuss the horror that followed the bombing of Hiroshima, maybe make this clear to participants in advance so they can avoid the event/part of the event if that is a challenging topic for them).
So I think it is totally fine for a group to ban particular controversial topics during meetings. What I think causes the problems I am worried about is banning people who have known controversial opinions that are expressed elsewhere.
If a specific person is unwilling to refrain from talking about their favorite subject at the meeting, I am then fine with banning them for that specific behavior (so long as it is done with a reasonable process, involving warnings and requiring people expressing the opposite point of view to also not start the arguments)
I am a bit more unsure about this but I also thinks this cuts the other way - if someone at an event loudly went around advocating for forcefully taking (e.g. by nationalising their wealth in an unprecedented and somewhat aggressive way ) rich people's money to fund egalitarian project X, I think one could also argue that such people make others uncomfortable enough that their attendance is undesirable.
I’m probably pretty close to you but my fears are different:
We decide that anyone who the median EA thinks might be racist cannot been celebrated in any way by a related conference.
Topics of race and genetics are not merely rarely discussed and heavy taxed (as currently) but banned.
Like many other discussions, these very hard to discuss topics never get easier to discuss or come to consensus on. Other discussions include Owen cotton Barrett, bostrom, whether sexism in EA is abnormally bad, whether competence and representation trade off, leverage and CEA drama, icky statusy things within EA, whether Will and Nick made grave errors, why hasn’t there been an FTX investigation and if global health is actually a waste of money compared to other options.
Somewhere in this ball of topics is something that would be really important to discuss well. Or somehow learning to discuss it would give us needed competence around coordination.
We miss out on better decisionmaking because of this.
Like i’d be okay if we picked 3 things you couldn’t discuss. But then when we added a new one, we took one away. It’s that it feels like the list is growing that i dislike.
(merely because i can name a big cluster of costly topics doesn’t mean that i could cheaply write an article or that the forum would discuss them well if it came up)
A more general formulation of this is of '1 way vs 2-way doors' sometimes reference by Jeff Bezos. Here from some article (not by Bezos):
To me a big part of the disagreement is which parts of this are 1-way or 2-way decisions.
I guess that to some, having racist speakers anywhere near EA feels like a 1-way decision. Once it starts, it won't unhappen and then there will just be racists around sometimes.
To me, the repeated action of banning topics, often without full agreements on the facts involved (we don't even agree on Hanania, let alone other speakers and attendees) is a 1-way decision. Once we start doing it, it becomes a tool that we can use that is hard to un-use. I want to be more cautious before we start being like "this person is unacceptable on grounds we don't all agree on".
Here then the question is how parties can both have these be 2 way doors. Perhaps we could agree to revisit the issue of racism in EA in a year and see where we think we are, with the power to renegotiate. If I were confident of that, I would be less worried about some more pushy moves now.
I strongly support local bans on particular topics, so long as they are done in a way that doesn't involve endorsing one side and then refusing to let people who disagree talk.
I am at least pretty relaxed on such bans as long as they are bounded. CEA can ban what they like from EAGs and i feel less bad than if EAs are attempting to ban things generally.
And I would be more relaxed on those things being banned if it were credible that they would be unbanned or that the amount of banned topics overall would be static.
This feels somewhat uncharitable.
Huh - this both feels like something I'm sympathetic to worrying about and matches what I've seen people say about similar issues around the internet. Why does it seem uncharitable to you?
I think given that his own example uses McCarthyism, while it might be incorrect he seems to at least not be attempting hyperbole - both examples end up in outcomes many people consider at least disasterous.
People can and should read whoever and whatever they want! But who a conference chooses to platform/invite reflects on the values of the conference organizers, and any funders and communities adjacent to that conference.
Ultimately, I think that almost all of us would agree that it would be bad for a group we're associated with to platform/invite open Nazis. I.e. almost no one is an absolutist on this issue. If you agree, then you're not in principle opposed to exlcuding people based on the content of their beliefs, so the question just becomes: where do you draw the line? (This is not a claim that anyone at Manifest actually qualifies as an open Nazi, more just a reductio to illustrate the point.)
Answering this question requires looking at the actual specifics: what views do people hold? Were those views legible to the event organizers? I fear that a lot of the discourse is getting bogged down in euphemism, abstraction, and appeals to "truth-seeking," when the debate is actually: what kind of people and worldviews do we give status to and what effects does that have on related communities.
If you think that EA adjacent orgs/venues should platform open Nazis, as long as they use similar jargon, then I simply disagree with you, but at least you're being consistent.
I appreciate the tone and my read of the aim of this - feels like it's trying to clarify what's at stake and cause more understanding and better discussion.
Could you help us understand some of your fears better? Although various positions have been expressed, the common core seems to be ~ we object to extending special-guest and/or speaker status to certain individuals at an EA-adjacent conference. I'm struggling to understand how that assertion strongly implies stuff like "pushing society in a direction that leads to" McCarthyism, embracing "cancel culture" norms more generally, or not "allow[ing adults] to read whichever arguments they are interested in about controversial topics . . . ." For example, I don't recall seeing anyone here say that Hanania et al. should get canceled by whoever is hosting their websites, that they should lose their jobs, etc. (although I don't recall every single comment).
To me, cancel culture is more "I find this offensive, and I desire and aim to shut down the person's ability to communicate that offensive message" while the response here has been more "I find this offense, and do not want it associated with me or my community. While this may have the incidental effect of making it somewhat harder for the speaker to convey his message or would-be listeners to hear it, that is not the aim of the objection)." I could see a few possible cruxes here: one could think there is no practical difference between these positions, or one could think that the objectors are actually in the first camp. Do either of these potential cruxes ring true to you?
So I certainly pattern match the things being said in this discussion as the things said by people who want to get Substack to remove Hanania, want people with his opinions who have a normal employer to lose their jobs, and then after they have lost their jobs, they want to have the financial system refuse to process payments to them by someone who wants to help them survive now that they've lost their job, since after all it is important to stop people from funneling money to Nazis.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think the crux is that I tend to think the objectors are actually in the first camp, and that they need to be fought on that basis. And so moving forward towards agreement would creating trust that the objectors actually aren't.
But I think there is also an important difference on the question of what it means to invite someone as a speaker -- ie does it mean that you are endorsing in some sense what they say, or are you just saying that they are someone that enough attendees will find interesting to make it worth giving them a speaking slot.
A culture in which we try to stop people from getting a chance to listen to people who they find interesting, because we dislike things they believe, seems to me to be the essence of the thing I think is bad. Giving someone an opportunity to speak is not endorsement in my head, and it is a very bad norm to treat it like it is.
This also, incidentally, is where the people running Manifest were coming from: They fundamentally don't see inviting Hanania as endorsing his most controversial views, and they certainly don't see it as endorsing the views he held in his twenties that he now loudly claims to reject.
While the deplatforming side seems to think that a culture where people who believe bad things are given platforms to speak just because the people deciding who will speak think they are interesting is terrible because it is implicitly endorsing the bad things they believe.
To give a different example, if I was running a major EA event, and I could get Emile Torres to speak at it, I definitely would, even though I think he is often arguing in bad faith, and even though I vehemently disagree with both much of his model of the world and the values he seems to espouse. I think enough people would find him interesting enough to be worth listening to, so it makes sense to 'extend him special-guest/or speaker status'.
I would be sad to see Emile Torres offered a speaking slot at an EA conference as this would reward bad faith criticism. I wouldn’t join a social pressure campaign to cancel him - sometimes people will make decisions I consider unwise and I’ll make decisions that they consider unwise - but I would caution someone considering doing this that they were making an unwise decision by inviting someone who often acts in bad faith and I would strongly recommend that they consider alternate names before resorting to Emile (I don’t think it would be hard to find equally interesting critics without the bad faith, his mind just immediately springs to mind due to availability bias).
I suppose I don't see listening to him as a reward to him, but something I do or don't do because it is good for me. The relevance of him saying things in bad faith is that it means you have to be more careful about trusting anything he says, and thus listening him is unusually likely to leave you with more inaccurate beliefs than you started with.
I suppose to explore the difference further, do you think it would be a bad idea to read something he wrote or to subscribe to his Twitter (which I do). Or is it specifically that you don't want to invite him to talk.
And in the case of invitation, is it because you are worried that people will get bad beliefs from listening to him, or primarily because you dislike that it would seem like a positive thing for him?
I think we should use talk invitations to nudge people towards acting in good faith.
I think that's going to make it significantly harder to make progress here. An assertion that people who have asserted X, and denied Y, actually believe Y implies that those people are misrepresenting their position for tactical advantage. Few people who actually believe X and not Y are going to be receptive to an expectation that they move toward W to prove they don't believe Y. I get that there are in fact individuals in society on these issues who actually cloak their belief in Y by asserting only X, but it doesn't follow that the particular X-believers in front of you are doing that.
This goes for both sides, by the way -- I believe there are individuals in society who defend platforming speech I find to be vile because they like the contents of the speech rather than out of free-speech principles as they claim. There may (or may not) be such individuals on the Forum. But: it wouldn't be fair or helpful for me to assume that any particular person was attempting to deceive me about the reasons for their support of Manifund's decision.
Moreover, the proffered reasons for the various positions either have merit, or they lack merit, irrespective of the subjective motivations of the people offering those positions.
Yeah, that's a critical crux here. I think there are at least a couple of axes going on here:
Finally, for most viewpoints, some degree of object-level assessment of the speech is going to be necessary. For a silly example, platforming speakers who believe the world is flat and carried around on a turtle isn't consistent with a platform's professed goal of hosting important conversations that matter. Neither is platforming speakers who make speeches about how terrible an entity the New England Patriots are (no matter how true this is!)
For what it's worth, I was one of the most anti-Hanania/Manifest people in the original big thread, and I don't think I'm all that "cancel-y" overall. I'm opposed to people being fired from universities for edgy right-wing opinions on empirical matters, and I'm definitely opposed to them being cut off from all jobs. I do think people should not hire open neo-Nazis (or for that matter left-wingers who believe in genuinely deranged antisemitic conspiracy theories) for normal jobs, but I don't think any of the Manifest speakers fell in that category. But I see a difference between the role of universities-find out the truth no matter what by permitting very broad debate-and the role of a group like EA that has a particular viewpoint and no obligation to invite in people who disagree with it.
For what it's worth, calling for deplatforming people based on thinking they're racist based on what they wrote from when they were younger and uncharitable interpretations of a couple of tweets feels pretty "cancel-y" to me.
FYI: Emile Torres is using they/them pronouns. I think you should edit your comment to use their preferred pronouns.
I feel sad that you're getting downvoted. Whether or not your position is correct (I personally disagree more than I agree), it seems to me that this is content which will be helpful for moving people towards mutual understanding of where the disagreements are.
I think it's fine to have a narrower idea of what views should be platformed within your own community than in society at large. Different communities have different purposes, and different purposes will point to different sets of ideas and speakers to be platformed. That is as it should be. I want to suggest two other possible cruxes which do seem somewhat cruxy to me:
1. deplatforming these particular speakers is not what the ideals of EA dictate. The core thing that EA is about is creating an intellectually open space to explore strange fringe ideas about how to make the world better, and these speakers fit that purpose.
2. Manifest is not an EA event. That is part of what attracted me to it. It belongs to the forecasting community, which is a distinct thing, even if the membership is overlapping. So when EAs try to deplatform speakers at Manifest, they are reaching out beyond their own community and trying to dictate what can be said in someone elses community, which sure makes it look a lot more like your idea of cancel culture.
I would not agree with that. I view the core idea as actually making the world better (i.e., as conducting altruism effectively), and exploring ideas as an instrumental goal toward that end. I do not think focus on an idea that in my view has -- at best -- a very tenuous link to any plausible theory of doing good in the world is actually instrumental toward the core idea. Too much emphasis on free-expression ideology risks making freedom of expression an end in itself, similar to how scratching the ideological itches of traditional charity donors and executives became an end in itself. And while I think free expression is intrinsically valuable to human beings, I do not think it intrinsically valuable to EA in the same way.
The organizers advertised here; I think that makes it our business to criticize what they advertised where warranted.
I find the criticism "this wasn't in your community" and the criticism "you're trying to dictate to another community" to be somewhat at odds here. I, like most commenters here, have zero power in the forecasting community. Trying to "dictate" what people do in a community over which I have zero power sounds like a colossal waste of time. My lack of power also implies that my criticism would not cause any concrete injury to the forecasting community. To the extent that individual commenters do have some power or influence in the forecasting community, that's a hint that they are in fact associated with that community to some extent.
I also don't agree more generally that criticizing actions of another community is "dictating" anything to them. Under a broad definition where expressing disapproval of decisions relating to speech constitutes dictating, I think there are a number of communities to which the vast majority of EAs would like to "dictate" things!
To your first point, fair. I think the crux is just very object level assessments of the individual speakers and the ideas they hold, and I don't want to go down that road here.
To your second point, your argument seems to imply that it is ok to exercise influence by calling people "racist" anywhere you can. That seems to imply that literally nothing would be "cancel culture" to you, which is not where you started a couple of comments ago.
Executive summary: Debates about inviting controversial speakers to events reflect broader concerns about societal trends, and productive dialogue requires engaging with the underlying fears on both sides rather than arguing past each other.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Can I add one more fear - mischaracterising the scientific credibility of scientific racism/ HBD.
Having these voices like Hanania & Razib Khan at Manifest (with no counterbalance) is going to make people think that there is more scientific support for the "race realist/ HBD" position than there actually is.
In actual fact, the opposite is true.
Response by evolutionary biologists responded to Nicholas Wade's book: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/letters-a-troublesome-inheritance.html the
American Society of Human Genetics statement https://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(18)30363-X.pdf and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists statement https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
Further papers on Race & IQ https://r.jordan.im/download/racism/bird2021.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.202100204?
I appreciate the papers link, but the existence of discussions like this is why statements by official bodies concerned about reputation cannot be taken as strong evidence.
Or more if the evidence cited for the socially required position in the official statement is fairly weak and hedged it becomes actually weak counter evidence (I'm not saying that's the case, I haven't yet read the statements).
Basically threatening scholars with deplatforming for expressing the wrong beliefs damages the link between what scientific groups say and what the best processes for evaluating the evidence will tell us. This is an example of why speech control makes us collectively stupider.
Note, this is not an infinitely strong effect, if it was really clear from the evidence that HBD was true, I would not expect these statements, but I would expect them for any range between HBD is definitely false to some form HBD is the most likely explanation, but with strong counter arguments that can't be dismissed easily.