not that I really mind, but why is the author anonymous? it seems like such a tame criticism it's hard to imagine anyone getting upset about it

didn't take the bait :(

Yeah, the idea that self-resolution and insider trading don't require central regulation to manage does seem more like a novelty, that's fair.

What purpose does this page serve? Who has a problem or a question that is best solved or answered by this list?

I don't see the idea of "prediction markets that anyone can create" as particularly crazy or even novel. Many people were frustrated with regulatory barriers preventing prediction markets in the US before Manifold came along; my impression is that Manifold's innovation is "if we use play money rather than real money we avoid a lot of the regulation and some of the incentive for abuse, but hopefully still motivate people to participate". Plus, perhaps, innovation in market structure that attempts to simplify the market interface and/or compensate for the lack of liquidity. (And a bunch of product work actually getting the details right.)

I realise you actually work for Manifold so maybe you have access to better information than me, but this is what it seems like to me from the outside.

can you say more about how you approached this decision and what seemed like the key considerations for you? I'm interested in whether you were primarily approaching it as something about his views, or about his interpersonal behaviour and alleged abuse, and given your decision to allow him, whether it was "I don't think the allegations of misbehaviour are credible enough to act on", or "even if the allegations were true, they wouldn't constitute reason to exclude him", or some third thing.

I appreciate this is probably a stressful request, and I don't necessarily think I'm entitled to the answers, but it's something I think about a lot so I'm really interested in hearing how people are approaching it.

First, I'm pretty sure it is common lingo to have "controversial" be used in the way it is in this article. If this were a news story in The New York Times, I'd expect it would be much more likely to use the word "controversial" than the word "exclusionary".

If the New York Times and WSJ both had front-page stories about "Conference draws attention for controversial speakers", I'd expect this to be more about radical right-wing or left-wing beliefs than I would the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Yeah, and I mostly think this is a mixture of confusion and cowardice on their part, frankly. To the extent that they really believe the controversy is itself the problem, I think they're wrong. To the extent that they're saying "controversial" because it's unarguably literally true and allows them to imply "bad" without having to actually say it, I think it's an attempt to project a false neutrality, to take a side without appearing to take a side. Some react to that by saying "let our neutrality not be false", some by "let us not project neutrality". Either way has more respect from me.

But I could imagine many ideas in this category. If there were a speaker talking about how to secure Taiwan, arguably Chinese nationalists would feel uncomfortable attending and argue that that is exclusionary. Many people are uncomfortable with basic ideas in effective altruism and might not attend conferences with prominent EAs - they might argue that that EA is exclusionary.

Yeah, for sure I expect disagreement about what's exclusionary, and when we should stand by something even though it's exclusionary. My main point was to point out that lots of disagreements aren't exclusionary, and choosing how we handle potentially-exclusionary discourse doesn't need to put any of that at stake. (There's room to disagree with this distinction, but that's the distinction I was trying to draw.)

Yeah I just don't think that what people are objecting to is that these beliefs are the subject of even heated disagreement. I'm not saying "disagreement is fine, as long as it's not heated", I'm saying "even heated disagreement is fine, but there's some other distinction that makes it potentially a problem", and while I'm not quite precise about what that other distinction is, it's something like, is this topic directly about some of the people in the conversation, and does it implicitly or explicitly threaten the legitimacy of their presence or their contribution?

I think vaccine skepticism is an interesting example, as I do tend to think conferences shouldn't invite vaccine skeptics. But that's more out of a sense that vaccine skeptics in practice are grifters / dishonest (which is no coincidence, in that the genuinely curious have mostly had their curiosity satisfied). I would be very happy to see someone speak about how the new malaria vaccines aren't effective enough to be worth it, if they had good reasons for thinking that.

To be honest, I didn't intend to focus primarily on what an exclusionary belief is, as much as highlight that many controversial beliefs are not exclusionary. If we want to get more precise about it, I'm saying something like: all the objectionable beliefs here are beliefs about people who are also (perhaps prospectively) participating in the discussion, and this is a key thing that distinguishes them from like 95% of controversial (in the sense of heated disagreement) beliefs, and that's a whole lot of baby that we risk throwing out with the bathwater if we keep saying "controversial" like the controversy itself is the problem.

There are many anti-nuclear and green energy activists who would not attend a conference with a speaker who has advocated nuclear energy as a necessary part of the transition away from fossil fuels. There are surely researchers who do gain of function research, or who view it as essential to protecting against future pandemics, who would not attend a conference with a speaker advocating against gain of function research.

I think this is mostly just arguing over hypotheticals, so it's pretty impossible to adjudicate, but I want to highlight a difference between "I'm not going to this conference because it's a waste of time, because they are discussing ideas that are obviously (to me) wrong", and "I'm not going to this conference because it's supporting and strengthening people who are actively hostile towards me, on the basis of characteristics that I can't change, and is thereby either hostile to me itself or at least indifferent to hostility towards me".

Ehh I like this sentiment but feel like you overstate it a bit. We can't control Scott and that's good and normal and how things should be. But we sure can express our opinions about it, and he sure does listen to those opinions to some extent, and even if he doesn't, spectators from other communities will draw conclusions from what we tend to vocally like or dislike.

I think it would be an improvement if we pushed out all the worst, most mindkilled commentators to an ACX 2 subreddit. I think it's pretty silly to suggest that wouldn't be a significant change in terms of what message we project about our norms and what spaces we make available for people to use.