This is heartbreaking. I'm so sorry. 

(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".)

No, I think this is again importantly wrong.  

First, this was published in the Guardian US, not the Guardian. 

The Guardian US does not have half the traffic of the NYTimes. It has about 15% the traffic, far as I can tell (source). The GuardianUS has 200k Twitter followers; The Guardian has 10M Twitter followers (so 2% of the following).

Second, I scrolled through all the tweets in the link you sent showing "praise". I see the following: 

• Emile Torres with 250 likes. 
• Timnit Gebru's new research org retweeting, 27 likes
• A professor I don't know supporting it, 117 likes
• Shakeel being "glad to see the press picking it up", 14 likes
• A confusing amount of posts, maybe 10+, which retweet and get 0 likes and no engagement, and 10 that get 1-10 likes
• Original tweet by the author of the article, 500 likes
• Another journalist praising, 60 likes

You can of course compare this to: 

• Tweet from a usually EA-critical account with 161 likes, "This is just bad assignment work for whoever wrote this beat."
• Theo Jaffe critical tweet, 144 likes
• Robin Hanson with 400 likes, complaining about defamation. 
• Byrne Hobart critical tweet, 500 likes
• Multiple Kelsey tweets, with 300 likes
• Habryka's refutation, 450 likes 
• Quilette editor critical tweet, 100 likes

So I think this just clearly proves my point: the majorty of engagement of this article on Twitter is just commenting on it being a terrible hit piece. 

The tiny wave of praise came mostly from folks well known for bad faith attacks on EA, a strange trickle of no-to-low engagement retweets, 1-2 genuine professors, and, well, Shakeel. 

Ah! I was wrong to claim you made "no" such comments. I've edited my above comment.

Now, I of course notice how you only mention "lots of mistakes" after Jeffrey objects, and after it's become clear that there is a big outpouring of hit piece criticism, and only little support. 

Why were you glad about it before then? 

Did you:

• ...not think it was a hit piece? (I think you're a smart guy, and even a journalist yourself, so I'm kind of incredulous about you not picking up on the patterns here)
• ...or were you okay with the-amount-of-hit-piece-you-thought-it-was? (this is of course what I'm worried about, and why I am pursuing this so vigorously. I think this article crossed several very important epistemic red lines, and I will fight for those lines to remain intact, and will be very vocal about confronting journalists close to the community who don't seem to respect them)
• ...or something else? (reality might of course be more complicated than my neatly packaged options above, so do feel free to explain)

In the follow-up tweet you say: "Glad to see the press picking [this story] up (though wish they made the rationalist/EA distinction clearer!)"

So far as I've found, you've made no comments indicating that you disagree with the problematic methodology of the piece, and two comments saying you were "delighted" and "glad" with parts of it. I think my quote is representative. I've updated my comment for clarity. 

Nonetheless: how would you prefer to be quoted? 

EDIT: Shakeel posted a comment pointing to a tweet of his "mistakes" in the post, and I was wrong to claim there were no comments. 

It also just occurred to me that Shakeel's first tweet about the article was I think(?) the first time it appeared on Twitter. It was actually made before the author's themselves retweeted it. And also before any of the "hit piece" pushback had appeared. 

I'd be curious to hear from @Austin some thoughts on where you think the line of acceptable conduct is? (Though I know it's really tricky to specify, as argued here.)

Man yesterday this was at +20 karma and no it's at -20. There seems to be a massive diurnal effect in how the votes on the forum swing. 

I think both of those karma values are kind of extreme, and so find myself flipping my vote around. But wish I could leave an anchor vote like "if the vote diverges from value X, change my vote to point it back toward X"

I think Shakeel's cited definition with my clarification here seems good; https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MHenxzydsNgRzSMHY/my-experience-at-the-controversial-manifest-2024?commentId=rB6pq5guAWcsAJrWx

I think the really key thing here is the bait-and-switch at play. 

Insofar as "controversial" means "heated discussion of subject x", let's call that "x-controversial".

Now the article generates heated discussion because of "being a hit piece", and so is "hit-piece-controversial". However, there's then also heated discussion of racism on the forum, call that "racism-controversial". 

If we then unpack the argument made by Garrison above, it reads as "It is fair and accurate to label Manifest racism-controversial, because of a piece of reporting that was hit-piece controversial" -- clearly an invalid argument. 

Moreover, I don't know that the forum discourse was necessarily that heated; and seems like there could be a good faith conversation here about an important topic (for example the original author has been super helpful in engaging with replies, I think). So it also seems lots of "heat" got imported from a different controversy. 

Crucially, I think part of the adversarial epistemic playbook of this article, the journalist behind it, as well as your own Tweets and comments supporting it, is playing on ambiguities like this (bundling a bunch of different x-controversial and y-controversial things into one label "controversial"), and then using those as the basis to make sweeping accusations that "organisations [...] cut all ties with Manifold/Lightcone".

That is what I'm objecting so strongly against.