Effective Altruists: look, we tried to invite nice people as well as the huge racists we knew were huge racists when we invited them. What? Exclude the racists? But they're so interesting!
Why so many “racists” at Manifest? — EA Forum
First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard
Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you're "the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference." How is that fair? :-(
The comments about the event are great over here. The initial poster talks about 8 invited racist speakers, but you could argue there were more like 10 or 12. The owners/organizers then talk about how the confrence had 60 speakers. They later say they would have backed off the "edginess" (i.e racism) by 5%.
So even by their own take, instead of having 15% racist invited speakers, they would prefer 10% invited racist speakers. We want 5 racists next time, not 8.
no, they will go from 10 racist talks to 9.5 racist talks
Very late, but for the love of God, make sure you raise your black child with enough respect for themselves and their race that they'll avoid debating twitter racists. Make sure your router drops requests to 4chan.org! Disable DNS over HTTPS on their devices! Run all their traffic through a proxy, MitM every request for an image and have a chat with them if you start seeing a lot of pfp sized pictures of roman statues. You need your kid to avoid these people the way they should avoid a hot stove.
Here's the "what did you like least" survey entries the organizers say they classified as "edgy people":
"all the racism stuff" = "edgy people". Yup.
Where is this from? Sorry if I missed the link in the big watermuddying wall of text.
Our sessions and guests spanned a wide range of topics: prediction markets and forecasting, of course; but also finance, technology, philosophy, AI, video games, politics, journalism and more.
haha
Our sessions and guests spanned a wide range of topics: grifting and grifting, of course; but also grifting, grifting, racism, grifting, racism, racism, racism and more.
Wow, the commenters seem surprisingly...not ok with the guest choices. Especially Hannania
They are more defensive of the racists in the other blog post on this topic: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MHenxzydsNgRzSMHY/my-experience-at-the-controversial-manifest-2024
Maybe its because the HBDers managed to control the framing with the other thread? Or because the other thread systematically refuses to name names, but this thread actually did name them and the conversation shifted out of a framing that could be controlled with tone-policing and freeze peach appeals into actual concrete discussion of specific blatantly racists statements (its hard to argue someone isn't racist and transphobic when they have articles with titles like "Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?").
that habryka dude sure is quite something (and by something i think he's a fucking shithead):
It’s a combination of those things.
Because rationalism the coherent phenomenon was founded with the more or less explicit intention of building a cult, Yudkowsky’s original rule-set incorporated all of the basic cult rules, which every cult leader tends to be able to work out mostly for themselves by looking at what they outwardly want to build (a movement) and what they inwardly want to do with it (retain personal power over that movement)
So, for example, the particular way that Yudkowsky frames “objectivity” coalesces later on around the “object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy, “low” vs “high” “decoupling”, the “grey tribe”, but it’s there from the beginning in his insistence on the highly specific and idiosyncratic framework proposed in The Sequences, his constant explicit insistence on the rarity of his chosen elect, and also just in (a) his consistent lambasting of people who work outside that framework in the text of The Sequences themselves, and (b) his sometimes hilarious neg/love-bombing of the reader
Of (b), my favourite example is that passage where he bizarrely takes an unnecessary moment to call you an idiot if you think that there’s a universal clock measuring time throughout the universe, in the full knowledge that his nerdy readers are aware of relativity
So the whole system, beginning with LessWrong’s very founding, is geared to control the framing in ways like not naming names. Naming names is a failure of objectivity, because it brings in the sorts of particulars that might exercise your ordinary human judgement - ordinary human judgement is bad, we know this from Daniel Kahneman, and that’s another rule of objectivity. So, moreover, the whole system is geared so as to keep “objective” framings which favour HBD “in-group”, and to displace good human judgements (‘Richard Hanania is a ridiculous mendacious racist’) into the “out-group”).
HBD hegemony within the movement (in influence if not in numbers), moreover, could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set. In spite of his own protestations, Yudkowsky’s pugilistic naturalism was sufficiently both insisted upon and theoretically naive as to ultimately yield hegemony to the HBDers by sheer inertia: once you have eliminated and salted the earth of any thinking which fails to embrace the most childish physical-scientistic reductionism, then when your rules for thinking enter the arena of politics (especially American politics) and human biology, you have already ceded all possible theoretical ground to HBD, and any counter-weight you try to introduce thereto becomes the pathetic mewling of Kahnemanian irrational beliefs. Your rhetoric already implied “it’s just basic biology” from the very beginning.
So, for anyone keeping score, the only way for anyone on LessWrong to win the rhetorical argument is, unfortunately, just to be normal, and violate one or more of the LessWrong standards for thinking.
Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?
I had to google this but it's real.
these guys should really stop using words they don't understand. (i know, in case of the muppet quoted below it's almost impossible.)
"Human biodiversity denial." There's a guy who is self-aware about his racism laying the groundwork for pretending he is not.
if there is a huge split in EA because the rationalists insist on turbo racism it will be hilarious
The net downvotes are the rest of the community frantically whispering "FFS Roko keep our racism on the down-low!"
Fails to list SlateScott as a controversial guest.
Also, did he just use a bang path to refer to a racist dude's Twitter persona? Seeing old school lore adopted by these mutants gives me heartburn.
Oh, and that bit at the end disclaiming it as an EA event despite it clearly being an EA event is classic "decoupler" (or, if you like, responsibility avoider.)
some commenters in those threads are talking about the New York EAs vs the Berkeley EAs - the former are rich liberals, the latter are rationalist cultists. there are several suggestions that EA needs to expel the rationalists.
the furious defenders of racism^Wfreedom of ideas in those threads don't seem to figure out that they're why the non-racist EAs are suggesting that expelling rationalism from EA is even possible
i mean, they should have done so about a decade ago, because they were only and ever a fucking embarrassment
but now they're being a hugely racist embarrassment, not just a nerd-weird one, and it's harder to spin that
i mean, not that liberals aren't all for a bit of systemic racism, but you can't make it personal like that
Ok I've been giving $25 a month to Effectivealtruism.com for about 5 years now, and my understanding was they predominantly buy mosquito nets and give cash directly. Should I swap to a different charity?
it's literally these guys. MacAskill, who is splashed on the front page, goes on in his book about how much more important it is to think about 10^54 future computer emulations than mere tawdry actual existing people suffering now.
So you will probably want to look inside the box and look precisely where your donations go, if the organisation you're sending your money to has a public list up.
They do buy mosquito nets, although it's unclear that all malaria net charities do so in culturally-appropriate ways where they'll be used as intended. I believe they've stopped with the large grants to deworming charities, which is good, because the effectiveness of deworming programs is extremely controversial. Depending on where you direct your money at that parent website, it might go to EA Funds, who send a lot of money at global development but has also paid a ton of salaries for people researching LLMs and AI. Or it could go to EffectiveVentures, which might have spent your money buying a castle. For reasons.
If you support mosquito nets, you can give to the mosquito net charity directly, cut out the overhead. Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières does good global development work if you don't mind giving to a huge organization that by necessity has higher overhead. Avoid the Red Cross and you should be fine.
I just can't, it's like that one scene from Austin Powers.
And the comment was edited to add:
Which is the second or third time in this saga I've seen people back down from good points due to bad replies. Like someone needs to tell him he's in the wrong crowd and this isn't normal.
And this is their reply:
Followed by ten thousand words that I'm not reading