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My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024 — EA Forum
forum.effectivealtruism.orgComment by TracingWoodgrains - I'm not particularly happy to see people within this community immediately present and accept the framing that Manifest was controversial because people reacted harshly to an article explicitly aimed at smearing a community I belong to with reckless disregard for truth and bizarrely sinister framing of mundane decisions, written by people who proceeded simply by reading a guest list without even bothering to attend the event they were writing about. In that regard, Manifest is only controversial in the same sense Scott Alexander was controversial when the New York Times wrote about him.
To name something is often to make it so; to lead with the framing that Manifest was controversial is to encourage other people to see it that way, yielding to the frame of people who treat EA itself as controversial. That has an impact on everyone who attends, organizes, and puts effort into it. I recognize that your own experience was mixed and have no problem with you sharing that and exploring it, but I think it's worth being cautious about frame-setting in the title in that way, particularly given its potential impact on early-career organizers or guests.
I was excited and honored to be invited to Manifest. It's the first conference that went out of its way to invite me as a special guest, more-or-less the first place I spoke openly under my own name, and a place that gave me the opportunity to meet and speak with people I have read and admired for years. It was an extraordinarily valuable experience for me, one where I seized the opportunity to give a light-hearted presentation on a niche topic, chat with and learn from many of my role models, and generally enjoy meeting people in person who I have only had the chance to interact with online.
I am extremely confident that an article aimed not at attacking the conference but at presenting an even-handed, cohesive picture of the experience as a whole would read very differently to the Guardian article and would include many mo
…And if it weren’t for that one joke by Hannibal, Bill Cosby would be very uncontroversial.
He also wants us to know that Hannania is much less right than he’s made out to be.. Richard gave him a signal boost and is cool with gay people! Unfortunately, Tracey hasn’t grasped that “right winger” is simply a metonym for “thinks blacks are the second least domesticable African animal after zebras”
Also he doesn’t grasp that people hate Hanania because he’s a racist, not because of where he falls on the forced left/right spectrum.
People like TW are the perfect distillation of the booksmart Slate Star Codex fan class, who are so completely sealed in their bubble that they aren’t even in touch with major parts of themselves anymore. They lose, or never developed, the capacity to even simulate a coherent theory of mind which would make appropriate sense of what the other person is saying. Brains like a Frank Gehry building with a roof made from sheer enthusiasm supported by warped tent poles of Scott Alexander heuristics sticking out at odd angles from each other.
Wow, I went looking for something else and found a deeply sad illustration of exactly what I’m talking about:
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1772398359745012139
“Yeah, they’re good people; we would hang out more, but my brain isn’t leaking out of my ears”
Not to get too corny about it, but there are people in this world who think “don’t condescend” means “be nice about other people’s shortcomings” and people who think it means “you might fucking learn something if you would just stop condescending to people you perceive as having shortcomings”, and the first group is completely oblivious to the difference
Which is fine, actually, kind of. It certainly takes genuine work if for whatever reason you grew up to see things in a particular way. But it’s also completely not fucking fine that there are so many people going about their lives pontificating on the world without a shred of the requisite humility.
TW went on Hanania’s fucking podcast
these threads are made of lie down in a flea circus, get up denying the existence of fleas
Aw, Hanania’s a good egg, he liked my incredibly stupid case for surrogacy from a reactionary perspective with shit machine-generated illustrations
Text in AI-generated images will never not be funny to me. N the most n’tural hnertis indeed.
mijn promptus hoorts
drunk thought: I want to hear Till Lindemann singing this, in the closest manner to Mein Herz Brennt as could be managed, with as much genml bullshit strewn in for serious insanity
Putting aside the obvious elders of zionny subtext… I’m an unabashed humanist and this is one of the most childishly anthropocentric things I’ve ever read. Death and decay are human concepts you big dummy. Sucks for you that you apparently can’t imagine our universe outside of your silly meat-bound linear-time phenomenology, but do try to respect and enjoy reality instead of talking like a 1920s pulp protagonist.
Deep into that diatribe:
What a disgustingly privileged thing to say. People have survived in shitty situations so therefore more children in poverty is axiomatically good?
This guy deserves poverty.(edit: maybe that’s a bit too far but I fucking hate this guy)@sinedpick @sneerclub Nah, I think don’t think he ultimately means icky children living in poverty (ewww) but rather more digital humans living in computers. Unless I’m conflating him with so many flaky/evil others.
In this case, the context is definitely humans being born on earth. The entire diatribe I responded to can be summed up as “People have all kinds of ethical and moral objections to surrogacy. In this post, I dismiss all of those without an argument, and instead assign positive moral value to everything that increases the number of lives, including surrogacy.” It’s probably one of the dumbest things I read this week.
I parsed “right” there as “much less correct than he’s made out to be” and was like, ye, probably, he’s like 0 correct so any amount he’s made out to be is too much.