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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.
The author appears to now be planning a hitpiece on David Gerard:
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11466&start=50#p355881
I, for one, am just psyched to see what Jesse Singal’s research assistant is going to tell us about the evils of Wikipedia.
I tried to look up this Mr. Gerard’s lurid wikipedia past expecting at least a torture dungeon or wiki-cult or something; but all I found were a bunch of people grumpy that they couldn’t turn wikipedia articles into cryptocurrency ads.
Booring.
don’t forget the ones outraged they can’t use the Daily Mail or the Sun as sources
When I was listening to the most recent episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast which was all in on mocking J. Michael Bailey with a special dig at autogynephilia theories, I went to go see if David had any history policing weirdos on Bailey’s wikipedia page, as an excuse to bring the episode in for a stubsack link. And he didn’t, which means, once again, booring.
ten years ago the wikipedia cranks had compiled lore on me, and some of it had a vague relation to anything that ever happened! Sure can’t wait to see what a good faith rationalist researcher comes up with
so now we have confirmation that tracing w. is (a) a petty, vengeful prick and (b) reads this; good. tracing, whoever you are, why don’t you focus on some introspection, like consider what causes you to agree with obvious anti-scientific crap (scientific racism, hbd) and why do you prefer the company of fascists (proto, wannabe, true, disguised, and the illinois nazis) to the company of people who don’t think genocide can be justified for any reason?
i must point out that i’ve barely interacted with the guy, if at all, and had previously considered him on the saner end of the rationalists from his reasonably coherent twitter
“wikipediocracy”? fucking seriously?
for all the good and bad bits that wikipedia has (and there are notably many of the latter too), a rulership is definitely not among that list afaik. wtf.
(e: I’m going purely off the domain name there, but holy shit what a name)
literally started by a guy who was banned for trying to set up a business to write wikipedia articles, and the evils of JIMMY WAAAAAAAAALES!!! still fill his spleen
aaaaand then I actually looked at the page. fuck me it’s even worse.
@froztbyte @sneerclub Well, if the vast majority of people in a community share a consensus reality and basic principles, you don’t need a formal governance structure to oppress hallucinating sociopaths.
TW emailed me asking if I’d be willing to help with the piece. I declined (I can’t see it being any sort of productive use of my time), but I expect he will cobble together something from the extant public records.