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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.
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.