Challenging Social Norms and the Importance of Free Thinkers

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Against the Guardian's hit piece on Manifest, published by Omnizoid on June 20, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Crosspost of this on my blog
The Guardian recently released the newest edition in the smear rationalists and effective altruists series, this time targetting the
Manifest conference. The piece titled "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back," is filled with
bizarre factual errors, one of which was so egregious that it merited a connection. It's the standard sort of journalist hitpiece on a group: find a bunch of members saying things that sound bad, and then sneeringly report on that as if that discredits the group.
It reports, for example, that Scott Alexander attended the conference, and links to the
dishonest New York Times smear piece criticizing Scott, as well as a
similar hitpiece calling Robin Hanson creepy. It then smears Razib Khan, on the grounds that he once wrote a piece for magazines that are Paleoconservative and anti-immigration (like around half the country). The charges against Steve Hsu are the most embarrassing - they can't even find something bad that he did, so they just mention half-heartedly that there were protests against him.
And it just continues like this - Manifest invited X person who has said a bad thing once, or is friends with a bad person, or has written for some nefarious group.
If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend checking out
Austin's response. I'm not going to go through and defend each of these people in detail, because I think that's a lame waste of time. I want to make a more meta point: articles like this are embarrassing and people should be ashamed of themselves for writing them.
Most people have some problematic views. Corner people in a dark alleyway and start asking them why it's okay to kill animals for food and not people (as I've done many times), and about half the time they'll suggest it would be
okay to kill mentally disabled orphans. Ask people about why one would be required to save children from a pond but not to give to effective charities, and a sizeable portion of the time, people will suggest that one wouldn't have an obligation to wade into a pond to save drowning African children. Ask people about population ethics, and
people will start rooting for a nuclear holocaust.
Many people think their worldview doesn't commit them to anything strange or repugnant. They only have the luxury of thinking this because they haven't thought hard about anything. Inevitably, if
one thinks hard about morality - or most topics - in any detail, they'll have to accept all sorts of very unsavory implications. In philosophy, there are all
sorts of impossibility proofs, showing that we must give up on at least one of a few widely shared intuitions.
Take the accusations against Jonathan Anomaly, for instance. He was smeared for supporting what's known as liberal eugenics - gene editing to make people smarter or make sure they don't get horrible diseases. Why is this supposed to be bad?
Sure, it has a nasty word in the name, but what's actually bad about it? A lot of people who think carefully about the subject will come to the same conclusions as Jonathan Anomaly, because there isn't anything objectionable about gene editing to make people better off. If you're a conformist who bases your opinion about so called liberal eugenics (
terrible term for it) on the fact that it's a scary term, you'll find Anomaly's position unreasonable, but if you actually think it through, it's
extremely plausible, and is even agreed with by
most philosophers. Should philosophy conferences be disbanded because too many philosophers have offensive views?
I've elsewhere remarked that
cancel culture is a tax on being interesting. Anyone who says a lot of things and isn't completely beholden to social co...