The Nonlinear Library EA - Responses to Manifest are not about Manifest by timunderwood
Jun 25, 2024
The podcast delves into the root fears behind arguments about excluding certain individuals, touching on issues of minorities being unwelcome, the connection of important identities to racists, and the fear of racial injustice. It also emphasizes the need for balanced solutions and intellectual freedom in addressing these concerns.
03:29
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: Responses to Manifest are not about Manifest, published by timunderwood on June 25, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is obvious in one way, but I think forgotten in a lot of the details about these arguments: People do not actually care very much about whether Manifest invited Hanania, they care about the broader trend.
And what I mean by that is specifically that the group that argues that people like Hanania should not be invited to events like Manifest are scared of things like:
They care about whether minorities are being excluded and made unwelcome in EA spaces.
They care about an identity they view as very important being connected to racists
More broadly, they are ultimately scared about the world returning to the sort of racism that led to the Holocaust, to segregation, and they are scared that if they do not act now, to stop this they will be part of maintaining the current system of discrimination and racial injustice.
They feel like they don't belong in a place where people like Hanania are accepted
I apologize if I did not characterize the fears correctly, I am part of the other group, and my model of what motivates the people I disagree with is almost always going to be worse than my model of what motivates me. I am scared of things like:
Making a policy that people like Hanania should never be invited to speak is pushing society in a direction that leads to things like Maoist struggle sessions, McCarthyism (I think we are currently at the level of badness that McCarthyism represented), and at an actual extreme, the thought police from 1984.
The norms cancel culture embraces functionally involve powerful groups being allowed to silence those they dislike. This is still the case no matter what the details of the arguments for the positions are.
Assuming a priori that we know that a certain person's policy arguments or causal model is false leads us to have stupider opinions on average.
I don't belong in a place where adults are not be allowed to read whichever arguments they are interested in about controversial topics, and then form their own opinions, even if those opinions disagree with social orthodoxy.
The biggest point I want to make is that none of these things are arguments against each other.
Cancel culture norms might be creating a tool for power, and make minorities more welcome.
This might push society to be more like a McCarthyist or Maoist place where people are punished for thinking about the wrong questions and having the wrong friends, and at the same time it might prevent backsliding on racial justice, and lead to improvements in equality between racial groups.
Perhaps McCarthy actually made the US meaningfully safer from communist takeover. Most of the arguments that McCarthy was terrible that I recall from university seemed to just take as a given that there was no real risk of a communist takeover, but even if the odds of that were low, making those odds even lower was worth doing things that had costs elsewhere (unless, of course, you think that a communist revolution would have been a good thing).
If we are facing a situation where the policy favored by side A leads to costs that side B is very conscious of, and vice versa, it is likely that if instead of arguing with each other, we attempted to build ideas that addressed each others core concerns, we might come up with ideas that let each side get more of what they want at a smaller cost to what the other side wants.
The second point I'd like to make, is that arguing passionately, with better and better thought experiments that try to trigger the intuitions underlying your position, while completely ignoring the things that actually led the people you are arguing with to the positions they hold, is unlikely to be productive.
Engage with their actual fears if you want to c...
This is obvious in one way, but I think forgotten in a lot of the details about these arguments: People do not actually care very much about whether Manifest invited Hanania, they care about the broader trend.
And what I mean by that is specifically that the group that argues that people like Hanania should not be invited to events like Manifest are scared of things like:
They care about whether minorities are being excluded and made unwelcome in EA spaces.
They care about an identity they view as very important being connected to racists
More broadly, they are ultimately scared about the world returning to the sort of racism that led to the Holocaust, to segregation, and they are scared that if they do not act now, to stop this they will be part of maintaining the current system of discrimination and racial injustice.
They feel like they don't belong in a place where people like Hanania are accepted
I apologize if I did not characterize the fears correctly, I am part of the other group, and my model of what motivates the people I disagree with is almost always going to be worse than my model of what motivates me. I am scared of things like:
Making a policy that people like Hanania should never be invited to speak is pushing society in a direction that leads to things like Maoist struggle sessions, McCarthyism (I think we are currently at the level of badness that McCarthyism represented), and at an actual extreme, the thought police from 1984.
The norms cancel culture embraces functionally involve powerful groups being allowed to silence those they dislike. This is still the case no matter what the details of the arguments for the positions are.
Assuming a priori that we know that a certain person's policy arguments or causal model is false leads us to have stupider opinions on average.
I don't belong in a place where adults are not be allowed to read whichever arguments they are interested in about controversial topics, and then form their own opinions, even if those opinions disagree with social orthodoxy.
The biggest point I want to make is that none of these things are arguments against each other.
Cancel culture norms might be creating a tool for power, and make minorities more welcome.
This might push society to be more like a McCarthyist or Maoist place where people are punished for thinking about the wrong questions and having the wrong friends, and at the same time it might prevent backsliding on racial justice, and lead to improvements in equality between racial groups.
Perhaps McCarthy actually made the US meaningfully safer from communist takeover. Most of the arguments that McCarthy was terrible that I recall from university seemed to just take as a given that there was no real risk of a communist takeover, but even if the odds of that were low, making those odds even lower was worth doing things that had costs elsewhere (unless, of course, you think that a communist revolution would have been a good thing).
If we are facing a situation where the policy favored by side A leads to costs that side B is very conscious of, and vice versa, it is likely that if instead of arguing with each other, we attempted to build ideas that addressed each others core concerns, we might come up with ideas that let each side get more of what they want at a smaller cost to what the other side wants.
The second point I'd like to make, is that arguing passionately, with better and better thought experiments that try to trigger the intuitions underlying your position, while completely ignoring the things that actually led the people you are arguing with to the positions they hold, is unlikely to be productive.
Engage with their actual fears if you want to c...