“Why so many ‘racists’ at Manifest?” by Austin

Manifest 2024 is a festival that we organized last weekend in Berkeley. By most accounts, it was a great success. On our feedback form, the average response to “would you recommend to a friend” was a 9.0/10. Reviewers said nice things like “one of the best weekends of my life” and “dinners and meetings and conversations with people building local cultures so achingly beautiful they feel almost like dreams” and “I’ve always found tribalism mysterious, but perhaps that was just because I hadn’t yet found my tribe.”

Arnold Brooks running a session on Aristotle's Metaphysics. More photos of Manifest here.

However, a recent post on The Guardian and review on the EA Forum highlight an uncomfortable fact: we invited a handful of controversial speakers to Manifest, whom these authors call out as “racist”. Why did we invite these folks?

First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — [...]

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Outline:

(01:01) First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard

(03:03) Okay, but there sure seemed to be a lot of controversial ones…

(06:03) Bringing people together with prediction markets

(07:31) Anyways, controversy bad

(08:57) Aside: Is Manifest an Effective Altruism event?

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First published:
June 18th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.