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Against the Guardian's hit piece on Manifest
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Bentham's Bulldog
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Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
This post is a community defense piece responding to negative press coverage of the Manifest conference; relevant to discussions of EA/rationalist community norms and media relations, but not directly related to AI safety research.
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Importance: 18/100opinion piececommentary
Summary
This EA Forum post defends the Manifest forecasting conference against a Guardian article criticizing its attendees for controversial views, arguing the piece relies on guilt-by-association and factual errors. The author makes a broader case that rigorous intellectual inquiry on difficult topics inevitably produces positions that sound offensive out of context, and that media-driven cancellation of unconventional thinkers is harmful to serious discourse.
Key Points
- •Argues the Guardian article uses guilt-by-association tactics rather than engaging substantively with the ideas or people it criticizes.
- •Contends that intellectually honest exploration of complex topics (e.g., ethics, philosophy, forecasting) will sometimes yield controversial-sounding conclusions.
- •Defends holding unconventional views (e.g., liberal eugenics, challenging philosophical positions) as compatible with participating in good-faith intellectual discourse.
- •Frames media 'hit pieces' as a form of cancel culture that chills serious engagement with hard questions in EA and rationalist communities.
- •Highlights factual errors in the Guardian piece as undermining its credibility and journalistic standards.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Manifest (Forecasting Conference) | Organization | 50.0 |
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Against the Guardian's hit piece on Manifest
— EA Forum
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by Bentham's Bulldog Jun 19 2024 5 min read 34 58
Community Frontpage 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 correction. 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
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