My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
webAuthor
Maniano
Credibility Rating
3/5
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
Relevant to discussions about EA community norms, reputational risk, and the challenge of maintaining open intellectual discourse without platforming harmful ideologies; not directly AI safety content but touches on EA organizational culture.
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60
Comments
246
Forum
eaforum
Forum Tags
CommunityBuilding effective altruismForecastingCommunity experiencesCriticism of the effective altruism communityManifold MarketsOpinionCriticism of effective altruismPrediction markets
Metadata
Importance: 28/100blog postcommentary
Summary
A firsthand account of attending Manifest 2024, a prediction markets conference, describing an uncomfortable undercurrent of scientific racism and human biodiversity (HBD) discussions among attendees. The author validates core criticisms that the event platformed controversial speakers while noting some overgeneralizations in subsequent media coverage. The piece raises concerns about high-trust EA community spaces being exploited to normalize racially incendiary ideas.
Key Points
- •Author observed coded discussions around 'human biodiversity' and scientific racism as a notable undercurrent at Manifest 2024, a Lightcone-organized conference.
- •Author partially defends The Guardian's critical coverage while acknowledging it made overgeneralizations conflating the event with the broader EA community.
- •Raises concern that EA's 'high-trust environment' and norm of steelmanning ideas may be exploited by bad actors testing receptiveness to racist ideologies.
- •Highlights a tension between EA's commitment to free inquiry and the risk of platforming or legitimizing harmful pseudoscientific ideas.
- •Serves as a community self-reflection piece on vetting speakers and attendees, and the reputational risks to EA-adjacent organizations.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Manifest (Forecasting Conference) | Organization | 50.0 |
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# My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
By Maniano
Published: 2024-06-17
My experience at the recently controversial conference/festival on prediction markets
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Background
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I recently attended the triple whammy of rationalist-adjacent events of [LessOnline](https://less.online/), [Summer Camp, and Manifest 2024](https://www.manifest.is/). For the most part I had a really great time, and had more interesting conversations than I can count. The overlap between the attendees of each event was significant, and the topics discussed were pretty similar.
The average attendee for these events is very smart, well-read, and most likely working in tech, consulting, or finance. People were extremely friendly, and in general the space initially felt like a high-trust environment approaching that of an average EAGlobal conference (which also has overlap with the rational-ish communities, especially when it comes to AI risks), even if the number of EA people there was fairly low–the events were very rationalist-coded.
Nominally, Manifest was about prediction markets. However, the organizers had selected for multiple quite controversial speakers and presenters, who in turn attracted a significant number of attendees who were primarily interested in these controversial topics, most prominent of which was eugenics.
This human biodiversity (HBD) or “scientific racism” curious crowd engaged in a tiring game of carefully trying the waters with new people they interacted with, trying to gauge both how receptive their conversation partner is to racially incendiary topics and to which degree they are “one of us”. The ever-changing landscape of euphemisms for I-am-kinda-racist-but-in-a-high-IQ-way have seemed to converge to a stated interest in “demographics”–or in less sophisticated cases the use of edgy words like “based”, “fag”, or “retarded” is more than enough to do the trick. If someone asks you what you think of Bukele, you can already guess where he wants to steer the conversation to.
The Guardian article
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### I
While I was drafting this post, The Guardian [released a flawed article on Lightcone](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/16/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-eugenics-scientific-racism), who own the event venue Lighthaven, that a certain lawsuit claims was partially bought with FTX money (which [Oliver Habryka from Lightcone denies](https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280)). The article detailed some of the scientific racism special guests these past three events had.
In the past, The Guardian has released a couple of articles on EA that were a bit hit-piece-y, or tried to connect nasty things that are not really connected to EA at all to EA, framing them as representative of the entire movement. Sometimes the things presented were relevant to other loosely EA-connected communities, or some of the people
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