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.
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 consensus will eventually say some things that sound bad. The only people safe from cancel culture are those who never have interesting thoughts, who never step outside of the Overton window, who never advance beyond irrational and immoral societal norms, for they are beholden to the norms of their society.
Lots of people seem to treat associations like a disease—if you associate with people who think bad things, they’ll infect you with the badness bug, and then you’ll become bad too (this seems to be the reasoning behind the Guardian smearpiece). If I accepted this I’d have to be a Hermit in the wilderness, because I think almost everyone either thinks or does bad things—specifically, people who eat meat have, I think, either repugnant views or do things they know to be very wrong.
The association as disease model is crazy! It’s valuable to associate with people who think bad things. Has Hanania said some things I regard as objectionable? Of course. Does this mean I think Hanania should be permanently shunned? No—he’s an interesting guy who I can learn a lot from.
No one has ever convincingly explained why one shouldn’t interact with bad people or invite them to their conferences (even though it’s taken as axiomatic by lots of people). Suppose the Manifest crew really invited some bad hombres. So what? Why not have bad people give talks? While maybe the bad people will bring the good people over to the dark side, maybe the good people will bring the bad people over to the light side. For this reason, I’d expect people with radical views to be depolarized by an event like Manifest, if it has any impact on one’s views.
The Guardian hitpiece was written by Jason Wilson and Ali Winston. Maybe the Wilson and Winstons only go to conferences where no one thinks anything offensive (and perhaps everyone’s last name starts with a Wi, and has an o as the second to last letter). But if this is so then they only hung out with prudish bores. Anyone who thinks for themselves about issues will think some things that they wouldn’t want to utter at a liberal dinner party.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Social norms are often wrong. Just like old social norms were racist and sexist and homophobic, we should expect modern consensus views to often be similarly in error. This means that even if a person believed all and only true things, they’d end up constantly disagreeing with social norms. They’d end up thinking things that the ~Wilsons wouldn’t like—that they’d think are worthy of cancellation.
Are there any philosophers who don’t think any offensive things about ethics? I can’t think of any. Singer, one of the most influential ethicists, has been so controversial that he’s drawn protests, and supports infanticide in some cases. Should we want groups that censor people like Singer—people who diverge from mainstream groupthink?
If, as I’ve argued before, people who are interesting and write a lot will generally say controversial things, then stifling those who have controversial views will produce either people who self-censor or people who are not interesting. It will produce a world devoid of free thinkers who write a lot, a world filled with the type of Midwit who determines their beliefs by judging what things sound good rather than what is true.
The people at Manifest weren’t even disproportionately right-wing. Scott isn’t right-wing—neither were most of the attendees. But they provided enough fodder for a Guardian hitpiece because they had the unfortunate property of being interesting, of thinking for themselves. If we don’t want a society of boring conformists, we’ll have to tolerate that sometimes conferences will have people who we disagree with. The fact that in 2024, the Guardian is still churning out these misleading, low-info hitpieces in an attempt to cancel people is shameful.
