Given the post is broadly negative about Rationality culture, choosing an obnoxious, sexual, and niche example strikes me as likely deliberate. 

The homogeneity and narrowness of the conference might also suggest various limits and pipeline problems like narrowing from general population to "the demographics of blogging" to "the demographics of EA in general" to "the demographics of forecasting" to "the demographic willing and able to attend a conference about these things." 

Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it, to clearly and loudly dismiss a noticeable and direly hated minority. My prediction is doing so will not actually improve openness, but it could be an interesting experiment and at least it won't generate stupid Grauniad hit pieces (a competing fluff piece, maybe). Anti-Manifest when and where?

>so alienated by wokeness (which many see as anathema to the project of truth-seeking)

Would you be willing to express any degree of agreement or disagreement? 

Or, perhaps, a brief comment on whether certain epistemic approaches could be definitionally incompatible? That is, that what "woke" call truth-seeking is so different from what "rationalists" call truth-seeking (not taking a position here on which one is more correct, mind you) as to be totally separate domains of thought, EA's version is somewhere in between, and that tension/confusion is contributing to these issues. 

"You can do better at displaying openness by explicitly denying access to certain gerrymandered ideas" is certainly a take. Not necessarily a wrong one, but a fragile knife to walk, to mix metaphors.

>I'm just worried how the term "racist" easily steers this off the rails, as seen in some of the other comments on this post

Not many terms are more gerrymandered or more "powerful." Overuse and lack of clarity are degrading its usefulness.

>(Maybe some could introduce themselves in reply to this comment? :) )

Doing so seems like a good way to get put on some EA watchlist of who shouldn't be invited to future events, or at least put under greater scrutiny :p Maybe after the election season you'll have better luck...

PETA has been around for longer than EA, among other (rather less obnoxious and more effective) animal welfare organizations; I don't think losing what makes EA distinct would entail losing animal welfare altogether. The shrimp and insect crowd probably wouldn't remain noticeable. Not because I think they overlap heavily with the skeptic-EA crowd (quite the opposite), but because they'd simply be drowned out. Tolerance of weirdness is a fragile thing.

I do think the evidence is already there for a certain kind of losing/wildly redefining "effective," ie, criminal justice reform. Good cause, but no way to fit it into "effectiveness per dollar" terms without stretching the term to meaninglessness. 

It's a famously "reclaimed" slur: Dan Savage used it positively for decades. But there is some dispute- in particular, it seems that many older gay men still have a strongly negative view of it, whereas younger crowds seem generally more accepting. As a Millennial, but not really in "the community," I still find it off-putting when it's used positively. 

I've heard that there's some queer vs gay tension as well that people that ID as queer are turning "fag" back into a slur, but I have no clue to what extent this is an actual phenomenon instead of outrage-bait.

The movement that quite famously spends 2/3 of its funding on improving health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa is too racist? 

Alas, big movements do struggle to maintain purity, don't they?

Has anyone said he should be platformed without criticism? The point of contention seems to be that many people think he shouldn't have been a speaker at all and that everyone who interacts with him is tainted. That is not a subtle difference.

As HL Mencken famously said, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

If principles only apply to the people that uphold them, then they're not principles: they're just another word for tribalism. Lovely conflict theory you've got there.

EA is already incredibly far outside the "normiesphere," so to speak. Calling it that is making some incredibly normative assumptions. What you're looking for is more along the lines of "social justice progressive" EA and SJP-skeptical EA. As much as some people like to claim "the ideology is not the movement," I would agree that such a split is ultimately inevitable (though I think it will also gut a lot of what makes EA interesting, and eventually SJP-EA morphs into bog-standard Ford Foundation philanthropy).

Still not that accurate, since I suspect there's a fair number of people that disagree with Hanania, but think he should be allowed to speak, while supporting the global health efforts in Africa. But so it goes, trying to name amorphous and decentralized groupings.