By far the most dismaying part of my work at CEA was the increasing realisation that a big chunk of the rationalist community is just straight up racist.
Shakeel Hashim, former head of communication at the Center for Effective Altruism
1. Preliminary remarks
Before beginning, I want to make three preliminary remarks. First, a content warning: this post discusses a conference which platformed a number of scientific racists and an afterparty hosted by a leader of the neoreactionary movement. It also discusses the views of invited guests, as well as reactions by effective altruists and their allies to the aftermath of the conference. Some of the events and views discussed involve racism, sexism, fascism, and other troubling ideologies. I have not edited any of these materials, save for omitting those discussions which contain or discuss slurs.
Second, a disclosure: this blog has been funded through the end of 2024 by Manifund. I no longer receive a financial benefit from this funding. However, I think it is important to declare relevant conflicts of interest, and it remains true that this blog is supported until the end of the year by Manifund, and in particular by a grant directed by an individual heavily involved with Manifold, Manifund and Manifest.
Third, an uncomfortable tension: Comments will remain closed on this post, as with all posts in this series. This sits uncomfortably with the very real need to correct factual errors that may arise in covering complex and ongoing issues at length. Please do feel free to reach out at reflectivealtruismeditor@gmail.com to discuss factual corrections. I will make all corrections that I have reason to believe are true and important.
2. Introduction
This is Part 2 in a series on Human Biodiversity. Human biodiversity (HBD) is the latest iteration of modern race science. This series discusses the impact of HBD on effective altruism and adjacent communities, as well as the harms done by debating and propounding race science.
Part 1 introduced the series, explaining what HBD is and why propounding HBD is wrong.
I said in Part 1 that the next post in this series would discuss Richard Hanania. In a way, today’s post does begin with Hanania, though a full discussion of Hanania’s relationship to effective altruism will have to wait.
Today’s post discusses the platforming of HBD advocates and other troubling individuals at Manifest 2023 and Manifest 2024. Although there was not inconsiderable controversy about the speakers invited to Manifest 2023, there has been a great deal of public discussion of Manifest 2024 following an article in The Guardian which criticized the platforming of HBD advocates. I think it is time to speak publicly about these issues before memories fade, concern diminishes, and the opportunity for positive change passes by.
Here is how I will proceed. Section 3 introduces four key organizations and events. Section 4 discusses happenings at Manifest 2023, and Section 5 discusses reactions to Manifest 2023. Section 6 discusses happenings at Manifest 2024, and Sections 7-8 discuss reactions to Manifest 2024. Section 9 discusses the relationship between these events and the effective altruism movement. Section 10 concludes.
3. Background: Manifold, Manifund, Manifest and Lightcone
Manifold (formerly Manifold Markets) is a prediction market founded in 2021 by Austin Chen, James Grugett, and Stephen Grugett. Manifold began with seed funding ($20k) from Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Grants. It has since received funding from the Long-Term Future Fund ($200k), FTX Future Fund ($1.5M) and Survival and Flourishing Fund ($1.2M).
Manifund is a charitable organization aiming to fund impactful projects. Manifund was co-founded in 2023 by Austin Chen, co-founder of Manifold, and Rachel Weinberg.
Manifest is a conference organized for two years running, in both 2023 and 2024. As of June 21, 2024, the conference is described on its website as “A festival for forecasting and prediction markets, hosted by Manifold and Manifund.”
Both Manifest conferences have been held at the Lighthaven Campus in Berkeley, California, run by Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is a project of the Center for Applied Rationality, and is the parent organization of LessWrong.
4. Manifest 2023: Events
The first Manifest, organized in 2023, attracted controversy for the invitation of several speakers affiliated with, or adjacent to the HBD movement.
4.1. Richard Hanania
Much of the controversy surrounded the invitation of Richard Hanania, who will be the subject of the next post in this series.
We first met Hanania in Part 4 of my series on Belonging. This series discussed Hanania’s essay “Why EA will be anti-woke or die“, which was cross-posted on the EA Forum in the wake of the TIME Magazine article on sexual misconduct within the effective altruist movement. We saw there that Hanania bemoans a trend in which “women’s tears will defeat men’s logic every time” and suggests that “the concept of rationality itself needs to be problematized in order to take sexual harassment” as seriously as the author of this article does.
We also saw that the same article by Hanania links his defense of (alleged) sexual misconduct to a number of explicitly racist views, including the suggestion that in a free market of ideas we will find “Asian and white men on top who are there because they’re simply better than everyone else.”
What I did not say is that elsewhere, Hanania has done considerably worse. A full discussion will have to wait for the next post in this series, but here is a short highlight reel.
Hanania used to run the website HBDbooks.com on which he reviewed and endorsed a variety of HBD-related books. Hanania has suggested (in dialogue with Steven Sailer) that he is at least 99% confident there is a genetically-rooted black-white IQ gap of at least 5-10 points. In a long career writing for white supremacist and racist outlets such as Counter-Currents, Taki’s magazine and VDARE, and commenting in venues such as the Unz Review, Hanania penned racist screeds such as the essay “Why are black people so loud?“ (Apparently “They have lower IQs and less inhibitions because they evolved in a less demanding environment.”). And Hanania used anecdotes such as this one to opine on the lives of people of color in the United States and draw conclusions for policy abroad:
Not too long ago I got lost in a black neighborhood and felt so unsafe that I turned around and took the longer way where I was going to avoid driving through the place. I saw blacks yelling at one another at the top of their lungs, walking out in front of cars, menacingly strutting with their pants hanging down. I felt a deep revulsion and found myself thankful that I could get out of there and leave the area behind. I can’t imagine what White South Africans go through, in a country politically, socially and culturally dominated by blacks. Even whites who’ve lived under tyrannies in the past must’ve felt less fear because of the similarities they felt between themselves and the rulers. I can only shudder at the thought of what life under black rule must be like. They’ll all starve when whites are finished on the African continent, like a horrible virus that destroys all other life before it has no more bodies to feed off of and dies.
Despite Hanania’s literary history and the limited relevance of his writings to forecasting, Hanania’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology sponsored a $25,000 prediction tournament on Manifold Markets in 2022. Hanania played a central role throughout the contest
The next year, Hanania was invited to Manifest 2023 as a speaker.
After a wave of protests led to a stalemate, Hanania was eventually allowed to attend but not to speak. Instead, the New York Times reports that Hanania held a book signing at Manifest 2023 for his book, The origins of woke.
No less a friend of the rationalists than Scott Alexander has said that the real project of Hanania’s book is to overturn United States civil rights law. Alexander writes:
[Hanania is] writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.
That is the kindest thing that can be said for Hanania’s book. Many suspect that Hanania, like other darlings of the alt-right, uses a nominal discussion of wokeness and civil rights law as a Trojan Horse to introduce white supremacist ideologies into mainstream political discussion. For example, Tyler Austin Harper suggests at The Atlantic that:
The Origins of Woke is a gateway drug, one that smuggles virulent, pseudoscientific racism into the mainstream by dressing up its poison with occasional moments of serious argumentation. His apparent strategy is part of a broader far-right trend that we might call “Trojan-horsing”: using the trappings of scholarship to lure college-educated readers who are put off by the excesses of “woke” culture down a reactionary or racist rabbit hole.
So far, we have seen that Hanania sponsored a prediction tournament on Manifold in 2022 and was invited to speak at Manifold 2023, with this invitation being converted into a book signing after protests. We will also see that Hanania was invited back in 2024.
4.2. Jonathan Anomaly
Several other controversial speakers were invited to Manifest 2023, including Robin Hanson and Simone and Malcolm Collins. But perhaps the most concerning is Jonathan Anomaly, who we will see in later sections was also invited to speak at Manifest 2024.
Anomaly was hounded from his academic position after publishing an article entitled “Defending eugenics.” By the fifth paragraph of this article, Anomaly arrives at a rather startling proposal:
Darwin argued that social welfare programs for the poor and sick are a natural expression of our sympathy, but also a danger to future populations if they encourage people with serious congenital diseases and heritable traits like low levels of impulse control, intelligence, or empathy to reproduce at higher rates than other people in the population. Darwin feared that in developed nations “the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members” … While Darwin’s language is shocking to contemporary readers, we should take him seriously.
Mass protests including an open letter signed by more than 200 researchers chased Anomaly from his position. Or, as Anomaly tells it, “American universities have been ideologically captured. So, after a decade of teaching at Duke and Penn, I left the American academy for good.”
Since then, Anomaly has expressed more extreme versions of the same view while writing for the usual far-right venues including Aporia, Quilette and the Unz Review. One of his more topical contributions to Quilette is entitled “Effective vs. pathological altruism: What if feeding the hungry creates more hungry people to feed?“. That article begins by expressing the concern that food aid may do more harm than good to the countries aided:
Certain kinds of aid to poor countries can have tangible benefits in the short run, but long run costs, such as an expanding population in poor countries that is more likely to suffer the ravages of famine, pestilence, and war.
Anomaly’s interests soon shift towards a familiar trope of far-right discourse: growing African populations will flood other countries with migrants:
Demographers predict that the population of Africa alone will rise from about 200 million in 1950 to a projected four billion by 2100. The problems this will cause in countries without stable political institutions are staggering. And these problems are likely to bleed over into other countries, especially in the form of mass migration.
In case it is not clear what kind of a discussion Anomaly is trying to start here, Anomaly has also co-authored an editorial entitled “We shouldn’t obsess about race and IQ, but we should openly discuss it.” Anomaly wants to talk about race and IQ, and understands full well how talk about genetic enhancement, embryonic selection, migration or foreign aid policy can be used as a foil to bring up such issues.
Anomaly kept his talk relatively tame at Manifest 2023, though his talk does seem to be continuous with much of his broader, more extreme project and views. For example, Anomaly was introduced at Manifest 2023 as a “professor and eugenicist”. Anomaly suggested that polygenetic embryo selection could leave future generations with traits such as a higher IQ and heightened resistance to disease, and that prediction markets could help to guide this process. And while some attention was paid to prediction markets, one gets the impression that Anomaly was at least as interested in talking about eugenics.
Edit: As of September 11, 2024 the Anomaly talk video from 2023 appears to have been edited to remove Anomaly’s introduction as a “professor and eugenicist”. Here is the original introduction.
5. Manifest 2023: Reactions
Hanania’s invitation to speak at Manifest 2023 drew no small amount of attention and controversy. This included open debate at Manifold (see here and here) and a very detailed podcast discussion.
In one poll, 20 users agreed and 27 users disagreed with the claim that “given his other beliefs, Richard Hanania has created enough value to deserve to speak at Manifest”. It is good to see a slim majority of disagreement on this question, as well as some staunch opposition: for example, Peter Wildeford, co-CEO of Rethink Priorities, “quit manifold entirely” in response to the Hanania debacle, after writing:
I’m upset by the idea Hanania may speak at Manifest. This really makes me not want to attend or speak there. I really don’t want Hanania in my forecasting community. I think he’s said things that go over the line for me. If the things Hanania says don’t go over the line, is there anything that does? I don’t like cancel culture. I don’t want Hanania to lose his job or anything. But I do think who we choose to promote in a speaking role has important consequences, both symbolic and real. It’s not censorship to refuse to put him in a speaking position.
All told, at least three speakers and a sponsor also pulled out.
One of the conference organizers, Austin Chen, defended his decision to invite Hanania with three arguments.
First, Chen cites an article by Scott Alexander arguing that we should “Rule thinkers in, not out“. Chen suggests that Hanania has been “professional and courteous”, truth-seeking, and supportive of forecasting. In what will become a recurring theme, Chen suggests that Hanania was invited primarily based on “his record of support for forecasting platforms”. Please keep this theme in mind while counting the number of scientific racists who have all been, according to the organizers, invited primarily because of their relevance to forecasting.
Second, we will see in the next post that Hanania delivered a rather convenient and half-hearted apology for his behavior after being called out for racism by the Huffington Post. We will also see in that post that almost no one (not even Counter-Currents) believes Hanania’s repentance to be genuine. Nevertheless, such unlikely apologies do provide a convenient excuse for platforming Hanania, and Chen seizes on the opportunity, arguing: “I believe in second chances; he’s publicly denounced his past views and announced an intention to do better.”
Finally, Chen holds, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Many things can be said here, but as before, perhaps the most direct could be to count the number of scientific racists whose right to speak seems to be defended to the death. One may be a coincidence, and two a suspicious number. But the next year at Manifest 2024, the racists were back again, and in greater numbers than before.
6. Manifest 2024: Events
6.1. Special guests
The organizers of Manifest did not, it appears, learn much from the reactions to Manifest 2023. Both Hanania and Anomaly were back as “special guests”, the latter delivering a talk arguing for a “hereditarian view” of “traits like intelligence and personality”. Robin Hanson and the Collinses were also back, alongside a smattering of minor offenders.
There were. however, some interesting new additions to the list of special guests. Let us discuss three in particular.
6.1.1. Brian Chau
Brian Chau is executive director of Alliance for the Future, an organization with close links to the effective accelerationist movement. Chau’s views on race have been documented many times, but perhaps the closest to home is a story by Shakeel Hashim, previously the communications director of CEA and now a Tarbell Fellow. Here is a small sampling of what Hashim had to say about Chau:
He has repeatedly asserted that the US is a “Black Supremacist country”, railing against what he refers to as the “Black grievance mindset”.
Chau also frequently platforms controversial figures on his podcast, including Curtis Yarvin, who has said neo-Nazis’ hearts are “in the right place”, and Richard Hanania, who recently referred to black people as “animals”. Chau called Hanania a “brilliant analyst and policy thinker” and Yarvin’s episode “among the best”.
In another tweet from December 2023, Chau jokes about a “dark comedy version of Ratatouille where the Harvard president is a [sic] affirmative action hire black woman” who, when testifying to Congress, would “beg a white guy to feed her answers through a brain implant”. At the time of the tweet, Harvard’s president was Claudine Gay, a black woman.
In a January 2024 post about AI deepfakes, Chau falsely claimed that George Floyd, a black man whose 2020 murder by a police officer sparked widespread racial justice protests, was a “domestic abuser”. “George Floyd was a deepfake”, Chau wrote, adding that Floyd’s “life is a rounding error when determining the fakeness of the video”.
Chau tells the story rather differently. To hear Chau tell it, talk of systemic racism is the beginning of a new set of pogroms:
When leftist organizations blame the economic failure of blacks on “systemic oppression” or “racism”, they are establishing and fanning the flames of the desire for ethnic persecution. That is the story of all anti-Chinese pogroms and if we are being honest, all famous anti-Semitic pogroms, including the current one perpetrated by Hamas. Pogroms are a tool of the uncivilized against the civilized. They are motivated by the delusional belief that an ethnic group’s failure is due to the miasmatic conspiracy of another.
I will leave readers to decide what to make of Chau’s proposal. For my part, my own family was on the receiving end of many of those anti-Semitic pogroms, and I don’t much appreciate the comparison.
6.1.2. Razib Khan
Razib Khan is a writer. In what is becoming something of a theme for Manifest attendees, Khan was chased from his contract as an op-ed writer at the New York Times after a scathing exposé of past racist remarks.
Khan wrote frequently for the usual slate of magazines, writing a regular column at the Unz Review, a letter exchange with Steven Sailer (the founder of the HBD movement) at VDARE, and a review of Charles Murray’s The bell curve at Quilette. (In later posts, we will discuss another review of The bell curve, this time at LessWrong, with 94 karma as of the time of writing).
Khan has explicitly held that HBD is not racist, writing in an article for the Unz Review entitled “Wow – Times Have Changed, But It’s Still Whitey’s Fault!” that:
For what it’s worth, I believe that one need not be racist (and use normative language like “superior” and “inferior”) and still accept human biodiversity.
I think that Khan does a bit more than excuse HBD. His letter exchange with Sailer shows a disquieting comfort speaking the language of race science, often in coarse terms. For example:
If by “intelligence” one means analytic reasoning skills, it seems that the Northeast Asians —Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans — are somewhat more intelligent than the white norm. … Most of the evidence also seems to point to New World Indians’ scoring slightly below whites. Thus, Mestizos (white-Indian mixes) would have slightly lower IQs than whites, while Eurasians (white-East Asian crosses) would have slightly higher IQs. The correlation between the increasing blondeness of high I.Q. Eurasians would be somewhat mitigated if the less intelligent Eurasian men happened to import intelligent East Asian women to make up for their competitive disadvantage on the marriage market, while the more intelligent Eurasians would marry less intelligent blondes (i.e., European derived females). The key is how much more intelligent the high status Eurasian males are, and how much more intelligent Asian females are vs. European females.
In addition, the most intelligent Eurasian men might also be the most “nerdish” as Mr. Sailer would say … This would make it rather more difficult for them to attract high status “blondes.” What I am saying is that there is a difference between the macho Mestizo and black men, who attain high status in most likely extroverted fields (say entertainment, sports, law, politics, and business) while highly intelligent Eurasians might be funneling into scientific fields, making their values, and their possible mates, a bit different. Melinda French Gates for instance, to use the classic example of a nerd-wife, is attractive, but not blonde.
And one last thing: I am sure no one who reads VDARE has watched any pornography of late, but if anyone would care to, they would find that the only class of women that rivals busty blondes in disproportionate numbers in American pornography is East Asian females.
It is, from this and other exchanges, frustratingly hard to pin any specifically problematic views on Khan, beyond general crudeness and poor choice of friends. After all, Khan did not say that any of the differences he discusses have a biological rather than cultural cause. But one does not casually write such words in a letter exchange with the founder of the HBD movement in a flagrantly racist magazine, and certainly Khan knows how these and other words of his would have been read.
6.1.3. Stephen Hsu
Stephen Hsu is a physicist at Michigan State University. Hsu was chased from his position as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Michigan State by two petitions on behalf of Michigan State faculty, staff and students (see here and here).
Those petitions called out Hsu for a range of statements seeming to endorse key tenets of scientific racism. In particular, Hsu several times expressed sympathy for, or perhaps endorsed the view that there are nontrivial genetically-mediated differences in intelligence and cognitive ability between racial groups and that these differences are worthy of scientific study (see here, here, here).
Hsu did, of course, raise the usual complaints that he had been misunderstood. Interested readers can click here to follow some of Hsu’s responses, together with replies by Dr. John Jackson, who studies the alt right.
6.1.4. An emerging pattern
Between Manifest 2023 and Manifest 2024, readers could not be blamed for detecting an emerging pattern of scientific racists invited as speakers or special guests. We will see below that the organizers of Manifest 2024 maintained, as they had the year before, that these individuals had been invited primarily because of their interest to the forecasting community.
That is, I must say, a startlingly large number of scientific racists who just happen to be of interest to the forecasting community. Are the organizers leaving out other reasons for inviting these speakers? Or have they correctly captured the interests of the forecasting community? Neither conclusion would be especially pretty.
6.2. Afterparty
After the conference, an unofficial afterparty was hosted by Curtis Yarvin. Accounts of the party and its relationship to the conference differ, but here is a middle-of-the-road summary by one of the more prominent complainants:
Yarvin wasn’t there as an attendee or as an invitee, but both his personal assistant and many people who seemed to have close ties to him were attending the events. Many attendees also took part in the afterparty organized by Yarvin at his house.
Before discussing the details of this party, it is important to say a few words about Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is one of the founders of the neoreactionary (NRx) or dark enlightenment movement. The sociologist Roger Burrows outlines five key tenets of the neoreactionary movement:
(1) An opposition to democratic forms of governance; (2) an attempt to construct a new patchwork of (city-) state forms in which ‘exit’ is the only ‘human right’ (3) an attack on discourses that foreground notions of human equality; (4) a (welcoming) belief in the inevitability of an approaching singularity in which AI and bio-technologies begin to meld with the human form; (5) and, for now, the necessity to undermine actors who promulgate ideologies of democracy, equality or who advocate for the regulation of science and technology. [Numbers added]
Although Yarvin’s views are contested, most have seen his views as decidedly racist. Burrows continues:
The Dark Enlightenment is, at its core, a eugenic philosophy of what [Nick] Land has termed ‘hyper-racism’. In Land’s schema, the consumers ‘exiting’ from competing gov-corps quickly form themselves into, often racially based, microstates. Capitalist deterritorialization combines with on-going genetic separation between global elites and the rest of the population resulting in complex new forms of ‘Human Bio-diversity’ (HBD).
Rosie Gray concludes much the same for The Atlantic:
Yarvin’s posts on history, race, and governance are written in a style that is detached and edgy, to say the least. “What’s so bad about the Nazis?” he asked in a blog post in 2008, writing, “we are taught that the Nazis were bad because they committed mass murder, to wit, the Holocaust. On the other hand… (a): none of the parties fighting against the Nazis, including us, seems to have given much of a damn about the Jews or the Holocaust. (b): one of the parties on our side was the Soviet Union, whose record of mass murder was known at the time and was at least as awful as the Nazis’.” “It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin wrote in 2007. In a 2009 post about the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s defense of slavery, he argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others.
With this in mind, one might guess what happened at the Yarvin afterparty. Accounts differ, but here is one account by the same complainant whose words began this subsection:
If you were fun to hang around with, you probably were also invited to the Curtis Yarvin afterparty as well. The party featured almost every single person from the three events that fell under the category “vaguely racist” (the more cringy or overtly racist ones weren’t invited), along with many people who were there probably just out of sheer curiosity (these included some pretty famous people within the community, but I am not naming names). Newbies thought that the party was kind of lame, and the amount of controversial things being said was only about half a notch worse than what was already being said after midnight during Manifest when people didn’t have as many social guards up. Anti-trans sentiment, however, appeared to be way higher during the Yarvin party, even if race stuff was not much worse. And wow, some people really do idolize this Yarvin dude.
What did the organizers of Manifest 2024 do about this afterparty? We might expect that the organizers would have taken prior action to dissuade people from attending the party, or post-hoc action to condemn the party and ensure that no suitable event takes place in the future.
Please write to me by email if you know of any substantive action taken, either to prevent or to condemn this party. I know of none.
7. Manifest 2024: Expressions of concern
How did effective altruists and their allies react to the events of Manifest 2024? Perhaps the best way to get a sense of the discussion would be to read the discussion on the EA Forum (especially this and this) and adjacent venues. However, I recognize that readers’ time is limited, so I will do my best to summarize some representative reactions from what has become quite a voluminous discussion.
In this section, I discuss some ways in which effective altruists and their allies expressed concern for the events of Manifest 2024. Then in the next section, I discuss some ways in which they expressed rather less concern.
7.1. Quitting
We saw above that Peter Wildeford, co-CEO of Rethink Priorities, withdrew from any involvement with Manifold or Manifest last year after Hanania’s invitation. Shakeel Hashim, formerly head of communications at CEA, did the same. While Wildeford and Hashim were ahead of the curve in this matter, they were followed in 2024 by a number of others.
Bob Jacobs, the organizer of EA Ghent, withdrew entirely from the EA movement, citing Manifest 2024 as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. An anonymous effective altruist quit for a number of reasons, including the concern that effective altruism had become “a community whose commendable openness to unbiased discussion of any idea is being misused by questionable actors to platform their views.”
7.2 Blanket condemnation
Racism is one of the most destructive forces in modern society. Some commentators were rightly appalled at the influx of racists at Manifest 2024, and made their displeasure known.
Shakeel Hashim, formerly head of communications at CEA and now a Tarbell Fellow, wrote:
By far the most dismaying part of my work at CEA was the increasing realisation that a big chunk of the rationalist community is just straight up racist. EA != rationalism, but I do think major EA orgs need to do a better job at cutting ties with them. Fixing the rationalism community seems beyond hope for me — prominent leaders are some of the worst offenders here, and it’s hard to see them going away. And the entire “truth seeking” approach is often a thinly veiled disguise for indulging in racism.
And David Mathers wrote:
We need to get better as a community in excluding extreme right authoritarian people from spaces associated with us. It’s bad stuff on its merits, it’s uncomfortable for many EAs who are not straight white men (not all necessarily obviously more than literally zero very right-wing people of colour are fine with this stuff, and some are in EA), and it makes me and I suspect other people nervous about publicly identifying with EA.
Both Hashim and Mathers clearly condemn the events at Manifold, and we will see below that a number express more muted versions of the same condemnation.
7.3. Rethinking organization
We will see in the next section that two of the three organizers have not substantially repented for their actions at Manifest 2024. However, the third organizer, Rachel Weinberg, does appear to have some regrets. Weinberg writes in response to the original critical post about Manifest 2024:
Overall, I’m sympathetic to the point this post is making. This is tricky because I think I could defend the choice to have any of the individual controversial speakers … That said, in the end, the concentration of the edgy people was weirdly high, in a way that seems to have skewed your experience significantly. I’m sorry. As Saul and Austin have indicated in their comments, this was a thing we were concerned about, and though we took some action to correct it, perhaps we didn’t totally succeed.
This is about as thin of an apology and a reconsideration as it is possible to make. Nevertheless, it is better than nothing, and it is appreciated.
7.4. Explanations of social dynamics
It can be very difficult for those who are not the targets of racism to understand how racist systems operate. It is therefore helpful to explain, when possible, how racist speech functions to oppress and silence, while at the same time disguising itself in a more innocent form.
Some commentators went out of their way to explain how racism was operative at Manifest 2024. For example, Rubi J. Hudson considers Austin Chen’s suggestion that “My plan was then to invite & highlight folks who could balance this [the racists] out”. Hudson responds:
I think this is basically a misconception of how the social dynamics at play work. People aren’t worried about the relative number of “racists”, they’re worried about the absolute number. The primary concern is not that they will be exposed to racism at the conference itself, but rather that attending a conference together will be taken as a signal of support for the racists, saying that they are welcome in the community. To pick Hanania as an example, since he has the most clearly documented history of racist statements, I have peers who would absolutely see me choosing to attend the same conference as him as a sign that I don’t think he’s too bad. And if I know that expectation and chose to go anyway, there would be additional merit to that reading.
Likewise, Nathan Young quotes a well-known blog post by Bryan Caplan acknowledging how discussions of race and IQ often proceed in practice:
My fellow IQ realists are, on average, a scary bunch. People who vocally defend the power of IQ are vastly more likely than normal people to advocate extreme human rights violations. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a One-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a No-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forced sterilization for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forcible exile of people with low IQs – fellow citizens, not just immigrants. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate murdering people with low IQs.
This is important, because even those who believe that it should in principle be permissible to discuss questions about race and IQ might still worry that Hanania and other invitees do not exactly discuss these questions in a healthy way.
7.5. Muted opposition
Many effective altruists have learned that strong opposition to racism is not a good strategy for those who desire to retain their position within the movement. There were, however, a number of more muted protests.
For example, James Herbert, the co-director of EA Netherlands, wrote:
If you’re seeing things on the forum right now that boggle your mind, you’re not alone. Forum users are only a subset of the EA community. As a professional community builder, I’m fortunate enough to know many people in the EA community IRL, and I suspect most of them would think it’d be ridiculous to give a platform to someone like Hanania.
Similarly, Ben Stewart, a research fellow at Open Philanthropy, linked to a philosophical defense of `no platforming’ by Robert Simpson and Amia Srinivasan. Stewart suggested that this defense might apply well to recent discourse.
A subtler form of opposition came from Dustin Moskovitz, currently the largest funder of effective altruist causes. Moskovitz announced that he would be pulling back from funding a small subset of causes. Although Moskovitz did not offer an exhaustive list of causes, Moskovitz did suggest that he had lost interest in funding rationalist events such as Manifest based on their penchant for platforming those who hold fringe views:
My view is that rationalists are the force that actively makes room for it (via decoupling norms), even in “guest” spaces. There is another post on the forum from last week that seems like a frankly stark example. I cannot control what the EA community chooses for itself norm-wise, but I can control whether I fuel it.
Sometimes it is the quietest words of protest that speak most loudly, and I think that rationalists would do well to heed these words. While I will not speculate on the full extent of funding changes, I hope that the message of these words is received. Most respectable individuals are not willing to be associated with events such as Manifest or the movements that host them, and they may well vote with their wallets against repeated misbehavior.
8. Manifest 2024: Expressions of unconcern
Although many authors expressed grave concern over the events of Manifest 2024, a good number expressed less concern. Here are some common ways in which some authors’ relative lack of concern made itself felt in recent discussions.
8.1. Failing to rethink organization
We saw above that one of the three organizers of Manifest 2024 expresses some remorse about the invitations sent to scientific racists. The other two organizers, however, do not clearly share her attitude.
In a post entitled `Why so many “racists” at Manifest?‘, Austin Chen writes:
I stand behind every one of the speakers we asked to come; they have taught me much, and I am grateful they chose to attend our event.
Elsewhere, Saul Munn writes:
Most of the comments that critique my/rachel’s/austin’s decisions (and many of the ones supporting our decisions!) have made me quite sad/anxious/ashamed in ways i don’t endorse — and (most) have done ~nothing to reduce the likelihood that i invite speakers who the commenters consider racist to the next manifest.
I have no reason to believe that either of these two organizers have learned their lesson, or that they will avoid platforming racists next year if given the chance.
8.2. Fake news
Effective altruists have taken something of an endless beating in the popular press. Perhaps as a result of this, they have become increasingly willing to condemn hostile articles as mere hitpeices or fake news, even when those articles are produced by world-leading journalists in internationally-renowned venues.
Indeed, the lead author of the Guardian piece, Jason Wilson, is a regular Guardian contributor whose journalism focuses largely on racism, extremism and the alt-right. This would, one supposes, make Wilson a leading journalistic authority on precisely the issue at hand. However, effective altruists and their allies often expressed a different view.
For example, a leading effective altruist blogger calls the Guardian article a “ridiculous hit piece,” which links to the “dishonest New York Times smear piece criticizing Scott” Alexander.
One EA-adjacent reader penned an article for no less than Quilette in defense of Manifest 2024. This article called the Guardian article an exercise in “truly lamentable journalism, replete with factual errors, misrepresentations of key people and ideas, and a general attitude of haughty contempt that seeks to denounce rather than understand and explain.” It complained of the article’s “shabbiness” and held that “the authors seem to be entirely unfamiliar with the subculture about which they are writing”. The article was particularly upset about “disgraceful allegations … directed at former Duke and Penn professor Jonathan Anomaly, whom they describe as a ‘eugenicist.’” This is, one is led to assume, less disgraceful than the introduction Anomaly was given at Manifest 2023: we saw above that Anomaly was introduced there as a “professor and eugenicist”.
Oliver Habryka, a leading rationalist and head of Lightcone Infrastructure (which owns the campus that hosted Manifest 2024) complained that “A recent Guardian article about events hosted at our conference venue Lighthaven is full of simple factual inaccuracies”
Echoing Habryka, journalist Kelsey Piper complains that “Wow. The wacky Guardian piece is badly wrong about many things, but mostly things for which I wouldn’t expect a correction… but this is way past that.”
This level of distrust in mainstream media is disquieting. It reminds me to some extent of an exchange I had with Eliezer Yudkowsky, detailed in Part 4 of my series on Belonging. There Yudkowsky responded to a TIME Magazine article on sexual misconduct in effective altruism by claiming that “I’ve had worse experiences with coverage from professional journalists than I have from random bloggers.”
I do understand that effective altruists are scarred from repeated criticism by the media. They have taken quite a beating. That is, however, no excuse to conclude that the media is unreliable. It might be a better reason to ask whether the media has a point.
8.3. Denials of intent to platform
To hear the organizers tell it, all of the speakers at Manifest 2023 and Manifest 2024 were invited simply for their interest to the forecasting community. The fact that they all happened to share one extremely toxic set of opinions was of no consequence.
For example, we saw above that Austin Chen defended his decision to invite Hanania to Manifest 2023 on the grounds of Hanania’s relevance to forecasting. Chen offers the same defense of his most controversial invitations to Manifest 2024, writing:
My criteria for inviting a speaker or special guest was roughly, “this person is notable, has something interesting to share, would enjoy Manifest, and many of our attendees would enjoy hearing from them”. Specifically:
- Richard Hanania — I appreciate Hanania’s support of prediction markets, including partnering with Manifold to run a forecasting competition on serious geopolitical topics and writing to the CFTC in defense of Kalshi. (In response to backlash last year, I wrote a post on my decision to invite Hanania, specifically)
- Simone and Malcolm Collins — I’ve enjoyed their Pragmatist’s Guide series, which goes deep into topics like dating, governance, and religion. I think the world would be better with more kids in it, and thus support pronatalism. I also find the two of them to be incredibly energetic and engaging speakers IRL.
- Jonathan Anomaly — I attended a talk Dr. Anomaly gave about the state-of-the-art on polygenic embryonic screening. I was very impressed that something long-considered science fiction might be close to viable, and thought that other folks would also enjoy learning about this topic.
- Brian Chau — I’ve followed Brian’s Substack since before he started Alliance for the Future. I’m quite uncertain whether AI Pause or e/acc is the right path forward for AI, and know folks on both sides. To get more clarity on the issue, I was specifically interested in setting up a debate between Brian and Holly Elmore, who runs PauseAI US (an organization which Manifund fiscally sponsors).
- Stephen Hsu and Razib Khan were invited by my cofounder at Manifold, Stephen Grugett; I’m less familiar with their work, but have enjoyed our interactions to date.
This is somewhat difficult to believe. I can think of only one hypothesis that explains why a radically disproportionate number of scientific racists would be invited to a forecasting conference if they were selected only on the basis of their relevance to forecasting. This hypothesis is that the forecasting community at large contains about the same proportion of scientific racists as were invited to speak at Manifest. This hypothesis would take the organizers of Manifest rather out of the frying pan and into the fire. For my own part, I do not believe this hypothesis. But if I did, this would hardly make matters better for Chen and colleagues.
8.4. Denials of racism
We saw above that there are good reasons to be concerned about the involvement of speakers at Manifest 2024 with scientific racism. This did not stop many commentators from downplaying the extent of racism at Manifest 2024.
For example, one author took to the estimable venue Quilette to defend the organizers of Manifest, saying this in defense of the speakers chosen:
The [Guardian] article describes Manifest’s speakers as “controversial” and then tries to link them to the far-right. … [They] attack Razib Khan, not for anything he has written or said, but for publishing articles in the paleoconservative webzine TakiMag and for once writing a letter to the white-nationalist site VDare. They go on to traduce Brian Chau, executive director of the effective accelerationist nonprofit Alliance for the Future, as a racist and sexist based on claims made in an article by a journalist-in-residence at Tarbell. Ironically, Tarbell is funded by the “TESCREAL” nonprofit Open Philanthropy, one of the largest supporters of EA causes. The most notorious of Chau’s “false, racist” claims was that George Floyd was a “domestic abuser,” when in fact Floyd was convicted of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon—not a terribly meaningful distinction and certainly not evidence of racism. It doesn’t appear to matter to Wilson and Winston that Richard Hanania has apologised for the time he spent dabbling in white nationalism more than a decade ago, nor that his current beliefs tend substantially towards mainstream liberalism, nor that he spends much of his time on Twitter and Substack deriding the stupidity of the populist Right. In their Guardian article, Hanania is dismissed as a “rightwing writer … whose pseudonymous white-nationalist commentary from the early 2010s was catalogued last August in HuffPost.” Accusations of racism and misogyny are not arguments, they are simply slurs used to defame thinkers who do not share the authors’ worldview.
A bit more temperately, the effective altruist blogger Bentham’s Bulldog wrote:
Inevitably, if one thinks hard about morality—or most topics—in any detail, they’ll have to accept all sorts of very unsavory implications … 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?
Perhaps the worst denial came from Roko (of `basilisk‘ fame), whose opinions on these issues are generally too strong even for the EA Forum. This instance was no exception, since Roko did not even attempt to deny the platforming of HBD advocates, but instead denied that there is anything false or racist about HBD. Roko wrote:
If the Effective Altruism movement turns into a human biodiversity denial movement that will definitely outstrip all the potential good it could do, with the possible exception of AI alignment.
I am pleased to see that this particular comment enjoys -43 karma at the time of writing. I would like to see stronger pushback against some of the previous opinions, but one must start somewhere.
8.5. Standing on principle
A number of authors found reason not only to excuse the platforming of racists at Manifest, but in fact to treat their platforming as an exercise in one or another moral principle in desperate need of defense.
Kat Woods, co-founder of Nonlinear and Charity Entrepreneurship, argued that inviting fewer racists to speak at conferences would be a sign of cultishness:
Effective Altruism is in danger of actually becoming super culty and people need to speak up and stop it from happening. There’s currently a loud minority of EAs saying that EA should ostracize people if they associate with people who disagree with them. That we should try to protect EAs from ideas that are not held by the majority of EAs. This is one of the defining features of a cult. EA should not cross this line.
Anna Salamon, president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality (which oversees Lightcone, the organization that hosted Manifest), struck a similar tone:
I want to be in a movement or community where people hold their heads up, say what they think is true, speak and listen freely, and bother to act on principles worth defending / to attend to aspects of reputation they actually care about, but not to worry about PR as such. It’s somehow hard for me to read the OP and the comments below it without feeling like I should cower in fear and try to avoid social attack. I hope we don’t anyhow. … Alternately put: a culture of truthseeking seems really important if we want to do actual good, and not just think we’re doing good or gain careers by being associated with the idea of do-gooding or something.
One commentator appears to have gone too far, gracing the EA Forum with the simple comment:
First they came for the high decouplers …
As of June 25th, the comment sits at slightly below zero karma. I am glad to hear that most forum readers react negatively to the comparison between the Nazi genocides and protests against scientific racists. However, even this reaction is somewhat tempered by the fact that the comment enjoys nearly twice as many “agreement” votes as “disagreement” votes. It seems that most of those voting on this comment did not disagree, but simply thought the commentator was being sloppy and rude.
These commentators seem to have learned an important strategic point: the only rhetorically successful response to great wrongdoing is to claim a greater moral principle in favor of your actions. However, most of the defended moral principles fall considerably short of the threshold of plausibility.
In response to Woods, most movements refuse to platform racists without much danger of slipping into cult-hood. In response to Salamon, it is important to stress that scientific racism is roundly rejected by the scientific community, and that the invited guests were not persecuted scientists seeking to present suppressed results but, by and large, pundits seeking to peddle opinions that scientists have rejected. In response to the last author, I have no comment.
8.6. Truth-seeking versus reputation-seeking
Many rationalists view HBD as an uncomfortable truth, suppressed not because it is false but rather because of what it might imply. This leads them to frame the conflict as one of truth-seeking (open inquiry into HBD) versus reputation-seeking (closing inquiry into HBD, not because HBD is false or racist, but because it will lower the reputation and influence of the movement).
Most prominently, Nathan Young wrote a post on the EA Forum entitled “Truth-seeking vs Influence-seeking – a narrower discussion.” The link to Manifest was explicit:
There has lately been conflict between different EAs over the relative priority of something like “truth-seeking” and something like “influence-seeking”. This has mostly been discussed in connection with controversy over Manifest’s guest list.
Young highlights a number of comments which frame the conflict at Manifest as a conflict of truth-seeking versus reputation-seeking, such as Anna Salamon’s suggestion from the previous subsection that she would like “to be in a movement or community where people hold their heads up [and] say what they think is true … but not to worry about PR as such.”
Young also highlights a number of critics, who have learned that it may be dialectically advantageous to frame anti-racism in terms of reputational costs when speaking to effective altruists and their allies. For example, a Manifest volunteer wrote:
EA needs to recognise that even associating with scientific racists and eugenicists turns away many of the kinds of bright, kind, ambitious people the movement needs. I am exhausted at having to tell people I am an EA ‘but not one of those ones’.
I understand the dialectical appeal of this framing. Indeed, I suspect it is no accident that this was one of the best-received critical comments of the whole debate.
At the same time, I would urge those committed to anti-racist activism not to frame opposition to HBD as a reputational or strategic matter. Defenders of race science must not be encouraged to see their views as a subject for legitimate inquiry, let alone as an uncomfortable truth. It is certainly true that HBD hurts the reputation of those who espouse it, but it is also true that HBD is false, repeatedly debunked, and rests on a pile of shoddy science. I hope that this stronger answer to HBD will become more prominent in future discussions, and that voting patterns will reflect more willingness to acknowledge the falsity of HBD, instead of focusing on its reputational costs.
9. Relationship to effective altruism
Readers might, with some justification, ask what all of this has to do with effective altruism. After all, Manifest occurred during a summer trio of rationalist events at a campus owned by the parent organization of LessWrong. Isn’t Manifest to be blamed on the rationalists, rather than on effective altruists?
I have some sympathy for this response. Indeed, I would place at least as much blame for Manifest on the rationalists as on effective altruists. But the trouble with trying to blame Manifest on the rationalists is that effective altruists are trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, they rightly stress that rationalism is distinct from effective altruism, and there have been recent calls to make it more so. On the other hand, effective altruism remains deeply intertwined with rationalism at many levels, and effective altruists do not seem clearly poised to change that (see, for example, recent discussion here). If effective altruists want to remove themselves from responsibility for behaviors claimed to originate with the rationalists, they need to greatly reduce the entanglement between the effective altruist and rationalist communities.
We will see more evidence for the intermixing of rationalist and effective altruist communities in later posts in this series. But for now, let us consider a few of the many ways in which Manifold, Manifund and Manifest were linked to effective altruist grants, organizations, personnel, and projects.
We saw earlier in this post that Manifold has received funding from the Long-Term Future Fund ($200k), FTX Future Fund ($1.5M) and Survival and Flourishing Fund ($1.2M). (The organizers do note that this specific event, Manifest, was not directly funded by EA organizations, since all funding came from ticket sales and corporate sponsorships.)
All three of the organizers of Manifest 2024 identify as “proudly EA”. One of them also estimates that a modest 15-25% of Manifest 2024 attendees self-identify as effective altruists, and notes that the organizers “also invited many speakers who we respect for their work in EA areas.”
Beyond the organizers of Manifest, many key personnel at Manifold and Manifund are effective altruists or EA-adjacent individuals. We saw in Section 3 that both co-founders of Manifund, and at least one co-founder of Manifold identify as effective altruists. Beyond these leaders, Manifund distributes much of its money through regrantors. At the moment, there are 17 active regrantors: Marcus Abramovitch, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Renan Araujo, Joel Becker, Austin Chen, Isaak Freeman, Adam Gleave, Dan Hendrycks, Evan Hubinger, Tristan Hume, Ryan Kidd, Gavriel Kleinwaks, Neel Nanda, Zvi Mowshowitz, Nuño Sempere, Ted Suzman, Rachel Weinberg. These individuals include many effective altruists, and a number of others who are at least EA adjacent.
Most of the discussion of Manifest 2024 quoted above took place on the EA Forum, so that the vast majority of reactions discussed above were reactions from EA Forum users. A good number of off-forum reactions also came from effective altruists or EA-adjacent authors.
Manifest 2023 was advertised by the organizers at least twice (here, here) at post-length on the EA Forum, as was Manifest 2024 (here, here). Manifold and Manifund are frequent topics of discussion on the EA Forum, with regular funding updates, program announcements, and reflections being offered at post length.
Manifold introduces itself with a custom-made video by Rational Animations, which has been awarded sizable grants by organizations such as Open Philanthropy ($3M, $1M, $285K), FTX Future Fund ($400k), and EA Funds ($30K). Rational animations itself produces large numbers of animations on effective altruist and EA-adjacent topics, and has collaborated with many other leading effective altruist organizations.
All of this points to the typically high degree of entanglement found between effective altruists, rationalists, and other EA-adjacent groups. It may be correct to say that Manifest is not an effective altruist event, and that Manifold and Manifund are not effective altruist organizations. But it would not be correct to say that the events or organizations are highly separate from effective altruism, in a way that relieves the movement of any substantial responsibility for Manifest or suggests that the problems seen at Manifest are unlikely to be seen, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the effective altruist ecosystem. Nor, I think would it be correct to say that effective altruists have taken clear efforts to condemn and distance themselves from Manifest.
10. Conclusion
The events of the past few weeks have been, for many of us, rather sudden and overwhelming. Perhaps not coincidentally, this post has come more suddenly and in rather more intricate detail than I had envisioned the next post in the series would come.
I hope that effective altruists and their allies might use the events of Manifest 2023 and Manifest 2024 as an opportunity to reflect on the role that HBD plays within effective altruism and adjacent communities. And in particular, if effective altruists wish to pursue a narrative in which certain adjacent communities bear the lion’s share of guilt, I hope that they will do their part to make that narrative plausible by suitably distancing themselves from the guilty parties.
This was not a one-off event, and the problem cannot be solved simply by reacting to Manifest. But a strong and credible signal that the events at Manifest were wrong, and that the community is committed to positive change, would go a long way towards disentangling effective altruists and their allies from an ideology that they should want no part of.
Appendix: Corrections
(1) The link in Section 7.1 to Bob Jacobs’ withdrawal pointed incorrectly to a different individual’s withdrawal. This has been fixed.
(2) The sub-subsection numbering for Sections 6.1.2-6.1.4 was incorrect. I have fixed this.
(3) The discussion in Section 7.3 incorrectly linked to a different comment by Weinberg. The correct link is here. The link has also been updated in the post. For about ten minutes, the corrections section of this post wrongly implied that Weinberg’s comment had been edited. That was factually incorrect, and wrongly accused Weinberg of misconduct. I am sorry. The mistake was mine, and I apologize.
(4) Jason Wilson’s first name was incorrectly listed as “Jared”. I have fixed this.