Comment by TracingWoodgrains - I'm not particularly happy to see people within this community immediately present and accept the framing that Manifest was controversial because people reacted harshly to an article explicitly aimed at smearing a community I belong to with reckless disregard for truth and bizarrely sinister framing of mundane decisions, written by people who proceeded simply by reading a guest list without even bothering to attend the event they were writing about. In that regard, Manifest is only controversial in the same sense Scott Alexander was controversial when the New York Times wrote about him.
To name something is often to make it so; to lead with the framing that Manifest was controversial is to encourage other people to see it that way, yielding to the frame of people who treat EA itself as controversial. That has an impact on everyone who attends, organizes, and puts effort into it. I recognize that your own experience was mixed and have no problem with you sharing that and exploring it, but I think it's worth being cautious about frame-setting in the title in that way, particularly given its potential impact on early-career organizers or guests.
I was excited and honored to be invited to Manifest. It's the first conference that went out of its way to invite me as a special guest, more-or-less the first place I spoke openly under my own name, and a place that gave me the opportunity to meet and speak with people I have read and admired for years. It was an extraordinarily valuable experience for me, one where I seized the opportunity to give a light-hearted presentation on a niche topic, chat with and learn from many of my role models, and generally enjoy meeting people in person who I have only had the chance to interact with online.
I am extremely confident that an article aimed not at attacking the conference but at presenting an even-handed, cohesive picture of the experience as a whole would read very differently to the Guardian article and would include many mo
…And if it weren’t for that one joke by Hannibal, Bill Cosby would be very uncontroversial.
Some people’s moral intuitions are that nonexistence is preferable to, or not obviously worse than, existence in a less-than-ideal setting. I wholly reject this intuition, and looking at the record of the persistence of life in the face of adversity, belong to a heritage of those who have, time and time again, rejected it. Life is Good.
What a disgustingly privileged thing to say. People have survived in shitty situations so therefore more children in poverty is axiomatically good? This guy deserves poverty. (edit: maybe that’s a bit too far but I fucking hate this guy)
@sinedpick@sneerclub Nah, I think don’t think he ultimately means icky children living in poverty (ewww) but rather more digital humans living in computers. Unless I’m conflating him with so many flaky/evil others.
In this case, the context is definitely humans being born on earth. The entire diatribe I responded to can be summed up as “People have all kinds of ethical and moral objections to surrogacy. In this post, I dismiss all of those without an argument, and instead assign positive moral value to everything that increases the number of lives, including surrogacy.” It’s probably one of the dumbest things I read this week.
Deep into that diatribe:
What a disgustingly privileged thing to say. People have survived in shitty situations so therefore more children in poverty is axiomatically good?
This guy deserves poverty.(edit: maybe that’s a bit too far but I fucking hate this guy)@sinedpick @sneerclub Nah, I think don’t think he ultimately means icky children living in poverty (ewww) but rather more digital humans living in computers. Unless I’m conflating him with so many flaky/evil others.
In this case, the context is definitely humans being born on earth. The entire diatribe I responded to can be summed up as “People have all kinds of ethical and moral objections to surrogacy. In this post, I dismiss all of those without an argument, and instead assign positive moral value to everything that increases the number of lives, including surrogacy.” It’s probably one of the dumbest things I read this week.