WE DEMAND A CORRECTION TO uh various minor nitpicks
also we swear we totally didn’t get your email
bonus from thread:
I am having a lot of fun on Manifold, but if the team insists on inviting eugenics speakers to conferences, its probably time for me to leave :-/
What exactly is your objection to people exercising their bodily autonomy to implement voluntary eugenics?
Imagine being such losers that you get owned by the fucking Guardian, and as your brilliant followup, you start screaming “I’M NOT OWNED”
first comment:
The response from Habryka points out several factual inaccuracies, but I don’t see anything that directly refutes the core issue the article brings up. I recognize that engaging with the substance of the allegations might be awkward and difficult, not constituting “winning” in the rationalist sense.
dutifully downvoted to -6 of course
One problem with discussing this is that we here arguably have an asymmetric discourse situation.
"I’d like to tell you my thoughts on these various eugenicists, but they would be repulsive, fedposts, impossible to convey accurately in public discourse.
Well, they got their wish, the Guardian piece is now updated:
This article was amended on 17 June 2024 to include a comment from Oliver Habryka about the purchase of Lighthaven that was received after publication; in responding, Habryka disclosed an escrow document for the property’s purchase showing a $1m deposit from, and refunded to, North Dimension Inc, a subsidiary of FTX’s sister company Alameda, which he said meant “the relevant funds never entered our bank account”. An earlier version mistakenly said Lightcone, rather than CFAR, was the sole member of Lightcone Rose Garden, and that Habryka was the latter’s registered agent, when another individual is listed in that role. A reference to Manifund as a “prediction market” has also been corrected.
I think the Gruaniad had a lot of fun with this. By hyperfocusing on the nitpicks, the rats gave them an open goal in correcting tiny details (who now cares whether any money from SBF actually entered the account of Lightcone?) but left the bigger details in place: namely that Lightcone is tight with racists.
Edit a few libertarians(?) in the comments are urging Habryka to sue for libel in the UK, totally fine with using the power of the state to enforce speech! He modestly declines, likely he knows it’s not a slam-dunk win (especially if the newspaper actually amends the piece) and that news orgs live for being sued for defamation. It’s the classic sign of a bully to sue, and it generates a ton of press.
habryka on LW:
(To be clear, for LessOnline we didn’t invite anyone who I think even remotely fits that description, I think? It’s plausible we missed something, but like, actual racism is totally the kind of thing that would have caused me to remove someone from the “blogs we love” list, if it was part of their blogging.
Manifest runs a much stronger “just invite people who are popular and share interests, with less regards for why they are popular” policy, which I think has a bunch of stuff going for it, but definitely produces a very different selection of speakers as I think is apparent from looking at the invited speaker lists.)
the long list of race scientists are not “actual racism” ok dude. this is in reply to someone saying that it was these precise people that kept him from attending
Lol this is not the great anti-racist response they might think it is.
“We would never invite (especially blatant eugenics level) racists to LessOnline! The Manifestival on the other hand… (conveniently advertised on the LessOnline homepage and discount tickets if you go to both!)”
i would think that for habryka “actual racism” means something like open calls to genocide, not, you know, actual racism.
I don’t think even that does it. Richard Hanania, one of Manifest’s promoted speakers, wrote “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?”.
The good news is that eugenics chuds are really easy to simulate.
so sorry that you have to soil your diodes with these shitheads’ tamagotchis
With just a little bit of creative bin-packing they can share a core with the processes that simulate the smell of sewage and leafblower noise.
I love how you can see people rushing in to buy the prediction right after the correction happened and before the author called it. This system is very secure totally.
This is going to happen in any prediction market whose events are opened and closed manually. Unless you can automatically halt trading when the condition is met (this is probably what people call an “AI-complete” problem), there will always be people who notice the condition is met before the event runner. The unfair trades will certainly be reversed if this is a prediction market worth even a little bit of its salt.
