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Notes -
Yeah, for me this is very much an "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" situation. I have my differences with the Lightcone guys, but the article was atrocious, and Oliver and I chatted a bit about it after its release.
Mind, I have a personal stake in this, since I was invited to present at Manifest and loved every second of it. I met a startling amount of old-school Motte users there as well. While the conference was ostensibly about prediction markets, in many ways it felt like keeping that spirit alive and bringing it into in-person spaces. Lighthaven is beautiful, Manifest rocked, and the Guardian can shove off.
One author is the same person who fruitlessly doxxed dissident right figure L0m3z the other week, while perennial anti-rationalist obsessive David Gerard bragged about giving background info. It's the sort of article that's much less interested in any real journalism and much more interested in creating a paper trail to establish the spookiness of everyone involved.
The EA forum has a couple of posts on the matter that I've been commenting in. It's an interesting environment, torn between social justice progressivism and rationalist instincts, but I usually get a more-or-less fair hearing over there. The posts in question:
My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
Why are so many "racists" at Manifest?
Anyway, the most serious implication is a potential closing of Lighthaven, which would be a major blow for the Bay Area rationalists and for adjacent spheres, since it really is an incredible venue. That would happen with or without the article, though, and depends on a lot of funding questions. Manifest itself is unlikely to be moved by the article—the organizers and attendees know what they want, and the Guardian's irritation is only so much noise. Time will tell, though.
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