SneerClub

It's the Guardian, but it's still a good read. All of Sneerclub's favorite people were involved.

Last weekend, Lighthaven was the venue for the Manifest 2024 conference, which, according to the website, is “hosted by Manifold and Manifund”. Manifold is a startup that runs Manifund, a prediction market – a forecasting method that was the ostensible topic of the conference.

Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).

Billed speakers from the broader tech world included the Substack co-founder Chris Best and Ben Mann, co-founder of AI startup Anthropic. Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.

One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.)

Another, Razib Khan, saw his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment had been announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDare.

The Michigan State University professor Stephen Hsu, another billed guest, resigned as vice-president of research there in 2020 after protests by the MSU Graduate Employees Union and the MSU student association accusing Hsu of promoting scientific racism.

Brian Chau, executive director of the “effective accelerationist” non-profit Alliance for the Future (AFF), was another billed guest. A report last month catalogued Chau’s long history of racist and sexist online commentary, including false claims about George Floyd, and the claim that the US is a “Black supremacist” country. “Effective accelerationists” argue that human problems are best solved by unrestricted technological development.

Another advertised guest, Michael Lai, is emblematic of tech’s new willingness to intervene in Bay Area politics. Lai, an entrepreneur, was one of a slate of “Democrats for Change” candidates who seized control of the powerful Democratic County Central Committee from progressives, who had previously dominated the body that confers endorsements on candidates for local office.