There’s more shit gems in the comments, but I think my summary captures most of the major points. One more comment that stuck out:

Being a republican is equally as compatible with EA as being a Democrat. Lots of people on both sides have incompatible views. I honestly think you just haven’t met enough Republicans!

Yes, this is actually true, and it is a bad thing and an indictment of EA.

Edit 1: There is another post clarifying that it wasn’t mostly racists (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/34pz6ni3muwPnenLS/why-so-many-racists-at-manifest ) but 1) this is sneerclub, not careful count of the exact percentage of racists and racist talks to avoid hurting feelings club 2) if you sit down at a table with 3 Neo-Nazis, there are 4 Neo-Nazis sitting down. 3) “Full” is a subjective description, so yes its valid. two major racists would be more than my quota 4) see sidebar on debate

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?”.

Did you misread or are you making a joke (sorry the situation is so absurd its hard to tell)? Curtis Yarvin is Moldbug, and he was the one hosting the afterparty (he didn’t attend the Manifest conference himself). So apparently there were racists too cringy even for Moldbug-hosted parties!

They are more defensive of the racists in the other blog post on this topic: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MHenxzydsNgRzSMHY/my-experience-at-the-controversial-manifest-2024

Maybe its because the HBDers managed to control the framing with the other thread? Or because the other thread systematically refuses to name names, but this thread actually did name them and the conversation shifted out of a framing that could be controlled with tone-policing and freeze peach appeals into actual concrete discussion of specific blatantly racists statements (its hard to argue someone isn’t racist and transphobic when they have articles with titles like “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?”).

Yudkowsky’s original rule-set

Yeah the original no-politics rule on lesswrong baked in libertarian assumptions into the discourse (because no-politics means the default political assumptions of the major writers and audience are free to take over). From there is was just a matter of time until it ended up somewhere right wing.

“object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy

I hadn’t linked the tendency to go meta to the cultishness or no-politics rule before, but I can see the connection now that you point it out. As you say, it prevents simply naming names and direct quotes, which seems to be a pretty good tactic for countering racists.

could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set

I’m not sure that rule-set made HBD hegemony inevitable, there were a lot of other factors that helped along the way! The IQ-fetishism made it ripe for HBDers. The edgy speculative futurism is also fertile ground for HBD infestation. And the initial audience and writings having a libertarian bend made the no-politics rule favor right wing ideology, an initial audience and writing set with a strong left wing bend might go in a different direction (not that a tankie internal movement would be good, but at least I don’t know tankies to be HBD proponents).

just to be normal

Yeah, it seems really rare for a commenter to simply say racism is bad, you shouldn’t invite racists to your events. Even the ones that seem to disagree with racism impulsively engage in hand wringing and apologize for being offended and carefully moderate their condemnation of racism and racists.

If it was one racist dude at a conference I could accept it was a horrible oversight on the conference organizers part if they immediately apologized and assured it wouldn’t happen again. But 8 racist dudes (or 12 if you count the more mask-on racists) is too many to be accidental or an oversight.

how is that not obvious

Well, probably some of them are deliberately racist HBD advocates, but are mask on enough to play dumb and hand wring and complain about free speech. Some of them have HBD sympathies but aren’t quite outright advocates, so they don’t condemn the inclusion of racists because of their own sympathies. Some of them are against HBD, but know being too direct and forceful and not framing everything in 8 layers of charity and good-faith assumptions isn’t acceptable on the Lesswrong or EA forums so they don’t just come out and say what they mean. And some of them actually buy all the rhetoric about charitably and free speech and act as useful idiots or a buffer to the others.

Roko is also violating their rules of assuming charitably and good faith about everything and going meta whenever possible. Because defending racists and racism is fine, as long as your tone is careful enough and you go up a layer of meta to avoid discussing the object level claims.

Which, to recap for everyone, involved underpaying and manipulating employees into working as full time general purpose servants. Which is pretty up there on the scale of cult-like activity out of everything EA has done. So it makes sense she would be trying to pull a switcheroo as to who is responsible for EA being culty…

It turns out there is a level of mask-off that makes EAs react with condemnation! It’s somewhere past the point where the racist is comparing pronouns to genocide, but it exists!

Nice effort post! It feels like the LLM is pattern matching to common logic tests even when that is the totally incorrect thing to do. Which is pretty strong evidence against LLM’s properly doing reasoning as opposed to getting logic test and puzzles and benchmarks right through sheer memorization and pattern matching.