Ebenezer Dukakis
Posts 2
Comments53
it's extremely uncommon for a comment to get to this level without being norm-breaking.
That doesn't match my impression. IMO internet downvotes are generally rather capricious and the Forum is no exception. For example, this polite comment recommending a neuroscience book got downvoted to -60, apparently leading the author to delete their account.
In any case, Concerned User is concerned about a reputational risk. From the perspective of reputational risk, repeatedly harping on e.g. a downvoted post from many months ago that makes us look bad seems like a very unclear gain. I didn't downvote Concerned User's comment and I think they meant well by writing it, but it does strike me as an attempt to charge into quicksand, and I tend to interpret the downvotes as a strong feeling that we shouldn't go there.
I've been reading discussions like this one on the EA Forum for years, and they always seem to go the same way. Side A wants to be very sure we're totally free of $harmful_ideology; Side B wants EA to be a place that's focused on factual accuracy and free of intellectual repression. The discussion generally ends up unsatisfactory to both sides. Side A interprets Side B's arguments as further evidence of $harmful_ideology. And Side B just sees more evidence of a chilling intellectual climate. So I respect users who have decided to just downvote and move on. I don't know if there is any solution to this problem -- my best idea is to simultaneously condemn Nazis and affirm a commitment to truth and free thought, but I expect this would end up going wrong somehow.
As far as I can tell, there's no disagreement in this thread that Hanania held some repugnant views in the early 2010s. In terms of deciding whether to shun him in the present, it seems like the key issues are
(a) what the statue of limitations should be
and
(b) whether he said something repugnant recently enough that the statue of limitations would not apply
Perhaps you believe that Hanania's early-2010s comments somehow reveal a "more authentic" version of his beliefs that he's hiding from the public nowadays. That seems unlikely to me, given the more recent posts of his that I linked elsewhere in this thread. If he still held his early-2010s beliefs secretly, I don't think he would argue against them so explicitly now.
Thank you. Is your thought that "revolution in our culture or system of government" is supposed to be a call for some kind of fascist revolution? My take is, like a lot of right-leaning people, Hanania sees progressive influence as deep and pervasive in almost all American institutions. From this perspective, a priority on fighting crime even when it means heavily disparate impact looks like a revolutionary change.
Hanania has been pretty explicit about his belief that liberal democracy is generally the best form of government -- see this post for example. If he was crypto-fash, I think he would just not publish posts like that.
BTW, I don't agree with Hanania on everything... for example, the "some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans" line from the post I just linked sketches me out some -- it seems to conflate moral value with ability. I find Hanania interesting reading, but the idea that EA should distance itself from him on the margin seems like something a reasonable person could believe. I think it comes down to your position in the larger debate over whether EA should prioritize optics vs intellectual vibrancy.
Here is another recent post (titled "Shut up About Race and IQ") that I struggle to imagine a crypto-Nazi writing. E.g. these quotes:
The fact that individuals don’t actually care all that much about their race or culture is why conservatives are always so angry and trying to pass laws to change their behavior... While leftists often wish humans were more moral than they actually are, right-wing identitarians are unique in wishing they were worse.
...
People who get really into group differences and put it at the center of their politics don’t actually care all that much about the science. I think for the most part they just think foreigners and other races are icky. They therefore latch on to group differences as a way to justify what they want for tribal or aesthetic reasons.
Your comment seems a bit light on citations, and didn't match my impression of Hanania after spending 10s of hours reading his stuff. I've certainly never seen him advocate for an authoritarian government as a means of enforcing a "natural" racial hierarchy. This claim stood out to me:
Hannania called for trying to get rid of all non-white immigrants in the US
Hanania wrote this post in 2023. It's the first hit on his substack search for "immigration". This apparent lack of fact-checking makes me doubt the veracity of your other claims.
It seems like this is your only specific citation:
a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people
This appears to be a falsified quote. [CORRECTION: The quote appears here on Hanania's Twitter. Thanks David. I'm leaving the rest of my comment as originally written, since I think it provides some valuable context.] Search for "we need more" on Wikipedia's second citation. The actual quote is as follows:
...actually solving our crime problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government. Whether you want to focus on guns or the criminals themselves, it would involve heavily policing, surveilling, and incarcerating more black people. If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take.
This paragraph, from the same post, is useful context:
As I argue in my articles on El Salvador, any polity that has a high enough murder rate needs to make solving crime its number one priority. This was true for that nation before Bukele came along, as it is for major American cities today. It’s not a big mystery how to do this, it’s just politically difficult, because literally everything that works is considered racist. You need more cops, more prisons, and more use of DNA databases and facial recognition technology. You can’t have concerns about disparate impact in a world where crime is so overwhelmingly committed by one group.
Hanania has stated elsewhere that he's a fan of Bukele and his policies. Hanania's position appears to be that since St Louis has a murder rate comparable to El Salvador when Bukele took power, St Louis could benefit from Bukele-style policies, but that would require stuff that liberals don't like. Wikipedia makes it sound like antipathy towards Black people is his explicit motive, but that's not how I understood him. It might be his implicit motive, but that could be true for anyone -- maybe liberals prefer soft-on-crime policies because high crime keeps Black people in poverty. Who knows.
If you want to convince me that Hanania is a current-Nazi, let's discuss the single worst thing he said recently under his real name, and we can see if the specific quote holds up to scrutiny in context.
[EDIT: To be clear, if you want to exclude Hanania because you think he is kinda sketchy, or was a bad person in the past, or is too willing to make un-PC factual claims, that may be a reasonable position. I'm arguing against excluding him on the basis that he's a Nazi, because I don't think that is currently true. His 2023 post advocating for racially diverse immigration to the US seems like a very straightforward disproof. If you manage to get Wikipedia to cite it, I'll be impressed, by the way.]
I actually did change my mind recently about free trade after reading this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/
I wish more EAs would read it, it affected my thinking about development economics a lot. However, it's not an anti-capitalist book, just pro-government-intervention.
As for radically reworking capitalism -- I'm excited about this and have some ideas for doing it (example idea: citizen assemblies that attempt to measure externalities of individual Fortune 500 companies and set their corporate tax rate accordingly, then perhaps a prediction market for the decision of the citizen's assembly). But I think the thing to do is to prove the idea works on a small scale and then gradually increase the scale. Do it in a town. When it works in a town, do it in a district. When it works in a district, do it in a province. When it works in a province, do it in a country. When it works in a country, do it all over the world.
One hypothesis: Forum users differ on whether they prioritize optics vs intellectual freedom.
Optics voters downvote both Parr and Concerned User. They want it all to go away.
Intellectual freedom voters upvote Parr, but downvote Concerned User. They appreciate Parr exploring a new cause proposal, and they feel the censure from Concerned User is unwarranted.
Result: Parr gets a mix of upvotes and downvotes. Concerned User is downvoted by everyone, since they annoyed both camps, for different reasons.