Reflections On Manifest

My sappiest article to date!

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all 'round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

—In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

I recently attended Manifest—a conference for the people on my corner of the internet: lovers of prediction markets, bloggers, rationalists, effective altruists, and nerds of other stripes (“That’s a corner of the internet?” my mom asked incredulously. Indeed it is.) It was a truly wonderful experience with many of the world’s coolest people: Scott Alexander (who, when asked what his favorite blogs were, very generously listed mine as one of his favorites—we made it folks),

Joe Carlsmith

,

Regan Arntz-Gray

,

Vaishnav Sunil

,

Dan Elton

,

TracingWoodgrains

, and numerous others—too many to list. A significant share of the public figures I admire most were all in one place, available to freely chat with.

The people there were wonderful. I made many friends including [Redacted] and [Redacted]. [Redacted] and [Redacted] were related by way of [Redacted]—so that was cool :)! I met Robin Hanson and Curtis Yarvin and all sorts of other cool people, many of whom were public figures. There’s something a bit surreal about just hanging out in the residence of Curtis Yarvin, the dark prince of the dark right himself.

One of the weirdest things about it was that I was a mini-celebrity at Manifest. When I tell normal people that I have a blog, they’ll obviously have never heard of it. If they take a look at it, they find it bizarre and confusing, occasionally repulsive. In contrast, at Manifest, people would come up to me and ask me, “are you Bentham’s Bulldog?” as if Bentham’s Bulldog was someone serious, someone whose opinions mattered. This blog was born when I randomly decided that I wanted to write some stuff about why Michael Huemer was wrong about utilitarianism—thank you to all of you for helping make it into something more, for being interested and engaged, for caring about the things I say.

I know that about 2,000 people read the blog regularly—or at least, are subscribed. But it’s hard to get an intuitive sense of how many that is. It’s hard to really get, on an intuitive level, that when I fire off a random article about something that’s been bugging me, it is read by a population roughly 20 times the number of people that fit in big college lecture halls. It’s cool to know that the things I say matter to people, that there are actually people who find what I write interesting, whose mornings are made better by the things I say—especially when those people are some of the humans on the planet I most respect, like Scott Alexander, people who have profoundly shaped my worldview, who, in various ways, helped me get through difficult elements of life.

I will never meet most of the people reading this in person. But I am incredibly grateful to you all.

The weekend was filled with interesting conversations. Conversations with Regan and Vaish about free will (still haven’t convinced them with free will, but I hope to soon), with Carlsmith about moral realism, epistemic realism, and infinites. Carlsmith thinks that infinites break ethics and epistemology to such an extent that one shouldn’t think there are precise facts about them in the first place, while I disagree. Carlsmith was especially impressive—I remember Richard once remarked that the average Carlsmith blog post is much better than nearly all published works of analytic philosophy. He was just as impressive in person as that description would lead one to believe. The conference was filled with people who didn’t just treat ideas as things to signal about, but actually cared about them, actually cared about getting to the truth. It’s admirable, even if the people there were almost exclusively Godless heathens :).

Tragically, I didn’t make the last day. I would have, but my grandmother was having an 80th birthday (I know, very inconvenient!!). Nonetheless, I can say without a doubt that of all the places I’ve been in the last year, Manifest was my favorite. If you’re a nerd of some stripe but haven’t met similar kinds of nerds in person, I can’t recommend going to a conference that gathers those nerds highly enough.

In the normal world, people like me who obsess over philosophy, worry about AI and existential risks, know who Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander are, and read blogs are a minority. In the real world, when I tell people that I have a blog where I write about niche philosophy topics, I’m a bit embarrassed, a bit like one might be showing off their Lego collection. At Manifest, however, it became real, on a visceral level, that there were people like me, that we’re not some kind of weird alien offshoot from the human population. This may sound like a bit of an exaggeration, and perhaps it is, but it’s hard to overstate just how profound it is to realize that there are other people like you—that they’re not just internet-floating heads, but real, flesh and blood people.

I’ve always found tribalism mysterious, but perhaps that was just because I hadn’t yet found my tribe.

(I’m the one on the far right—ironic, given who I’m standing next to).