shredlefiddle
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User ID: 1727
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
A few weeks ago I linked to a discussion in the NYT about affirmative action. The most popular NYT comments were at least weakly supportive of the conservative Supreme Court's coming affirmative action ban.
Here's an NYT story from a few days ago about black New Yorkers being priced out of the city. I'm bolding sentences of interest.
2nd most recommended comment (427 Recommend)
NYC has always been expensive. One thing that was touched on in the article is that families are fleeing the NYC school system. That deserves a closer look by the NYT. It’s not just white families, but also black families. The reforms made by DeBlasio made it impossible for parents to be sure their kids would get a good education. It’s now mostly a lottery system. It was supposed to be more equitable but now provides a path for no one.
4th most recommended comment (338 Recommend)
I can already hear the New York naysayers saying "How can black New Yorkers move to somewhere like Georgia where people are so racist??"
As a former New Yorker who grew up there but has since lived in Texas, southern California, and now small city Georgia, I loved seeing this article. Georgia is the first part of the country that I have lived where I actually see real community and friendly interactions between blacks and whites as the norm rather than exception.
Others chime in with similar stories:
I’m a black woman from Texas but have lived in NYC for about the past decade. In my opinion, my home city in Texas was less racially (and socioeconomically) segregated than NYC. As someone else commented, middle/upper middle class black families were more of a norm rather than an exception where I am from in TX.
What does it take to achieve "friendly interactions between blacks and whites as the norm rather than exception"? What are the success stories of positive race relations (including in a non-American context) that we can learn from? I'm interested in scientific data, commenter anecdote, and everything in between. Let's identify and replicate successes like these.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Prediction challenge: The NYT recently released an article on the likely result of the supreme court ending affirmative action. What is the most common sentiment in the comments? (As measured by "reader picks", most recommended comments.)
To play, make a prediction regarding the NYT readership's first thought on ending affirmative action, in your head (easy mode) or in a reply to this comment (hard mode). Then read the most recommended comments here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/us/affirmative-action-admissions-scotus.html#commentsContainer Without editing your original prediction, reflect on how you did.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
The crusade to find and eradicate this force has not been without costs and those costs only rise as the desperation to find a cause is frustrated by the most likely candidates, culture and genetics are not allowed to be examined.
I agree, but talking about race & IQ just strengthens this crusade in practice. Talking about race & IQ causes people to correctly worry about a Nazi resurgence for the reasons I stated, which strengthens the left, which strengthens the crusade.
Emphasizing constructive responses based on culture and environmental factors is a way to redirect left-wing energy in a productive direction, and should be considered preferable to race & IQ talk.
Moral worth is about capacity for suffering. Most people have the intuition that the welfare of children should be prioritized over that of adults, even though children are often less intelligent than adults, have less experience, few life specifics, and take few actions. That's because kids suffer more easily. Since people with Downs, and different human races, have equal capacity for suffering, they also have equal moral worth.
You don't see people pointing out that IQ does not equate to moral worth because, for most of us, it is too obvious to require further repetition.
You can see people in this very thread arguing against it. I'm not sure it is as universally held a belief as you claim here.
Not for Stalin or Ghengis Khan either or any other tyrant.
You don't think Nazi/Stalinist labor camps represent a meaningful curtailing of our potential for a flourishing future as a species? I really don't know what to say. If you have no strong preference between being in a labor camp, and being in a flourishing posthuman society where everyone lives way better than a present-day billlionaire, your preferences are... highly unusual.
How do you find people trustworthy enough to be granted adjudication of which information the rest of us may be permitted to know?
This is a problem for infohazards in general. I'm not proposing any such trustworthy group. But spreading infohazards is antisocial behavior. It's like deliberately posting a meme online that triggers people prone to seizures -- kind of a dick move.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
No, I don't, because they don't last. They aren't sustainable. In the absolute worst-case, the people running them grow old and die or are killed, and the next generation doesn't generally have the stomach for it. Alternatively, they actually kill everyone they were trying to kill, and then have to get on with an existence made no easier by the slaughter. Either way, no permanent deflection in the course of humanity results. We go on.
We can't count on things working out that way. If we're talking posthumanity, the old generation might not die out, due to immortality tech. Laborers could be kept alive using the same tech. Furthermore in this very thread you can see someone making the claim "those of the least moral worth are people we want to suffer". Social science just isn't advanced enough for us to rule out the possibility of permanent dystopia, unfortunately.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Are you okay?
This seems like a clear violation of the "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" rule, and yet this comment is the most upvoted in the thread.
I used to think this forum was interesting and special, but it's increasingly clear to me that it's not substantially different from any other online community, with the tendency for a single view to predominate and write itself blank checks for whatever behavior it wants.
(Note: I think your argument has numerous weaknesses, I just don't care to engage at this point)
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Chris Rufo has been championing legal challenges of this sort:
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Arealchrisrufo%20%22civil%20rights%20law%22
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
I think we more or less can, actually. Every previous social and political structure has collapsed, usually in surprisingly short order. Those that have lasted have also tended to be fairly livable for those within them. Then too, some of the absolute worst societies have been those explicitly designed to maximize welfare and stability. Human frailty can be a blessing: those who attempt to build monuments to their own reason often live to see their structures, mercifully, collapse.
Future technology puts us outside the distribution of past societies, we can't count on anything.
The Soviet Union lasted for quiet a while.
If such people begin gaining significant control, we fight them.
Cool, glad we're on the same page then.
Social Science is pretty clearly the prerequisite for imposing a permanent dystopia.
North Korea has lasted for decades without advanced social science.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Well, as you age, your intelligence will fade. So if you believe you will be worth less morally when you're elderly, has that caused you to save less for retirement than you would otherwise?
Do you believe that you have less moral worth when you are sick, sleep-deprived, intoxicated, distracted, or otherwise cognitively impaired? And if so by how much?
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
The fact that you think the only thing holding us back from Nazism is this noble lie is truly horrifying to me.
It seems like a possibility, is all. And it's not a noble lie so much as a noble silence.
I've been needing to say this more frequently here and it's starting to trouble me, noble lies do not work.
Citation needed. If your girlfriend asks you if her cherished dress makes her look fat, what do you tell her?
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Why did they suck? Convince us.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
You're talking about a guy that reacted to Internet Feminism by contemplating suicide or chemical castration.
Side note, I suspect unless you yourself have been dogpiled on a national scale the way Aaronson was, it's difficult to understand the emotions it produces.
Unfortunately, it appears that education is increasing IQ but not increasing general cognitive ability (Lasker & Kirkegaard, 2022; Hu, 2022; Kirkegaard, 2022). This is reflected in the fact that not all g-loaded test items see improvement. It is as if you purchased my cheat sheet and became good at the test but noticeably saw no improvement on certain items, namely the ones not on the cheat sheet.
Seems like a bad argument. You claim that education represents an effort to "game the test". But if so, why would it increase IQ? Very few schools give lessons in how to pass an IQ test!
"Does generalize" vs "doesn't generalize" seems like a false dichotomy. It sounds like education generalizes to some degree, but not to the point of increasing "general cognitive ability". Call it an increase in "general scholarly ability" or something like that. Increasing "general scholarly ability" could still be a huge deal. Lots of important intellectual tasks probably depend on "general scholarly ability" in addition to "general cognitive ability".
BTW, I made the argument above due to my knowledge of causal graphs, which is itself something I learned in an educational context. Does my knowledge of causal graphs cause me to score higher on an IQ test? Probably not. But it does make me a better thinker and scholar.
Furthermore, your post misses an important point: Average IQ might not matter much for national prosperity. It may be the case that what matters is the IQ of the top 5% of the population. The top 5% will be over-represented in key administrative roles and in innovation clusters that drive economic growth. See https://www.institutostrom.org/en/2018/09/09/hive-mind-how-your-nations-iq-matters-so-much-more-than-your-own-interview-with-garett-jones/
So instead of discussing the impact of education on the population as a whole, perhaps we should be focused on the impact of education on the so-called "cognitive elite". I think there are a number of reasons to believe this impact is positive. In the absence of education, it seems likely to me that much of the "cognitive elite" would fail to acquire the belief that scholarship is important, get nerd sniped by computer games, and fail to develop self-discipline. Our education system teaches the "cognitive elite" to be snooty nerds who think that ability to solve tricky calculus problems is what's important in life, because they're surrounded by peers who can't solve those problems, and their ability to solve those problems makes them feel special. Without an education system, those same nerds would just be an unusually talented bicycle mechanic in an African peasant village, letting their potential go to waste.
I think the education of the cognitive elite matters a lot, because scholarship is a force multiplier on general cognitive ability. (By "force multiplier", I mean if your general cognitive ability is low, scholarship won't help much, but if it is high, scholarship can help a lot.) A few thousand years ago, humans had similar biological potential and general cognitive ability, but ancient civilizations weren't able to do cool stuff like modern civilizations -- essentially, because their wise men were focused on divining the will of the gods from sheep entrails instead of arguing about causal graphs.
Suppose we did a study in Ancient Greece which found that being tutored by Aristotle had no effect on the lives of 99% of Athenians. It seems like whatever Aristotle has to teach us cannot help Athenians with everyday tasks like farming and shopkeeping. We conclude that Aristotle is a fraud and learning from him is a waste of time. Then Alexander the Great gets tutored by Aristotle and conquers a huge fraction of the known world.
So overall my argument is something like: A country whose bureaucrats are familiar with e.g. causal graphs will make better policy than a country whose bureaucrats don't understand causal graphs. And education is a way to increase the fraction of bureaucrats who understand causal graphs. If we abandoned our commitment to education, none of our bureaucrats will understand causal graphs, and that will cause them to make bad policy, which will have bad downstream effects. I don't think this argument is refuted by your analysis.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Interesting, I think this theory implies that sports rivalries are helping to make America less racist?
It hasn't actually done that in the last two thousand years of future, though.
Uh, have you been paying attention? In the past 20 years there have been massive social changes due to technology. As Noah Smith puts it: "Online was once a way to escape from offline; now offline is a way to escape from online." Social changes due to technology go way back -- writing enabled bureaucracy enabled monarchy, the printing press enabled the Reformation, iron working enabled cheaper and more widespread weapons enabled more egalitarian governance, cheap airfare enabled widespread tourism, etc. Human society is vastly different now than it was in the Paleolithic. Pretty much all of the social changes which have occurred since that time have been due to technology.
In any case, the original claim was about WWII, not the future.
Do I really have to argue that if Hitler had won WWII, the planet would be significantly more likely to be dominated by anti-human values? This is getting kind of tiresome tbh. Please use your common sense.
The US was a winner of WW2. The US won the cold war. And the planet is dominated by US values. Am I supposed to believe this is a coincidence?
Even if you believe that social change is random instead of self-reinforcing, the initial conditions matter a great deal. For your argument to hold, you'd have to show that benevolent societies are such a strong attractor in the space of societies that regardless of initial conditions, you always end up at a benevolent society. You haven't remotely shown that, and in fact you yourself have argued the opposite: "us periodically killing each other in large numbers is the trajectory of humanity". The current benevolent society is rare, valuable, and needs to be preserved.
Then the killers died or were themselves killed off, and the people who replaced them distanced themselves from the whole miserable business.
Not historically inevitable. Things could've been different if the dice came up differently and Khrushchev was a Stalin devotee instead of a Stalin denouncer. Recall that Stalin was focused on creating a cult of personality, so this counterfactual isn't at all implausible.
us periodically killing each other in large numbers is the trajectory of humanity.
Not so much recently. We are increasingly achieving victory over violence (cc Steven Pinker). This wasn't inevitable. It's a result of brave and noble sacrifices made by e.g. the soldiers who defeated the Confederacy and the soldiers who defeated Hitler. (The US Civil War is especially instructive -- if you read the history of the time, it's clear that the North only went to war once the historical determinism view, "slavery will inevitably fade", was refuted decisively and repeatedly by how things were developing. The book Team of Rivals has details on this.)
And social science is how they did it.
You claimed that to create a stable dystopia, we'd need social science advanced enough to make accurate predictions about how future technology might radically transform societies. It's clear to me that North Korea doesn't have such advanced social science. Yet it has managed to be a stable dystopia over multiple generations, despite your claim that tyranny is inherently unstable.
I'm not going to reply to you further because it's increasingly clear to me that you are not arguing in good faith.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
You acknowledge it's possible for something to be true, but for people to poorly acknowledge it, right?
Challenging people on the implications of their beliefs is a standard argumentative technique. If you're not acting on the implications, maybe there's a part of you that doesn't actually buy into the belief.
wait, what moral worth does a person who's braindead, or in a permanent, unrecoverable coma have? In the normal case, that person will be alert and intelligent in at most a dozen hours, but if that isn't true ...
I agree that if there's a braindead person in a permanent unrecoverable coma, we should probably pull the plug on them and use the resources to help others. (Well, under ideal circumstances cryogenically freeze them first, in case future tech can help them recover from the coma)
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
If that were true, there wouldn't be things like Make a Wish to help kids who are about to die be happy.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Okay, but plants and fish can suffer just like we can. Yeah, plants! Plants have coordinated physical responses to harmful stimuli. What makes this not 'suffering'?
This is definitely a legitimate perspective that EAs consider. Shrimp welfare is big in the EA movement for example. I don't know if plants have qualia though.
What do you mean, exactly?
I mean if you take the exact same negative event, and consider its impact on you as an adult vs as a kid, its impact is gonna be lower on you as an adult. E.g. getting a shot at the doctor's office -- it is gonna cause a lot more distress to kid-you than adult-you.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
unscrupulous younger students could wait until an older student had worked out nearly all the kinks in an experiment and then swoop in to take credit for the results.
Did you swap older/younger here?
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
It seems like this pretty much explains the replication crisis, no? There just isn't much expertise accumulating on how to do actual science, in particular data analysis. By the time you get to be a senior grad student, you might have accumulated some knowledge on what a solid statistical analysis looks like, but then you're either up (to an administer role where you don't get your hands dirty with data) or out of academia into industry.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
FWIW, I (long-time EA) downvoted your comments because non-diplomatic comments on the forum just make things worse, regardless of which side they come from.
Lying to you about whether you look fat has differences other than just magnitude to lying about whether the parachute you're about to jump with can handle your weight.
If white lies can be correct at small magnitude, why can't they be correct at large magnitude? The point of the dress example is to illustrate direction, not magnitude. Scaling the magnitude of a vector by a positive factor doesn't change its direction.
That is the lie that you want to tell.
Not what I said. I'm advocating a "muddle through" approach of providing evidence against oppression-related hypotheses as can be done appropriately & inoffensively (e.g. mentioning widespread existence of ethnic gaps probably not due to oppression, like the White-Asian IQ gap), and doing what we can to address factors that are addressable (environmental factors, cultural factors, that discrimination which actually exists). As a concrete point, I favor Supreme Court limitations on affirmative action, because I think at this point affirmative action is kind of just creating a class of people who are paid to argue for affirmative action.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Should this really be reassuring though? Suppose you could order a science kit in the mail that allowed you to grow a brain in a vat. Imagine someone was worried about crime in their neighborhood. You respond by reassuring them: "Criminal brains are just human brains, made of neurons. Order the brain-in-a-vat kit and play with one yourself. Once you do, you'll recognize the various ways that brains can veer off track and get weird."
There's nothing inherent about token prediction which prevents Bing from doing scary stuff like talking to a mentally ill person, convincing the mentally ill person they have a deep relationship, and hallucinating instructions for a terrorist attack.
I think there is a good case to be made that race/IQ discussions are an existential risk.
Many people on this forum probably like to think of themselves as "high decouplers" -- I used to think of myself as the same way -- but to be quite honest, it is very difficult to let "racial IQ differences" in through my perceptual door without some darker thoughts following it. Even on this forum, I don't often see people mentioning that IQ differences shouldn't imply differences in moral worth -- which suggests to me that many people here do actually have an unarticulated, possibly subconscious, belief that this is the case.
Furthemore, even if everyone here, and everyone in EA, is a high decoupler, it's clear that the world is full of low decouplers. Just observe your nearest political debate. So from a consequentialist perspective, spreading race/IQ discussions could be incredibly damaging.
Back to x-risk. In the terminology of Bostrom's paper, Hitler winning World War II would most likely count as a "shriek" or a "whimper" at the very least: https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks If not an "s-risk" (worse than an x-risk): https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/s-risks/
And while wokes discount the possibility that Hitler being a hater caused him to endorse eugenics, it's possibility that causality flows in the other direction as well. We can't rule it out, and the chance it is true should be a major update for how we discuss race & IQ.
If you've heard the term existential risk, you've likely also heard the term infohazard. It seems possibly to me that race/IQ information is in fact an infohazard.
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