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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Another day, another Guardian hit job.

The title reads "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back"

Take a moment to form a hypothesis about what kind of group this could be. The KKK? Some fringe right-wingers? An Israeli lobby group?

Turns out their target of the day is Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is running lesswrong, which is a grandparent of themotte.

I personally have only heard of lightcone in context of TracingWoodgrains' writings on the Nonlinear investigation conducted by Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka. (TIL that this is a name different from the handle of a former motte mod. In my defense, I did not read a lot from either of them. Blame my racist brain.)

Of course Trace's critique could not be more different from what the Guardian writes about lightcone.

They start off by linking the NYT article on Scott Alexander. I think it is the one where they tried to doxx him. Apparently the NYT does not like my adblocker or something, the only think I get (besides a picture which indicates that the NYT designers have way too much time on their hand) is the text "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space -- Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared." -- I guess that is one way to phrase it. Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again, not that anyone cares (but it's the thought that counts).

Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!

Apparently they found no dirt on Eliezer, which to me seems like a failure of investigative journalism. EY has written a lot more than the six lines Cardinal Richelieu would have required.

Then they come to the "extreme figures" present at Manifest 2024.

Jonathan Anomaly is apparently pro eugenics. Never heard of him. However, given that anything from "select embryos which do not have a genetic disease" to "encourage smart and successful people to have kids" can be called eugenics, and given that the article would cite the most damning quotation, I will assume that he is not a Nazi.

Razib Khan is a journalist scientist and writer who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.

I vaguely recall Stephen Hsu being discussed on slatestarcodex and from what I remember my conclusion was that he got cancelled for a lack of ideological purity -- calling for research into increasing human intelligence is not acceptable, and talking about race differences is even less acceptable.

Brian Chau is apparently an e/acc and thus probably the most controversial person from my personal point of view. But then, engaging in honest discussion with advocates of other positions is generally a good thing, so if Lighthaven is more inclusive than Aella's birthday party, I am kinda fine with it.

Of course, the narrative would not be complete without the specter of antisemitism, here in the form of a quote "[Hsu is] often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people [...]". I think the rationalist community is a bad place for antisemites for the same reason why the marathon Olympics are a bad place for white supremacists.

In the end, the plug for this story -- lightcone having received money from SBF -- has no bearing on the bulk of the article, which is about how icky these ratsphere nerds are. It does not matter if SBF donated to the Save Drowning Puppies Foundation or to the Feed Puppies to Alligators Alliance -- either the donations can be kept or not.

Edit: fixed Khan's profession.

I'm not sure what to make of this hostility towards the article. What about it is wrong, exactly?

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic.

Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences. Even if you always imagined yourself an enlightened rationalist far above the boorish outcasts that, unlike you, must have reached these very same racist conclusions through some dark age anti-rationalist sorcery.

Though I doubt this will lead anywhere, as this sort of reporting is usually just about petty politics and interpersonal relations between the uncool kids from school, I wouldn't mind it actually doing some damage. Why should this group of smarts be exempt from the contempt of mainstream society? They have certainly proven themselves to being no better morally.

It seems like some humbling is in order. After all, the very same 'rationalist sphere' in question has proven time and time again that they stand firmly behind the principles of 'racism bad', 'misogyny bad' and all the rest. By what mechanism do they propose to defend themselves after their better part falls firmly on the wrong side of these things? Like, does it need spelling out to these big brained luminaries of ours? You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology. It doesn't matter how nuanced and detailed your blogpost is. Some wordcel is just going to copy paste your conclusion and now you're no better than the evil racists you spent 15 paragraphs trying to distance yourself from. And you know what? The wordcel is right! You did reach the same conclusion, after all.

wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic

Using truly the broadest possible interpretation of a dictionary definition, sure. But we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

Um, yes, in this case it very much is - Anomaly used the word himself in the paper Guardian is doing the Body Snatchers scream at, to refer (correctly) to what he was advocating.

More generally, "eugenics" is and has always been a very broad term; the eugenicists of the 19th and 20th centuries would absolutely consider these kinds of schemes eugenic. I agree that there's a lot of rhetorical trickery enabled by the term's breadth, but that breadth is authentic.

If you are out in public airing your view that it's an inherently good thing that smart and beautiful people are having more children then you are a eugenicist. The implications of what you have to think and believe to say such a thing are obvious.

Most people would not think this or perceive the darkly hinted implications. This maximally benign idly wishing beautiful smart would have kids is not the common use understanding of eugenics and the implications are more in your imagination than other people's.

There's a small fringe of progressives actively looking for wrongthink. They denounce all sorts of mainstream views as fascism, racist dogwhistling, etc. This appears to be their hobby. Getting enraged at "bad" people feels good to them. They are a very small portion of the population. I suppose these people would sniff out the wrongthink in this and declare it to be just like the Nazis and [bad thing]-adjacent and wave around a non-common-use understanding of 'eugenics' as one of many disingenuous rhetorical smears.

Whether most people are dumb enough to not understand something or not is irrelevant. The journalist is obviously smart enough to. Doing the maximally benign wrongthink is still wrongthink. The Stasi doesn't owe you any favors to interpret you flirtations with eugenics as anything other than an ultimately hostile act.

Whether they are actively looking for wrongthink or not is irrelevant. You can't do positive flirtations about verboten subjects. Even if you are an old fuddy duddy and think your tweets are benign.

I don't strictly disagree with you. I just don't understand why you are arguing this. Neither one of us makes the rules.

Almost everyone thinks this though. It's just one of those things that people generally agree on but people get uncomfortable if you're too explicit about it.

There are plenty of people who think that beautiful, intelligent people having fewer kids is evidence that they’re ‘responsible’.

And they probably think it's even more responsible for stupid ugly people to have fewer kids.

Well yes, lots of those people will go on to say inmates shouldn’t be released without being sterilized first.

Let's be precise.

The argument that high-IQ women should either get married and start having children as a first step after graduating from college, or avoid going to college altogether and focus on becoming mothers, i.e. that society should incentivize them to do so, I think it's fair to say, counts as borderline dissident among middle-class college-educated normies today. It doesn't count as 100% badthink maybe, but it's close. Ultimately this is the essence of positive eugenics.

Negative eugenics, i.e. the argument that the fertility rate of low-IQ people should be curbed in various ways, on the other hand, is definitely outside the Overton window. Yes, you can argue that liberal policies pertaining to abortion and birth control actually have this effect in the real world, but I doubt they actually reduce the relative fertility rate of low-IQ people as compared to that of high-IQ ones, so there's that.

Also, it's fair to say that, to the extent eugenics is dismissed as deplorable junk science by the Guardian-reading demographic, it is done so because it's interpreted as an outgrowth of White supremacism.

What I don't think is borderline dissident is the idea that smart beautiful women should have at least two kids starting in their mid to late 20s after getting their careers established and finding the right husband or that stupid ugly people should have at most two kids and also wait until they're financially and romantically stable. That is also a positive eugenics position albeit one less extreme and rarely stated explicitly. But I would guess most people agree with it.

White middle class people having one kid is morally irresponsible in the age of climate change and economic precarity, brown people having kids in a warzone is proof that we need to open our borders and wallets to alleviate human suffering. Liberals get squeamish at any suggestion that abortion be extended specifically to populations with current, let alone future, suboptimal life outcomes. Any suggestion that abortions be subsidized for poor (brown) people or for mentally ill is met with cries of racism, and that instead their choice to carry a crack baby to term should be supported now and forever with more social welfare.

Ultimately it is pretty easy to drill down the opposition to (current thing) purely on the grounds of 'the people I hate love it'. To be fair, the right is super guilty of this too. White supremacists (larpers or not) get tied in knots when informed that abortion rights means you get less black or brown criminals ala Piketty, and there are exceedingly few white babies being aborted these days. White girls use contraceptives and aren't afraid to request condoms, black girls use their (shitty) math skills.

It's perfectly consistent to think that people should have fewer children but that they should be looked after once they're born.

Actual population control efforts in the real world are mostly targeted at third worlders.

There was plenty of drunken campfire agonizing about the morality of neocolonial imposition of western values on local populations back in the mid 2000s already, and the rhetoric has gotten worse since. Between theological opposition to population control and liberal white guilt, population control is very much not in vogue any more. My own thoughts are that externally encouraged population control schemes have never succeeded but that goes too deep into anecdata.

My only nitpick is that you seem to be assuming that there's an overlap between racists and social conservatives. I doubt that is, or even was the case.

Yes there is. Old not-terribly online people.

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And yet in 2006 Idiocracy presented the ‘stupid people having too many children is destroying this country’ school of liberalism pretty openly. It’s clear that the taboo isn’t really that, it’s more as you say in the last paragraph.

Indeed, but that was a different era, before the Great Awokening. It's also true that feminist websites posted recommendations to women for avoiding getting raped back then. It's no coincidence that liberal critiques of the movie have also appeared.

How many people are actually on board with the Great Awokening though? I don't think it's that popular.

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