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Notes -
https://benthams.substack.com/p/hordes-of-vultures-descend-on-bostrom
Bentham’s Bulldog discusses a recent apology letter from Nick Bostrom for saying the n-word as well as saying that blacks have lower average intelligence in an offensive way in the mid-nineties. Bostrom also says in the apology letter that he’s not really a supporter of eugenics as some claim. Despite apologizing, Bostrom is attacked still for reiterating he believes in IQ gaps and “handwaving” about eugenics.
I think he needs to argue why more explicitly. There's no particular reason the truth can't have negative repercussions, such as lowering the status of black people, which I think most would agree would be racist.
Which is not an argument for censorship in my view, whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be, and so on. But it's a tricky bullet to bite, in this environment where preserving the clout of certain groups is oh-so-important.
The solution is to not lower the status of people with lower IQ. It is possible, and quite likely, that we literally live in a world where black people, on average, have lower IQ than white people. If true, this means that, in reality, one of the following must be true: people with lower IQ have the same moral value as people with higher IQ, or black people have less moral value than white people.
No amount of obfuscation, linguistic gymnastics, or averting ones gaze can avoid this dilemma. You have to pick one of the two (technically there's a third option where unintelligent people have more value than intelligent people, but that's pretty niche). An awful lot of people firmly believe that people with low IQ are lesser, which forces them to either accept reality and become racists, or deny reality to avoid the logical conclusion of their beliefs. I would argue that the latter is just closeted racism because they believe unintelligent people are lesser, so all of the unintelligent black people who exist in reality are people they implicitly attribute as being lesser. The bullet to bite is that unintelligent people are not automatically bad people, and you're not better than them just because you're smarter than them. Once you do this, the entire structure of "racist truths" disintegrates, because you're not automatically assigning moral value or hatred to people just because of the way they were born.
The truth cannot be racist, because the truth does not assign moral value. People do that.
"Status" is a very broad term that refers to - how much people like you, how much power people give you, how much weight people give to your ideas, etc. Giving less power to, and paying less attention to the ideas of, dumber people is correct, natural, and impossible not to do.
It's also true, if IQ is just iq-as-measured - vox claims "There’s no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes", implying said differences exist! That they're environmental makes bostrom's claim that "blacks are more stupid than whites" facially and obviously true, only disliked because 'implying black is bad' is considered very mean.
Any slightly-consequentialist 'moral value' values intelligence, because intelligence helps understand and accomplish things. If you morally value EA, or the flu vaccine, or electric power, or 'humans existing at all' - you value intelligence. Claims to not morally value intelligence come from only morally valuing intent, as if "morals" are foremost a standard by which one judges other people (and judging people for being dumb would be unkind). But if morals are an attempt to understand the effects of one's actions - to see what happens - then this is irrelevant, the "moral weight" of the drowning child, caused by the child actually dying, isn't changed if only a 125iq person can run a deworming foundation. Although it might suggest better causes than the deworming foundation.
You’re equivocating between instrumental and intrinsic value. Most consequentialists don’t intrinsically value intelligence at all. They only intrinsically value pleasure or positive experiential valence or whatever. And things that are only instrumentally valuable do not have real value. They’re just parasitic on the things that do.
The point of morality is to guide our actions. Merely understanding their effects tells us nothing about what to do. We need further principles that say which effects we should seek and which we should avoid. That an effect is good or bad means nothing by itself. We have to also know when we should do good and prevent bad.
I'm arguing they're closely related.
Intelligence isn't parasitic on whatever the 'really valuable' things are? Elaborate? Is one, personally, building something or uncovering a beautiful result in mathematics, really valueless in a way that, uh, playing basketball with your kid isn't? It'd be very weird for "teaching your kid math" to have "intrinsic value" but the material action of doing math to not have value, when the former is an evolutionary adaptation that exists for the purpose of the latter (albeit with math substituted for "knapping flint" or something).
The core part here is knowing what is good and bad, which is what "understanding their effects" meant above. You're referring to the "is/ought" distinction here - except oughts seem to depend quite intimately on ises, a person dying is important because ... they die, which is an "is"!
The core point, though, is that the human lives morality seems to be oriented around have content - if you stop someone from dying, this causes them to ... live longer and experience and do more things, and this seems to be why dying is bad, and preventing dying is good. But why stop at saying 'and all humans are the same', when the experiences/lives, which are the only things that actually change when you e.g. save a life, can differ so much? Is "saving the life" of a cancer patient ... for fifteen minutes, after which they actually die quite the same as saving the life of a ten year old, who'll live another 70 years + have children? Okay, is saving the life of someone who's severely physically and intellectually disabled, and will be tube-fed and gurgle for 20 years until dying of some hospital-acquired infection quite the same? No, and it's because their experiences will lack most of what's worthwhile. Okay - now someone who's slightly less severely intellectually disabled - say at the level of a two-year-old until death. They'll ... also lack most of the experiences most humans have, meaning caring for them causes much less than caring for a non-disabled two year old, who'll mature and have many of the glorious experiences humans do! One can compare that to an animal - whose experiences have some value, but who you'd surely claim are worth less than a human, despite them being quite similar at a high level - animals feel for and care for their kin, eat, try to solve problems they have, struggle against nature, etc.
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The bullet to bite is that you are better for every meaningful measurement of "better". Pretending a cracked out murderer who can't do math is as valuable to society as a hard working bright person who does his job is just another form of denial.
Smart people can be cracked out murderers. It's less likely, but entirely possible. More realistically, smart people can have high paying jobs and obey the law and still do unethical things that cause harm to others in a less traceable way, but often with much greater effects due to their increased influence. Just because it's hard to create and enforce laws that measure their misdeeds and punish them appropriately (which is especially hard because most politicians are this kind of person) does not make them good or valuable people, even if some people treat them as if they are.
Of course if you choose the nicest most benevolent person in the smart people group and compare them to the worst person in the dumb people group then you'll conclude the smart people have more value. And even if you look at the nicest most benevolent person in each group and compare them you'll conclude the smart people have more value because they have more power and influence with which to do good things. But if you look at the worst and scummiest people in each group you'll conclude the opposite because the smart person has more power and influence with which to do evil things. No low IQ murderer will ever come close to doing as much evil as Hitler or Stalin, who were highly intelligent people. Intelligence gives more potential, but this potential can be used for good or evil, and it's the person's moral character and personality that determines what they'll use it for, and thus their net moral value.
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The usual bit of orthodoxy is that "moral value" is unconnected to one's value to society, and that "moral value" is what really matters. Really matters for what? Putatively, everything: respect, dignity, worth, entitlement. Realistically, a narrower category: being spoken to and of politely, participating in welfare entitlements, enjoying legal protection against certain types of discrimination, and legal status as a human being.
In ordinary language, when you say that some is "great", you're not staying that they have greater moral value. You're saying that they have good qualities.
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If you believe in the Eliezer school of AI existential risk, than you should think this as high IQ people are about to destroy the light cone.
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I think most people would agree that black people having their status lowered (specifically as black people in comparison to non-black people) would be racist. It does not follow that if the truth was one of the causes of this, then the truth is racist. Something having racist repercussions does not imply that it is itself racist - if it did, then we would necessarily conclude that literally everything is racist, which would strip "racism" of any meaning and make it a non-word that has neither negative nor positive connotations.
Particularly considering that "lowering the status of black people" isn't something the "truth" can do by adjusting the dial or something; it takes the active effort of millions of humans making individual idiosyncratic decisions in reaction to the "truth" to accomplish such a lowering of status. In this specific example, the racism seems pretty clear to me sourced from individuals' reaction to the truth, not truth itself.
If racists want to police blacks more heavily because of the fact that blacks commit much more crime, is it the fault of racists racistly policing, or is it the fault of the racist fact that blacks commit 60% of murders?
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No, I think most people will consider the idea that blacks have a lower IQ than whites to be racist, even though they probably couldn't explain exactly why they think that.
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I think what he's getting at with that line is that "the truth is value neutral."
"Black people in aggregate are less smart on average than white people" as a statement doesn't really imply any judgment of the situation one way or the other.
To different people this statement can have different connotations. I can think of two obvious value-laden judgments one could make in response to the above statement.
1: "and therefore they are the strictly inferior race and can rightfully be subjugated."
2: "and therefore they are more vulnerable to exploitation and should be given extra assistance in order to make up for this difference."
And one is not proven racist for reciting a fact, but rather for the arguments and conclusions one draws from that fact.
Of course people reading that statement will probably already have a preferred interpretation in mind and thus will read it with that interpretation in mind, and judge the speaker accordingly.
I think you're giving the critics too much credit here. The sin is in the truthful statement, not its implications.
"All races have equal intelligence" is axiomatic to the woke. Challenging other people's deeply held convictions is considered boorish. You wouldn't go up to a Muslim and talk about Mohammed's 10 year old wife. You wouldn't spit on the graves of a Confucian's ancestors. And you don't talk to the woke about racial differences in intelligence.
Yes, and I'm agreeing that's the 'sin' of Bostrom in their eyes.
He says "the data says this, we should believe this (to some relatively high confidence level) and operate as if it is true."
So the question is, can one be considered 'racist' for merely stating a true fact of the world without applying a value judgment to it?
Yes. In fact, that's a greater racism because it challenges a deeper value. To make the religion analogy again, what's a greater sin, committing adultery or denying the divinity of Christ? Challenging wokism with direct threats to its underpinning axioms is much worse than venial sins such as, for example, moving to a different school district when your own becomes more diverse.
Wokism is not "mistakes" on top of an otherwise liberal philosophy, it has a completely different relationship with the nature of reality. Truth has nothing to do with it.
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But valuing the truth is axiomatic to rationalists. Which I suspect means that they and wokes will ever be friends.
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I certainly don't agree that would be racist. How can it be? The truth is neutral, it has no particular animus against any group of people. If knowing the truth causes people to do something racist, that doesn't somehow make the truth racist.
I think some truths are value neutral, but not all of them, and this particular one has nasty implications under common sense reasoning. Yes, you can't derive an ought from an is, but that's only true at max rigor, which isn't how most people operate most of the time. With good reason: with enough rigor, the world dissolves into a fine mist.
I agree that people can and probably will be stupid with some truths. That still doesn't lend the truth a moral valence. Any truth is neutral, and cannot be racist (or immoral in any other way).
If this is the case, why did Scott come up with that "at least two of true, kind and necessary" posting rule? It only makes sense if some truths are unkind, which is one way a truth can have moral valence.
Not so. The truth itself does not have moral valence. Saying the truth to someone, however, can have moral valence.
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Only if you consider kindness per se to have moral valence.
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I think that in casual English usage, definitions are subject to political adjustment, and "no true Scotsman" is an acceptable inference principle: "a is an instance of A, and A can't be B" doesn't mean that a is not an instance of (firm and immutable in its extension), but rather that either the definition of A or the definition of B, whichever holds less force and significance, ought to be adjusted to break the chain of inference.
To the extent "no true Scotsman" is intuitively felt to be a fallacy at all, it is on the basis of this adjustment being done too readily and to accommodate overly insignificant special cases. If someone asserted that those Scotsmen who sided with the Plantagenets were no true Scotsmen, few would bat an eye. The assertion you quote, I imagine, is trying to do something similar, in that it asserts that being The Truth(tm) is a sufficiently major exception that adjusting the definition of racism around it does not debase the importance of the latter.
Good comment, but then, this makes it sound like he should have said "The truth cannot be racist*", with the asterisk expanding out into the kind of impossibly nuanced argument that would allow one to claim "yes, they are generally dumber than you, but you should still respect them!".
I mean, can one respect someone while simultaneously claiming they're duller? Seems like it would take some real contortions, common-sensically, once you feel someone is not at least your equal, you don't respect them. Sure, you can still feel compassion for them, but it sounds very disempowering to say "whites should be compassionate towards blacks". Arguably, that's the attitude wokes take, but I think that's the reason they often say things that sound awfully racist.
It seems to me that you treat respect as purely binary, in the sense that you either respect someone or don't.
I claim otherwise, that there are varying degrees of respect, and that all it takes to be a decent-ish person is to extend a minimum level of respect to everyone unless they provide a reason to withdraw even that.
I respect otherwise normal people with below average intelligence, say a hard working janitor with 90 IQ. I wouldn't insult them, denigrate them, deny them any basic rights such as political representation, their wage, a right to speech etc.
Do I respect them less than say Von Neumann? Obviously, as do most people in general when they explicitly state that they have "great respect" for person X, a qualifier that would be pointless if there was only a singular level of respect that is either given or withheld.
As far as I'm concerned, treating other people politely, refraining from insulting them, and such is perfectly adequate. And that it by no means is a form of disrespect to advocate that a 140 IQ person is more appropriate/worthy of being assigned a job and wage that shows the scarcity of their cognitive labor than a 80 IQ person is, while still respecting both.
The problem is, people are asking for more than that. But yes, it is true respect is a spectrum and not a binary. It would be interesting if the case of the janitor could generalize to race relations, but it doesn't seem like it can because of the commitment to equality. It still seems impossible to attempt to use an analogy like that to handle a genetic explanation for the black IQ gap.
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Yes, obviously? Why would someone being duller than me have any sort of connection to my respect for them?
I run into people who are not my equal all the time and have no trouble respecting them. Some of them are shorter than me, physically weaker than me, or stupider than me. Everyone runs into people all the time who are not at least their equals, if they function in society. It is essentially a necessary component of a functioning society that people are able to respect others regardless of others being at least their equals or not. Choosing how much you respect someone based on whether they're at least your equal or not isn't common sense in any way.
That's the attitude wokes take, yes, and that's indeed a reason they often say things that sound awfully racist. So to avoid that, we can say that "individuals should respect other individuals without care for their intelligence." And then really live it.
One can respect people who are not one's equals yes, but I think this is conditional on one not thinking very often, or at all, of the ways in which one is superior, particularly if intellect is the disparity. Which suggests a way forward here, since it doesn't seem like individualism will be making a comeback: the truth about black IQ can't be in the water supply. It probably can only be safely handled in the ivory tower, though even there there's a vigorous effort to squelch it. But no, it would probably be healthier to come up with a way to process it.
I don't think this is true at all, and I don't see any reason why it would be true.
I disagree with both sentences here. Despite all the efforts by extremists on both (all) sides of the political spectrum, individualism is still around, even if weakened, and the idea that truth about IQ could only be handled safely in the ivory tower just seems like baseless scaremongering.
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