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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.
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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