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I'll be damned. EA might just be the one left-leaning space that will survive wokeness in perpetuity. The response to the Hanson deplatforming was inspiring, and support for Bostrom actually seems pretty strong at the forum. This might even be a good thing for them. As they get tarred as a den of reactionaries, woke sympathetic people will become less interested in engaging with them, and the entry of future enemies into their ranks might decrease.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/
Are we reading the same forum?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ALzE9JixLLEexTKSq/cea-statement-on-nick-bostrom-s-email
(emphasis mine)
Once you start condemning the "discussion of ideas" for reasons other than obvious falsity or existential risk, you lose all credibility as a rationalist organization (and frankly even those two exceptions are debatable). There are a few people in the comments pushing back, but that's always how it starts out. The posts cited by DaseindustriesLtd in the below comment are quite damning. Its important to remember that, "making people feel comfortable," means conforming to the dominant culture, and we all know what the dominant culture in London and Berkeley is.
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.
Late to the party on this one, but:
Hitler winning (and let's for the sake of argument assume this amounts to "Hitler rules the world forever", though this is an oversimplification) wouldn't have been an S, a Bang or a Crunch. Hitler's ideal end-state looks vaguely like "a bunch of happy Nazi Germans everywhere", which rules out S or Bang, and Hitler certainly wasn't opposed to, shall we say, "racial self-improvement" so Crunch is ruled out as well. You could actually plausibly say that this hypothetical "Hitler permanent Fuhrer of world" scenario would have a lower likelihood of Bangs compared to RL, since a single world leader is capable of avoiding Molochian traps like the one we're currently experiencing with AI, and Hitler also showed serious concern for silly-sounding X-risks (he took the "nuclear bomb lights the atmosphere on fire" issue seriously when it was noticed by the Uranverein - you can even argue he took it more seriously than the US did with the Manhattan Project).
You get a Shriek only if Hitlerian society both is stable and is bad. I think the first (now discarding the assumption from earlier) is unlikely since the technology to enforce permanent police state did not exist (it's questionable whether it currently exists). I don't think it's obvious that Hitler's ideal Aryan utopia is especially bad, either. Certainly, the part where most of the then-current world population is exterminated is horrific, but that's an event, not a permanent state - even if your goal is "kill everyone except non-deformed German Gentiles", eventually you run out of anyone who doesn't fit and the maintenance only consists of abortion. There's an argument that Nazi (end-state) society is not the best society, but when the chips are down I must admit that I'm not sure there's a better stable society, and an "X-risk" that is the best that can be hoped for is by definition not an X-risk at all (as your source notes).
To be clear, I'm generally opposed to Nazis IRL, because while genocide is a temporary state of affairs it is still terrible, and because the largest group of Nazis at the current time - the Communist Party of China, despite its name - is currently intent on building neural-net AGI which if not stopped will almost assuredly cause a Bang X-catastrophe. But some perspective is useful.
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This is too vague for me. How specifically is race/IQ discussion an existential risk? For whom? What scenario are you afraid of?
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As is often brought up on this, the sin of comparing racial IQ belongs to the woke and the info hazard is the notion that we should take seriously racial outcome data with the implicit belief that there is no racial gap and thus some other force must exist that hampers black excellence. 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, not being allowed to be examined. I do not hate low intelligence whites and I do not hate low intelligence blacks. I am not resentful to higher intelligence people of any color. This difference does not need to destroy us but it may anyways, and if it does it will not be the fault of the people on the side of truth.
Relevant themotte posts I made a year ago (the decision is currently being appealed):
Ontario court rules that the Ontario Math Proficiency Test to become certified as a teacher is unconstitutional because of differences in the pass rate between racial groups
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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.
Unless those environmental factors too conspicuously seem to not pan out, it creates a system that selects for the least falsifiable explanations because they best survive falsification. And these explanations are becoming more and more unhinged. We have progressed to math being a racist product of white people. And that's the safer theory, the much more popular theory that one sometimes hears is that it is white racism that holds blacks back. This does not go anywhere good, mountains of corpses await us on this path. The failure of purges that cannot succeed proving the need for more purges.
This is only because you insist on framing it this way. Anglos are shorter than the Dutch on average, it's a brute fact. It is unfortunate for English Basketball teams. But no one is genociding the English over it, even in the Netherlands. We can acknowledge that different populations have different average traits even IQs and the effects this has on things like ivy league representation and not become nazis. The fact that you think the only thing holding us back from Nazism is this noble lie is truly horrifying to me.
I've been needing to say this more frequently here and it's starting to trouble me, noble lies do not work. Truth is a vengeful enemy that all must eventually submit to. When you promise these people that all are blank slates and that you can fix the systems to make us all equal they will eventually find out that you were lying and they will eat you alive and you will deserve it.
It seems like a possibility, is all. And it's not a noble lie so much as a noble silence.
Citation needed. If your girlfriend asks you if her cherished dress makes her look fat, what do you tell her?
It is not some neutral silence to go along with a program doomed to fail. This 'silence' amounts to the consent of spending billions on making promises that cannot be kept.
I don't have trouble decoupling but the magnitude here is a quality all its own. I don't even want to concede the white lies point but it's totally irrelevant. This is not a matter of flattery, it's people's lives you're talking about. 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.
And seriously, ground level without the high meta commentary do you think this is going to work? Do you think people are not going to notice that this is not working? The indicators have been established, the promises have been made. The indicators will find that the promises are not met. again. When this becomes clear what do you imagine happening? Shoulders will be shrugged and we'll move to the next intervention? The operative narrative is that people like me are actively, over decades and centuries, stealing the futures of black children. generation after generation. That is the lie that you want to tell. The lie that you think will keep the peace. please actually answer this, do you think this is going to work? Have you thought this far ahead or are you just operating on some kind of short sighted belief that if we do the most inoffensive thing nothing bad can come of it and we'll be forgiven? This lie will eat it's proponents alive and it may take the rest of us with it.
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.
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.
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We seem to have undergone some phase change overnight, the consensus moving from «IQ gap exists, but is very likely not genetic in origin» to «IQ gap is meaningless» to «there is no IQ gap, shut up you Nazi». And it's not a few extreme crazies. This guy from OpenAI says:
It reminds me of the days before the war, with rushed, cowardly final preparations, ass-covering formalities. At the time it wasn't obvious where this was going.
The king is as naked /the deer is as unhorselike as ever; but the king's guard are sufficiently powerful now for that detail to be inconsequential. Databases are being closed off, papers retracted without justification, tenures canceled, and reasonable folks are falling over themselves to demonstrate their outrage at the very idea that Bostrom's factual claim is conceivably true or «excusable» – as if this claim weren't common knowledge just a few years ago, with them perfectly positioned to know this. They deny their Kolmogorov complicity, hoping others won't call them out on this bullshit, for the same ass-covering reasons.
I wonder if our resident anti-HBD folks like @Amadan will follow suit? Had Oceania always been at war with Eurasia? Was there ever any IQ gap? Is this just some Mandela effect, or was this about «chuds» posting fake graphs?
I have always expected something like this to happen in case of the disappearance of plausible alternatives to the American project. There's nowhere to run to, no sovereigns which aren't existential enemies, so the freedom circus can just be turned off, bit by bit. This is mostly a blip, and not the most significant issue anyway. We'll see more of such turnkey consensus events. And of course the wave of AI misinformation will cover the tracks just fine.
I don't think it's a phase change, so much as a long-existing deep aversion to racism among normal people. The same people would've probably disliked 'blacks are dumber than whites' five years ago too - I've played the same game bostrom did "just use the plain meanings of the word dumb, it's literally true!" and got the same response he is now.
Meanwhile, the anti-racist genetic scientists still aren't denying that IQ exists - vox 2017, motherjones 2019 which claims "the black-white IQ gap has narrowed. Roughly speaking, it was about 15 points in 1970 and it’s about 10 points now". Even kevin bird c. sep 2022 isn't denying a gap exists, just claiming it isn't genetic.
Bird, for all his faults, is working in genetics, and is better-acquainted with the relevant literature than 95-99% of people pontificating on race and IQ. This isn't about domain experts: this is about the popular sentiment of EAs. IQ differences were common knowledge. I observe this changing.
People may feel arbitrarily strongly about racism, but Bostrom's claim was and is factual, and he is called out for not repudiating it. He maintains that Black people have lower IQs, and is not saved by couching it in polite, defensive and academic verbiage. They're not merely arguing that the attitude of his original text is inexcusable – they're saying he has not budged on the substance of that «racism».
Edit: here's a good example.
Note how he cleverly (not really) shifts from IQ difference to genetics.
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I don't know why you are singling me out for this uncharitable and inaccurate callout, but I'm not anti-HBD, I'm anti-racist (in the traditional sense, not in the Ibram Kendi sense). Not the same thing, even if Ibram Kendi says it is.
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To the contrary, I think this is what drives most of the anti-HBD sentiment. They do in fact think that intelligence is related to moral worth* and that is why they are horrified by the idea that it could be unevenly distributed across different populations. Because that would make them racist.
*I believe this because most of the protestations, at least on the level of internet discussion, are coming from people who have very little life success to show except for their above-average intelligence. The archetype is probably the twitter user who has her academic credentials in her handle.
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You commit the classic mistake of safetyists: ignoring costs of prioritization of issues that have caught your attention. Put another way, you act as if the null hypothesis about risks is uncontestable, even though it may be a product of individual fascination, memetic evolution in the largely irrational environment of public discourse, or social engineering that was conducted with no concern for truth or long-term collective benefit.
Treating an idea as an X-risk factor and thus an infohazard reduces our ability to intellectually engage with its implications, which is inherently bad in any value system that prizes rational pursuit of truth. But more importantly for consequentialists, if the idea is true, this inevitably shuts off degrees of freedom for navigating the world and dealing with its challenges. Taboos on knowledge quantitatively increase true uncertainty, and qualitatively transform known unknowns into unknown unknowns. This may increase vulnerability to all sorts of risks, including X-risks. Therefore, the burden of proof is on the side purporting that an idea constitutes an X-risk. Moreover, you must prove that the risk you seek to prevent is greater than the probability-weighted sum of risks you enable. To even begin doing that, you need to treat the idea and its implications seriously yourself.
And what makes you especially qualified to bear this infohazard?
As usual, all of this has been argued before. As it happens with HBD, people arguing for censorship are already victims of censorship, so they believe their first guesses informed by mass media constitute sufficient argument to maintain the same censorship regime. The premise of negative expected value of HBD is taken axiomatically; you wrap it in rationalist lingo, while others go for more mundane theories. Their models of harm have not withstood critical inquiry; should we presume yours would?
Says Cofnas:
Simply put: people who have hampered intelligence research and its implications, far from having a claim to some noble mission, can be held responsible for astronomical cumulative suffering, literally billions of QALYs lost. We are all short-lived, imbecilic cripples because a century ago Boaz and his ilk have decided that the only Utopia we deserver must be reached through Gulags. Do you accept this responsibility?
You discuss the risk of Nazism, or concretely some HBD-informed oppression of low-IQ minorities. Very well.
Had any discriminatory regime in history depended on research into cognitive differences? Does the whole of the case against HBD amount to excesses of American eugenics campaign, that was ignorant even by the standards of contemporaries? Then that's just nothing, that's incomparable in scale to even one month's worth of Soviet and Chinese egalitarianism that has resulted in Lysenko.
Further:
This is precisely what is happening now in the US. Do you not believe that the worldview which holds that higher-performing demographics are engaged in what amounts to a collective conspiracy constitutes an X-risk?
Etc. I recommend reading it in full.
There is also a trivial utilitarian argument for valuing truth on this issue inherently. As Scott has demonstrated in his Parable, you cannot very well enforce lying about an isolated scientific fact. An entire regime of lies will spring forth in place of the institute of science, rewarding deceit (ergo, sociopathy) with more power; starting with Boazism, you will end up under Lysenko's heel. This is the proverbial road to Hell paved with good intentions:
That's some recipe for a thriving future. Are you willing to endorse this? Is your case for infohazard that strong?
But all of that is small potatoes to a proper long-termist rationalist effective altruist utilitarian do-gooder.
The real point is: eugenicists, too, wanted to prevent existential risks arising from dysgenic civilizational collapse. And they have failed – thanks to meddlers like you. Now we are obviously too dumb to devise AI alignment scheme that'd satisfy Yud. The smart fraction of current humanity is too small for such endeavors, mostly preoccupied with rat races like high-frequency trading and dark pattern software engineering, and there is nowhere near enough competence in policy and education to do this without extreme measures that constitute X/S-risks themselves, like nuclear war with China and Bostrom's Panopticon option. Finally, our social engineering institutions are largely captured by psychopaths who have passed through the anti-honesty filter of blank slatism. We are plunging into the singularity as terrified apes with an average g that's not enough to multiply 15 by 7 or parse a 4-column table, manipulated by bad actors.
And you want to keep digging. Because something something «we can't rule out the possibility that something something Hitler».
Are you okay?
In Sweden, eugenicists were in charge for 50 years and got what they reasonably could get. Are modern Swedes a race of supermen moving and shaking the world?
What eugenicists could win in country like Sweden is tiny morsel of the whole eugenic program, only minuscule step towards the dream, you would reply.
Stronger government with more will is required, and such government was ready at the time.
In our time line, Lysenko won in the great struggle between Lamarckists and Mendelians (who were, as all mainstream geneticists of the time, hardcore eugenicists) but there was nothing foreordained about his triumph. It can be explained by Lysenko's greater adroitness in skullduggery and intrique (and promising results right now, instead generations away).
If you have will, HBDIQ theory and eugenic practice can be easily reconciled with Marxism - Marx and Engels themselves saw no contradiction between laws of dialectic materialism and their own HBD awareness/bestial zoological racism.
https://mankindquarterly.org/files/sample/muellersletter.pdf
Imagine if things went the other way.
Imagine modern Russians as nation of geniuses, nation of heroes, nation of scientists and poets spouting magnificent moustaches. What future was lost.
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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)
Oh well! One option would be to report it, block me and move on. Complaining about votes is the epitome of futility.
But if you're so inclined. Do you think I'm upvoted because of that last sentence, irrespective of it, or in spite of it? No doubt your ego must press you to feel it's not the latter – which would discredit me, my argument and the apparent community consensus, validating you both morally and intellectually. Indeed, this is basically what you proceed to say; btw, I've written this entire response before finishing reading yours.
I have an admission to make. I like to insert a mild ad hominem jab into a beatdown which is otherwise designed to be empirically, logically and rhetorically nigh-unassailable (yes, yes, cringe, tips fedora, whatever, it's nothing special but I do like having this skill) so that my opponent sees confirmation of his suspicions, pounces on it, exiting the topic into meta discussion, and therefore demonstrates he has no remaining object level counterarguments – effectively conceding the point.
And when an opponent does have both an object-level case to make and enough restraint/self-confidence to stay on the supposedly important topic, ignoring the low-hanging fruit of a legalistic call-out that'd score him a win in a school debate club – this creates an opportunity for authentic human communication where both sides may learn something new and true, instead of wading through the mirror labyrinth of ego defenses.
It is my sincere belief that such opt-out baiting should be a widely used practice for filtering out epistemic terrorists and building a high-trust environment – something we can observe EAs suffer from lacking.
Mods won't endorse it, sadly.
(Still haven't read the rest of your post).
Ok, done. It's not quite what I've predicted but close enough. We are an echo chamber so that's why my post gets upvotes.
I will keep making these arguments and pushing them into the mainstream. If you truly believe they constitute an X-risk factor, and ever feel like addressing their «numerous weaknesses», please don't feel limited by the need to retaliate at me for my rudeness by «not humoring» them or something. The future of humanity is at stake, you know!
You're right, the mods aren't going to endorse tactically baiting people to try to weed out the undesirables.
"Are you okay?" was borderline and I almost gave you a warning, but we don't actually mod every statement that might be a little more snide than it needs to be. I'm more unhappy with you openly admitting that you insert ad hominems just to troll your opponents into losing it. You tend to get slightly more slack because you are generally a high effort poster with a lot of AAQCs, but now I'm going to be less chill about this sort of thing in the future.
That's fine, it's about time I improve my technique; it may be interesting to substitute ad hominem with some obvious fallacy that cannot offend (and is immaterial to the broader argument).
Your characterization isn't very fair – «just to troll your opponents into losing it» suggests that there's mendacity and some trolling effort to push them over the edge, whereas what's really happening, IMO, is they're given a good-faith response plus an opportunity to cheaply dismiss it on legalistic grounds. Their emotions don't really concern me, and for all I know they feel very smug and content when calling out a fallacy. Win-win, really!
But okay.
Consider, though, that if you start discriminating against my lines that are otherwise allowed, you'll have failed in about the same way this guy did.
I'm not threatening to discriminate against lines that are otherwise allowed. We exercise some subjectivity in enforcement. This has always, explicitly been the case (hence people periodically complaining that long-time good posters get cut more slack, and our response being "Yes, and?") I'm saying you have burned some of the goodwill that until now gave you more slack.
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I don't think the truth can ever be an infohazard, but that's me.
Personally I'm only interested in race/IQ as a way of finally strangling expectations of equality of outcome to death.
Bostrom would disagree:
https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf
I don't think this is a good strategy, because the equality of outcome people gain strength from anything that looks like right-wing extremism. A better strategy would be the one Coleman Hughes uses: Point out that differences in achievement between ethnicities are ubiquitous across many countries, ergo unlikely to be a result of some sort of unique racist oppression in the USA/UK/etc.
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ONLY the truth can be an infohazard! Bostrom's original example, iirc, was a hypothetical world where nukes are really easy to make and can be manufactured by one man with just glass and wires in a specific geometric configuration. "How to arrange glass and wires in your shed to blow up a city" is therefore an infohazard only because, yes, it's true, if you arrange glass and wires that way you'll blow up a city.
That sounds like something people should know so that they don't live in cities in the first place.
But I'll concede that at some point infohazards grow large enough (and the risk vs benefit ratio of more people knowing them grows great enough) that they truly are infohazards. If you can build a planet-destroying nuke with relatively minimal effort, that's obviously something you don't want getting out. Though even then, you'd probably want to share related information, such as a lie that the earth is at constant threat of destruction due to asteroids, in order to shape culture and policy to best respond to the real threat.
The trouble is that I'd argue that the concept of "infohazard" is itself more of an infohazard than the concept of race and IQ. It gives free speech opponents more weapons, and IMO free speech is even more important than egalitarianism. Free speech will (imo) lead to egalitarianism over the long run, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
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Or perhaps people don't mention it often simply because they consider it uncontroversial, and therefore see no need to repeat it.
It's certainly the case for me - why would I waste time with repeatedly stating it, instead of getting to the meat of the discussion and the actual disagreements? These statements only added if you're worried about being misunderstood otherwise.
In general, it seems fraught to assume that if people don't talk about a certain topic, they must hold a specific position on it - especially a position that is the opposite of a societywide consensus. I rarely see people in here mention that the earth orbits the sun - this hardly suggests they secretly believe in geocentrism.
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Yes, but not only IQ differences. The belief that some people have more moral worth than others is quietly common. Most people, in whatever contrived hypothetical situation we'd like to pose, would save a brilliant scientist, or a professional basketball player, or a supermodel, over someone dumb, untalented, and unattractive.
This sort of thing does not, without much more, imply genocide or eugenics. (Though support for non-coercive forms of eugenics is common around here and also quietly pretty mainstream where it's practicable and therefore people have real opinions rather than opinions chosen entirely for signaling value. The clearest present-day example is when when clients of fertility clinics choose sperm or egg donors.)
Very serious people discuss that link, and Peter Singer for one is an utilitarian ethicist who uses it for arguments that seem to me to justify policies wrt mentally handicapped that have actually been implemented by the good old nazis 1.0.
I hope that linking intelligence <-> moral worth or human status is minoritarian here, but I wouldn't assume this to be the case for neither cognitive and professional elites, nor the general population. Generally, I would have the same tendency to see that link as being the implied default unless explicitly denied.
"Everyone has equal moral worth" is an often-held background assumption for much of the 'professional elites' - e.g. the richest billionares are donating to AIDS charities for africa,' and not the 'clone john von neumann foundation'. Same for the general population.
That seems to me to be one of those skin-deep beliefs doglatine talked about last week - easily contradicted by actions.
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The Nazis did many bad things but that doesn't mean everything they did was bad. If your only argument against a policy is that the Nazis did it too you might need to rethink drinking water and breathing
Not everything the nazis did was bad, but knowledge and know-how gathered in killing the mentally handicapped came in handy for organizing the Holocaust.
The issue is not "Singer defending arbitrary thing that Nazis did (and normal people do as well)" but "Singer defending something that established the nazis' reputation for being uniquely evil".
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Please do not try to steelman Nazi eugenics programmes. Please. Otherwise you will make yourself sound like "Yeah, Hitler went a bit too far, but he was basically right about the Jewish Question".
The Nazis were not doing nice respectable quiet science. They were doing bad shit. They wanted to kill off people, and they did. And depending on your circumstances, to them you might be one of the 'lives undeserving of life' or 'natural slave race meant to serve us'.
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Consider a negative-infinity IQ person, i.e. a corpse, or a bipedal-seeming rock. Do they have moral worth? Not really. Okay, what about a cow? Cows can certainly 'feel', pain, they have desires, some intelligence, etc. If you say 'not at all' - why, given that? If you say 'yes, as much as humans' ... what about fish? Plants? Bacteria? If you say 'somewhere in between' - okay, intelligence and capability relate to moral worth.
More directly, the "worth" of a human can't come from anywhere else than their experiences, actions, or other specifics of their life - is there anything else? And more intelligence or capability enables/ and causes better versions of the former. This is intuitive in the lesser - a downs' syndrome person clearly has much less of all of life than a person, for the same reasons a cow does. What is one protecting when one says Einstein and a person-of-Downs are the same, "morally"?
If moral worth comes from intelligence, then there is always someone smarter than you, and so they have the right to kill you/abuse you because "you clearly have much less of all of life than I do".
This is the exact attitude I was getting at, with old assumptions that the poor were just of coarser grade than their betters, so they could more easily endure pain and disappointment because they were too stupid and too insensitive to feel suffering in the same, elevated, rarified way their superiors with their more delicate constitutions and refined senses did.
And naturally, if they are inferior in sensibility, they are inferior all round so it's okay to mistreat, exploit and abuse them since they don't feel it, you know. Not like we do:
This isn't fair at all. At best you could claim that they have the right to kill you to save their own life. Nobody has the right to cause suffering just because they're more morally valuable. Humans are worth more than cows; that doesn't mean we have the rightto torture them.
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Yeah, if you posit 'killing is always wrong and everyone has equal moral worth', you can conclude that 'killing is always wrong and everyone has equal moral worth'. Except for cows, apparently. Seriously, how do cows, or rabbits, or fish fit into this equation? Evolution very cleanly demonstrates they're mostly the same as us, mechanically - just a lot dumber. Yet we're free to kill them, or at least let them perish painfully by the billions in the wild, because ... ? I respect EA for taking the ideas they believe seriously!
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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.
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'?
What do you mean, exactly? Kids cry when they suffer to get the attention of adults, because they're weak and need to be protected while they mature. That's also where the intuition that the welfare of children matters more comes from. Adults cry less because they can explicitly solve problems. Does this necessarily correspond to a 'depth of 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.
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.
Is distress the measurement of moral worth? For one, if you instantly die, that doesn't cause distress. If a kid was an experienced meditator and didn't cry at age 3 because they understood the empty nature of suffering, that wouldn't make killing them better. All of the other experiences in life are worth causing, and 'preventing a death' causes all of them to continue.
Agreed, assuming an individual's life has more experiences to celebrate than experiences to mourn. E.g. I'm pro-choice because my guess is that on expectation, an unwanted child will have more experiences to mourn than experiences to celebrate
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Pretty sure it's the other way around. We prioritize children because they have more life left to life. They have a full lifetime of adult intelligence awaiting them, plus their remaining childhood.
If that were true, there wouldn't be things like Make a Wish to help kids who are about to die be happy.
Nah, same thing. Their deaths are particularly sad, so we make extra efforts to cheer them (and ourselves) up.
That may be, but I think we still prioritize child welfare in other ways -- even ways that don't impact their chance of survival to adulthood.
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But those of the least moral worth are people we want to suffer.
Um... in the context of the EA movement at least, we don't want anyone to suffer.
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It's a lot easier when you have an aunt with Down Syndrome and an uncle who worked for say... the bad, obviously unethical responsible parts of Enron or Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers or for Bernie Madoff. (I'm describing my personal situation)
But I can hope that many here encounter the kind, cheerful and helpful mentally retarded at the grocery store or at a paper shredding site and notice that the main FTX individuals who actually fuck them and the rest of society over are 2-3 comments up or down in this or that thread.
People with Downs' Syndrome aren't protected from attempted malice by virtue of their stupidity - they're just too incompetent to do any damage, and attempted aggression or harmful activity is promptly suppressed by caretakers (who should be doing better things). Maybe your aunt is a not-fraud-committing executive at an insurance company, and your uncle is henry. Consider: a society of just downies and Henrys wouldn't even be a society, while a society of Enron, Google, and AXA is just ... our society.
We have structured society such that a downs person would have trouble knocking over the light and burning down the barn.
You are correct that with many of the most stupid we are comfortable confining them to prevent self harm or massive harm to the uninvolved.
A society of my aunt and Henrys would necessarily devolve into hunter gatherers who would be in a precarious position.
A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.
I can only think people believe this because they've internalized some kind of balanced RPG stat rolling system and think the actual world works like that. In RPGs for balance reasons you often have things like strength trading off for agility/dexterity/speed. This makes sense in games you want to be fair because it allows for specialization. But in reality strength comes from well built muscles and speed comes from well built muscles and dexterity comes from well built muscles and agility comes from well build muscles. Life does not care even a little bit about fairness, the balancing mechanism is that the weak are culled and their gene lines end. There is no evidence that intelligence is trading off of anything else, at least not since food became so abundant that providing too much power to a brain could be calorically unsustainable. Smart people may handicap themselves through behavior for some culture reason but it's not an inherent quality of being smart and I can think of few survival situations where intelligence is anything but a boon.
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If airdropped, right now, into a remote rainforest, it'd be a toss-up - intelligence is very useful, but Henry's probably pretty buff, and his friends probably have more experiences with rural life.
However, in the past, the people like, say with the genes of, the professionals win easily. They know little about "real life" today, like how to make rope from plant fibers or even start fire, because those aren't useful in the current_year - but they would've been in the past, and intelligence is only an asset for learning that. They're similarly physically weak because, again, that isn't useful for thinking about risk or finance - but in a hunter-gatherer society, it's necessary to labor, and the smartest people would be (as a distribution) as strong as the less intelligent. They also wouldn't be progressive or peaceful!
As someone watching the reality show Alone, where contestants are literally airdropped into the wilderness with only a few tools, none of the winners seem dumb and in fact are generally very articulate and clever problem solvers.
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...presuming that the selection effects that gifted them with higher intelligence didn't trade off for anything else important in a less abstract environment. Old stories have many people too clever to be trustworthy, who come to bad ends. Obviously, those stories are less popular with people who are very, very smart, but one wonders if they point to a balancing mechanism in the social game. For all the frequent claims by the highly intelligent that their minds contain those of lesser mortals, it doesn't look to me like it actually works out that way in practice all that often.
Beware fictional evidence.
Old stories are spread by people who wish to control the people who are clever, by reducing their status. Some of the old stories about people who were too clever and untrustworthy are clearly wrong by our standards, like all those stories about Jews cleverly cheating the Gentiles.
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IIRC (from steve hsu?), GWASes have found, in the modern environment, little antagonistic pleiotropy between traits.
Can you give a specific example of how intelligence might trade off negatively? Reading about hunter gatherers has given me a general sense that intelligence was generally valuable there too. Untrustworthy people of similar equal IQ trick or harm each other all the time - intelligence changes the dynamics a bit, but I don't see it making that significant of a difference, compared to the potential benefit.
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A minority of the people who comment here have HBD as a hobby-horse. Quite a few of the rest of us have settled on generally ignoring the conversations they generate, since the resulting conversations have a long history of being unproductive. This results in most of the conversations involving the HBD enthusiasts and those most offended by them. 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.
...How? This doesn't seem remotely accurate. Not for Stalin or Ghengis Khan either or any other tyrant.
Maybe. How do you find people trustworthy enough to be granted adjudication of which information the rest of us may be permitted to know?
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.
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.
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.
He's complaining that he isn't seeing more of it. I'm pointing out that he isn't seeing more of it, because a number of us aren't touching the bait. The belief that moral value is determined by IQ is held by a handful of people here. The opposite belief is held by significantly more. I don't claim either belief is universal, but while we are not supposed to build consensus here, I'm pretty confident that those making such claims are a small minority.
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.
Fair enough, and I agree that it's generally dickish behavior. Unfortunately, it's dickish behavior that's protected by the precommitments this place is built 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.
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.
Maybe the Singularity will change that, and maybe it won't. Maybe the Singularity happens, and maybe it doesn't. It is not clear to me that, presuming that it does happen and can build long-term stable structures, doubling down on the necessity of imposing some sort of superior structure actually moves the probabilities in the desired direction.
If such people begin gaining significant control, we fight them.
Social Science is pretty clearly the prerequisite for imposing a permanent dystopia. I certainly agree that it's not terribly advanced, but it seems to me that's an argument for my position, not yours.
Future technology puts us outside the distribution of past societies, we can't count on anything.
The Soviet Union lasted for quiet a while.
Cool, glad we're on the same page then.
North Korea has lasted for decades without advanced social science.
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"many people here do actually have an unarticulated, possibly subconscious, belief that this is the case." - There's nothing subconscious about it. I believe this is the case, and am willing to defend it explicitly.
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?
You acknowledge it's possible for something to be true, but for people to poorly acknowledge it, right? Consider telling an addict that "yeah, you may CLAIM cocaine is bad for you, but if you really believe that why's there some white powder on your jeans"?
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 ...
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.
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)
This doesn't really prove it false though! Consider telling the slaveowner who's having doubts about slavery that "well, you own slaves, so"? The way that codes today is "which is disgusting, and you shouldn't", but the way you're using it is "and slavery is fine, therefore". Morals aren't attempting to "find our current beliefs", as that would make pondering morality entirely vacuous, one can be wrong!
So to be consistent with their doubts, they'll want to liberate their slaves. Pointing out inconsistency is valuable.
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You are a minority in this regard. But by all means, make your case.
Am I misreading some double negative in that sentence, or is it you that has a particularly dismal view of this place? Count me in as having that supposedly minority view. I don't have time write an essay on it, but morality is morality, and intelligence is intelligence. There might be some statistical voodoo where it turns out intelligent people tend act more moral, but that doesn't mean the two are directly linked. I've literally met a girl with Down's Syndrome that I'd give a higher moral worth than half of rationalists, I might even put her above myself if I had to judge things objectively.
The statement isn't "intelligent people act more honorably/morally", it's "intelligent people have better / deeper experiences and should be prioritized as moral subjects". Although arguably the former is true too, consequentially - a 90iq person can't cure cancer or invent the computer or whatever, and immoral acts are necessarily counter to some moral acts, so any specific level of accomplishment needs a certain level of intelligence to accomplish. E.g. someone who's sufficiently intellectually disabled doesn't even have the awareness to 'save the drowning child'
Yeah I know, "intelligent people act more honorably/morally" was the steelman. The second statement is morally abhorrent under my framework.
And it doesn't even seem to prioritize intelligent people, as much as chicks with BPD who love you like crazy, but want to off themselves when you don't give them enough attention, or addicts tripping balls on acid or heroin. And speaking of offing yourself, the chronically depressed they might as well go and do it, and make way for people with "better" experiences.
Sure, which is why you don't hold their actions to the same standard.
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OP claimed that many people here quietly believe that IQ determines moral worth.
I disagree. I think people who believe that IQ determines moral worth are a fairly small if strident minority here.
@Lepidus is registering that he believes that IQ does determine moral worth, and I am inviting him to make his case.
I think your view, which I agree with, is actually the majority here, though that fact is less evident than it might otherwise be because a lot of the long-timers here are tired of taking the bait on conversations that tend to be repetitive, uninteresting, and unproductive.
can we have a poll on this?
You know >I am inviting him to make his case.
would help to to determine opinions of majority here and minority here.
We have rules against such things for a reason(consensus building). What use would this information be to you? Do you think popularity of a belief that does seem to be pretty contested is really that important? I'll register as someone on the HBD side who thinks that intelligence is not very strongly correlated with moral worth but frankly it's a question that hinges mostly on framing and very little on the kind of thing that makes interesting arguments. Most of what you tend to get and are indeed getting here are people arguing part eachother with totally different definitions of moral and worth and intelligence.
I think many people think that intelligence is incredibly valuable and value raising it in a population as a moral aim. Or it is at least trivially instrumental to moral aims as a more intelligence population alleviates more suffering, produces and experiences better art and is able to develop more wisely. whether we can assign morality to intellectual failings is another questions, that I personally answer no to because to me morality implies some kind of choice and people do not choose to be dumb. And talk of raising a population's intelligence can but does not have to imply some pretty horrible practices of the past which definitely is poisoning the conversation, "We think you have equal moral weight to smarter people but would prefer you not reproduce" is both unconvincing to the people being cleansed from the gene pool and often put much less kindly.
There are many twists and turns in this debate but as @fcfromssc said, they rarely change and people stuck in the twists and turns rare change each other's minds even when they basically agree on everything but definitions.
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