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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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