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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.
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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