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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.
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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