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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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