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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.
Yes, I recognized this maneuver, that's why I specifically decided to argue against it instead of getting bogged down defending that I don't think white lies are a good idea either. To be clear I don't think white lies are correct even at small magnitude, but even if I grant they can be that does not imply well intentioned lies can be good at high magnitudes. I even provided an example for why the very same lie can vary in wrongness by magnitude.
This is just arguing HBD but handicapping yourself from using the truth and culture factors is not more broachable than HBD. so you're left with environmental explanations. As the interventions fail at incredible cost all we'll be left with is discrimination.
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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.
... huh, lukas gloor claims
to positive score
Look, I'm not saying that blank slatism/IQ equality is an undisputed consensus. But you point to old hands, people who are aware of what I call common knowledge. This is the new school of EA.
The situation is developing quickly. I wonder what the equilibrium willl be. Probably the same one we had on /r/slatestarcodex post HBD and CW ban, mutatis mutandis.
I thought that account was satire but I guess not.
Atheists would rather say that than the Nicene Creed:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages. Light of Light; true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man. And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; whose Kingdom shall have no end.
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Reading most of today's EA forum posts, quite a few, including some from rationalists, take the various nuanced positions - "IQ differences are real but genetic differences aren't", from AnonymousCommentator to 82 upaltruisms, citing an APA report.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/frcAPFXwiCpNrECgQ/a-general-comment-on-discussions-of-genetic-group
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology
Several 'open discourse is important' arguments, the usual 'IQ differences have no moral worth so rebutting racist claims by claiming differences don't exist misses the point', oliver habryka claiming that
This coexists of course with stuff like bostrom is racist, which is basically being sexist, and as a woman that is not okay
also, from miles brundage, "Policy stuff at @openai"
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I barely knew about EA until a few years ago, so I wouldn't know if it used to be common knowledge. If so, my guess as to the cause is EA growing, and the new people they draw in being less rationalist contrarians and more ... normal, socially-driven, progressive people.
I skimmed a bunch of EA forum posts back to 2015 (couldn't find much about race/iq in search) and it seems different in many ways. When "Lila" writes a post about "Why I left EA" in 2017, it's because of "moral anti-realism, utilitarianism, and particularism", as opposed to sexual harassment. Admittedly, those were related to "fail[ing] to address violence and exploitation, which are major causes of poverty in the developing world. (Incidentally, I also think that they undervalue how much reproductive freedom benefits women.)" - but that's much better than "I'm tired."
It also feels a lot less careerist? And much more passionate, driven. Posts seem to be more about ideas and advocacy, and about the global poor, and less "I'm launching a think tank for connecting EA professionals to promising opportunities. For the moment, we're focusing on mental health interventions in shrimp and chickens."
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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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