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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.
"many people here do actually have an unarticulated, possibly subconscious, belief that this is the case." - There's nothing subconscious about it. I believe this is the case, and am willing to defend it explicitly.
You are a minority in this regard. But by all means, make your case.
Am I misreading some double negative in that sentence, or is it you that has a particularly dismal view of this place? Count me in as having that supposedly minority view. I don't have time write an essay on it, but morality is morality, and intelligence is intelligence. There might be some statistical voodoo where it turns out intelligent people tend act more moral, but that doesn't mean the two are directly linked. I've literally met a girl with Down's Syndrome that I'd give a higher moral worth than half of rationalists, I might even put her above myself if I had to judge things objectively.
OP claimed that many people here quietly believe that IQ determines moral worth.
I disagree. I think people who believe that IQ determines moral worth are a fairly small if strident minority here.
@Lepidus is registering that he believes that IQ does determine moral worth, and I am inviting him to make his case.
I think your view, which I agree with, is actually the majority here, though that fact is less evident than it might otherwise be because a lot of the long-timers here are tired of taking the bait on conversations that tend to be repetitive, uninteresting, and unproductive.
can we have a poll on this?
You know >I am inviting him to make his case.
would help to to determine opinions of majority here and minority here.
We have rules against such things for a reason(consensus building). What use would this information be to you? Do you think popularity of a belief that does seem to be pretty contested is really that important? I'll register as someone on the HBD side who thinks that intelligence is not very strongly correlated with moral worth but frankly it's a question that hinges mostly on framing and very little on the kind of thing that makes interesting arguments. Most of what you tend to get and are indeed getting here are people arguing part eachother with totally different definitions of moral and worth and intelligence.
I think many people think that intelligence is incredibly valuable and value raising it in a population as a moral aim. Or it is at least trivially instrumental to moral aims as a more intelligence population alleviates more suffering, produces and experiences better art and is able to develop more wisely. whether we can assign morality to intellectual failings is another questions, that I personally answer no to because to me morality implies some kind of choice and people do not choose to be dumb. And talk of raising a population's intelligence can but does not have to imply some pretty horrible practices of the past which definitely is poisoning the conversation, "We think you have equal moral weight to smarter people but would prefer you not reproduce" is both unconvincing to the people being cleansed from the gene pool and often put much less kindly.
There are many twists and turns in this debate but as @fcfromssc said, they rarely change and people stuck in the twists and turns rare change each other's minds even when they basically agree on everything but definitions.
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