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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.
I don't think the truth can ever be an infohazard, but that's me.
Personally I'm only interested in race/IQ as a way of finally strangling expectations of equality of outcome to death.
ONLY the truth can be an infohazard! Bostrom's original example, iirc, was a hypothetical world where nukes are really easy to make and can be manufactured by one man with just glass and wires in a specific geometric configuration. "How to arrange glass and wires in your shed to blow up a city" is therefore an infohazard only because, yes, it's true, if you arrange glass and wires that way you'll blow up a city.
That sounds like something people should know so that they don't live in cities in the first place.
But I'll concede that at some point infohazards grow large enough (and the risk vs benefit ratio of more people knowing them grows great enough) that they truly are infohazards. If you can build a planet-destroying nuke with relatively minimal effort, that's obviously something you don't want getting out. Though even then, you'd probably want to share related information, such as a lie that the earth is at constant threat of destruction due to asteroids, in order to shape culture and policy to best respond to the real threat.
The trouble is that I'd argue that the concept of "infohazard" is itself more of an infohazard than the concept of race and IQ. It gives free speech opponents more weapons, and IMO free speech is even more important than egalitarianism. Free speech will (imo) lead to egalitarianism over the long run, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
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