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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.
Consider a negative-infinity IQ person, i.e. a corpse, or a bipedal-seeming rock. Do they have moral worth? Not really. Okay, what about a cow? Cows can certainly 'feel', pain, they have desires, some intelligence, etc. If you say 'not at all' - why, given that? If you say 'yes, as much as humans' ... what about fish? Plants? Bacteria? If you say 'somewhere in between' - okay, intelligence and capability relate to moral worth.
More directly, the "worth" of a human can't come from anywhere else than their experiences, actions, or other specifics of their life - is there anything else? And more intelligence or capability enables/ and causes better versions of the former. This is intuitive in the lesser - a downs' syndrome person clearly has much less of all of life than a person, for the same reasons a cow does. What is one protecting when one says Einstein and a person-of-Downs are the same, "morally"?
Moral worth is about capacity for suffering. Most people have the intuition that the welfare of children should be prioritized over that of adults, even though children are often less intelligent than adults, have less experience, few life specifics, and take few actions. That's because kids suffer more easily. Since people with Downs, and different human races, have equal capacity for suffering, they also have equal moral worth.
Pretty sure it's the other way around. We prioritize children because they have more life left to life. They have a full lifetime of adult intelligence awaiting them, plus their remaining childhood.
If that were true, there wouldn't be things like Make a Wish to help kids who are about to die be happy.
Nah, same thing. Their deaths are particularly sad, so we make extra efforts to cheer them (and ourselves) up.
That may be, but I think we still prioritize child welfare in other ways -- even ways that don't impact their chance of survival to adulthood.
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