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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.
As is often brought up on this, the sin of comparing racial IQ belongs to the woke and the info hazard is the notion that we should take seriously racial outcome data with the implicit belief that there is no racial gap and thus some other force must exist that hampers black excellence. The crusade to find and eradicate this force has not been without costs and those costs only rise as the desperation to find a cause is frustrated by the most likely candidates, culture and genetics, not being allowed to be examined. I do not hate low intelligence whites and I do not hate low intelligence blacks. I am not resentful to higher intelligence people of any color. This difference does not need to destroy us but it may anyways, and if it does it will not be the fault of the people on the side of truth.
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.
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