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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.
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.
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