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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.
You commit the classic mistake of safetyists: ignoring costs of prioritization of issues that have caught your attention. Put another way, you act as if the null hypothesis about risks is uncontestable, even though it may be a product of individual fascination, memetic evolution in the largely irrational environment of public discourse, or social engineering that was conducted with no concern for truth or long-term collective benefit.
Treating an idea as an X-risk factor and thus an infohazard reduces our ability to intellectually engage with its implications, which is inherently bad in any value system that prizes rational pursuit of truth. But more importantly for consequentialists, if the idea is true, this inevitably shuts off degrees of freedom for navigating the world and dealing with its challenges. Taboos on knowledge quantitatively increase true uncertainty, and qualitatively transform known unknowns into unknown unknowns. This may increase vulnerability to all sorts of risks, including X-risks. Therefore, the burden of proof is on the side purporting that an idea constitutes an X-risk. Moreover, you must prove that the risk you seek to prevent is greater than the probability-weighted sum of risks you enable. To even begin doing that, you need to treat the idea and its implications seriously yourself.
And what makes you especially qualified to bear this infohazard?
As usual, all of this has been argued before. As it happens with HBD, people arguing for censorship are already victims of censorship, so they believe their first guesses informed by mass media constitute sufficient argument to maintain the same censorship regime. The premise of negative expected value of HBD is taken axiomatically; you wrap it in rationalist lingo, while others go for more mundane theories. Their models of harm have not withstood critical inquiry; should we presume yours would?
Says Cofnas:
Simply put: people who have hampered intelligence research and its implications, far from having a claim to some noble mission, can be held responsible for astronomical cumulative suffering, literally billions of QALYs lost. We are all short-lived, imbecilic cripples because a century ago Boaz and his ilk have decided that the only Utopia we deserver must be reached through Gulags. Do you accept this responsibility?
You discuss the risk of Nazism, or concretely some HBD-informed oppression of low-IQ minorities. Very well.
Had any discriminatory regime in history depended on research into cognitive differences? Does the whole of the case against HBD amount to excesses of American eugenics campaign, that was ignorant even by the standards of contemporaries? Then that's just nothing, that's incomparable in scale to even one month's worth of Soviet and Chinese egalitarianism that has resulted in Lysenko.
Further:
This is precisely what is happening now in the US. Do you not believe that the worldview which holds that higher-performing demographics are engaged in what amounts to a collective conspiracy constitutes an X-risk?
Etc. I recommend reading it in full.
There is also a trivial utilitarian argument for valuing truth on this issue inherently. As Scott has demonstrated in his Parable, you cannot very well enforce lying about an isolated scientific fact. An entire regime of lies will spring forth in place of the institute of science, rewarding deceit (ergo, sociopathy) with more power; starting with Boazism, you will end up under Lysenko's heel. This is the proverbial road to Hell paved with good intentions:
That's some recipe for a thriving future. Are you willing to endorse this? Is your case for infohazard that strong?
But all of that is small potatoes to a proper long-termist rationalist effective altruist utilitarian do-gooder.
The real point is: eugenicists, too, wanted to prevent existential risks arising from dysgenic civilizational collapse. And they have failed – thanks to meddlers like you. Now we are obviously too dumb to devise AI alignment scheme that'd satisfy Yud. The smart fraction of current humanity is too small for such endeavors, mostly preoccupied with rat races like high-frequency trading and dark pattern software engineering, and there is nowhere near enough competence in policy and education to do this without extreme measures that constitute X/S-risks themselves, like nuclear war with China and Bostrom's Panopticon option. Finally, our social engineering institutions are largely captured by psychopaths who have passed through the anti-honesty filter of blank slatism. We are plunging into the singularity as terrified apes with an average g that's not enough to multiply 15 by 7 or parse a 4-column table, manipulated by bad actors.
And you want to keep digging. Because something something «we can't rule out the possibility that something something Hitler».
Are you okay?
In Sweden, eugenicists were in charge for 50 years and got what they reasonably could get. Are modern Swedes a race of supermen moving and shaking the world?
What eugenicists could win in country like Sweden is tiny morsel of the whole eugenic program, only minuscule step towards the dream, you would reply.
Stronger government with more will is required, and such government was ready at the time.
In our time line, Lysenko won in the great struggle between Lamarckists and Mendelians (who were, as all mainstream geneticists of the time, hardcore eugenicists) but there was nothing foreordained about his triumph. It can be explained by Lysenko's greater adroitness in skullduggery and intrique (and promising results right now, instead generations away).
If you have will, HBDIQ theory and eugenic practice can be easily reconciled with Marxism - Marx and Engels themselves saw no contradiction between laws of dialectic materialism and their own HBD awareness/bestial zoological racism.
https://mankindquarterly.org/files/sample/muellersletter.pdf
Imagine if things went the other way.
Imagine modern Russians as nation of geniuses, nation of heroes, nation of scientists and poets spouting magnificent moustaches. What future was lost.
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