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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.
Late to the party on this one, but:
Hitler winning (and let's for the sake of argument assume this amounts to "Hitler rules the world forever", though this is an oversimplification) wouldn't have been an S, a Bang or a Crunch. Hitler's ideal end-state looks vaguely like "a bunch of happy Nazi Germans everywhere", which rules out S or Bang, and Hitler certainly wasn't opposed to, shall we say, "racial self-improvement" so Crunch is ruled out as well. You could actually plausibly say that this hypothetical "Hitler permanent Fuhrer of world" scenario would have a lower likelihood of Bangs compared to RL, since a single world leader is capable of avoiding Molochian traps like the one we're currently experiencing with AI, and Hitler also showed serious concern for silly-sounding X-risks (he took the "nuclear bomb lights the atmosphere on fire" issue seriously when it was noticed by the Uranverein - you can even argue he took it more seriously than the US did with the Manhattan Project).
You get a Shriek only if Hitlerian society both is stable and is bad. I think the first (now discarding the assumption from earlier) is unlikely since the technology to enforce permanent police state did not exist (it's questionable whether it currently exists). I don't think it's obvious that Hitler's ideal Aryan utopia is especially bad, either. Certainly, the part where most of the then-current world population is exterminated is horrific, but that's an event, not a permanent state - even if your goal is "kill everyone except non-deformed German Gentiles", eventually you run out of anyone who doesn't fit and the maintenance only consists of abortion. There's an argument that Nazi (end-state) society is not the best society, but when the chips are down I must admit that I'm not sure there's a better stable society, and an "X-risk" that is the best that can be hoped for is by definition not an X-risk at all (as your source notes).
To be clear, I'm generally opposed to Nazis IRL, because while genocide is a temporary state of affairs it is still terrible, and because the largest group of Nazis at the current time - the Communist Party of China, despite its name - is currently intent on building neural-net AGI which if not stopped will almost assuredly cause a Bang X-catastrophe. But some perspective is useful.
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