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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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This seems like a clear violation of the "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" rule, and yet this comment is the most upvoted in the thread.
I used to think this forum was interesting and special, but it's increasingly clear to me that it's not substantially different from any other online community, with the tendency for a single view to predominate and write itself blank checks for whatever behavior it wants.
(Note: I think your argument has numerous weaknesses, I just don't care to engage at this point)
Oh well! One option would be to report it, block me and move on. Complaining about votes is the epitome of futility.
But if you're so inclined. Do you think I'm upvoted because of that last sentence, irrespective of it, or in spite of it? No doubt your ego must press you to feel it's not the latter – which would discredit me, my argument and the apparent community consensus, validating you both morally and intellectually. Indeed, this is basically what you proceed to say; btw, I've written this entire response before finishing reading yours.
I have an admission to make. I like to insert a mild ad hominem jab into a beatdown which is otherwise designed to be empirically, logically and rhetorically nigh-unassailable (yes, yes, cringe, tips fedora, whatever, it's nothing special but I do like having this skill) so that my opponent sees confirmation of his suspicions, pounces on it, exiting the topic into meta discussion, and therefore demonstrates he has no remaining object level counterarguments – effectively conceding the point.
And when an opponent does have both an object-level case to make and enough restraint/self-confidence to stay on the supposedly important topic, ignoring the low-hanging fruit of a legalistic call-out that'd score him a win in a school debate club – this creates an opportunity for authentic human communication where both sides may learn something new and true, instead of wading through the mirror labyrinth of ego defenses.
It is my sincere belief that such opt-out baiting should be a widely used practice for filtering out epistemic terrorists and building a high-trust environment – something we can observe EAs suffer from lacking.
Mods won't endorse it, sadly.
(Still haven't read the rest of your post).
Ok, done. It's not quite what I've predicted but close enough. We are an echo chamber so that's why my post gets upvotes.
I will keep making these arguments and pushing them into the mainstream. If you truly believe they constitute an X-risk factor, and ever feel like addressing their «numerous weaknesses», please don't feel limited by the need to retaliate at me for my rudeness by «not humoring» them or something. The future of humanity is at stake, you know!
You're right, the mods aren't going to endorse tactically baiting people to try to weed out the undesirables.
"Are you okay?" was borderline and I almost gave you a warning, but we don't actually mod every statement that might be a little more snide than it needs to be. I'm more unhappy with you openly admitting that you insert ad hominems just to troll your opponents into losing it. You tend to get slightly more slack because you are generally a high effort poster with a lot of AAQCs, but now I'm going to be less chill about this sort of thing in the future.
That's fine, it's about time I improve my technique; it may be interesting to substitute ad hominem with some obvious fallacy that cannot offend (and is immaterial to the broader argument).
Your characterization isn't very fair – «just to troll your opponents into losing it» suggests that there's mendacity and some trolling effort to push them over the edge, whereas what's really happening, IMO, is they're given a good-faith response plus an opportunity to cheaply dismiss it on legalistic grounds. Their emotions don't really concern me, and for all I know they feel very smug and content when calling out a fallacy. Win-win, really!
But okay.
Consider, though, that if you start discriminating against my lines that are otherwise allowed, you'll have failed in about the same way this guy did.
I'm not threatening to discriminate against lines that are otherwise allowed. We exercise some subjectivity in enforcement. This has always, explicitly been the case (hence people periodically complaining that long-time good posters get cut more slack, and our response being "Yes, and?") I'm saying you have burned some of the goodwill that until now gave you more slack.
That's cool! Privilege spoils, and also makes one a target of contempt.
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