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Notes -
https://benthams.substack.com/p/hordes-of-vultures-descend-on-bostrom
Bentham’s Bulldog discusses a recent apology letter from Nick Bostrom for saying the n-word as well as saying that blacks have lower average intelligence in an offensive way in the mid-nineties. Bostrom also says in the apology letter that he’s not really a supporter of eugenics as some claim. Despite apologizing, Bostrom is attacked still for reiterating he believes in IQ gaps and “handwaving” about eugenics.
The eugenics angle comes from the infamous Timnit Gebru, among others.
Curiously, Gary Marcus (famous for his poor critiques of mainstream machine learning, and vague advocacy for neurosymbolic approaches) is also at risk of cancellation in a similar manner now. He has angered the same Timnit Gebru and some other ladies by not mentioning a diverse enough list of names of (mostly misguided, in his opinion) AI researchers in his recent interview with Ezra Klein (see decent commentary) – and for having a backbone, but only barely (but still more than Bostrom; always pitiful to see scared autistics)*. One of Gebru's allies has provided an exceptionally apt formulation of woke logic of power:
To wit. If you challenge our accusations, in whole or even in part, you are erasing our lived experience/silencing marginalized voices/perpetuating the iniquity etc. and are an enemy of progress, as expected of a privileged old white cisheteronormative dude (and to think we gave you a chance to prove you're different from that ilk!); thus you shall be destroyed. If you kowtow and acknowledge our accusations, you cede your moral agency to us, and as an ignorant, oafish «ally» with his heart in the right place who strives to do better, you will have to unquestionably assist us in struggles to come.
Or to quote Land's 2013 masterpiece again:
Or in terms a child would get: heads I win, tails you lose.
Poor bastard:
Well! Color me surprised.
Note the smug Domingos.
Bentham's bulldog is also guilty of dancing to their tune: what's the point of quoting Mother Jones as a gotcha? Whom is this supposed to win over? (Incidentally, here's a good refutation of that article.)
Some people say that wokeness is a religion. For the narrow circle of true believers, perhaps; and for conformists of little faith who go by Cuius regio, eius religio, arguably; but it's also much cruder than that. This is wokeness in practice, and it is not some cute alternative belief system from the academic hothouse that is poorly compatible with our philistine mores, but the cold logic of school bullying, the tactic of muggers who goad you into a rhetorical pitfall where you'll willingly part with your possessions to not get «rightfully» beaten, the dialectics of a Russian prison heart-to-heart with your rectum at stake. This is naked power-seeking, two-bit hostility of chronically defecting bad actors who think it clever to ignore plebeian rules of coexistence; systematic social parasitism and predation. And the proper reaction to this is what a tattooed thief-in-law would get for trying to quiz and then rape a law-abiding citizen in public.
Of course these people are not the problem. The problem is – to loan a page from their book – the «moderate majority» which isn't willing to recognize their epistemic terrorism for what it is and support actual victims. It would be perfectly reasonable for Marcus to reply with some variant of «oh piss off you psychotic witch» – except his own academic environment would disown him for it, rather then murmur «indeed, what the hell». He is, after all, presumed to need the status of an «ally» that these people have taken upon themselves the authority to assign; he can be threatened with its revocation. Gebru is higher-status than a mere professor emeritus who is a meritless superstar in his own right. Jeff Dean could politely defend her firing, but Jeff Dean is a crucial figure in an existentially important project for the world's premier corporation. Can Bostrom's clout measure up? Like everyone in this network, he's a lame duck after the fall of FTX, and he's probably irrelevant from now on.
For my part, I'll say that if these people define racism as a belief that black people have lower average IQ than other major population groups, then okay, I'm racist. If they define racism somewhat more rigorously, as a belief that black people have lower IQs for innate genetic reasons, I'm still racist: the evidence is just overwhelming. If they ever wish to destroy me for those views, it'll be useless to attempt to backtrack like Bostrom tries to do with his talking from both sides of his mouth.
If they ever attempt to convince others that this implies support of racial discrimination on my part, all I can do is recognize this as unjustified malice that does not merit charity, and insist in turn that their political platform has no place in a polite society.
° Says Bostrom:
There's nothing to think about, though. As of January 2nd, and in following with the NIH barring data access for political reasons, the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium has updated their restrictions on reusing their data. Now they've included a prohibition on using their PGS/PRS/GPS for prenatal or preimplantation genetic testing: «Investigators may not use these data to develop any type of risk or predictive test for an unborn individual».
I really think you're in a bubble, considering the context his response was very heterodox. He mentioned some true things about other factors that affect IQ, apologized for his language, but said he'd "like to leave it to others" to determine if genes play a factor in IQ. He's getting dragged for this, and others have called it brave, I don't think it's fair to call Bostrom spineless.
I'd like to know exactly how you guys would have responded, maybe you can think of something better. But I feel like you're all just anonymous internet guys who don't have realistic standards for people who are trying to actually be effective and powerful and have more important priorities than culture warring.
Well okay, let's check his «apology» one more time. First of all I think his original text does not merit any apologies because it already included necessary caveats for its context, and only dishonest actors would insist on demanding things be justified outside of their original context. Moreover, affirming the taboo power of the «n-word», as if it were some automatically acting evil spell that harms Blacks, is both sadly hilarious and constitutes a social harm by infantilizing the body politic – akin to lead emissions. But that's an edgy aside.
The fuck? It's the same picture. Maybe it's him who's in a bubble. Is he actually under the impression that his attackers are misinformed but well-meaning peasants with pitchforks, or maybe dumb niggers who can be hypnotized with a string of multisyllabic words and thus miss the implication? They aren't. This was bound to only make them more bloodthirsty. Does he, truly, «repudiate» it completely, or simply regret its presentation and some fluff? Clearly the following. So he has lied. He does what a Mottizen with a particularly spicy and poorly-supported take can do when backed into a corner: erect a Motte that the charity rule prohibits dismissing out of hand, and keep both the dignity of standing for one's truth and the appearance of being a reasonable interlocutor. Only he's not on the Motte (could someone invite him?), he's exposed to Twitter where this waffling is instantly called out. I agree with wokes that he's insincere. This is worse than saying nothing: he's scared out of his wits, so he simultaneously affirms their moral superiority and his guilt, but does not let go of the issue of his alleged guilt.
Bruh. So he supports eugenics in the sense currently wielded – and loathed – by progressives. Reminder, he wrote the apology in advance, knowing that somebody was rummaging through his trash:
Why did he bring up eugenics on his own?
He should have let them make the first move. Scott near-painlessly shook off Topher Brennan publicizing his old emails (also affirming HBD, and even giving some credit to neoreactionaries!) precisely because he didn't bend over backwards to apologize, and certainly didn't try to anticipate what to defend from.
I admit I'm more of a fighting-with-a-waiter guy than a power-maximizing guy. Sorry that my limited experience suggests he's not going to become more powerful as a result of this whimpering. Let's wait and see, shall we?
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I'm thinking of a meme along the lines of the virgin Scott Alexander (don't tell anyone I said this) vs the chad Bostrom (Blacks are stupider..!).
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I bet he will soon "resign" from Oxford and this incident will be linked with SBF in attacking EA. Bostrom deserves some credit for not taking the Joy Reid route by claiming he never wrote the text and it was a hack. Of course, from a utilitarian viewpoint given Bostrom's influential work on EA and AI risk, should he have made such a lie?
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I used to look at the declining number of Christians in the U.S. to conclude that people were becoming more rational.
Now I realize that religiosity has just transferred -- slavery was the Original Sin, racism is the Devil, and we are all guilty unless we Repent (become anti-racist) and Jesus (black people) alone can forgive us.
It's so tiring.
From "I Am A New Atheist, And I Repent":
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No, it hasn’t. A list of parallels doesn’t make something a religion.
They aren’t even good examples! Racism isn’t an entity. Anti-racism lacks various key features of Christian repentance, such as securing an afterlife. Black people are not serving as a proxy for Christ the Redeemer and His voluntary self-sacrifice.
The buck basically stops at “both these groups have some idea of blame and atonement,” which is not exactly unique. Capitalism has debt; that doesn’t make it religious. Game theory’s tit-for-tat strategy doesn’t pigeonhole researchers as zealots.
I'd rephrase it as religion occupies the same or very similar roles as ideology. Religion is an ideology with a supernatural skin. That is why behaviors are the same for zealots whether it's Christianity, Communism or whatever. Ideology came first (as in an idea of how people should behave) a religion is just a sub variant.
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Sure.
I'd outright agree with something like @hydroacetylene or @VoxelVexillologist says here. There are obviously some SJWs who, in another era, would have been Christian/Muslim/HareKrishna/etc. evangelists. It's plausible that this is a causal relationship, and that the diminution of Christianity has either left a God-shaped hole or atrophied their natural skepticism. What's more, the movement enables, even endorses, dogmatic thinking and purity spirals that chafe against the bounds of Western liberalism.
These are interesting parallels to other pre-Enlightenment traditions. Is this because of a "near-inescapable part of the human condition?" Or perhaps because zealotry is memetically fit, and any movement which makes it to global prominence must have either mastered or accepted it? I think those are valid questions. I'd honestly be really interested in a sober comparison on the subject, one that tries to predict how social justice will react or evolve by analogy to religious movements.
That...is not what the OP provided. He was more interested in plopping social justice into a category with unpleasant associations. This is the worst argument in the world.
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It doesn't have to be a 1:1 match with Christianity to be a religion.
Religion tends to imply far-reaching moral claims and ways of living organized around mystical / supernatural ideas. Anti-racism/progressivism may be distinctly christian, and may make significant moral claims, but it isn't a religion - it doesn't have supernatural claims, nor does it provide a grounding for all or even most moral claims.
It's claimed to be a religion because of the combination of moral dedication and seeming wrongness - as if people follow it religiously because of a 'religious impulse' to believe strong moral claims at the expense of correctness. This doesn't work because wokeness makes specific, non-mystical claims - calling it a religion doesn't actually rebut the claims (it'd come closer if woke people believed in an Anti-Racism Allfather that lived in the sun, but it doesn't!).
Progressivism has those.
Modify this to "unfalsifiable ideas", and Progressivism has those.
No, it's claimed to be a religion because people have faith in it.
I'd say the claims are plenty "mystical". They don't need to be supernatural to be unfalsifiable, supra-rational, and they are definately used as the basis for moral reasoning that is not otherwise justified.
That isn't what makes a religion. Me having faith Man Utd will not be good for X years after Sir Alex doesn't make a football team a religion.
A religion is I think, a sub variant of an ideology, one with a supernatural element. A communist zealot and a Christian zealot will exhibit similar enforcing behaviors because both are expousing ideologies on how they think people should behave. Whether that is because they think that people should do X because God gave the 10 Commandments or because Marx said "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" doesn't impact their enforcing behavior really.
But only one is a religion, otherwise the term is too broad to be meaningful. For example it's probably tricky to discredit Communism by claiming Marx never existed.
Which isn't a claim on which is better or more true because the value judgement as to whether Marx was right is subjective, but it's a different kind of subjective as to whether a supernatural being exists.
Now it is certainly possible Marxism could BE a religion, if he was said to possess some kind of supernatural insight or was the avatar of a God or other mystical entity and that is why his ideas should be listened to.
Why does the supernatural idea matter, and how does one define "supernatural"?
If I claim that god is the substrate the natural world is built on, does that make him not supernatural any more? One presumes not. But when Marxists claim that iron laws of history demand that human civilization move through exactly one path with no possible deviations, why is that meaningfully less supernatural than me claiming God as substrate?
Both I and the Marxist are making unfalsifiable claims that the physical world is determined by metaphysical, unobservable, unfalsifiable forces. Being unable to prove the existence of those forces, we nonetheless both precommit to treating them as axiomatic. In other words, we put our faith in them, and act accordingly. Your "faith" in Man Utd is not based on metaphysical claims that take precedence over the physical, and that is why it is a poor comparison here; also, you've seen Man Utd play, while I have never seen God and the Marxist has never seen the classless society.
If I could prove to your satisfaction that the man named Jesus existed, I find it doubtful that you would promptly convert. Whether Jesus existed or not is hardly the issue, but rather whether what his metaphysical claims were true, no? And is it not exactly the same with Marx? The purported Jesus made specific claims about the supernatural: that it existed, and that as a result we should take specific actions and adopt specific values. Marx likewise made specific claims about the supernatural: that it did not exist, and that as a result we should take specific actions and adopt specific values.
I do not think there is a functional difference between asserting that a supernatural divinity exists, and asserting that history is bound by iron laws and can only proceed along one path.
What, specifically, is added to the analysis by separating positive spiritual claims into one category, and negative spiritual claims into the other category? What observed outcomes demand such a separation? The context of this conversation is about the label "religion" specifically used as a pejorative. Well and good, so what does this special label allow us to focus on that would otherwise pass unnoticed? Corrupting effects on reason? Additional zealotry? Violence or aggression? Why is the separate label useful?
The modern Atheist movement was based on the idea that religion was irrational, and often or even always harmful. Point me to an irrationality or a harm that any religion has ever caused or advocated, that materialist ideologies cannot match or surpass. You claim that labeling Marxism a religion makes the term too broad to be meaningful. Why, specifically? What is lost through such an application? What, specifically, does "Religion" by your definition do that ideology does not?
A non-religous ideology can absolutely be irrational. It can absolutely cause great harm. No question there.
If you could prove God exists then you have proved that Christianity is to a greater or lesser extent true. If you prove a classless society can exist, that doesn't impact whether it should.
If you could prove to me that Jesus existed and did the various miracles associated with him, then that fundamentally would change my view on reality in a major way. Proving communism works wouldn't. People can live in small communes, at small scales communism clearly can exist. If some AI assisted version of communism actually worked i'd be surprised but it wouldn't fundamentally change anything.
The difference is I think that God could in theory change the rules to say anything. The teachings and commandments are His, the judgments are His. It would still be Christianity if in a miracle every Bible tomorrow added an 11th commandment. Or changed all the others in the blink of an eye. You would (correctly I think!) probably see that as proof God existed. Perhaps that He was intervening to correct what man had written or whatever interpretation you might put on it.
If we change what Marx wrote to endorse free markets and the capital class then it is no longer communism at all. What the idea is (true or false) is what it is evaluated on.
Where the knowledge comes from is a critical part of religions, whereas if Marx was proven not to have existed and Bob Smith had written Das Kapital then nothing really changes, whether the ideas work or not would not change.
Would Christianity really be the same to you if it were proven God didn't exist? That it was just a set of rules for living written by men with no deific inspiration? Doesn't that change the fundamental idea of what Christianity even is? Or if it were revealed the Devil wrote the Bible to put evil into the heart of humans. Would you just shrug and say, but it works, so i will still go along with the commandments?
The source of knowledge or truth in Christianity is arguably the most important bit. Whether that source really exists is a major component of the faith. Christianity without God is just an ideology. Maybe it has good rules for living, but its no longer the same.
The source of knowledge in communism is nearly irrelevant. If we discovered Marx was a lie then communism is still just an ideology.
None of this necessarily changes how zealots behave just to be clear. As for why I draw the distinction, the argument made was that wokism was a religion, and I think that is incorrect and diminshes our understanding. Wokism like communism is built on materialism, and while enforcing behaviours will be the same either way (because those don't change whether you believe in God or racism), its fundamental conceptual building blocks and how it will mutate in the future are not the same as if its precepts were derived from a supernatural entity or not.
I'm not arguing it not being a religion makes it objectively better or worse in other words, just that it makes it different. It's likely to mutate and fragment much faster than Christianity did for example because it lacks an overarching "eye in the sky" and even that didn't entirely protect Christianity from fragmentation.
Wokism not being a religion won't necessarily impact how individuals behave, but does change how the movement overall will alter over time in my opinion.
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Yeah, and my point is 'unfalsifiable ideas' is a much broader concept than 'mystical and supernatural ideas'. A supernatural idea is 'God created the universe, piece by piece, and you go to hell if you don't believe in god'. One example of an unfalsifiable belief is: "everyone hates me. no matter how much they say they like me, they secretly hate me". another is "everyone is fundamentally good. no matter how many evil acts they commit, their nature is goodness".
If "faith" means "believing in something that is false", or "believing in something that's not falsifiable" then sure. If faith means something like 'choosing to believe in something even though you acknowledge it can't ever be proven, because you recognize it's your duty to believe', then ... no, progressives would claim their beliefs are normal, observable, and true, and not 'held on faith'. And the sense in which faith relates to religion seems more the latter to me.
Progressivism is, like, a set of beliefs that some people believe in for social/tribal reasons. It also gives some people a sense of community and purpose. Religions also do that, and it's "like" a religion in that sense. But in that sense Apple as an employer is also a religion, as is heavy metal music, so eh.
This belief is not merely unfalsifiable; it is supernatural. It posits a good which exists outside observable reality. The same is true for progressive beliefs.
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While there’s a minority of work types that think of black people as equivalent to Christ, it doesn’t seem like they’re a majority at all.
I totally buy that people getting less religious become more likely to believe in all sorts of other crazy shit, including dubious work narratives. But woke as Christianity does not seem accurate.
I sometimes wonder if it's really "people think they are becoming less religious, but religion-esque dogma and all its vices are actually a near-inescapable part of the human condition." Not sure myself, but it's a plausible take.
This sounds a lot less profound if rephrased as "people believing wrong things, and acting on them, is an inescapable part of the human condition", in which case that's just true because of how complicated everything is, and as one attempts to apprehend more and more complicated phenomena one continues making mistakes. There isn't an inherent 'religiousness' to all forms of being wrong!
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People are, by and large, shifting from traditional religious observances with known failure modes to low-demand spiritualism(like astrology) and non-spiritual affirmation(like therapy and allyship, etc), and the failure modes of these things are less known, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
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I think that is exactly what we are seeing. The problem isn't and has never been religion, it's dogma and zealotry. Those things have been part of religion, yes, but really that's just because humans practice religions and it turns out those things are inescapable human nature.
When people say "wokeism is a religion" or other similar statements, it's not so much an assessment of theological similarity. It's an attempt to draw attention to the dogmatic and zealous nature of woke activism by comparing it to a human activity which is well known to have those same failure points.
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The truth (cognitive and criminality differences) is in fact soft-racist using any non-perverted form of human morality.
The woke understand this (not it's truth value, but the logical conclusion if it were true) but their primary loyalty is to the black race so they'd rather enshrine it and it's vices as holy than see racism return. This shared moral assesment is why there was so little resistance from classical liberals to the woke takeover.
Rationalists (the top ones) are too smart to deny HBD (scientific racism), but being [insult against ingroup removed], they see nothing wrong with hurting good people who like them to help bad people (and their asociates) who hate them as long as total utilons increase. They are in fact offended that the woke would think they'd consider doing anything else. We've reached C.S Lewis reductio ad absurdum of total moral relativism, a previously implausible country in which "a man feels proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him". Conservatives are... irrelevant. They conserve whatever morality they are handed down, no matter how perverse and anti-racism as the raison d'etre of America was established long ago. Now they can't resist it, except by reifing it "Democrats are the real racists"!
I assume you're the same lepidus on the EA forum?
On the contrary, he's the same Lepidus as the one here on The Motte.
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This is a whole lot of weakmanning. Stop making broad generalizations about "the woke" and rationalists without putting a lot more effort into substantiating your uncharitable hot takes.
I don't understand what more I'm supposed to do here. That's "perverted", is my opinion about a moral vision that tallies up total pleasure and suffering while ignoring whether it's experienced by a good person or a bad person. I believe low IQ and a temperamental disposition towards hurting others are bad traits, and that those posessing them have lower value. Rationalists regularly acknowledge that yes IQ differences exist, read and agree with Steve Sailer, and then mention how knowing all this doesn't change their moral assesment in any way. I suppose "moral mutants" was a bit harsh and I will remove it. My apologies.
You can state your opinions about perverted moral visions and rationalist thinking, but statements like "(the wokes') primary loyalty is to the black race so they'd rather enshrine it and it's vices as holy than see racism return" is certainly not true (at best, it's an uncharitable description of some woke people), and slipping in the crack about "the black race ... and its vices" is also sloppy and uncharitable. (It's one thing to talk about HBD, it's another to just baldly denigrate an entire group. Lots of people want to say things about Jews and blacks and wokes and Trump supporters and Muslims and Republicans and Democrats, and we do not look kindly on any statement that can be summarized as "They suck, all of them."). And yes, calling people "moral mutants" falls into the same category. You can talk about specific people or beliefs that you think fall into the category of "moral mutant." Saying "rationalists are moral mutants" is not specific.
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I don't see how anyone could look at their rhetoric or their behavior and reasonably come to this conclusion. Seems to me that their primary loyalty (if one can call it that) is to politics.
It's actually pretty simple. The early liberal position was that blacks could and would reach equality with whites after the removal of discrimination and imposition of temporary positive discrimination. While some screwups were made early on - In the 90s, the Clintons and Joe Biden joined black leaders in pushing mandatory minimums and heavy law enforcement in black neighbourhoods, under the theory that neglect, tolerance of criminality, and retrograde welfare policies were the form of the racism that was keeping blacks down. And yet, inequality while reduced, wasn't fixed.
Blacks born to families making 200K were getting SAT scores equal to whites in families making 20K. The children of rich blacks were still going to jail at rates comparable to poor whites. At this point liberals could either:
Choose to tolerate a world in which the vast majority of blacks, being judged by their actual abilities, would be found unequal to whites.
Upgrade positive discrimination into pure anti-white racial hatred, crushing the white kulaks, taking their resources and representation in elite institutions away and giving these to blacks. Meanwhile, tar every positive white trait and figure as inherently evil (objectivity is white supremacy), while praising their black counterparts.
I don't need to mention which one they chose.
Qualifier: While Blacks are near the top of the totem pole, they are often outcompeted by other members of the Democratic coalition, which it needs to guarantee it's permanent power. Nonetheless, the fractures aren't as severe as anticipated. Latinos don't exactly like blacks, but they can deal with them through extra-political means while allying with them to continue squeezing whites.
"...their primary loyalty (if one can call it that) is to politics."
If it was, they'd take up a Bill Clinton style Law and Order campaign and pare it with at least making noises about immigration while pursuing extreme wealth redistribution and of course taking their cut at every step of the way. But more intuitively, do you think Dems are pushing trans kids because they think it polls well?
How, as our resident Christian, is it so hard for you to understand that people might be genuinely and unselfishly committed to an evil vision, for it's own sake.
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And even outside of politics, it sure seems like transgenders/non-binaries/other gender minorities come above blacks.
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I think he needs to argue why more explicitly. There's no particular reason the truth can't have negative repercussions, such as lowering the status of black people, which I think most would agree would be racist.
Which is not an argument for censorship in my view, whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be, and so on. But it's a tricky bullet to bite, in this environment where preserving the clout of certain groups is oh-so-important.
The solution is to not lower the status of people with lower IQ. It is possible, and quite likely, that we literally live in a world where black people, on average, have lower IQ than white people. If true, this means that, in reality, one of the following must be true: people with lower IQ have the same moral value as people with higher IQ, or black people have less moral value than white people.
No amount of obfuscation, linguistic gymnastics, or averting ones gaze can avoid this dilemma. You have to pick one of the two (technically there's a third option where unintelligent people have more value than intelligent people, but that's pretty niche). An awful lot of people firmly believe that people with low IQ are lesser, which forces them to either accept reality and become racists, or deny reality to avoid the logical conclusion of their beliefs. I would argue that the latter is just closeted racism because they believe unintelligent people are lesser, so all of the unintelligent black people who exist in reality are people they implicitly attribute as being lesser. The bullet to bite is that unintelligent people are not automatically bad people, and you're not better than them just because you're smarter than them. Once you do this, the entire structure of "racist truths" disintegrates, because you're not automatically assigning moral value or hatred to people just because of the way they were born.
The truth cannot be racist, because the truth does not assign moral value. People do that.
"Status" is a very broad term that refers to - how much people like you, how much power people give you, how much weight people give to your ideas, etc. Giving less power to, and paying less attention to the ideas of, dumber people is correct, natural, and impossible not to do.
It's also true, if IQ is just iq-as-measured - vox claims "There’s no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes", implying said differences exist! That they're environmental makes bostrom's claim that "blacks are more stupid than whites" facially and obviously true, only disliked because 'implying black is bad' is considered very mean.
Any slightly-consequentialist 'moral value' values intelligence, because intelligence helps understand and accomplish things. If you morally value EA, or the flu vaccine, or electric power, or 'humans existing at all' - you value intelligence. Claims to not morally value intelligence come from only morally valuing intent, as if "morals" are foremost a standard by which one judges other people (and judging people for being dumb would be unkind). But if morals are an attempt to understand the effects of one's actions - to see what happens - then this is irrelevant, the "moral weight" of the drowning child, caused by the child actually dying, isn't changed if only a 125iq person can run a deworming foundation. Although it might suggest better causes than the deworming foundation.
You’re equivocating between instrumental and intrinsic value. Most consequentialists don’t intrinsically value intelligence at all. They only intrinsically value pleasure or positive experiential valence or whatever. And things that are only instrumentally valuable do not have real value. They’re just parasitic on the things that do.
The point of morality is to guide our actions. Merely understanding their effects tells us nothing about what to do. We need further principles that say which effects we should seek and which we should avoid. That an effect is good or bad means nothing by itself. We have to also know when we should do good and prevent bad.
I'm arguing they're closely related.
Intelligence isn't parasitic on whatever the 'really valuable' things are? Elaborate? Is one, personally, building something or uncovering a beautiful result in mathematics, really valueless in a way that, uh, playing basketball with your kid isn't? It'd be very weird for "teaching your kid math" to have "intrinsic value" but the material action of doing math to not have value, when the former is an evolutionary adaptation that exists for the purpose of the latter (albeit with math substituted for "knapping flint" or something).
The core part here is knowing what is good and bad, which is what "understanding their effects" meant above. You're referring to the "is/ought" distinction here - except oughts seem to depend quite intimately on ises, a person dying is important because ... they die, which is an "is"!
The core point, though, is that the human lives morality seems to be oriented around have content - if you stop someone from dying, this causes them to ... live longer and experience and do more things, and this seems to be why dying is bad, and preventing dying is good. But why stop at saying 'and all humans are the same', when the experiences/lives, which are the only things that actually change when you e.g. save a life, can differ so much? Is "saving the life" of a cancer patient ... for fifteen minutes, after which they actually die quite the same as saving the life of a ten year old, who'll live another 70 years + have children? Okay, is saving the life of someone who's severely physically and intellectually disabled, and will be tube-fed and gurgle for 20 years until dying of some hospital-acquired infection quite the same? No, and it's because their experiences will lack most of what's worthwhile. Okay - now someone who's slightly less severely intellectually disabled - say at the level of a two-year-old until death. They'll ... also lack most of the experiences most humans have, meaning caring for them causes much less than caring for a non-disabled two year old, who'll mature and have many of the glorious experiences humans do! One can compare that to an animal - whose experiences have some value, but who you'd surely claim are worth less than a human, despite them being quite similar at a high level - animals feel for and care for their kin, eat, try to solve problems they have, struggle against nature, etc.
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The bullet to bite is that you are better for every meaningful measurement of "better". Pretending a cracked out murderer who can't do math is as valuable to society as a hard working bright person who does his job is just another form of denial.
Smart people can be cracked out murderers. It's less likely, but entirely possible. More realistically, smart people can have high paying jobs and obey the law and still do unethical things that cause harm to others in a less traceable way, but often with much greater effects due to their increased influence. Just because it's hard to create and enforce laws that measure their misdeeds and punish them appropriately (which is especially hard because most politicians are this kind of person) does not make them good or valuable people, even if some people treat them as if they are.
Of course if you choose the nicest most benevolent person in the smart people group and compare them to the worst person in the dumb people group then you'll conclude the smart people have more value. And even if you look at the nicest most benevolent person in each group and compare them you'll conclude the smart people have more value because they have more power and influence with which to do good things. But if you look at the worst and scummiest people in each group you'll conclude the opposite because the smart person has more power and influence with which to do evil things. No low IQ murderer will ever come close to doing as much evil as Hitler or Stalin, who were highly intelligent people. Intelligence gives more potential, but this potential can be used for good or evil, and it's the person's moral character and personality that determines what they'll use it for, and thus their net moral value.
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We're not talking about some hypothetical value to society though, we're talking about moral value.
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The usual bit of orthodoxy is that "moral value" is unconnected to one's value to society, and that "moral value" is what really matters. Really matters for what? Putatively, everything: respect, dignity, worth, entitlement. Realistically, a narrower category: being spoken to and of politely, participating in welfare entitlements, enjoying legal protection against certain types of discrimination, and legal status as a human being.
In ordinary language, when you say that some is "great", you're not staying that they have greater moral value. You're saying that they have good qualities.
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If you believe in the Eliezer school of AI existential risk, than you should think this as high IQ people are about to destroy the light cone.
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I think most people would agree that black people having their status lowered (specifically as black people in comparison to non-black people) would be racist. It does not follow that if the truth was one of the causes of this, then the truth is racist. Something having racist repercussions does not imply that it is itself racist - if it did, then we would necessarily conclude that literally everything is racist, which would strip "racism" of any meaning and make it a non-word that has neither negative nor positive connotations.
Particularly considering that "lowering the status of black people" isn't something the "truth" can do by adjusting the dial or something; it takes the active effort of millions of humans making individual idiosyncratic decisions in reaction to the "truth" to accomplish such a lowering of status. In this specific example, the racism seems pretty clear to me sourced from individuals' reaction to the truth, not truth itself.
If racists want to police blacks more heavily because of the fact that blacks commit much more crime, is it the fault of racists racistly policing, or is it the fault of the racist fact that blacks commit 60% of murders?
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No, I think most people will consider the idea that blacks have a lower IQ than whites to be racist, even though they probably couldn't explain exactly why they think that.
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I think what he's getting at with that line is that "the truth is value neutral."
"Black people in aggregate are less smart on average than white people" as a statement doesn't really imply any judgment of the situation one way or the other.
To different people this statement can have different connotations. I can think of two obvious value-laden judgments one could make in response to the above statement.
1: "and therefore they are the strictly inferior race and can rightfully be subjugated."
2: "and therefore they are more vulnerable to exploitation and should be given extra assistance in order to make up for this difference."
And one is not proven racist for reciting a fact, but rather for the arguments and conclusions one draws from that fact.
Of course people reading that statement will probably already have a preferred interpretation in mind and thus will read it with that interpretation in mind, and judge the speaker accordingly.
I think you're giving the critics too much credit here. The sin is in the truthful statement, not its implications.
"All races have equal intelligence" is axiomatic to the woke. Challenging other people's deeply held convictions is considered boorish. You wouldn't go up to a Muslim and talk about Mohammed's 10 year old wife. You wouldn't spit on the graves of a Confucian's ancestors. And you don't talk to the woke about racial differences in intelligence.
Yes, and I'm agreeing that's the 'sin' of Bostrom in their eyes.
He says "the data says this, we should believe this (to some relatively high confidence level) and operate as if it is true."
So the question is, can one be considered 'racist' for merely stating a true fact of the world without applying a value judgment to it?
Yes. In fact, that's a greater racism because it challenges a deeper value. To make the religion analogy again, what's a greater sin, committing adultery or denying the divinity of Christ? Challenging wokism with direct threats to its underpinning axioms is much worse than venial sins such as, for example, moving to a different school district when your own becomes more diverse.
Wokism is not "mistakes" on top of an otherwise liberal philosophy, it has a completely different relationship with the nature of reality. Truth has nothing to do with it.
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But valuing the truth is axiomatic to rationalists. Which I suspect means that they and wokes will ever be friends.
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I certainly don't agree that would be racist. How can it be? The truth is neutral, it has no particular animus against any group of people. If knowing the truth causes people to do something racist, that doesn't somehow make the truth racist.
I think some truths are value neutral, but not all of them, and this particular one has nasty implications under common sense reasoning. Yes, you can't derive an ought from an is, but that's only true at max rigor, which isn't how most people operate most of the time. With good reason: with enough rigor, the world dissolves into a fine mist.
I agree that people can and probably will be stupid with some truths. That still doesn't lend the truth a moral valence. Any truth is neutral, and cannot be racist (or immoral in any other way).
If this is the case, why did Scott come up with that "at least two of true, kind and necessary" posting rule? It only makes sense if some truths are unkind, which is one way a truth can have moral valence.
Not so. The truth itself does not have moral valence. Saying the truth to someone, however, can have moral valence.
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Only if you consider kindness per se to have moral valence.
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I think that in casual English usage, definitions are subject to political adjustment, and "no true Scotsman" is an acceptable inference principle: "a is an instance of A, and A can't be B" doesn't mean that a is not an instance of (firm and immutable in its extension), but rather that either the definition of A or the definition of B, whichever holds less force and significance, ought to be adjusted to break the chain of inference.
To the extent "no true Scotsman" is intuitively felt to be a fallacy at all, it is on the basis of this adjustment being done too readily and to accommodate overly insignificant special cases. If someone asserted that those Scotsmen who sided with the Plantagenets were no true Scotsmen, few would bat an eye. The assertion you quote, I imagine, is trying to do something similar, in that it asserts that being The Truth(tm) is a sufficiently major exception that adjusting the definition of racism around it does not debase the importance of the latter.
Good comment, but then, this makes it sound like he should have said "The truth cannot be racist*", with the asterisk expanding out into the kind of impossibly nuanced argument that would allow one to claim "yes, they are generally dumber than you, but you should still respect them!".
I mean, can one respect someone while simultaneously claiming they're duller? Seems like it would take some real contortions, common-sensically, once you feel someone is not at least your equal, you don't respect them. Sure, you can still feel compassion for them, but it sounds very disempowering to say "whites should be compassionate towards blacks". Arguably, that's the attitude wokes take, but I think that's the reason they often say things that sound awfully racist.
It seems to me that you treat respect as purely binary, in the sense that you either respect someone or don't.
I claim otherwise, that there are varying degrees of respect, and that all it takes to be a decent-ish person is to extend a minimum level of respect to everyone unless they provide a reason to withdraw even that.
I respect otherwise normal people with below average intelligence, say a hard working janitor with 90 IQ. I wouldn't insult them, denigrate them, deny them any basic rights such as political representation, their wage, a right to speech etc.
Do I respect them less than say Von Neumann? Obviously, as do most people in general when they explicitly state that they have "great respect" for person X, a qualifier that would be pointless if there was only a singular level of respect that is either given or withheld.
As far as I'm concerned, treating other people politely, refraining from insulting them, and such is perfectly adequate. And that it by no means is a form of disrespect to advocate that a 140 IQ person is more appropriate/worthy of being assigned a job and wage that shows the scarcity of their cognitive labor than a 80 IQ person is, while still respecting both.
The problem is, people are asking for more than that. But yes, it is true respect is a spectrum and not a binary. It would be interesting if the case of the janitor could generalize to race relations, but it doesn't seem like it can because of the commitment to equality. It still seems impossible to attempt to use an analogy like that to handle a genetic explanation for the black IQ gap.
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Yes, obviously? Why would someone being duller than me have any sort of connection to my respect for them?
I run into people who are not my equal all the time and have no trouble respecting them. Some of them are shorter than me, physically weaker than me, or stupider than me. Everyone runs into people all the time who are not at least their equals, if they function in society. It is essentially a necessary component of a functioning society that people are able to respect others regardless of others being at least their equals or not. Choosing how much you respect someone based on whether they're at least your equal or not isn't common sense in any way.
That's the attitude wokes take, yes, and that's indeed a reason they often say things that sound awfully racist. So to avoid that, we can say that "individuals should respect other individuals without care for their intelligence." And then really live it.
One can respect people who are not one's equals yes, but I think this is conditional on one not thinking very often, or at all, of the ways in which one is superior, particularly if intellect is the disparity. Which suggests a way forward here, since it doesn't seem like individualism will be making a comeback: the truth about black IQ can't be in the water supply. It probably can only be safely handled in the ivory tower, though even there there's a vigorous effort to squelch it. But no, it would probably be healthier to come up with a way to process it.
I don't think this is true at all, and I don't see any reason why it would be true.
I disagree with both sentences here. Despite all the efforts by extremists on both (all) sides of the political spectrum, individualism is still around, even if weakened, and the idea that truth about IQ could only be handled safely in the ivory tower just seems like baseless scaremongering.
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And that is why you should never apologize.
Easy to say that as anonymous troll demons (as Jordan Peterson would call us), but for someone with a public reputation/standing and a lot to lose - not least socially - as Bostrom the choice isn't clear-cut. Of course, his grovelling shows that he prefers the comfort of the establishment to telling hard truths. Which should probably lower his standing as a philosopher. But it also shows he's just a coward like most people.
Nope. It is as clear cut - because this tactic never works. The trolls always want more blood and humiliation.
To take an extreme example: compare and contrast Kanye and Nick Cannon. Both engaged in anti-Semitism but one backed down and the other didn't. Nick Cannon has a thriving career after apologising (repeatedly) and Kanye doesn't. So it is factually incorrect to say that it can never work to back down. Indeed in some cases, such as this example, backing down shouldn't even be seen as a negative.
I don't disagree with your point, but I'm not sure that West is the best example; I'd be very surprised if he was unable to produce extremely popular records or sell out concerts in the future, and so wouldn't say that his career is finished. But West would be a rare exception
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Nick Cannon was forgiven via the soft bigotry of low expectations. Bostrom -- a white professor of philosophy at Oxford -- will be afforded no such grace. His email demonstrates that he spoke the Murray Blasphemy with full intent and understanding, and his response so far concedes that the email was his; he will be anathema from this date forth, to a degree that will corrupt even his associates if they do not renounce him.
He is totally screwed. How to manage the wreckage of the remainder of his life is a question of aesthetics and personal values rather than of instrumental advantage. Apologies won't save him, but neither will any other course.
He may or may not be able to retain his tenured position at Oxford. If he does, it will be a lonely one, with students and faculty competing with one another to build credit by performing his anathema.
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