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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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It seems possibly to me that race/IQ information is in fact an infohazard.

I don't think the truth can ever be an infohazard, but that's me.

Personally I'm only interested in race/IQ as a way of finally strangling expectations of equality of outcome to death.

I don't think the truth can ever be an infohazard, but that's me.

Bostrom would disagree:

Information hazards are risks that arise from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of true information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm.

https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf

Personally I'm only interested in race/IQ as a way of finally strangling expectations of equality of outcome to death.

I don't think this is a good strategy, because the equality of outcome people gain strength from anything that looks like right-wing extremism. A better strategy would be the one Coleman Hughes uses: Point out that differences in achievement between ethnicities are ubiquitous across many countries, ergo unlikely to be a result of some sort of unique racist oppression in the USA/UK/etc.

I don't think the truth can ever be an infohazard, but that's me

ONLY the truth can be an infohazard! Bostrom's original example, iirc, was a hypothetical world where nukes are really easy to make and can be manufactured by one man with just glass and wires in a specific geometric configuration. "How to arrange glass and wires in your shed to blow up a city" is therefore an infohazard only because, yes, it's true, if you arrange glass and wires that way you'll blow up a city.

That sounds like something people should know so that they don't live in cities in the first place.

But I'll concede that at some point infohazards grow large enough (and the risk vs benefit ratio of more people knowing them grows great enough) that they truly are infohazards. If you can build a planet-destroying nuke with relatively minimal effort, that's obviously something you don't want getting out. Though even then, you'd probably want to share related information, such as a lie that the earth is at constant threat of destruction due to asteroids, in order to shape culture and policy to best respond to the real threat.

The trouble is that I'd argue that the concept of "infohazard" is itself more of an infohazard than the concept of race and IQ. It gives free speech opponents more weapons, and IMO free speech is even more important than egalitarianism. Free speech will (imo) lead to egalitarianism over the long run, but the reverse is not necessarily true.