Could you elaborate on why you’re so quick to associate racism with truthseekingness? You’re at least the third person to do so in this discussion and I think this demands an explanation. What’s the relationship between the two? Have you investigated racist assertions and concluded they are truthful?
You could say that lack of censorship, even of false ideas, is important for truth seeking in a community. But I don’t think you’d agree with a policy to allow everyone to say what they think is true without social consequences. Suppose a community of people are fixated on the intelligence of your children specifically, and they think that your children are genetically dumb. They post about this often on Twitter/X, and endorse eugenic policies to prevent future people from being like your children in particular. How would you feel about one of those people being a top billed guest to a conference? Would you approve of it because it demonstrates a strong commitment to truthseekingness?
Could you elaborate on why you’re so quick to associate racism with truthseekingness? You’re at least the third person to do so in this discussion and I think this demands an explanation. What’s the relationship between the two? Have you investigated racist assertions and concluded they are truthful?
Here’s where I see this association coming from. People vary in many ways, some directly visible (height, facial structure, speed, melanin) and some less so (compassion, facility with mathematics, creativity, musicality). Most directly visible ones clearly have a genetic component: you can see the differences between populations, cross-group adoptees are visibly much more similar to their birth parents than their adoptive parents, etc. With the non-visible variation it’s harder to tell how much is genetic, but evidence from situations like twins raised apart tells us that some is.
Getting closer to the edge, it’s likely that there are population-level genetic differences on non-visible traits: different populations have been under different selection pressures in ways that impacted visible traits, and it would be surprising if these pressures didn’t impact non-visible traits. One could go looking into this, try to figure out what is actually true, and if so what those differences are. If I did this I might find that some common racist stereotypes are backed up by reality, or I might find that they were not. Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was, and I don’t see much value in learning these answers, however, I’m not going to look into this. A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question. I think a lot of people reason this way about low-payoff controversial areas and avoid them.
Say someone does value seeking truth so highly that they’re willing to go into these areas despite the risk of social censure should they end up with politically difficult beliefs. If they encounter strong evidence that this aspect of reality has seriously unfortunate implications, they have two main options: delude themselves into thinking reality is otherwise or accept reality and with it the implications. Biting the bullet, the same good epistemic norms we need elsewhere for handling a messy world mean that if someone really does find themselves in that situation, I think they should do the latter.
Of course someone can also end up with racist beliefs through garden variety stereotyping, close mindedness, and bigotry. Since these are relatively common, most people saying racist things didn’t get there via an unusually strong commitment to seeking truth regardless of the social consequences. And even someone who has a scientific-sounding justification for their claims may have done a poor job (or not even attempted) to find out what’s really true, instead poking through some papers and ending up with their initial stereotypes strengthened through confirmation bias. So I think it’s generally incorrect to go from learning that a person has racist beliefs to increasing your sense of how truth-seeking they are, though it may still make sense if (a) your priors on reality being unfortunate here are high enough and (b) you know enough other things about this person that this path seems much more likely than the more common path.
I love this comment, it really helped me think about this.
To explore a little more, I had a small issue with this sentiment.
”Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was, and I don’t see much value in learning these answers, however, I’m not going to look into this. A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question. I think a lot of people reason this way about low-payoff controversial areas and avoid them.”
I completely agree with this as a guiding principle, and think it should probably usually be the default option for most people. “A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question.”
I think however that sticking to talking about every truth we find may not be a good idea, and I would bet you probably don’t actually talk about every uncomfortable finding you have com accross. “Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was”
I get the general principle of talking about what we discover along the rather than staying quiet, but I think there can be exceptions. If we do stumble across meaningful uncomfortable outcomes in either through our own research or on the internet or whatever, I think the best option might be to avoid talking about the issue at all. I’m not sure we ever “need” to talk about a research finding.
I agree with this statement “they have two main options: delude themselves into thinking reality is otherwise or accept reality and with it the implications.” but think that in some cases we can accept reality and still choose not to talk about it, oreven think about it very much, especially if talking about it is unlikely to lead to any helpful outcome.
I think the world in general is extremely unfair and there are quite a number of “unfortunate” and awkward truths even outside the realm of genetics, some of which might best to avoid talking about.
You’re right that I don’t have to talk about everything that I find. To take an uncontroversial example, if in my day job I find an easy way to make a bioweapon, I’m not going to blog how to do that.
But if you’re not going to talk about it if you conclude X, are you also not going to talk about it if you conclude not-X? If not then you’re making it much harder for other people to figure out what is true (more).
I feel one is always allowed not to speak about what they don’t want to, but that if one does decide to speak about something, they should never make a statement they know is a lie. This is sad, because depending on the issue and how it relates to your career and other stuff, you might not be able to just keep quiet, and besides, your silence is going to be interpreted uncharitably. People who have shown to consistently value and practice truth-saying should be allowed some sort of leeway, like ‘I will only answer n randomly chosen questions today (n also randomized) and you are not entitled to press further on anything I don’t answer’.
>If we do stumble across meaningful uncomfortable outcomes in either through our own research or on the internet or whatever, I think the best option might be to avoid talking about the issue at all.
You can’t ignore reality this selectively and expect reasonable outcomes. If I have two health problems, but I’m only allowed to treat one because the other is socially unacceptable, the other will get worse and worse. To be clear- I think there’s little value in discussing the whole genetic thing. But I think most people outraged by it are ignoring why it comes up.
If you want to avoid talking about the issue, then you have to move that removal up a level. So we refuse to consider that there are racial differences in genetics- okay, then you need to move that up a level and racial differences in anything are unacceptable topics. No more concern about statistical differences in, say, homeownership, graduation rates, or crime rates. To make certain causes verboten means the symptoms cannot be properly addressed either.
I believe this kind of absolute and strict colorblindness would be an improvement for society. But I suspect that most of the people complaining about Hanania would not agree.
For what it’s worth, I find Hanania an irritating troll and I don’t get the appeal to the Manifest crowd, except in the most cynical manner that he’s a right-winger who mostly shits on other right-wingers. A sort of guilty indulgence, like a comedian who makes jokes mostly about people you already don’t like.
oThis isn’t directly responsive to your comment but- I’ve gone to that particular edge of the map and poked around a bit. I think people who avoid looking into the question for the above reason typically sound like they expect that there plausibly be dragons. This is a PSA that I saw no dragons, so the reader should consider the dragons less plausible.
There certainly are differences in individual intelligence due to genetics. And at the species level, genes are what cause humans to be smarter than, say, turtles. It’s also true that there’s no law of reality that prevents unfortunate things like one group of sapients being noticeably smarter than another due to genetics. However, I’m pretty sure that this is not a world where that happened with continent-scale populations of homo sapiens[1]. I think it’s more likely that the standard evidence presented in favor instead indicates psychiatrists’ difficulty in accounting for all non-genetic factors.
I don’t mean to argue for spending time reading about this. The argument against checking every question still applies, and I don’t expect to update anyone’s expectations of what they’d find by a huge amount. But my impression is people sound like their expectations are rather gloomy[2]. I’d like to stake some of my credibility to nudge those expectations towards “probably fine”.
I feel like I ought to give a brief and partial explanation of why: Human evolutionary history shows an enormous “hunger” for higher intelligence. Mutations that increase intelligence with only a moderate cost would tend to rapidly spread across populations, even relatively isolated ones, much like lactose tolerance is doing. It would be strange this pressure dropped off in some locations after human populations diverged.
It’s possible that there were differing environmental pressures that pushed different tradeoffs over aspects of intelligence. Eg, perhaps at very high altitudes it’s more favorable to consider distant dangers with very thorough system-2 assessments, and in lowlands it’s better to make system-2 faster but less careful. However at the scale corresponding to the term “race” (ie roughly continent-scale), I struggle to think of large or moderate environmental trends that would affect optimal cognition style. Whereas continent-scale trends that affect optimal skin pigments are pretty clear.
Adding to this, our understanding of genetics is rapidly growing. If there was a major difference in cognition-affecting mutations corresponding to racial groupings, I’d have bet a group of scientists would have stumbled on them by now & caused an uproar I’d hear about. As time goes on the lack of uproars is becoming stronger evidence.
I suspect this is due to a reporting bias by non-experts that talk about this question. Those who perceive “dragons on the map” will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up. So people who calmly state facts on the matter instead of shouting about bias are disproportionately the ones convinced of the genetic differences, which heuristically over-weights their position.
The asymmetry that @Ben Millwood points to below is important, but it goes further. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they’ve found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they’ve been misinterpreting it. Except this doesn’t work on taboo topics:
Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing’s perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don’t know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
You wrote essentially the opposite (“Those who perceive ‘dragons on the map’ will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up.”) and I agree some people will think this way, but I think this is many fewer people than are willing to publicly argue for generally-accepted-as-good positions but not generally-accepted-as-evil ones.
Many people really do or don’t want dragons to exist, and so will argue for/against them without much real engagement with the evidence.
Good faith participation in a serious debate on the existence of dragons risks your reputation and jeopardizes your ability to contribute in many places.
So I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they’ve found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they’ve been misinterpreting it.
This is a bit discourteous here.
I am not claiming that A is convincing to me in isolation. I am claiming that after a hundred similarly smart people fit different evidence together, there’s so much model uncertainty that I’m conservatively downgrading A from “overwhelmingly obvious” to “pretty sure”. I am claiming that if we could somehow make a prediction market that would resolve on the actual truth of the matter, I might bet only half my savings on A, just in case I missed something drastic.
You’re free to dismiss this as overconfidence of course. But this isn’t amateur hour, I understand the implications of what I’m saying and intend my words to be meaningful.
Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing’s perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don’t know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
You wrote essentially the opposite… and I agree some people will think this way, but I think this is many fewer people than are willing to publicly argue for generally-accepted-as-good positions but not generally-accepted-as-evil ones
I think this largely depends on whether a given forum is anonymous or not. In an alternate universe where the dragon scenario was true, I think I’d end up arguing for it anonymously at some point, though likely not on this forum.
I was not particularly tracking my named-ness as a point of evidence, except insofar as it could be used to determine my engagement with EA & rationality and make updates about my epistemics & good faith.
Good faith participation in a serious debate on the existence of dragons risks your reputation and jeopardizes your ability to contribute in many places.
Sure. I understand it’s epistemically rude to take debate pot-shots when an opposing team would be so disadvantaged, and there’s a reason to ignore one-sided information. There’s no obligation to update or engage if this comes across as adversarial.
But I really am approaching this as cooperatively communicating information. I found I had nonzero stress about the perceived possibility of dragons here, and I expect others do as well. I think a principled refusal to look does have nonzero reputational harm. There will be situations where that’s the best we can manage, but there’s also such a thing as a p(dragon) low enough that it’s no longer a good strategy. If it is the case that there are obviously no dragons somewhere, it’d be a good idea for a high-trust group to have a way to call “all clear”.
So this is my best shot. Hey, anyone reading this? I know this is unilateral and all, but I think we’re good.
Thanks. There’s an asymmetry, though, where you can either find out that what everyone already thinks is true (which feels like a bit of a waste of time), or you can find out something deeply uncomfortable. Even if you think the former is where most of the probability is, it’s still not a very appealing prospect.
(I’m not sure what the rhetorical import of this or what conclusions we should draw from it, just felt like explaining why a lot of people find investigating distasteful even if they think it won’t change their mind.)
I think I wasn’t entirely clear; the recommendation was that if my claim sounded rational people should update their probability, not that people should change their asymmetric question policy. Edited a bit to make it more clear.
My view on this is that, unless there is some really strong argument against HBD type views that is not regularly being made by the people arguing that HBD type people are evil, we have in this case a dubious but plausible proposition (HBD) where the strength of the social consensus against it has gotten way, way stronger than the evidence against it.
People who are good at noticing holes in arguments are going to notice that the common arguments saying that HBD style ideas are obviously and completely false have lots of holes in them. Some of these people will then have a period where they think HBD is probably true before (possibly) they notice the holes that also exist in the arguments for HBD.
In this context it is pretty likely that ‘being good at noticing holes in arguments that your social group strongly endorses’ is going to associate with a tendency to ‘racism’.
I also have a dislike for excluding people who have racist style views simply on that basis, with no further discussion needed, because it effectively is setting the prior for racism being true to 0 before we’ve actually looked at the data.
Make the argument on the merits for why they are bad scholars making provably false arguments, like we do with creationists, anti-vaxxers, and 9-11 truthers, or let them talk. Trying to convince me to not listen to Hanania without establishing that what he says is not connected to reality feels to me like you are trying to make me have stupider beliefs because it is politically convenient for you.
That feeling, like you are treating me as a child who needs to be given false stories so I do the right thing, is probably behind a huge portion of the rationalist communities commitment to not excluding people.
Of course the story in the head of the anti racist is that they are stopping bad things from happening, and they are acting to prevent things like slavery, the holocaust, and Jim Crow from occurring, and that by excluding racists they are working to create a world where current systematic injustices get corrected.
It is possible that this consequentialist argument is correct, but it has nothing to do with epistemics, and simply making it means that you are (at this location) valuing consequences over truth.
Which of course (almost) everyone does sometimes. There are groups (both hypothetical and real) whose speech I’d like to suppress. This is a paradox in my thinking that I feel uncomfortable about, but it is there.
Make the argument on the merits for why they are bad scholars making provably false arguments, like we do with creationists, anti-vaxxers, and 9-11 truthers, or let them talk
This feels like a description of how you want reality to be rather than how it actually is. Prominent creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers generally don’t find scientists, engineers or political scientists queuing up to debate them or intellectuals queuing up to hear them out either and not because the strength of the evidence favours them. More to the point: if a conference on an apparently unrelated subject like prediction markets announces a lineup with an unusually large number of creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers the discussion will definitely be around why those people were selected and whether they should have been rather than rehashing old arguments about whether they have a point.
Likewise, if Manifest chose for some reason to stack their attendee list with people who were unusually outspokenly ‘woke’ or raving Stalinists[!] and the feedback was that they didn’t deserve a speaking slot on the basis of their social media obnoxiousness or their presence attracted the wrong sort of people, it wouldn’t say anything either way about the validity of their arguments. Nor does the fact they chose not to platform those sort of people.
You don’t pick truth when you pick your speaker lineup, you pick your audience.
In the case of someone like Hanania he’s not actually producing scientific research related to his political targets anyway, and I doubt the attendees who allegedly spent the social hours of the conference testing reactions to the word ‘fag’, looking for opportunities to bring up race and IQ in the conversation and inviting people to Curtis Yarvin’s afterparty if they like what they hear are behaving that way because they’re unusually good at following the evidence rather than the herd.
There are reasons why you might want to exclude HDBers that don’t depend on any particular HDB view being false. And there are reasons why you might object to including some of the people at Manifest even if you don’t think HDBers should be automatically excluded.
On the first point: The truth value of “most people who are into HDB are racist in the “dislike and are biased against Black people,” sense and many are fascists or support gross human rights violations” is independent of the truth-value of HDB. Certainly Bryan Caplan, who no one would consider a dogmatic leftist seems to think something like this (at least the human rights bit): see the blog post by him Nathan Young’s posted in another thread. The reports of slurs at the conference are evidence in favour of “invite HDB speakers, get bigots in the audience”, as is the presence of Yarvin (a genuine fascist’s) followers. (Even if Yarvin himself wasn’t there.)
It’s not low integrity to prioritise not attracting slur-chucking bigots and fascists over having speakers with a particular viewpoint even IF we assume that viewpoint includes some true and controversial claims. It is plausible that many obnoxious ideological groupings believe some true and controversial things. For all I know, Stalinists are nuch more likely to believe some true and controversial things about the US’s role in the Maidan rebellion and its influence on the later Russian decision to invade. But I would still be wary of inviting five people with that view to a prediction festival if it meant a high Stalinist attendance. I might be more inclined to invite them to an academic conference explicitly about the origins of the war in Ukraine.
This is also not an all-or-nothing matter. You can think it is possible for there to be some circumstances in which inviting some HDBers and still think these sort of considerations make it a bad idea to invite multiple people with scientific racism controversies to a fun conference on prediction.
On the second point:
Belief in HDB is not in fact the only objection to several of the the speakers and attendees. Hanania is a former white nationalist who called Black people animals. Chau seems to have made generically disparaging about women’s academic ability on twitter, and to have a general history of race/gender edgelording. Hanson said controversial (and in my view misogynistic) things about rape. The Yarvinites are followers of someone who openly supports dictatorship and praises slavery and 19th century defenses of slavery. (It’s not clear the organisers can be blamed for the Yarvinites attendance in fairness: they didn’t explicitly invite them or Yarvin.) It’s perfectly consistent to think some or all of that is ban worthy even if you also believe being a HDBer is not.
If people defending HDB and/or HDBers eant to argue all that stuff is not THAT bad, I personally think that supports the previous reason for excluding them.
(Not engaging with your central point, instead locally engaging with a bunch of sub-claims you make)
The reports of slurs at the conference are evidence in favour of “invite HDB speakers, get bigots in the audience”
To be clear, I haven’t heard of actually anyone citing any slurs (and don’t really know what you are referring to hear). I definitely did not hear any. Maybe someone mentioned this somewhere in the two comment threads numbering over 500+ comments. The closest I can find is this section of the “My experiences [...]” post, which says:
or in less sophisticated cases the use of edgy words like “based”, “fag”, or “retarded” is more than enough to do the trick. If someone asks you what you think of Bukele, you can already guess where he wants to steer the conversation to.
But that doesn’t really sound like slurs in the usual sense, or at least a stretch of the word (I use the words “based” and “retarded” occasionally. “fag” feels weirder to me, though I still wouldn’t describe it as a slur (and I am also not sure whether the author actually heard that term).
called Black people animals
Hanania seems to deny this in a public podcast and multiple people who have dug into this a good amount disagree with you on this. I think it’s bad form to cite it as a undisputed fact despite that.
The Yarvinites are followers
I think you are engaging in speculation about the type of person who attended here, or are engaging in the noncentral fallacy. My guess is there were some people at the event who liked some things about Yarvin. I am highly doubtful that your statements about “The Yarvinites” has much predictive power about what those people do or believe.
I am gay. At this point it’s a term of endearment. If someone called me a fag in an unfriendly way I’d just be a bit baffled. Of course, this is just me.
It’s a famously “reclaimed” slur: Dan Savage used it positively for decades. But there is some dispute- in particular, it seems that many older gay men still have a strongly negative view of it, whereas younger crowds seem generally more accepting. As a Millennial, but not really in “the community,” I still find it off-putting when it’s used positively.
I’ve heard that there’s some queer vs gay tension as well that people that ID as queer are turning “fag” back into a slur, but I have no clue to what extent this is an actual phenomenon instead of outrage-bait.
Yes, I agree it’s used not-that-rarely within the gay community. This is very similar to the n-word situation, and I don’t think is very material to whether it’s a slur or not.
If a gay person called me a fag, I’d update that they were more edgy than me. If a straight person called me a fag, I’d update that they were a bigot (and/or very socially inept and in need of a talking to).
I mean, I think there are many racist-associated slurs that seem much more like central examples to me. I feel like I see random Youtubers of streamers or people in live chats use words like “fag” reasonably frequently, whereas there are many slurs that would indeed peak my ears much more than that. But like, IDK, I haven’t heard it used much, so I don’t have super strong intuitions here.
FYI fag is a pretty central example of a slur in America imo.
It gets used and normalized in some edgy cultures but I think that’s sort of like how the n-word gets used in some subcultures. (When I was growing up at least it was probably in the top 5 ‘worst’ words to say, at least weighted by ‘anyone ever actually said them’)
There’s also a thing where ‘retarded’ went from ‘not that bad’ to ‘particularly bad in some circles’, although I’m not sure how that played out since it was ‘after my time’.
All of this is sort of anti-inductive and evolving and makes sense to not be very obvious to a foreigner.
Eh, I’ve been living in the U.S. for a full decade, so I think the “foreigner excuse” doesn’t really work here, I think I was mostly just wrong in a kind of boring way.
My guess is I just happened to have not heard this specific term used very much where I could see people’s social reaction to it, which I guess is a weird attribute of slurs. Reading more about it in other contexts definitely made me convinced it qualifies as a slur (but also, relatedly, would honestly be quite surprised if people used it in any kind of real way during Manifest).
I’m not sure what you mean by “real way”. One of the central ways it’s culturally understood that that word and certain uses of “gay” are bad to use is to be contemptuous about things one doesn’t like or are insufficiently masculine. That seems like an important and real way it can be used for harm, not only literally meaning to call a gay person a slur.
You use it in quotes to refer to how other people use it (as we’ve been doing in this discussion).
You use it in a clearly light-hearted ironic way (this is dicier, but clearly sometimes possible. For example, if the slur is directed at a clearly non-applicable inanimate object in an ironic way, like, if someone were to list profanities in an exaggerated and joking way against a chair they just stubbed their toe against.)
You use it in a very non-central way (like, someone talks about the historical use of the word faggot, or like, somehow uses it for it’s other meaning “a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel.”)
You have a substantially different cultural background (like, among Australians, friendly insults appear much more common, and calling each other “cunt” or “fag” seems not too rare)
There are probably some more ways I can think of, but these four seem like reasonably common causes of people using slurs with it being “real”.
I’m not aware of “fag” being a common term of endearment among Australians the way “cunt” is, though I might be wrong about that. I think it and “cunt” are in pretty different categories as far as obscene words go, at least in commonwealth countries.
In my experience of being an Australian, “fag” is not a common term of endearment I’ve encountered, except in the sense that general insults are used as terms of endearment (like “shit-for-brains” etc).
I have privately been told by someone I know who attended that they also heard slurs. (They didn’t say what other than “not the n-word”.) I’m not going to name them, because they have already said not to cite them on the forum about another thing they told me they was so my guess is they do not want to be dragged into the controversy on this.
I’d also say that I remember how certain neoreactionaries (not all of them) used to talk on SSC-these people of course eventually got banned. If that was a crowd attracted-which the Yarvin after party suggests it was-I am extremely unsurprised that people whose comments on SSC used to include things like rants about how “white gimmedats” and “white sluts” were teaming up with Black people to demand ruinous government spending, will also use racial slurs when they are not on a forum that will mod that out.
What is meant to be the non-central fallacy in this context? Are you just saying you doubt they are political supporters of Yarvin’s ideas?
(and I am also not sure whether the author actually heard that term)
I can’t confidently recall it was “fag” or “faggot” at this point anymore, but the term was definitely used.
I’m choosing to interpret this as you wondering if I used that collection of words as a representation of the kind of soft opens some of the attendees engaged in instead of real examples (as opposed to suggesting that I was lying), but “fag”, “retarded”, “based”, and “cuck” were all used quite a bit.
I’m choosing to interpret this as you wondering if I used that collection of words as a representation of the kind of soft opens some of the attendees engaged in instead of real examples (as opposed to suggesting that I was lying), but “fag”, “retarded”, “based”, and “cuck” were all used quite a bit.
Yep, that’s how I interpreted it, especially given that the other two seemed to me quite different (again, “based” really has no connotation with a slur to me and is just like a weird word that people on the Internet use, if anything it’s a compliment).
Not that Wikipedia is authoritative for anything, but it describes one of those words as “a term, usually considered a slur, used to refer to gay men.” I would personally characterize the r-word as a slur if referring to an individual with an intellectual disability (and at least as in poor taste otherwise). I’m over 40 so do not understand “based.” Of course, one can disagree with these opinions, but it would not be unreasonable for David to have characterized some of these words as slurs.
Hanania didn’t call black people animals. I reached out to him and this is what he said:
““These people” as in criminals and those who are apologists for crimes. A coalition of bad people who together destroy cities. Yes, I know how it looks. The Penny arrest made me emotional, and so it was an unthinking tweet in the moment.”
He also says it’s quoted in the Blocked and Reported podcast episode, but it’s behind a paywall and I can’t for the life of me get Substack to accept my card, so I can’t doublecheck. Would appreciate if anybody figured out how to do that and could verify.
Also, when I first read the tweet it was clear from the context that he wasn’t referring to black people.
I think generally though it’s easy to misunderstand people, and if people respond to clarify, you should believe what they say they meant to say, not your interpretation of what they said.
I agree with this diagnosis of the situation. At the same time, I feel like it’s the wrong approach to make it a scientific proposition whether racism is right or not. It should never be right, no matter the science. (I know this is just talking semantics, but I think it adds a bunch of moral clarity to frame it in this way, that science can never turn out to support racism.) As I said here, the problem I see with the HBD crowd is that they think their opinions on the science justifies certain other things or that it’s a very important topic.
The scientific proposition is “are there racial genetic differences related to intelligence” right, not “is racism [morally] right”?
I find it odd how much such things seem to be conflated; if I learned that Jews have an IQ an average of 5 points lower than non-Jews, I would… still think the Holocaust and violence towards and harassment of Jews was abhorrent and horrible? I don’t think I’d update much/at all towards thinking it was less horrible. Or if you could visually identify people whose mothers had drank alcohol during pregnancy, and they were statistically a big less intelligent (as I understand them to be), enslaving them, genociding them, or subjecting them to Jim Crow style laws would seem approximately as bad as it seems to do to some group that’s slightly more intelligent on average.
I meant to say the exact same thing, but seem to have struggled at communicating.
I want to point out that my comment above was specifically reacting to the following line and phrasing in timunderwood’s parent comment:
I also have a dislike for excluding people who have racist style views simply on that basis, with no further discussion needed, because it effectively is setting the prior for racism being true to 0 before we’ve actually looked at the data.
My point (and yours) is that this quoted passage would be clearer if it said “genetic group differences” instead of “racism.”
(The above comment makes no reference to racism, and seems to be arguing from general principles. You can object to the general principles, which Richard I think communicated pretty cogently and which presumably apply to opinions associated with racism, but I don’t really understand your comment about the author “associating racism with truthseekingness” since the author does not mention racism.
In as much as Richard is advocating for tolerating controversial beliefs, like some stuff associated with racism, it’s because of the general principles he outlines in his comment. But if that’s what you mean by “associate racism with truthseeking” it seems appropriate to engage with the details of his comment, instead of just asking him to re-explain himself.)
This is a top-level comment on a post titled “Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”. That’s the topic of discussion, and the commenter seems to think that truth-seekingness is related to this topic. That’s what I’m challenging.
The Kolmogorov complicity essay presents numerous instances where individuals held accurate beliefs that their governments deemed heretical. The truthfulness of these beliefs is crucial to the argument. Certainly the essay would come across differently if the heretical beliefs were things like “the sky is green” or “this specific couple’s children are genetically dumb” (when they’re not). Therefore, I fail to understand how this essay pertains to our current discussion unless the contentious racist beliefs are also truthful, which the commenter has not substantiated.
Therefore, I fail to understand how this essay pertains to our current discussion unless the contentious racist beliefs are also truthful, which the commenter has not substantiated.
Thanks! This feels like a more substantive response that seems potentially productive to engage with. Your previous comment felt to me like it was more just kind of ignoring the details of Richard’s comment.
I broadly endorse Jeff’s comment above. To put it another way, though: I think many (but not all) of the arguments from the Kolmogorov complicity essay apply whether the statements which are taboo to question are true or false. As per the quote at the top of the essay:
“A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble.”
That is: good scientists will try to break a wide range of conventional wisdom. When the conventional wisdom is true, then they will fail. But the process of trying to break the conventional wisdom may well get them in trouble either way, e.g. because people assume they’re pushing an agenda rather than “just asking questions”.
For what it is worth, a core argument I made was that many attendees at these events said clearly racist and bigoted things, far beyond milquetoast “there might be group IQ differences”. I am also disturbed by people jumping to the truth-seeking defence.
Could you elaborate on why you’re so quick to associate racism with truthseekingness? You’re at least the third person to do so in this discussion and I think this demands an explanation. What’s the relationship between the two? Have you investigated racist assertions and concluded they are truthful?
You could say that lack of censorship, even of false ideas, is important for truth seeking in a community. But I don’t think you’d agree with a policy to allow everyone to say what they think is true without social consequences. Suppose a community of people are fixated on the intelligence of your children specifically, and they think that your children are genetically dumb. They post about this often on Twitter/X, and endorse eugenic policies to prevent future people from being like your children in particular. How would you feel about one of those people being a top billed guest to a conference? Would you approve of it because it demonstrates a strong commitment to truthseekingness?
Here’s where I see this association coming from. People vary in many ways, some directly visible (height, facial structure, speed, melanin) and some less so (compassion, facility with mathematics, creativity, musicality). Most directly visible ones clearly have a genetic component: you can see the differences between populations, cross-group adoptees are visibly much more similar to their birth parents than their adoptive parents, etc. With the non-visible variation it’s harder to tell how much is genetic, but evidence from situations like twins raised apart tells us that some is.
Getting closer to the edge, it’s likely that there are population-level genetic differences on non-visible traits: different populations have been under different selection pressures in ways that impacted visible traits, and it would be surprising if these pressures didn’t impact non-visible traits. One could go looking into this, try to figure out what is actually true, and if so what those differences are. If I did this I might find that some common racist stereotypes are backed up by reality, or I might find that they were not. Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was, and I don’t see much value in learning these answers, however, I’m not going to look into this. A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question. I think a lot of people reason this way about low-payoff controversial areas and avoid them.
Say someone does value seeking truth so highly that they’re willing to go into these areas despite the risk of social censure should they end up with politically difficult beliefs. If they encounter strong evidence that this aspect of reality has seriously unfortunate implications, they have two main options: delude themselves into thinking reality is otherwise or accept reality and with it the implications. Biting the bullet, the same good epistemic norms we need elsewhere for handling a messy world mean that if someone really does find themselves in that situation, I think they should do the latter.
Of course someone can also end up with racist beliefs through garden variety stereotyping, close mindedness, and bigotry. Since these are relatively common, most people saying racist things didn’t get there via an unusually strong commitment to seeking truth regardless of the social consequences. And even someone who has a scientific-sounding justification for their claims may have done a poor job (or not even attempted) to find out what’s really true, instead poking through some papers and ending up with their initial stereotypes strengthened through confirmation bias. So I think it’s generally incorrect to go from learning that a person has racist beliefs to increasing your sense of how truth-seeking they are, though it may still make sense if (a) your priors on reality being unfortunate here are high enough and (b) you know enough other things about this person that this path seems much more likely than the more common path.
I love this comment, it really helped me think about this.
To explore a little more, I had a small issue with this sentiment.
”Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was, and I don’t see much value in learning these answers, however, I’m not going to look into this. A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question. I think a lot of people reason this way about low-payoff controversial areas and avoid them.”
I completely agree with this as a guiding principle, and think it should probably usually be the default option for most people. “A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question.”
I think however that sticking to talking about every truth we find may not be a good idea, and I would bet you probably don’t actually talk about every uncomfortable finding you have com accross. “Since by my values and temperament I would need to talk about what I found, whichever direction it was”
I get the general principle of talking about what we discover along the rather than staying quiet, but I think there can be exceptions. If we do stumble across meaningful uncomfortable outcomes in either through our own research or on the internet or whatever, I think the best option might be to avoid talking about the issue at all. I’m not sure we ever “need” to talk about a research finding.
I agree with this statement “they have two main options: delude themselves into thinking reality is otherwise or accept reality and with it the implications.” but think that in some cases we can accept reality and still choose not to talk about it, oreven think about it very much, especially if talking about it is unlikely to lead to any helpful outcome.
I think the world in general is extremely unfair and there are quite a number of “unfortunate” and awkward truths even outside the realm of genetics, some of which might best to avoid talking about.
You’re right that I don’t have to talk about everything that I find. To take an uncontroversial example, if in my day job I find an easy way to make a bioweapon, I’m not going to blog how to do that.
But if you’re not going to talk about it if you conclude X, are you also not going to talk about it if you conclude not-X? If not then you’re making it much harder for other people to figure out what is true (more).
I feel one is always allowed not to speak about what they don’t want to, but that if one does decide to speak about something, they should never make a statement they know is a lie. This is sad, because depending on the issue and how it relates to your career and other stuff, you might not be able to just keep quiet, and besides, your silence is going to be interpreted uncharitably. People who have shown to consistently value and practice truth-saying should be allowed some sort of leeway, like ‘I will only answer n randomly chosen questions today (n also randomized) and you are not entitled to press further on anything I don’t answer’.
I 100 percent agree with that, which is where the wisdom comes in to choose not speak about many things.
>If we do stumble across meaningful uncomfortable outcomes in either through our own research or on the internet or whatever, I think the best option might be to avoid talking about the issue at all.
You can’t ignore reality this selectively and expect reasonable outcomes. If I have two health problems, but I’m only allowed to treat one because the other is socially unacceptable, the other will get worse and worse. To be clear- I think there’s little value in discussing the whole genetic thing. But I think most people outraged by it are ignoring why it comes up.
If you want to avoid talking about the issue, then you have to move that removal up a level. So we refuse to consider that there are racial differences in genetics- okay, then you need to move that up a level and racial differences in anything are unacceptable topics. No more concern about statistical differences in, say, homeownership, graduation rates, or crime rates. To make certain causes verboten means the symptoms cannot be properly addressed either.
I believe this kind of absolute and strict colorblindness would be an improvement for society. But I suspect that most of the people complaining about Hanania would not agree.
For what it’s worth, I find Hanania an irritating troll and I don’t get the appeal to the Manifest crowd, except in the most cynical manner that he’s a right-winger who mostly shits on other right-wingers. A sort of guilty indulgence, like a comedian who makes jokes mostly about people you already don’t like.
oThis isn’t directly responsive to your comment but- I’ve gone to that particular edge of the map and poked around a bit. I think people who avoid looking into the question for the above reason typically sound like they expect that there plausibly be dragons. This is a PSA that I saw no dragons, so the reader should consider the dragons less plausible.
There certainly are differences in individual intelligence due to genetics. And at the species level, genes are what cause humans to be smarter than, say, turtles. It’s also true that there’s no law of reality that prevents unfortunate things like one group of sapients being noticeably smarter than another due to genetics. However, I’m pretty sure that this is not a world where that happened with continent-scale populations of homo sapiens[1]. I think it’s more likely that the standard evidence presented in favor instead indicates psychiatrists’ difficulty in accounting for all non-genetic factors.
I don’t mean to argue for spending time reading about this. The argument against checking every question still applies, and I don’t expect to update anyone’s expectations of what they’d find by a huge amount. But my impression is people sound like their expectations are rather gloomy[2]. I’d like to stake some of my credibility to nudge those expectations towards “probably fine”.
I feel like I ought to give a brief and partial explanation of why: Human evolutionary history shows an enormous “hunger” for higher intelligence. Mutations that increase intelligence with only a moderate cost would tend to rapidly spread across populations, even relatively isolated ones, much like lactose tolerance is doing. It would be strange this pressure dropped off in some locations after human populations diverged.
It’s possible that there were differing environmental pressures that pushed different tradeoffs over aspects of intelligence. Eg, perhaps at very high altitudes it’s more favorable to consider distant dangers with very thorough system-2 assessments, and in lowlands it’s better to make system-2 faster but less careful. However at the scale corresponding to the term “race” (ie roughly continent-scale), I struggle to think of large or moderate environmental trends that would affect optimal cognition style. Whereas continent-scale trends that affect optimal skin pigments are pretty clear.
Adding to this, our understanding of genetics is rapidly growing. If there was a major difference in cognition-affecting mutations corresponding to racial groupings, I’d have bet a group of scientists would have stumbled on them by now & caused an uproar I’d hear about. As time goes on the lack of uproars is becoming stronger evidence.
I suspect this is due to a reporting bias by non-experts that talk about this question. Those who perceive “dragons on the map” will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up. So people who calmly state facts on the matter instead of shouting about bias are disproportionately the ones convinced of the genetic differences, which heuristically over-weights their position.
The asymmetry that @Ben Millwood points to below is important, but it goes further. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they’ve found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they’ve been misinterpreting it. Except this doesn’t work on taboo topics:
Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing’s perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don’t know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
You wrote essentially the opposite (“Those who perceive ‘dragons on the map’ will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up.”) and I agree some people will think this way, but I think this is many fewer people than are willing to publicly argue for generally-accepted-as-good positions but not generally-accepted-as-evil ones.
Many people really do or don’t want dragons to exist, and so will argue for/against them without much real engagement with the evidence.
Good faith participation in a serious debate on the existence of dragons risks your reputation and jeopardizes your ability to contribute in many places.
So I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
This is a bit discourteous here.
I am not claiming that A is convincing to me in isolation. I am claiming that after a hundred similarly smart people fit different evidence together, there’s so much model uncertainty that I’m conservatively downgrading A from “overwhelmingly obvious” to “pretty sure”. I am claiming that if we could somehow make a prediction market that would resolve on the actual truth of the matter, I might bet only half my savings on A, just in case I missed something drastic.
You’re free to dismiss this as overconfidence of course. But this isn’t amateur hour, I understand the implications of what I’m saying and intend my words to be meaningful.
I think this largely depends on whether a given forum is anonymous or not. In an alternate universe where the dragon scenario was true, I think I’d end up arguing for it anonymously at some point, though likely not on this forum.
I was not particularly tracking my named-ness as a point of evidence, except insofar as it could be used to determine my engagement with EA & rationality and make updates about my epistemics & good faith.
Sure. I understand it’s epistemically rude to take debate pot-shots when an opposing team would be so disadvantaged, and there’s a reason to ignore one-sided information. There’s no obligation to update or engage if this comes across as adversarial.
But I really am approaching this as cooperatively communicating information. I found I had nonzero stress about the perceived possibility of dragons here, and I expect others do as well. I think a principled refusal to look does have nonzero reputational harm. There will be situations where that’s the best we can manage, but there’s also such a thing as a p(dragon) low enough that it’s no longer a good strategy. If it is the case that there are obviously no dragons somewhere, it’d be a good idea for a high-trust group to have a way to call “all clear”.
So this is my best shot. Hey, anyone reading this? I know this is unilateral and all, but I think we’re good.
Thanks. There’s an asymmetry, though, where you can either find out that what everyone already thinks is true (which feels like a bit of a waste of time), or you can find out something deeply uncomfortable. Even if you think the former is where most of the probability is, it’s still not a very appealing prospect.
(I’m not sure what the rhetorical import of this or what conclusions we should draw from it, just felt like explaining why a lot of people find investigating distasteful even if they think it won’t change their mind.)
Agreed.
I think I wasn’t entirely clear; the recommendation was that if my claim sounded rational people should update their probability, not that people should change their asymmetric question policy. Edited a bit to make it more clear.
My view on this is that, unless there is some really strong argument against HBD type views that is not regularly being made by the people arguing that HBD type people are evil, we have in this case a dubious but plausible proposition (HBD) where the strength of the social consensus against it has gotten way, way stronger than the evidence against it.
People who are good at noticing holes in arguments are going to notice that the common arguments saying that HBD style ideas are obviously and completely false have lots of holes in them. Some of these people will then have a period where they think HBD is probably true before (possibly) they notice the holes that also exist in the arguments for HBD.
In this context it is pretty likely that ‘being good at noticing holes in arguments that your social group strongly endorses’ is going to associate with a tendency to ‘racism’.
I also have a dislike for excluding people who have racist style views simply on that basis, with no further discussion needed, because it effectively is setting the prior for racism being true to 0 before we’ve actually looked at the data.
Make the argument on the merits for why they are bad scholars making provably false arguments, like we do with creationists, anti-vaxxers, and 9-11 truthers, or let them talk. Trying to convince me to not listen to Hanania without establishing that what he says is not connected to reality feels to me like you are trying to make me have stupider beliefs because it is politically convenient for you.
That feeling, like you are treating me as a child who needs to be given false stories so I do the right thing, is probably behind a huge portion of the rationalist communities commitment to not excluding people.
Of course the story in the head of the anti racist is that they are stopping bad things from happening, and they are acting to prevent things like slavery, the holocaust, and Jim Crow from occurring, and that by excluding racists they are working to create a world where current systematic injustices get corrected.
It is possible that this consequentialist argument is correct, but it has nothing to do with epistemics, and simply making it means that you are (at this location) valuing consequences over truth.
Which of course (almost) everyone does sometimes. There are groups (both hypothetical and real) whose speech I’d like to suppress. This is a paradox in my thinking that I feel uncomfortable about, but it is there.
This feels like a description of how you want reality to be rather than how it actually is. Prominent creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers generally don’t find scientists, engineers or political scientists queuing up to debate them or intellectuals queuing up to hear them out either and not because the strength of the evidence favours them. More to the point: if a conference on an apparently unrelated subject like prediction markets announces a lineup with an unusually large number of creationists, anti-vaxxers or 9-11 truthers the discussion will definitely be around why those people were selected and whether they should have been rather than rehashing old arguments about whether they have a point.
Likewise, if Manifest chose for some reason to stack their attendee list with people who were unusually outspokenly ‘woke’ or raving Stalinists[!] and the feedback was that they didn’t deserve a speaking slot on the basis of their social media obnoxiousness or their presence attracted the wrong sort of people, it wouldn’t say anything either way about the validity of their arguments. Nor does the fact they chose not to platform those sort of people.
You don’t pick truth when you pick your speaker lineup, you pick your audience.
In the case of someone like Hanania he’s not actually producing scientific research related to his political targets anyway, and I doubt the attendees who allegedly spent the social hours of the conference testing reactions to the word ‘fag’, looking for opportunities to bring up race and IQ in the conversation and inviting people to Curtis Yarvin’s afterparty if they like what they hear are behaving that way because they’re unusually good at following the evidence rather than the herd.
There are reasons why you might want to exclude HDBers that don’t depend on any particular HDB view being false. And there are reasons why you might object to including some of the people at Manifest even if you don’t think HDBers should be automatically excluded.
On the first point: The truth value of “most people who are into HDB are racist in the “dislike and are biased against Black people,” sense and many are fascists or support gross human rights violations” is independent of the truth-value of HDB. Certainly Bryan Caplan, who no one would consider a dogmatic leftist seems to think something like this (at least the human rights bit): see the blog post by him Nathan Young’s posted in another thread. The reports of slurs at the conference are evidence in favour of “invite HDB speakers, get bigots in the audience”, as is the presence of Yarvin (a genuine fascist’s) followers. (Even if Yarvin himself wasn’t there.) It’s not low integrity to prioritise not attracting slur-chucking bigots and fascists over having speakers with a particular viewpoint even IF we assume that viewpoint includes some true and controversial claims. It is plausible that many obnoxious ideological groupings believe some true and controversial things. For all I know, Stalinists are nuch more likely to believe some true and controversial things about the US’s role in the Maidan rebellion and its influence on the later Russian decision to invade. But I would still be wary of inviting five people with that view to a prediction festival if it meant a high Stalinist attendance. I might be more inclined to invite them to an academic conference explicitly about the origins of the war in Ukraine. This is also not an all-or-nothing matter. You can think it is possible for there to be some circumstances in which inviting some HDBers and still think these sort of considerations make it a bad idea to invite multiple people with scientific racism controversies to a fun conference on prediction.
On the second point:
Belief in HDB is not in fact the only objection to several of the the speakers and attendees. Hanania is a former white nationalist who called Black people animals. Chau seems to have made generically disparaging about women’s academic ability on twitter, and to have a general history of race/gender edgelording. Hanson said controversial (and in my view misogynistic) things about rape. The Yarvinites are followers of someone who openly supports dictatorship and praises slavery and 19th century defenses of slavery. (It’s not clear the organisers can be blamed for the Yarvinites attendance in fairness: they didn’t explicitly invite them or Yarvin.) It’s perfectly consistent to think some or all of that is ban worthy even if you also believe being a HDBer is not. If people defending HDB and/or HDBers eant to argue all that stuff is not THAT bad, I personally think that supports the previous reason for excluding them.
(Not engaging with your central point, instead locally engaging with a bunch of sub-claims you make)
To be clear, I haven’t heard of actually anyone citing any slurs (and don’t really know what you are referring to hear). I definitely did not hear any. Maybe someone mentioned this somewhere in the two comment threads numbering over 500+ comments. The closest I can find is this section of the “My experiences [...]” post, which says:
But that doesn’t really sound like slurs in the usual sense, or at least a stretch of the word (I use the words “based” and “retarded” occasionally. “fag” feels weirder to me, though I still wouldn’t describe it as a slur (and I am also not sure whether the author actually heard that term).
Hanania seems to deny this in a public podcast and multiple people who have dug into this a good amount disagree with you on this. I think it’s bad form to cite it as a undisputed fact despite that.
I think you are engaging in speculation about the type of person who attended here, or are engaging in the noncentral fallacy. My guess is there were some people at the event who liked some things about Yarvin. I am highly doubtful that your statements about “The Yarvinites” has much predictive power about what those people do or believe.
Wait what? I can’t think of many words that would be more central examples of slurs than that.
I am gay. At this point it’s a term of endearment. If someone called me a fag in an unfriendly way I’d just be a bit baffled. Of course, this is just me.
It’s a famously “reclaimed” slur: Dan Savage used it positively for decades. But there is some dispute- in particular, it seems that many older gay men still have a strongly negative view of it, whereas younger crowds seem generally more accepting. As a Millennial, but not really in “the community,” I still find it off-putting when it’s used positively.
I’ve heard that there’s some queer vs gay tension as well that people that ID as queer are turning “fag” back into a slur, but I have no clue to what extent this is an actual phenomenon instead of outrage-bait.
Yes, I agree it’s used not-that-rarely within the gay community. This is very similar to the n-word situation, and I don’t think is very material to whether it’s a slur or not.
If a gay person called me a fag, I’d update that they were more edgy than me. If a straight person called me a fag, I’d update that they were a bigot (and/or very socially inept and in need of a talking to).
I mean, I think there are many racist-associated slurs that seem much more like central examples to me. I feel like I see random Youtubers of streamers or people in live chats use words like “fag” reasonably frequently, whereas there are many slurs that would indeed peak my ears much more than that. But like, IDK, I haven’t heard it used much, so I don’t have super strong intuitions here.
FYI fag is a pretty central example of a slur in America imo.
It gets used and normalized in some edgy cultures but I think that’s sort of like how the n-word gets used in some subcultures. (When I was growing up at least it was probably in the top 5 ‘worst’ words to say, at least weighted by ‘anyone ever actually said them’)
There’s also a thing where ‘retarded’ went from ‘not that bad’ to ‘particularly bad in some circles’, although I’m not sure how that played out since it was ‘after my time’.
All of this is sort of anti-inductive and evolving and makes sense to not be very obvious to a foreigner.
Eh, I’ve been living in the U.S. for a full decade, so I think the “foreigner excuse” doesn’t really work here, I think I was mostly just wrong in a kind of boring way.
My guess is I just happened to have not heard this specific term used very much where I could see people’s social reaction to it, which I guess is a weird attribute of slurs. Reading more about it in other contexts definitely made me convinced it qualifies as a slur (but also, relatedly, would honestly be quite surprised if people used it in any kind of real way during Manifest).
I’m not sure what you mean by “real way”. One of the central ways it’s culturally understood that that word and certain uses of “gay” are bad to use is to be contemptuous about things one doesn’t like or are insufficiently masculine. That seems like an important and real way it can be used for harm, not only literally meaning to call a gay person a slur.
Some ways to use a slur in a non-real way:
You use it in quotes to refer to how other people use it (as we’ve been doing in this discussion).
You use it in a clearly light-hearted ironic way (this is dicier, but clearly sometimes possible. For example, if the slur is directed at a clearly non-applicable inanimate object in an ironic way, like, if someone were to list profanities in an exaggerated and joking way against a chair they just stubbed their toe against.)
You use it in a very non-central way (like, someone talks about the historical use of the word faggot, or like, somehow uses it for it’s other meaning “a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel.”)
You have a substantially different cultural background (like, among Australians, friendly insults appear much more common, and calling each other “cunt” or “fag” seems not too rare)
There are probably some more ways I can think of, but these four seem like reasonably common causes of people using slurs with it being “real”.
I’m not aware of “fag” being a common term of endearment among Australians the way “cunt” is, though I might be wrong about that. I think it and “cunt” are in pretty different categories as far as obscene words go, at least in commonwealth countries.
I briefly googled it and it seems at least somewhat common: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-Australian-men-like-to-use-faggot
Also, I guess Australian’s call cigarettes “fags” which I think guess is some evidence of the word being used more casually.
Not confident of this though, I’ve never been to Australia.
In my experience of being an Australian, “fag” is not a common term of endearment I’ve encountered, except in the sense that general insults are used as terms of endearment (like “shit-for-brains” etc).
Fair enough re the link!
Cigarettes are called fags in the UK and other commonwealth countries, yeah. I don’t think it has any direct connection to the slur.
I have privately been told by someone I know who attended that they also heard slurs. (They didn’t say what other than “not the n-word”.) I’m not going to name them, because they have already said not to cite them on the forum about another thing they told me they was so my guess is they do not want to be dragged into the controversy on this.
I’d also say that I remember how certain neoreactionaries (not all of them) used to talk on SSC-these people of course eventually got banned. If that was a crowd attracted-which the Yarvin after party suggests it was-I am extremely unsurprised that people whose comments on SSC used to include things like rants about how “white gimmedats” and “white sluts” were teaming up with Black people to demand ruinous government spending, will also use racial slurs when they are not on a forum that will mod that out.
What is meant to be the non-central fallacy in this context? Are you just saying you doubt they are political supporters of Yarvin’s ideas?
I can’t confidently recall it was “fag” or “faggot” at this point anymore, but the term was definitely used.
I’m choosing to interpret this as you wondering if I used that collection of words as a representation of the kind of soft opens some of the attendees engaged in instead of real examples (as opposed to suggesting that I was lying), but “fag”, “retarded”, “based”, and “cuck” were all used quite a bit.
Yep, that’s how I interpreted it, especially given that the other two seemed to me quite different (again, “based” really has no connotation with a slur to me and is just like a weird word that people on the Internet use, if anything it’s a compliment).
Not that Wikipedia is authoritative for anything, but it describes one of those words as “a term, usually considered a slur, used to refer to gay men.” I would personally characterize the r-word as a slur if referring to an individual with an intellectual disability (and at least as in poor taste otherwise). I’m over 40 so do not understand “based.” Of course, one can disagree with these opinions, but it would not be unreasonable for David to have characterized some of these words as slurs.
Hanania didn’t call black people animals. I reached out to him and this is what he said:
““These people” as in criminals and those who are apologists for crimes. A coalition of bad people who together destroy cities. Yes, I know how it looks. The Penny arrest made me emotional, and so it was an unthinking tweet in the moment.”
He also says it’s quoted in the Blocked and Reported podcast episode, but it’s behind a paywall and I can’t for the life of me get Substack to accept my card, so I can’t doublecheck. Would appreciate if anybody figured out how to do that and could verify.
Also, when I first read the tweet it was clear from the context that he wasn’t referring to black people.
I think generally though it’s easy to misunderstand people, and if people respond to clarify, you should believe what they say they meant to say, not your interpretation of what they said.
I agree with this diagnosis of the situation. At the same time, I feel like it’s the wrong approach to make it a scientific proposition whether racism is right or not. It should never be right, no matter the science. (I know this is just talking semantics, but I think it adds a bunch of moral clarity to frame it in this way, that science can never turn out to support racism.) As I said here, the problem I see with the HBD crowd is that they think their opinions on the science justifies certain other things or that it’s a very important topic.
The scientific proposition is “are there racial genetic differences related to intelligence” right, not “is racism [morally] right”?
I find it odd how much such things seem to be conflated; if I learned that Jews have an IQ an average of 5 points lower than non-Jews, I would… still think the Holocaust and violence towards and harassment of Jews was abhorrent and horrible? I don’t think I’d update much/at all towards thinking it was less horrible. Or if you could visually identify people whose mothers had drank alcohol during pregnancy, and they were statistically a big less intelligent (as I understand them to be), enslaving them, genociding them, or subjecting them to Jim Crow style laws would seem approximately as bad as it seems to do to some group that’s slightly more intelligent on average.
Well said.
I meant to say the exact same thing, but seem to have struggled at communicating.
I want to point out that my comment above was specifically reacting to the following line and phrasing in timunderwood’s parent comment:
My point (and yours) is that this quoted passage would be clearer if it said “genetic group differences” instead of “racism.”
(The above comment makes no reference to racism, and seems to be arguing from general principles. You can object to the general principles, which Richard I think communicated pretty cogently and which presumably apply to opinions associated with racism, but I don’t really understand your comment about the author “associating racism with truthseekingness” since the author does not mention racism.
In as much as Richard is advocating for tolerating controversial beliefs, like some stuff associated with racism, it’s because of the general principles he outlines in his comment. But if that’s what you mean by “associate racism with truthseeking” it seems appropriate to engage with the details of his comment, instead of just asking him to re-explain himself.)
This is a top-level comment on a post titled “Why so many “racists” at Manifest?”. That’s the topic of discussion, and the commenter seems to think that truth-seekingness is related to this topic. That’s what I’m challenging.
The Kolmogorov complicity essay presents numerous instances where individuals held accurate beliefs that their governments deemed heretical. The truthfulness of these beliefs is crucial to the argument. Certainly the essay would come across differently if the heretical beliefs were things like “the sky is green” or “this specific couple’s children are genetically dumb” (when they’re not). Therefore, I fail to understand how this essay pertains to our current discussion unless the contentious racist beliefs are also truthful, which the commenter has not substantiated.
Thanks! This feels like a more substantive response that seems potentially productive to engage with. Your previous comment felt to me like it was more just kind of ignoring the details of Richard’s comment.
I broadly endorse Jeff’s comment above. To put it another way, though: I think many (but not all) of the arguments from the Kolmogorov complicity essay apply whether the statements which are taboo to question are true or false. As per the quote at the top of the essay:
That is: good scientists will try to break a wide range of conventional wisdom. When the conventional wisdom is true, then they will fail. But the process of trying to break the conventional wisdom may well get them in trouble either way, e.g. because people assume they’re pushing an agenda rather than “just asking questions”.
For what it is worth, a core argument I made was that many attendees at these events said clearly racist and bigoted things, far beyond milquetoast “there might be group IQ differences”. I am also disturbed by people jumping to the truth-seeking defence.
What were the clearly racist of bigoted things?