Given my priors and respect for my leisure time I’m not going to read those giant threads. I won’t downvote you since I haven’t actually read it, but let me ask you a related question:
Do you think that out of the billions of possible correlations in the social sciences, the best use of our finite time on earth is to study this one? The incredibly flawed measure of ‘low iq’ is correlated with the arbitrary socially-contingent western category of ‘black people’ (almost certainly because of environmental factors). But there are millions of things correlated with the western category of ‘black people’ and there are millions of things correlated with ‘iq’. Furthermore, there are so many more variables to study that are less flawed and less arbitrary, why should we focus on the one correlation out of billions that racist people –who want to make the world worse for out fellow human beings– want to us to talk about?
I agree with basically everything you say here, but I also think it’s a bit unfair to point this out in the context of Kaspar Brandner sharing a lot of links after you did the same thing first (sharing a lot of links). :)
In any case, I think
not discussing the issue >> discussing the issue >> discussing the issue with flawed claims.
(And I think we’re all in trouble as a society because, unfortunately, people disagree about what the flawed claims are and we get sucked into the discussion kind of against our will because flawed claims can feel triggering.)
but I also think it’s a bit unfair to point this out in the context of Kaspar Brandner sharing a lot of links after you did the same thing first
Yeah that’s fair. I mean I did give summaries, but it’s still fair. If I could go back in time I would’ve posted that comment first and I would’ve tried to explain my emotions/reasoning process to the HBDers on this forum more.
I would have said: I get the allure of taboo studies. I want to be a moral philosopher, but moral philosophers are very smart and they don’t get a lot of funding. So even if I work very very hard, I probably won’t get to be one. I need a way to stand out, to make people notice I would be a good researcher… oh what’s this? Everyone is avoiding these taboo studies. So researching them makes me both stand out and makes me a comparatively high quality researcher since almost no one is competing with me.
It’s competition/capitalism/moloch that is driving me towards these subjects and even knowing this doesn’t make the allure go away. But ultimately I care about people more, and there are often good reasons these taboo’s were put in place. Perhaps the readers of this comment feel the same way. I empathize. The smart thing to have done was unpack these mental prioritizations immediately instead of grabbing my research. But I didn’t think of it, probably because I wanted to show that I could be a good researcher. Moloch got me. Please don’t spend your limited time on this subject, please don’t let moloch get you too.
Writing on such topics does the opposite of favoring your academic career. It is rather a form of career suicide, since you will likely get cancelled and ostracized. The topic is extremely taboo, as we can see with the reaction to Bostrom’s old email. He didn’t even support hereditarianism about IQ gaps, he just said they exist, which even environmentalists accept!
And with good reason, out of the billions of possible correlations to talk about this is one of the very few that will help racists.
Writing on such topics does the opposite of favoring your academic career
True, but most people can’t cut it in academia and if one fancies themselves a researcher this path will allow you to continue to keep doing that without a lot of intellectual competition. Plus you can still get funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund (I call them shady because they funded the distribution of ‘Erbkrank’-a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics- as one of their first projects and because they have ties to white supremacists groups, so their impartiality is suspect)
To be clear, I’m not saying studying this question is more important than anything else, just that research on it should not be suppressed, whatever the truth may be. This point was perhaps best put in the conclusion of this great paper on the topic:
The strategy – advocated by some influential scholars – of stigmatizing, suppressing, or downplaying evidence in favor of hereditarianism about group differences has been tried and has not worked. Research on this topic has been done and the results are widely available. Major psychology journals continue to publish work that deals openly with group differences (though researchers still debate about the relative contribution of genes and environment, and the question has not been settled definitively). Any measures that would be effective in preventing further work, such as those advocated by Kourany (2016), would have to be so severe that they would only attract even more attention to the findings they aimed to suppress. Science will carry on, and these questions will be answered. We should prepare in advance for the possibility that the genes underlying intelligence differences will not be distributed identically among ethnic groups. Failure to do this will only create a vacuum for “cranks rather than scientists” to opine on the nature and consequences of group differences (Anomaly, 2017, p. 293). Reich (2018) warns that if scientists “willfully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, [they] will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience” (p. 258).
This paper has argued that the usual utilitarian reasons given for restricting intelligence research are not convincing and, in fact, there are strong reasons, both utilitarian and non-utilitarian, to favor free inquiry. For philosophers specifically, there is an additional consideration. For decades, the contribution of philosophers to this debate has consisted mostly in providing alternative explanations for evidence seeming to support hereditarianism about race differences (see Sesardic, 2000, 2005), and advocating various kinds of restriction and censorship (see Cofnas, 2016). This may be because hereditarianism is controversial, and philosophers are strongly disincentivized from pursuing lines of argument that lead to truly controversial conclusions. Testifying to how serious this problem is, Jeff McMahan, Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer recently founded the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which will allow scholars to publish pseudonymously. Singer (2017) commented that “it’s unfortunate that such a journal should ever be considered necessary to enable controversial ideas to be published, but perhaps we have got to the point where it is.” It is not clear what kind of controversial ideas Singer had in mind, and the journal has not yet released its first issue, but it is hard to find a more controversial idea than hereditarianism about race differences in intelligence.
There is a danger for the philosophical community in putting our credibility on the line over the claim that race differences are entirely environmental. If work on genetics and neuroscience within the next decade produces convincing evidence that differences in measured intelligence among groups have a significant genetic component, there will be no way to conceal this information. The hereditarian explanation will have to be accepted, and people will know that philosophers were on the wrong side of the issue both scientifically and morally: scientifically, because we are supposed to be careful, disinterested commentators on scientific controversies, not activists supporting only the politically popular side; morally, because we did not help lay the groundwork for responding in a moral way to these facts that we should have known might be coming.
Given my priors and respect for my leisure time I’m not going to read those giant threads. I won’t downvote you since I haven’t actually read it, but let me ask you a related question:
Do you think that out of the billions of possible correlations in the social sciences, the best use of our finite time on earth is to study this one?
The incredibly flawed measure of ‘low iq’ is correlated with the arbitrary socially-contingent western category of ‘black people’ (almost certainly because of environmental factors). But there are millions of things correlated with the western category of ‘black people’ and there are millions of things correlated with ‘iq’.
Also, there are so many more variables to study that are less flawed and less arbitrary, why should we focus on the one correlation out of billions that racist people (who want to make the world worse for out fellow human beings) want to us to talk about?
IMO, I agree with the idea that EA shouldn’t invest anything in studying this, though I took a different path.
I think IQ differences are real and they matter.
However, I think the conclusion that HBD and far-righters/neo-nazis wants us to reach is pretty incorrect, given massive issues with both evidence bases and motivated reasoning/privileging the hypothesis.
Given my priors and respect for my leisure time I’m not going to read those giant threads. I won’t downvote you since I haven’t actually read it, but let me ask you a related question:
Do you think that out of the billions of possible correlations in the social sciences, the best use of our finite time on earth is to study this one?
The incredibly flawed measure of ‘low iq’ is correlated with the arbitrary socially-contingent western category of ‘black people’ (almost certainly because of environmental factors). But there are millions of things correlated with the western category of ‘black people’ and there are millions of things correlated with ‘iq’.
Furthermore, there are so many more variables to study that are less flawed and less arbitrary, why should we focus on the one correlation out of billions that racist people –who want to make the world worse for out fellow human beings– want to us to talk about?
I agree with basically everything you say here, but I also think it’s a bit unfair to point this out in the context of Kaspar Brandner sharing a lot of links after you did the same thing first (sharing a lot of links). :)
In any case, I think
not discussing the issue >> discussing the issue >> discussing the issue with flawed claims.
(And I think we’re all in trouble as a society because, unfortunately, people disagree about what the flawed claims are and we get sucked into the discussion kind of against our will because flawed claims can feel triggering.)
Yeah that’s fair. I mean I did give summaries, but it’s still fair. If I could go back in time I would’ve posted that comment first and I would’ve tried to explain my emotions/reasoning process to the HBDers on this forum more.
I would have said: I get the allure of taboo studies. I want to be a moral philosopher, but moral philosophers are very smart and they don’t get a lot of funding. So even if I work very very hard, I probably won’t get to be one. I need a way to stand out, to make people notice I would be a good researcher… oh what’s this? Everyone is avoiding these taboo studies. So researching them makes me both stand out and makes me a comparatively high quality researcher since almost no one is competing with me.
It’s competition/capitalism/moloch that is driving me towards these subjects and even knowing this doesn’t make the allure go away. But ultimately I care about people more, and there are often good reasons these taboo’s were put in place.
Perhaps the readers of this comment feel the same way. I empathize. The smart thing to have done was unpack these mental prioritizations immediately instead of grabbing my research. But I didn’t think of it, probably because I wanted to show that I could be a good researcher. Moloch got me. Please don’t spend your limited time on this subject, please don’t let moloch get you too.
Writing on such topics does the opposite of favoring your academic career. It is rather a form of career suicide, since you will likely get cancelled and ostracized. The topic is extremely taboo, as we can see with the reaction to Bostrom’s old email. He didn’t even support hereditarianism about IQ gaps, he just said they exist, which even environmentalists accept!
And with good reason, out of the billions of possible correlations to talk about this is one of the very few that will help racists.
True, but most people can’t cut it in academia and if one fancies themselves a researcher this path will allow you to continue to keep doing that without a lot of intellectual competition. Plus you can still get funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund (I call them shady because they funded the distribution of ‘Erbkrank’-a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics- as one of their first projects and because they have ties to white supremacists groups, so their impartiality is suspect)
Strong disagree here. See the quote of the paper I posted below.
I don’t fault you for not reading it all, but it is a good resource for looking up specific topics. (I have summarized a few of the points here.) And I don’t think IQ is a flawed measure, since it is an important predictor for many measures of life success. Average national IQ is also fairly strongly correlated with measures of national welfare such as per Capita GDP.
To be clear, I’m not saying studying this question is more important than anything else, just that research on it should not be suppressed, whatever the truth may be. This point was perhaps best put in the conclusion of this great paper on the topic:
IMO, I agree with the idea that EA shouldn’t invest anything in studying this, though I took a different path.
I think IQ differences are real and they matter.
However, I think the conclusion that HBD and far-righters/neo-nazis wants us to reach is pretty incorrect, given massive issues with both evidence bases and motivated reasoning/privileging the hypothesis.