This list is a good example of the sort of arguments that look persuasive to those already opposed to HBD, but can push people on the fence towards accepting it, so it may be net-negative from your perspective. This is what has happened to me, and Iâll elaborate on why â so that you may rethink your approach, if nothing else.
Even if you think my reasons failed, why would that push you towards accepting it? HBD is a hypothesis for how the world works, so the burden of proof is on HBD and giving a bad reason not to believe in HBD is not evidence for HBD. To give a very clear example, if someone says âI believe in unicornsâ, and I say âno unicorns do not exist because 1+1=3â that would fail to be evidence for unicorns not existing, but that does not mean it counts towards evidence for unicorns existing.
Disclaimer: I am a non-Western person with few traits worth mentioning. I identify with the rationalist tradition as established on LW, feel sympathy for the ideal of effective altruism, respect Bostrom despite some disagreements, have donated to GiveWell charities on EA advice, but I have not participated more directly. Seeing the drama, people expressing disappointment and threatening to leave the community, and the volume of meta-discussion, I feel like clarifying a few details that may be hard to notice from within your current culture, and hopefully helping you mend the fracture that is currently getting filled with the race-iq stuff.
Thank you for donating to GiveWell! Unimportant nitpick that has always bothered me: LW has an empiricist tradition, the term ârationalistâ is a misnomer.
All else being equal, people who hang around such communities prefer consistent models (indeed, utilitarianism itself is a radical solution to inconsistencies in other ethical theories). This discourse is suffused with intellectual inconsistency, on many levels of varying contentiousness.
I wouldnât say other ethical theories are internally inconsistent. They might have other attributes or conclusions that you think are bad, but the major ethical theories donât have any inconsistencies as far as I can tell. Do you have an example?On the other hand I do think Eliezer has some inconsistencies in his philosophy, although itâs hard to tell because heâs quite vague, doesnât always use philosophical terminology (in fact he isverydismissive of the field as a whole) and has a tendency to reinvent the wheel instead (e.g his âRequiredismâ is what philosophers would call compatibilism). Now usually I wouldnât mind it that much, but since philosophy requires such precision of language if you donât want to talk past each other, I do think this doesnât work in his favor.
On the faint level of moral intuitions, thereâs the strange beeline from the poorly supported prior that normalization of beliefs like Bostromâs will lead to bad effects like discrimination, to the consequentialist decision against entertaining them.
I would like to point out that my comment was not about Bostrom.
It is not clear that Bostromâs beliefs are harmful in this way, or more likely to encourage a net increase in discrimination than their negation. Arguments from historical precedent have big problems with them: they do not address the direction of causality
I mean even if you donât know which way the arrow of causality points, thatâs still an unnecessarily big risk. Itâs not particularly altruistic to make statements that have that big a chance of helping racists. You could also spend your time⌠not doing that. Also even if you reject arguments from historical precedent there is still the entire field of linguistic racism.
As it is not considered normal in the modern culture to equate moral worth and ability for individuals of any group, it can be expected that the same will hold should the difference in ability between groups be acknowledged.
Just because people wonât publicly state it doesnât mean it doesnât influence their thinking. Take for example the stereotype of the welfare queen. While not everyone will explicitly state âthis person has a lower moral worthâ (although some will) the racist stereotyping does lead to black people being harmed both socially and economically. The myth of meritocracy is strong, and people who are seen as unable to âpull themselves up by their bootstrapsâ are looked down upon.
Arguments from personal distress of users are valid points with regard to community health, but obviously (I hope) incommensurate with the question of global utility, and do not directly weigh on it.
What global utility? Racists want us to talk about this stuff, there are other correlations that are both on firmer ground, have more global utility and arenât fulfilling the desires of racists.
Perhaps the most obvious level is that specific failings Bostrom is credibly accused of (racist attitude, belief in the racial IQ difference, belief in the validity of IQ measurement) do not depend on HBD. (He has done himself no favors by bringing up eugenics). So itâs bizarre to see many people denounce his beliefs in toto, but support this denunciation with environmentalist explanations of the IQ gap
If you had read my comments you wouldâve seen that I both didnât respond to Bostrom, did respond to HBD and did support the environmental explantation of the IQ gap.
â in effect, conceding the specific factual claim in Bostromâs old email, or at least demonstrating that it is not beyond the pale by their own standard. To be clear: it is not in doubt that the IQ gap between Black and White Americans exists; and that it is as predictive of outcomes associated with cognitive capacity as IQ measurement is (which is to say, highly predictive â and this, too, is mainstream consensus). People who act indignant about such statements send a huge red flag, demonstrating either general unwillingness to educate themselves or irrational ideological bias on this specific matter. People who bring up irrelevant anti-HBD talking points demonstrate confused reasoning.
My comment didnât deny the existence of an IQ gap and my comment was responding to sapphire who was talking about HBD specifically and so it wasnât âirrelevant anti-HBD talking pointâ. If youâre not engaging with what I actually write Iâm starting to think that spending hours on this comment wasnât the best use of my time.
what your list most reminds me of is polemics of sophisticated Creationists in the heyday of New Atheism. Itâs a mix of true but irrelevant, misleadingly phrased, blatantly misinterpreting and patently false claims. Instrumentally they are gotchas
Very civil. It will not surprise you to learn that this does not motivate me to keep reading.
So I wonât compete in citations
Yeah Iâm out. *Iâm going to spend my time on something else now.
HBD is a hypothesis for how the world works, so the burden of proof is on HBD and giving a bad reason not to believe in HBD is not evidence for HBD.
This logic is only applicable to contrived scenarios where there is no prior knowledge at all â but you need some worldly knowledge to understand what both these hypotheses are about.
Crucially, there is the zero-sum nature of public debate. People deliberately publicizing reasons to not believe some politically laden hypothesis are not random sources of data found via unbiased search: they are expected to cherrypick damning weaknesses. They are also communicating standards of the intellectual tradition that stands by the opposing hypothesis. A rational layman starts with equal uncertainty about truth values of competing hypotheses, but learning that one side makes use of arguments that are blatantly unconvincing on grounds of mundane common sense can be taken as provisional evidence against their thesis even before increasing object-level certainty: poor epistemology is evidence against ability to discover truth, and low-quality cherrypicked arguments point to a comprehensively weak case. Again, consider beliefs generally known to be kooky, and what they bring to bear on the opposition. Their standard of rigor alone is discrediting to what they believe in.
Moreover, Iâve established that, upon checking, some of your links positively provide evidence in favor of HBD, rather than against â at least by the standard of evidence implicit in the phrasing of the list. Returning again to the Identical Ancestors Point, is presented as an Anti-HBD finding in the first place because it implies a very low prior for genetic divergence of populations, migrations somehow averaging it all out: Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didnât die out. (Is this the wrong takeaway? What, then, did you mean to say by adding it?) Looking into the actual paper, we see: âŚFor example, a present-day Norwegian generally owes the majority of his or her ancestry to people living in northern Europe at the IA point, and a very small portion to people living throughout the rest of the world. Furthermore, because DNA is inherited in relatively large segments from ancestors, an individual will receive little or no actual genetic inheritance from the vast majority of the ancestors living at the IA point. Not only does this make the original argument invalid (even in a strong absolute sense â there can be zero common inheritance!) â it directly reinforces the HBD conjecture that long-term (i.e. pre-IAP) divergent local adaptation is relevant to current genetic (and trait) differences.
LW has an empiricist tradition, the term ârationalistâ is a misnomer.
I agree that this is improper and irritating terminology, because doctrinally, LW asserts its allegiance to empiricism, with all the talk about Bayes-updating on evidence and how rationalists must âwinâ. But in practice this isnât so clear-cut: LW is fascinated with armchair thought experiments (that routinely count as evidence to update on), and all the attention devoted to infohazards, Pascal mugging, one-boxing, AI scenarios etc. suggests that they, as a living tradition, are not resilient to speculation the way pure empiricists â say, regular natural scientists â would be. So, not necessarily a misnomer.
the major ethical theories donât have any inconsistencies as far as I can tell
They are internally consistent, but I think the point of ethical theory is to clarify the intuitively knowable essence of moral action for purposes of nontrivial decisionmaking, not to assert what morality is and derive an arbitrary decision rule from there. Utilitarianism is often criticized for things like the repugnant conclusion, yet non-utilitarian ethical theories routinely produce more grating outputs, because they fail to capture the most significant part of intuitive ethics, which is mostly about harm reduction under conditions of resource scarcity. They are less consistent with ethics given to us in lived experience, so to speak.
even if you donât know which way the arrow of causality points, thatâs still an unnecessarily big risk. Itâs not particularly altruistic to make statements that have that big a chance of helping racists. You could also spend your time⌠not doing that.
No, the extent of the purported risk matters. You are just falling back on the unsupported prior about cost-benefit ratio because you have preemptively excluded all factors that may change the qualitative conclusion of ânot doing thatâ. To give a specific example: under the assumption that HBD is wrong, we must consider disparate outcomes to be a result of some discrimination and devote resources to alleviate it; but if HBD is actually right, thisâd necessarily mean that our costly attempts to help low-performing groups are suboptimal or futile (as in, not effective), and that we will have unfairly attributed blame, harming other groups psychologically and materially. Then there are knock-on effects of harming science: for starters, fears of enabling racists can hold back genomic medicine (and population-specific treatment) by increasing hurdles to data collection and access. We do not have a priori knowledge as to which costs are negligible. On a more meta level, Scott Alexanderâs parable comes to mind.
IMO itâs a weak argument because for all the racism, black Americans still report the highest self-esteem of all racial groups; and theories of stereotype threat are apparently unsupported by high-quality data; so it isnât clear what the odds are that some HBD research or whatever would harm people substantially. But even before that â there are laws against hate speech and discrimination, and they can be strengthened if needed; it seems very suboptimal to focus on not developing neutral knowledge only to deny hateful ideologies rhetorical ammo, instead of dealing with them directly. By the way, cannot racists point to censorshipas sufficient evidence of their correctness, if their intent is to spin available facts to their benefit? Actually, doesnât this enable them to â convincingly â claim that facts are much worse than they are, that the genomic gap in cognitive ability is bigger than the non-zero gap weâd have found (and, I believe, have partially found) with proper research (which is currently prohibited)? And in any case, you have to put racism-driven harms in the context of costs of pretending that HBD is certainly false â that is, under the assumption that we are âjust not doing thatâ and have no clue whether it is or isnât true.
As an aside, I am personally puzzled by the strong conviction of many that HBD becoming common knowledge could lead to normalization of racial discrimination. This is a normative, not scientific question. Societies with Social Darwinist values do not need HBD to embrace and exacerbate the status quo of disparate power. Societies with ethnocentric values opportunistically oppose and exploit ethnic outgroups regardless of relative merit. Mainstream modern value system depends on the premise of human rights, not equality of capability. We do not hold that it is normal to oppress individuals who are known to be below average in some morally neutral trait (except maybe for an expansive definition of âoppressâ and clinical issues having to do with lack of legal capacity), we have a strong revulsion to identity-based discrimination, and we understand the unreasonableness of treating individuals on the basis of average values.
Uncharitably, in the case of EA, this concern may have to do with the strain (common to EA and LW) of conspiratorial elitism and distrust in the democratic process, and with the unconscious belief that intelligence does define moral worth. Thatâs âŚnot a very popular belief. I would deeply hate it if my cognitive betters acted like they have greater moral worth than myself, and therefore, to be fair, I cannot deny equal moral worth to people of lower ability. Most people correctly believe that they arenât brilliant, but theyâre not so dull as to not arrive at this logic. There are some contingent factors that complicate the picture, but not fundamentally.
Without getting into the weeds of stereotype scholarship, the extent of claimed harms, and the irrational denial of the role of merit in achievement (reasoning in that wiki page doesnât even begin to address what would happen in a âproperâ meritocratic society after a few generations, because it is premised on genes not contributing to achievement; this is a typical case of an unexamined anti-HBD prior leading to policy errors)⌠Iâll just say that in my opinion both those issues, insofar as they harm anyone, have to do with beliefs about moral qualities. If âProtestant ethicâ is alive and prescribes vilification of people of lower morally neutral ability, then that is a problem in its own right and beyond the scope of this conversation. Luckily, Protestant ethic also encourages treating people on a case by case basis.
What global utility?
Crucially, the search for interventions that actually close the IQ gap. As it stands, we have picked low-hanging fruit like lead exposure, malnutrition, iodine deficiency, parasites and such (in developed nations; I expect EA efforts in Africa to keep delivering on this front), and are left with pursuing dead ends of addressing iniquity like the âfood desertsâ nonsense, or doubling down on stuff like school spending, that has long ran into diminishing or zero returns and is only popular because to point out its inefficacy means to risk being labeled racist. As Nathan Cofnas argues,
...But the reason that these programs, which Kourany rightly says ought to exist, have never been created is not because of racism but because of the taboo on talking about genetic differences among policy makers. No mainstream politician can acknowledge that there are differences that might call for the creation of a program to âwork with the strengths and work on the weaknesses of every [ethnic] group to help make them the very best they can be.â It is hereditarians who have advocated these programs and environmentalists who have resisted them.
Ironically, Cofnas got in trouble for this. If the suppression starts this far upstream from the object level, how can our priors be trusted?
there are other correlations that are both on firmer ground, have more global utility and arenât fulfilling the desires of racists
I sincerely doubt you can prove 1 or 2 (given that your critiques of relevant methodology werenât persuasive), and it looks like assigning any value to 3, on its own, is pure spite that is best left out of effective altruism. Making racists mad is not, in fact, a positive good, fun as it may be.
If you had read my comments
Have read some. I explicitly say Iâm addressing the state of discourse here, more than just your comment. I respond to you in particular when I quote specific passages. Sorry if that was unclear.
did support the environmental explantation of the IQ gap
Again, this is not HBD Central, and it is sufficient to establish that there is legitimate uncertainty, so we cannot fall back on the comfortable prior that costs of repudiating HBD are negligible.
Very civil. It will not surprise you to learn that this does not motivate me to keep reading.
Well, I believe that misleading people, and even wasting peopleâs time on true but irrelevant, misleadingly phrased, blatantly misinterpreting and patently false claims is a form of rudeness thatâs extra obnoxious, because it craftily avoids opprobrium one could earn with trivial show of disrespect. Itâs not fair to act indignant about an unflattering comparison after doing that. Even so, Iâve made peace with Brandoliniâs law, and kept addressing those claims on the object level, to substantiate my âvery civilâ summary and so that âEAs were to become a little more reserved on this topic, and at least stopped turning off potential recruits with irrefutable displays of irrationality.â To be honest your reaction isnât wholly unexpected, but I did hope that Iâve been polite enough to merit some tolerance.
Yeah Iâm out.
OK but please think of your stated desire is to persuade those who happen to believe in HBD to disbelieve it. Obviously youâve failed in my case, but I maintain that flaming out like that is detrimental even as far as fence-sitters are concerned. I believe Iâve provided sufficient receipts for the purpose of showing how your list is inadequate.
It is really not hard to showboat on this topic, by citing from very clearly argued stuff like this or âauthoritativeâ sources like that review or very technical recent papers or just by gesturing in the general direction of environmentalist rhetoric that is⌠the way Iâve described, and evident in, e.g., this condemnation of Cofnas, mired in (what I hope is obvious after my initial comment) logical fallacies and half-truths and raw indignation. Or one can just say that if this guy is challenged not by rational and empirical arguments but by being repeatedly called a pseudoscientist and getting a page full of personal attacks on him to the top of search results for his name (a page he responds to with an even pettier page), then he may get a lot of uncomfortable stuff right.
My point is not to showboat but to argue that people who pursue this anti-HBD rhetorical strategy, including you, are probably not succeeding, and are doing the community no favors.
Even if you think my reasons failed, why would that push you towards accepting it? HBD is a hypothesis for how the world works, so the burden of proof is on HBD and giving a bad reason not to believe in HBD is not evidence for HBD. To give a very clear example, if someone says âI believe in unicornsâ, and I say âno unicorns do not exist because 1+1=3â that would fail to be evidence for unicorns not existing, but that does not mean it counts towards evidence for unicorns existing.
Thank you for donating to GiveWell! Unimportant nitpick that has always bothered me: LW has an empiricist tradition, the term ârationalistâ is a misnomer.
I wouldnât say other ethical theories are internally inconsistent. They might have other attributes or conclusions that you think are bad, but the major ethical theories donât have any inconsistencies as far as I can tell. Do you have an example?On the other hand I do think Eliezer has some inconsistencies in his philosophy, although itâs hard to tell because heâs quite vague, doesnât always use philosophical terminology (in fact he is very dismissive of the field as a whole) and has a tendency to reinvent the wheel instead (e.g his âRequiredismâ is what philosophers would call compatibilism). Now usually I wouldnât mind it that much, but since philosophy requires such precision of language if you donât want to talk past each other, I do think this doesnât work in his favor.
I would like to point out that my comment was not about Bostrom.
I mean even if you donât know which way the arrow of causality points, thatâs still an unnecessarily big risk. Itâs not particularly altruistic to make statements that have that big a chance of helping racists. You could also spend your time⌠not doing that. Also even if you reject arguments from historical precedent there is still the entire field of linguistic racism.
Just because people wonât publicly state it doesnât mean it doesnât influence their thinking. Take for example the stereotype of the welfare queen. While not everyone will explicitly state âthis person has a lower moral worthâ (although some will) the racist stereotyping does lead to black people being harmed both socially and economically. The myth of meritocracy is strong, and people who are seen as unable to âpull themselves up by their bootstrapsâ are looked down upon.
What global utility? Racists want us to talk about this stuff, there are other correlations that are both on firmer ground, have more global utility and arenât fulfilling the desires of racists.
If you had read my comments you wouldâve seen that I both didnât respond to Bostrom, did respond to HBD and did support the environmental explantation of the IQ gap.
My comment didnât deny the existence of an IQ gap and my comment was responding to sapphire who was talking about HBD specifically and so it wasnât âirrelevant anti-HBD talking pointâ. If youâre not engaging with what I actually write Iâm starting to think that spending hours on this comment wasnât the best use of my time.
Very civil. It will not surprise you to learn that this does not motivate me to keep reading.
Yeah Iâm out.
*Iâm going to spend my time on something else now.
This logic is only applicable to contrived scenarios where there is no prior knowledge at all â but you need some worldly knowledge to understand what both these hypotheses are about.
Crucially, there is the zero-sum nature of public debate. People deliberately publicizing reasons to not believe some politically laden hypothesis are not random sources of data found via unbiased search: they are expected to cherrypick damning weaknesses. They are also communicating standards of the intellectual tradition that stands by the opposing hypothesis. A rational layman starts with equal uncertainty about truth values of competing hypotheses, but learning that one side makes use of arguments that are blatantly unconvincing on grounds of mundane common sense can be taken as provisional evidence against their thesis even before increasing object-level certainty: poor epistemology is evidence against ability to discover truth, and low-quality cherrypicked arguments point to a comprehensively weak case. Again, consider beliefs generally known to be kooky, and what they bring to bear on the opposition. Their standard of rigor alone is discrediting to what they believe in.
Moreover, Iâve established that, upon checking, some of your links positively provide evidence in favor of HBD, rather than against â at least by the standard of evidence implicit in the phrasing of the list. Returning again to the Identical Ancestors Point, is presented as an Anti-HBD finding in the first place because it implies a very low prior for genetic divergence of populations, migrations somehow averaging it all out: Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didnât die out. (Is this the wrong takeaway? What, then, did you mean to say by adding it?) Looking into the actual paper, we see: âŚFor example, a present-day Norwegian generally owes the majority of his or her ancestry to people living in northern Europe at the IA point, and a very small portion to people living throughout the rest of the world. Furthermore, because DNA is inherited in relatively large segments from ancestors, an individual will receive little or no actual genetic inheritance from the vast majority of the ancestors living at the IA point. Not only does this make the original argument invalid (even in a strong absolute sense â there can be zero common inheritance!) â it directly reinforces the HBD conjecture that long-term (i.e. pre-IAP) divergent local adaptation is relevant to current genetic (and trait) differences.
I agree that this is improper and irritating terminology, because doctrinally, LW asserts its allegiance to empiricism, with all the talk about Bayes-updating on evidence and how rationalists must âwinâ. But in practice this isnât so clear-cut: LW is fascinated with armchair thought experiments (that routinely count as evidence to update on), and all the attention devoted to infohazards, Pascal mugging, one-boxing, AI scenarios etc. suggests that they, as a living tradition, are not resilient to speculation the way pure empiricists â say, regular natural scientists â would be. So, not necessarily a misnomer.
They are internally consistent, but I think the point of ethical theory is to clarify the intuitively knowable essence of moral action for purposes of nontrivial decisionmaking, not to assert what morality is and derive an arbitrary decision rule from there. Utilitarianism is often criticized for things like the repugnant conclusion, yet non-utilitarian ethical theories routinely produce more grating outputs, because they fail to capture the most significant part of intuitive ethics, which is mostly about harm reduction under conditions of resource scarcity. They are less consistent with ethics given to us in lived experience, so to speak.
No, the extent of the purported risk matters. You are just falling back on the unsupported prior about cost-benefit ratio because you have preemptively excluded all factors that may change the qualitative conclusion of ânot doing thatâ. To give a specific example: under the assumption that HBD is wrong, we must consider disparate outcomes to be a result of some discrimination and devote resources to alleviate it; but if HBD is actually right, thisâd necessarily mean that our costly attempts to help low-performing groups are suboptimal or futile (as in, not effective), and that we will have unfairly attributed blame, harming other groups psychologically and materially. Then there are knock-on effects of harming science: for starters, fears of enabling racists can hold back genomic medicine (and population-specific treatment) by increasing hurdles to data collection and access. We do not have a priori knowledge as to which costs are negligible. On a more meta level, Scott Alexanderâs parable comes to mind.
IMO itâs a weak argument because for all the racism, black Americans still report the highest self-esteem of all racial groups; and theories of stereotype threat are apparently unsupported by high-quality data; so it isnât clear what the odds are that some HBD research or whatever would harm people substantially. But even before that â there are laws against hate speech and discrimination, and they can be strengthened if needed; it seems very suboptimal to focus on not developing neutral knowledge only to deny hateful ideologies rhetorical ammo, instead of dealing with them directly. By the way, cannot racists point to censorshipas sufficient evidence of their correctness, if their intent is to spin available facts to their benefit? Actually, doesnât this enable them to â convincingly â claim that facts are much worse than they are, that the genomic gap in cognitive ability is bigger than the non-zero gap weâd have found (and, I believe, have partially found) with proper research (which is currently prohibited)? And in any case, you have to put racism-driven harms in the context of costs of pretending that HBD is certainly false â that is, under the assumption that we are âjust not doing thatâ and have no clue whether it is or isnât true.
As an aside, I am personally puzzled by the strong conviction of many that HBD becoming common knowledge could lead to normalization of racial discrimination. This is a normative, not scientific question. Societies with Social Darwinist values do not need HBD to embrace and exacerbate the status quo of disparate power. Societies with ethnocentric values opportunistically oppose and exploit ethnic outgroups regardless of relative merit. Mainstream modern value system depends on the premise of human rights, not equality of capability. We do not hold that it is normal to oppress individuals who are known to be below average in some morally neutral trait (except maybe for an expansive definition of âoppressâ and clinical issues having to do with lack of legal capacity), we have a strong revulsion to identity-based discrimination, and we understand the unreasonableness of treating individuals on the basis of average values.
Uncharitably, in the case of EA, this concern may have to do with the strain (common to EA and LW) of conspiratorial elitism and distrust in the democratic process, and with the unconscious belief that intelligence does define moral worth. Thatâs âŚnot a very popular belief. I would deeply hate it if my cognitive betters acted like they have greater moral worth than myself, and therefore, to be fair, I cannot deny equal moral worth to people of lower ability. Most people correctly believe that they arenât brilliant, but theyâre not so dull as to not arrive at this logic. There are some contingent factors that complicate the picture, but not fundamentally.
Without getting into the weeds of stereotype scholarship, the extent of claimed harms, and the irrational denial of the role of merit in achievement (reasoning in that wiki page doesnât even begin to address what would happen in a âproperâ meritocratic society after a few generations, because it is premised on genes not contributing to achievement; this is a typical case of an unexamined anti-HBD prior leading to policy errors)⌠Iâll just say that in my opinion both those issues, insofar as they harm anyone, have to do with beliefs about moral qualities. If âProtestant ethicâ is alive and prescribes vilification of people of lower morally neutral ability, then that is a problem in its own right and beyond the scope of this conversation. Luckily, Protestant ethic also encourages treating people on a case by case basis.
Crucially, the search for interventions that actually close the IQ gap. As it stands, we have picked low-hanging fruit like lead exposure, malnutrition, iodine deficiency, parasites and such (in developed nations; I expect EA efforts in Africa to keep delivering on this front), and are left with pursuing dead ends of addressing iniquity like the âfood desertsâ nonsense, or doubling down on stuff like school spending, that has long ran into diminishing or zero returns and is only popular because to point out its inefficacy means to risk being labeled racist. As Nathan Cofnas argues,
Ironically, Cofnas got in trouble for this. If the suppression starts this far upstream from the object level, how can our priors be trusted?
I sincerely doubt you can prove 1 or 2 (given that your critiques of relevant methodology werenât persuasive), and it looks like assigning any value to 3, on its own, is pure spite that is best left out of effective altruism. Making racists mad is not, in fact, a positive good, fun as it may be.
Have read some. I explicitly say Iâm addressing the state of discourse here, more than just your comment. I respond to you in particular when I quote specific passages. Sorry if that was unclear.
Again, this is not HBD Central, and it is sufficient to establish that there is legitimate uncertainty, so we cannot fall back on the comfortable prior that costs of repudiating HBD are negligible.
Well, I believe that misleading people, and even wasting peopleâs time on true but irrelevant, misleadingly phrased, blatantly misinterpreting and patently false claims is a form of rudeness thatâs extra obnoxious, because it craftily avoids opprobrium one could earn with trivial show of disrespect. Itâs not fair to act indignant about an unflattering comparison after doing that. Even so, Iâve made peace with Brandoliniâs law, and kept addressing those claims on the object level, to substantiate my âvery civilâ summary and so that âEAs were to become a little more reserved on this topic, and at least stopped turning off potential recruits with irrefutable displays of irrationality.â To be honest your reaction isnât wholly unexpected, but I did hope that Iâve been polite enough to merit some tolerance.
OK but please think of your stated desire is to persuade those who happen to believe in HBD to disbelieve it. Obviously youâve failed in my case, but I maintain that flaming out like that is detrimental even as far as fence-sitters are concerned. I believe Iâve provided sufficient receipts for the purpose of showing how your list is inadequate.
It is really not hard to showboat on this topic, by citing from very clearly argued stuff like this or âauthoritativeâ sources like that review or very technical recent papers or just by gesturing in the general direction of environmentalist rhetoric that is⌠the way Iâve described, and evident in, e.g., this condemnation of Cofnas, mired in (what I hope is obvious after my initial comment) logical fallacies and half-truths and raw indignation. Or one can just say that if this guy is challenged not by rational and empirical arguments but by being repeatedly called a pseudoscientist and getting a page full of personal attacks on him to the top of search results for his name (a page he responds to with an even pettier page), then he may get a lot of uncomfortable stuff right.
My point is not to showboat but to argue that people who pursue this anti-HBD rhetorical strategy, including you, are probably not succeeding, and are doing the community no favors.