I agree the article was pretty bad and unfair, and I agree with most things you say about cancel culture.
But then you lose me when you imply that racism is no different than taking one of the inevitable counterintuitive conclusions in philosophy thought experiments. (I’ve previously had a lengthy discussion on this topic in this recent comment thread.)
If I were an organizer of a conference where I wanted having interesting and relevant ideas being discussed, I’d still want there to be a bar for attendees to avoid the problem Scott Alexander pointed out (someone else recently quoted this in this same context, so hat tip to them, but I forget the name of the person):
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I’d be in favor of having the bar be significantly lower than many outrage-prone people are going to be comfortable with, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to have a bar that is basically “if you’re interesting, you’re good, no matter what else.”
In any case, that’s just how I would do it. There are merits to having groups with different bars.
(In the case of going for a very low one, I think it could make sense to think about the branding and whether it’s a good idea to associate forecasting in particular with a low filter.)
Basically, what I’m trying to say is I’d like to be on your side here because I agree with many things you’re saying and see where you’re coming from, but you’re making it impossible for me to side with you if you think there’s no difference between biting inevitable bullets in common EA thought experiments vs “actually being racist” or “recently having made incredibly racist comments.”
I don’t think I’m using the adjective ‘racist’ here in a sense that is watered down or used in an inflationary sort of way; I think I’m trying to be pretty careful about when I use that word. FWIW, I also think that the terminology “scientific racism” that some people are using is muddling the waters here. There’s a lot of racist pseudoscience going around, but it’s not the case that you can say that every claim about group differences is definitely pseudoscience (it would be a strange coincidence if all groups of all kinds had no statistical differences in intelligence-associated genes). However, the relevant point is group differences don’t matter (it wouldn’t make a moral difference no matter how things shake out because policies should be about individuals and not groups) and that a lot of people who get very obsessed with these questions are actually racist, and the ones who aren’t (like Scott Alexander, or Sam Harris when he interviewed Charles Murray on a podcast) take great care to distance themselves from actual racists in what they say about the topic and what conclusions they want others to draw from discussion of it. So, I think if someone were to call Scott Alexander and Sam Harris “scientifically racist,” then that seems like it’s watering down racism discourse because I don’t think those people’s views are morally objectionable, even though it is the case that many people’s views in that cluster are morally objectionable.
I agree the article was pretty bad and unfair, and I agree with most things you say about cancel culture.
But then you lose me when you imply that racism is no different than taking one of the inevitable counterintuitive conclusions in philosophy thought experiments. (I’ve previously had a lengthy discussion on this topic in this recent comment thread.)
If I were an organizer of a conference where I wanted having interesting and relevant ideas being discussed, I’d still want there to be a bar for attendees to avoid the problem Scott Alexander pointed out (someone else recently quoted this in this same context, so hat tip to them, but I forget the name of the person):
I’d be in favor of having the bar be significantly lower than many outrage-prone people are going to be comfortable with, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to have a bar that is basically “if you’re interesting, you’re good, no matter what else.”
In any case, that’s just how I would do it. There are merits to having groups with different bars.
(In the case of going for a very low one, I think it could make sense to think about the branding and whether it’s a good idea to associate forecasting in particular with a low filter.)
Basically, what I’m trying to say is I’d like to be on your side here because I agree with many things you’re saying and see where you’re coming from, but you’re making it impossible for me to side with you if you think there’s no difference between biting inevitable bullets in common EA thought experiments vs “actually being racist” or “recently having made incredibly racist comments.”
I don’t think I’m using the adjective ‘racist’ here in a sense that is watered down or used in an inflationary sort of way; I think I’m trying to be pretty careful about when I use that word. FWIW, I also think that the terminology “scientific racism” that some people are using is muddling the waters here. There’s a lot of racist pseudoscience going around, but it’s not the case that you can say that every claim about group differences is definitely pseudoscience (it would be a strange coincidence if all groups of all kinds had no statistical differences in intelligence-associated genes). However, the relevant point is group differences don’t matter (it wouldn’t make a moral difference no matter how things shake out because policies should be about individuals and not groups) and that a lot of people who get very obsessed with these questions are actually racist, and the ones who aren’t (like Scott Alexander, or Sam Harris when he interviewed Charles Murray on a podcast) take great care to distance themselves from actual racists in what they say about the topic and what conclusions they want others to draw from discussion of it. So, I think if someone were to call Scott Alexander and Sam Harris “scientifically racist,” then that seems like it’s watering down racism discourse because I don’t think those people’s views are morally objectionable, even though it is the case that many people’s views in that cluster are morally objectionable.