I think it is trivially true that we sometimes face a tradeoff between utilitarian concerns arising from social capital costs and epistemic integrity (see this comment).
But I don’t think the Bostrom situation boils down to this tradeoff. People like me believe Bostrom’s statement and its defenders don’t stand on solid epistemic ground. But the argument for bad epistemics has a lot of moving parts, including (1) recognizing that the statement and its defenses should be interpreted to include more than their most limited possible meanings, and that its omissions are significant, (2) recognizing the broader implausibility of a genetic basis for the racial IQ gap, and (3) recognizing the epistemic virtue in some situations of not speculating about empirical facts without strong evidence.
All of this is really just too much trouble to walk through for most of us. Maybe that’s a failing on our part! But I think it’s understandable. To convincingly argue points (1) through (3) above I would need to walk through all the subpoints made on each link. That’s one heck of a comment.
So instead I find myself leaving the epistemic issues to the side, and trying to convince people that voicing support for Bostrom’s statement is bad on consequentialist social capital grounds alone. This is understandably less convincing, but I think the case for it is still strong in this particular situation (I argue it here and here).
I think it is trivially true that we sometimes face a tradeoff between utilitarian concerns arising from social capital costs and epistemic integrity (see this comment).
But I don’t think the Bostrom situation boils down to this tradeoff. People like me believe Bostrom’s statement and its defenders don’t stand on solid epistemic ground. But the argument for bad epistemics has a lot of moving parts, including (1) recognizing that the statement and its defenses should be interpreted to include more than their most limited possible meanings, and that its omissions are significant, (2) recognizing the broader implausibility of a genetic basis for the racial IQ gap, and (3) recognizing the epistemic virtue in some situations of not speculating about empirical facts without strong evidence.
All of this is really just too much trouble to walk through for most of us. Maybe that’s a failing on our part! But I think it’s understandable. To convincingly argue points (1) through (3) above I would need to walk through all the subpoints made on each link. That’s one heck of a comment.
So instead I find myself leaving the epistemic issues to the side, and trying to convince people that voicing support for Bostrom’s statement is bad on consequentialist social capital grounds alone. This is understandably less convincing, but I think the case for it is still strong in this particular situation (I argue it here and here).