Here as everywhere the key, to keep sane, is to hold a number of thoughts simultaneously:
1) The original email is horribly racist and indefensible. Just awful.
2) The author seems to have evolved since and should be given the benefit of the doubt.
3) Sincerely apologizing for past misdeeds is good in and of itself.
4) Descending on anyone who attempts to apologize without crediting them for the apology only emboldens those who will see the outcome and conclude that it is better not to apologize at all.
5) Thinkers are not gods or saints and should not be treated as such .
6) There is no “original sin”. It is good for you to hold ideas that are good for the world. If someone else who holds ideas that are good for the world also holds ideas that are bad for the world, you are not responsible and should not feel guilty about it.
7) It is unproductive to think of “intellectual leaders”, ther status, and their reputation in general. Intellectual leaders gain their status from pushing ideas that you find convincing. It is the ideas that you should focus on. Your duty is to keep and promote the ones that work, get rid of the ones that don’t.
8) Because people hold a mix of contradictory ideas, if you focus on the people, you will find yourself tied to ideas you disagree with and make yourself vulnerable to guilt-by-association.
9) Ideas held by the same people are not necessarily correlated in the realm of ideas. If they are, there must be a demonstrable rational mechanism by which they are. (If, for instance, this email had been written by a far right anti-immigration politician who spends his time writing about the “great replacement”, you could find a clear intellectual connection.)
10) In fact, people often hold two ideas that seem negatively correlated in the rational realm. For example, many Christians are in favour of violent retaliation, even as a concept (not to mention in practice).
11) Can you find a mechanism by which EA ideas correlate with racism? They would seem to be at complete odds. One of the central moral premises of EA is cosmopolitanism and the impartial good, the idea that human beings have inherent moral worth and dignity regardless of where they come from. Which is why, for example, EAs often get accused of trying to prioritize “the far” over “the near”.
12) What about rationalism? In principle, rationalism has less of an inherent defense mechanism against racism than EA ideas. In particular, there is a form of adolescent rationalism which goes something like this: a) it is good to be intelligent and rational b) not all people are similarly intelligent and rational c) find a reason why the other people are the ones who are dumb (in fact, the more different, the dumber) and I am smart. There is an idea of ranking in b) which does have some idea-level correlation with elitism, solipsism, condescension, and various dehumanizing worldviews. However, rationalism also has a natural counter against racism which is that c) in that adolescent version is pure irrational silliness—the idea collapses on itself. Therefore embracing the adolescent version tells more about your character than it does about rationalism itself.
TDLR : That Bostrom used to be racist does not mean that it is a bad idea to give money to help the global poor in effective ways or to try to prevent nuclear wars from happening
9) Ideas held by the same people are not necessarily correlated in the realm of ideas. If they are, there must be a demonstrable rational mechanism by which they are.
I, for one, see that longtermism is animated by the same cosmopolitanism that motivates EA in general. But Emile Torres and co. don’t see it that way. Torres thinks that longtermism itself is linked to white supremacist and rich-world supremacist beliefs. Since many people nowadays first hear about longtermism from Emile Torres’s hit pieces, they are likely to conclude that longtermism is racist and rich-worldist.
Ugh. Painful to read.
Here as everywhere the key, to keep sane, is to hold a number of thoughts simultaneously:
1) The original email is horribly racist and indefensible. Just awful.
2) The author seems to have evolved since and should be given the benefit of the doubt.
3) Sincerely apologizing for past misdeeds is good in and of itself.
4) Descending on anyone who attempts to apologize without crediting them for the apology only emboldens those who will see the outcome and conclude that it is better not to apologize at all.
5) Thinkers are not gods or saints and should not be treated as such .
6) There is no “original sin”. It is good for you to hold ideas that are good for the world. If someone else who holds ideas that are good for the world also holds ideas that are bad for the world, you are not responsible and should not feel guilty about it.
7) It is unproductive to think of “intellectual leaders”, ther status, and their reputation in general. Intellectual leaders gain their status from pushing ideas that you find convincing. It is the ideas that you should focus on. Your duty is to keep and promote the ones that work, get rid of the ones that don’t.
8) Because people hold a mix of contradictory ideas, if you focus on the people, you will find yourself tied to ideas you disagree with and make yourself vulnerable to guilt-by-association.
9) Ideas held by the same people are not necessarily correlated in the realm of ideas. If they are, there must be a demonstrable rational mechanism by which they are. (If, for instance, this email had been written by a far right anti-immigration politician who spends his time writing about the “great replacement”, you could find a clear intellectual connection.)
10) In fact, people often hold two ideas that seem negatively correlated in the rational realm. For example, many Christians are in favour of violent retaliation, even as a concept (not to mention in practice).
11) Can you find a mechanism by which EA ideas correlate with racism? They would seem to be at complete odds. One of the central moral premises of EA is cosmopolitanism and the impartial good, the idea that human beings have inherent moral worth and dignity regardless of where they come from. Which is why, for example, EAs often get accused of trying to prioritize “the far” over “the near”.
12) What about rationalism? In principle, rationalism has less of an inherent defense mechanism against racism than EA ideas. In particular, there is a form of adolescent rationalism which goes something like this: a) it is good to be intelligent and rational b) not all people are similarly intelligent and rational c) find a reason why the other people are the ones who are dumb (in fact, the more different, the dumber) and I am smart. There is an idea of ranking in b) which does have some idea-level correlation with elitism, solipsism, condescension, and various dehumanizing worldviews. However, rationalism also has a natural counter against racism which is that c) in that adolescent version is pure irrational silliness—the idea collapses on itself. Therefore embracing the adolescent version tells more about your character than it does about rationalism itself.
TDLR : That Bostrom used to be racist does not mean that it is a bad idea to give money to help the global poor in effective ways or to try to prevent nuclear wars from happening
I, for one, see that longtermism is animated by the same cosmopolitanism that motivates EA in general. But Emile Torres and co. don’t see it that way. Torres thinks that longtermism itself is linked to white supremacist and rich-world supremacist beliefs. Since many people nowadays first hear about longtermism from Emile Torres’s hit pieces, they are likely to conclude that longtermism is racist and rich-worldist.