I believe you when you say that you might not have expressed a thought as horrible as that, but from the opposite end, statements like “racism against people who privileged is impossible” are completely common within the social justice movement and objectively worse, at least from my point of view.
I was disappointed to see that he wrote that he wrote that email, but at least Bostrom was being edgy when arguing that we shouldn’t be edgy. And insofar as we would like there to be less “edge-lording”, if people are going to be edgy in the service of anything, I suppose being edgy as an argument against being edgy is among the less bad reasons to be edgy. Though, of course, it does rather counterproductive.
In any case, his intent—to encourage people to not needlessly offend people—wasn’t horrible—even if the execution was. Intent isn’t everything, but it’s something.
First all, I think it’s clearly much worse than some mentioning the n-word directly rather than replacing it with the string “n-word”, especially in the 90s social context.
Secondly, I think that the focus on labeling people who lean towards there being a genetic difference in population means as bad is mistaken given that the threat is actually people who try to leverage this claimed difference politically or attempt to inject their belief in this difference into as many conversations as possible. I think once we have in mind precisely which subset of people we should be worried about, then my position on what is worse ends up being quite natural.
I believe you when you say that you might not have expressed a thought as horrible as that, but from the opposite end, statements like “racism against people who privileged is impossible” are completely common within the social justice movement and objectively worse, at least from my point of view.
I was disappointed to see that he wrote that he wrote that email, but at least Bostrom was being edgy when arguing that we shouldn’t be edgy. And insofar as we would like there to be less “edge-lording”, if people are going to be edgy in the service of anything, I suppose being edgy as an argument against being edgy is among the less bad reasons to be edgy. Though, of course, it does rather counterproductive.
In any case, his intent—to encourage people to not needlessly offend people—wasn’t horrible—even if the execution was. Intent isn’t everything, but it’s something.
“Racism against people who are privileged is impossible” is objectively worse than what view specifically?
First all, I think it’s clearly much worse than some mentioning the n-word directly rather than replacing it with the string “n-word”, especially in the 90s social context.
Secondly, I think that the focus on labeling people who lean towards there being a genetic difference in population means as bad is mistaken given that the threat is actually people who try to leverage this claimed difference politically or attempt to inject their belief in this difference into as many conversations as possible. I think once we have in mind precisely which subset of people we should be worried about, then my position on what is worse ends up being quite natural.