The original email (written 26 years ago) was horrible, but Bostrom’s apology seems reasonable.
If you look at the most horrible thing that every each person has done in their entire life, it’s likely that almost everyone (in that age) has done things that are at least as horrible as writing that email.
The OP reads as if it was optimized to cause as much drama as possible, rather than for pro-social goals.
First, I don’t think I’ve ever expressed a view as horrible as that. I don’t want to make myself out to be a saint or something, and maybe I’ve done more harmful if less obviously spicy things (e.g., I ate a bunch of animals in my youth). But I’m reflexively sceptical of defences which are like “oh, surely everyone makes mistakes”. I think it’s ok to have high standards, and lots of people get through their youth managing not to make egregiously racist statements.
But this isn’t my crux; my crux is that the apology doesn’t ring sincere to me. He says lots of words about repudiating the email, but like...I don’t understand why he said it at the time, and what changed in his opinions to make him apologize for it at the time, and reject it now. I agree with some other commenters that it’s not clear that he thinks this is object-level bad vs PR-bad.
Doesn’t the first sentence of his old email make this part fairly clear? It sounds like he’s talking about the classic edgelord thing of enjoying the tension between intuitive repugnance and (what he took to be) logical truth on a strictly literal reading, when divorced of all subtext (which is presumably not what any reasonable person would ordinarily take the claims in question to communicate). Perhaps similar to how many philosophers find logical paradoxes invigorating. (Cf. Scott Alexander’s classic post on related issues.)
That’s not to defend it, and I agree his apology isn’t sufficiently clear about why his particular example was so egregiously poorly-chosen. But it does strike me as most likely stemming from neuro-atypicality rather than racist intent, for whatever that’s worth. (Many understandably care more about racist effects than racist intent, but I mention the latter here since you seem be to be asking about Bostrom’s motivations, and that does seem relevant to assessments of blameworthiness.)
(Not sure whether this clarification is needed, but just in case...)
When I wrote “If you look at the most horrible thing that every person has done in their entire life[…]” I meant: “If for every person you look at the most horrible thing that that person has done[…]” (I.e. it can be a completely different thing for each person.) I’ve edited my comment to make that clear.
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 disagree with this, I think the apology, presumably carefully considered, is as bad as, if not worse, than the original email (at least, the apology contributes to a larger proportion of my negative update than the email written 26 years ago). I also think the apology was poorly written, and I would be surprised if this was signed off by a PR or comms expert.
The OP reads as if it was optimized to cause as much drama as possible, rather than for pro-social goals.
Happy to hear constructive feedback, and am curious about what gives you this impression. I think there are clear ways this post could have been worded and framed in a way that would cause more drama. I’m sharing in part because I care about the EA community, and I think this may be useful information for the EA community to know about and engage with, and in part because the individual who shared this post with me found it disconcerting that no one had spoken out against it yet. I resonated with this, and didn’t want other community members to feel similarly.
The people who I discussed this with prior to posting agreed that we didn’t want this post to prompt object level IQ debates, which are usually unproductive, but also not highlight the PR angle too much, since as other commenters alluded to, this isn’t and shouldn’t be seen as the primary concern.
To add one more person’s impression, I agree with ofer that he apology was “reasonable,” I disagree with him that your post “reads as if it was optimized to cause as much drama as possible, rather than for pro-social goals,” and I agree with Amber Dawn that the original email is somewhat worse than something I’d have expected most people to have in their past. (That doesn’t necessarily mean it deserves any punishment decades later and with the apology –non-neurotyptical people can definitely make a lot of progress between, say, early twenties and later in life, in understanding how their words affect others and how edginess isn’t the same as being sophisticated.)
I think this is one of these “struggles of norms” where you can’t have more than one sacred principle, and ofer’s and my position is something like “it should be okay to say ‘I don’t know what’s true’ on a topic where the truth seems unclear ((but not, e.g., something like Holocaust denial)).” Because a community that doesn’t prioritize truth-seeking will run into massive troubles, so even if there’s a sense in which kindness is ultimately more important than truth-seeking (I definitely think so!), it just doesn’t make sense as an instrumental norm to treat it as sacred (so that one essentially forces people to say things that might be false or else they are punished).
Separately from that, I think it’s bad to reinforce the idea that group averages have any normative relevance whatsoever. If we speak as though the defence against racism is empirically finding that all intelligence differences for group averages are at most environmentally-caused, then that’s a weak defence against racism! It’s “weak” because it could turn out to be false. But in reality, I don’t think there’s any possiblefinding that could make us think “racism is okay.” In my view, not being racist – in the sense that has moral significance for me – means that (1) you’re not more inclined to falsely reach a conclusion about people from a different ethnicity than you’d reach the same conclusion about (e.g.) your own ethnicity and (2) when you consider “candidates” (in whatever context) with equal characteristics/interests/qualifications, etc., you’re not more inclined to treat some worse than others based solely on their ethnicity. If we hold this view, we get to relax to about what could be found out about group averages.
That said, I do agree that there’s very little, if anything, to gain from discussions about group averages, and that the people who are eager to bring up the topic seem morally suspicious. (In this specific case of Bostrom_2023 writing the apology, it’s not like he could have chosen to avoid the topic entirely – so given the mistakes he made 26 years ago, he had to address it again.)
and I agree with Amber Dawn that the original email is somewhat worse than something I’d have expected most people to have in their past.
When I wrote “If you look at the most horrible thing that every person has done in their entire life[…]” I meant: “If for every person you look at the most horrible thing that that person has done[…]” (I.e. it can be a completely different thing for each person.) I’ve edited my comment to make that clear.
How does this change the meaning? (Genuine question) You’re still saying it’s likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
It changes the emphasis a bit from “written evidence” (and “expressed worldviews”) to “anything whatsoever.”
E.g., if classrooms in 2005 had CCTV, you could find a video of my 14-year-old self deliberately mispronouncing someone else’s name to make it sound dumb and making a comment about them having “girly” hair after someone else had already started making fun of him. I think that video would be similarly hard to watch as the original Bostrom email is hard to read.
edit: At least on some dimensions of “hard to watch”? I understand the view that Bostrom’s comments were much worse, but I think there’s something especially jarring about expressed lack of empathy when the person who’s being hurt is right in front of you, as opposed to saying dumb stuff in a small/closed setting to be intellectually edgy.
Unless people here have a far better story than “Eugenics is horrible because eugenics!” behind their usage of the word ‘horrible’ with respect to Bostrom’s words I suggest they stop using it. This is the EA forum after all and we ought to do better here than circular logic.
You’re still saying it’s likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
Consider a random human who spent about 278,860 hours as an adult person on earth (as Bostrom has, according to Wikipedia). Let’s label that random person as “extremely morally robust” if during those 278,860 hours they have not once done something at least as horrible as writing that email (as a philosophy student, in a discussion about offending people, in 1995).
Suppose someone is robust to the point that the chance of them doing something at least as horrible in a random hour of their adult life is like the chance to flip a coin and get heads 15 times in a row. Even that hypothetical human is very unlikely (~0.02% chance) to get the “extremely morally robust” label as defined above.
That said, I do agree that there’s very little, if anything, to gain from discussions about group averages, and that the people who are eager to bring up the topic seem morally suspicious
Racial disparities are a key political/culture wars topic. There’s nothing suspicious about enumerating regressors.
The original email (written 26 years ago) was horrible, but Bostrom’s apology seems reasonable.
If you look at the most horrible thing that
everyeach person has done in their entire life, it’s likely that almost everyone (in that age) has done things that are at least as horrible as writing that email.The OP reads as if it was optimized to cause as much drama as possible, rather than for pro-social goals.
First, I don’t think I’ve ever expressed a view as horrible as that. I don’t want to make myself out to be a saint or something, and maybe I’ve done more harmful if less obviously spicy things (e.g., I ate a bunch of animals in my youth). But I’m reflexively sceptical of defences which are like “oh, surely everyone makes mistakes”. I think it’s ok to have high standards, and lots of people get through their youth managing not to make egregiously racist statements.
But this isn’t my crux; my crux is that the apology doesn’t ring sincere to me. He says lots of words about repudiating the email, but like...I don’t understand why he said it at the time, and what changed in his opinions to make him apologize for it at the time, and reject it now. I agree with some other commenters that it’s not clear that he thinks this is object-level bad vs PR-bad.
Doesn’t the first sentence of his old email make this part fairly clear? It sounds like he’s talking about the classic edgelord thing of enjoying the tension between intuitive repugnance and (what he took to be) logical truth on a strictly literal reading, when divorced of all subtext (which is presumably not what any reasonable person would ordinarily take the claims in question to communicate). Perhaps similar to how many philosophers find logical paradoxes invigorating. (Cf. Scott Alexander’s classic post on related issues.)
That’s not to defend it, and I agree his apology isn’t sufficiently clear about why his particular example was so egregiously poorly-chosen. But it does strike me as most likely stemming from neuro-atypicality rather than racist intent, for whatever that’s worth. (Many understandably care more about racist effects than racist intent, but I mention the latter here since you seem be to be asking about Bostrom’s motivations, and that does seem relevant to assessments of blameworthiness.)
(Not sure whether this clarification is needed, but just in case...)
When I wrote “If you look at the most horrible thing that every person has done in their entire life[…]” I meant: “If for every person you look at the most horrible thing that that person has done[…]” (I.e. it can be a completely different thing for each person.) I’ve edited my comment to make that clear.
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.
“I don’t think I’ve ever expressed a view as horrible as that”
Count yourself lucky that you don’t hold any heretical beliefs.
”the apology doesn’t ring sincere to me”
He apologized for his offensive wording and nothing more because he understands that that’s all he has to apologize for.
I disagree with this, I think the apology, presumably carefully considered, is as bad as, if not worse, than the original email (at least, the apology contributes to a larger proportion of my negative update than the email written 26 years ago). I also think the apology was poorly written, and I would be surprised if this was signed off by a PR or comms expert.
Happy to hear constructive feedback, and am curious about what gives you this impression. I think there are clear ways this post could have been worded and framed in a way that would cause more drama. I’m sharing in part because I care about the EA community, and I think this may be useful information for the EA community to know about and engage with, and in part because the individual who shared this post with me found it disconcerting that no one had spoken out against it yet. I resonated with this, and didn’t want other community members to feel similarly.
The people who I discussed this with prior to posting agreed that we didn’t want this post to prompt object level IQ debates, which are usually unproductive, but also not highlight the PR angle too much, since as other commenters alluded to, this isn’t and shouldn’t be seen as the primary concern.
To add one more person’s impression, I agree with ofer that he apology was “reasonable,” I disagree with him that your post “reads as if it was optimized to cause as much drama as possible, rather than for pro-social goals,” and I agree with Amber Dawn that the original email is somewhat worse than something I’d have expected most people to have in their past. (That doesn’t necessarily mean it deserves any punishment decades later and with the apology –non-neurotyptical people can definitely make a lot of progress between, say, early twenties and later in life, in understanding how their words affect others and how edginess isn’t the same as being sophisticated.)
I think this is one of these “struggles of norms” where you can’t have more than one sacred principle, and ofer’s and my position is something like “it should be okay to say ‘I don’t know what’s true’ on a topic where the truth seems unclear ((but not, e.g., something like Holocaust denial)).” Because a community that doesn’t prioritize truth-seeking will run into massive troubles, so even if there’s a sense in which kindness is ultimately more important than truth-seeking (I definitely think so!), it just doesn’t make sense as an instrumental norm to treat it as sacred (so that one essentially forces people to say things that might be false or else they are punished).
Separately from that, I think it’s bad to reinforce the idea that group averages have any normative relevance whatsoever. If we speak as though the defence against racism is empirically finding that all intelligence differences for group averages are at most environmentally-caused, then that’s a weak defence against racism! It’s “weak” because it could turn out to be false. But in reality, I don’t think there’s any possible finding that could make us think “racism is okay.” In my view, not being racist – in the sense that has moral significance for me – means that (1) you’re not more inclined to falsely reach a conclusion about people from a different ethnicity than you’d reach the same conclusion about (e.g.) your own ethnicity and (2) when you consider “candidates” (in whatever context) with equal characteristics/interests/qualifications, etc., you’re not more inclined to treat some worse than others based solely on their ethnicity. If we hold this view, we get to relax to about what could be found out about group averages.
That said, I do agree that there’s very little, if anything, to gain from discussions about group averages, and that the people who are eager to bring up the topic seem morally suspicious. (In this specific case of Bostrom_2023 writing the apology, it’s not like he could have chosen to avoid the topic entirely – so given the mistakes he made 26 years ago, he had to address it again.)
When I wrote “If you look at the most horrible thing that every person has done in their entire life[…]” I meant: “If for every person you look at the most horrible thing that that person has done[…]” (I.e. it can be a completely different thing for each person.) I’ve edited my comment to make that clear.
How does this change the meaning? (Genuine question) You’re still saying it’s likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
It changes the emphasis a bit from “written evidence” (and “expressed worldviews”) to “anything whatsoever.”
E.g., if classrooms in 2005 had CCTV, you could find a video of my 14-year-old self deliberately mispronouncing someone else’s name to make it sound dumb and making a comment about them having “girly” hair after someone else had already started making fun of him. I think that video would be similarly hard to watch as the original Bostrom email is hard to read.
edit: At least on some dimensions of “hard to watch”? I understand the view that Bostrom’s comments were much worse, but I think there’s something especially jarring about expressed lack of empathy when the person who’s being hurt is right in front of you, as opposed to saying dumb stuff in a small/closed setting to be intellectually edgy.
Unless people here have a far better story than “Eugenics is horrible because eugenics!” behind their usage of the word ‘horrible’ with respect to Bostrom’s words I suggest they stop using it. This is the EA forum after all and we ought to do better here than circular logic.
Consider a random human who spent about 278,860 hours as an adult person on earth (as Bostrom has, according to Wikipedia). Let’s label that random person as “extremely morally robust” if during those 278,860 hours they have not once done something at least as horrible as writing that email (as a philosophy student, in a discussion about offending people, in 1995).
Suppose someone is robust to the point that the chance of them doing something at least as horrible in a random hour of their adult life is like the chance to flip a coin and get heads 15 times in a row. Even that hypothetical human is very unlikely (~0.02% chance) to get the “extremely morally robust” label as defined above.
Racial disparities are a key political/culture wars topic. There’s nothing suspicious about enumerating regressors.