It is commonly theorized that having friends who hold a viewpoint should make one more charitable to that viewpoint. This has not been the case with HBD. I have a close friend of around decade who has gotten increasingly obsessed with HBD. In general they are a smart and friendly person. But the things they have started espousing have become really shocking.
Example of their beliefs: If Black people are not heavily under-represented in a ‘cognitively demanding’ organization that is very strong evidence the organization is racist against White and Asian individuals!
Obviously this point of view is completely at odds with any sort of fair and inclusive community or organization. They have also moved further and further rightwing. This resulted in a lot of personal problems when I came out as trans. They don’t ‘just’ have some abstract objections, they were quite toxic to an old and supportive friend when she was having a hard time. They explicitly admit that a huge driving force for them moving rightward in general is belief in HBD. The logic for why is not hard to see. If you believe in HBD you can start to feel ‘persecuted’ by people on the left or center-left. It’s easy to start sympathizing with the right and far right.
I’ve been in the rationalist community for over a decade and the EA community for a somewhat shorter period. I have seen tons of seemingly kind and reasonable friends become increasingly far-right after they got into HBD. Im honestly not surprised FLI was considering funding an explicit far-right nazi-adjacent group. The sympathies run deep. Neo-reaction has been close to the EA and rationalist communities for a very large fraction of our history.
It would be extremely hypocritical for me to hold people to views they no longer support. I endorsed HBD in 2015 and 2016. Like many rationalists I was introduced to HBD by reading Slatestarcodex. Promoting HBD in anyway, including privately exposing people to the ideas, is one of the biggest regrets of my life. It is a seriously harmful philosophy. Im very, very sorry for any negative impact my actions may have caused. For obvious reasons I have sympathy for people who have gotten into the racist pipeline. I honestly only got out because the right is so shitty to trans people and is pretty anti-vegan. Like many eggs I had a lot of trans friends. Independently I was quite convinced veganism was a positive lifestyle. them being so shitty on slam dunk issues like trans rights made me start rethinking other parts of the ideology I had started adopting. HBD is a very harmful pseudo-science and it is totally unacceptable that people with power in Effective Altruism believe in it.
I truly hope the EA movement can move toward a better future free from this toxicity.
>If Black people are not heavily under-represented in a ‘cognitively demanding’ organization that is very strong evidence the organization is racist against White and Asian individuals!
Any way of measuring cognitive ability shows that blacks have lower cognitive ability on average than whites and asians. Not only that, they have a lower variance in IQ, meaning fewer people 3 standard deviations above the black mean than whites/asians 3 standard eviations above the white/asian means respectively.
Any sufficiently large and non-niche organization (e.g. not some black focused charity or anything else that may legitimately have some metirocratic basis for favoring black applicants, or is located somewhere where there’s mostly black people in the local labor market) that hires people at least significantly on the basis of cognitive ability and does not consider race should hire far fewer black people per capita than whites or asians. This has to be the case.
If this isn’t the case, then this organization simply then factors other than cognitive ability must be dominating the hiring criteria, especially if we average this out over a whole sector, type of organization or the whole economy to smooth out any idiosyncrasies.
And we know for an indisputable fact that A) Universities engage in affirmative action on the basis of race which results in black applicants being admitted to selective colleges with academic scores below that of other races who get admitted and B) Black college graduates at all levels of qualification have significantly lower IQ, literacy and numeracy than graduates of other races at the same qualification level. So yes, its trivially true that institutions discriminate against whites and asians on the basis of race. You may think this is a good thing, but if you deny it exists then you are objectively incorrect.
>Obviously this point of view is completely at odds with any sort of fair and inclusive community or organization.
Hiring people on the basis of their cognitive ability is necessary NOT inclusive. Hiring the person who is most intellectually capable is necessarily discriminatory, even if we’re talking about picking between people of different races.
As for fair, what is “fair”? Who decides what that is? Is a high IQ asian applicant missing out on a position at harvard to a lower IQ black applicant on the basis of their race “fair”?
I think this is highly unfair. But perhaps even more importantly, this will lead to worse social outcomes because there is a strong correlation between job performance and IQ.
Anything other than picking people at random is going to be not “inclusive”, but doing so would make the maintenance of a modern economy impossible.
Thanks for this perspective, sapphire. I’m glad you managed to get out. I honestly am not hopeful about the prospects for a wider detangling of EA and white supremacy but I will keep my fingers crossed.
It is commonly theorized that having friends who hold a viewpoint should make one more charitable to that viewpoint. This has not been the case with HBD. I have a close friend of around decade who has gotten increasingly obsessed with HBD. In general they are a smart and friendly person. But the things they have started espousing have become really shocking.
Example of their beliefs: If Black people are not heavily under-represented in a ‘cognitively demanding’ organization that is very strong evidence the organization is racist against White and Asian individuals!
Obviously this point of view is completely at odds with any sort of fair and inclusive community or organization. They have also moved further and further rightwing. This resulted in a lot of personal problems when I came out as trans. They don’t ‘just’ have some abstract objections, they were quite toxic to an old and supportive friend when she was having a hard time. They explicitly admit that a huge driving force for them moving rightward in general is belief in HBD. The logic for why is not hard to see. If you believe in HBD you can start to feel ‘persecuted’ by people on the left or center-left. It’s easy to start sympathizing with the right and far right.
I’ve been in the rationalist community for over a decade and the EA community for a somewhat shorter period. I have seen tons of seemingly kind and reasonable friends become increasingly far-right after they got into HBD. Im honestly not surprised FLI was considering funding an explicit far-right nazi-adjacent group. The sympathies run deep. Neo-reaction has been close to the EA and rationalist communities for a very large fraction of our history.
It would be extremely hypocritical for me to hold people to views they no longer support. I endorsed HBD in 2015 and 2016. Like many rationalists I was introduced to HBD by reading Slatestarcodex. Promoting HBD in anyway, including privately exposing people to the ideas, is one of the biggest regrets of my life. It is a seriously harmful philosophy. Im very, very sorry for any negative impact my actions may have caused. For obvious reasons I have sympathy for people who have gotten into the racist pipeline. I honestly only got out because the right is so shitty to trans people and is pretty anti-vegan. Like many eggs I had a lot of trans friends. Independently I was quite convinced veganism was a positive lifestyle. them being so shitty on slam dunk issues like trans rights made me start rethinking other parts of the ideology I had started adopting. HBD is a very harmful pseudo-science and it is totally unacceptable that people with power in Effective Altruism believe in it.
I truly hope the EA movement can move toward a better future free from this toxicity.
>If Black people are not heavily under-represented in a ‘cognitively demanding’ organization that is very strong evidence the organization is racist against White and Asian individuals!
Any way of measuring cognitive ability shows that blacks have lower cognitive ability on average than whites and asians. Not only that, they have a lower variance in IQ, meaning fewer people 3 standard deviations above the black mean than whites/asians 3 standard eviations above the white/asian means respectively.
Any sufficiently large and non-niche organization (e.g. not some black focused charity or anything else that may legitimately have some metirocratic basis for favoring black applicants, or is located somewhere where there’s mostly black people in the local labor market) that hires people at least significantly on the basis of cognitive ability and does not consider race should hire far fewer black people per capita than whites or asians. This has to be the case.
If this isn’t the case, then this organization simply then factors other than cognitive ability must be dominating the hiring criteria, especially if we average this out over a whole sector, type of organization or the whole economy to smooth out any idiosyncrasies.
And we know for an indisputable fact that A) Universities engage in affirmative action on the basis of race which results in black applicants being admitted to selective colleges with academic scores below that of other races who get admitted and B) Black college graduates at all levels of qualification have significantly lower IQ, literacy and numeracy than graduates of other races at the same qualification level. So yes, its trivially true that institutions discriminate against whites and asians on the basis of race. You may think this is a good thing, but if you deny it exists then you are objectively incorrect.
>Obviously this point of view is completely at odds with any sort of fair and inclusive community or organization.
Hiring people on the basis of their cognitive ability is necessary NOT inclusive. Hiring the person who is most intellectually capable is necessarily discriminatory, even if we’re talking about picking between people of different races.
As for fair, what is “fair”? Who decides what that is? Is a high IQ asian applicant missing out on a position at harvard to a lower IQ black applicant on the basis of their race “fair”?
I think this is highly unfair. But perhaps even more importantly, this will lead to worse social outcomes because there is a strong correlation between job performance and IQ.
Anything other than picking people at random is going to be not “inclusive”, but doing so would make the maintenance of a modern economy impossible.
Thanks for this perspective, sapphire. I’m glad you managed to get out. I honestly am not hopeful about the prospects for a wider detangling of EA and white supremacy but I will keep my fingers crossed.