Bostrom was essentially still a kid (age ~23) when he wrote the 1996 email. What effect does it have on kids’ psychology to think that any dumb thing they’ve ever said online can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion for the rest of their lives? Given that Bostrom wasn’t currently spreading racist views or trying to harm minorities, it’s not as though it was important to stop him from doing ongoing harm. So the main justification for socially punishing him would be to create a chilling effect against people daring to spout off flippantly worded opinions going forward. There are some benefits to intimidating people away from saying dumb things, but there are also serious costs, which I think are probably underestimated by those expressing strong outrage.
Of course, there are also potentially huge costs to flippant and crass discussion of minorities. My point is that the stakes are high in both directions, and it’s very non-obvious where the right balance to strike is. Personally I suspect the pendulum is quite a bit too far in the direction of trying to ruin people’s lives for idiotic stuff they said as kids, but other smart people seem to disagree.
As some others have noted, probably the best approach we can take to the question of a genetic racial IQ gap is to voluntarily avoid mentioning the idea or at least to portray the question as relatively uninteresting (as Bostrom said in his apology), especially since the policy implications of such a gap wouldn’t be that big anyway. However, trying to suppress inquiries by others into the topic seems to me like it may cause more harm than good, via the Streisand effect. If it looks like there’s secret knowledge that the scientific community has informally conspired to suppress, the topic suddenly becomes way more interesting. There was also a genuine conspiracy (both in terms of meetings among scientists and tacit peer pressure) to suppress discussion of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 in 2020, and that fact made the question much juicier.
I admire that Bostrom’s apology didn’t take the easy way out by lying to pretend he thinks there’s no possibility of a genetic IQ gap. I see that as a positive sign about his intellectual honesty. (Actually, it’s obvious that between any two groups of humans, there will be some difference in the distribution of genes and therefore some nonzero genetically caused difference in the average of almost any trait you wish to measure. The real question is whether those differences are big or negligible. And even if the differences are non-negligible, I suspect it’s usually bad to highlight them anyway, such as due to stereotype threat and the possibility of encouraging violence toward and persecution of outgroups. In medical contexts, such as when people with African ancestry are genetically more at risk from certain diseases than other groups, highlighting these differences seems useful.)
Many progressive institutions spend a great deal of time highlighting racial differences. I really wish they would not. Even worse, they go on to attribute these gaps to discrimination and nefariousness on the part of oppressor groups. If gaps are not due to discrimination, then it is immoral to place blame on a the designated oppressor group for discrimination. In other contexts, this is common sense. It is wrong to attribute Jewish success to coordinated conspiracies and exploitation because their success is largely attributable to higher average cognitive ability and intellectual culture.
There are successful minority groups throughout the world who are resented because their higher socioeconomic status is attributed to exploitation. I think this is an unfortunate situation. If anything, attributing socioeconomic outcomes to exploitation leaves a group open to violence moreso than attributing socioeconomic gaps to average cognitive ability differences.
Few people think it is moral to commit acts of violence against less intelligent people. Even fewer probably think it is acceptable to commit acts of violence against a group because they are a member of a groups with a lower than average level of cognitive ability. I really never see these attitudes. Eventually whatever is true about differences will come to light. The truth cannot be supressed for ever. It is best to argue now that nothing like violence comes from the existence of non-negligable gaps. What does follow is that a certain way of thinking about politics in mostly egalitarian societies, namely as race and class conflict, needs to be less dominant.
We ought to move back to the attitude that it is an ideal to not care about race, sex, gender, sexual orientation etc rather than that we need to always be thinking about these things. It is hard to pushback against this narrative without touching on extraordinarily tabboo topics because absolute fairness creates disparity and mentioning the better explanations will get you regarded as a “bad person” and in some cases fired from your job.
We ought to move back to the attitude that it is an ideal to not care about race, sex, gender, sexual orientation etc rather than that we need to always be thinking about these things.
I plausibly agree. There are times and places to bring up racism and sexism, their historical contexts, and instances where they still exist today. But I also get the sense that people would generally be happier (plausibly even many minorities(?), though I’m not at all sure about that) if they ruminated on these ideas less often. Rumination can both exacerbate the pain of actual injustices and make one perceive injustices where they may not actually exist or don’t exist much (manspreading, Shirtgate, etc). Note that this point can also apply to anti-woke people: focusing a bit less on the perceived wrongs of cancel culture might make them happier.
Believers in genetic racial IQ gaps often say their viewpoint is needed in cases like affirmative action, to show that it’s not necessarily discriminatory if the demographic composition of some elite group doesn’t match the demographic composition of the whole population. But if we were more race-blind and didn’t think much about demographic composition to begin with, then talking about the possibility of genetic racial IQ gaps would also be less relevant. In order for this to work, society would also have to improve on providing better education, nutrition, income, etc to poorer parts of society, because otherwise not thinking much about the demographic composition of elite groups could lead to not noticing the substantial environmental and cultural causes of inequality that definitely still remain and that affirmative action aims to overcome. OTOH, maybe it’s naive to expect significant improvement in society’s motivation to actually raise the living standards of poor people, in which case the “kludge” of affirmative action might be better than nothing.
I think having a few visible examples of minorities in powerful positions, such as the first black or female president of the USA, can be pretty valuable as inspiring role models. It may also be the case that people would be deterred from entering workplaces where there are too few “of one’s own kind” (race, gender, etc), such as because of fearing harassment. Maybe most humans are actually too tribalistic to pull off race-blindness, gender-blindness, etc. IDK.
In any case, I suspect it’s generally more fruitfuil to focus on helping poor people (of all races) economically than to focus on, say, discrimination in hiring, because I think economic and cultural inequalities drive a lot of the inequality in outcome that we observe. In elite settings, my experience is that hiring discrimination is often in the direction of favoring black, women, gay, etc candidates, though I’m sure discrimination against such groups still happens somewhat too.
Even fewer probably think it is acceptable to commit acts of violence against a group because they are a member of a groups with a lower than average level of cognitive ability. I really never see these attitudes.
I imagine those attitudes were common during slavery and colonization. For example, the Europeans who arrived in the New World in the centuries after 1492 probably considered the indigenous people inferior and therefore didn’t feel as guilty about enslaving or murdering them.
In the contemporary West, I agree that the view you mention seems rarer. Society tends to take less action against violence or hardship endured by very poor people, and poverty correlates with lower cognitive ability, but this isn’t an intentional part of society’s ideology so much as a byproduct of apathy.
In the case of non-human animals, even most SJWs think it’s fine to enslave and murder them, and probably a main reason SJWs would cite for this is that non-human animals have different brains than humans do, though it’s unclear how much this reason is about intelligence per se versus sentience.
Some notes on the last paragraph in my above comment:
When I used the phrase “SJWs”, I intended it to have either neutral valence or a valence of friendly teasing. I agree with some amount of the SJW agenda myself. However, Wikipedia says that since 2011, the term is primarily used as an insult and is associated with the alt-right, which was not an implication I had in mind. Like Bostrom’s 1996 email and 2023 apology, this example is an illustration that it can be difficult to realize exactly how a given word or statement may be perceived, especially if people are reading it as if it were a dog whistle.
Part of my reason for using the term “SJW” was that I didn’t want to say merely “leftist” or “progressive”. I was a strong leftist and progressive in the early aughts, and back then, people with that ideology were, in my experience, generally more focused on trying to improve people’s welfare via economic and other government-level policy. Progressives didn’t spend as much time as they do now on shaming individual people or groups. I think the woke-ward shift of the last decade, while it raises some important issues that were less highlighted in the past, is plausibly overall less useful for improving total human welfare than the earlier economic and policy focus was. So I don’t like conflating “woke” with “progressive”. (That said, I think some progressive economic policy positions, such as against outsourcing American jobs to developing nations, may be net bad for short-term human welfare.)
A more neutral phrasing than “SJW” could have been just “social-justice activist”.
As far as the other part of my phrasing, when I said that most social-justice activists “think it’s fine to enslave and murder” non-human animals, I was in part being deliberately provocative to make a point. Bostrom is right when he says in his apology: “I do think that provocative communication styles have a place”. If I had instead written that most social-justice activists “think it’s acceptable for farmers to raise and slaughter livestock”, the use of those conventional euphemisms would have dulled what I was trying to convey, which is that this practice is actually really awful. (BTW, I should also acknowledge that I myself pay for some amount of enslavement and murder of dairy cows, via eating cheese and ice cream. However, I think the total amount of harm this causes is much lower than the harm caused by eating meat from smaller farm animals.)
Provocation can shock people out of their normal way of seeing the world into looking at some fact in a different light. This seems to be roughly what Bostrom was saying in the first paragraph of his 1996 email. However, in the case of that email, it’s unclear what socially valuable fact he was trying to shock people into seeing in a new way.
One function of comedy is to do roughly the same thing: stating some true fact in an unconventional way in order to make people see the world through a new lens. However, an important principle in comedy is the distinction between “punching up” and “punching down”, and if we interpret Bostrom’s 1996 statement as analogous to provocative humor, it would clearly be punching down.
It’s fairly common and even celebrated in modern Western society to hear statements like “women are more productive than men” or “girls are smarter at language than boys”. Many of these statements are made in fairly blunt language, similar to Bostrom’s 1996 statement. I assume most people think these statements about female superiority are pretty harmless, both because they’re seen more as “punching up” (given the history of men dominating women in much of the world until the late 20th century) and because the hypothesis of biological gender differences is less taboo and more scientifically established. But I do think the contrast in people’s reactions between saying “boys are worse at language than girls” versus Bostrom’s 1996 statement is interesting, and it shows that the degree of outrage a statement provokes is often not obvious unless you have a lot of experience with a specific culture’s norms.
I do worry a bit that the casual misandry that society often seems to celebrate may be detrimental to the self-esteem of boys, though I’m also not interested in trying to police such language. It’s plausible to me that some amount of humorous mocking between different groups is actually helpful, by showing people that we can laugh together, rather than priming ourselves to interpret any offensive statement as an act of aggression.
Thanks. :) I feel somewhat bad about spending time on this topic rather than my usual focus areas, especially since many of my points were already made by others. Plus, as I mentioned and as Bostrom learned, anything you say about controversial topics online is fodder for political enemies to take out of context. But I have a (maybe non-utilitarian) impulse to stick up for what I think is right even if some people will dislike me for doing so. (For a time, my top-level comment here had a net agreement of −10 or so. Of course, maybe the downvoters were correct and I’m wrong.)
Provocation can shock people out of their normal way of seeing the world into looking at some fact in a different light. This seems to be roughly what Bostrom was saying in the first paragraph of his 1996 email. However, in the case of that email, it’s unclear what socially valuable fact he was trying to shock people into seeing in a new way.
Bostrom’s email was in response to someone who made the point you do here about provocation sometimes making people view things in a new light. The person who Bostrom was responding to advocated saying things in a blunt and shocking manner as a general strategy for communication. Bostrom was saying to them that sometimes, saying things in a blunt and shocking manner does nothing but rile people up.
Interesting! I admit I didn’t go and read the original discussion thread, so thanks for that context. To the extent that Bostrom was arguing against being needlessly shocking, he was kind of already making the same point that his critics have been making: don’t say needlessly shocking things. He didn’t show enough sensitivity/empathy in the process of presenting the example and explaining why it was bad, but he was writing a quick email to friends, not a carefully crafted political announcement intended to be read by thousands of people.
I assume most people think these statements about female superiority are pretty harmless, both because they’re seen more as “punching up” (given the history of men dominating women in much of the world until the late 20th century) and because the hypothesis of biological gender differences is less taboo and more scientifically established.
In my experience, the reason these statements tend to get less pushback is that they are generally explained by gendered socialization and norms rather than intrinsic biological or genetic factors, whereas the race/gender arguments that receive pushback claim that certain groups are genetically (intrinsically) inferior.
I see. :) I would think people would consider biological differences much more plausible in the gender case than the race case. I’ve heard several people say that when you’re a parent to both a boy and a girl, the differences between them are unmistakeable even in the first ~2 years. I think many American adults at least privately understand that there are big biological differences between the brains of men and women, while most American adults probably expect no non-trivial biological racial brain differences. But yeah, any particular gender difference, such as the language gap, could be mostly or all environmental.
I don’t like calling ~ 23 year olds “essentially still a kid.” I think that has to cut both ways; if someone is “essentially still a kid” we shouldn’t metaphorically let them use matches—by which I mean have any roles and functions that could cause significant harm if they act badly.
I do think age is mitigating in the context of the 1996 email (on top of the passage of 26 years), but I feel that phrasing goes too far.
Fair enough. :) Some headlines called the FTX leadership “a gang of kids”, which I think isn’t unreasonable, even though they were in their late 20s or early 30s. The main thing I wanted to convey is that people at this age often have limited life experience or understanding of how the world works and so often do dumb things. Youth is a time to explore weird ideas and make mistakes. Therefore, I would agree that 23-year-olds generally shouldn’t be entrusted to hold important decision-making positions unless they’ve shown a track record of unusual maturity.
I think it is bad to deny a person access to a position because of the statistical average of their group. If a 23 year old is competent, then hold them to the same standard.
It is odd to me that you would comment that highlighting differences in cognitive ability between groups should be taboo and suppressed and yet openly state that 23 year olds should have to face different standards in order to be entrusted in decision-making positions. I think you would find it utterly repugnant to say that blacks should have higher standards before we trust them.
Edit: I don’t think this is particularly bad and this attitude is relatively common. I just want to point out that I think this looks like an odd double-standard in my view, although many may disagree. Sorry if this comment comes across as aggressive.
I said that 23-year-olds should demonstrate “a track record of unusual maturity” in order to have important positions, not that they should always be denied them. In some cases, such as becoming the president of the USA, a minimum age requirement may make sense because the stakes are so high, although one could say that we should just let voters decide if any given person is qualified.
But you’re right that I support a strong prior against, say, tasking a 23-year-old to run a major organization—a prejudice that needs to be overcome with strong enough evidence of maturity and competence—in a way that it would be abhorrent to do for a member of a particular racial group.
It’s interesting to ponder the reasons for different attitudes toward racism vs ageism. My two main guesses are:
Average differences in traits based on age are sometimes quite large, enough that the value of using the prejucide for making predictions can exceed the unfairness downsides of stereotyping people. For example, my impression is that young men are on average much riskier drivers than older men, so there’s not a ton of society-level outrage about charging 16-year-old men several times more for car insurance than 55-year-old men, although I imagine that many individual young men who are cautious drivers are rightly annoyed by this situation.
Historical context leads us to treat racial / sexual / etc discrimination more seriously than discrimination based on age, height, extroversion, etc. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a lot of genocide against short people of the same race, or enslavement of them, or forcing them to use separate bathrooms, etc. A main argument for caution about racial stuff is a slippery slope concern that there’s some small chance that allowing more callousness on these issues could actually lead to a new genocide, so the expected value of worrying about it is nontrivial, even if the risk of the genocide is very low. (That said, excessive mob punishment of people for not following ever-more-demanding requirements regarding proper speech and conduct may itself pose a very small risk of genocidal outcomes, and it’s non-obvious whether this risk is smaller or larger than the racial genocide risk in the modern West. It may also be the case that the hostility between the extreme woke and extreme anti-woke camps makes both of them stronger, at the expense of moderate voices, thereby increasing both types of genocide risk at once.)
There are some types of discrimination that receive surprisingly little sympathy despite the lifelong trauma they can cause people, such as favoritism toward attractive people. Even woke Hollywood—despite extraordinary efforts to introduce diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—rarely casts unattractive actors for leading roles. Maybe this is understandable, because those movies would usually perform poorly at the box office, and for whatever reason, there’s not enough social outrage about discrimination against unattractive people to offset that. (To the extent that one point of watching a movie is to see attractive people, maybe one could argue that unattractive people are genuinely less qualified for the job, and no amount of new evidence could overcome that fact. This would make attractiveness discrimination unfortunate but not stereotyping. OTOH, there’s some chance that if the unattractive person were given the leading role, s/he would charm audiences to a degree that the movie’s creators didn’t expect, in which case it could be similar to the case of a surprisingly wise 23-year-old.)
Historical context leads us to treat racial / sexual / etc discrimination more seriously than discrimination based on age, height, extroversion, etc. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a lot of genocide against short people of the same race, or enslavement of them, or forcing them to use separate bathrooms, etc.
I agree with your comment in general, but I’m not quite sure about this point. I think age-based discrimination has been / is quite severe (though perhaps it is also often justified, since age does make a lot of difference to people’s abilities):
Children are often forced to go sit in a small room all day, subject to the arbitrary whims of a single adult with little oversight, and often have to endure criminal violence from other children with little recourse, in a way that would be unacceptable for older people.
Young men have been repeatedly conscripted to fight in wars with high mortality rates.
Old people might face compulsory redundancy.
Young people have to pay taxes to fund benefits for older people, even if those retirees did not have to pay those taxes when they were young, and these retirement benefits may not be available by the time the young retire.
Many facilities do ban children, and people often complain about children being allowed on planes etc.
In many places babies can be killed by their parents without legal consequence.
Older people are often targeted by younger criminals because they are vulnerable.
In some places older people may be pressured to commit suicide to free up resources.
Many laws are passed that systematically disadvantage younger people (e.g. NIMBY rules on homebuilding).
I think school is vastly less bad than, say, slavery, with some possible exceptions like if there’s extreme bullying at the school.
You’re right that the violence children endure from each other (and sometimes from their own parents) would be unacceptable if done to adults. If one adult hits another, that’s criminal assault/battery. If a kid hits another kid, that’s just Tuesday.
Children are also subject to the arbitrary whims of their parents, and are made to do unpaid labor against their will, though usually parents don’t treat their own children extremely badly. (Of course, some parents do horrifically abuse or neglect their children.)
In any case, as you said, to some extent the lack of freedom for children is inevitable. (Actually, there is a way to avoid it entirely: don’t have children, which is the antinatalist solution. If sentient beings didn’t exist, none of the problems we’re discussing here would be problems anymore.)
It’s definitely right to look at historical and other social context to explain current and past attitudes towards discrimination as explanations. A utilitarian framework is probably not the right approach, nor most other ethics systems.
I doubt there was ever a time in the modern era where attitudes were consistent, and there’s loads of social conditioning going on. I don’t think many women felt angry in the 19th century when their heads of government were (almost?) invariably men, because “that’s just how things are” and nobody else was getting angry about it anyway.
My favorite example of current discrimination that totally flies under the radar of the collective ire is height discrimination. 6 of 46 US presidents[1] have been of below average height, a result this extreme or more has less than a 0.005 chance occuring due to randomness (i.e. your chances of becoming president are 2 orders of magnitudes lower if you are short). This is not totally unknown, occasionally there’s a paper or article about height advantages, but people perceive it as a mere curiosity. Personally speaking as a short guy, this absolutely fails to anger me either.
Average differences in traits based on age are sometimes quite large, enough that the value of using the prejucide for making predictions can exceed the unfairness downsides of stereotyping people.
Even if there were no average differences in maturity between age groups, it still might be rational to prefer older people for important roles like president or CEO for pure credentialing reasons. The reason is simple. 23 year olds have had less time to prove their maturity. Even if they were highly mature, their track record would be brief, and thus not conclusive.
Also, we all once were, are, or expect to be 23 years old at some point. That’s not a complete justification for many reasons, but it makes me relatively less concerned about age-based classifications than classifications where the burden is not felt close to equally by everyone over time.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s an excellent point and probably is a big part of the explanation. There are a few cases where it might not apply, such as if a mother stays at home with her kids during her 20s and 30s, enters the workforce in her 40s, and faces ageism because she’s not as sharp as the younger people. In that case, she never once was a sharp young person in the workplace. But these kinds of cases also tend to be ones where people feel that ageism is more of a problem.
Bostrom was essentially still a kid (age ~23) when he wrote the 1996 email.
I agree with Jason. I don’t think being 23 years old means that you’re “essentially still a kid”.
If we want to judge young adults for their positive achievements, it makes sense to hold a symmetric attitude and judge them for their mistakes as well (though one could take the perspective that we shouldn’t judge anyone for making mistakes, but that’s a separate argument).
Fluid intelligence is generally considered to peak between one’s late teens to mid 20s, and the majority of measured cognitive abilities either decline or only very slightly rise after the age of 23. If we use cognitive ability as the marker of adulthood, rater than life experience, one could even make the case that 23 year olds are more “adult” than any other age group.
(Though of course I might be biased, because I’m 23 years old right now.)
Thanks. :) I mainly had in mind something more like wisdom, rather than intelligence. Social norms on particular topics are often not what you would expect by armchair reasoning. In many cases, you have to directly encounter people expressing those norms, or see news stories / hear gossip about people who have run afoul of those norms, to know what they are. Nerds who are very interested in science/math/theoretical things may be less likely to learn about these norms than the average person, despite having high fluid intelligence. (BTW, this is one reason I’ve updated toward thinking reading some amount of news is important.) I imagine that people told Bostrom that what he said in 1996 wasn’t cool, and if so, that was a useful learning experience for him. The only problem was that it was written down for posterity to see.
I think cultural context is also relevant to judging these things. Most young people today (even most nerds) know that what Bostrom said (even though it was in the context of giving an example of what you shouldn’t say) would elicit strong negative reactions, given how much media attention these things receive. I assume this was less obvious to nerds in the 1990s (though it was probably fairly predictable even back then).
For what it’s worth, my fifth-grade class was assigned to read The Great Gilly Hopkins, which includes a tasteless joke about the N-word (though in the context of suggesting the person making it was being an asshole). And in high school, in 2005, when reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we used the N-word in relation to Jim without any problems, because that’s the word Twain used. The degree of sensitivity around these things has changed a lot in the last 10-20 years.
Most young people today (even most nerds) know that what Bostrom said (even though it was in the context of giving an example of what you shouldn’t say) would elicit strong negative reactions, given how much media attention these things receive. I assume this was less obvious to nerds in the 1990s (though it was probably fairly predictable even back then).
It is perhaps important to note that in the original email, Bostrom quite directly says that he is aware of the social norm about not saying what he said. In fact, that was one of the main points of the email: that saying something true in a blunt manner about a controversial topic is likely to be viewed as offensive. If Bostrom learned anything—and indeed, he apologized within 24 hours—it was that saying something like that can be inadvisable even among friends.
In general, I don’t think old people generally have a stronger understanding of social norms than younger people. Old people will of course have more experience to draw from, and their mannerisms will have gone through more trial and error. In that sense, I agree: old people are often wiser. But the frontier of cultural norms are generally driven by young people, and old people are often left out of that conversation.
It is not uncommon to hear young people say they’re shocked by their older relatives who are ignorant or only superficially aware of social norms that became widespread in the last ten years, e.g. stating one’s pronouns while introducing oneself. To the extent that we are judging people on their understanding of current social norms, we should probably hold young adults to the strictest standards of any group.
Interesting point! I hadn’t even heard of “stating one’s pronouns while introducing oneself”, although maybe that’s because I rarely meet anyone in person.
As you said, there’s a tension between young people having the cutting edge of norms versus older people knowing a greater quantity of norms, even though some may be stale.
I think the obsession among young people with political correctness increased dramatically in the last 10 years, and it was barely a discussion topic when I was in pre-college school. Usually it seemed to be teachers and administrators trying to inculcate anti-bullying lessons into the students. At the anti-bullying workshops, students often rolled their eyes. So I’m not sure how true it would have been to say that students were at the vanguard of social norms in my school. (I went to a pretty liberal public school in upstate New York.)
I may also be generalizing too much from my own past self, since I was often called “oblivious” at Bostrom’s 23-year age and wasn’t that well informed about scandals, maybe because I thought they were too gossip-y and not as important as “serious” topics. (Now I realize that gossip is actually very important.)
If Bostrom learned anything—and indeed, he apologized within 24 hours—it was that saying something like that can be inadvisable even among friends.
Yeah. He also said he only “recently” began to believe that speaking flippantly is unsuccessful, which I think jibes with my hypothesis of him being fairly oblivious. Many people would consider the ineffectiveness of speaking flippantly so obvious as to not be worth mentioning as any kind of realization.
Bostrom was essentially still a kid (age ~23) when he wrote the 1996 email. What effect does it have on kids’ psychology to think that any dumb thing they’ve ever said online can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion for the rest of their lives? Given that Bostrom wasn’t currently spreading racist views or trying to harm minorities, it’s not as though it was important to stop him from doing ongoing harm. So the main justification for socially punishing him would be to create a chilling effect against people daring to spout off flippantly worded opinions going forward. There are some benefits to intimidating people away from saying dumb things, but there are also serious costs, which I think are probably underestimated by those expressing strong outrage.
Of course, there are also potentially huge costs to flippant and crass discussion of minorities. My point is that the stakes are high in both directions, and it’s very non-obvious where the right balance to strike is. Personally I suspect the pendulum is quite a bit too far in the direction of trying to ruin people’s lives for idiotic stuff they said as kids, but other smart people seem to disagree.
As some others have noted, probably the best approach we can take to the question of a genetic racial IQ gap is to voluntarily avoid mentioning the idea or at least to portray the question as relatively uninteresting (as Bostrom said in his apology), especially since the policy implications of such a gap wouldn’t be that big anyway. However, trying to suppress inquiries by others into the topic seems to me like it may cause more harm than good, via the Streisand effect. If it looks like there’s secret knowledge that the scientific community has informally conspired to suppress, the topic suddenly becomes way more interesting. There was also a genuine conspiracy (both in terms of meetings among scientists and tacit peer pressure) to suppress discussion of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 in 2020, and that fact made the question much juicier.
I admire that Bostrom’s apology didn’t take the easy way out by lying to pretend he thinks there’s no possibility of a genetic IQ gap. I see that as a positive sign about his intellectual honesty. (Actually, it’s obvious that between any two groups of humans, there will be some difference in the distribution of genes and therefore some nonzero genetically caused difference in the average of almost any trait you wish to measure. The real question is whether those differences are big or negligible. And even if the differences are non-negligible, I suspect it’s usually bad to highlight them anyway, such as due to stereotype threat and the possibility of encouraging violence toward and persecution of outgroups. In medical contexts, such as when people with African ancestry are genetically more at risk from certain diseases than other groups, highlighting these differences seems useful.)
Many progressive institutions spend a great deal of time highlighting racial differences. I really wish they would not. Even worse, they go on to attribute these gaps to discrimination and nefariousness on the part of oppressor groups. If gaps are not due to discrimination, then it is immoral to place blame on a the designated oppressor group for discrimination. In other contexts, this is common sense. It is wrong to attribute Jewish success to coordinated conspiracies and exploitation because their success is largely attributable to higher average cognitive ability and intellectual culture.
There are successful minority groups throughout the world who are resented because their higher socioeconomic status is attributed to exploitation. I think this is an unfortunate situation. If anything, attributing socioeconomic outcomes to exploitation leaves a group open to violence moreso than attributing socioeconomic gaps to average cognitive ability differences.
Few people think it is moral to commit acts of violence against less intelligent people. Even fewer probably think it is acceptable to commit acts of violence against a group because they are a member of a groups with a lower than average level of cognitive ability. I really never see these attitudes. Eventually whatever is true about differences will come to light. The truth cannot be supressed for ever. It is best to argue now that nothing like violence comes from the existence of non-negligable gaps. What does follow is that a certain way of thinking about politics in mostly egalitarian societies, namely as race and class conflict, needs to be less dominant.
We ought to move back to the attitude that it is an ideal to not care about race, sex, gender, sexual orientation etc rather than that we need to always be thinking about these things. It is hard to pushback against this narrative without touching on extraordinarily tabboo topics because absolute fairness creates disparity and mentioning the better explanations will get you regarded as a “bad person” and in some cases fired from your job.
I plausibly agree. There are times and places to bring up racism and sexism, their historical contexts, and instances where they still exist today. But I also get the sense that people would generally be happier (plausibly even many minorities(?), though I’m not at all sure about that) if they ruminated on these ideas less often. Rumination can both exacerbate the pain of actual injustices and make one perceive injustices where they may not actually exist or don’t exist much (manspreading, Shirtgate, etc). Note that this point can also apply to anti-woke people: focusing a bit less on the perceived wrongs of cancel culture might make them happier.
Believers in genetic racial IQ gaps often say their viewpoint is needed in cases like affirmative action, to show that it’s not necessarily discriminatory if the demographic composition of some elite group doesn’t match the demographic composition of the whole population. But if we were more race-blind and didn’t think much about demographic composition to begin with, then talking about the possibility of genetic racial IQ gaps would also be less relevant. In order for this to work, society would also have to improve on providing better education, nutrition, income, etc to poorer parts of society, because otherwise not thinking much about the demographic composition of elite groups could lead to not noticing the substantial environmental and cultural causes of inequality that definitely still remain and that affirmative action aims to overcome. OTOH, maybe it’s naive to expect significant improvement in society’s motivation to actually raise the living standards of poor people, in which case the “kludge” of affirmative action might be better than nothing.
I think having a few visible examples of minorities in powerful positions, such as the first black or female president of the USA, can be pretty valuable as inspiring role models. It may also be the case that people would be deterred from entering workplaces where there are too few “of one’s own kind” (race, gender, etc), such as because of fearing harassment. Maybe most humans are actually too tribalistic to pull off race-blindness, gender-blindness, etc. IDK.
In any case, I suspect it’s generally more fruitfuil to focus on helping poor people (of all races) economically than to focus on, say, discrimination in hiring, because I think economic and cultural inequalities drive a lot of the inequality in outcome that we observe. In elite settings, my experience is that hiring discrimination is often in the direction of favoring black, women, gay, etc candidates, though I’m sure discrimination against such groups still happens somewhat too.
I imagine those attitudes were common during slavery and colonization. For example, the Europeans who arrived in the New World in the centuries after 1492 probably considered the indigenous people inferior and therefore didn’t feel as guilty about enslaving or murdering them.
In the contemporary West, I agree that the view you mention seems rarer. Society tends to take less action against violence or hardship endured by very poor people, and poverty correlates with lower cognitive ability, but this isn’t an intentional part of society’s ideology so much as a byproduct of apathy.
In the case of non-human animals, even most SJWs think it’s fine to enslave and murder them, and probably a main reason SJWs would cite for this is that non-human animals have different brains than humans do, though it’s unclear how much this reason is about intelligence per se versus sentience.
Some notes on the last paragraph in my above comment:
When I used the phrase “SJWs”, I intended it to have either neutral valence or a valence of friendly teasing. I agree with some amount of the SJW agenda myself. However, Wikipedia says that since 2011, the term is primarily used as an insult and is associated with the alt-right, which was not an implication I had in mind. Like Bostrom’s 1996 email and 2023 apology, this example is an illustration that it can be difficult to realize exactly how a given word or statement may be perceived, especially if people are reading it as if it were a dog whistle.
Part of my reason for using the term “SJW” was that I didn’t want to say merely “leftist” or “progressive”. I was a strong leftist and progressive in the early aughts, and back then, people with that ideology were, in my experience, generally more focused on trying to improve people’s welfare via economic and other government-level policy. Progressives didn’t spend as much time as they do now on shaming individual people or groups. I think the woke-ward shift of the last decade, while it raises some important issues that were less highlighted in the past, is plausibly overall less useful for improving total human welfare than the earlier economic and policy focus was. So I don’t like conflating “woke” with “progressive”. (That said, I think some progressive economic policy positions, such as against outsourcing American jobs to developing nations, may be net bad for short-term human welfare.)
A more neutral phrasing than “SJW” could have been just “social-justice activist”.
As far as the other part of my phrasing, when I said that most social-justice activists “think it’s fine to enslave and murder” non-human animals, I was in part being deliberately provocative to make a point. Bostrom is right when he says in his apology: “I do think that provocative communication styles have a place”. If I had instead written that most social-justice activists “think it’s acceptable for farmers to raise and slaughter livestock”, the use of those conventional euphemisms would have dulled what I was trying to convey, which is that this practice is actually really awful. (BTW, I should also acknowledge that I myself pay for some amount of enslavement and murder of dairy cows, via eating cheese and ice cream. However, I think the total amount of harm this causes is much lower than the harm caused by eating meat from smaller farm animals.)
Provocation can shock people out of their normal way of seeing the world into looking at some fact in a different light. This seems to be roughly what Bostrom was saying in the first paragraph of his 1996 email. However, in the case of that email, it’s unclear what socially valuable fact he was trying to shock people into seeing in a new way.
One function of comedy is to do roughly the same thing: stating some true fact in an unconventional way in order to make people see the world through a new lens. However, an important principle in comedy is the distinction between “punching up” and “punching down”, and if we interpret Bostrom’s 1996 statement as analogous to provocative humor, it would clearly be punching down.
It’s fairly common and even celebrated in modern Western society to hear statements like “women are more productive than men” or “girls are smarter at language than boys”. Many of these statements are made in fairly blunt language, similar to Bostrom’s 1996 statement. I assume most people think these statements about female superiority are pretty harmless, both because they’re seen more as “punching up” (given the history of men dominating women in much of the world until the late 20th century) and because the hypothesis of biological gender differences is less taboo and more scientifically established. But I do think the contrast in people’s reactions between saying “boys are worse at language than girls” versus Bostrom’s 1996 statement is interesting, and it shows that the degree of outrage a statement provokes is often not obvious unless you have a lot of experience with a specific culture’s norms.
I do worry a bit that the casual misandry that society often seems to celebrate may be detrimental to the self-esteem of boys, though I’m also not interested in trying to police such language. It’s plausible to me that some amount of humorous mocking between different groups is actually helpful, by showing people that we can laugh together, rather than priming ourselves to interpret any offensive statement as an act of aggression.
Great comments, Brian. You should spend more time on the Forum!
Thanks. :) I feel somewhat bad about spending time on this topic rather than my usual focus areas, especially since many of my points were already made by others. Plus, as I mentioned and as Bostrom learned, anything you say about controversial topics online is fodder for political enemies to take out of context. But I have a (maybe non-utilitarian) impulse to stick up for what I think is right even if some people will dislike me for doing so. (For a time, my top-level comment here had a net agreement of −10 or so. Of course, maybe the downvoters were correct and I’m wrong.)
Bostrom’s email was in response to someone who made the point you do here about provocation sometimes making people view things in a new light. The person who Bostrom was responding to advocated saying things in a blunt and shocking manner as a general strategy for communication. Bostrom was saying to them that sometimes, saying things in a blunt and shocking manner does nothing but rile people up.
Interesting! I admit I didn’t go and read the original discussion thread, so thanks for that context. To the extent that Bostrom was arguing against being needlessly shocking, he was kind of already making the same point that his critics have been making: don’t say needlessly shocking things. He didn’t show enough sensitivity/empathy in the process of presenting the example and explaining why it was bad, but he was writing a quick email to friends, not a carefully crafted political announcement intended to be read by thousands of people.
In my experience, the reason these statements tend to get less pushback is that they are generally explained by gendered socialization and norms rather than intrinsic biological or genetic factors, whereas the race/gender arguments that receive pushback claim that certain groups are genetically (intrinsically) inferior.
I see. :) I would think people would consider biological differences much more plausible in the gender case than the race case. I’ve heard several people say that when you’re a parent to both a boy and a girl, the differences between them are unmistakeable even in the first ~2 years. I think many American adults at least privately understand that there are big biological differences between the brains of men and women, while most American adults probably expect no non-trivial biological racial brain differences. But yeah, any particular gender difference, such as the language gap, could be mostly or all environmental.
I don’t like calling ~ 23 year olds “essentially still a kid.” I think that has to cut both ways; if someone is “essentially still a kid” we shouldn’t metaphorically let them use matches—by which I mean have any roles and functions that could cause significant harm if they act badly.
I do think age is mitigating in the context of the 1996 email (on top of the passage of 26 years), but I feel that phrasing goes too far.
Fair enough. :) Some headlines called the FTX leadership “a gang of kids”, which I think isn’t unreasonable, even though they were in their late 20s or early 30s. The main thing I wanted to convey is that people at this age often have limited life experience or understanding of how the world works and so often do dumb things. Youth is a time to explore weird ideas and make mistakes. Therefore, I would agree that 23-year-olds generally shouldn’t be entrusted to hold important decision-making positions unless they’ve shown a track record of unusual maturity.
I think it is bad to deny a person access to a position because of the statistical average of their group. If a 23 year old is competent, then hold them to the same standard.
It is odd to me that you would comment that highlighting differences in cognitive ability between groups should be taboo and suppressed and yet openly state that 23 year olds should have to face different standards in order to be entrusted in decision-making positions. I think you would find it utterly repugnant to say that blacks should have higher standards before we trust them.
Edit: I don’t think this is particularly bad and this attitude is relatively common. I just want to point out that I think this looks like an odd double-standard in my view, although many may disagree. Sorry if this comment comes across as aggressive.
It’s a great point, and not at all aggressive. :)
I said that 23-year-olds should demonstrate “a track record of unusual maturity” in order to have important positions, not that they should always be denied them. In some cases, such as becoming the president of the USA, a minimum age requirement may make sense because the stakes are so high, although one could say that we should just let voters decide if any given person is qualified.
But you’re right that I support a strong prior against, say, tasking a 23-year-old to run a major organization—a prejudice that needs to be overcome with strong enough evidence of maturity and competence—in a way that it would be abhorrent to do for a member of a particular racial group.
It’s interesting to ponder the reasons for different attitudes toward racism vs ageism. My two main guesses are:
Average differences in traits based on age are sometimes quite large, enough that the value of using the prejucide for making predictions can exceed the unfairness downsides of stereotyping people. For example, my impression is that young men are on average much riskier drivers than older men, so there’s not a ton of society-level outrage about charging 16-year-old men several times more for car insurance than 55-year-old men, although I imagine that many individual young men who are cautious drivers are rightly annoyed by this situation.
Historical context leads us to treat racial / sexual / etc discrimination more seriously than discrimination based on age, height, extroversion, etc. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a lot of genocide against short people of the same race, or enslavement of them, or forcing them to use separate bathrooms, etc. A main argument for caution about racial stuff is a slippery slope concern that there’s some small chance that allowing more callousness on these issues could actually lead to a new genocide, so the expected value of worrying about it is nontrivial, even if the risk of the genocide is very low. (That said, excessive mob punishment of people for not following ever-more-demanding requirements regarding proper speech and conduct may itself pose a very small risk of genocidal outcomes, and it’s non-obvious whether this risk is smaller or larger than the racial genocide risk in the modern West. It may also be the case that the hostility between the extreme woke and extreme anti-woke camps makes both of them stronger, at the expense of moderate voices, thereby increasing both types of genocide risk at once.)
There are some types of discrimination that receive surprisingly little sympathy despite the lifelong trauma they can cause people, such as favoritism toward attractive people. Even woke Hollywood—despite extraordinary efforts to introduce diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—rarely casts unattractive actors for leading roles. Maybe this is understandable, because those movies would usually perform poorly at the box office, and for whatever reason, there’s not enough social outrage about discrimination against unattractive people to offset that. (To the extent that one point of watching a movie is to see attractive people, maybe one could argue that unattractive people are genuinely less qualified for the job, and no amount of new evidence could overcome that fact. This would make attractiveness discrimination unfortunate but not stereotyping. OTOH, there’s some chance that if the unattractive person were given the leading role, s/he would charm audiences to a degree that the movie’s creators didn’t expect, in which case it could be similar to the case of a surprisingly wise 23-year-old.)
I agree with your comment in general, but I’m not quite sure about this point. I think age-based discrimination has been / is quite severe (though perhaps it is also often justified, since age does make a lot of difference to people’s abilities):
Children are often forced to go sit in a small room all day, subject to the arbitrary whims of a single adult with little oversight, and often have to endure criminal violence from other children with little recourse, in a way that would be unacceptable for older people.
Young men have been repeatedly conscripted to fight in wars with high mortality rates.
Old people might face compulsory redundancy.
Young people have to pay taxes to fund benefits for older people, even if those retirees did not have to pay those taxes when they were young, and these retirement benefits may not be available by the time the young retire.
Many facilities do ban children, and people often complain about children being allowed on planes etc.
In many places babies can be killed by their parents without legal consequence.
Older people are often targeted by younger criminals because they are vulnerable.
In some places older people may be pressured to commit suicide to free up resources.
Many laws are passed that systematically disadvantage younger people (e.g. NIMBY rules on homebuilding).
Good list. :)
I think school is vastly less bad than, say, slavery, with some possible exceptions like if there’s extreme bullying at the school.
You’re right that the violence children endure from each other (and sometimes from their own parents) would be unacceptable if done to adults. If one adult hits another, that’s criminal assault/battery. If a kid hits another kid, that’s just Tuesday.
Children are also subject to the arbitrary whims of their parents, and are made to do unpaid labor against their will, though usually parents don’t treat their own children extremely badly. (Of course, some parents do horrifically abuse or neglect their children.)
In any case, as you said, to some extent the lack of freedom for children is inevitable. (Actually, there is a way to avoid it entirely: don’t have children, which is the antinatalist solution. If sentient beings didn’t exist, none of the problems we’re discussing here would be problems anymore.)
It’s definitely right to look at historical and other social context to explain current and past attitudes towards discrimination as explanations. A utilitarian framework is probably not the right approach, nor most other ethics systems. I doubt there was ever a time in the modern era where attitudes were consistent, and there’s loads of social conditioning going on. I don’t think many women felt angry in the 19th century when their heads of government were (almost?) invariably men, because “that’s just how things are” and nobody else was getting angry about it anyway.
My favorite example of current discrimination that totally flies under the radar of the collective ire is height discrimination. 6 of 46 US presidents[1] have been of below average height, a result this extreme or more has less than a 0.005 chance occuring due to randomness (i.e. your chances of becoming president are 2 orders of magnitudes lower if you are short). This is not totally unknown, occasionally there’s a paper or article about height advantages, but people perceive it as a mere curiosity. Personally speaking as a short guy, this absolutely fails to anger me either.
1: https://www.thoughtco.com/shortest-presidents-4144573
Even if there were no average differences in maturity between age groups, it still might be rational to prefer older people for important roles like president or CEO for pure credentialing reasons. The reason is simple. 23 year olds have had less time to prove their maturity. Even if they were highly mature, their track record would be brief, and thus not conclusive.
Also, we all once were, are, or expect to be 23 years old at some point. That’s not a complete justification for many reasons, but it makes me relatively less concerned about age-based classifications than classifications where the burden is not felt close to equally by everyone over time.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s an excellent point and probably is a big part of the explanation. There are a few cases where it might not apply, such as if a mother stays at home with her kids during her 20s and 30s, enters the workforce in her 40s, and faces ageism because she’s not as sharp as the younger people. In that case, she never once was a sharp young person in the workplace. But these kinds of cases also tend to be ones where people feel that ageism is more of a problem.
I agree with Jason. I don’t think being 23 years old means that you’re “essentially still a kid”.
If we want to judge young adults for their positive achievements, it makes sense to hold a symmetric attitude and judge them for their mistakes as well (though one could take the perspective that we shouldn’t judge anyone for making mistakes, but that’s a separate argument).
Fluid intelligence is generally considered to peak between one’s late teens to mid 20s, and the majority of measured cognitive abilities either decline or only very slightly rise after the age of 23. If we use cognitive ability as the marker of adulthood, rater than life experience, one could even make the case that 23 year olds are more “adult” than any other age group.
(Though of course I might be biased, because I’m 23 years old right now.)
Thanks. :) I mainly had in mind something more like wisdom, rather than intelligence. Social norms on particular topics are often not what you would expect by armchair reasoning. In many cases, you have to directly encounter people expressing those norms, or see news stories / hear gossip about people who have run afoul of those norms, to know what they are. Nerds who are very interested in science/math/theoretical things may be less likely to learn about these norms than the average person, despite having high fluid intelligence. (BTW, this is one reason I’ve updated toward thinking reading some amount of news is important.) I imagine that people told Bostrom that what he said in 1996 wasn’t cool, and if so, that was a useful learning experience for him. The only problem was that it was written down for posterity to see.
I think cultural context is also relevant to judging these things. Most young people today (even most nerds) know that what Bostrom said (even though it was in the context of giving an example of what you shouldn’t say) would elicit strong negative reactions, given how much media attention these things receive. I assume this was less obvious to nerds in the 1990s (though it was probably fairly predictable even back then).
For what it’s worth, my fifth-grade class was assigned to read The Great Gilly Hopkins, which includes a tasteless joke about the N-word (though in the context of suggesting the person making it was being an asshole). And in high school, in 2005, when reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we used the N-word in relation to Jim without any problems, because that’s the word Twain used. The degree of sensitivity around these things has changed a lot in the last 10-20 years.
It is perhaps important to note that in the original email, Bostrom quite directly says that he is aware of the social norm about not saying what he said. In fact, that was one of the main points of the email: that saying something true in a blunt manner about a controversial topic is likely to be viewed as offensive. If Bostrom learned anything—and indeed, he apologized within 24 hours—it was that saying something like that can be inadvisable even among friends.
In general, I don’t think old people generally have a stronger understanding of social norms than younger people. Old people will of course have more experience to draw from, and their mannerisms will have gone through more trial and error. In that sense, I agree: old people are often wiser. But the frontier of cultural norms are generally driven by young people, and old people are often left out of that conversation.
It is not uncommon to hear young people say they’re shocked by their older relatives who are ignorant or only superficially aware of social norms that became widespread in the last ten years, e.g. stating one’s pronouns while introducing oneself. To the extent that we are judging people on their understanding of current social norms, we should probably hold young adults to the strictest standards of any group.
Interesting point! I hadn’t even heard of “stating one’s pronouns while introducing oneself”, although maybe that’s because I rarely meet anyone in person.
As you said, there’s a tension between young people having the cutting edge of norms versus older people knowing a greater quantity of norms, even though some may be stale.
I think the obsession among young people with political correctness increased dramatically in the last 10 years, and it was barely a discussion topic when I was in pre-college school. Usually it seemed to be teachers and administrators trying to inculcate anti-bullying lessons into the students. At the anti-bullying workshops, students often rolled their eyes. So I’m not sure how true it would have been to say that students were at the vanguard of social norms in my school. (I went to a pretty liberal public school in upstate New York.)
I may also be generalizing too much from my own past self, since I was often called “oblivious” at Bostrom’s 23-year age and wasn’t that well informed about scandals, maybe because I thought they were too gossip-y and not as important as “serious” topics. (Now I realize that gossip is actually very important.)
Yeah. He also said he only “recently” began to believe that speaking flippantly is unsuccessful, which I think jibes with my hypothesis of him being fairly oblivious. Many people would consider the ineffectiveness of speaking flippantly so obvious as to not be worth mentioning as any kind of realization.