I feel like some people are reading “I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago” and thinking that he has not repudiated the entire email, just because he also says “The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive”. I wonder if you interpreted it that way.
One thing I think Bostrom should have specifically addressed was when he said “I like that sentence”. It’s not a likeable sentence! It’s an ambiguous sentence (one interpretation of which is obviously false) that carries a bad connotation (in the same way that “you did worse than Joe on the test” has a different connotation than “Joe did better than you on the test”, making the second sentence probably better). Worst of all, it sounds like the kind of thing racists say. The nicest thing I would say about this sentence is that it’s very cringe.
Now I’m a “high-decoupler Independent”, and “low-decoupler Democrats” clearly wanted Bostrom to say different things than me. However, I suspect Bostrom is a high-decoupler Independent himself, and on that basis he loses points in my mind for not addressing the sorts of things that I myself notice. On the other hand… apology-crafting is hard and I think he made a genuine attempt.
But there are several things I take issue with in Thorstad’s post, just one of which I will highlight here. He said that the claim “I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general” is “widely repudiated, are based on a long history of racist pseudoscience and must be rejected” (emphasis mine). In response to this I want to highlight a comment that discusses an anti-Bostrom post on this forum:
This post says both:
> If you believe there are racial differences in intelligence, and your work forces you to work on the hard problems of resource allocation or longtermist societal evolution, nobody will trust you to do the right tradeoffs.
and
> If he’d said, for instance, “hey I was an idiot for thinking and saying that. We still have IQ gaps between races, which doesn’t make sense. It’s closing, but not fast enough. We should work harder on fixing this.” That would be more sensible. Same for the community itself disavowing the explicit racism.
The first quote says believing X (that there exists a racial IQ gap) is harmful and will result in nobody trusting you. The second says X is, in fact, true.
I think that we high-decouplers tend to feel that it is deeply wrong to treat a proposition X as true if it is expressed in one way, but false/offensive if expressed in another way. If it’s true, it’s true, and it’s okay to say so without getting the wording perfect.[1]
In the Flynn effect, which I don’t believe is controversial, populations vary significantly on IQ depending on when they were born. But if timing of birth is correlated with IQ, then couldn’t location of birth be correlated with IQ? Or poverty, or education? And is there not some correlation between poverty and skin color? And are not correlations usually transitive? I’m not trying to prove the case here, just trying to say that people can reasonably believe there is a correlation, and indeed, you can see that even the anti-Bostrom post above implies that a correlation exists.
Thorstad cites no evidence for his implication that the average IQ of blacks is equal to the average IQ of everyone. To the contrary, he completely ignores environmental effects on intelligence and zeroes in on the topic of genetic effects on intelligence. So even if he made an effort to show that there’s no genetic IQ gap there would still be a big loophole for environmental differences. Thorstad also didn’t make an effort to show that what he was saying about genetics was true, nor did he link to someone who did make that effort (but I will. Here’s someone critiquing the most famous version of HBD, and if you know of a work that directly addresses the whole body of scientific evidence rather than being designed as a rebuttal, I’d like to see it.) Overall, the piece comes across to me as unnecessarily politicized, unfair, judgemental, and not evidence-based in the places it needs to be.
Plus it tends toward dihydrogen monoxide-style arguments. To illustrate this, consider these arguments supporting the idea of man-made global warming: “denial that humans cause global warming is often funded by fossil-fuel companies with a vested interest in blocking environmental regulations, some of which have a history of unethical behavior. And many of the self-proclaimed experts who purport to show humans don’t cause climate change are in fact charlatans. The Great Global Warming Swindle, a denier film, labeled fellow denier Tim Ball as the ‘head of climatology’ at the University of Winnipeg, which does not, in fact, have a climatology department. As droughts, heat waves and hurricane damage figures increase, it’s time to reject denial and affirm that we humans are responsible.” As a former writer for SkepticalScience who fought against climate denial for years, I held my gag reflex as I wrote those sentences, because they were bad arguments. It’s not that they are false; it’s not that I disagree with them; it’s that they are politicized statements that create more heat than light and don’t help demonstrate that humans cause global warming. There are ample explainers and scientific evidence out there for man-made global warming, so you don’t need to rely on guilt-by-association or negative politically-charged narratives like the one I just wrote. Same thing for Bostrom—there may be good arguments against him, but I haven’t seen them.
I also believe actions speak louder than words, so that Bostrom’s value seems much higher than his disvalue (I know little about his value, but a quick look at his bio suggests it is high), and that in EA we should employ the principle of charity.
Also, if someone doesn’t know if an idea is true, it’s wrong to condemn them just for saying they don’t know or for not picking a side, as Thorstad does.
I feel like some people are reading “I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago” and thinking that he has not repudiated the entire email, just because he also says “The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive”. I wonder if you interpreted it that way.
One thing I think Bostrom should have specifically addressed was when he said “I like that sentence”. It’s not a likeable sentence! It’s an ambiguous sentence (one interpretation of which is obviously false) that carries a bad connotation (in the same way that “you did worse than Joe on the test” has a different connotation than “Joe did better than you on the test”, making the second sentence probably better). Worst of all, it sounds like the kind of thing racists say. The nicest thing I would say about this sentence is that it’s very cringe.
Now I’m a “high-decoupler Independent”, and “low-decoupler Democrats” clearly wanted Bostrom to say different things than me. However, I suspect Bostrom is a high-decoupler Independent himself, and on that basis he loses points in my mind for not addressing the sorts of things that I myself notice. On the other hand… apology-crafting is hard and I think he made a genuine attempt.
But there are several things I take issue with in Thorstad’s post, just one of which I will highlight here. He said that the claim “I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general” is “widely repudiated, are based on a long history of racist pseudoscience and must be rejected” (emphasis mine). In response to this I want to highlight a comment that discusses an anti-Bostrom post on this forum:
I think that we high-decouplers tend to feel that it is deeply wrong to treat a proposition X as true if it is expressed in one way, but false/offensive if expressed in another way. If it’s true, it’s true, and it’s okay to say so without getting the wording perfect.[1]
In the Flynn effect, which I don’t believe is controversial, populations vary significantly on IQ depending on when they were born. But if timing of birth is correlated with IQ, then couldn’t location of birth be correlated with IQ? Or poverty, or education? And is there not some correlation between poverty and skin color? And are not correlations usually transitive? I’m not trying to prove the case here, just trying to say that people can reasonably believe there is a correlation, and indeed, you can see that even the anti-Bostrom post above implies that a correlation exists.
Thorstad cites no evidence for his implication that the average IQ of blacks is equal to the average IQ of everyone. To the contrary, he completely ignores environmental effects on intelligence and zeroes in on the topic of genetic effects on intelligence. So even if he made an effort to show that there’s no genetic IQ gap there would still be a big loophole for environmental differences. Thorstad also didn’t make an effort to show that what he was saying about genetics was true, nor did he link to someone who did make that effort (but I will. Here’s someone critiquing the most famous version of HBD, and if you know of a work that directly addresses the whole body of scientific evidence rather than being designed as a rebuttal, I’d like to see it.) Overall, the piece comes across to me as unnecessarily politicized, unfair, judgemental, and not evidence-based in the places it needs to be.
Plus it tends toward dihydrogen monoxide-style arguments. To illustrate this, consider these arguments supporting the idea of man-made global warming: “denial that humans cause global warming is often funded by fossil-fuel companies with a vested interest in blocking environmental regulations, some of which have a history of unethical behavior. And many of the self-proclaimed experts who purport to show humans don’t cause climate change are in fact charlatans. The Great Global Warming Swindle, a denier film, labeled fellow denier Tim Ball as the ‘head of climatology’ at the University of Winnipeg, which does not, in fact, have a climatology department. As droughts, heat waves and hurricane damage figures increase, it’s time to reject denial and affirm that we humans are responsible.” As a former writer for SkepticalScience who fought against climate denial for years, I held my gag reflex as I wrote those sentences, because they were bad arguments. It’s not that they are false; it’s not that I disagree with them; it’s that they are politicized statements that create more heat than light and don’t help demonstrate that humans cause global warming. There are ample explainers and scientific evidence out there for man-made global warming, so you don’t need to rely on guilt-by-association or negative politically-charged narratives like the one I just wrote. Same thing for Bostrom—there may be good arguments against him, but I haven’t seen them.
I also believe actions speak louder than words, so that Bostrom’s value seems much higher than his disvalue (I know little about his value, but a quick look at his bio suggests it is high), and that in EA we should employ the principle of charity.
Also, if someone doesn’t know if an idea is true, it’s wrong to condemn them just for saying they don’t know or for not picking a side, as Thorstad does.