Someone who is clearly not racist accidentally said something that sounds pretty racist, decades ago, and then apologized profusely.
Registering strong disagreement with this characterisation. Nick has done vanishingly little to apologise, both now and in 1997. In the original emails and the latest apology, he has done less to distance himself from racism than to endorse it.
In the original emails and the latest apology, he has done less to distance himself from racism than to endorse it.
In what ways do you think the 2023 message endorses racism? Is there a particular quote or feature of it that stands out to you?
The apology contains an emphatic condemnation of the use of a racist slur:
I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately
represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately
apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I
recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
The 1996 email was part of a discussion of offensive communication styles. It included a heavily contested and controversial claim about group intelligence, which I will not repeat here. [1] Claims like these have been made by racist groups in the past, and an interest in such claims correlates with racist views. But there is not a strict correlation here: expressing or studying such claims does not entail you have racist values or motivations.
In general I see genetic disparity as one of the biggest underlying causes of inequality and injustice. I’ve no informed views or particular interests in averages between groups of different skin colour. But I do feel terrible for people who find themselves born with a difficult hand in the genetic lottery (e.g. a tendency to severe depression or dementia). And so I endorse research on genetic causes of chronic disadvantage, with the hope that we can improve things.
One of the main complaints people (including me) have about Bostrom’s old_email.pdf is that he focuses on the use of a slur as the thing he is regretful for, and is operating under a very narrow definition of racism where a racist is someone who dislikes people of other races. But the main fault with the 1996 email, for which Bostrom should apologise, the most important harm and the main reason it is racist, was that it propagated the belief that blacks are inherently stupider than whites (it did not comment on the causation, but used language that is conventionally understood to refer to congenital traits, ‘blacks have lower IQ than mankind in general’). Under this view, old_email.pdf omits to apologise for the main thing people are upset about in the 1996 email, namely, the racist belief, and the lack of empathy for those reading it; and it clarifies further that, in Bostrom’s view, the lower IQ of blacks may in fact be in no small part genetically determined, and moreover, as David Thorstad writes, “Bostrom shows no desire to educate himself on the racist and discredited science driving his original beliefs or on the full extent of the harms done by these beliefs. He does not promise to read any books, have hard conversations, or even to behave better in the future. If Bostrom is not planning to change, then why are we to believe that his behavior will be any better than it was in the 1990s?”
So in my view: in total, in 1996 Nick endorses racist views, and in 2023 he clarifies beyond doubt that the IQ gap between blacks and whites may be genetically determined (and says sorry for using a bad word).
I am sorry for saying that black people are stupider than whites. I no longer hold that view.
Even if he, with evidence, still believes it to be true? David Thorstad can write all he wants about changing his views, but the evidence of the existence of a racial IQ gap has not changed. It is as ironclad and universally accepted by all researchers as it was in 1996 following the publication of the APA’s Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.
This may be a difference of opinion, but I don’t think that acknowledging observed differences in reality is a racist view. But I am interested to know if you would prefer he make the statement anyway.
By the way, the finding of an IQ gap isn’t (or shouldn’t be?) what is under contention/offensive, because that’s a real finding. It’s the idea that it has a significant genetic component.
I think both Bostrom and I claim that he does not believe that idea, but I’ll entertain your hypothetical below.
I think that, in the world where racial IQ gaps are known not to have a significant genetic component, believing so anyway as a layperson makes one very probably a racist (glossed as a person whose thinking is biased by motivated reasoning on the basis of race); and in the world where racial IQ gaps are known to have a significant genetic component, believing so is not strong evidence of being a racist (with the same gloss). There are also worlds in between.
In any of these worlds, and the world where we live, responsible non-experts should defer to the scientific consensus (as Bostrom seems to in 2023), and when they irresponsibly promote beliefs that are extremely harmful and false, through recklessness, they should apologise for that.
I don’t think anyone should apologise for the very act of believing something one still believes, because an apology is by nature a disagreement with one’s past self. But Bostrom in 2023 does not seem to believe any more, if he ever did, that the racial IQ gap is genetically caused, which frees him up to apologise for his 1996 promotion of the belief.
As a reminder, the original description I took issue with was:
Someone who is clearly not racist accidentally said something that sounds pretty racist, decades ago, and then apologized profusely
It ‘sounds pretty racist’ to say “blacks have lower IQ than mankind in general” because that phrasing usually implies it’s congenital. In other words, in 1996, Bostrom (whose status as a racist is ambiguous to me, and I will continue to judge his character based on his actions in the coming weeks and months) said something that communicates a racist belief, and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was an accident — a reckless one, but an accident. However, apart from apologising for the n-word slur, I haven’t seen much that can be interpreted as an apology for the harm caused by this accident.
Now, if Bostrom, as a non-expert, in fact is secretly confident that IQ and race correlate because of genetics, I think that his thinking is probably biased in a racist way (that is to say, he is a racist) and he should be suspicious of his own motives in holding that belief. If he then finds his view was mistaken, he may meaningfully apologise for any racist bias that influenced his thinking. Otherwise, an apology would not make any sense as he would not think he’d done anything wrong.
The lack of apology for promulgating accidentally (or deliberately) the racist view is wrong if Bostrom does not hold the view (/any more). He is mistaken when in 2023 he skates over acknowledging the main harm he contributed to, by focusing mostly on his mention of the n-word (a lesser harm, partly due to the use-mention distinction).
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.
Registering strong disagreement with this characterisation. Nick has done vanishingly little to apologise, both now and in 1997. In the original emails and the latest apology, he has done less to distance himself from racism than to endorse it.
In what ways do you think the 2023 message endorses racism? Is there a particular quote or feature of it that stands out to you?
The apology contains an emphatic condemnation of the use of a racist slur:
The 1996 email was part of a discussion of offensive communication styles. It included a heavily contested and controversial claim about group intelligence, which I will not repeat here. [1] Claims like these have been made by racist groups in the past, and an interest in such claims correlates with racist views. But there is not a strict correlation here: expressing or studying such claims does not entail you have racist values or motivations.
In general I see genetic disparity as one of the biggest underlying causes of inequality and injustice. I’ve no informed views or particular interests in averages between groups of different skin colour. But I do feel terrible for people who find themselves born with a difficult hand in the genetic lottery (e.g. a tendency to severe depression or dementia). And so I endorse research on genetic causes of chronic disadvantage, with the hope that we can improve things.
[1] This comment by Geoffrey Miller provides a bit more context on why Bostrom may have chosen this particular example.
One of the main complaints people (including me) have about Bostrom’s old_email.pdf is that he focuses on the use of a slur as the thing he is regretful for, and is operating under a very narrow definition of racism where a racist is someone who dislikes people of other races. But the main fault with the 1996 email, for which Bostrom should apologise, the most important harm and the main reason it is racist, was that it propagated the belief that blacks are inherently stupider than whites (it did not comment on the causation, but used language that is conventionally understood to refer to congenital traits, ‘blacks have lower IQ than mankind in general’). Under this view, old_email.pdf omits to apologise for the main thing people are upset about in the 1996 email, namely, the racist belief, and the lack of empathy for those reading it; and it clarifies further that, in Bostrom’s view, the lower IQ of blacks may in fact be in no small part genetically determined, and moreover, as David Thorstad writes, “Bostrom shows no desire to educate himself on the racist and discredited science driving his original beliefs or on the full extent of the harms done by these beliefs. He does not promise to read any books, have hard conversations, or even to behave better in the future. If Bostrom is not planning to change, then why are we to believe that his behavior will be any better than it was in the 1990s?”
So in my view: in total, in 1996 Nick endorses racist views, and in 2023 he clarifies beyond doubt that the IQ gap between blacks and whites may be genetically determined (and says sorry for using a bad word).
A more detailed viewpoint close to my own from David Thorstad: https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/2023/01/12/off-series-that-bostrom-email/
Would you prefer Bostrom’s apology read:
Even if he, with evidence, still believes it to be true? David Thorstad can write all he wants about changing his views, but the evidence of the existence of a racial IQ gap has not changed. It is as ironclad and universally accepted by all researchers as it was in 1996 following the publication of the APA’s Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.
This may be a difference of opinion, but I don’t think that acknowledging observed differences in reality is a racist view. But I am interested to know if you would prefer he make the statement anyway.
By the way, the finding of an IQ gap isn’t (or shouldn’t be?) what is under contention/offensive, because that’s a real finding. It’s the idea that it has a significant genetic component.
I think both Bostrom and I claim that he does not believe that idea, but I’ll entertain your hypothetical below.
I think that, in the world where racial IQ gaps are known not to have a significant genetic component, believing so anyway as a layperson makes one very probably a racist (glossed as a person whose thinking is biased by motivated reasoning on the basis of race); and in the world where racial IQ gaps are known to have a significant genetic component, believing so is not strong evidence of being a racist (with the same gloss). There are also worlds in between.
In any of these worlds, and the world where we live, responsible non-experts should defer to the scientific consensus (as Bostrom seems to in 2023), and when they irresponsibly promote beliefs that are extremely harmful and false, through recklessness, they should apologise for that.
I don’t think anyone should apologise for the very act of believing something one still believes, because an apology is by nature a disagreement with one’s past self. But Bostrom in 2023 does not seem to believe any more, if he ever did, that the racial IQ gap is genetically caused, which frees him up to apologise for his 1996 promotion of the belief.
As a reminder, the original description I took issue with was:
It ‘sounds pretty racist’ to say “blacks have lower IQ than mankind in general” because that phrasing usually implies it’s congenital. In other words, in 1996, Bostrom (whose status as a racist is ambiguous to me, and I will continue to judge his character based on his actions in the coming weeks and months) said something that communicates a racist belief, and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was an accident — a reckless one, but an accident. However, apart from apologising for the n-word slur, I haven’t seen much that can be interpreted as an apology for the harm caused by this accident.
Now, if Bostrom, as a non-expert, in fact is secretly confident that IQ and race correlate because of genetics, I think that his thinking is probably biased in a racist way (that is to say, he is a racist) and he should be suspicious of his own motives in holding that belief. If he then finds his view was mistaken, he may meaningfully apologise for any racist bias that influenced his thinking. Otherwise, an apology would not make any sense as he would not think he’d done anything wrong.
The lack of apology for promulgating accidentally (or deliberately) the racist view is wrong if Bostrom does not hold the view (/any more). He is mistaken when in 2023 he skates over acknowledging the main harm he contributed to, by focusing mostly on his mention of the n-word (a lesser harm, partly due to the use-mention distinction).
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.