I noticed Torres likes to bring up a particular critique around how longtermism is eugenicist. I haven’t been great at parsing it because it’s never very well explained, but my best guess is that it goes:
Longtermists prioritise the long term future very strongly
They are regularly happy to make existential trade-offs for one group of people in order to improve the lives of a different group of people in their thought experiments
In some cases, arguments such as these have been made in order to materially redirect funding from saving lives of the global poor to ‘increasing capacity’ for rich people who could work on longtermist causes
These ‘capacity increases’ sometimes look like just improving quality of life for these people (ex. Wytham Abbey in the most egregious case)
Sometimes these groups get selected in a way that makes them look suspiciously genetic
For example, the people who get privileged in these scenarios are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) white, and the people who get traded off are overwhelmingly non-white
Therefore, longtermism isn’t necessarily intentionally eugenicist, but without significant guardrails could very well end up improving the lives of some genetic groups at the expense of others
This is the best steelperson I could come up with. I am sympathetic to the above formulation, but I imagine Torres’ version is a bit more extreme in practice. Fundamentally, I wonder if longtermists should more strongly reject arguments that involve directing funding toward privileged people for ‘capacity building’.
But regardless, I’d love to know what your thoughts on that particular line of reasoning are (and not necessarily Torres’ specific formulation of it, which as you’ve demonstrated, is likely to be too extreme to be coherent).
(I wonder if now that we’ve thoroughly discredited this person, we can move onto more interesting and stronger critiques of longtermism)
I assume Torres is thinking about transhumanism. Transhumanists want to use genetic engineering (amongst other) things, to ensure that people are born with more desirable capacities and abilities than they would be otherwise. That’s one thing that people sometimes mean by “eugenics”. There’s a culture gap between analytic philosophy out of which EA comes and other areas of academia here. Mildly “eugenic” views like this are quite common in analytic ethics I think, but my impression (less sure about this) is that they horrify a lot of people in other humanities disciplines.
Stronger “eugenic” views and, relatedly, extremely controversial views about race are also held by some prominent EAs, i.e. Scott Alexander, Nick Bostrom (at least at one point.) I.e. Scott is at least somewhat sympathetic to trying to influence which humans have children in order to improve the genetics of the population, though he is cagey about what his actual position is: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck?hide_intro_popup=true Apart from the infamous racism email, Bostrom at one point discussed “dysgenic” trends (less intelligent people having more children) as an X-risk in one of his early papers (albeit to say that he didn’t think the issue was all that important.) A post defending a goal of trying to stop people from having children with a high chance of various genetically influenced diseases and claiming the “eugenics” label as a positive one received many upvotes on this forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PTCw5CJT7cE6Kx9ZR/most-people-endorse-some-form-of-eugenics Peter Singer famously argues that it parents should have a right to kill disabled babies at birth if they want to replace them with non-disabled babies (because all babies aren’t “persons” anyway): https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html
I’m inclined to write defenses of views in the latter paragraph:
My read (I admit I skimmed) is that Scott doesn’t opine because he is uncertain whether there is a large scale reproduction-influencing program that would be a good idea in a world without GE on the horizon, not that he has a hidden opinion about reproduction programs we ought to be doing despite the possibility of GE.
I don’t think the mere presence of a “dysgenic” discussion in a Bostrom paper merits criticism. Part of his self-assigned career path is to address all of the X-risks. This includes exceedingly implausible phenomena such as demon-summoning, because it’s probably a good idea for one smart human to have allocated a week to that disaster scenario. I don’t think dysgenic X-risks are obviously less plausible than demon-summoning, so I think it’s a good idea someone wrote about it a little.
The article on this forum originated as a response to Torres’ hyperbolic rhetoric, and primarily defends things that society is already doing such as forbidding incest.
Singer’s argument, if I remember correctly, does not involve eugenics at all. It involves the amount of enjoyment occurring in a profoundly disabled child vs a non-disabled child, and the effects on the parents, but not the effect on a gene pool. I believe the original actually indicated severe disabilities that are by their nature unlikely to be passed on (due to lethality, infertility, incompatibility with intercourse, or incompatibility with consent), so the only impact would be to add a sibling to the gene pool who might be a carrier for the disability.
You are right—thank you for clarifying. This is also what Torres says in their TESCREAL FAQ. I’ve retracted the comment to reflect that misunderstanding, although I’d still love Ozy’s take on the eugenics criticism.
I noticed Torres likes to bring up a particular critique around how longtermism is eugenicist. I haven’t been great at parsing it because it’s never very well explained, but my best guess is that it goes:
Longtermists prioritise the long term future very strongly
They are regularly happy to make existential trade-offs for one group of people in order to improve the lives of a different group of people in their thought experiments
In some cases, arguments such as these have been made in order to materially redirect funding from saving lives of the global poor to ‘increasing capacity’ for rich people who could work on longtermist causes
These ‘capacity increases’ sometimes look like just improving quality of life for these people (ex. Wytham Abbey in the most egregious case)
Sometimes these groups get selected in a way that makes them look suspiciously genetic
For example, the people who get privileged in these scenarios are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) white, and the people who get traded off are overwhelmingly non-white
Therefore, longtermism isn’t necessarily intentionally eugenicist, but without significant guardrails could very well end up improving the lives of some genetic groups at the expense of others
This is the best steelperson I could come up with. I am sympathetic to the above formulation, but I imagine Torres’ version is a bit more extreme in practice. Fundamentally, I wonder if longtermists should more strongly reject arguments that involve directing funding toward privileged people for ‘capacity building’.
But regardless, I’d love to know what your thoughts on that particular line of reasoning are (and not necessarily Torres’ specific formulation of it, which as you’ve demonstrated, is likely to be too extreme to be coherent).
(I wonder if now that we’ve thoroughly discredited this person, we can move onto more interesting and stronger critiques of longtermism)
I assume Torres is thinking about transhumanism. Transhumanists want to use genetic engineering (amongst other) things, to ensure that people are born with more desirable capacities and abilities than they would be otherwise. That’s one thing that people sometimes mean by “eugenics”. There’s a culture gap between analytic philosophy out of which EA comes and other areas of academia here. Mildly “eugenic” views like this are quite common in analytic ethics I think, but my impression (less sure about this) is that they horrify a lot of people in other humanities disciplines.
Stronger “eugenic” views and, relatedly, extremely controversial views about race are also held by some prominent EAs, i.e. Scott Alexander, Nick Bostrom (at least at one point.) I.e. Scott is at least somewhat sympathetic to trying to influence which humans have children in order to improve the genetics of the population, though he is cagey about what his actual position is: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck?hide_intro_popup=true Apart from the infamous racism email, Bostrom at one point discussed “dysgenic” trends (less intelligent people having more children) as an X-risk in one of his early papers (albeit to say that he didn’t think the issue was all that important.) A post defending a goal of trying to stop people from having children with a high chance of various genetically influenced diseases and claiming the “eugenics” label as a positive one received many upvotes on this forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PTCw5CJT7cE6Kx9ZR/most-people-endorse-some-form-of-eugenics Peter Singer famously argues that it parents should have a right to kill disabled babies at birth if they want to replace them with non-disabled babies (because all babies aren’t “persons” anyway): https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html
I’m inclined to write defenses of views in the latter paragraph:
My read (I admit I skimmed) is that Scott doesn’t opine because he is uncertain whether there is a large scale reproduction-influencing program that would be a good idea in a world without GE on the horizon, not that he has a hidden opinion about reproduction programs we ought to be doing despite the possibility of GE.
I don’t think the mere presence of a “dysgenic” discussion in a Bostrom paper merits criticism. Part of his self-assigned career path is to address all of the X-risks. This includes exceedingly implausible phenomena such as demon-summoning, because it’s probably a good idea for one smart human to have allocated a week to that disaster scenario. I don’t think dysgenic X-risks are obviously less plausible than demon-summoning, so I think it’s a good idea someone wrote about it a little.
The article on this forum originated as a response to Torres’ hyperbolic rhetoric, and primarily defends things that society is already doing such as forbidding incest.
Singer’s argument, if I remember correctly, does not involve eugenics at all. It involves the amount of enjoyment occurring in a profoundly disabled child vs a non-disabled child, and the effects on the parents, but not the effect on a gene pool. I believe the original actually indicated severe disabilities that are by their nature unlikely to be passed on (due to lethality, infertility, incompatibility with intercourse, or incompatibility with consent), so the only impact would be to add a sibling to the gene pool who might be a carrier for the disability.
You are right—thank you for clarifying. This is also what Torres says in their TESCREAL FAQ. I’ve retracted the comment to reflect that misunderstanding, although I’d still love Ozy’s take on the eugenics criticism.
My take was originally in my article but wound up being cut for flow—I wound up posting it on my blog.