Enthusiastic utilitarian and moral realist. I made this anonymous account to talk about the controversial stuff.
AnonymousQualy
Because I’m a consequentialist, and it seems like I need the the aforementioned norms to get good consequences (EA not doing irrepairable damage to its reputation) in this case.
Social organizations like EA face their own form of natural selection. EA competes for members and funding with other good-doing and intellectual communities, in an environment where prospective members and funders almost universally believe that saying “different races have different average IQs” is irredeemably racist. A large portion of EAs rallying in support of someone who said that is therefore a surefire way for EA to lose members and funds.
It would be adaptive* for EA to have norms in favor of downvoting strongly taboo-breaking comments that have little to no utility-creating potential.
*butchering the definition of that word a bit
Humans evolved strong punishment norms for a reason.
While I normally value EA members’ willingness to break social norms, I’m finding myself wishing for the chilling effect of taboos and punishments right now. The forum has done incredible damage to itself over the last few days.
I can’t express my agreement with this post strongly enough.
I’ve been a hardcore utilitarian for many years, EA-interested for a few years, and (minorly) EA involved for the past year. The forum’s response to this event has shaken my belief in EA’s ability to grow and influence the world for good much more than the FTX scandal did. For starters, I no longer feel I can recommend EA to other people (for now at least) because they might check out the forum and wonder if I’m racist.
Leaving aside the question of whether Bostrom’s statement was “true” (I don’t think so, but don’t feel like litigating it in these comments), it unquestionably violated one of the strongest taboos that exists in the year 2023. There’s no question that defending it hurts EA’s credibility in the eyes of the larger world.
If you’re someone from a rationalist community or elsewhere where epistemic integrity is your first order of concern, I’m begging you to reconsider when posting on this forum. The effect of a statement on social welfare ought to be the guiding concern here.
Note that I’m not asking anyone to disregard epistemic integrity, or even necessarily compromise it. But I think most of us have “default” modes of communication (even if we try not to). On this forum, that default should favor social welfare consequences.
Just based on the discussion I’ve seen so far, I don’t think people are taking this issue seriously enough. Reputational costs from stuff like this are real and they are large.
I’m a relatively new here. I was still willing to tell people about EA after the FTX debacle, despite it being pretty damaging to my credibility. But this incident has changed that. All it would take is one unfortunate google search for someone to wonder whether I’m secretly racist. Of course, I’ll keep donating to givewell and give directly, but telling other people about the movement is completely off the table for the time being. I even made this new anonymous account so that my name won’t come up on this website.
I also think people are dramatically underestimating just how (1) morally terrible, and (2) scientificly unfounded Bostrom’s statement and apology both were. Geneticists know race is a social construct at this point, with no basis in actual genes. Psychologists know IQ is a somewhat mysterious measure (no, scoring lower on an IQ test does not necessary mean a person is “more stupid”). It is affected by things like income shifts across generations and social position. For Bostrom to even have that opinion as an educated 23-year-old was bad, but to not unequivocably condemn it today—despite the harm it can clearly cause—seems even worse.
I am strongly confident that this is true. My prior is something like 99%. I can’t think of a single person I’ve met in real life (and I’ve been offline involved with political organizations, nonprofits, and a wide variety of intellectual communities) who wouldn’t consider “different races have different average IQs” to be prima facie racist. The number goes up only slightly for people I’ve encountered online (and more than half of them were encountered over the past few days).
Edit:
I think demonstrates just how disconnected some EAs are with mainstream social norms (I don’t mean that as an insult; being disconnected from mainstream norms has its benefits, though I think it’s bad in this specific case). Claiming a difference in intelligence between races is one of the worst things you can say in polite society in 2023. It’s pretty much on par with rape apologia or advocating for pedophilia. It’s worse than, say, advocating in support of torture.