I’m a student of moral science at the university of Ghent, where I also started an EA group.
If you’re interested in philosophy and mechanism design, consider checking out my blog.
I also co-started Effectief Geven (Belgian effective giving org), am a volunteer researcher at SatisfIA (AI-safety org) and a volunteer writer at GAIA (Animal welfare org)
For example, Francis and Kirkegaard (2022) employ the use of instrumental variables
I can view an astonishing amount of publications for free through my university, but they haven’t opted to include this one, weird… So should I pay money to see this “Mankind Quarterly” publication?
When I googled it I found that Mankind Quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics.
It’s funded by the Pioneer Fund which according to wikipedia:
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 “to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences”. The organization has been classified as a hate group and has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature.
[2][3][4][5]One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools ofErbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.[6]
Something tells me it wouldn’t be very EA to give money to these people.
So what about the second source?
For example, if a high GDP caused higher IQ, we would expect oil-rich nations like Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait to score closer to nations like the USA, UK, and Japan in NIQ. However, they score more in line with their geographic neighbors, suggesting, but not proving, that NIQ causes prosperity rather than vice versa (Christainsen, 2013).
I can check Christainsen’s work since it’s in a reputable journal and thus available through my university. He himself says in the paper:
While differences in average scores worldwide can thus be plausibly viewed as being influenced
by genetic differences across world regions, it is also possible that score differences are influenced by regional differences in culture that are independent of genetic factors.
Cultural factors are harder to measure and thus get neglected in research thanks to the streetlight effect. Still we might sample a subsection of more easily measurable cultural interventions like eduction and see which way they point. We can use the education index to compare the mentioned countries. Countries like the USA, UK and Japan score high on it (0.9, 0.948, 0.851 respectively) while countries like Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait score lower (0.659, 0.802, 0.638 respectively). That seems like a promising indication, but can education actually increase IQ?
You cited Ritchie in this post, but he and his colleagues also have a later meta-analysis showing that education can greatly increase intelligence:
Across 142 effect sizes from 42 data sets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the life span and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence.
Now you might worry that this is not “true intelligence/g-factor” and a “hollow” gain, but I fear that here we run into the issue that there’s no consensus on what the “true intelligence” actually is. It may be hollow according to your definition but not mine. Even if there was consensus we might disagree about what IQ actually measures. The debate about what aspects of “true intelligence” IQ actually captured is summarized on wikipedia as:
While IQ tests are generally considered to measure some forms of intelligence, they may fail to serve as an accurate measure of broader definitions of
human intelligenceinclusive of, for example,creativityandsocial intelligence. For this reason, psychologist Wayne Weiten argues that theirconstruct validitymust be carefully qualified, and not be overstated.[84]According to Weiten, “IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable.”[84]Some scientists have disputed the value of IQ as a measure of intelligence altogether. In
The Mismeasure of Man(1981, expanded edition 1996),evolutionary biologistStephen Jay Gouldcompared IQ testing with the now-discredited practice of determining intelligence viacraniometry, arguing that both are based on the fallacy ofreification, “our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities”.[90]Gould’s argument sparked a great deal of debate,[91][92]and the book is listed as one ofDiscover Magazine’s “25 Greatest Science Books of All Time”.[93]Along these same lines, critics such as
Keith Stanovichdo not dispute the capacity of IQ test scores to predict some kinds of achievement, but argue that basing a concept of intelligence on IQ test scores alone neglects other important aspects of mental ability.[15][94]Robert Sternberg, another significant critic of IQ as the main measure of human cognitive abilities, argued that reducing the concept of intelligence to the measure of g does not fully account for the different skills and knowledge types that produce success in human society.[95]
_______
In 2002, psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their seminal book in the field of national intelligence entitled IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Their starting assumption was that since IQ and earnings had a positive correlation, the relationship should persist when comparing nations, meaning that nations with higher average IQ should be more economically productive (Lynn & Vanhanen, p. 4).
Yeah, I really wouldn’t trust how that book picks its data. As stated in “A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans”:
For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975; Ferron, 1965; Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a, b; Nenty & Dinero, 1981; Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices. Nonetheless, an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)’s reviews of the literature is that they are unsystematic.
They’re not the only one who find Lynn’s choice of data selection suspect. Wikipedia describes him as:
Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described “scientific racist”[1][2][3] who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.[4] He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal.[a] Lynn was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
Many scientists criticised Lynn’s work for lacking scientific rigour, misrepresenting data, and for promoting a racialist political agenda.[b] A number of scholars and intellectuals have said that Lynn is associated with a network of academics and organisations that promote scientific racism.[c] He has also advocated fringe positions regarding sexual differences in intelligence.[26]
____
Lynn and Vanhanen collected IQ scores from various studies and made corrections, such as adjusting for the FLynn Effect
I suggest you remove the capital L typo, otherwise people might erroneously think Lynn had something to do with its discovery.
_______
The case for the importance of IQ for numerous real-world outcomes was made in the controversial book The Bell Curve (1994) by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. They cogently argued that cognitive ability was playing a more important role than socioeconomic status in influencing various socioeconomic outcomes such as being in poverty, finishing high school, finishing college, being unemployed, having an illegitimate first birth, having a low-weight baby, committing a crime, and other significant outcomes (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, pp. 127-268).
That book has so many problems that instead of typing it all out I would like to direct people to this video which points out a lot of them. (It also goes over a lot of Lynn’s other scientific malpractices)
______
Even if one embraces the 100% environmental explanation for national differences in IQ, one can still consider the possibility of environmental interventions being less cost-effective or more limited in magnitude relative to what could be called “genetic interventions.”
I don’t think anyone thinks the environment explains 100%, but given that it’s much larger and has many more variables it seems reasonable to assume it can explain more of it. Since we profess ourselves to be effective altruists I would also like to see a price comparison between the interventions. This post doesn’t really discuss how high the prices for “genetic interventions” are, while environmental interventions like giving iodine are really cheap. Giving iodine used to be one of GiveWell’s top charities:
We have limited data on the costs of iodization, but estimates range from $0.05-$0.10 per person per year. Salt iodization appears to be within the range of cost-effectiveness of our priority programs.
Iodine deficiency causes an average drop of 13 IQ points, which means we can gain much more than the estimated 9 IQ points of embryo selection at a tiny fraction of the cost.
________
This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.
I think the real worry here is that the elites will use their (increased) power to ensure that the government doesn’t give subsidies to the poor so they can keep their relative power in society. A similar dynamic is already happening in education with the money for public schools vs private schools so I suspect this would also happen with other ‘intelligence-increasing interventions’.
_______
Intellectuals today, even geneticists, continue to take a firm stance against “eugenics” (see Harden, 2021; Rutherford, 2022). Opponents of practices such as screening embryos know that the accusation of “eugenics” is an effective tool because it so widely elicits repugnance. Whether or not a practice like embryo screening qualifies as actual “eugenics” is a fact about the English language rather than morality. The Chinese equivalent, “yousheng,” is used almost exclusively in a positive manner when referring to preimplantation diagnosis (Cyranoski, 2017). Furthermore, the mere accusation of eugenics is insufficient evidence of the practice being repugnant since most people endorse some form of “eugenics.” Even if some practices are eugenic, there are surely morally defensible forms of eugenics (see Weit et al., 2021).
I would argue that’s a good thing. Like @titotal commented on the ‘most people endorse some form of “eugenics”’ post:
I think it’s a good thing that most people have a revulsion towards the Nazi version of eugenics. I think trying to rehabilitate the word “eugenics” could plausibly lead to a lessening of that revulsion and and increase in support for their version. Just use a different word for the thing that’s okay, and that all goes away.
[...]
Trying to rehabilitate the word “eugenics” is like someone trying to rehabilitate the swastika symbol by waving a sanksrit version it around and insisting it means prosperity and good luck. It’s not gonna work, it’s going to offend and upset people, and people are gonna think you’re a Nazi.
____
I do feel some amount of warped-mirror empathy for the fact that you clearly spend a lot of time writing a long post with lots of citations on a politically unpopular position that doesn’t get a lot of karma. A similar thing happened to me albeit from the polar opposite side of the political spectrum, which is why part of me wanted to spend time giving you something I didn’t get, a rigorous reply. But another part of me remembers that the last time I spend time arguing IQ and genetics on this forum a bunch of HBD-proponents brigaded me and I lost karma and voting power.
So I obviously did end up writing this comment because I’m an idiot, but I think I will leave it at that.
Feel free to reply to this comment but I now feel exhausted and fear a back and forth will get me brigaded, sorry :/
Reddit user blueshoesrcool discovered that Effective Ventures (the umbrella organization for the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80000 hours, GWWC, etc) has missed its charity reporting deadline by 27 days.
Given that there’s already a regulatory inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation, maybe someone should look into this.
Okay, if there’s anyone here who actually believes in HBD, here’s a couple reasons why you shouldn’t:
Human biodiversity is actually pretty low. Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks.
Twin studies are flawed in methodology. Twins, even identical twins, simply do not have exactly the same DNA.
Evolution isn’t just mutations and natural selection. Not every trait is an adaptation.
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells.
We don’t mate randomly, which is an assumption in many genetics studies.
HBD is not generally accepted in academia.
Special thanks to these threads for compiling most of the information
Now you might want to attack one of these (and feel free to send me a message), but even if you’re right, that would still leave more than enough reasons to stay away from HBD.
This post has convinced me to stay in the EA community. If I could give all the votes I have given to my own writings to this post, I would. Many of the things in this post I’ve been saying for a long time (and have been downvoted for) so I’m happy to see that this post has at least a somewhat positive reaction.
To add to what this post outlines. While the social sciences are often ignored in the EA community one notable exception to that is (orthodox) economics. I find it ironic that one of the few fields where EA’s are willing to look outside their own insular culture, is in itself extremely insular. Other social studies like philosophy, political science, history, sociology, gender studies all make a lot of attempts to integrate themselves with all the other social sciences. This makes it so that learning about one discipline also teaches you about the other disciplines. Economists meanwhile have a tendency to see their discipline as better than the others starting papers with things like:
Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques.
In the paper “The Superiority of Economists” by Fourcade et al, economists were found to be the only group that thought interdisciplinary research was worse than research from a singular field. Furthermore they looked at top papers from political science, economics and sociology. They found that political science and sociology cited economics papers many times more than the other way around:
This lack of citing other social sciences was later confirmed by Angrist et al:
Take for example supply and demand. The standard supply and demand model will tell you that having/increasing the minimum wage will automatically increase unemployment. But if we look at actual empirical evidence it shows us that it doesn’t. Learning the basics of economics might mislead people about which policies will actually help people and a more holistic look at the social sciences as a whole may counter that.
By focussing our recruitment on only a couple disciplines we inherit the problems of those disciplines. It is no wonder then that just like the EA community, economics is also very homogeneous. Bayer and Rouse show us that women are given less degrees in economics than other disciplines:
And get only 13.7% of the authorship of economics papers. Women are also less likely to get tenure in their first academic job compared to men and face a lot of discrimination in general. An AEA survey found that half of women say they were treated unfairly because of their sex and almost half say they’ve avoided conferences/seminars because of fear of harassment.
One of the only other social studies that is popular in EA is philosophy, which has similar issues with underrepresentation and discrimination.
For the longest time the EA topics page had a segment with ‘key figures’. This is obviously bad if you want to combat ‘hero worship’. My memory might be off but I seem to remember that the only social studies that were present were philosophy and economics, and practically everyone on that page was a man. [EDIT: Found an image, my memory was pretty close and in fact that page still exists! AND SBF WAS STILL ON IT!]
Even now we have a tag for philosophy and economics, but not for sociology, anthropology, political science, gender studies or many other social studies.
These are also the two social studies that the rationalists are the most interested in. The accusation of ‘bad epistemics’ seems to coincide a lot with ‘non-rationalist epistemic’. I’ve wanted to push back on the dominant rationalists framework for quite a while now, and one post in particular I wanted to write is an attack on scientific-realism and a defense of social constructivism. I never did it because I feared it would get downvoted, nominally because it’s not directly ‘effective altruism’. But the hidden premises in how we research, how we categorize the world and what gets to count as ‘genuine science’ have a huge effect on what gets to count as ‘effective altruism’.
I made two visual guides that could be used to improve online discussions. These could be dropped into any conversation to (hopefully) make the discussion more productive.
The first is an update on Grahams hierarchy of disagreement
I improved the lay-out of the old image and added a top layer for steelmanning. You can find my reasoning here and a link to the pdf-file of the image here.
The second is a hierarchy of evidence:
I added a bottom layer for personal opinion. You can find the full image and pdf-file here.
Lastly I wanted to share the Toulmin method of argumentation, which is an excellent guide for a general pragmatic approach to arguments
Thank you for your detailed addition of context, but I’m honestly slightly disappointed.
You accuse me of making false claims yet this response doesn’t say which claims in either my post or my comment are false. In fact, you don’t even quote my writing at all, and the comment is mainly about why you think this project is a good idea.
You say:
I am not trying to prevent people expressing their opinions, but would ask that any speculation (or, for example, digging for the physical addresses of vaguely related entities)
For the people who got the impression I digged through obscure messages for people’s private addresses, I didn’t. They are the addresses that are publicly listed on the respective websites contact pages. I did this initially to defend these organizations against the claim that they were buying a castle and this was a way to show concrete evidence that they weren’t castles. I only later discovered the purchase of this chateau.
You write:
The implication “you got a grant from a foundation that was sponsored by FTX” ⇒ “what you are doing is suspicious” is nonsense. [...]
1. Suggestive framing like “they got a grant not long before bankruptcy”. The implication is that grantees should have done – in addition to basic due diligence about the FTX Foundation being a legitimate entity and usual anti-money laundering – some sort of brilliant investigation to discover that FTX was going to go bankrupt in a few months because of fraud inside it.
But neither my comment nor my post made this claim. In fact I even wrote:
While she seems like a wonderful person I would urge her and ESPR, in light of recent information, to return the money. We already have a controversial estate purchase and it seems SBF admitted to fraud in this interview. [emphasis added]
It is the recent information about SBF and Oxford that makes it pernicious.
You write:
2. Ignoring causality. For example, Irena was working on the discussed project for years. It isn’t the case the SBF conceived this.
I never claimed SBF conceived of this, in fact I explicitly wrote:
Mrs. Kotíková claims that she applied to FTX for a grant for an international education center and simply received it. On the first attempt.
You continue:
Liability. Both the law and commonsense protect you if you took an action in good faith, as the grantees did. Mens rea is there for a reason: to hold off optics-based kneejerk judgments.
I never claimed nor implied that you did anything illegal. You write:
Buying a venue of this size takes time. In this case, it involved multiple checks by lawyers, accountants, and technicians. The grant agreement was signed in July, the transaction was not actually completed and visible in the registry until mid-October. It would have been odd to announce the purchase before the transaction was complete.
Even if you don’t want to talk about the project before the purchase, I still feel it could’ve been disclosed in October, November or December.
You write:
…also, to reiterate, contrary to rumour, the property is not owned by Irena Kotíková or Czech EA association or “EA Prague”. Also it’s probably worth understanding for people involved, the project is mostly a lot of work, not some sort of leisure spending.
I never claimed that it was leisure spending and I didn’t claim it was owned by Irena, Czech EA or EA Prague, the title of this post is “ESPR should return the FTX-funded chateau” and thats what my post talks about.
It was introduced by the Party for the Animals and passed in 2021. However, it only passed because the government had just fallen and the senate was distracted by passing covid laws, which meant they were very busy and didn’t have a debate about it. Since the law is rather vague there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have passed without the covid crisis.
It was supposed to start this year, but the minister of agriculture has decided he will straight up ignore the law . The current government is not in favor of this law and so they’re looking at ways to circumvent it.
It’s very unusual for the Dutch government to ignore laws, so they might get sued by animal rights activists. I expect they will introduce a new law rather quickly that repeals this ban, but the fact that it passed at all and that this will now become a big issue in the news is very promising for the 116 million Dutch farm animals.
I found this topic first from a short snippet in The Week, then from the news article https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/maintaining-a-vegetarian-diet-might-be-in-your-genes-180983021.
Remove the dot at the end, otherwise it’s a dead link.
It is important to note that behavior is always in relation to an environment, so we can’t say that some behavior is 70% caused by genetics, the most we can say is that something is 70% caused by genetics in this specific environment. This is easy to check with a thought experiment, lets take these people whose “willingness to stick with veg*n diets, regardless of their stated reasons, are 70-80% inborn” lock them in a vegetarian Hindu monastery and you’ll obviously see the rate of vegetarian diets skyrocket. So when you write “Vegetarianism is mostly genetic, claim Wesseldijk et al.” Wesseldijk herself would say:
Yet, as Dr. Wesseldijk reminded me in an email, high heritabilities do not imply that biology is destiny. According to surveys by the Vegetarian Resource Group, the percentage of Americans who are vegetarian or vegan jumped six-fold between 1994 and 2022—from 1% to 6%. This impressive change in patterns of meat-eating was due to shifts in cultural attitudes, not changes in our DNA.
And to tie it in to the Hindu monastery (from the same article):
It is important, however, to keep in mind that estimates of heritability only apply to the populations that the subjects in the studies represent. Most of the individual differences in meat-eating among the Dutch are rooted in genes, yet culture is almost entirely responsible for the fact that per capita meat consumption is 20 times higher in the Netherlands than it is in India.
Or as Dr. Wesseldijk has also phrased it:
An environment can completely counteract something that is highly heritable, and the same goes with vegetarianism
I already worked on a project like this previously:
Yellow stands for happiness, that which utilitarianism pursues
White stands for morality, that which utilitarianism is
The symbol is a sigma, since utilitarians care about the sum of all utility
The symbol is also an hourglass, since utilitarians care about the (longterm) future consequences
If you don’t like the rounded design I can also make it more angular:
The size of the symbol, the angles, the proportions of the flags etc can all be changed if you have specific preferences. The main idea is the sigma that also functions as an hourglass.
I do however worry whether it’s wise to make symbols for philosophical ideas. I like designing these things, but you run the risk that these symbols can be used to make people strongly identify themselves with these ideas, instead of them being things that people can dispassionately examine and perhaps reject. I would advise everyone to say things like: “I like utilitarianism” or “I believe in utilitarianism”, instead of “I am a utilitarian”. Let’s make sure ethical ideas don’t become as rigidly polarized as political ideas.
EDIT: If you want to redesign this flag, go right ahead! I’m planning to donate the prize money if I win, so if you improve on my design and also donate the prize money, that would actually make me very happy.
The Belgian senate votes to add animal welfare to the constitution.
It’s been a journey. I work for GAIA, a Belgian animal advocacy group that for years has tried to get animal welfare added to the constitution. Today we were present as a supermajority of the senate came out in favor of our proposed constitutional amendment. The relevant section reads:
It’s a very good day for Belgian animals but I do want to note that:
This does not mean an effective shutdown of the meat industry, merely that all future pro-animal welfare laws and lawsuits will have an easier time. And,
It still needs to pass the Chamber of Representatives.
If there’s interest I will make a full post about it
ifonce it passes the Chamber.EDIT: Translated the linked article on our site into English.