At least for myself, it wouldn’t have been obvious in advance that there would be exactly two factors, as opposed to (say) one, three or four.
Kaj_Sotala
Karma: 884
Perhaps more educated people are more happy with their career and thus more reluctant to change it?
Or just more invested in it—if you’ve spent several years acquiring a degree in a topic, you may be quite reluctant to go do something completely different.
For future studies, might be worth rephrasing this item in a way where this doesn’t act as a confounder for the results? I’d expect people in their early twenties to answer it quite differently than people in their early forties.
I was thinking that if they insist on requiring it (and I get around actually participating), I’ll just iterate on some prompts on wombo.art or similar until I get something decent.
Because it also mentions woo, so I think it’s talking about a broader class if unjustified beliefs than you think.
My earlier comment mentioned that “there are also lots of different claims that seem (or even are) irrational but are pointing to true facts about the world.” That was intended to touch upon “woo”; e.g. meditation used to be, and to some extent still is, considered “woo”, but there nonetheless seem to be reasonable grounds to think that there’s nonetheless something of value to be found in meditation (despite there also being various crazy claims around it).
My above link mentions a few other examples (out-of-body experiences, folk traditions, “Ki” in martial arts) that have claims around them that are false if taken as the literal truth, but are still pointing to some true aspect of the world. Notably, a policy of “reject all woo things” could easily be taken to imply rejecting all such things as superstition that’s not worth looking at, thus missing out on the parts of the woo that were actually valuable.
IME, the more I look into them, the more I come to find that “woo” things that I’d previously rejected as not worth looking at because of them being obviously woo and false, are actually pointing to significantly valuable things. (Even if there is also quite a lot of nonsense floating around those same topics.)
I agree, but in that case you should say make it clear how your interpretation differs from the author’s.
That’s fair.
What makes you think it isn’t? To me it seems both like a reasonable interpretation of the quote (private guts are precisely the kinds of positions you can’t necessarily justify, and it’s talking about having beliefs you can’t justify) as well as a dynamic that feels like one that I recognize as one that has been occasionally present in the community. Fortunately posts like the one about private guts have helped push back against it.
Even if this interpretation wasn’t actually the author’s intent, choosing to steelman the claim in that way turns the essay into a pretty solid one, so we might as well engage with the strongest interpretation of it.
There are a few different ways of interpreting the quote, but there’s a concept of public positions and private guts. Public positions are ones that you can justify in public if pressed on, while private guts are illegible intuitions you hold which may nonetheless be correct—e.g. an expert mathematician may have a strong intuition that a particular proof or claim is correct, which they will then eventually translate to a publicly-verifiable proof.
As far as I can tell, lizards probably don’t have public positions, but they probably do have private guts. That suggests those guts are good for predicting things about the world and achieving desirable world states, as well as being one of the channels by which the desirability of world states is communicated inside a mind. It seems related to many sorts of ‘embodied knowledge’, like how to walk, which is not understood from first principles or in an abstract way, or habits, like adjective order in English. A neural network that ‘knows’ how to classify images of cats, but doesn’t know how it knows (or is ‘uninterpretable’), seems like an example of this. “Why is this image a cat?” → “Well, because when you do lots of multiplication and addition and nonlinear transforms on pixel intensities, it ends up having a higher cat-number than dog-number.” This seems similar to gut senses that are difficult to articulate; “why do you think the election will go this way instead of that way?” → “Well, because when you do lots of multiplication and addition and nonlinear transforms on environmental facts, it ends up having a higher A-number than B-number.” Private guts also seem to capture a category of amorphous visions; a startup can rarely write a formal proof that their project will succeed (generally, if they could, the company would already exist). The postrigorous mathematician’s hunch falls into this category, which I’ll elaborate on later.
As an another example, in the recent dialog on AGI alignment, Yudkowsky frequently referenced having strong intuitions about how minds work that come from studying specific things in detail (and from having “done the homework”), but which he does not know how to straightforwardly translate into a publicly justifiable argument.
Private guts are very important and arguably the thing that mostly guides people’s behavior, but they are often also ones that the person can’t justify. If a person felt like they should reject any beliefs they couldn’t justify, they would quickly become incapable of doing anything at all.
Separately, there are also lots of different claims that seem (or even are) irrational but are pointing to true facts about the world.
This is indeed a wonderful story!
This version has nicer line breaks, in my opinion.
Here’s an audio version read by Leonard Nimoy.
Draft and re-draft (and re-draft). The writing should go through many iterations. You make drafts, you share them with a few people, you do something else for a week. Maybe nobody has read the draft, but you come back and you’ve rejuvenated your wonderful capacity to look at the work and know why it’s terrible.
Kind of related to this: giving a presentation about the ideas in your article is something that you can use as a form of a draft. If you can’t get anyone to listen to a presentation, or don’t want to give one quite yet, you can pick some people whose opinion you value and just make a presentation where you imagine that they’re in the audience.
I find that if I’m thinking of how to present the ideas in a paper to an in-person audience, it makes me think about questions like “what would be a concrete example of this idea that I could start the presentation with, that would grab the audience’s attention right away”. And then if I come up with a good way of presenting the ideas in my article, I can rewrite the article to use that same presentation.
(Unfortunately myself I have mostly taken this advice in its reverse form. I’ve first written a paper and then given a presentation of it afterwards, at which point I’ve realized that this is actually what I should have said in the paper itself.)
Depends on exactly which definition of s-risks you’re using; one of the milder definitions is just “a future in which a lot of suffering exists”, such as humanity settling most of the galaxy but each of those worlds having about as much suffering as the Earth has today. Which is arguably not a dystopian outcome or necessarily terrible in terms of how much suffering there is relative to happiness, but still an outcome in which there is an astronomically large absolute amount of suffering.
Fair point. Though apparently measures of ‘life satisfaction’ and ‘meaning’ produce different outcomes:
So, how did the World Happiness Report measure happiness? The study asked people in 156 countries to “value their lives today on a 0 to 10 scale, with the worst possible life as a 0 and the best possible life as a 10.” This is a widely used measure of general life satisfaction. And we know that societal factors such as gross domestic product per capita, extensiveness of social services, freedom from oppression, and trust in government and fellow citizens can explain a significant proportion of people’s average life satisfaction in a country.
In these measures the Nordic countries—Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland—tend to score highest in the world. Accordingly, it is no surprise that every time we measure life satisfaction, these countries are consistently in the top 10. [...]
… some people might argue that neither life satisfaction, positive emotions nor absence of depression are enough for happiness. Instead, something more is required: One has to experience one’s life as meaningful. But when Shigehiro Oishi, of the University of Virginia, and Ed Diener, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, compared 132 different countries based on whether people felt that their life has an important purpose or meaning, African countries including Togo and Senegal were at the top of the ranking, while the U.S. and Finland were far behind. Here, religiosity might play a role: The wealthier countries tend to be less religious on average, and this might be the reason why people in these countries report less meaningfulness.
It has been suggested that people are succumbing to a focusing illusion when they think that having children will make them happy, in that they focus on the good things without giving much thought to the bad.
Worth noting that you might get increased meaningfulness in exchange for the lost happiness, which isn’t necessarily an irrational trade to make. E.g. Robin Hanson:
Stats suggest that while parenting doesn’t make people happier, it does give them more meaning. And most thoughtful traditions say to focus more on meaning that happiness. Meaning is how you evaluate your whole life, while happiness is how you feel about now. And I agree: happiness is overrated.
Parenting does take time. (Though, as Bryan Caplan emphasized in a book, less than most think.) And many people I know plan to have an enormous positive influences on the universe, far more than plausible via a few children. But I think they are mostly kidding themselves. They fear their future selves being less ambitious and altruistic, but its just as plausible that they will instead become more realistic.
Also, many people with grand plans struggle to motivate themselves to follow their plans. They neglect the motivational power of meaning. Dads are paid more, other things equal, and I doubt that’s a bias; dads are better motivated, and that matters. Your life is long, most big world problems will still be there in a decade or two, and following the usual human trajectory you should expect to have the most wisdom and influence around age 40 or 50. Having kids helps you gain both.
Thanks. It looks to me that much of what’s being described at these links is about the atmosphere among the students at American universities, which then also starts affecting the professors there. That would explain my confusion, since a large fraction of my academic friends are European, so largely unaffected by these developments.
there could be a number of explanations aside from cancel culture not being that bad in academia.
I do hear them complain about various other things though, and I also have friends privately complaining about cancel culture in non-academic contexts, so I’d generally expect this to come up if it were an issue. But I could still ask, of course.
We also discussed some possible reasons for why there might be a disappointing future in the sense of having a lot of suffering, in sections 4-5 of Superintelligence as a Cause or Cure for Risks of Astronomical Suffering. A few excerpts:
4.1 Are suffering outcomes likely?
Bostrom (2003a) argues that given a technologically mature civilization capable of space colonization on a massive scale, this civilization “would likely also have the ability to establish at least the minimally favorable conditions required for future lives to be worth living”, and that it could thus be assumed that all of these lives would be worth living. Moreover, we can reasonably assume that outcomes which are optimized for everything that is valuable are more likely than outcomes optimized for things that are disvaluable. While people want the future to be valuable both for altruistic and self-oriented reasons, no one intrinsically wants things to go badly.
However, Bostrom has himself later argued that technological advancement combined with evolutionary forces could “lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being worth caring about” (Bostrom 2004), admitting the possibility that there could be technologically advanced civilizations with very little of anything that we would consider valuable. The technological potential to create a civilization that had positive value does not automatically translate to that potential being used, so a very advanced civilization could still be one of no value or even negative value.
Examples of technology’s potential being unevenly applied can be found throughout history. Wealth remains unevenly distributed today, with an estimated 795 million people suffering from hunger even as one third of all produced food goes to waste (World Food Programme, 2017). Technological advancement has helped prevent many sources of suffering, but it has also created new ones, such as factory-farming practices under which large numbers of animals are maltreated in ways which maximize their production: in 2012, the amount of animals slaughtered for food was estimated at 68 billion worldwide (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2012). Industrialization has also contributed to anthropogenic climate change, which may lead to considerable global destruction. Earlier in history, advances in seafaring enabled the transatlantic slave trade, with close to 12 million Africans being sent in ships to live in slavery (Manning 1992).
Technological advancement does not automatically lead to positive results (Häggström 2016). Persson & Savulescu (2012) argue that human tendencies such as “the bias towards the near future, our numbness to the suffering of great numbers, and our weak sense of responsibility for our omissions and collective contributions”, which are a result of the environment humanity evolved in, are no longer sufficient for dealing with novel technological problems such as climate change and it becoming easier for small groups to cause widespread destruction. Supporting this case, Greene (2013) draws on research from moral psychology to argue that morality has evolved to enable mutual cooperation and collaboration within a select group (“us”), and to enable groups to fight off everyone else (“them”). Such an evolved morality is badly equipped to deal with collective action problems requiring global compromises, and also increases the risk of conflict and generally negative-sum dynamics as more different groups get in contact with each other.
As an opposing perspective, West (2017) argues that while people are often willing to engage in cruelty if this is the easiest way of achieving their desires, they are generally “not evil, just lazy”. Practices such as factory farming are widespread not because of some deep-seated desire to cause suffering, but rather because they are the most efficient way of producing meat and other animal source foods. If technologies such as growing meat from cell cultures became more efficient than factory farming, then the desire for efficiency could lead to the elimination of suffering. Similarly, industrialization has reduced the demand for slaves and forced labor as machine labor has become more effective. At the same time, West acknowledges that this is not a knockdown argument against the possibility of massive future suffering, and that the desire for efficiency could still lead to suffering outcomes such as simulated game worlds filled with sentient non-player characters (see section on cruelty-enabling technologies below). [...]
4.2 Suffering outcome: dystopian scenarios created by non-value-aligned incentives.
Bostrom (2004, 2014) discusses the possibility of technological development and evolutionary and competitive pressures leading to various scenarios where everything of value has been lost, and where the overall value of the world may even be negative. Considering the possibility of a world where most minds are brain uploads doing constant work, Bostrom (2014) points out that we cannot know for sure that happy minds are the most productive under all conditions: it could turn out that anxious or unhappy minds would be more productive. [...]
More generally, Alexander (2014) discusses examples such as tragedies of the commons, Malthusian traps, arms races, and races to the bottom as cases where people are forced to choose between sacrificing some of their values and getting outcompeted. Alexander also notes the existence of changes to the world that nearly everyone would agree to be net improvements—such as every country reducing its military by 50%, with the savings going to infrastructure—which nonetheless do not happen because nobody has the incentive to carry them out. As such, even if the prevention of various kinds of suffering outcomes would be in everyone’s interest, the world might nonetheless end up in them if the incentives are sufficiently badly aligned and new technologies enable their creation.
An additional reason for why such dynamics might lead to various suffering outcomes is the so-called Anna Karenina principle (Diamond 1997, Zaneveld et al. 2017), named after the opening line of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina: “all happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. The general form of the principle is that for a range of endeavors or processes, from animal domestication (Diamond 1997) to the stability of animal microbiomes (Zaneveld et al. 2017), there are many different factors that all need to go right, with even a single mismatch being liable to cause failure.
Within the domain of psychology, Baumeister et al. (2001) review a range of research areas to argue that “bad is stronger than good”: while sufficiently many good events can overcome the effects of bad experiences, bad experiences have a bigger effect on the mind than good ones do. The effect of positive changes to well-being also tends to decline faster than the impact of negative changes: on average, people’s well-being suffers and never fully recovers from events such as disability, widowhood, and divorce, whereas the improved well-being that results from events such as marriage or a job change dissipates almost completely given enough time (Lyubomirsky 2010).
To recap, various evolutionary and game-theoretical forces may push civilization in directions that are effectively random, random changes are likely to bad for the things that humans value, and the effects of bad events are likely to linger disproportionately on the human psyche. Putting these considerations together suggests (though does not guarantee) that freewheeling development could eventually come to produce massive amounts of suffering.
yet academia is now the top example of cancel culture
I’m a little surprised by this wording? Certainly cancel culture is starting to affect academia as well, but I don’t think that e.g. most researchers think about the risk of getting cancelled when figuring out the wording for their papers, unless they are working on some exceptionally controversial topic?
I have lots of friends in academia and follow academic blogs etc., and basically don’t hear any of them talking about cancel culture within that context. I did recently see a philosopher recently post a controversial paper and get backlash for it on Twitter, but then he seemed to basically shrug it off since people complaining on Twitter didn’t really affect him. This fits my general model that most of the cancel culture influence on academia comes from people outside academia trying to affect it, with varying success.
I don’t doubt that there are individual pockets with academia that are more cancely, but the rest of academia seems to me mostly unaffected by them.
On the positive side, a recent attempt to bring cancel culture to EA was very resoundingly rejected, with 111 downvotes and strongly upvoted rebuttals.
I don’t know, but I get the impression that SWB questions are susceptible to framing effects in general: for example, Biswas-Diener & Diener (2001) found that when people in Calcutta were asked for their life satisfaction in general, and also for their satisfaction in 12 subdomains (material resources, friendship, morality, intelligence, food, romantic relationship, family, physical appearance, self, income, housing, and social life), they gave on average a slightly negative rating for the global satisfaction, while also giving positive ratings for all the subdomains. (This result was replicated at least by Cox 2011 in Nicaragua.)
Biswas-Diener & Diener 2001 (scale of 1-3):
The mean score for the three groups on global life satisfaction was 1.93 (on the negative side just under the neutral point of 2). [...] The mean ratings for all twelve ratings of domain satisfaction fell on the positive (satisfied) side, with morality being the highest (2.58) and the lowest being satisfaction with income (2.12).
Cox 2011 (scale of 1-7):
The sample level mean on global life satisfaction was 3.8 (SD = 1.7). Four is the mid-point of the scale and has been interpreted as a neutral score. Thus this sample had an overall mean just below neutral. [...] The specific domain satisfactions (housing, family, income, physical appearance, intelligence, friends, romantic relationships, morality, and food) have means ranging from 3.9 to 5.8, and a total mean of 4.9. Thus all nine specific domains are higher than global life satisfaction. For satisfaction with the broader domains (self, possessions, and social life) the means ranged from 4.4 to 5.2, with a mean of 4.8. Again, all broader domain satisfactions are higher than global life satisfaction. It is thought that global judgments of life satisfaction are more susceptible to positivity bias and that domain satisfaction might be more constrained by the concrete realities of an individual’s life (Diener et al. 2000)
In particular, Elon Musk claims that BCIs may allow us to integrate with AI such that AI will not need to outcompete us (Young, 2019). It is unclear at present by what exact mechanism a BCI would assist here, how it would help, whether it would actually decrease risk from AI, or if it is a valid claim at all. Such a ‘solution’ to AGI may also be entirely compatible with global totalitarianism, and may not be desirable. The mechanism by which integrating with AI would lessen AI risk is currently undiscussed; and at present, no serious academic work has been done on the topic.
We have a bit of discussion about this (predating Musk’s proposal) in section 3.4. of Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk; we’re also skeptical, e.g. this excerpt from our discussion:
De Garis [82] argues that a computer could have far more processing power than a human brain, making it pointless to merge computers and humans. The biological component of the resulting hybrid would be insignificant compared to the electronic component, creating a mind that was negligibly different from a ‘pure’ AGI. Kurzweil [168] makes the same argument, saying that although he supports intelligence enhancement by directly connecting brains and computers, this would only keep pace with AGIs for a couple of additional decades.
The truth of this claim seems to depend on exactly how human brains are augmented. In principle, it seems possible to create a prosthetic extension of a human brain that uses the same basic architecture as the original brain and gradually integrates with it [254]. A human extending their intelligence using such a method might remain roughly human-like and maintain their original values. However, it could also be possible to connect brains with computer programs that are very unlike human brains and which would substantially change the way the original brain worked. Even smaller differences could conceivably lead to the adoption of ‘cyborg values’ distinct from ordinary human values [290].
Bostrom [49] speculates that humans might outsource many of their skills to non-conscious external modules and would cease to experience anything as a result. The value-altering modules would provide substantial advantages to their users, to the point that they could outcompete uploaded minds who did not adopt the modules. [...]
Moravec [194] notes that the human mind has evolved to function in an environment which is drastically different from a purely digital environment and that the only way to remain competitive with AGIs would be to transform into something that was very different from a human.
Let’s look at some of your references. You say that Scott has endorsed eugenics; let’s look up the exact phrasing (emphasis mine):
Even though I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics, I don’t think these are two things that go well together – making the income conditional upon sterilization is a little too close to coercion for my purposes. Still, probably better than what we have right now.
“I don’t like this, though it would probably be better than the even worse situation that we have today” isn’t exactly a strong endorsement. Note the bit about disliking coercion which should already suggest that Scott doesn’t like “eugenics” in the traditional sense of involuntary sterilization, but rather non-coercive eugenics that emphasize genetic engineering and parental choice.
Simply calling this “eugenics” with no caveats is misleading; admittedly Scott himself sometimes forgets to make this clarification, so one would be excused for not knowing what he means… but not when linking to a comment where he explicitly notes that he doesn’t want to have coercive forms of eugenics.
Next, you say that he has endorsed “Charles Murray, a prominent proponent of racial IQ differences”. Looking up the exact phrasing again, Scott says:
The only public figure I can think of in the southeast quadrant with me is Charles Murray. Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that’s mine too. Not because I have great answers to all of the QZ article’s problems. But just because I don’t have any better ideas1,2.
What is “the southeast quadrant”? Looking at earlier in the post, it reads:
The cooperatives argue that everyone is working together to create a nice economy that enriches everybody who participates in it, but some people haven’t figured out exactly how to plug into the magic wealth-generating machine, and we should give them a helping hand (“here’s government-subsidized tuition to a school where you can learn to code!”) [...] The southeast corner is people who think that we’re all in this together, but that helping the poor is really hard.
So Scott endorses Murray’s claims that… cognitive differences may have a hereditary component, that it might be hard to teach the average trucker and his kids to become programmers, and that we should probably implement a basic income so that these people will still have a reasonable income and don’t need to starve. Also, the position that he ascribes to both himself and Murray is the attitude that we should do our best to help everyone, and that it’s basically good for everyone try to cooperate together. Not exactly ringing endorsements of white supremacy.
Also one of the foonotes to “I don’t have any better ideas” is “obviously invent genetic engineering and create a post-scarcity society, but until then we have to deal with this stuff”, which again ties to the part where to the extent that Scott endorses eugenics, he endorses liberal eugenics.
Finally, you note that Scott identifies with the “hereditarian left”. Let’s look at the article that Scott links to when he says that this term “seems like as close to a useful self-identifier as I’m going to get”. It contains an explicit discussion of how the possibility of cognitive differences between groups does not in any sense imply that one of the groups would have more value, morally or otherwise, than the other:
I also think it’s important to stress that contemporary behavioral genetic research is — with very, very few exceptions — almost entirely focused on explaining individual differences within ancestrally homogeneous groups. Race has a lot to do with how behavioral genetic research is perceived, but almost nothing to do with what behavioral geneticists are actually studying. There are good methodological reasons for this. Twin studies are, of course, using twins, who almost always self-identify as the same race. And genome-wide association studies (GWASs) typically use a very large group of people who all have the same self-identified race (usually White), and then rigorously control for genetic ancestry differences even within that already homogeneous group. I challenge anyone to read the methods section of a contemporary GWAS and persist in thinking that this line of research is really about race differences.
Despite all this, racists keep looking for “evidence” to support racism. The embrace of genetic research by racists reached its apotheosis, of course, in Nazism and the eugenics movements in the U.S. After all, eugenics means “good genes”– ascribing value and merit to genes themselves. Daniel Kevles’ In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity should be required reading for anyone interested in both the history of genetic science and in how this research has been (mis)used in the United States. This history makes clear that the eugenic idea of conceptualizing heredity in terms of inherent superiority was woven into the fabric of early genetic science (Galton and Pearson were not, by any stretch, egalitarians) and an idea that was deliberately propagated. The idea that genetic influence on intelligence should be interpreted to mean that some people are inherently superior to other people is itself a racist invention.
Fast-forward to 2017, and nearly everyone, even people who think that they are radical egalitarians who reject racism and white supremacy and eugenic ideology in all its forms, has internalized this “genes == inherent superiority” equation so completely that it’s nearly impossible to have any conversation about genetic research that’s not tainted by it. On both the right and the left, people assume that if you say, “Gene sequence differences between people statistically account for variation in abstract reasoning ability,” what you really mean is “Some people are inherently superior to other people.” Where people disagree, mostly, is in whether they think this conclusion is totally fine or absolutely repugnant. (For the record, and this should go without saying, but unfortunately needs to be said — I fall in the latter camp.) But very few people try to peel apart those ideas. (A recent exception is this series of blog posts by Fredrik deBoer.) The space between, which says, “Gene sequence differences between people statistically account for variation in abstract reasoning ability” but also says “This observation has no bearing on how we evaluate the inherent value or worth of people” is astoundingly small. [...]
But must genetic research necessarily be interpreted in terms of superiority and inferiority? Absolutely not. To get a flavor of other possible interpretations, we can just look at how people describe genetic research on nearly any other human trait.
Take, for example, weight. Here, is a New York Times article that quotes one researcher as saying, “It is more likely that people inherit a collection of genes, each of which predisposes them to a small weight gain in the right environment.” Substitute “slight increase in intelligence” for “small weight gain” in that sentence and – voila! You have the mainstream scientific consensus on genetic influences on IQ. But no one is writing furious think pieces in reaction to scientists working to understand genetic differences in obesity. According to the New York Times, the implications of this line of genetic research is … people shouldn’t blame themselves for a lack of self-control if they are heavy, and a “one size fits all” approach to weight loss won’t be effective.
As another example, think about depression. The headline of one New York Times article is “Hunting the Genetic Signs of Postpartum Depression with an iPhone App.” Pause for a moment and consider how differently the article would be received if the headline were “Hunting the Genetic Signs of Intelligence with an iPhone App.” Yet the research they describe – a genome-wide association study – is exactly the same methodology used in recent genetic research on intelligence and educational attainment. The science isn’t any different, but there’s no talk of identifying superior or inferior mothers. Rather, the research is justified as addressing the needs of “mothers and medical providers clamoring for answers about postpartum depression.” [...]
1. The idea that some people are inferior to other people is abhorrent.
2. The mainstream scientific consensus is that genetic differences between people (within ancestrally homogeneous populations) do predict individual differences in traits and outcomes (e.g., abstract reasoning, conscientiousness, academic achievement, job performance) that are highly valued in our post-industrial, capitalist society.
3. Acknowledging the evidence for #2 is perfectly compatible with belief #1.
4. The belief that one can and should assign merit and superiority on the basis of people’s genes grew out of racist and classist ideologies that were already sorting people as inferior and superior.
5. Instead of accepting the eugenic interpretation of what genetic research means, and then pushing back against the research itself, people – especially people with egalitarian and progressive values — should stop implicitly assuming that genes==inherent merit.
So you are arguing that Scott is a white supremacist, and your pieces of evidence include:
A comment where Scott says that he doesn’t want to have coercive eugenics
An essay where Scott talks about the best ways of helping people who might be cognitively disadvantaged, and suggests that we should give them a basic income guarantee
A post where Scott links to and endorses an article which focuses on arguing that considering some people as inferior to others is abhorrent, and that we should reject the racist idea of genetics research having any bearing to how inherently valuable people are
Also the sleight of hand where the author implies that Scott is a white supremacist, and supports this not by referencing anything that Scott said, but by referencing things that unrelated people hanging out on the SSC subreddit have said and which Scott has never shown any signs of endorsing. If Scott himself had said anything that could be interpreted as an endorsement of white supremacy, surely it would have been mentioned in this post, so its absence is telling.
As Tom Chivers recently noted:
It’s part of the SSC ethos that “if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do”, then you should consider the possibility that that’s because you don’t understand, rather than because they’re stupid; the “principle of charity”. So that means taking ideas seriously — even ones you’re uncomfortable with. And the blog and its associated subreddit have rules of debate: that you’re not allowed to shout things down, or tell people they’re racist; you have to politely and honestly argue the facts of the issue at hand. It means that the sites are homes for lively debate, rare on the modern internet, between people who actually disagree; Left and Right, Republican and Democrat, pro-life and pro-choice, gender-critical feminists and trans-activist, MRA and feminist.
And that makes them vulnerable. Because if you’re someone who wants to do a hatchet job on them, you can easily go through the comments and find something that someone somewhere will find appalling. That’s partly a product of the disagreement and partly a function of how the internet works: there’s an old law of the internet, the “1% rule”, which says that the large majority of online comments will come from a hyperactive 1% of the community. That was true when I used to work at Telegraph Blogs — you’d get tens of thousands of readers, but you’d see the same 100 or so names cropping up every time in the comment sections.
(Those names were often things like Aelfric225 or TheUnBrainWashed, and they were usually really unhappy about immigration.)
That’s why the rationalists are paranoid. They know that if someone from a mainstream media organisation wanted to, they could go through those comments, cherry-pick an unrepresentative few, and paint the entire community as racist and/or sexist, even though surveys of the rationalist community and SSC readership found they were much more left-wing and liberal on almost every issue than the median American or Briton. And they also knew that there were people on the internet who unambiguously want to destroy them because they think they’re white supremacists.
Fair. In that case this seems like a necessary prerequisite result for doing that deeper investigation, though, so valuable in that respect.