Any links to where Scott Alexander deliberately argues that black people have lower IQs for genetic reasons? I’ve been reading his blog for a decade and I don’t recall any posts on this.
nathan98000
I think any discussion of race that doesn’t take the equality of races as a given will be considered inflammatory. And regardless of the merits of the arguments, they can make people uncomfortable and choose not to associate with EA.
I think collections like this are helpful, but it’s a misleading to say it presents the “frontier of publicly available knowledge.”
Taking just the first section on moral truth as an example, it seems like a huge overstatement to say this collection of podcasts and forum posts gets people to the frontier of this subject. Philosophers have spent a long time on this, writing thousands of papers. And at a glance, it seems like all of OPs linked resources don’t even intend to give an overview of the literature on meta-ethics. They instead present their own personal perspectives.
And all of the resources in this section are EA/rationalist affiliated. Surely there have been some people who’ve said intelligent things about the nature of morality prior to Yudkowsky’s birth, right? Neglecting these voices seems like an oversight, especially given the stated goal of getting readers to the frontier of publicly available knowledge.
Going forward, I’d suggest making more modest claims about what can be accomplished by a reading list like this and expanding the range of perspectives that’s considered worth listening to.
The concept of self-esteem has a somewhat checkered history in psychology. Here, an influential review paper finds that self-esteem leads people to speak up more in groups and to feel happier. But it fails to have consistent benefits in other areas of life such as educational/occupational performance or violence. And it may have detrimental effects, such as risky behavior in teens.
Overall, the benefits of high self-esteem fall into two categories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings. We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) causes benefits. Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to boost self-esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved outcomes. In view of the heterogeneity of high self-esteem, indiscriminate praise might just as easily promote narcissism, with its less desirable consequences. Instead, we recommend using praise to boost self-esteem as a reward for socially desirable behavior and self-improvement.
FWIW standard conceptions of existential risk would categorize suffering risks as a type of existential risk. For example, Nick Bostrom has defined it as “threats that could cause our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life.” (emphasis mine)
I think indoctrination (at least among adults) is actually surprisingly difficult. The psychologist Hugo Mercier was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast to discuss why.
And the other thing which has had much more dramatic consequences is the idea of brainwashing: the idea that if you take prisoners of war and you submit them to really harsh treatment — you give them no food, you stop them from sleeping, you’re beating them up — so you make them, as you are describing, extremely tired and very foggy, and then you get them to read Mao for hours and hours on end. Are they going to become communists? Well, we know the answer, because unfortunately, the Koreans and the Chinese have tried during the Korean War, and it just doesn’t work at all. They’ve managed to kill a lot of POWs, and they managed to get I think two of them to go back to China and to claim that they had converted to communism. But in fact, after the fact, it was revealed that these people had just converted because they wanted to stop being beaten and starved to death, and that as soon as they could revert back to go back to the US, they did so.
I’d also echo others’ comments that I think testing a curriculum will be relatively hard. Even education programs with clear measurables (e.g. financial literacy programs, work-skills programs for former convicts, second language programs) often end up unsuccessful. It would be even more difficult to teach “love.” How do you measure how loving someone is and reliably teach it to others?
Fwiw this review discusses why Rutger Bregman’s book is deeply flawed.
”That he felt the need to misrepresent the past and other cultures in order to provide a ‘hopeful’ history is rather a message of despair. Bregman presents hunter-gatherer societies as being inherently peaceful, antiwar, equal, and feminist likely because these are commonly expressed social values among educated people in his own society today. This is not history but mythology.”
Interesting post! I think what would have made this more helpful would be a discussion of the kinds of arguments that led you to change your mind in each case. For example, you note that you were convinced of universal prescriptivism but then later came to reject it. A brief discussion of the relevant arguments for/against would be interesting!
[What] is required of the philosopher is also to provide grounding or to think about grounding upon which the intuitions pointed to by a thought experiment are consistent.
Why can’t a philosopher just present a counterexample? In fact, it seems arguing from a specific alternative grounding would make Timmerman’s argument weaker. As he notes (emphasis mine):
I have purposefully not made a suggestion as to how many (if any) children Lisa is obligated to rescue. I did so to make my argument as neutral as possible, as I want it to be consistent with any normative ethical view ranging from moral libertarianism to a view that only permits Lisa to indulge in a comparably insignificant good a single time.
As an analogy, if you make a general claim such as: “All marbles are blue,” it’s enough to point to a single counterexample to show that that claim is false. I don’t also have to have my own view about what colors marbles come in.
Also, as a matter of interpreting Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Singer doesn’t justify his principles based on any inferences from the drowning child thought experiment. Instead, he only uses that thought experiment as an application of his principles, which he takes to simply be common-sense. And although Singer is himself a utilitarian, he doesn’t make any argument for utilitarianism in that paper, largely for the same reason as Timmerman! He wants diverse people to agree with him regardless of their grounding for the principles he discusses.
I don’t quite understand your objection to Timmerman’s thought experiment. You say it’s “ad hoc” and “justifies our complacency arbitrarily”, but it’s unclear what you mean by these terms. And it’s unclear why someone should agree that it’s ad hoc and arbitrary.
This seems like a good summary! Was this downvoted merely because of a wrong pronoun?
I don’t think advocating for libertarian socialism or anarcho-communism is a tractable way to improve the world. I also think it’s not at all obvious that it would even be desirable.
And in the US at least, the term “social justice” has become extremely politically loaded, and I think it would be unwise for EAs to explicitly associate themselves with the term.
For someone not familiar with Farrell’s work, what’s the main problem with it?
I appreciate the post, though I think “The universe is meaningless” section wasn’t so convincing. The universe is meaningless because we’re the product of natural selection? I would want a better argument than that.
FWIW I think it’s still the case that psychologists/neuroscientists are nowhere near developing an accurate lie detector. And the paper you cite doesn’t seem to support the claim that lie detection technology is accurate. From the abstract (emphasis mine):
Analyzing the myriad issues related to fMRI lie detection, the article identifies the key limitations of the current neuroimaging of deception science as expert evidence and explores the problems that arise from using scientific evidence before it is proven scientifically valid and reliable. We suggest that courts continue excluding fMRI lie detection evidence until this potentially useful form of forensic science meets the scientific standards currently required for adoption of a medical test or device.
There are methodological challenges associated with the typical studies done on lie detection. From a 2016 paper (emphasis mine):
Great hopes and expectations were expressed regarding the potential use of brain imaging techniques for the detection of deception. Contrary to what has been advocated by many researchers as well as practitioners (e.g., Bles & Haynes, 2008; Farwell, 2012; Langleben et al., 2005), the introduction of new measures such as P300 and fMRI is by no means a solution to the problems associated with the ANS-based CQT polygraph test. The CQT has been criticized for lacking proper controls and being unstandardized. In addition, its outcome is often contaminated by prior information available to the examiner. None of these criticisms can be resolved by replacing ANS recordings with fMRI measures.
Moreover, all paradigms face a similar logical problem: deception cannot be directly inferred either from the presence of emotional arousal in the CQT or from attentional orienting or inhibition in the CIT or DoD, regardless of whether ANS, reaction times, ERPs, or fMRI measures have been used.
So I’m not sure what the basis is for saying it’s an “unambiguous mistake” to think accurate lie detection technology is a long way off.
I’m personally skeptical that we’ll ever “solve” what the neural basis of sentience is. That said, I think there are still some promising ways a better understanding of psychology can advance standard EA causes. Here’s a paper that goes into more depth on this issue:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35981321/
But for the paradox’s setup to make sense, the player must have, in some sense, made his decision before the prediction is made: he is either someone who is going to take both boxes or someone who is just going to take the opaque box.
This doesn’t seem correct. It’s possible to make a better than random guess about what a person will decide in the future, even if the person has not yet made their decision.
This is not mysterious in ordinary contexts. I can make a plan to meet with a friend and justifiably have very high confidence that they’ll show up at the agreed time. But that doesn’t preclude that they might in fact choose to cancel at the last minute.
I suppose I agree that humanity should generally focus more on catastrophic (non-existential) risks.
That said, I think this is often stated explicitly. For example, MacAskill in his recently book explicitly says that many of the actions we take to reduce x-risks will also look good even for people with shorter-term priorities.
Do you have any quote from someone who says we shouldn’t care about catastrophic risks at all?
Maybe a more realistic example would be helpful here. There have been recent reports claiming that, although it will negatively affect millions of people, climate change is unlikely to be an existential risk. Suppose that’s true. Do you think EAs should devote as much time and effort preventing climate change-level risks as they do preventing existential risks?
Just to reiterate your original claim, you said that Scott “has done a lot, entirely deliberately in my view, to spread that view [that black people have lower IQs for genetic reasons].”
And your evidence for this claim is that:
He linked to neo-reactionaries on his blogroll who hold this view.
He privately told friends that HBD (which isn’t exclusively about the causes of racial IQ differences) is “probably partially correct or at least very non-provably non-correct.” And he demanded they never reveal this publicly.
He isn’t “repulsed” or “creeped out” or “upset” by reactionaries.
I find this extremely unpersuasive and misleading.
I don’t know which neo-reactionaries you’re referring to when you say he linked to them on his blogroll, but he very clearly doesn’t agree with everything they say. He has explicitly disagreed with the neo-reactionary movement at length.
Telling something to friends in private and demanding secrecy seems like the exact opposite of trying to spread a view. And saying a view is “probably partially correct or at least non-provably non-correct” is hardly a ringing endorsement of the view.
Come on… He doesn’t have the right emotional vibes, therefore he must be deliberately spreading the view?? I’m personally a vegan for ethical reasons. In fact, I think factory farming is among the worst things humanity has ever done. But I’m not “creeped out” or “repulsed” by people who eat meat.
Your evidence is extremely weak, and it’s disappointing that as of my response, it has 18 upvotes.