The way he is speaking in the email is offensive, and good that he has apologized for it.
The finding that generally many groups of black people have on average lower IQ than than the median is pretty robust, and he does make it clear even in the initial emailthat he doesn’t think they are morally inferior or that he doesn’t hold the actual negative views about them that one might associate with this language.
What’s the GiveWell of AI Safety?
Visiting an old book store and reading random old books on topis is a horrible idea and I disrecommend it whole-heartedly. The vast majority of random books are crap, and old books are on average maybe even more crap (caveat that the good ones are the ones we still hear about more) since even more from them has been disproven/has been added to by now.
>I think the sequences are okay intro points for a number of topics, but they should not be treated as the foundation of ones belief system
I’d say the exact opposite—they are a great foundation that for the most part helps form a coherent world view rather than just getting bits and pieces from everywhere and not necesserily connecting them, but you can go explore further in many directions for a more in-depth (and sometimes more modern) perspective.
That’s nearly true by definition for imperfect proxys. They don’t carry all the information so you can improve on them by using other measures.
The general argument is that it’s just a useful but imperfect proxy, your findings are that it correlates with some stuff we might find just imperfectly so how do you go from being imperfect to ‘shouldnt be used’ again?
It’s not brave truth telling, it’s unnecessarily rude and not remotely helpful to put it that way.
For the record , however, there’s little reason to think racism is the primary cause for the disparity given that it holds nearly everywhere. As it is important not to be disparaging or straight racist it’s also important to actually hold accurate beliefs and not just convenient or good sounding ones.