The agree-votes have pretty directly proven you correct.
ZachWeems
Karma: 68
I think people are accidentally down-voting instead of disagree-voting, which makes the comment hidden.
The up/down vote is on the left, agree/disagree is on the right.
|I meant to link to Gottfredson’s statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don’t.
My disagreement was with the characterization of Gottfredson’s statement as mainstream when this is disputed by mainstream sources.
It is true that there was a difference in IQ scores, so I suggested a less disputed source saying so.
|People don’t object as often to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, “black people are abused by the police more” doesn’t get the response of “what do you mean by black?...”
Perhaps I was overly harsh in my initial reply. However, I do endorse being very rigorous when talking about the overlap of race and genetics. Whereas in the example of police, we generally assume that any influence of race on a given interaction involves the social labels.
|I do not think that these categories are perfectly defined and unambiguous, and yet I think they can have genetic differences.
The issue I find relevant isn’t vagueness, it’s that the standard ways to subdivide humans into 3-10 races don’t cleave reality at the joints.
If I understand correctly, ignoring recent intermixing, humans can be divided into the highly genetically diverse “Khoisan”, and the much more populous and less diverse non-Khoisan. Descendants of the out-of-Africa migration group (ie people who aren’t of sub-Saharan ancestry) are effectively one branch of non-Khoisan.
|And although you can find some counter examples, I think it is generally true that black people tend to be more related to each other than white people.
Ignoring recent intermixing, I think this is actually false, and may remain false if we ignore the Khoisan peoples. On average, a randomly selected black person may be more closely related to a randomly selected white (or Asian) person than to another randomly selected black person. (Whereas white or Asian people would be more closely related to their own group). This can happen if multiple clusters are grouped together under one label.
Whereas a couple weakened versions of your claim are true:
“Socially defined labels contain nonzero information about genetics, such that you can predict someone’s racial label with very good accuracy by looking at their genome, much more so than if people had been randomly assigned to racial groups.”
And, “You can decompose racial groups into a reasonably small number of subgroups, such that a randomly chosen member of a subgroup is on average closer to another random member than to a random member of another group” is probably true as well.
Would that I had a prediction market, to stake money
Half my savings, to whale the odds one bit
And draw certain readers’ attention:
GUYS
FORGET THE POLITICS
MEANINGFUL GENETIC IQ GAPS BETWEEN RACIAL GROUPS ARE NOT REAL
You are free
The air is fragrant and devoid of infohazards
You need not trade between integrity and reputation
This is not the worst of all worlds
Sometimes we get lucky
In our world our evolutionary history makes it implausible
It didn’t need to be this way
There’s Everett branches where talk of Sapiens and Antecessor need caution
That is their problem
Here you can simply look at the evidence and forget your angst
So rejoice
Or sell me your underpriced agreement
Separate from my other comment:
|people of the white race, black race, and Asian race
I’m assuming this was completely unintended, but terms like “the X race” have very negative connotations in American English. Especially if X is “white”. Better terms are “X people” or “people categorized as X”.
“Blacks” also has somewhat negative connotations. “Black people” is better.
(I apologize on behalf of America for our extremely complicated rules about phrasing)
I hard-disagreed for two reasons:
The mainstream-ness of the linked statement is heavily disputed. A person in 1996 could have reasonably been unaware of this ofc. (You may have intended to link to the 1996 APA report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns instead?)
Accuracy about genetics and race is unusually important in charged conversations like this, and your 1st paragraph seems to miss an important point: categories like “black”, “white” and “Asian” are poor choices of genetic clusters. This is part of why population geneticists will call race a social construct: if you set out to find “racial” clusters of alleles (which is generally asserted to be low-value), you will find far better fits than society’s standard racial groupings.
You’re correct that “race” in the social sense has nonzero genetic meaning. However this doesn’t mean that members of the same “race” are particularly related. For example, my understanding is that a Korean, a Scotsman, an indigenous Australian, and a Meru would all likely share more alleles than any would with a Tuu. Yet the last two or three would be categorized as “black”. You could make a computer program that correctly predicts someone’s “race”, but it would be doing something equivalent to saying “this person is probably Meru, and Meru are labelled ‘black’”.
I disagree with the first and last sentences of the last paragraph- while Bostrom’s statements were compatible with a belief in genetically-influenced IQ differences, he did not clearly say so.
That said, it isn’t to his credit that he hedged about it in the apology.
Tangent: Out of curiosity, did you/ does your friend typically refer to (belief in meaningful genetically influenced racial IQ differences) as “HBD”, as “part of/under HBD”, or neither?
My impression was the term was mostly used by genetics nerds, with a small number of racists using the term as a fig leaf, causing the internet to think it was a motte-and-bailey in all uses. If people who mostly cared about the IQ thing used it regularly I suppose I was wrong.
(And to be clear since I’m commenting under my own name, meaningful genetically influenced racial IQ differences aren’t plausible. My interest is the old internet drama.)
FAQ number 5) reads oddly.
|5) Was nepotism involved? In particular, would FLI’s president’s brother have profited in any way had the grant been awarded?
|No. He published some articles in the newspaper, but the understanding from the very beginning was that this was pro-bono, and he was never paid and never planned to get paid by the newspaper of the foundation. The grant proposal requested no funds for him. He is a journalist with many years of experience working for Swedish public radio and television, and runs his own free and non-commercial podcast. The newspaper linked some of his episodes, but this has nothing to do with FLI, and it provided no ad revenue since he runs no ads. He was shocked by the recent revelations of extremism and plans no further association with the newspaper.
I think you should list the purely contextual information (that an FLI executive’s sibling has written articles for the newspaper etc) before the responsive information (that this did not influence the decision etc).
Also, definitely state the responsive information as two parts:
-Stuff that FLI knows, stated as fact
-”We reached out to [sibling], and he communicated the following”
FLI as an institution does not (I assume) accept representations by its executives’ family members as verified fact or allow them editorial influence. Separating the facts that FLI knows from the facts represented to FLI by the sibling emphasizes this.
It makes complete sense for Tegmark to defend & believe his brother in personal statements, and for FLI to give a relative the opportunity to communicate something in a circumstance like this.
However FLI isn’t Tegmark. FLI’s statements about his brother should be objective and based on information that can be verified by another executive. The statements should be made as if there’s a small chance it’s later discovered that his brother is lying about his politics or finances, because FLI should not make statements about Tegmark’s brother based on his personal judgement.
Consider that perhaps the reason most of us on the forum aren’t agreeing with you- and the reason Bostrom himself repudiated his words- isn’t the taboo around the belief, but rather that most of us think the evidence is unconvincing at best.
But most of us are not willing to have the object-level debate here for reasons such as politics being mindkiller, not wanting this to become a forum for debating taboo positions, and yes, internal and public perception of the community.
(I don’t have survey data or anything, but I’d bet this is the case.)
If so, to the extent the majority of EA’s tend to be right about things, you should update in that direction in lieu of having the thoughtful critiques of your position.
Agreed.
My model is, he has a number of frustrations with EA. That on its own isn’t a big deal. There are plenty of valid, invalid, and arguable gripes with various aspects of EA.
But he also has a major bucket error where the concept of “far-right” is applied to a much bigger Category of bad stuff. Since some aspects of EA & longtermism seem to be X to him, and X goes in the Category, and stuff in the Category is far-right, EA must have far-right aspects. To inform people of the problem, he writes articles claiming they’re far-right.
If EA’s say his claims are factually false, he thinks the respondents are fooling themselves. After all, they’re ignoring his wider point that EA has stuff from the Category, in favor of the nitpicky technicalities of his examples. He may even think they’re trying to motte & bailey people into thinking EA & longtermism can’t possibly have X. To me, it sounds like his narrative is now that he’s waging a PR battle against Bad Guys.
I’m not sure what the Category is, though.
At first I thought it was an entirely emotional thing- stuff that make him sufficiently angry, or a certain flavor of angry, or anything where he can’t verbalize why it makes him angry, are assumed to be far-right. But I don’t think that fits his actions. I don’t expect many people can decide “this makes me mad, so it’s full of white supremacy and other ills”, run a years-long vendetta on that basis, and still have a nuanced conversation about which parts aren’t bad.
Now I think X has a “shape”- with time & motivation, in a safe environment, Torres could give a consistent definition of what X is and isn’t. And with more of those, he could explain what it is & why he hates it without any references to far-right stuff. Maybe he could even do an ELI5 of why X goes in the same Category as far right stuff in the first place. But not much chance of this actually happening, since it requires him being vulnerable with a mistrusted representative of the Bad Guys.
Commenting from five months into the future, when this is topically relevant:
I disagree. I read Torres’ arguments as not merely flawed, but as attempts to link longtermism to the far right in US culture wars. In such environments people are inclined to be uncharitable, and to spread the word to others who will also be uncharitable. With enough bad press it’s possible to get a Common Knowledge effect, where even people who are inclined to be openminded are worried about being seen doing so. That could be bad for recruiting, funding, cooperative endeavors, & mental health.
Now, there’s only so many overpoliticized social media bubbles capable of such a wide effect, and they don’t find new targets every day. So the chances of EA becoming a political bogeyman are low, even if Torres is actively attempting this. But I think bringing up his specific insinuations to a new audience invites more of this risk than is worth it.
I have read and reread this comment and am honestly not sure whether this was a reply to my answer or to something else.
On point 1, I think the past week is a fair indication that the coronavirus is a big problem, and we can let this point pass.
On point 2, as of my answer, there seemed to be no academic talk of human challenge trials to shorten vaccine timelines, regardless of how many were working on vaccines. The problem I see is that if a human challenge trial would shorten timelines, authorities and researchers might still hesitate to run one due to paternalistic attitudes in medical ethics. The problem not that authorities and researchers are not trying to make a vaccine or need amateurs to do their job for them. So, this problem in particular seemed neglected, and worth raising to their attention.
On point 3, I’m not sure if you intended to discuss the expected impact of speeding vaccine development, or if you were confused on what a human challenge trial is? I did not discuss making theoretical models of the impact of the coronavirus on the world.
Points 4 and 5 do not seem to engage with my answer at all.
If this was a mispost, no harm no foul.
Otherwise- I’m not opposed to having a respectful, in-depth discussion of this issue. But the majority of your reply was off-topic and the rest only vaguely engaged with what I wrote. If future replies are similar I’m not going to respond.
Medicine isn’t my area, but I’d guess the timelines for vaccine trial completion might be significantly accelerated if some trial participants agreed to be deliberately exposed to SARS-CoV-2, rather than getting data by waiting for participants to get exposed on their own. This practice is known as a “human challenge trial” (HCT), and is occasionally used to get rapid proof-of-concept on vaccines. Using live, wild-type SARS-CoV-2 on fully informed volunteers could possibly provide valuable enough data to reduce the expected development time of the vaccine by several weeks, with a large expected number of lives saved as a result.
Similar usage of HCT’s seems to generally be permitted by the relevant ethics committees for low-risk diseases, such as dengue fever, but not high-risk ones, like Ebola or HIV. A brief look at a WHO document on these, and a longer look at relevant US federal law, didn’t turn up any hard rules on how dangerous a disease can be before exposure to a “wild-type” virus is forbidden, and both at least mention considering societal benefits as a factor. However, sometimes HCT’s for relatively minor diseases like Zika are refused.
The WHO document mentions that these sorts of tests are considered better for selecting between vaccine candidates or supporting evidence than as robust proof of effectiveness for general usage (see Section 5 of the linked document). The document seems to expect that most usages for preventing dangerous diseases will involve modified diseases. Using wild-type coronavirus would be both faster and stronger evidence of efficacy.
There are probably many other people on this forum who could address the expected value of such a trial better than I could, but my suggestion is that EA’s engage with the relevant regulators to push for allowing such trials to take place if they would help. Basically, having volunteers put themselves at risk for a faster vaccine would be net positive; independent ethics committees might reject such a study anyways; generating regulatory or public support could make this less likely.
If this were to happen, it seems like a key narrative point would be that the government is allowing people to voluntarily take on risks to find a cure. I think that there would be plenty of volunteers if you asked right, and if some EA’s were to do this, it would help their optics tremendously if several of them vocally volunteered.
Meta:
It might be worthwhile to have some sort of flag or content warning for potentially controversial posts like this.
On the other hand, this could be misused by people who dislike the EA movement, who could use it as a search parameter to find and “signal-boost” content that looks bad when taken out of context.
|...having a Big Event with people On Stage is just a giant opportunity for a bunch of people new to the problem to spout out whatever errors they thought up in the first five seconds of thinking, neither aware of past work nor expecting to engage with detailed criticism...
I had to go back and double-check that this comment was written before Asilomar 2017. It describes some of the talks very well.
I would also like to be added to the crazy EA’s investing group. Could you send an invite to me on here?
The ’Stache is great! He’s actually how I heard about Effective Altruism.
Right, I’m accounting for my own selfish desires here. An optimally moral me-like person would only save enough to maximize his career potential.
Regarding the last paragraph, in the edit:
I think the comments here are ignoring a perfectly sufficient reason to not, eg, invite him to speak at an EA adjacent conference. If I understand correctly, he consistently endorsed white supremacy for several years as a pseudonymous blogger.
Effective Altruism has grown fairly popular. We do not have a shortage of people who have heard of us and are willing to speak at conferences. We can afford to apply a few filtering criteria that exclude otherwise acceptable speakers.
“Zero articles endorsing white supremacy” is one such useful filter.
I predict that people considering joining or working with us would sometimes hear about speakers who’d once endorsed white supremacy, and be seriously concerned. I’d put not-insignificant odds that the number that back off because of this would reduce the growth of the movement by over 10%. We can and should prefer speakers who don’t bring this potential problem.
A few clarifications follow:
-Nothing about this relies on his current views. He could be a wonderful fluffy bunny of a person today, and it would all still apply. Doesn’t sound like the consensus in this thread, but it’s not relevant.
-This does not mean anyone needs to spurn him, if they think he’s a good enough person now. Of course he can reform! I wouldn’t ask that he sew a scarlet letter into his clothing or become unemployable or be cast into the outer darkness. But, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that past actions as a public thinker can impact your future as a public thinker. I sure hope he wouldn’t hold it against people that he gets fewer speaking invitations despite reforming.
-I don’t see this as a slippery slope towards becoming a close-minded community. The views he held would have been well outside the Overton window of any EA space I’ve been in, to the best of my knowledge. There were multiple such views, voiced seriously and consistently. Bostrom’s ill-advised email is not a good reason to remove him from lists of speakers, and Hanania’s multi-year advocacy of racist ideas is a good reason. There will be cases that require careful analysis, but I think both of these cases are extreme enough to be fairly clear-cut.