Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed.
Can anybody offer insight into the reasons here? Obviously there is not going to be an objective answer to this question. And that is probably why the linked page does not try to give an answer.
I'm assuming lack of funding wasn't the problem, since they froze fundraising (if the inability to raise funds was the problem it is unlikely that they would have done this).
"Any organization embedded in a larger organization or community needs to invest to a certain degree in
establishing the right kind of social relationships to maintain this embeddedness. Incentives must be
aligned, and both parties must also recognize this alignment. We did not invest enough in university
politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty.
There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities.
When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several
times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we
misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders
is important."
What an irony! The Bostrom Institute has to close in the midst of the spectacular rise of AI, and the all-important questions of AI risks and human value alignment are more hotly debated than ever.
I hope that Bostrom and his colleagues will continue and deepen their research, because humanity needs such insights now more than ever.
How does one research and generate insights for what does not exist yet? Is there a framework? At SXSW this year, there were a couple of talks about forecasting, as a tool for futurism, but where ethics are concerned, I’ve not seen a good template. Maybe all if this is obvious, yet I’m curious so I’m asking.
I'm not expert and struggled to read Bostrom's Super Intelligence, but my interpretation was it started with a lot of broad, hand-wavy factors & historical interpetations, layered on some pretty tenious projections as inevitable and wanked off with deep thought experiments. I get this sort of open-ended exploration has value, but I'm not sold on it's "prioritized value" when compared with other areas and directions.
It's extremely repetitive; he could have written a book one-third of its length without leaving anything out. There's some good stuff in there, but I was sort of annoyed that the author forces you to read everything three times. Kinda disrespectful to his readers' available free time.
it seems plausible that all new things are brought into existence unintentionally. that is, you tried to create something you imagined, but what you actually created was something else. certainly there are many examples of thinking about renewable energy that were completely wrong because they were based on presumptions that no longer hold, or in some cases were already wrong but in a nonobvious way
as my wife points out, we can't even imagine any of the things that do actually exist, only drastic simplifications thereof
I constantly see the argument "no country has ever been powered by solar and wind", implying that it therefore can't be done, and that one should use nuclear instead (never mind the same is true of nuclear; not even France is fully nuclear powered).
> never mind the same is true of nuclear; not even France is fully nuclear powered
This seems somewhat bad-faith: nuclear does supply the majority of France's power, and since nuclear is a "base load" part of the mix, it would be inefficient to get 100% of power from nuclear rather than a peaking-friendly mix that includes e.g. hydro and gas.
Are you confusing electricity generation with electricity use? If we're counting off-grid electricity generation, then we're talking about A) critical infrastructure like utilities or B) off-grid homes or communities which typically use solar panels, small wind turbines or gas/biogas to generate their own power. The off-grid portion most likely make up a tiny portion of France's energy mix, which is dominated by nuclear (>50%).
No, I'm talking about energy use that doesn't involve electricity production at all. It potentially could be electrified in many cases, but that doesn't reduce the hypocrisy of the selective "if it hasn't been done it can't be done" mindset.
How is that relevant in this context, though? Why is it bad faith when we're talking about grid-supplied electricity generation? We need electricity generation, and most of France's is nuclear. It seems uncontroversial.
It's because the "if it hasn't been done, it can't be done" argument applies to nuclear displacing fossil fuels. Remember, the decarbonization goal has to be all uses of fossil fuels, not just their use for the grid.
Is FHI even needed anymore? His ideas clearly won and took hold of a large group of people. AI doomerism is the default stance most people have on AI. e/acc makes up a tiny fraction of popular discourse today.
- This report looks like it was put together in a week's time.
- As an academic, I am sure the quality of the presentation is lower than that of 90% of the academic papers out there.
A group of scammers without specialized education, theorizing about immortality (from people without medical education), saving humanity (thank you, but humanity thrives without your help), about ethics in artificial intelligence (from people who do not know any programming language), about drug promotion (from professional drug abusers), about pumping money into cryptocurrencies (which they personally purchased) and even crypto exchanges they own (hello SBF).
I hope to see all these people in jail (as I see they have already removed their names from the site).
I hate to break it to you, but these scholars are not going to jail for their bad ideas. That's not how a free society works. We'll have to settle for general disrepute.
That reflects kind of badly on NeurIPS if true. I first became aware of him over 10-15 years ago when he was pushing his "mathematical universe" idea, which is quite simply the most vapid and contentless idea I've ever seen in physics. (I don't think it's at all surprising that someone like him would be drawn to the AI community, or vice versa!)
He has some PhD students doing what seems to me to be reasonable work that gets published at NeurIPS. Somewhat speculative, of the flavor you’d expect from theoretical physicists doing AI work, but it’s at least speculation about concrete technologies that exist, not pure metaphysics. For example, there’s a recent paper proposing and validating in small models a possible mechanism to explain some power laws seen in NN scaling curves [1]. May turn out to be wrong, but doesn’t seem nutty to me. On the other hand, I’d guess these papers specifically are probably not what got him famous in AI circles. For that his general self-created role as AI futurist is probably more responsible [2]. I tend to avoid that kind of stuff, but staking out a debate position on questions like “how smart could AI get? Will it kill us all?” is the kind of stuff the general public likes to hear.
I think that paper is pretty weak, but at least in terms of content it's still night and day compared with the nature of Tegmark's clout-chasing in his physics days. But it's pretty grim if that's the kind of paper that made him popular at NeurIPS.
My read is that some former fans strongly disagree with, and are thus disappointed by, Tegmark's recent enthusiasm for "AI will kill us all" arguments, & advocacy of strong/intrusive policies against AI progress.
His flavour of "modal realism" is rather different from those of David Lewis or Takashi Yagisawa – the way he intersected that with debates about mathematical Platonism – original and interesting
I doubt he's right, but novel wrongness is admirable in a way that same old wrongness
Well, he published a nonfiction book, the best part of which is the first chapter which consists of literally a fiction story.
He also has some serious problems with blinders, but they're the same blinders HN has so if I explain any further this post will get flagged, flogged, deleted, and downvoted. Ah well.
But I have no idea whether those allegations are true or accurate–I just did a search trying to work out what people here were talking about, and this is the first thing that came up, and this is the first I've heard of this controversy
No, the allegations in that article are not accurate; I remember discussion of it at the time. The story there is that Nya Dagbladat applied for a grant from FLI, passed the first phase of the grant-award process, and was rejected during due diligence. Then after the rejection had already happened, espo.se ran the article you linked to, which made it sound like they had funded or were going to fund them, which they weren't.
Curious as to why they didn't explore independence, moving from Oxford to a separate non-profit org. Getting funded doesn't seem impossible given the amount of high-profile e/acc advocates.
Not to mention the "big picture" EAs did damage when put in charge of the money FTX was doling out. They had people who'd been funding organizations that would feed, cloth, and medicate people move their funding to "existential problems" like AI and climate science. While I won't argue the value of those, vague theoreticals are arguably more commonly tacticaled than those on the ground trying to help with active issues.
For a nonprofit research group with no patents/IP/etc, simply starting over with the same people is actually a better strategy than trying to "move". Nothing is lost (no capital, equipment, etc) and you don't have to deal with entanglements with the previous institution.
I think you are confusing EA and e/acc. EA was about billionaires defrauding the population who entrusted them with their money to give away to whatever cause was deemed best by the current "scientific" consensus in EA. Causes can include things like the suffering of fish or AI ending the known universe.
e/acc is about doing capitalism so hard so that AI will solve every problem.
Well, that's the point in question. For its critics, the whole enterprise is a misguided sham. See Leif Wenar's stimulating recent piece, 'The Deaths of Effective Altruism', which sees SBF less as aberration, than symptom.
I think EA was naive from the start, both in its unreflective moral realism, and its reduction of complicated questions of social theory down to back-of-the-envelope utility calculations based on threadbare empirics.
> For its critics, the whole enterprise is a misguided sham.
I'm a critic, but I don't think it's a sham. I do think it's very misguided and I very strongly suspect it has evolved into a cult, but it's not a sham.
> “None of them,” said a young Australian woman to laughter. Out came story after story of the daily frustrations of their jobs. Corrupt local officials, clueless charity bosses, the daily grind of cajoling poor people to try something new without pissing them off.
Probably too late for anyone to notice, but I appreciate this being posted.
My perspective on this coming into the discussion is EA started off well and noble and I had a good impression of organizations like GiveWell and the Against Malaria Foundation. I was largely of the mind that EA was corrupted later on when it was taken over by long-termists and AI alarmists who Pascal's Wagered their way into making no possible cause more important than raising the probability of producing infinite future good by infinitesimal percentage points that are bullshit to begin with because nobody can estimate future probability to that many significant digits anyway. But the original "most charity money today goes to museums and universities that are already rich so they can buy paintings and build ornate classrooms - surely we can do better with poverty aid in developing nations" message was basically sound.
This guy is making me question whether any of it was ever sound. Unless this is all lies, it would appear GiveWell was, at best, selectively presenting data and making up a lot of it, at worst, flat-out lying, and poverty aid in and of itself may not even be effective, possibly not even net positive.
It's interesting to see myself going in the exact opposite direction of the supposed "all old people are conservative" trope. I was an avowed libertarian 20 years ago, but today, everything I see and learn has made me question whether concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny number of oligarchs who use shoddy data that might be made up to justify allocating resources toward pet projects they already found interesting in the first place is really the best way to organize the whole of human activity. Maybe, Marxist as it sounds, the real answer is distribute that power more evenly amongst all people and let those closest to each local purchasing decision decide what to allocate toward.
In theory, that is what free market economics was supposed to accomplish in the first place, but it doesn't work if you only have a few hundred out of 8 billion people making 99% of the world's purchasing decisions. You've just privatized a centralized command economy.
"distributing power evenly" is the classic reign-of-terror trope. Hell is always paved with good intentions and if you want to abandon unplanned order (our society) and build some utopia where a "the adults in the room" distribute power "evenly" to "distributed" parties than you'll just re-create a new Mao\Stalin\Committee of Public Safety.
Except 100% Free Markets lead to Monopolies. Then the argument is, those big companies are 'Free' to crush all competition and innovation.
But to prevent monopolies, you would need regulation, something to prevent them from forming, and then that is then 'Not-Free'. How dare you prevent me from having a monopoly.
It's a conundrum, if there is no oversight, regulation, then you are totally free to prevent other from having freedoms. It's just who do you want in control.
The fancy multiple Harry Potter castles they bought while saying everything was scientifically calibrated to not do the buying of fancy buildings and other status stuff normal charities and universities do.
Weren't the castles on sale at a bargain price? It seems like that was one of those inflammatory stories 'look they are buying castles', but then you look closer and they were cheaper than office space would be.
He was doing fraud, but the rest are mentally masturbating about problems that are about as relevant to the world as the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin.
Bear with a digression. CS Lewis was a professor at Oxford. His novel “That Hideous Strength” is about an organization that wants to use science to save humanity.
“It’s a little fantastic to base one’s actions on a supposed concern for what’s going to happen millions of years hence; and you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity, too.”
— That Hideous Strength: (Space Trilogy, Book Three) (The Space Trilogy 3) by C. S. Lewis
Of course, it all goes very, very bad. The whole book can be read as a warning against what we now call transhumanism, obviously from a Christian perspective.
Given CS Lewis’s Oxford connection, I have always wondered if some of the faculty had their doubts about the FHI
While I do appreciate this reference and agree with CS Lewis here, I think it's a bit of a stretch to draw a connection between him and the present day Oxford philosophy faculty. He was a single don from nearly a century ago, who now really belongs to the canon at large rather than a single university. Perhaps the current faculty all hold some special reverence for him, but it seems more likely that modern mainstream philosophers (not only at Oxford) merely share with Lewis some basic grasp of common sense, which informs their skepticism of FHI and EA.
I agree with you completely. And yet...I can't imagine at least some of them aren't aware of it, and it might have planted a seed. I could totally believe there was a faculty meeting and someone said: "Didn't CS Lewis write a book or two about this?" followed by laughter (some of it nervous). It's just so odd to me that out of all the universities in the world, FHI ended up at the place CS Lewis was when he wrote this book. I can pull quote after quote out of it, that if you don't know it was written in 1943, you would think he was parodying FHI and EA. Which really reflects that these two movements aren't that new.
Not defending it. Just think the parallels with the novel are amusing. John Gray has been arguing for years that humanism and transhumanism grew out of Christian millennialism
I doubt that the philosophy faculty would take CS Lewis' opinion seriously into consideration. He was a decent storyteller, but not much of a philosopher.
His work is often quietly cited by a handful of moral philosophers. In particular, The Discarded Image, anytime someone is writing about medieval philosophy.
Anyway, being a philosopher simply isn't what the guy did and academics are fairly dismissive without consideration anytime religion (and specifically Christian apologetics) gets in the mix.
> academics are fairly dismissive without consideration anytime religion (and specifically Christian apologetics) gets in the mix.
In fairness, it's a good heuristic. Most Christian apologetics are just less poetic subsets of the Book of Job, but their authors act like they have some new and exciting insight that will prove Christianity 100% for sure this time. It's a total waste of time to engage.
C.S. Lewis's works are the exception, not the rule, since there's actually something there to engage with. Plus, he's just a good author.
Maybe. I don't disagree with you at all really, but I don't think it's "Christian apologetics" who get derided in academic spheres. Being openly religious (specifically Western religions, other world religions get virtually no pushback) at all is considered gauche. People I've known to be religious in these spheres are typically very quiet about it. I'm not religious, but lean more towards agnosticism than atheism and I don't feel comfortable sharing that in these circles. If there's any place you should be comfortable saying "I don't know" it SHOULD be this one.
It's also really weird in fields like archaeology/anthropology in North American institutions where western religious texts are given no consideration (not that they should) whereas Native American creation myths are given a kind of deference. White guilt is a powerful thing.
I'd interested to take a look if you have any further info about which moral philosophers and which works cite The Discarded Image?
I admit I haven't read that one myself; my own take on him as a philosopher stems from reading Mere Christianity and summaries of Surprised by Joy, and not being aware of any references to his work by more recent philosophers that I've been interested in such as Chomsky, Zizek, or Dennett. I got a strong feeling that Lewis' arguments and exposition were guided by something other than logic, though they pretended to be following it. The trilemma is an example of this.
> I got a strong feeling that Lewis' arguments and exposition were guided by something other than logic, though they pretended to be following it. The trilemma is an example of this.
One way to discover that we necessarily have worldviews outside of logic is to look at a statement like this, and realize it appeals to something outside of logic (feelings) to critique how someone else is only pretending to follow it.
I am not saying that I or anyone am perfectly logical or uninfluenced by feeling. Hume was exactly correct when he said the reason is the slave of the passions.
But - with his trilemma, Lewis claims "here is a logical argument for believing in the Christian god", and then presents a weak and illogical argument. It's difficult to know what to make of this except that Lewis was somehow blinded to the logical flaws.
> "here is a logical argument for believing in the Christian god"
That is definitely not the point of the trilemma. It simply argues that Christ must be placed into one of three categories, which do not include "generally nice and completely harmless moral teacher". He was clearly claiming to be God, which obviously leads to the trilemma of choices between Liar, Lunatic and Lord.
That doesn't say which one of those three to pick. Just ruling out the other possibilities by considering the claims he made about himself.
I don't know if that's true. Certainly there are biblical scholars who would disagree. It's not mentioned in the first three gospels, for example.
> obviously leads to the trilemma of choices
Again, not obvious. The three choices are logically incomplete. There are other possibilities, such as that Jesus was not a ful-on lunatic: he had a single delusional belief about his own divinity but was otherwise rational.
It's a false trilemma, as there are othe possibilities: he did not actually exist historically, or he was a wise, nice guy and others made up all the God stuff over the years, or he was a nice guy trying to help people and he thought tactically the mystical claims would allow him to help more people. One can probably imagine a bunch more or less realistic possibilities given a little while to think about it.
You must remember that the trilemma exists in a context. Lewis set it up as a reply to people who "say that they're ready to accept Jesus as a good human teacher, but not ready to accept him as God". That is, they already accepted that he existed, and that the set of teachings recorded was more or less accurate.
That rules out "did not actually exist historically" and "others made up all the God stuff over the years". (I mean, those exists as possibilities in an absolute sense, but not as possibilities that he had to answer, because the people he was answering didn't hold those as options.)
And to me, "a nice guy trying to help people and he thought tactically the mystical claims would allow him to help more people" sounds a lot like "liar". Liar with good intentions, but still liar.
Well, if you have to presuppose that the gospels are true then you are probably arguing with a tiny slice of people: those who believe the gospels are more or less accurate down to the specific quotes of Jesus but do not believe he was the son of God. I would say that "accept Jesus as a good human teacher" is a far broader category than this and nothing about it implies a particularly strict belief in the truth of the gospels.
I'd also say that, even accepting the gospels, we have to really take wide views of "liar, lunatic, or Lord" to make it work. Lewis himself further described the "liar" as akin to the "Devil of Hell" - I wouldn't characterize the liar I described as such. And he said the lunatic was akin to "the man who says he is a poached egg", but people are great at compartmentalization and can hold some very silly specific beliefs while still being otherwise rational, sane people. Even "Lord" admits plenty of things we wouldn't recognize as Christianity, e.g. rejecting the trinity or plenty of other heresies.
In the 1950s, in Great Britain, the basic accuracy of the gospels was a lot more widely shared assumption/presupposition than it is today.
If you're going to accept Jesus as a good human teacher, but not accept that he actually taught what the gospels say he did, then you have a good teacher but no teachings. And maybe that's a position that a lot of people like, because it leaves them an empty figure into which they can pour whatever teachings they personally favor, but I think it's rather a cop-out. (A steelman version would be: "I think he was a good human teacher, but no reliable record of what he actually taught survives, so we cannot claim that any particular teaching or position has his stamp of approval." But I still think that's weak. If you can't trust the record of what he taught, how can you trust the record that he was a good teacher?)
Accepting the gospels, the liar you describe is still offering people eternal life, at a price - "take up your cross and follow me". (The cross was not just a burden, it was an instrument of execution.) If the eternal life isn't there, it's hard to describe that as a benign or beneficial lie. Note that many of his followers were executed. (Our record of that doesn't depend on the gospels - Tacitus also says this.) You may say that this still falls short of Lewis's description, but it's far from your description. (I'd have to go back and reread Lewis's argument to see how tightly he has boxed people in on the "liar" branch.)
>Accepting the gospels, the liar you describe is still offering people eternal life, at a price - "take up your cross and follow me". (The cross was not just a burden, it was an instrument of execution.) If the eternal life isn't there, it's hard to describe that as a benign or beneficial lie.
If you don't actually believe in the supernatural stuff it seems like the definition of a benign lie. He thinks having society follow his broader teachings would result in a much better society on net, regardless of some people being killed for following and spreading it. He thinks that you go in the dirt when you die so he says, hey, actually you go up to this great place. This really helps it catch on and spread. Nobody finds out that part's not true because when they die they just go in the dirt.
Any kind of large-scale change will have some specific people dying compared to the counterfactual of not making the change. To assess whether the change is benign, positive, or negative, we must grapple with both the positive and negative impacts.
For example, I could wave a magic wand today and fix climate change, saving millions or billions of lives. But since I did so, some granny slips on a patch of ice next winter and dies from the fall. Without my magic wand, she would have lived.
Now, I don't specifically know who this granny is before I choose to wave my wand, but as a thinking individual I understand that some such granny must exist. In fact, there are probably many grannies who will die as a result. Would you argue that waving my wand is not a positive change because specific people exist who will be harmed?
I don't think it rules out "others made up all the God stuff over the years". It's perfectly reasonable to take John with a big pinch of salt and believe that Jesus did not claim divinity, and I wouldn't be surprised if Lewis' intended audience included such people.
It's highly debatable whether Jesus believed himself to be divine. There are more than three options, for example Jesus may have simply made a mistake in his own reasoning. It is not as inconceivable as Lewis makes out that Jesus was a lunatic or a liar.
My feeling is that Chomsky, Zizek and Dennett aren't free of being guided by something other than logic for some of their arguments as well. For example, Dennett's arguments against the hard problem of consciousness come across as dogmatic materialism.
Could you expand on that, and perhaps provide an example? I've heard similar claims, and people using the phrase "consciousness explained away". Certainly Dennett is an unashamed materialist. The word "dogmatic" however suggests he holds that position as a matter of faith, which I think is a misrepresentation.
Thank you! I love Mary Midgley and now that you mention it, it makes sense. Of course, there's the Oxford connection, and Midgley was critical of reductionist materialism, though she was no Christian apologist. There are loops within loops here, such as the Anscombe connection to both of them.
Thank you. The name vaguely rings a bell but certainly not someone I know much about.
The natural follow-up question -although probably hard to answer - is whether the existing philosophy faculty includes others like Midgley who have a positive view of Lewis, to the extent that it would influence this decision. I would have expected most of the philosophers there to be in the analytic tradition, but happy to be shown wrong.
Seems at first glance to be the same type slippery eel org as the 'Future of Life Institute'. They seem to have far more in common under the covers than just similar sounding names.
> In January 2023, Bostrom issued an apology for a 1996 email where he had stated that he thought "Blacks are more stupid than whites", and where he also used the word "niggers" in a description of how he thought this statement might be perceived by others. The apology, posted on his website, stated that "the invocation of a racial slur was repulsive" and that he "completely repudiate[d] this disgusting email". In his apology, he wrote “I think it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity.”
Edit: also adding the second paragraph from Wikipedia to avoid accusations of smearing:
> In January 2023, Oxford University told The Daily Beast, "The University and Faculty of Philosophy is currently investigating the matter but condemns in the strongest terms possible the views this particular academic expressed in his communications." In August 2023, the investigation concluded (according to a letter Bostrom posted on his website) that "we do not consider [Bostrom] to be a racist or that [he holds] racist views, and we consider that the apology [he] posted in January 2023 was sincere."
Another member of this institute was effective altruist William MacAskill, who has appeared in media in 2023 in this context: "Sam Bankman-Fried and Will MacAskill weren't just philosophical allies. They were old friends."
> In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.
I'm just speculating, but it stands to reason that the Institute became a PR net negative for Oxford (or this specific Faculty).
This is a smear taken out of context. What Bostrom actually had to say is both accurate and mild:
> “I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking: the more counterintuitive and repugnant a formulation, the more it appeals to me given that it is logically correct,” the quoted excerpt begins. “Take for example the following sentence: Blacks are more stupid than whites. I like that sentence and I think it is true.
“But recently I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that. They would think that I were a ‘racist’: that I _disliked_ black people and thought it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t. It’s just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by ‘smart’ and ‘stupid’. I may be wrong about the facts, but that is what the sentence means for me. For most people, however, the sentence seems to be synonymous with: ‘I hate those bloody n------!!!!”
It also leaves out that the university investigated and came to the seemingly-rare conclusion that the controversial statement didn't indicate that he's a racist.
I wonder if these people ever paused to consider they aren't as smart as they think they are, if they're just figuring out some basics of human communication in their mid 20s that my 8 year old has known for years.
Bostrom has always had the air of knowing he’s phenomenally intelligent and absolutely brilliant and almost certainly the smartest person in any room. Yet his work smacks of grind and storytelling rather than genius.
Your comment lead the poker player in me to watch a few videos of Bostrom speaking, such as his TED talk. He has clearly worked hard to become conversant in these ideas, but I don't detect any original provocative thought.
You seem to be using my post as a mirror for the same.
I really have no idea what your strange dialogue in Simpson's-parody English is about or where it comes from, or the need, from me basically commenting "Nick Bostrom is not a genius".
I also have zero clue what you mean by "[T]he whole “smash the patriarchy” movement might overlook that we actually live in a matriarchy, and this is just what it imperceptibly looks like." I've never written anything like this. I work at Google.
A) You did write it, even if it were a joke. Don't be a liar-pants.
B) It wasn't a joke. You called it "fairly troll-ish". It was thus fairly serious. It is your mind child, such as it is. It's okay if you aren't any good at philosophy or deep thinking.
C) Google doesn't do anything serious in Liverpool.
D) Given we have humble intellect and status, let's try being a bit less pretentious and a bit kinder and more respectful. That way, we can make Hacker News and the world at large a more pleasant place :)
The irony is that you are looking at an example where a guy literally paused to consider how he was not so smart about communication. He also shared it with others who can also lack this skill
> Doesn't sound like someone doing introspection, it sounds more like he is lamenting that the world isn't as "logical" as he is.
There's an autistic elephant in the room. "Why are people so irrational" could be one of the slogans if there was a high functioning autistic persons society
Sure, I don't think anyone was claiming infallibility.
I think it is easy however to romanticize these such errors made in the pursuit of truth.
It can be like the pointing out the fallibility of Galileo Galilei in thinking he wouldn't be held to the inquisition, and made to recant his evidence of heliocentrism.
I tend to agree with this sentiment in general, given the outcome of the misstep.
But I think it is a great poverty of mind and a sad commentary that things cannot be said without risking having their meaning turned inside out and amplified in their grotesquely mutated form by eager syncophants of pseudoreligios thought police.
It really has the smell of 1600s style witch hunts.
High dimensionality, more granular interpretation/models of the world. More conscious/deliberate behaviour, less benefit from neurological canalisation.
I don't think you're seeing ineptitude, I think you're seeing lucidity, sapience.
I mean you have to be fairly dull yourself to be wound up over a mundane 1996 email decades later. I think we should get the pitchforks out for Wikipedia for using the n-word so flippantly. Which happened today in public, and not privately in 1996
Has your 8 yr old really known this for years? He may behave in a conformist way, instinctively, without being able to describe it or understand the phenomenon... both of which are, in my opinion, required to know it.
And who's figuring out whose communication? He basically has to draw a picture in crayon of what he means, just so all the rest of you don't misconstrue his meaning. Your "human communication" is much too defective to be so proud of it.
I assume by "draw a picture in crayon", you mean provide a very simple explanation. You seem to be confusing the fact that children generally draw simple things, and also draw with crayons commonly. But there is nothing about crayons intrinsically that means a crayon drawings must be simple.
Having drawn with crayons, pencils, and pens, I think there is an intrinsic property about crayon drawings that does severely limit their maximum complexity/detail.
If he has to draw a picture in crayon, maybe he must think a little harder with that big head of his about how to say it properly in the first place so it doesn't require a second explanation?
In this case, it's really hard to understand why someone not completely idiotic when it comes to communication would have used the phrase "I like that sentence" after saying "Blacks are more stupid than whites."
The additional context you provide suggests that the smear was taken out of context in order to hide the fact that the smear was in fact covering a skid mark over a shit stain.
Yeah, I don't get how that context makes anything better. All it says to me is Bostrom is trying to claim he's not racist because he knows his racist view will get him called a racist and therefor he's not racist.
The argument doesn't make sense. You don't get to claim your view that black people are inferior to "mankind" isn't racist just because someone calls you a racist
Depends on how you define racism: is it a descriptive (this is a fact about the world that I consider to be true: this group is smart, that group is not) or perceptive (this is what I want to see in the world: this group should be given privileges, that group should not) view? In the email, his own statement is the former, and his assumed definition of racism clearly only relates to the latter.
He said that black people have lower IQ, which is true. You are the one who translated that to "black people are inferior". You are the one who is equating intelligence with superiority. You are projecting this belief onto him. Reasonable people can simultaneously believe two truths: "black people have lower IQ" and "black people are not inferior".
This context makes it worse. I was imagining a bunch of different framings that would make it sound thoughtful, but I've literally heard the same thing from Klansmen in Arkansas. Literally, not figuratively.
That last sentence is a symptom of people thinking that the only important issue is whether they're good people or not. He's saying that saying dogs are stupider than humans is not the same as hating dogs. Who cares what he hates? The question is who he hires, and who he gives the benefit of the doubt to. Not hiring dogs isn't hating dogs either.
I don't understand you position. Are you saying the question of if dogs are stupid is irrelevant, off limits, and if you know the answer it is unethical to say it?
Suppose dogs (your choice) are stupider. How should someone behave?
Most people are not ready to have an honest discussion about the correlation between race and IQ. It sadly gets muddied by various political ministrations. But it seems like a genuine effect that should be studied more. If we truly want equality of opportunity, we must understand what is causing certain races to be on the left side of the normal distribution. Is it nutrition? Social status? Lack of parenting? A combination of these?
Bostrom's only crime there was hoping for an honest, curious, and intellectual discussion.
For example, scientists have honestly looked up the "biology" or "DNA" hypothesis. But this hypothesis is not very strong:
- why a "color-of-the-skin" would be linked to IQ when a "color-of-the-eye" would not?
(and also: why some people are so interested in IQ and color-of-the-skin but are not interested as soon as the genetic factor is something less "visible to the eye"?)
- how could there be IQ disparity based on skin color when the human DNA is so strongly mixed that between two white men and one black man, one of the white can easily be genetically closer to the black than the other white? There is no "DNA of Black Men" group: the DNA of black men is as diverse as the one of the white men and mixes totally with the one of the white men.
- why black men placed on different social situations are scored so differently on IQ when they have very similar DNA (same family or even twins separated at birth)
- why white men placed on different social situations are scored so differently on IQ? If you use white men as a way to predict IQ based on sociological factors, you get a formula that also predict black IQ, so science would say that color-of-the-skin is not the relevant factor here.
There are works about IQ and skin colors for ages now, and the discourse seems to always go backwards with people saying "sure, but let's forget that we know it does not make more sense and try again". This is those people who stop the honest, curious and intellectual discussion.
And I'm pretty sure the first reaction to this would be "it's all lies", because instead of an honest, curious and intellectual discussion, a lot of people who want to have this discussion are in fact more interested of pushing for one particular answer. For different reasons, but I think one of these reasons is the same as why the EA movement was popular despite being so flawed: those people want to think of themselves as very deep and very smart, they want to see "counter intuitive and repugnant" things and stroke their ego by explaining how smart they are for not finding it counter intuitive or repugnant. The problem is that they sometimes just take things that are counter intuitive and incorrect, and they force them into "look at me, I'm smart, it's counter intuitive and yet I dare to consider it".
It's basically what the Bostrom says: he says himself that he is attracted by the idea black people have lower IQ because it is the rebel thing to do. But being the rebel thing to do does not mean that it is scientifically correct or scientifically smart (it can sometimes be, and sometimes not be, you have the same odds throwing a coin). Saying "women are biologically less apt to choose their leaders and therefore it makes sense they don't have the right to vote" or "the position of stars in the sky is affecting our lives based on in which months people were born" are both as "counter intuitive" and "repugnant" as the Black IQ discussion.
Also, it's a bit strange, because in the case of the Black IQ question, the hypothesis of "I see black men failing more often, so I guess they are not as smart", is not counter intuitive at all. It is people who have considered this hypothesis and realised it's simplistic and the truth is more complicated who went further than the basic intuition.
> - why a "color-of-the-skin" would be linked to IQ when a "color-of-the-eye" would not?
To try to steel-man the argument: there is no reason to think, at a long-term global level, there would be any correlation between genes for any particular physical appearance traits and genes for intelligence
However, at the level of a specific nation, during a specific period in its history: that nation may be composed of a small number of major descent groups. It is plausible that group A may have higher frequency of "high IQ genes" than group B, and groups A and B may also differ in their frequency of physical appearance traits genes. And, some of those physical traits may have a marked difference in distribution between A and B, and others a less marked difference. So, in that limited context, a positive correlation between heritable IQ and some-but-not-other physical appearance traits might emerge; however, as we broaden the context, both spatially and temporally, we'd expect that correlation to weaken and then dissipate.
Note I only said "It is plausible that", I'm not saying this is actually true in any particular case. I'm just saying that even if your conclusion is correct, this line of argument you are using to make it is somewhat of a straw-man.
> why some people are so interested in IQ and color-of-the-skin but are not interested as soon as the genetic factor is something less "visible to the eye"?
Because "race/ethnicity" (descent group) and "color-of-the-skin" are not the same thing. Two people from distant parts of the world can have a similar shade of skin but have much more remote shared ancestry. A person will often be genetically much closer to a person from the same country with a markedly different skin shade than they are to someone with a similar skin shade on the other side of the globe. In certain spatiotemporally limited contexts (some countries during some periods of their history), color-of-skin can be a somewhat of a proxy for descent group, to the point that one becomes a metonym for the other, in broader contexts that breaks down.
Also, the claim that descent groups have different distributions of high intelligence genes doesn't necessarily have anything to do with skin colour. For example, it is sometimes claimed (I make no comment on whether it is true) that Askhenazi Jews in Central/Eastern Europe had higher IQ genes than their non-Jewish neighbours did: there was no significant difference in skin colour between the two groups.
> However, at the level of a specific nation, during a specific period in its history: that nation may be composed of a small number of major descent groups. ... and groups A and B may also differ in their frequency of physical appearance traits genes.
That's exactly my argument. Isn't it funny that people interested in the Black IQ question just consider that the only physical appearance worth studying is the color of the skin? Cluster of people with specific genes are super common. It is why your "get my ancestor from my DNA" test is able to tell you that you are X% spanish and Y% danish. But strangely, these people are wondering if a huge group of "black skin" mixing over a full continent and a huge group of "white skin" mixing over a full continent, somehow, is the only main pertinent cluster to separate IQ.
> Because "race/ethnicity" (descent group) and "color-of-the-skin" are not the same thing.
Isn't that exactly my point?
> In certain spatiotemporally limited contexts (some countries during some periods of their history), color-of-skin can be a somewhat of a proxy for descent group, to the point that one becomes a metonym for the other, in broader contexts that breaks down.
My point is that the people interested in the Black IQ question consider that color-of-skin is the best proxy, to the point that they don't even consider that there should be other proxy.
If indeed they were just "asking a scientific question", why are they always asking "what about the skin-color-cluster" and never asking "what about the hair-color-cluster"?
In reality, the reason is simpler: color-of-skin is a clear and popular ingroup / outgroup separator. Some people see black skin people, and they say "they are not like us", and it is a catalyser for the idea that color-of-skin is a good proxy: they like to think that they are different from them, especially if this difference rationalizes their opinions of them or justifies some of their biased conclusions (such as ultimate attribution error between ingroup and outgroup).
> Also, the claim that descent groups have different distributions of high intelligence genes doesn't necessarily have anything to do with skin colour ... Askhenazi Jews ...
That is correct. If the Black IQ question would had only one half of the arguments given in the case of the Akhenazi IQ question, I would give then the benefit of the doubt. I give the benefit of the doubt for the Ashkhenazi IQ question because there are way better arguments: a mechanism that explains why this group is a cluster, parallel factors such as specific genetic diseases, a non naive clustering such as "they look different, so their genes are different", a non naive clustering such as "let's put population thousands of kilometers apart in the same cluster, but suddenly draw the line even for neighboring population", ...
It still smells pretty fishy: why focusing on intelligence and not plenty of other stuffs? And "intelligence" is not even a "core component", it's an emergent property made of hundreds of characteristic: being able to do geometry and being able to do logic is as different as being able to digest milk and being able to run fast. Each of the component have their own advantages and disadvantages in plenty of very specific situations, it is just unrealistic that all the components have been favorised in one cluster and all have been disfavorised in another cluster. Even basic questions are just impossible to answer: is doing something that returns a benefice in the short-term smarter than doing something that returns a bigger benefice in the long-term (surely, whatever your answer is, you can change the factor between the two returns to find a situation where you don't agree with your answer anymore). So, I would give credit to a study that say "this cluster has better capacity for X", with X pretty limited, not obviously hierarchical and not so simplistic as a term like "intelligent".
But again, strangely, people interested in the Black IQ question are not really interested in the Askhenazi IQ question, and they scream at the "cancel of the science" when people consider rightly the Black IQ question to be pseudoscience, but don't care about how the Askhenazi IQ question is treated (unless they can instrumentalise it for their own purpose).
> Isn't it funny that people interested in the Black IQ question just consider that the only physical appearance worth studying is the color of the skin?
"Black" isn't a proper descent group, it is a term applied to everyone from American Descendants of Slavery to Indigenous Australians to Melanesians to umpteen different distantly related groups in Africa (a continent with massive internal genetic diversity). There is no meaningful question to ask about "Black IQ"
> In reality, the reason is simpler: color-of-skin is a clear and popular ingroup / outgroup separator. Some people see black skin people, and they say "they are not like us", and it is a catalyser for the idea that color-of-skin is a good proxy: they like to think that they are different from them, especially if this difference rationalizes their opinions of them or justifies some of their biased conclusions (such as ultimate attribution error between ingroup and outgroup).
Is that actually what happened though? Imagine a parallel universe which is uncannily like this one, except for the fact that Europeans and Africans happened to have largely similar skin colours (it doesn't matter whether we suppose they be equally dark or equally pale or equally blue-green). Would that have resulted in European-Americans treating African-American descendants of slaves equally? Or would they have still been oppressed about as much, and if some other physically visible marker could have been found to distinguish them, discrimination would have been based on that instead?
> But again, strangely, people interested in the Black IQ question are not really interested in the Askhenazi IQ question
I think human genetic diversity and the heritability of intelligence is an interesting topic–albeit one about which our knowledge is (at least at present) greatly outweighed by our ignorance. But my impression is a lot of people want to approach that topic primarily through the lens of contemporary and historical inter-group dynamics within one specific country: a lens which adds more heat than light, and as someone who has lived their whole life on the other side of the planet, looks like just excessively focusing on just one question and ignoring a hundred others like it
> There is no meaningful question to ask about "Black IQ"
Yep, exactly my point.
> Is that actually what happened though?
I'm not saying that you can only consider a group as a outgroup if they have different skin color. What I'm saying is that foreigners (whatever skin color they have) are considered as a outgroup, and then, people associate easy characteristics of these outgroup as "being foreigner". This is for example why black-skin people who live in white-skin-dominated countries for generations are still strongly associated as being "foreigner" even if they are less foreigner than the white-skin person who was born 500 kilometers away and grew up in a totally different culture.
And this is why people are so interested in Black IQ, not because they are interested in science, but because they are interested in easy ways to confirm or rationalize their prejudice on people they associate with their outgroup.
> I think human genetic diversity and the heritability of intelligence is an interesting topic
It is. But it is very very strange that people who, according to them, are just "interested in the subject" are focalising in the most useless and stupid approach of it. I cannot find the quote, I think it was from Gould, saying that genetic of intelligence is an interesting topic but people who are approaching it with this particular aspect are not contributing anything to science.
> But my impression is a lot of people want to approach that topic primarily through the lens of contemporary and historical inter-group dynamics within one specific country
Yes, I agree with that: what you call "the lens of contemporary and historical inter-group dynamics within one specific country" is what I call "confirming or rationalizing their prejudice on people they associate with their outgroup".
> What I'm saying is that foreigners (whatever skin color they have) are considered as a outgroup, and then, people associate easy characteristics of these outgroup as "being foreigner". This is for example why black-skin people who live in white-skin-dominated countries for generations are still strongly associated as being "foreigner" even if they are less foreigner than the white-skin person who was born 500 kilometers away and grew up in a totally different culture.
I'm not sure it actually works that way though. My impression as an outsider observer: many people from southern India have skin as dark as many African-Americans do, but if they immigrate to the US, while it wouldn't be true to say that none of them ever experience any discrimination and prejudice, on the whole it is at a significantly lower level than what African-Americans experience. A lot of the problems the African-American community experiences are arguably due to history (slavery, Jim Crow, etc) rather than skin colour in itself, which is why many immigrants with equally dark skin don't experience the same degree of difficulties, and find a much smoother path to integration with the American mainstream.
We are saying the same thing. I'm saying that someone is a foreigner _not because of the color of the skin_, but because they are identified, in a way or another, as a foreigner, and put in one or more of the outgroup.
The whole Black IQ question is focusing on the skin color not because the skin color in itself is relevant, but because the Black IQ question wants to focus on foreigner and that the skin color is an easy way to do that without admitting it. And it is 100% consistent with what you say: in the Black IQ question, what the people who give credit to this theory refer to when they say "black" is NOT including southern Indians with equally dark skin. It is the proof that it is not about skin color, but about racist prejudice against African-Americans.
Then, yes, of course, there are several outgroups, and racism applies differently depending on the circumstances. There is obviously an entanglement between past history and recent history, but I don't understand what you are trying to come to? That the Black IQ question is because some people hate some people while these people are being totally neutral on the skin color? So why is the Black IQ question regrouping people based on the skin color as a proxy for a specific outgroup?
For the element where I say that some black-skin people integrated for generation are still way too often classified as foreigner, this is not contradictory to anything you are saying, and I doubt you can just say it's incorrect based only on few examples, as I have few examples where it is the case (the same way you cannot say "it is not correct that some cats are white because I can give you examples of non-white cats": as soon as I've observed white cats, my sentence is validated, and the fact you haven't seen any does not change that. If it exists some black-skin individual integrated for generation that are seen as foreigners, then it means that what I'm saying is correct)
TL;DR:
People are not racist against some other people fundamentally because they have a different skin color (this would be a very ridiculous assertion). They are racist towards them because they are identified as an outgroup. Then, the skin color is used as one of the proxy to classify other people in this outgroup (and other characteristics can invalidate this classification even if the skin is dark, this is why black-skinned Indians or very tanned white people are not often classified as black).
The philosopher David Thorstad keeps a blog with critiques of EA and related ideas. His writing strikes me as fairly patient and in good faith. (Or at least, it's more measured than some of my own comments on this thread!)
He wrote this good dissection of the Bostrom email controversy, and why the apology doesn't cut it:
That said -- it did happen way back in the 90's. There has to be a place for forgiveness, even for imperfect people offering imperfect apologies. My sense is that there's plenty of other things to criticize that are more recent and more central to this general school of thought.
I suppose we could also say IQ highly correlates with social ineptitude. Who could've known people wouldn't like you if you made repugnant statements... surely not 'smart' people!
Being socially ept requires high intelligence. However people that deeply apply their brains to social situations are often unrecognised as being bright in wider society. Although they may well be highly rewarded. And I suspect the very skilled often hide their skill because it's a hidden weapon in political or business negotiations. It is really hard to see applied IQ and you need to be very trusted for someone to explain their thinking: plus you need to be EQ smart to spot others that are EQ smart (and the +ve side of Dunning-Kruger causes problems too).
I think you are alluding to the stereotype of social ineptitude of geeks or academics. Personally I have found that focusing your IQ too tightly into one narrow discipline is not that smart. Really smart geeks seem to also be highly socially capable: IQ is general intelligence. Some of the smartest people I know left school at 15: you won't have highly academic discussions with them because it usually doesn't interest them but their raw IQ shows up in a bunch of other unobvious ways.
Disclaimer: I'm a geeky slow learner - a redundant disclaimer given I'm making comments on HN.
Edit: given we are on HN, here's a good example of Paul Graham deeply recognising someone as smart and socially epter than himself: https://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html
Bostrom's original statement was not remotely accurate or mild. The statement, "Take for example the following sentence: Blacks are more stupid than whites. I like that sentence and I think it is true." -- is a classic example of racism. It is racist to the core. Not only that, Bostrom knew at the time racism like that would make things more difficult for him and he was correct. Sometimes cancel culture is deserved. At least he eventually apologized for it.
Every time race comes up on HackerNews i am shocked at how horrifyingly racist (some) users of this site are. Not only did a user somehow think that this context would exonerate this very racist man, both you and I are getting immediately downvoted for disagreeing. There was a post last week or so that was so full of racist comments it just got taken down. I wonder what on earth brings together HackerNews and racism like this.
Some words of wisdom passed on to me from a very knowledgeable person who was in turn given this knowledge when starting their career.
"This organization (group of people) represents a random sample of the population. Traits that occur within individuals in the population will therefore occur within some individuals in this organization (group of people.)"
You know, topics like this are not always black and white. There is a full-range, nuance and discussion.
I'd also wager that the downvotes here are because this flame-bait kind of comments are not appropriate for HN, or if they are appropriate then some might not think it's contributing to the discussion anyways.
Me, I think the refusal by some to admit (or accept) that the full-context post adds to the discussion and to instead double-down and cry more racism is definitely not constructive.
I'm honestly getting tired of these "race card" low-blows and one-sided thinking shutting down conversation.
> I'd also wager that the downvotes here are because this flame-bait kind of comments are not appropriate for HN, or if they are appropriate then some might not think it's contributing to the discussion anyways.
It's odd to me that calling racism racism when a parent called it not racism is either non-contributing or inflamatory. Seems to me it is warranted.
"That's racist; cancel them!" falls in the latter category. It's the mindless baying of the rabble. You don't engage with the rabble, as there's no fixing stupid. You just hope they shut up, so that you and the other adults can think, and you hope that the rabble burns down someone else's house.
Analogously, there's not much to be gained from engaging with someone shouting "Allahu Akbar; death to infidels!" That's drone purview.
This could equally be applied to statements like 'blacks are more stupid than whites'. Rather than anyone calling for Bostrom to be cancelled, most of the people posting here just wonder how a clever and academically successful person like Bostrom could have been oblivious to the factual and historical problems of such a broad generalization. One could equally wonder why he picked a racial trope as his controversial example, as opposed to challenging the conventional wisdom on nuclear weapons, or economics, or the superiority of rugby to association football, or the correct pronunciation of 'gif'.
But the author himself says that his sentence is repugnant.
Are you saying that the author has no rational to say that?
It really looks like nowadays we cannot say "that looks racist" without being accused of being the big satan that want to cancel everyone. If this kind of "ad-hominem" is not itself not without any rational and not noisy and inflammatory, I don't know what is.
You can, if you want, defend that according to you this statement was fine and not racist. But you don't do just that, you also say that people who don't agree with you merit to be down-voted and that the forum would be better if their voice was not even there. Difficult to not see there exactly a justification of a "cancelation" of an opinion you just don't like.
> Are you saying that the author has no rational to say that?
Sure, instrumental rationale: PR.
And, because I believe that Bostrom says what he means, Bostrom probably does think what he said was repugnant, but probably not in a way that you would find satisfying. Bostrom probably thinks that speaking truthfully about vulnerable people, in a manner that could distress them (e.g. owing to their misunderstanding of the truthful words, or in a "truth hurts" sort of way), is morally repugnant. Better to spare them suffering. If I am correct, I disagree with Bostrom. Having to cater to delicate and low-IQ sensibilities is a wrench in the wheels of intellectual discourse, as well as a dystopian blow to personal expression. Don't let the scolds win.
> It really looks like nowadays we cannot say "that looks racist"
You don't have a license to denigration. Think very carefully, and consider the possibility that you are wrong, before you cast stones.
> You can, if you want, defend that according to you this statement was fine and not racist.
But what I quoted contained my rationale? If it ain't good enough for you, the impetus is on you to prove that Bostrom is, in fact, a witch. The ball is in your court.
> Difficult to not see there exactly a "cancelation" of an opinion you just don't like.
Any opinion at all, and especially opinions that differ from my own, I'd welcome at the table, as long as said opinion is articulated and epistemically rationalized by someone who is smart and who has given it careful thought. If you're not capable of that, then yes, your silence would improve the forum.
A statement that Race X is "more stupid" than Race Y is almost tautologically racist.
The idea that Nick denigrating an entire race as 'stupid' is "accurate and mild", whereas any suggestion that the statement contains racism requires a "license to denigrate" is truly through the looking glass...
He's not saying the race is stupid. He is saying that it is more stupid, an operant he expounds on, revealing his underlying meaning as both accurate and mild. A factual statement is not and is never denigration.
If you and you specifically were the sole member of a race, for instance, his operant would rank your race below that of Black. This would be an observation, not a denigration.
But, if you are not Black, you are the recipient of favorable averaging. Your race would be less stupid than Black, despite you.
> He's not saying the race is stupid. He is saying that it is more stupid
I think the fact that you're reduced to asserting that it's logically possible to assert that a group is "more stupid" without asserting that they are in any way stupid pretty neatly demonstrates my point about comparisons between races with disparaging adjectives being almost tautologically racist.
(The second half of your post is even more pointless to engage with. :)
Yup. Like are we moving the goalposts as to what racism is. I'm not sure how you could come up with a statement which is more unequivocally racist.
It really is telling that somehow none of these people that care about reasonable debate are criticising the guy saying that implying some racists are stupider than others is "accurate and mild". Apparently, him saying that is fine. But ever suggesting anything is racist is not.
Clearly, the only logical conclusion here is that nobody is allowed to call anything racist. This sounds like something you would only try and enforce if you are invested in more rampant racism.
Who is saying that Bostrom is racist because his vibe was off?
The fact is that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery just because he wanted to be cool and rebel. I personally don't think Bostrom is "racist", more that he is an idiot with edgelord tendencies (and I think this alone justifies to not consider him for intellectual jobs: in a similar way, it is sometimes funny how some people are arguing that they are not racist or sexist, they just are a dick to other people regardless of their skin color or gender, as if it does not mean that society would be better without them too)
>The fact is that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery
The measured IQ difference between races is not science quackery. It's a fact accepted by most who seriously study the issue. For example, the American Psychological Association issued a review of the evidence and concluded there is a Black-White IQ testing gap[1]:
> The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socioeconomic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential.
So the question remains, do facts have any place at all in this debate, or is it just vibes? Presumably stating a fact in and of itself cannot reasonably be construed as evidence of racism. And so what is left is to condemn Bostrom for his vibe.
I read the area that talks about race. 1. This only mentions African americans, who are mixed West Africans and are a tiny portion of the black race. 2. It specifically says that black people's scores on tests have improved since the 1970s. Around the time they got civil rights. So this is to do with poverty and systemic oppression (the combination of these, and cultural impacts of these, not JUST socioeconomic factors), not race. The statement "blacks are stupider than whites" is very different to "African Americans do worse in tests due the legacy of systemic racism". This is why Bostrom updated his comments to say exactly that.
I mean, you're extrapolating much more than the evidence warrants. Everyone on all sides of this debate believe environment has some significant role in measured IQ. So the fact that the IQ gap has reduced since African American's material condition has improved does not imply the entire gap is due to environmental influences.
You're also changing the subject. The issue is whether the widely accepted Black-White IQ gap exculpates Bostrom of the charge of racism. The question of the source of the IQ gap is a separate issue. Whether that source turns out to be fully environmental or only partially is a separate concern.
As I've said, I don't consider Bostrom as a racist, I consider him as an idiot because he felt for the first scientific quackery that sounds edgy.
Even in 1996, it was obvious that "Blacks are less smart than Whites" is incredibly scientifically stupid, the same way that saying not long ago "LK-99 superconductor is a game changer, and people who are skeptics are wrong". In 1996, it was clear for anyone who look more than 10 minutes that the situation was way muddier than Bostrom realised, and that Bostrom is as stupid as the idiots who jumped on the LK-99 superconductor craze without waiting for more info.
Dunno why i can't reply to your reply, but I pointed out earlier than West African immigrants (sharing West African ancestry with AAs) are some of the most successful immigrant families in the US. Others have tried to debunk this for me saying only the best emigrate to the US. Okay, well why is this the same case in the UK where all black people are immigrants? Caribbean immigrant families have worse outcomes than Nigerian immigrant families. So it's not genetic. It's about transatlantic slavery, the legacy of oppression that that has had, and the cultural distrust of the system that thrives amongst these people in the wake of such systemic oppression.
There's a timeout between when the comment is first posted and when the reply button is visible.
>Others have tried to debunk this for me saying only the best emigrate to the US.
It's not about the US specifically, but about some avenues for immigration costing significant money, time, educational attainment, etc. I don't know much about the UK immigration system, but probably Black immigrants to the UK are similarly selected to be higher IQ than average. It's not like they can just walk across the border.
>Caribbean immigrant families have worse outcomes than Nigerian immigrant families.
You can't just naively compare two very different political situations and social contexts and expect them to be equal on all relevant traits. What political systems in place may make it easier for a Caribbean family to immigrate to the UK compared to Nigerians? Who knows, but these are relevant facts that you can't just assume are identical or irrelevant. These things need to be studied carefully if they are to be taken as conclusive evidence.
I agree there's more to be examined if we want a good picture. There's still no proven correlation between race and intelligence here. And that is all I'm arguing. Saying "blacks are stupider than whites" is a statement that is lazy to the point of being racist. It is definitely not "accurate and mild".
> There's still no proven correlation between race and intelligence here.
If you take race as just a grouping trait for a collection of individuals, then this is just plainly false. Black/White as a grouping trait does in fact correlate with measured average IQ differences. This result is not in doubt. If you're taking race as some abstract ideal then there is no evidence that the abstract concept of race correlates with IQ scores. But this just changes the subject.
>Saying "blacks are stupider than whites" is a statement that is lazy to the point of being racist. It is definitely not "accurate and mild".
If the argument is that he didn't take sufficient care and sensitivity to an issue he knew or should have known is highly inflammatory, then you should just say that. But this just sounds like a vibe check to me. Which is fair, but at least be honest about it.
This is what is called a spurious correlation, and it is wildly considered as a scientific mistake to call it simply "a correlation", because either the person that talks about correlation has made a mistake by not checking if it's spurious or not, or the person that talks about correlation is intellectually dishonest.
It's like saying that black skin and lion attacks are correlated: while it is true that the correlation coefficient shows a number that correspond to a correlation, proper scientists don't do that, because it is not the skin color that is intrinsically correlated with the lion attacks, but the fact that lions and victims are both present in some specific regions. It is just bad science, or even pseudo-science, to call it "correlated", because you have done half the work and stop before the end. It's a bit like providing a result without the uncertainty bands when those uncertainty bands indicate we haven't reached statistical significance: it's bad science and it is not accepted for publication.
I guess you know it, but just in case: the stupid graph where you see a growing line between skin color and IQ is because the samples are not corrected for socio-economical status, which is itself clearly correlated with IQ. It's like taking blue-eyed people who are poor and stop their education early and brown-eyed people who have been to uni and then looking at the IQ.
Additionally, the stupid naive line is not the only method to check if it is genetic. You can also compare IQ score of twins separated at birth or look at the genome of the cluster that you pretend is "genetically less intelligent" and see if in this cluster there is less variance than in any other groups. In both case, the conclusion is that the IQ score appears to not be correlated to a specific genome. So via this approach, the conclusion is that "we cannot conclude it is correlated" because there is no mechanism to explain it and it can be spurious or a fluctuation.
Thank you for talking sense very well. It very suspicious and disingenous that people seem to want to double down on the loose idea that there may be causation here when it would be ridiculous to do so in any other scientific context. It's blatantly racism and/or, as you said, simply falling for some very inaccurate and dangerous rhetoric by people with a racist agenda.
Did you even read the article you point to? It looks like you just cherry picked a sentence that says what you want to hear.
The passage that you highlight does not say that there is a gap not explained by socio-economical status, it says "it is not ONLY socio-economical". It does not say there is no biases in the the test construction, it says "there is no OBVIOUS biases". And it ends up with "At present, no one knows". It was in 1996. Since then, more studies have been done, based on a black people sample that sees its socio-economical status evolving, and the picture became clearer, showing that what the authors did not know in 1996 are now understood, and it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status.
So, yes, in 1996, believing in "Whites are smarter than Blacks" was quackery, the same way that few months ago, falling for the LK-99 superconductor craze was falling for quackery: you had to be an idiot to not notice you cannot jump to conclusion. The article you quote here is saying exactly that: you cannot reliably say "Whites are smarter than Blacks", because we don't know why we see a gap, it can be a simple statistical fluctuation or a spurious correlation that we haven't discovered yet. It is explicitly said in the article conclusion: "In a field where so many issues are unresolved and so many questions unanswered, the confident tone that has characterized most of the debate on these topics is
clearly out of place". They say that Bostrom confident tone that Whites are smarter than Blacks is clearly out of place.
> It looks like you just cherry picked a sentence that says what you want to hear.
I cherry-picked a sentence from the summary section for the sake of providing a representative statement of the content of the article relevant to the discussion. There's nothing bad form about that. Nothing you say undermines the relevance of the point or somehow minimizes it.
>and the picture became clearer, showing that what the authors did not know in 1996 are now understood, and it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status.
Feel free to provide the studies that demonstrate this.
> I cherry-picked a sentence from the summary section for the sake of providing a representative statement of the content of the article relevant to the discussion.
"cherry picking" is a term used to talk about picking the "nice" context and not picking the "not nice" context, and therefore depicting the situation in a misleading way. The article that you quote was a reaction from the APA to the Black IQ controversies and is widely viewed as the APA taking the position that saying "Whites are smarter than Blacks" as not supported by APA. It is what someone understand when they read the full conclusions (other interpretations do not make sense).
> Feel free to provide the studies that demonstrate this.
It's very easy to find them. The fact that you are not aware of these shows that you are not very aware of the state of the art in the subject.
But for example:
Kaplan, Jonathan Michael (January 2015). "Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called "X"-factors: environments, racism, and the "hereditarian hypothesis"".
Birney, Ewan; Raff, Jennifer; Rutherford, Adam; Scally, Aylwyn (24 October 2019). "Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer"
Dickens, William T.; Flynn, James R. (2006). "Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples"
Nisbett, Richard E.; Aronson, Joshua; Blair, Clancy; Dickens, William; Flynn, James; Halpern, Diane F.; Turkheimer, Eric (2012). "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin"
>is widely viewed as the APA taking the position that saying "Whites are smarter than Blacks" as not supported by APA.
The thing is, I never claimed otherwise. My claim was very specific, and I used the APA review as a citation of that specific point. Namely, that the measured Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science but is accepted by most people who study the issue.
>It's very easy to find them. The fact that you are not aware of these shows that you are not very aware of the state of the art in the subject.
Usually people's claims overstep the actual evidence in their claimed citations. The gambit is that their interlocutor won't look or won't understand what they're reading if they did. Your citations are a case-in-point.
The first one is not about IQ at all, but about the changes in household wealth due to the Great Recession.
The fourth one is a commentary piece that doesn't explicitly defend the point of contention.
The second piece's title looks like commentary, so I didn't bother with it.
The third one defends the claim that the Black-White gap has reduced by 5 points, which is at least somewhat relevant, but doesn't at all defend your claim that the Black-White IQ gap has been demonstrated to be fully explained by bias and socioeconomic status.
> Namely, that the measured Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science but is accepted by most people who study the issue.
I have said that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery.
You answered saying that it is not, explaining that the Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science and therefore, all that remains is vibe.
Except that the science quackery is not "just observing that in data we see a difference while not correcting" (this is just facts and indeed people agree with that), the science quackery is to conclude garbage from this observation.
> Your citations are a case-in-point.
What a surprise. Of course you will say "no! no! it's not true! I don't believe articles that say what I don't want to believe".
> The first one is not about IQ at all, but about the changes in household wealth due to the Great Recession.
Are you stupid? The APA paper says "right now, socio-economic data is not enough to explain it", I've said "things have changed since then, for example look at this paper that shows that socio-economic data is now enough to explain it", and you answer "it does not mention IQ"?
> The fourth one is a commentary piece that doesn't explicitly defend the point of contention.
Are you stupid? The APA paper says "right now, socio-economic data is not enough to explain it", I've said "things have changed since then, for example look at this piece of commentary where very established experts explicitly explain that socio-economic data is now enough to explain it", and you answer "it does not mention IQ"?
> The second piece's title looks like commentary, so I didn't bother with it.
Of course you did not, every excuse is good for you to deny the facts. Commentaries are a valid way to communicate scientific results, it is ridiculous to say "the scientists have said their conclusions are X or Y, but I still maintain it is not because they said it on a pink piece of paper instead of green".
> The third one defends the claim that the Black-White gap has reduced by 5 points, which is at least somewhat relevant, but doesn't at all defend your claim that the Black-White IQ gap has been demonstrated to be fully explained by bias and socioeconomic status.
Are you stupid? You asked me to demonstrate that the picture became clearer, this article explicitly says that between 1996 and now, people have observed an evolution that makes thing clearer. And now you also take ONE of the few article, the one focusing on this aspect, and pretend that it invalidates everything because it does not focus on the other aspect. That's typical of discussion with pseudoscience partisan: you say "X and Y", you gave them 2 articles, one demonstrating X, one demonstrating Y, and they will say "invalid: the first one does not demonstrate Y, the second one does not demonstrate X". (and I know, "no, it's not true, none of these articles exist, I deny it". Whatever)
Tell me, in a theoretical parallel world where indeed my sentence is correct (it is correct in this world, but let's make the thought experiment where we agree it is correct), what should I provide to you that you will not reject for one reason or another? I'm sure you like to think of yourself very generously, but the reality is that in this parallel world, you will behave exactly like here: nothing will never be perfect enough to you, you will still believe you're right no matter what your interlocutor is bringing.
Anyway, I think I've made my point, no? You were saying that Bostrom is just "racist because his vibe is off", and by your own admission (you agree the APA article is saying "Whites are smarter than Blacks" is stupid), we know agree it's ridiculous to pretend it is "just because of his vibe". Since then, you several time been intellectually dishonest. At the end, it just reenforces my impression that Bostrom is just an idiot that indeed have fallen for science quackery and have said racist stuffs because his played edgelord. Because if it was not the case, it is very strange that people who defend him are all exactly at the same level.
Honestly the fact that this guy ever suggested that our argument here was that "Bostrom's vibe was off" was already such a bad faith argument that I'm not surprised he is unwilling to engage with studies you have suggested. Sounds like he wants to think he is being persecuted by the "woke mob" rather than encountering people soberly debunking racial bias that has no scientific basis.
>You answered saying that it is not, explaining that the Black-White IQ gap is not crackpot science and therefore, all that remains is vibe.
That's not the argument I made. Are you allergic to nuance? Are you incapable of giving a charitable take of your interlocutors position? This is the problem with these discussions, the blatant dishonesty being deployed in service to one's position.
>Except that the science quackery is not "just observing that in data we see a difference while not correcting" (this is just facts and indeed people agree with that)
This is the only observation my argument needs, and is the only thing I ever claimed in this entire discussion. The issue is whether the widely accepted Black-White IQ testing gap exculpates Bostrom of the charge of racism. The additional context and the deeper question of the cause of the gap doesn't change the fact of the measurement gap and potentially doesn't change the exculpatory nature of it. If you disagree, your responses should address this disagreement.
You already said you didn't think Bostrom was racist for the statement, so apparently your purpose in this discussion was different. But note that you did interject into a discussion that was explicitly about the claim itself being "almost tautologically racist".
>You asked me to demonstrate that the picture became clearer
Blatantly dishonest. The full quote of yours I responded to is "and the picture became clearer, showing that what the authors did not know in 1996 are now understood, and it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status". If you honestly took from that quote that I asked how the picture became clearer, then you are the stupid one in this exchange. I don't actually think you are stupid, which just leaves dishonesty.
Your specific claim "it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status" is plainly not at all demonstrated by the articles you linked. They potentially could support a relevant premise in such an argument, but they do not in themselves make the argument. If you make a specific and contentious claim in a dispute, you should give direct support for the claim. Trying to pass off tangentially related pieces of information as supporting the claim is pure dishonesty.
>Are you stupid?
No, but you are clearly a dishonest interlocutor.
>what should I provide to you that you will not reject for one reason or another?
The claim you made is that the Black-White gap is known to be mainly (i.e. mostly) a result of bias and socioeconomic status differences. A legitimate demonstration of this will start with an analysis of test results where the gap "mostly" disappears once the claimed bias and socioeconomic differences are controlled for. I say start with because we also know that IQ and socioeconomic status correlate, and so controlling for a correlating variable is just controlling for differences in the target property. In other words, controlling for IQ differences eliminates IQ differences. So much care needs to be taken when controlling for socioeconomic status and drawing conclusions about IQ differences. But I am very interested in engaging with attempts at such controls.
The problem with these debates is that the position that is moral-coded gets to shovel any and all bullshit in favor of it and are rarely called out for it. Those that call it out are branded as moral degenerates. There is no honest evaluation of the evidence. There is no chance of changing an opposing person's mind. Each side is just further entrenched and leaves the debate feeling like they won. And the world is worse off for the interaction. It's insidious.
Are you really unable to understand that "whites are smarter than blacks" and "we observe a statistical discrepancies in the observed IQ" is not the same?
Let me take plenty of examples, applicable or not to the specific observation we talk about, where we see exactly this observation and yet the conclusion X is smarter is just stupid.
Take 2 groups of people, put one group of people in a torture chamber without food and sleep for 48h, then give the IQ tests to both. Do you really think the tortured group is less smart than the other?
Take 2 groups of people, put one group in a class room and teach them for 2 years Japanese, then give a Japanese tests to both. Do you really think the other group is less able to learn language?
Take 2 groups of people, pass the IQ tests to both, then if the first group does not score significantly better than the second, redo the test over and over until you have a statistical fluctuation such that the first group does score significantly better (at 3-sigma confidence level, it should happen on average 1 time over 100). Do you really think the second group is less smart than the first group (despite that it does significantly better than the first group in some discarded cases)?
Take 2 groups of people, pass for the two of them 100 questions. Then take the 10 questions where the first group done the best and the second done the worst and call these 10 questions "IQ test". Do you really think the second group is less smart than the first group?
In all of these examples, the observation is there, and yet, it is incorrect to say that one group is smarter than the other. Some of these situations are even really similar to what people today consider as the reason why we see a discrepancy in the Black IQ question. For example, the socio-economical status says that 2 persons who are equally intelligent will not score the same IQ score if one of the two had access to some education that the other did not. In fact, you may even say that someone who manage to score 15/20 in a uni science test without having been to secondary school is definitively smarter than someone who score 17/20 but needed years of training and several attempts of the exam to reach this score: the second is definitively slower at understanding physics.
> But note that you did interject into a discussion that was explicitly about the claim itself being "almost tautologically racist".
But I agree with that: the claim itself is almost tautologically racist. I think Bostrom said a racist thing not because he is racist, but because he is an idiot and did not even realize his simplistic conclusion was wrong.
To take again an example I've given previously: the fake videos surrounding LK-99 were fake, make by scammers who cheated. Some people who were overexcited about LK-99 gave credit and supported these videos. These videos and their authors ARE FAKE AND SCAMMER, "almost tautologically". But some supporters of the LK-99 craze did not manipulate videos themselves, they did not create fakes. It is not because these people shared videos they did not realise were fake that the videos themselves are suddenly not fake. Same here: Bostrom said racist things, and it is not because Bostrom had no true racist intent (or at least I give him the benefice of the doubt) that the thing is suddenly not racist.
> Your specific claim "it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status" is plainly not at all demonstrated by the articles you linked
Sure ... whatever. There is literally one article titled "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin", but, yeah, I'm sure it does not say that at all. If you read the article, they are referencing numerous other studies that show (in short, not literally) the fitted curve between socio-economical status and IQ test score by comparing IQ test score for the same population before and after socio-econimical status progress. They argue that this curve fits perfectly to explain the gap. What they call "environmental factors" are access to education, economic gain, ... so it is indeed what is referred to as socio-economic status in the previous discussion.
> where the gap "mostly" disappears once the claimed bias and socioeconomic differences are controlled for
There is an article literally titled "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin". This is literally what this article does: it shows that if you control for environmental factor and don't use biased samples, the gap mostly disappears.
> The problem with these debates is that the position that is moral-coded gets to shovel any and all bullshit in favor of it and are rarely called out for it. Those that call it out are branded as moral degenerates.
This is clearly not my case, I never in this discussion mentioned "moral" or whatever. This shows your true color: you are really thinking that someone who does not agree with you can only be an idealist acting to defend some moral. My position is simple: science articles show that if you correct for environmental factors, the gap disappear. I don't care about moral or whatever. If the studies were saying the opposite, I would defend the opposite. The reason I don't defend the opposite is just because the opposite is not the reality, the opposite is not confirmed by science. But it is very telling that your only way to manage your cognitive dissonance when confronted with someone that does agree with you is to invent a crazy explanation in your mind: surely this person is a hippy (or whatever you want to call it, I don't care) that don't want to accept the facts for some moral reason.
> Each side is just further entrenched and leaves the debate feeling like they won. And the world is worse off for the interaction. It's insidious.
Not really though: the facts don't change. It does not matter if I'm right or if I'm wrong, or if you're right or if you're wrong, the facts prevail and scientists will be guided by facts. Nowadays, scientists are guided by facts, this is why people who says "whites are smarter than blacks" are slowly discarded of scientific position. And you and I under our "people on HN" avatars, we don't matter: it does not matter that you don't believe me, because scientists don't care about you. And I'm sure you are saying "but scientists are now all woke lefties or too afraid to talk because academia has been taken over by the PC police". Whatever make you feel better to deny that facts are just prevailing and that, bad luck, the facts are not saying what you would have preferred to hear.
There is no "2 sides". There is in one side, facts and science, that will continue whatever you choose to believe, and then there is irrelevant person on the internet as you and me, and amongst this group, there are the idiots that are screaming that academia is controlled by lefties or PC police because they don't follow their believes when facts say otherwise.
You are pretending that you are welcoming any opinion, especially opinions that differ from your own. Yet, you were very quick to invent unfunded hypotheses to cast opinions different from yours as "not smart and therefore discardable".
Your "PR" hypothesis or "cater to delicate and low-IQ sensibilities" falls flat as the author has demonstrated before and after that he does not want to play in this PR game. It's exactly the point he is making in the first statements and the point he is making in his excuse: "I do think that provocative communication styles have a place". He also explains that he apologized 24h after having sent that message, when he had no idea that he will need one day some kind of PR considerations, and at a time when he was not even pressured to make any kind of apologies.
So, no, I call bullshit: he is giving the proof, himself, by explaining that, 24h after having said that, he properly realised his words went further than his thoughts. Without any need for PR, without even any pressure pushing him to do so. (and again, if it is a lie, it's a stupid one, as someone can check, and a totally useless one, because it does not need to invent that if he just want to do some PR clean-up)
The funny part is that I think the quote is indeed racist but the guy is not, he is just one of these edgelords who want to provoke to feel themselves smart (based on what he himself says when he explains that he is biased towards provocative ideas). But now you are yourself painting him as a smart guy for defending something that himself explained is in fact not smart and not his opinion at all. It feels like some silence would have improved the forum and also avoided some people to look pretty stupid ...
Your conflation of responding "yes it is," when someone claims something is not racist when it clearly is with "that's racist, cancel them!" seems disingenuous. As disingenuous as conflating it to "Allahu Akbar; death to infidels". Correctly identifying a statement as racist when someone else said it wasn't is about as polar opposite as you can get to "death to infidels!" Do you see them as equivalent?
I'm not sure what you think about my comments is flame bait. I'm having a discussion about whether or not these comments are racist, since someone brought them up.
This is not pulling out the "race card". I made absolutely no "low-blows". Stating that calling black people lower IQ than whites is very much racist is not an unreasonable thing to say. I have no problem with anyone bringing up context. I just think implying that anything about the statement is "accurate" is racist. I'm not sure what is so contraversial about stating that saying white people are inherently smarter than other races is a white supremacist talking point.
And its not just me, anyone saying absolutely anything in support of the idea that what this guy said was bad is being downvoted. No matter how restrained their comment.
I would also much rather people replied to me rather than just downvote. That would be a discussion.
It isn't a smear. His qualifying remarks indicate that he's either too stupid, arrogant, or bigoted to understand or care how context works, and thus has no business running a hot dog stand, much less an institute. Even disregarding that, publicly revealing his thoughts and framing them in such a fashion shows he has no common sense.
An academic would need to be incredibly stupid to think that that's a good thing to say in writing or out loud. The idea that you can "just" say these things is almost entirely the purview of people who coincidentally just so happen to not say or refer to all of the contextual and explicative ideas around them, making pointing to IQ without them essentially meaningless at best and racist at worst.
It's also not really "accurate or mild", as Bostrom himself stated in his apology for the email that:
> I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
How is this "both accurate and mild?" If anything, it makes Bostrom seem even more racist, harkening back to the 20th century notion of scientific racism, which, regardless of whether you put a pseudoscientific spin on it, is still racism.
Thats.... still racist? Why does he think black people have a lower IQ? Nigerian immigrants to the US are some of the most successful immigrants. Like... black people just do not have lower IQs and to say so is considered very dangerous rhetoric for a reason. The reason we even have pervasive belief that black people are stupider is because it was convenient rhetoric for the colonial powers pillaging Africa and treating black people as subhuman cattle. It's not a claim based on fact, nor is it a benign thing to say.
...IQ tests are also wildly flawed measures of intelligence anyway, but let's not even get into that.
It of course depends on how you cut and slice it, and also on the categorisation of black - but we are talking about approximately 2-3 billion people there if we include India, Indonesia, Africa and the rest of the world.
Can you point to a study that has comprehensively assessed that total population? Or just a few studies by Americans, who make their own racial biases, which from a cynical perspective can be boiled down to rampant and cruel exploitation over several centuries, abundantly clear in the articles concerned?
Immigrants across the world tend to be a slightly self selecting class of folks - why would black immigrants be any different on that front?
Can you point to anyone other than yourself who calls Indonesians black? Because I think otherwise it's not worthwhile discussing categorization and measurement in good faith with you.
South Asians are a wholly different and distinct group. Most Indonesians are
South-East Asian, except for Chinese migrants and those living on the island of New Guinea. Africa is a continent, not a race.
What you're saying is all over the place. And I'm not here to discuss politics.
Yup, I"m British and can confirm this was the case and it makes just as much sense as any other categorisation of black. Its almost as if race is a made up social construct. Even within Africa there are many different ethnicities, many of which are not very represented amongst African Americans, which is probably what the majority of people here see as black. That's just a subset of West Africans who are pretty mixed at this point.
Bro race is still made up in those scenarios. Somalis, Ethiopians, Zulus and African Americans are all black. None of these groups are the same ethnicity at all. Categorising them as "black" means nothing about their genetics. It means nothing about their culture. It means nothing about their medical outcomes.
"Bro", race is a trivial fact to me. To you it's an ideological tenet.
>None of these groups are the same ethnicity at all.
I already explained this to you in another comment. You aren't saying anything new or interesting. Also, Somalis and Ethiopians are part of the same Northern East African genetic cluster.
I knew you were going to be like "ACTUALLY SOMALIS AND ETHIOPIANS ARE VERY CLOSE". Sure, they're not close to the other two.
Also, do not tell me what I think.
Race is an ideological tenet created by colonialists to justify crimes against humanity. It is something non-factual that does not exist. Somalis, Nigerians, Zulus, African Americans - these people are not the same ethnicity. They are simply all black. Categorising them as black is only important if you want to create an artificial hard line in the sand between them and the white peoples. This is useful when you need to pit one group against another.
I do not believe in this ideology. People are people and ethnicities exist on a much smaller scale than race and are much more clearly defined and genetically traceable. Race is made up. It is not an ideology I believe in. It is an ideology enforced on me.
There it is! The punchline I was waiting for. The name of the villains in your creation myth, a glaring example of doublethink, and the point that you were oh-so eager to make from the very beginning.
>Race is an ideological tenet created by colonialists
A truth independently discovered by every people group. And now of course the medical community and the field of genetics.
>Sure, they're not close to the other two.
Which I explained twice and did it first. Nothing new or interesting.
You realise you actually sound like a cultist with that first line? Like you're accusing me of being a heathen based on some insane subjective interpretation of what I think. I said the wrong words in your mind and now I'm basically a satanist. You literally sound like that. Notice how I just spoke about facts and you have decided to make this about your assumptions about my character.
I have absolutely no problems with white people. I'm literally half white. All my favourite family members who are literally my flesh and blood are white. Most of my friends are white. I grew up in a 99% white community. I do not think white people are the enemy and I do not think the majority of them hold any racist views. I do not hold white people collectively accountable for things their ancestors did centuries ago or assume anything bad about them based on this. I stated facts about history I was not blaming any race in modern times for the existence of these facts. They are just true, but they are of the past. I think white and black people should work together as the one and only race - the human race - to make the world better.
What is your argument against me now? Can you make one without resorting to gross assumptions of me being an evil white-people-hating black power SJW demonrat?
I made it very clear that I do not believe that race is real. So why would I view white people as some sort of inherently morally tarred enemy?
Again, I'm literally more ethnically white more than I am anything else.
>categorizing people by skin colour is ridiculous for almost all purposes
Sure. But race is most often about genetic (or ethno-linguistic) heritage, not skin color. A person from Japan might have the same skin color as someone from Greece.
Only three large racial (genetic) groups in Sub-Saharan Africa.
>Which one exactly is the genetically stupid one?
You're trying to turn this into a normative claim, which it is not. And you started with the assumption that people are just saying this stuff for no reason at all.
Even the apology is sort of terrible. I'm not sure that I ever want it implied that black people have lower "cognitive capacity", whether or not it's said with recognition of social factors outside of our control. Social outcomes =/= cognitive capacity. And the causal factor here is poverty > race.
Why do you jump to that conclusion? It certainly isn't implied by a literal and direct interpretation of the statement. Somewhat ironic because the quote is talking about the value of being direct.
Good riddance to these ideologues. It's a shame that the announcement shows no trace of remorse for the crimes they inspired (e.g. at FTX) or the lives that have been ruined by the cults to which they lent academic legitimacy. Instead, their demise is chalked up to some bland moaning about "administrative headwinds".
Realistically, we're probably only looking at a brief respite before they regroup under some other benevolent-sounding name. Be on the lookout for their next incarnation, and let's hope that Oxford won't repeat the mistake of allowing them to evangelize under the seal of a great university.
(Edit in response to causal's question below):
They legitimized longtermism and pseudo-rational AI panic, which transformed much of EA into an apocalyptic sect, with all the high-demand group dynamics that come with it. Their research created an air of urgency and expediency which, among other bad outcomes, inspired the devoted EAs at FTX to justify their crimes to themselves. These crimes resulted in privation and a few suicides for their innocent depositors. To this day, there are EAs who rationalize these crimes against their outgroup as not that bad, considering that the "Future of Humanity" is at stake.
You can look at the movement and find plenty of other negative effects of this urgency and expediency, but for me personally, the FTX crimes are what woke me up to the true nature of these hazardous ideas.
It's quite a leap to assume that SBF only turned to a life of crime because the EA movement lured him into it.
There are legitimate criticisms of EA and I'm not personally a follower of the movement but your post comes off as way too generally dismissive. Many of the people involved seem to have good intentions and a lot of money has been donated to objectively good causes. The longtermism stuff is more squishy, but our society is pretty bad at dealing with certain types of existential risks and we could use more people thinking about solutions rather than less.
> to assume that SBF only turned to a life of crime because the EA movement lured him into it.
It's not an assumption. It's a matter of record, understood by anyone who knows the basics of the FTX saga. SBF is a lifelong utilitarian, and his co-conspirators were also committed EAs. Anyone who obscures that fact is abetting the campaign of obfuscation.
> Many of the people involved seem to have good intentions
Yup. That includes Sam and his friends. How did that turn out?
> a lot of money has been donated
To borrow your language, "it's quite a leap to assume" that anyone donated money just because EA lured them into it. How do we know they weren't going to behave altruistically in the absence of the movement?
Why is there an isolated demand for rigor when confronting the movement's adverse effects? Do you think that Sam is inherently a criminal, with ideology playing no role, whereas EA donors aren't inherently generous?
> to objectively good causes
Fair enough. I will concede that there were a few of these. In some cases, early EA principles may have helped people arrive at these good ideas in a way that wouldn't have happened without the movement.
It's just that, I get annoyed when people dismiss the downsides, writing them off as aberrations or lone bad actors. And given the major flaws in the philosophy, it's hard to shake my suspicion that most of their longtermist explorations are worse than just "squishy". It seems quite plausible that they're doing more harm than good.
This type of argument can be used against pretty much any group that has ever existed, then either it's too broad and not a meaningful critique of the group itself or a critique of humans getting together in general.
Sorry, you've lost me here. Which part of my argument are referring to?
I'm not criticizing a group, btw. I'm criticizing ideas. Ideas have specific consequences. Some ideas inspire good actions. Some inspire bad actions that outweigh the good.
When an idea claims to have big consequences in the distant future, we can look at its consequences in the present day to help us guess the likely nature of those future consequences.
Oxford deals in ideas, and gets to decide which ones to host and fund. Sometimes they get it wrong, mistaking bad ideas for good ones. That's unfortunate, but it's nice when they come around to the right assessment eventually.
The grandparent poster stated that "grandparent poster statement that "to assume that SBF only turned to a life of crime because the EA movement lured him into it." and you responded "It's not an assumption. It's a matter of record, understood by anyone who knows the basics of the FTX saga. SBF is a lifelong utilitarian, and his co-conspirators were also committed EAs. Anyone who obscures that fact is abetting the campaign of obfuscation." Your response never responded to the grandparent's statement because you never showed which parts of Effective Altruism encouraged crime. Instead, you showed that the FTX criminals claimed they believed in Effective Altruism.
Every movement, religion, organization, company, and government has bad apples. Just because Sam Bankman-Fried and his executives said they followed Effective Altruism does not mean they really did. Could you please cite some evidence that the Effective Altruism belief encourages crime? Also, could you please explain why a belief or movement should be judged by what a few members do?
I am making this post because I do not like seeing groups, organizations, and movements blamed for what a few members do. It's unjust and unhelpful.
If you want a citation that EA belief does, in practice, encourage crime, I would direct you to literally all the reporting on FTX.
But if I'm reading you correctly, you're asking instead for a citation of some EA materials in which EA leadership says, "do fraud". There is no such citation. That is not how this works. Looking at history, a recurring pattern is that good-sounding ideas can have bad consequences. When it happens, they rarely come out and say "do bad stuff".
> please explain why a belief or movement should be judged by what a few members do?
A belief or movement should be judged by the total impact across all members. I'm not just talking about a naive weighted sum -- that would just be more utilitarianism, which is the evil idea we need to unlearn here.
A better framing is that you're trying to infer a risk distribution based on the observed data. In so doing, you incorporate an understanding of the history of altruism, where it's way easier to do major damage than major good. Therefore, you heavily weight a downside event, because this is merely a taste of the true tail risk.
Tail risk is easy to underestimate (see the work of Nassim Taleb on this). If you throw out negative data points, you're making it even harder to appreciate the worst case.
> I am making this post because I do not like seeing groups, organizations, and movements blamed for what a few members do.
I suppose this is a fine instinct in general. And I'm all for protecting minority viewpoints and their right to think freely.
But when a group makes wild claims about how its revolutionary thought process can discover shortcuts to astronomical benefits in the distant future, then they're operating on pure ideology without much of a feedback loop. In such a case, the question of the ideology's tail risk becomes extra important.
You may notice that by my reasoning here, the lessons from FTX should have less bearing on how we view the "neartermist" cause areas, where EAs are measuring their impact and reacting to facts on the ground. This is indeed true. I believe that early EA did a lot of good, and there are still a few "neartermist" EAs left, doing decent work.
So to bring the thread full circle, this distinction is all the more reason to celebrate the end of FHI, which helped drive the shift within EA toward longtermism, where their utilitarianism is a poor fit and, I would claim, a danger to humanity.
I really don't think you can blame Effective Alterism (EA) or these guy for FTX. FTX was a fraud and it occurred because Sam Bankman-Fried used customer money to prop up his failing investment company (Almeada Research). To be blunt he stole from his customers to try and prop up a failing business. He also lied, used customer money to fund a lavish lifestyle, used customer money to donate to political causes, etc.
Basically, I doubt Effective Altruism condoned stealing from people to prop up businesses, fund personal causes, and enrich oneself.
Actually the belief that you're good or "doing altruism" is exactly the kind of thing that would cause a person to do such evil things.
If we take bible metaphorically it's pretty smart because believing you are a inherently unworthy sinner will actually encourage you to do good things instead of the opposite which just causes people to do evil things and virtue signal.
Basically "But we're the good guys" <- that's how you know who is truly evil.
> it occurred because Sam Bankman-Fried used customer money to...
This is a weird use of "because". You're saying roughly, "the fraud occurred because <the mechanics of the fraud>". That stuff is not why it occurred, it's how.
People do things for reasons.
> fund a lavish lifestyle
More lavish than portrayed in his PR and parroted by EA leaders, but less lavish than a typical billionaire in his situation (to say nothing of a typical crypto billionaire!)
Spending some money on nice, convenient living for himself and his team is not inconsistent with longtermism. To use a CS term, it's analogous to the concept of amortization.
I saw some Mr Beast branded candy bars at the supermarket this week. Pretty sure that's not a future-saving venture, that's just taking advantage of the sugar-addicted kids that form his fanbase.
i'm honestly glad, there seems to be a lot of places that may as well be called "the institute of impending doom for all of humanity" and i just don't care for this fear-based grant entrenchment, it gets us nowhere. people who are pioneering the front lines of any technology understand risk better than people who write about it
> people who are pioneering the front lines of any technology understand risk better than people who write about it
That's far from guaranteed, and we have a long history of lessons written in blood that says otherwise. The people pioneering a technology are going to be self-selected to be the most optimistic about its potential and the most dismissive of its negative impacts.
Seems the incompetent and curiously hostile Philosophy Faculty at Oxford killed FHI.
> While FHI had achieved significant academic and policy impact, the final years were affected by a gradual suffocation by Faculty bureaucracy. The flexible, fast-moving approach of the institute did not function well with the rigid rules and slow decision-making of the surrounding organization. (One of
our administrators developed a joke measurement unit, “the Oxford”. 1 Oxford is the amount of work it
takes to read and write 308 emails. This is the actual administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account within the Philosophy Faculty so that we could start using it - after both
the funder and the University had already approved the grant.)
Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Unfortunately, this led to the eventual loss of lead researchers and especially the promising and diverse cohort of junior researchers, who have gone on to great things in the years since. While building an impressive alumni network and ecosystem of new nonprofits, these departures severely reduced the Institute. In late 2023, the Faculty of
Philosophy announced that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.
Surely it was Oxford, the institute older than most nations, being incompetent, and nothing to do with the easy money tap called Sam Bankman Fraud being thrown in jail. Oxford just seems like a easy scapegoat as they can’t just say “our biggest donor is in jail for the foreseeable future and we have no money left because we used it to buy a mansion [0]”
You obviously missed this part:
> This is the actual administrative effort it took for FHI to have a small grant disbursed into its account within the Philosophy Faculty so that we could start using it - after both the funder and the University had already approved the grant.
They make quite a clear difference between Oxford (i.e. the University) and the faculty.
They froze the institute "starting in 2020", three years before anybody suspected SBF was anything other than the Great Tech Messiah.
FTX didn't even get its initial funding until the last months of 2019.
I mean sure, FTX might be a stain on FHI's reputation now, but it certainly can't have been the initial cause of these actions by Oxford. The dates just don't work.
Nobody in this entire movement wants to take responsibility for what anybody else does, and it's honestly exhausting. They have this dense belief that once a thinker releases his ideas into the water, he bears no responsibility for the crimes and excesses they inspire.
Ugh. Looking back at this comment of mine, I wish I could delete/retract. It's misdirected in the context of the thread, and an overreaction at best. GP was only talking about certain budgeting decisions, so it makes total sense to distinguish between the orgs here. Oxford did not buy the mansion.
I think that either the link has changed or that the statement has changed, because the statement I'm reading is very different from your quote "in both content and deliverance" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGtlUMMkOU))
“It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints—“ red tape” was the word its supporters used—which have hitherto hampered research in this country.”
— That Hideous Strength: by C. S. Lewis (1943)
The book literally starts with a competition between Oxford and a fictional university about who gets to host a “trans-humanist” research organization.
Curious use of the word faculty . . . I would say the problem is the administration and bureaucracy and not the faculty (which usually refers to the academic staff). I guess they mean the word in the sense of the administrative unit of the university. Regardless, this is not a problem confined to Oxford; it seems to have proliferated throughout academia in the last couple of decades. The sheer amount of utter bullshit is mind boggling; I figure about 1 in 10 people actually do useful work while the other 9 conspire to make that person's life more difficult. Of course, industry is hardly any better . . .
Why not assume that the OP knows the definition of the word "faculty" and that when the OP writes, "suffocation by Faculty bureaucracy", he meant suffocation by academic staff?
Can anybody offer insight into the reasons here? Obviously there is not going to be an objective answer to this question. And that is probably why the linked page does not try to give an answer.
I'm assuming lack of funding wasn't the problem, since they froze fundraising (if the inability to raise funds was the problem it is unlikely that they would have done this).
Edit: looks like he got smeared in January of 2023, but that doesn't explain the freeze starting three years earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40066352
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