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Multiheaded comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong
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Yuh. On LessWrong, scientific racism is a standard permitted scientific heresy for signaling nonconformity. It's the nonconformist in black, not the one in a clown suit. (And this is a stupidity that is extremely offputting.)
It's not "racism" if you feel sympathetic and heartbroken for all the people and cultures clearly, unknowingly fucked over by mere biology, and would work hard on something in that direction - a global uplift project, donating to avenues which could eventually provide opportunity for massive genetic surgery (a class of charity currently consisting of SIAI, SIAI and SIAI), developing a political and cultural framework for something like "compassionate eugenics" (using as little coercion and stirring up as little drama as viable) - yes, I'd commit to any of that, if I wasn't confident that simply trying to cut all the Gordian knots in our vicinity with superhuman intelligence wasn't a better idea. (As it stands, I sort of desire to fight my akrasia to a standstill and find a good optimized way to help with the latter; however, it's not just akrasia, it's all sorts of problems I have with getting in productive work on anything.)
However, if I was, for some defensible reason, unwilling to relegate the entire mess to superintelligence, wouldn't trying what I described be noble instead of "racist"?
(Uh-huh, my signaling is about as subtle as a troll with a sledgehammer here. A troll of the fantasy non-network variety, that is. Well, whatever, I'm certain I've got a valid and coherent sentiment.)
Aaaaaaaa. This is such a bad idea that I don't even know where to start.
Racism as it's presently conceptualized isn't a simple matter of fear or hatred of ethnic others, unfortunately. That would be comparatively easy to deal with. It's an enormously messy tangle of signaling and countersignaling and I really can't do it justice without reading a few books for background and then devoting a sequence to it (which I'm not going to do for reasons that should be obvious), but as an oversimplification you can probably sum up most of the Western world's high-status thinking regarding race as follows:
Everything even tangentially related to race is ineradicably tainted by ingroup/outgroup biases.
Because of this, attitudes and social prescriptions appearing to differentiate in any way by ethic background, or by any factor that can plausibly be linked to ethic background, are automatically suspect and should be compensated for as soon as discovered.
That includes these rules.
Now, that's a fairly cynical way of putting it (I'm optimizing for brevity), but to a first approximation I don't think it's even wrong.
So yes, conceptually your project should be seen as noble, if you accept all its prerequisites. But no one's going to try to evaluate those prerequisites on their merits. Instead you won't make it five steps before someone links to "The White Man's Burden" and things get nasty.
Of course not. That would subject accusations of racism to falsifiability.
Might be. Might be. Yet can't you envision e.g. transhumanism being tabooed like that if found to be "ineradicably tainted" by the human lust for power and an insidiously corrupting desire for a "legitimate" reason to feel superior to the people you currently associate yourself with?
If the so-called "HBD-sphere" or "Reactosphere" in general, for all its flaws (and I see some pretty fucking horrific flaws in it) can get away with a lot more, so can the LW Discussion section, or that semi-private enclosure being proposed around here.
That's a common argument against it, actually, although it's usually framed in class terms. Maybe the most common once you filter out all the various manifestations of "ew, that's gross".
Not one that I accept myself, but like I said I only buy an approximation of the thinking above. There's plenty of places it'll steer you wrong at the margins.
Also, I'm indeed feeling a significant pressure to agree wholeheartedly with this comment and retract everything, because you and the high-status mainstream thinkers would be for me retracting it, and people like the HBD Bi- sorry, HBD Chick would be derisive of such "self-censorship". Now I can feel for myself just how insidious the Blue vs Green pattern in your head can get when it's really trying to override you.
People competent enough about intelligence enhancement tech to understand what you said are usually too incompetent about racism to start implementing anything like this without it blowing up in our faces. Remember that video where Razib Khan (?) asked Eliezer which groups were most interested in race-IQ research results, and it went like "I don't know, Ashkenazi Jews?" "White supremacists." "Oh."? That's how ridiculously ignorant we are. The common wisdom is here for a reason.
Referring to this (video here)?
Remember reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Yeah. Lots of people mention the finding that white people are smarter in average than black people, but few of them mention that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are even smarter.
(And if I was asked about that, I'd answer “Yes, it has been found that white people have a higher average IQ than black people, but then again, Asians and Jews have an even higher one", so that I don't lie but still get to piss extreme-right-wingers off.)
The same. Hell, I remember reading the comments on such some alt-right blog - maybe UR, maybe some other one - and seeing a bunch of "white nationalists" who frequent those first imply that intelligence is the only measure of a person that matters, then trying to wriggle out of proclaiming the Jews to be the world's only rightful aristocracy and bowing down before them; that "argument" basically went like "We embrace Nature's truth if it makes us smarter than someone, but we aren't obliged to shit if someone ends up smarter than us." Equating "smarter" with "superior", of course.
Not to argue about definitions, but this seems well within the original definition of 'racism' as I understand it ("...claim that some races are superior to other races"). And society has good historical reasons to look askance at it -- for example, the outside view says nobody should trust your motives. (In particular, you shouldn't trust yourself.) It also says we shouldn't trust your factual beliefs without extremely strong evidence.
You know, it is.
Plenty of racists historically wanted to "uplift" the savages, mostly through cultural assimilation, but occasionally through interbreeding. Neither of these could fully uplift them to our level, of course, but at least they would be better off than they would be on their own. "developing a political and cultural framework for something like "compassionate eugenics" (using as little coercion and stirring up as little drama as viable)" has also been a fairly obvious position for, y'know, actual racists, as opposed to the stereotyped klan member people are thinking of when they use that signal.