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bramflakes comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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So this person acknowledges their own biases, notes that some otherwise perfectly reasonable and in their opinion "Rational" people believe in HBD, and then (as far as I can tell) doesn't make any effort to investigate whether they might actually be true?
This is what motivated cognition looks like. If someone cannot change their mind because (sorry for the bluntness but there's no other way I can describe my impression in under a paragraph) their feelings might be hurt, and they are actively working against resolving this inner conflict, then they should not be in a rationalist community.
Really? Do you really think everyone who comes off as irrational based on a blog post of theirs that you read shouldn't be here? (There would be nobody left for you to talk to!) Or are you annoyed at this particular person because they said mean things about a group that contains you?
"This is what motivated cognition looks like. If someone cannot take criticism of their in-group without launching an ad-hominem attack on the critic, then they should not be in a rationalist community."
That sword cuts both ways.
Okay disclaimer - reading it did make me feel a little annoyed. Partly due to their writing style, partly due to me identifying with the specific subgroup of LW they're talking about, and partly on principle.
No but when it's so clear-cut as in this case, yes.
If someone point-blank does not want to talk at the object-level about some controversial topic, and makes many veiled comments about what kind of nasty group I must belong to in order to entertain such beliefs, and has made it very clear they are happy to withdraw from the entire community surrounding it, what exactly am I supposed to do other than say "here's the door, have a nice day"?
Like you, I think that the linked blogger's position, as stated, is completely incompatible with the purpose of this community, but I think the point being made by some here is that steelmanning their criticisms, on the off-chance that their reaction might have been triggered by something legitimately criticism-worthy, is an option.
Note to self: start steelmanning more.
There's irrationality and then there's faith-based epistemic insanity. This person actually states that he cannot accept any perceived challenge to their preferred theories. Seriously, read the blogpost. He/she is as rational as the most extreme Christian fundamentalist. Do you really think such folks could ever be productive contributors to this site?
They can be, but it's not worth trying to seek them out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't lukeprog have pretty serious Christian beliefs at one point?
I find your mismatched pronouns painful.
I think it makes a big difference if the preferred theory is gender/racial equality as opposed to fundamentalist Christianity, and whether the opposition to those perceived challenges result from emotional sensitivity as opposed to blind faith. At the very least, the blog post doesn't indicate that the author would be irrational about issues other than marginalization.
Does fundamentalist Christianity indicate that the believer would be irrational about issues other than religion?
If yes, what's the difference?
It's not clear to me that avowed racists (and sorry, that's what "HBD" is a euphemism for) make up any any significant portion of the LessWrong community, just a loud portion of it. Self-described "reactionaries" are certainly a very small (but loud) minority here.
Really we should get better at conveying when opinions held by a loud minority here are not by any means the opinion of the majority.
What do you mean by racist?
Edit: If by racist you mean "hate people who don't share the same skin color with them" then I would guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean "think that some racial groups are superior and others inferior" then I would also guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean "think that different populations of people differ significantly along various axes such as athletic ability, intelligence, memory etc." then yes there are a lot of racists on LW.
The third option does not imply either of the first two.
I think Chris is slightly mistating the problem, at least on Lesswrong. It would be sort of shocking if various genetically distinguishable population cohorts all happened to be exactly equal in average intelligence. But that's not what's so off-putting about the reactionaries. The problem comes with their reliance on extremely lazy statistical discrimination in individual cases. They have made quite clear that if they encounter a woman or an individual of African descent who has tested very high on an IQ test, they would still discriminate against that individual for jobs or educational slots, arguing that racial/gender averages swamp the evidence from the test, which might just regress to the mean.
To me, the individual IQ test is much stronger evidence and should swamp the cohort averages.
Quite a number of people pooh pooh the reliability of IQ tests, most usually people in dogmatic denial about HBD. Are they also horrible people for their "lazy statistical discrimination"?
Your comment is basically a non sequitor boo light, unless there is some obscure second meaning to the term "statistical discrimination" with which I am unfamiliar.
In any case, IQ tests can be less-than-perfect measures of intelligence and still be far more reliable than the evidence on which the reactionaries are relying.
Also, there is no particular reason why learning that a group's average IQ is a standard deviation lower than you thought before should cause a decrease in your sympathy and empathy for that group. I see no one in that camp saying "How can we use this information to optimize charities?" which is the obvious first question if you care about the people you're talking about. Why would a fact about an innate feature that people can't control shrink your moral circle?! I'm sure there are exceptions, but it is eminently clear reading reactionary blogs just who they care about.
If anything, I'd expect it to increase sympathy.
I think a lot of people lose sympathy when they feel like there's nothing they can do. You see this pattern with people who have addict relatives or friends who make bad romantic decisions. At first they try to offer advice and money and various kinds of help but as this doesn't work, they revert to not even feeling sympathy anymore. I think ascribing genetic inferiority to underprivileged groups is likely to work like this for a lot of people.
I don't think so.
Sympathy tends to extend more for lack of capability than poor choices.
And it takes some non-intuitive insight to understand that in some situations "poor choices" are caused by a "lack of capability". Specifically, a capability to think or act sufficiently rationally. (Where "sufficiently" depends on the specific situation.)
The underlying "off-putting" issue is that 'HBD' advocacy tends to attract some especially hateful people in droves - this is quite clear if you take a glance at even 'high-quality' "HBD" sites with open commenting. And this has literally nothing to do with the merit of the scientific question, does (literal) human biodiversity in intelligence, personality etc. exist. Honestly, it's not clear that we know one way or the other. It's a very tricky situation if you are committed to both truth-seeking and a reasonable ethical stance.
Selection bias. Because of the taboo against voicing support of HBD, most of the less hateful voices simply shut up to avoid public censure. That only leaves those more concerned with the truth than being liked, and the dogmatic racist loons, who usually outnumber them by a wide margin.
You might have a point here, but it's not clear what the counterfactual is. As HBD advocates like to point out, many and perhaps most people (including minorities) behave in private as if they believed in HBD (for instance, by buying housing in "good" neighborhoods, choosing "good" schools and the like, where "good" is defined by demographics).
By this argument, the "less hateful voices" who are silenced include most of the population, even though these same people might want to enforce a ban on publicly accepting HBD, for social signaling reasons (i.e. not wanting to be perceived by others as a dogmatic racist loon). Interestingly, it's not clear to me how stable this equilibrium is.
What you believe in private versus what you're willing to advocate in public creates the selection bias, and this comment here seems to agree.
But I don't see why they would actually want, as oppose to merely pretend to want, a ban on publicly accepting HBD for signaling purposes. If they don't want to be perceived as a racist loon, they'll just avoid admitting to the view in public.
Whoa. The "demographics" people are choosing on are income, not race. Faced with a choice between living in a middle class majority-black neighborhood and a (forgive the term) white trash neighborhood, I think most people would choose the former. This fact may get obscured by the relative paucity of middle class majority-black neighborhoods, but at least in the US, that has at least as much to do with redlining, the legacy of sundown towns, and such as it does with HBD.
Except those behaviors express belief in statistics, not that those statistics are biological in nature. Biological diversity does not have to be the cause for statistical trends. Have HBD adherents falsified other explanations for the statistics?
You do not have to eliminate other explanations to accept genetic causes. A combination is likely. Bu you have to prove other causes explain all the effect in all cases to prove genetic equivalence.
Lesswrong has actually had such individuals show up here, too, from time to time. They get downvoted into oblivion and/or Eliezer or one of the other high-status people shows up and encourages downvoting people who feed the troll. So the racists who are just using biodiversity as a rationalization for already-committed racism get driven off.
This does seem relevant when answering the separate question of whether the topic should just be taboo.
To the extent that I've been involved in these debates on LW, I'm almost always arguing for the anti-racist and anti-sexist position, but I still wouldn't want Lesswrong to adopt the norms of discourse that prevail at "safe space" feminist sites. Because that way really does lie madness (I've seen a feminist website drive off anyone who wanted to dispute the claim "rape is worse than murder," to give one egregious example).
waves
Am I going to be "downvoted into oblivion"?
Almost every community has a large share of crazies, and fringe political communities are certainly going to have a lot of them. I think the difference is the content of what reactionaries say. Their rhetoric isn't so much worse than extreme social justice types or extreme atheists (I'm thinking of the freethoughtblogs type), but what they say is completely alien and horrifying to most people.
Would you mind defining what you mean by "superior" and "inferior"?
I dunno, I have often heard the following charge against HBDers "You're just trying to prove your own superiority under a pathetic veil of pseudo-science that you call HBD". I'd rather not talk about superiority and I'd rather talk about the specific axes along which populations might differ, and how that might inform policy decisions (an even more volatile topic).
Notably, that charge is typically leveled at Caucasians who, by HBD lights, are noticeably inferior to East Asians.