Radical Empath Ismam
Posts 6
Comments60
Race science is well-established pseudoscience recognised by the scientific community. This why I roll my eyes when EAs think of themselves as elite or smarter than average. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, anti-intellectual currents within this movement, and race science isn't the only pseudoscientific inclination in my opinion, and in the opinion of a few others in this movement I have learned.
Unlike you however I actually am grateful for EAs anti-science streak to be so nakedly visible, because it is actually valuable information for outsiders and insiders to know. Knowledge of the EAs embracing race science should inform the public how seriously to take this movement, and can only help weed out the good parts of EA from the bad.
We shouldn't mask up the shortcomings of EA to make it look like a better movement than it actually is.
I also want to say I've been really impressed by the work of the Quincy Institute (https://quincyinst.org/). They advocate for an anti-war & anti-interventionist foreign policy, which is very neglected amongst think tanks in this area due to the high levels of funding by weapons-makers and the military-industrial complex. They're work on the Iran nuclear deal was highly lauded.
Nuclear weapons are of course a specific area they focus on, but their more holistic Anti-war & Anti-interventionist advocacy has noticeably improved the foreign policy debate and challenged hawkish perspectives that dominate this space and I suspect is a very effective way to reduce X-Risk.
Would love to see EAs engaged in Anti-war & Anti-interventionist spaces as they seem very neglected and a chance to make an outsized impact.
The nobel-winning ICANW also does really excellent work and spoke at EAGx Australia.
Can I add one more fear - mischaracterising the scientific credibility of scientific racism/ HBD.
Having these voices like Hanania & Razib Khan at Manifest (with no counterbalance) is going to make people think that there is more scientific support for the "race realist/ HBD" position than there actually is.
In actual fact, the opposite is true.
Response by evolutionary biologists responded to Nicholas Wade's book: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/letters-a-troublesome-inheritance.html the
American Society of Human Genetics statement https://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(18)30363-X.pdf and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists statement https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
Further papers on Race & IQ https://r.jordan.im/download/racism/bird2021.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.202100204?
I was involved in the EA movement from around 2014 in Sydney Australia, which I expect is similar to the UK as you mentioned (but all the same, the UK & Australia were and are major centres for the EA movement and our lack of interaction with the Rationalist community in those early days should be noted).
From my recollection, in those early days the local EA Sydney community would co-host events with the local Less Wrong Rationality, Transhumanist, and the Science Party groups just to get the numbers up for events. So yes, the Rationalists did mix with EA, but their contribution was on-par with the Transhumanists.
I don't recall rationality being a major part of major EA literature at the time (The Most Good You Can Do, The Life You Can Save). Even utilitarianism was downplayed as being fundamental to being an EA. It was later on that Rationality became more influential.
I'm in favour of distancing "Rationality" from EA.
As I've said elsewhere, Less-Wrong "rationality" isn't foundational to EA and it's not even the accepted school of critical thinking.
For example, I personally come from the "scientific skepticism" tradition (think Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Steven Novella, James Randi, etc...), and in my opinion, since EA is simply scientific skepticism applied to charity, scientific skepticism is the much more natural basis for critical thinking in the EA movement than LW.
I've been in the EA movement for a long time and I can attest Rationality did not play any part in the EA movement in the early days.
EA to "decouple" from LW/rationality
I mean, why not? Less-wrong "rationality" isn't foundational to EA, it's not even the accepted school of criticial thinking.
For example, I personally come from the "scientific skepticism" tradition (think Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Steven Novella, James Randi, etc...), and in my opinion, since EA is simply scientific skepticism applied to charity, scientific skepticism is the much more natural basis for criticial thinking in the EA movement than LW.
You should absolutely do it, and I would agree that you probably would not receive material backlash.
But I would be careful to assume that your success means that any plain old person can critique EA and receive a warm reception.
You've spent a long time building amicable relationships with EAs (I suspect by walking on eggshells, self-censoring - hope I am not being presumptuous here David).
Longtermists have (past-tense) done bad things. The worry is now evidenced by a track record. It's not some theoretical worry about the future. Are we still not able to admit this as a movement?
Things done under the guise of longtermism:
I can't even begin to estimate the harm done by SBF's political interference, succesfully electing his crypto-friendly candidates to the world's most powerful institution of democracy, the US House. Permanently altering the course of world history, ending the careers of some very promising principled candidates who refused to take big money.