All of ZachWeems's Comments + Replies

Regarding the last paragraph, in the edit:

I think the comments here are ignoring a perfectly sufficient reason to not, eg, invite him to speak at an EA adjacent conference. If I understand correctly, he consistently endorsed white supremacy for several years as a pseudonymous blogger.

Effective Altruism has grown fairly popular. We do not have a shortage of people who have heard of us and are willing to speak at conferences. We can afford to apply a few filtering criteria that exclude otherwise acceptable speakers. 

"Zero articles endorsing white suprem... (read more)

The agree-votes have pretty directly proven you correct.

|I meant to link to Gottfredson's statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don't.

My disagreement was with the characterization of Gottfredson's statement as mainstream when this is disputed by mainstream sources. 

It is true that there was a difference in IQ scores, so I suggested a less disputed source saying so.

|People don't object as often  to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, "black people are abused by the police more" doesn't get the response of "wh... (read more)

Separate from my other comment:

|people of the white race, black race, and Asian race

I'm assuming this was completely unintended, but terms like "the X race" have very negative connotations in American English. Especially if X is "white". Better terms are "X people" or "people categorized as X".

"Blacks" also has somewhat negative connotations. "Black people" is better.

(I apologize on behalf of America for our extremely complicated rules about phrasing)

I hard-disagreed for two reasons:

• The mainstream-ness of the linked statement is heavily disputed. A person in 1996 could have reasonably been unaware of this ofc. (You may have intended to link to the 1996 APA report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns instead?)
• Accuracy about genetics and race is unusually important in charged conversations like this, and your 1st paragraph seems to miss an important point: categories like "black", "white" and "Asian" are poor choices of genetic clusters. This is part of why population geneticists will call race a social con

I disagree with the first and last sentences of the last paragraph- while Bostrom's statements were compatible with a belief in genetically-influenced IQ differences,  he did not clearly say so.

That said, it isn't to his credit that he hedged about it in the apology.

Tangent: Out of curiosity, did you/ does your friend typically refer to (belief in meaningful genetically influenced racial IQ differences) as "HBD", as "part of/under HBD", or neither?

My impression was the term was mostly used by genetics nerds, with a small number of racists using the term as a fig leaf, causing the internet to think it was a motte-and-bailey in all uses. If people who mostly cared about the IQ thing used it regularly I suppose I was wrong.

(And to be clear since I'm commenting under my own name, meaningful genetically influenced racial IQ differences aren't plausible. My interest is the old internet drama.)

FAQ number 5) reads oddly.

|5) Was nepotism involved? In particular, would FLI's president's brother have profited in any way had the grant been awarded?

|No. He published some articles in the newspaper, but the understanding from the very beginning was that this was pro-bono, and he was never paid and never planned to get paid by the newspaper of the foundation. The grant proposal requested no funds for him. He is a journalist with many years of experience working for Swedish public radio and television, and runs his own free and non-commercial podcast. The... (read more)

Consider that perhaps the reason most of us on the forum aren't agreeing with you- and the reason Bostrom himself repudiated his words- isn't the taboo around the belief, but rather that most of us think the evidence is unconvincing at best. 

But most of us are not willing to have the object-level debate here for reasons such as politics being mindkiller, not wanting this to become a forum for debating taboo positions, and yes, internal and public perception of the community.

(I don't have survey data or anything, but I'd bet this is the case.)

If so, to the extent the majority of EA's tend to be right about things, you should update in that direction in lieu of having the thoughtful critiques of your position.

Agreed. 

My model is, he has a number of frustrations with EA. That on its own isn't a big deal. There are plenty of valid, invalid, and arguable gripes with various aspects of EA. 

But he also has a major bucket error where the concept of "far-right" is applied to a much bigger Category of bad stuff. Since some aspects of EA & longtermism seem to be X to him, and X goes in the Category, and stuff in the Category is far-right, EA must have far-right aspects. To inform people of the problem, he writes articles claiming they're far-right. 

If... (read more)

Commenting from five months into the future, when this is topically relevant:

I disagree. I read Torres' arguments as not merely flawed, but as attempts to link longtermism to the far right in US culture wars. In such environments people are inclined to be uncharitable, and to spread the word to others who will also be uncharitable. With enough bad press it's possible to get a Common Knowledge effect, where even people who are inclined to be openminded are worried about being seen doing so. That could be bad for recruiting, funding, cooperative endeavors, &... (read more)

I have read and reread this comment and am honestly not sure whether this was a reply to my answer or to something else.

On point 1, I think the past week is a fair indication that the coronavirus is a big problem, and we can let this point pass.

On point 2, as of my answer, there seemed to be no academic talk of human challenge trials to shorten vaccine timelines, regardless of how many were working on vaccines. The problem I see is that if a human challenge trial would shorten timelines, authorities and researchers might still hesitate to run one due to p... (read more)

Meta:

It might be worthwhile to have some sort of flag or content warning for potentially controversial posts like this.

On the other hand, this could be misused by people who dislike the EA movement, who could use it as a search parameter to find and "signal-boost" content that looks bad when taken out of context.

|...having a Big Event with people On Stage is just a giant opportunity for a bunch of people new to the problem to spout out whatever errors they thought up in the first five seconds of thinking, neither aware of past work nor expecting to engage with detailed criticism...

I had to go back and double-check that this comment was written before Asilomar 2017. It describes some of the talks very well.

I would also like to be added to the crazy EA's investing group. Could you send an invite to me on here?

The 'Stache is great! He's actually how I heard about Effective Altruism.

Right, I'm accounting for my own selfish desires here. An optimally moral me-like person would only save enough to maximize his career potential.

| It just seems rather implausible, to me, that retirement money is anywhere close to being a cost-effective intervention, relative to other likely EA options.

I don't think that "Give 70-year-old Zach a passive income stream" is an effective cause area. It is a selfish maneuver. But the majority of EAs seem to form some sort of boundary, where they only feel obligated to donate up to a certain point (whether that is due to partially selfish "utility functions" or a calculated move to prevent burnout). I've considered choosing some arbit... (read more)

Question 2: Suppose tomorrow MIRI creates a friendly AGI that can learn a value system, make it consistent with minimal alteration, and extrapolate it in an agreeable way. Whose values would it be taught?

I've heard the idea of averaging all humans' values together and working from there. Given that ISIS is human and that many other humans believe that the existence of extreme physical and emotional suffering is good, I find that idea pretty repellent. Are there alternatives that have been considered?

It seems like people in academia tend to avoid mentioning MIRI. Has this changed in magnitude during the past few years, and do you expect it to change any more? Do you think there is a significant number of public intellectuals who believe in MIRI's cause in private while avoiding mention of it in public?