#aesthetic (but ultimately irrational) posturing masquerading as a takedown of of others’ supposed aesthetic irrationalities | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

aronarchy · 1 year

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FYI this has been going on— (cw for screenshots from a racist rightwing blog)

[image IDs: several screenshots from a blog post by Noah Carl, a rightwing “researcher” of racial pseudoscience, regarding “Nick Bostrom’s pre-emptive apology”

2nd screenshot of Carl’s statement shown above:

Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford who works on topics like existential risk and human enhancement. I haven’t read much of his work, but people I respect rate it very highly. Anatoly Karlin (whom I had on the podcast recently) considers him “the greatest living philosopher”.

A few days ago, Bostrom posted a document titled ‘Apology for An Old Email’ on his website. The document was subsequently shared on Twitter by his colleague Anders Sandberg, apparently at Bostrom’s request. It begins:

> I have caught wind that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people … I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.

The email in question, which was sent “in the mid 90s” as part of a discussion about “offensive communication styles”, is as follows:

> 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. Take for example the following sentence:

> Blacks are more stupid than whites.

[I cut off the rest of Carl’s screenshot of Bostrom’s email, as it contained more unpleasant antiblack commentary]

3rd screenshot:

You don’t have to apologise for saying offensive things in a setting that people have selected into for the specific purposes of discussing offensive things. Stand-up comedians don’t need to apologise for telling jokes at their shows that it would inappropriate for them to tell in church. Moreover, Bostrom made the comments more than twenty years ago, and he “immediately apologised” at the time! End of story.

Yet as you well know, academia is crawling with offence archaeologists – low-lifes who spend their time combing through other people’s writing with the hope of finding something they can use to ruin their careers. They are not virtuous, and they do not care about the downtrodden. Their aim is simply to “take down” someone whose views they disapprove of – usually someone who contributes far more to society than they do.

In light of this, you can understand why Bostrom wanted to “get ahead” of the controversy by saying his piece pre-emptively. Unfortunately, what he said may have made things worse – not only for himself but for others who might find themselves in similar situations in the future.

4th:

Rather than making the points I made above (and perhaps apologising for needing to bring the admittedly provocative email to people’s attention), he issued an embarrassingly grovelling apology:

> I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago … The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time … and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.

As for his “actual views”, Bostrom thinks “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”. And he wants you to know that he has given to charities “fighting exactly this problem”, including “the Black Health Alliance”.

The one saving grace of his apology – from the perspective of grown-up intellectual discourse – was that he didn’t denounce the hypothesis that genes contribute to group differences in cognitive ability. “It is not my area of expertise”, he wrote, “and I don’t have any particular interest in the question.” Note: the latter claim is likely to be false; how could you not be interested in it?

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https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1615072322058076166

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tweet by xriskology:

The real victimhood culture is on the political right:

[a screenshot from the same Noah Carl blog post shown above]

thread QRTing their tweet:

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

My line is that your career can be destroyed by exposing the truth (that you’re still soft on vapid racial pseudoscience 25 years after endorsing it), then it deserves to be.

I find it deeply disgusting and infuriating the way that so many “rationalists” are framing everything in terms of “he said a bad word and immediately apologized 25 years ago” when that’s not even fucking remotely the issue and would amount to almost no blowback on its own.

I think almost no one gives a shit about Bostrom using the n-word 25 years ago, his apology for that isn’t the issue. The issue is that his recent apology is stunning in what it studiously doesn’t renounce and the way it leaves claims about genetic racial intelligence open.

I’m well aware that Bostrom makes the perfectly fine transhumanist move that “even if racial intelligence disparities were a thing, they’re irrelevant because everyone can individually tinker with themselves in whatever direction” but it’s not enough to merely bracket the claims.

Bostrom’s “apology” sounds perfectly fine to him and his circles because “I am not an expert on racial science” sounds like a renunciation of his claim “blacks are stupider than whites” to them. But it’s anything but! It doesn’t address at all what he still believes.

The fact is that the specific measures the rationalist community chooses to valorize, certain limited performances of rationality, do not exclude shitbags willing to make some contortions so those shitbags flock into their circles, expelling others, and shaping background norms.

I’d be willing to bet at sharp odds that >50% of the self-identified rationalist community believes “there are significant genetic racial disparities in intelligence between the races and unfairly we can’t talk about this.”

That is the problem Bostrom’s non-apology exemplifies

Now there are myriad good mechanisms and reasons to dismiss the object-level claim, but sure, ghosts could exist and it could be true, the biggest problem is the way this “likelihood” has been drastically inflated within the rationalist community by their social dynamics.

The rationalist community is running the proverbial bar where they let nazis in. And if you fail to draw the line with one nazi, you very rapidly just have a nazi bar. Because nazis are large in number, have few other options, and are willing to go through a lot of contortions.

Nazis will absolutely shit themselves silly writing endless papers throwing chaff everywhere like the “200 proofs the earth is not flat” and credulous “rationalist” bros whose whole self-image prioritizes feeling smarter than everyone and holders of esoteric truths love that.

And so we see vast asymmetries and distortions in the epistemic frames of most “rationalists” as a consequence of their sociological dynamics. They proactively read anti-woke folks on the right and then pretty much never delve deep into radical leftist arguments.

They’ll delve into the most esoteric neoreactionary screeds with giant bibliographies of catholic and postmodern writers to find the secret actual argument for an inane conservative position, but then assume every leftist argument is the first related tumblr post they found.

Scott Alexander Siskind BRAGGED that his readership was fair and balanced because he had some socialists and only like 22% identified openly as alt-right or neoreactionary. That is not balance. That is a nazi bar. And that social fabric warps one’s epistemology.

Bostrom honestly thought he was addressing the problem with his racist email in the 90s. And Sandberg (god damnit dude) read it and was like “this is a knockout response I want to be associated with” and hordes of fuckers saw the same.

reply to the thread by zorangecats:

One observation I’ve made is I’ve never seen the rationalist “steelman” for the feminist worldview. An interesting omission.

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https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1614428504581607424

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tweet by Aella_Girl:

Lost some respect for EA due to the response to the Bostrom thing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised? CEA has always leaned a bit too far towards PR at the expense of integrity. I guess I’d hoped to see some more bravery. Feel like the correct response would have had more nuance.

thread QRTing her tweet:

The lost “integrity” she’s bemoaning is that the Centre for Effective Altruism released a very thin anodyne statement condemning Bostrom’s “words” (presumably just his original email and no detail on whether the racial pseudoscience in particular sucks)

Imagine being so fucking twisted that you see condemning racist shit to any minor degree as a lack of integrity.

These people’s entire morality is about fiercely condemning and ostracizing anyone who ever dabbles in condemning or ostracizing people over shit like racism, rape, and transphobia.

It’s pure Coalition Of The Bad shit.

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#repost of someone else’s content #twitter repost #nick bostrom #racism #antiblackness #antiblackness cw #gillis #Enlightened Centrism #the self-proclaimed ‘rationalist’ community #aella #underdiscussed but important #claiming rationality =/= your calculations are free of error #(or that your formulas are correct in the first place)#(or that you are automatically free of bias or inaccuracy)#aesthetic (but ultimately irrational) posturing masquerading as a takedown of of others’ supposed aesthetic irrationalities #as it always goes -- whites make counterfactual statements & construct theories around them motivated by (yes) *bias*#and pass it off as fact --> any of the marginalized who debunk those inaccuracies & present the facts are labeled as biased ourselves #claiming we debunk bioessentialism & tie that to our egalitarian ideology bc ideology first ‘pseudo’science second #when in fact that it exactly what *they* did and what we do is *to undo what they did first*#however their epistemology also has a built-in self-defense mechanism:#‘if they claim x y z they must be wrong because as our ‘facts’ prove they’re too irrational & stupid to know what’s right #(and their disagreement proves our theories are right)’#same self-reinforcing mechanism fundamental to western colonialism (& patriarchy) in the modern form that claims to be rational/scientific #also how the entire psychiatric field conducts itself (heavy ties to other fields of human biological study esp. neuroscience)#& can successfully hook a lot of ppl already motivated to fall for this kind of stacking the deck #but the (yes) *aesthetic* they present themselves w/ makes it easier for them to deflect criticism #bc ‘I am Objectively Right according to Science --> all those critics are just irrational moralist science-haters’#especially frustrating when many in that crowd *do* promote genuinely suppressed but correct ideas (such as transhumanism)#but then try to lump in things like racism as similarly suppressed unjustly as if the dynamics are anywhere near the same #I wasnt aware abt Bostrom bc Ive been off twitter for months

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