Human Biodiversity (Part 4: Astral Codex Ten)

I identify with your asterisk quite a bit. I used to be much more strongly involved in rationalist circles in 2018-2020, including the infamous Culture War Thread. I distanced myself from it around ~2020, at the time of the NYT controversy, mostly just remaining on Rationalist Tumblr. (I kinda got out at the right time because after I left everyone moved to Substack, which positioned itself against the NYT by personally inviting Scott, and was seemingly designed to encourage every reactionary tendency of the community.)

One of the most salient memories of the alt-right infestation in the SSC fandom to me was this comment by a regular SSC commenter with an overtly antisemitic username, bluntly stating the alt-right strategy for recruiting ~rationalists:

[IQ arguments] are entry points to non-universalist thought.

Intelligence and violence are important, but not foundational; Few people disown their kin because they're not smart. The purpose of white advocacy is not mere IQ-maximization to make the world safe for liberal-egalitarianism; Ultimately, we value white identity in large part because of the specific, subjective, unquantifiable comfort and purpose provided by unique white aesthetics and personalities as distinct from non-whites and fully realized in a white supermajority civilization.

However, one cannot launch into such advocacy straight away, because it is not compatible with the language of universalism that defines contemporary politics among white elites. That shared language, on both left and right, is one of humanist utilitarianism, and fulfillment of universalist morals with no particular tribal affinity. Telling the uninitiated Redditor that he would experience greater spiritual fulfillment in a white country is a non-starter, not on the facts, but because this statement is orthogonal to his modes of thinking.

Most people come into the alt-right from a previous, universalist political ideology, such as libertarianism. At some point, either because they were redpilled externally or they had to learn redpill arguments to defend their ideology from charges of racism/sexism/etc, they come to accept the reality of group differences. Traits like IQ and criminality are the typical entry point here because they are A) among the most obvious and easily learned differences, and B) are still applicable to universalist thinking; that is, one can become a base-model hereditarian who believes in race differences on intelligence without having to forfeit the mental comfort of viewing humans as morally fungible units governed by the same rules.

This minimal hereditarianism represents an ideological Lagrange point between liberal-egalitarian and inegalitarian-reactionary thought; The redpilled libertarian or liberal still imagines themselves as supporting a universal moral system, just one with racial disparate impacts. Some stay there and never leave. Others, having been unmoored from descriptive human equality, cannot help but fall into the gravity well of particularism and "innate politics" of the tribe and race. This progression is made all but inevitable once one accepts the possibility of group differences in the mind, not just on mere gross dimensions of goodness like intelligence, but differences-by-default for every facet of human cognition.

The scope of human inequality being fully internalized, the constructed ideology of a shared human future cedes to the reality of competing evolutionary strategies and shared identities within them, fighting to secure their existence in the world.

There is isn't really much more to say, he essentially spilled the beans – but in front on an audience who pride itself so much in "high-decoupling" that they can't warp their mind around the idea that overt neo-Nazis might in fact be bad people who abuse social norms of discussion to their advantage – even when said neo-Nazis are openly bragging about it to their face.

If one is a a rationalist who seek to raise the sanity waterline and widely spread the tools of sound epistemology, and even more so if one is an effective altruist who seek to expand the moral circle of humanity, then there is zero benefit to encourage discussion of the currently unknowable etiology of a correlation between two scientifically dubious categories, when the overwhelming majority of people writing about it don't actually care about it, and only seek to use it as a gateway to rehabilitating a pseudoscientific concept universally rejected by biologists and geneticists, on explicitly epistemologically subjectivist and irrationalist grounds, to advance a discriminatory-to-genocidal political project.

I imagine people inclined to defend Scott are often a) People who themselves agree with HBD or b) people who don't really have an opinion on it (or maybe even disagree with it)* but think that Scott arrived at his "belief" (i.e. >50% credence) in HBD by honest inquiry into the evidence to the best of his ability, and think that is never wrong to form empirical beliefs in this way. I don't think people could believe Scott rejects HBD if they actually read him at all closely. (Though he tends to think and talk in probabilistic terms rather than full acceptance/rejection. As you should!) In the Hanania review he explicitly says he puts "moderate probability" on some HBD views, which isn't that different from what he said in the Brennan email. 

As to WHY people think a) and b), I'd say it is a mixture of (random order, not order of importance):  

1) People like Scott and that biases them.

2) People want to defend a prominent rationalist/EA for tribal reasons.

3) People have a (genuinely praiseworthy in itself in my view) commitment to following the evidence where it leads even when it leads to taboo conclusion, and believe that Scott's belief in HBD (and other controversial far-right-aligned beliefs of his) have resulted from him following the evidence to the best of his ability, and therefore that he should not be condemned for them. (You can think this even if you don't think the beliefs in question are correct. My guess is "the views are wrong and bad but he arrived at them honestly so you can't really blame him" is what less right-leaning rationalists like Kelsey Piper or Ozy Brennan think for example, though they can speak for themselves obviously. Maybe Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks this too actually, he's condemned rationalisms far-right wing in pretty strong terms in the past, though that doesn't necessarily mean he rejects every HBD belief I guess.) 

4) A faction of rationalists (and therefore EAs, and also I guess *some* EAs who aren't rationalists are like this, though my guess is much less) are just, well *bigoted*: they enjoying hearing and discussing things about why women/Black people are bad, because they like hating on women/Black people. As to WHY they are like that, I think (though I may be typical minding here**), that an important part of the answer is that they feel rejected socially, and especially sexually, for their broadly "autistic" personality traits, and also believe that the general culture is "feminizing" against the things that people-mostly, not entirely men-with that type of personality tend to value/overvalue, truth-seeking, honesty even when it upsets people, trying to be self-controlled and stoical. (I actually agree that certain parts of US liberal culture HAVE probably moved too far against those things.) 


*My guess is that Matthew Adelstein/Bentham's Bulldog is probably a Scott-defender who thinks HBD is wrong: https://benthams.substack.com/p/losing-faith-in-contrarianism

**I have autism, and have recently acquired my first ever girlfriend aged 37, and even as my considered belief is that they are in fact quite unfair to feminists in many ways, a lot of the feelings in Scott's Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled posts are very, very familiar to me. 

I'd say an obvious difference is that EA family planning orgs aren't doing permanent sterilization. 

I'd also say that the reason Thorstad is upset is probably mostly because he sees Scott's support for the org as "let's get rid of drug addicts children from the next generation because they have bad genes", and-rightly in my view-worries that this is the sort of logic that the Nazis used to justify genocide of the "wrong sort" of people, and that if HBD becomes widely believed people might turn this logic against Black people. Scott could (and would) reasonably protest that there is a big difference between being prepared to use violence for eugenic goals, and merely incentivizing people towards them in non-coerceive ways. But if you apply this to race rather than drug addicts "we should try and make there be less Black people, non-coercively" is still Nazi and awful. 

This sort of eugenic reasoning doesn't actually seem to be what's going on with Project Prevention itself, incidentally. From the Guardian article, it seems like the founder genuinely values the children of drug addicts as human beings, given she adopted them and is just trying to stop them being hurt. From that point of view, I'd say she is probably a bit confused though: it's not clear most children of addicts have lives that are worse than nothing, even though they will be worse than average. So it's not clear it actually helps them to prevent them being born. 

Puzzled by your last paragraph. The Guardian article explicitly says that in the US their work has been compared to Nazi eugenics.

Don't see a significant difference. 

AnonymousTurtle @ 2024-11-03T12:15 (+3)

I do, reading Thorstad I thought Alexander

1. Was ignoring that Zuckerberg is indeed using nice pictures to improve his reputation.
2. Was seriously endorsing Murray for welfare czar.

Reading the original I see that neither is true: the Murray pick was absurdist humor, and the Zuckerberg thing was that good things are good even if Zuckerberg does them.

David Mathers🔸 @ 2024-11-03T12:26 (+4)

"the Murray pick was absurdist humor" What makes you think that? I would feel better if I thought that was true. 

AnonymousTurtle @ 2024-11-03T12:44 (+3)

Honest question, have you read the linked post?

- Build Trump’s wall, because it’s a meaningless symbol that will change nothing, but it’ll make Republicans like me, and it will make Democrats focus all their energy on criticizing that instead of anything substantive I do.

Maybe absurdist humor is not the right description, but it's very clearly not meant to be a serious post.

David Mathers🔸 @ 2024-11-03T12:55 (+5)

Having now read the whole thing, not just the bit you quoted originally, I think it is sort of a joke but not really: a funny, slightly exaggerated rendering of what his real ideological views actually are, exaggerated a bit for comic effect. I don't think Thorstad was majorly in the wrong here, but maybe he could have flagged this a bit. 

AnonymousTurtle @ 2024-11-03T13:25 (+7)

I'll let readers decide, just adding some reactions at the time for more context:

 

 

 

David Mathers🔸 @ 2024-11-03T13:36 (+4)

Fair enough, this does make me move a bit further in the "overall a joke" direction. But I still think the names basically match his ideological leanings. 

AnonymousTurtle @ 2024-11-03T14:16 (+3)

Do you mean Bernie Sanders, Peter Thiel, or "Anonymous Mugwump"? I can't think of an ideological leaning these three have in common, but I don't know much about Mugwump

David Mathers🔸 @ 2024-11-03T14:20 (+2)

Thiel and Sanders don't have much in common, but Scott has stuff in common with Thiel and Sanders. (I.e. he shares broadly pro-market views and skepticism of social justice and feminism with Thiel, and possibly pro HBD views, although I don't know what Thiel thinks about HBD, plus an interest in futurism and progress, and he shares redistributive and anti-blaming the poor for being poor economic views with Sanders.) 

AnonymousTurtle @ 2024-11-03T15:05 (+2)

Then I'm sure he has stuff in common with Mugwump as well (and with you, me, and Thorstad)

David Mathers🔸 @ 2024-11-03T15:22 (+2)

My reading of the post (which is contestable) is that he chose the people as a sort of joke about "here is a controversial or absurdly in-group person I like on this issue". I can't prove that reading is correct, but I don't really see another that makes sense of the post. Some of the people are just too boring choices-Yglesias, for the joke to just be that the list is absurd. 

Matrice Jacobine @ 2024-11-15T22:30 (+3)

I think it, like much of Scott's work, is written with a "micro-humorous" tone but reflect to a significant extent his genuine views – in the case you quoted, I see no reason to it's not his genuine view that building Trump's wall would be a meaningless symbol that would change nothing, with all that implies of scorn toward both #BuildTheWall Republicans and #Resistance Democrats.

Another example, consider these policy proposals:

- Tell Russia that if they can defeat ISIS, they can have as much of Syria as they want, and if they can do it while getting rid of Assad we’ll let them have Alaska back too.

- Agree with Russia and Ukraine to partition Ukraine into Pro-Russia Ukraine and Pro-West Ukraine. This would also work with Moldova.

[...]

- Tell Saudi Arabia that we’re sorry for sending mixed messages by allying with them, and actually they are total scum and we hate their guts. Ally with Iran, who are actually really great aside from the whole Islamic theocracy thing. Get Iran to grudgingly tolerate Israel the same way we got Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc to grudgingly tolerate Israel, which I assume involves massive amounts of bribery. Form coalition for progress and moderation vs. extremist Sunni Islam throughout Middle East. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

Months later he replied this to an anonymous ask on the subject:

So that was *kind of* joking, and I don’t know anything about foreign policy, and this is probably the worst idea ever, but here goes:

Iran is a (partial) democracy with much more liberal values than Saudi Arabia, which is a horrifying authoritarian hellhole. Iran has some level of women’s rights, some level of free speech, and a real free-ish economy that produces things other than oil. If they weren’t a theocracy, it would be hard to tell them apart from an average European state.

In the whole religious war thing, the Iranians are allied with the Shia and the Saudis with the Sunni. Most of our enemies in the Middle East are Sunni. Saddam was Sunni. Al Qaeda is Sunni. ISIS is Sunni. Our Iraqi puppet government is Shia, which is awkward because even though they’re supposed to be our puppet government they like Iran more than us. Bashar al-Assad is Shia, which is awkward because as horrible as he is he kept the country at peace, plus whenever we give people weapons to overthrow him they turn out to have been Al Qaeda in disguise.

Telling the Saudis to fuck off and allying with Iran would end this awkward problem where our friends are allies with our enemies but hate our other friends. I think it would go something like this:

- We, Russia, and Iran all cooperate to end the Syrian civil war quickly in favor of Assad, then tell Assad to be less of a jerk (which he’ll listen to, since being a jerk got him into this mess)

- Iraq’s puppet government doesn’t have to keep vacillating between being a puppet of us and being a puppet of Iran. They can just be a full-time puppet of the US-Iranian alliance. Us, Iran, Iraq, and Syria all ally to take out ISIS.

- We give Iran something they want (like maybe not propping up Saudi Arabia) in exchange for them promising to harass Israel through legal means rather than violence. Iran either feels less need to develop nuclear weapons, or else maybe they have nuclear weapons but they’re on our side now so it’s okay.

- The Saudi king was visibly shaken and dropped his copy of Kitab al-Tawhid. The Arabs applauded and accepted Zoroaster as their lord and savior. A simurgh named “Neo-Achaemenid Empire” flew into the room and perched atop the Iranian flag. The Behistun Inscription was read several times, and Saoshyant himself showed up and enacted the Charter of Cyrus across the region. The al-Saud family lost their crown and were exiled the next day. They were taken out by Mossad and tossed into the pit of Angra Mainyu for all eternity.

PS: Marg bar shaytân-e bozorg

Do Scott actually believe the Achaemenid Empire should be restored with Zoroastrianism as state religion? No, "that was *kind of* joking, and [he doesn't] know anything about foreign policy, and this is probably the worst idea ever". Does this still reflect a coherent set of (politically controversial) beliefs about foreign policy which he clearly actually believe (e.g. that "Bashar al-Assad [...] kept the country at peace" and Syrian oppositionists were all "Al-Qaeda in disguise"), that are also consistent with him picking Tulsi Gabbard as Secretary of State in his "absurdist humor"? Yeah, it kinda does. Same applies, I think, to the remainder of his post.