Sure, and I think that we should discuss anything with such a theory of impact. Or scan it and downvote it.

Here the system worked as it should, I think. 

I want to note that within a few minutes of posting the parent comment, it received 3 downvotes totaling -14 (I think they were something like -4, -5, -5, i.e., probably all strong downvotes) with no agreement or disagreement votes, and subsequently received 5 upvotes spread over 20 hours (with no further downvotes AFAIK) that brought the net karma up to 16 as of this writing. Agreement/disagreement is currently 3/1.

This pattern of voting seems suspicious (e.g., why were all the downvotes clustered so closely in time). I reported the initial cluster of downvotes to the mods in case they want to look into it, but have not heard back from them yet. Thought I'd note this publicly in case a similar thing happened or happens to anyone else.

I should probably stop posting on this or reading the comments, for the sake of my mental health (I mean that literally, this is a major anxiety disorder trigger for me.) But I guess I sort of have to respond to a direct request for sources. 

Scott's official position on this is agnosticism, rather than public endorsement*. (See here for official agnosticism: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart)

However, for years at SSC he put the dreaded neo-reactionaries on his blogroll. And they are definitely race/IQ guys. Meanwhile, he was telling friends privately at the time, that "HBD" (i.e. "human biodiversity", but generally includes the idea that black people are genetically less intelligent) is "probably partially correct or at least very non-provably non-correct": https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001 . That is technically still leaving some room for agnosticism, but it's pretty clear which way he's leaning. Meanwhile, he also was saying in private not to tell anyone he thinks this (I feel like I figured out his view was something like this anyway though? Maybe that's hindsight bias): 'NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence'. And he was also talking about how publicly declaring himself to be a reactionary was bad strategy for PR reasons ("becoming a reactionary would be both stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-reactionary readers"). (He also discusses how he writes about this stuff partly because it drives blog traffic. Not shameful in itself, but I think people in EA sometimes have an exaggerated sense of Scott's moral purity and integrity that this sits a little awkwardly with.) Overall, I think his private talk on this paints a picture of someone who is too cautious to be 100% sure that Black people have genetically lower IQs, but wants other people to increase their credence in that to >50%, and is thinking strategically (and arguably manipulatively) about how to get them to do so. (He does seem to more clearly reject the anti-democratic and the most anti-feminist parts of Neo-Reaction.) 

I will say that MOST of what makes me angry about this, is not the object-level race/IQ beliefs themselves, but the lack of repulsion towards the Reactionaries as a  (fascist) political movement. I really feel like this is pretty damning (though obviously Scott has his good traits too). The Reactionaries are known for things like trolling about how maybe slavery was actually kind of good: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters/  Scott has never seemed sufficiently creeped out by this (or really, at all creeped out by it in my experience). But he has been happy to get really, really angry about feminists who say mean things about nerds**, or in one case I remember, stupid woke changes to competitive debate. (I couldn't find that one by googling, so you'll have to trust my memory about it; they were stupid, just not worth the emotional investment.) Personally, I think fascism should be more upsetting than woke debate! (Yes, that is melodramatic phrasing, but I am trying to shock people out what I think is complacency on this topic.) 

I think people in EA have a big blind-spot about Scott's fairly egregious record on this stuff, because it's really embarrassing for the community to admit how bad it is, people (including me often; I feel like I morally ought to give up ACX, but I still check it from time to time) like his writing for other reasons. And frankly, there is also a certain amount of (small-r) reactionary white male backlash in the community. Indeed, I used to enjoy some of Scott's attacks on wokeness myself; I have similar self-esteem issues around autistic masculinity issues as I think many anti-woke rationalists do. The currently strongly negative position is one I've come to slowly over many years of thinking about this stuff, though I was always uncomfortable with his attitude towards the Reactionaries. 



*[Quoting Scott] 'Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolvable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future. If you target me based on this, please remember that it’s entirely a me problem and other people tangentially linked to me are not at fault.)'

** Personally I hate *some* of the shit he complains about there too, although in other cases I probably agree with the angry feminist takes and might even sometimes defend the way they are expressed. I am autistic and have had great difficulties attracting romantic interest. (And obviously, as my name indicates I am male. And straight as it happens.) But Scott's two most extensive blogposts on this are incredibly bare of sympathetic discussion of why feminists might sometimes be a bit angry and insensitive on this issue. 

Yeah maybe? 

Do you want to discuss it? I can understand value people would have taken from the post even while disagreeing with its general thrust. Also it's pretty hard for those people to suggest why they supported it if that's gonna tar them with being a racist, so it's possible they have reasons I can't guess. 

I guess there is the possibility of brigading though that always seems less likely to me than people seem to think it is. 

It also seems plausible that people saw it as some kind of free speech bellwether, though that seems mistaken to me (you can just downvote the bad stuff and upvote the good).

Another quote that hopefully makes it even clearer:

If you are worried that an immigrant may be more likely to vote Democrat/Left, commit a crime, retain their non-Western culture or be on welfare and believe that it is ethical to exclude them from migrating for these reasons, why is it not ethical to prevent someone from giving birth if their offspring are prone to all of these behaviors? There are people within the native country which are, statistically speaking, likely to grow up and vote Democrat/Left, commit crimes and be on welfare. For example, if someone's parents both voted Democrat/Leftist and their parent's parents voted Democrat/Left, they are probably more prone to voting Democrat/Left than an immigrant. I think some will say that they do want to restrict birth but can't because it is not politically feasible, but imagine that you could have full control to implement this policy for the sake of the hypothetical.

Also, a quote from "Ives Parr" in this very thread:

I was not trying to implement a strange voluntary option.

That's fine. I was adding more clarity.

I think the title is accurate and the content of my article is clear that I am not suggesting violating anyone's consent or the law. Did you read the article? I don't see how you draw these conclusions from the title alone or how the title is misleading. I gave policy recommendations which mostly involved funding research.

That's plausible, although I find it somewhat less likely to be a complete or primary explanation based on my recollection of voting patterns/trends on past eugenics-adjacent posts. 

In any event, I don't think "was down-voted a lot" (from harfe's comment) would be a complete summary of the voting activity.

Your first post on the Forum was, in my mind, rather dismissive of objections to the infamous Bostrom listserv, and suggested we instead criticize whoever brought this information to light (even though there is zero reason to believe they are a member of this community or an adjacent community). That's not a good way to start signaling good faith.

You may disagree with my argument, but it was made in good faith. I'm not trolling or lying in that article. The reason I wrote that was because I felt that I could contribute a perspective which the majority of EA was overlooking. Similarly for the case for genetic enhancement. It is not discussed very much, so I felt I could make a unique contribution. Whereas, in other areas like animal welfare--I did not feel like I had a particularly important insight. If someone's first post was about veganism and a later posts were about veganism, it would not be a good reason to think the person is arguing in bad faith. 

I think the reason you might think what I am doing might be bad faith is because you attribute nefarious intentions to people interested in genetic enhancement. Perhaps the base rate of people talking about "eugenics" is higher for being bad faith, but it is much simpler to just consider the content of the message they are sending at the moment. Besides, if someone writes a 10K word well-argued article (in my opinion) for topic X that is attempting to be grounded in reality and extensively cited, it seems weird to call it "bad faith" if it is not trollish or highly deceptive.

Much of your prior engagement in comments on the Forum has related to race, genetics, eugenics, and intelligence, although it has started to broaden as of late. That's not a good way to show that you are not seeking to "inject a discussion about race, genetics, eugenics, and intelligence in EA circles" either.

When I see that EAs are making wrong statements about something I know about, I feel like I am in a position to correct them. These not mostly responses to EAs who are already discussing these topics. Moreover, if a discussion of intelligence, genes, genetic enhancement (or even race) could improve human welfare then it is worth having. My work is not merely an effort to "inject" these topics needlessly into EA. 

Single-focus posters are not going to get the same presumption of good faith on topics like this that a more balanced poster might. Maybe you are a balanced EA in other areas, but I can only go by what you have posted here, in your substack, and (presumably) elsewhere as Ives Parr. I understand why you might prefer a pseudonym, but some of us have a consistent pseudonym under which we post on a variety of topics. So I'm not going to count the pseudonym against you, but I'm going to base my starting point on "Ives Parr" as known to me without assuming more well-rounded contributions elsewhere.

If I was a single-issue poster on veganism, would you assume I am bad faith? If you want to have a prior of suspiciousness based being somewhat single-issue, I suppose you can. But you should have a posterior belief based on the actual content of the posts. I'll further add here that I have been thinking about EA generally and considered myself an EA for a long time:

1. "Should Effective Altruists make Risky Investments?" (Dec 9, 2021)
2. "What We Owe The Future" book review (Sep 28, 2022)
3. Defending EA against a critique by Bryan Caplan (Aug 4, 2023)

I could use further evidence of my participation in the EA community, but you have to understand my hesitation as people are suggesting I'm basically a Nazi and parsing over my past work--something I consider immoral and malicious in this context.

But ultimately, I don't think this matters too much because you can just literally read the content. Arguing like this is kind of silly. It involves a type of reputation destruction based on past comments that is quite unvirtuous intellectually. And once we have the content of the post, it no longer seems relevant. We should just majorly update on whether I seem good faith in the post or not.

I must commend you for actually engaging with the content. Thank you.

A Surprising Conclusion

As far as the environmental/iodine issues, let me set for a metaphor to explain one problem in a less ideologically charged context. Let's suppose I was writing an article on improving life expectancy in developing countries. Someone with a passing knowledge of public health in developing countries, and the principles of EA. might expect that the proposed solution would be bednets or other anti-infectious disease technologies. Some might assign a decent probability to better funding for primary care, a pitch for anti-alcohol campaigns, or sodium reduction work. Almost no one would have standing up quaternary-care cancer facilities in developing countriesusing yet-to-be-developed drugs on their radar list. If someone wrote a long post suggesting that was the way, I would suspect they might have recently lost a loved one to cancer or might have some other external reason for reaching that conclusion.

I reject this analogy and I substitute my own which I think is more fitting. If someone was discussing alleviating the impact of malaria with bed nets, and someone came along with a special interest in gene drives and suggested it could have a huge impact--perhaps a much larger impact that bed nets--then it would seem this is a reasonable point of discussion that is not necessarily motivated by some ulterior motive. I used this analogy in the article as well. Whether or not gene drives are better is an empirical question. If someone made an extended argument why they think it could be high impact, then it is questionable to think it's bad faith. Especially if there is not trollish or rude or highly deceptive comments.

I think that's a fair analogy of your recommendation here -- you're proposing technology that doesn't exist and wouldn't be affordable to the majority of people in the most developed countries in the world if it did. The fact that your chosen conclusion is an at least somewhat speculative, very expensive technology should have struck you as pretty anomalous and thrown up some caution flags. Yours could be the first EA cause area that would justify massive per-person individual expenditures of this sort, but the base rate of that being true seems rather low. And in light of your prior comments, it is a bit suspicious that your chosen intervention is one that is rather adjacent to the confluence of "race, genetics, eugenics, and intelligence in EA circles."

Some of the technology currently exists. We can perform polygenic embryo screening and gene-editing is in its early stages but not yet safe. We have also achieved IVG in mice, and there are start ups that are working on it currently. That breakthrough would bring very large returns in terms of health, intelligence, and happiness. Metaculus estimated that IVG was ~10 years away. 

My argument is not for "massive per-person individual expenditures of this sort." This is wrong. I gave 8 policy proposals and give a bunch of money to people to use this technology was not on the list. I was mostly advocating accelerating the research and allowing voluntary adoption. If EA accelerates the breakthroughs, people would use it voluntarily.

A Really Concerning Miss in Your Post

Turning to your post itself, the coverage of possible environmental interventions in developing countries in the text (in the latter portions of Part III) strikes me as rather skimpy. You acknowledge that environmental and nutritional factors could play a role, but despite spending 100+ hours on the post, and despite food fortification being at least a second-tier candidate intervention in EA global health for a long time, you don't seem to have caught the massive effect of cheap iodine supplementation in the original article. None of the citations for the four paragraphs after "The extent to which the failure of interventions in wealthy nations is applicable to developing nations is unclear" seem to be about environmental or nutritional effects or interventions in developing countries.

While I can't tell if you didn't know about iodine or merely chose not to cite any study about nutritional or environmental intervention in developing countries, either way Bob's reference to a 13-point drop in IQ from iodine deficiency should have significantly updated you that your original analysis had either overlooked or seriously undersold the possibility for these interventions. Indeed, much relevant information was in a Wikipedia article you linked on the Flynn effect, which notes possible explanations such as stimulating environment, nutrition, infectious diseases, and removal of lead from gasoline [also a moderately well-known EA initiative]. Given that you are someone who has obviously studied intelligence a great deal, I am pretty confident you would know all of this, so it seems implausible that this was a miss in research.

On a single Google search ("effects of malnutrition in children on iq"), one of the top articles was a study in JAMA Pediatrics describing a stable 15.3-point drop in IQ from malnutrition that was stable over an eight-year time period. This was in Mauritius in the 1970s, which had much lower GDP per capita at the time than now but I believe was still better in adjusted terms than many places are in 2024. The percentage deemed malnourished was about 22%, so this was not a study about statistically extreme malnutrition. And none of the four measures were described as reflecting iodine deficiency. That was the first result I pulled, as it was in a JAMA journal.  A Wikipedia article on "Impact of Health on Intelligence" was also on the front page, which would have clued you into a variety of relevant findings.

We should be giving people iodine where they are deficient and preventing starvation. Bob raised this objection and I addressed it in the comments. It is worth mentioning. I did say that environmental conditions can depress IQ in the original article, especially at the extremes. The part about heritability that I mentioned undermines the impactfulness to some extent because the environmentality of IQ is low and the sources of variation are not particularly clear. But heritability is not well estimated between developing and developed nations, so I expressed some hesistancy about reaching a strong conclusion there. 

There is a lot of work on preventing starvation and malnutrition already, so the aim was to be neglected, tractable, and important. The benefit of accelerating enhancement is that people can voluntarily use it without the need for spending money in each case. Moreover, the gains from enhancement would be very very large for certain forms of technology and there we can embrace both types of intervention where the environmental interventions are effective. Here is what I said in the original article:

The extent to which the failure of interventions in wealthy nations is applicable to developing nations is unclear. If interventions are largely ineffective, this is evidence that they may be ineffective in the developing world. However, there is a plausible case to be made for certain threshold effects or influences unique to the conditions of poor nations. In some countries, children suffer from extreme levels of malnutrition and exposure to parasites. Extremely few children in the developed world face such obstacles. An intervention that prevents extreme malnutrition might appear ineffective in the United States but shows gains in Yemen or South Sudan. When nutrient deprivation is so great that it disrupts proper brain formation, it is likely to depress not only IQ scores but also cognitive ability. Similarly, when groups are wholly unexposed to logical reasoning, they are likely to score lower on IQ tests. Such issues are not wholly uncommon, and interventions would play an important role in such instances. Furthermore, for populations unexposed to academic tests, IQ scores will likely underestimate ability.

The extent to which we can expect environmental interventions to work as a means of improving NIQ largely depends on the extent to which we think environmental differences are driving international differences. If we suspect that NIQ differences are driven entirely by environmental differences, then improvements in nutrition and education may equalize scores. If genetic differences are playing a causal role, equalizing environments will not equalize NIQ scores. A reasonable prior assumption is non-trivial levels of influence from both. Various lines of evidence point to the prospect of zero genetic influence globally being exceptionally unlikely. For example, interventions are largely ineffective in the USA, with an average IQ of approximately 97-99, and the US still lags behind Singapore with an NIQ of approximately 106-107 (Becker, 2019). While some dismiss the genetic influence of genes on NIQ as “not interesting,” it is extremely relevant to the near future of humanity, especially considering that countries with lower NIQ typically have higher fertility (Francis, 2022).

Even if one embraces the 100% environmental explanation for national differences in IQ, one can still consider the possibility of environmental interventions being less cost-effective or more limited in magnitude relative to what could be called “genetic interventions.” Furthermore, since there are little to no means of permanently boosting IQ in more developed countries, there may be stagnation once a country reaches beyond a certain threshold of average nutrition and education.

Looking toward genetic interventions may be more fruitful, even if we accept that environmental interventions are important to some extent. IQ gains without diminishing marginal returns are implausible, given that adults in academic institutions or pursuing academic interests do not continue to add IQ points cumulatively until they achieve superintelligence. Some forms of genetic enhancement would not suffer from this problem of diminishing returns, and could in fact create superintelligent humans. Also importantly, if a genetic intervention could be administered at birth and reduce the need for additional years of schooling, it could save a tremendous amount of a student’s time.

This is a really bad miss in my mind, and is really hard for me to square with the post being written by a curious investigator who is following the data and arguments where they lead toward the stated goal of effectively ending poverty through improving intelligence. If readily-available data suggest a significant increase in intelligence from extremely to fairly cheap, well-studied environmental interventions like vitamin/mineral supplementation, lead exposure prevention, etc., then I would expect an author on this Forum pitching a much more speculative, controversial, and expensive proposal to openly acknowledge and cite that. As far as I can see, there is not even a nod toward achieving the low-hanging environmental/nutritional fruit in your conclusion and recommendations. This certainly gives the impression that you were pre-committed to "genetic enhancement" rather than a search for effective, achievable solutions to increase intelligence in developed countries and end poverty. Although I do not expect posts to be perfectly balanced, I don't think the dismissal of environmental interventions here supports a conclusion of good-faith participation in the Forum.

I've addressed this above and in the original article I compared environmental with genetic, providing some evidence to think that the potential gains are limited in a way that genetic enhancement is not. Much of the effort to prevent the causes that depress IQ are widely understood as problems and addressed by global health initiatives. 

I can understand if someone disagrees, but does this really seem like a bad faith argument? It seems like this accusation is considered more intuitively plausible because what I am arguing elicits feelings of moral disgust.

Conclusion

That is not intended as an exhaustive list of reasons I find your posts to be concerning and below the standards I would expect for good-faith participation in the Forum. The heavy reliance on certain sources and authors described in the original post above is not exactly a plus, for instance. The sheer practical implausibility of offering widespread, very expensive medical services in impoverished countries -- both from a financial and a cultural standpoint -- makes the post come across as a thought experiment (again: one that focuses on certain topics that certain groups would like to discuss for various reasons despite tenuous connections to EA).

 

The technology will be adopted voluntarily without EA funds if the tech is there. I am not advocating for spending on individuals.

EAs seem generally fine with speculation and "thought experiments" generally if they have a plausible aim of improving human flouring, which my argument does. That should be the central focus of critiques.

Also, this is the EA Forum, not a criminal trial. We tend to think probabilistically here, which is why I said things like it being "difficult to believe that any suggestion . . . is both informed and offered in good faith" (emphasis added). The flipside of that is that posters are not entitled to a trial prior to Forum users choosing to dismiss their posts as not reflecting good-faith participation in the Forum, nor are they entitled to have their entire 42-minute article read before people downvote those posts (cf. your concern about an average read time of five minutes).

I understand it's not a criminal trial. But expecting someone to read an article before downvoting or attacking stawman arguments seems quite reasonable as a standard for the forum. This EA forum post we are commenting on suggests that I am supporting Nazi ideology (which I am not!). How can someone recognize this without actually reading? 

This incentivizes these sorts of critiques and creates a culture of fear to discuss important but taboo ideas. If an idea where to rise that was actually important, it may end up neglected if people don't give it a fair chance.

Thank you for grappling with the actual content of the article. I'll state that I do feel your characterization of me being in bad faith feels quite unfair. It seems strange that I would go through all this effort to respond if I was just trolling or trying to mess with the EA forum users.