[Book Review] "The Bell Curve" by Charles Murray

[-]JenniferRM4y470

I read the book years ago "to find out what all the fuss was about" and I was surprised to find that the book was only about white America for the most part.

After thinking about it, my opinion was that Murray should have left out the one chapter about race (because that discussion consumed all the oxygen and also) because the thing I was very surprised by, and which seemed like a big deal, and which potentially was something that could be changed via policy, and thus probably deserved most of the oxygen, was the story where:

the invisible migration of the twentieth century has done much more than let the most intellectually able succeed more easily. It has also segregated them and socialized them.

The story I remember from the book was that colleges entrance processes had become a sieve that retained high IQ whites while letting low IQ whites pass through and fall away.

Then there are low-IQ societies where an underclass lives with nearly no opportunity to see role models doing similar things in substantially more clever ways.

My memory is that the book focused quite a bit on how this is not how college used to work in the 1930s or so, and that it was at least partly consciously set up... (read more)

[-]cousin_it4y*160

(3) tax businesses for hogging up all the smart people, if they try to brain drain into their own firm?

Due to tax incidence, that's the same as taxing smart people for getting together. I don't like that for two reasons. First, people should be free to get together. Second, the freedom of smart people to get together could be responsible for large economic gains, so we should be careful about messing with it.

9Said Achmiz4y

See also: “The Problem Isn’t the ‘Merit,’ It’s the ‘Ocracy’” (The Scholar’s Stage).

6lsusr4y

I'm totally unharmed. I didn't even lose my phone. There is absolutely nothing you can do but appreciate the offer and the well wishes.

2JenniferRM4y

I'm glad you are unharmed and that my well wishes were welcome :-)

[-]Zack_M_Davis4y400

What's with the neglect of Richard J. Herrnstein?! His name actually comes first on the cover!

9lsusr4y

In retrospect, I wish I had titled this [Book Review] "The Bell Curve" by Richard Herrnstein instead. That would have been funny. I have read two other books by Charles Murray and zero other books by Richard Herrnstein. In my head, I think of all of them as "Charles Murray books", which is unfair to Richard Herrnstein.

5Ben Pace4y

+1 it would have been funny, especially if you'd opened by lampshading it.

[-]PeterMcCluskey4y260

I mostly agree with this review, but it endorses some rather poor parts of the book.

Properly administered IQ tests are not demonstrably biased against social, economic, ethnic, or racial groups. ... Charles Murray doesn’t bother proving the above points. These facts are well established among scientists.

Cultural neutrality is not well established. The Bell Curve's claims here ought to be rephrased as something more like "the cultural biases of IQ tests are equivalent to the biases that 20th century academia promoted". I've written about this here and here.

the gap between the adopted children with two black parents and the adopted children with two white parents was seventeen points, in line with the B/W difference customarily observed. Whatever the environmental impact may have been, it cannot have been large.

This seems to assume that parental impact constitutes most of environmental impact. Books such as The Nurture Assumption and WEIRDest People have convinced me that this assumption is way off. The Bell Curve has a section on malparenting seemed plausible to me at the time it was written, but which now looks pretty misguided (in much the same way as mainstream social science was/is misguided).

[-]Jay4y80

Just for context, I'd like to point out that the SAT has been revised and renormed since 1994 (twice IIRC). Current test scores are not straightforwardly comparable to the scores discussed in the book and in the post.

[-]Rafael Harth4y80

Imagine a world where having [a post mentioning the bell curve] visible on the frontpage runs a risk of destroying a lot of value. This could be through any number of mechanisms like

The site is discussed somewhere, someone claims that it's a home for racism and points to this post as evidence. [Someone who in another universe would have become a valueable contributor to LW] sees this (but doesn't read the post) it and decides not to check LW out.
A woke and EA-aligned person gets wind of it and henceforth thinks all x-risk related causes are unworthy of

... (read more)

[-]Ruby4y490

In my capacity as moderator, I saw this post this morning and decided to leave it posted (albeit as Personal blog with reduced visibility).

I think limiting the scope of what can be discussed is costly for our ability to think about the world and figure out what's true (a project that is overall essential to AGI outcomes, I believe) and therefore I want to minimize such limitations. That said, there are conversations that wouldn't be worth having on LessWrong, topics that I expect would attract attention just not worth it–those I would block. However, this post didn't feel like where I wanted to draw the line. Blocking this post feels like it would be cutting out too much for the sake of safety and giving the fear of adversaries too much control over of us and our inquiries. I liked how this post gave me a great summary of controversial material so that I now know what the backlash was in response to. I can imagine other posts where I feel differently (in fact, there was a recent post I told an author it might be better to leave off the site, though they missed my message and posted anyway, which ended up being fine).

It's not easy to articulate where I think the line is or why... (read more)

6Rafael Harth4y

Thanks for being transparent. I'm very happy to see that I was wrong in saying no-one else is taking it seriously. (I didn't notice that the post wasn't on the frontpage, which I think proves that you did take it seriously.) I don't understand this concern (which I classify as the same kind of thing voiced by Zack many times and AAB just a few comments up.) We've have a norm against discussing politics since before LessWrong 2.0, which doesn't seem to have had any noticeable negative effects on our ability to discuss other topics. I think what I'm advocating for is to extend this norm by a pretty moderate amount? Like, the set of interesting topics in politics seems to me to be much larger than the set of interesting [topics with the property that they risk significant backlash from people who are concerned about social justice]. (I do see how this post is useful, but the bell curve is literally in a class that contains a single element. There seem to be < 5 posts per year which I don't want to have on LW for these kinds of reasons, and most of them are less useful than this one.) My gears-level prediction for how much that would degrade discussion in other areas is basically zero, but at this point I must be missing something? A difference I can see is that disallowing this post would be done explicitly out of fear or backlash whereas the norm against politics is because politics is the mind killer, but i guess I don't see why that makes a difference (and doesn't the mind killer argument extend to these kinds of topics anyway?) I do think that if we order all posts by where they appear on this spectrum, I would put this farther to the right than any other post I remember, so we genuniely seem to differ in our judgment here. I echo anon03 in that the title is extremely provocative, but minus the claim that this is only a descriptive statement. I think it's obviously intentionally provocative (though I will take this back if the author says otherwise), given that

[-]Vaniver4y360

Elsewhere you write (and also ask to consolidate, so I'm responding here):

The main disagreement seems to come down to how much we would give up when disallowing posts like this. My gears model still says 'almost nothing' since all it would take is to extend the norm "let's not talk about politics" to "let's not talk about politics and extremely sensitive social-justice adjacent issues", and I feel like that would extend the set of interesting taboo topics by something like 10%.

I think I used to endorse a model like this much more than I do now. A particular thing that I found sort of radicalizing was the "sexual preference" moment, in which a phrase that I had personally used and wouldn't have associated with malice was overnight retconned to be a sign of bigotry, as far as I can tell primarily to score points during the nomination hearings for Amy Coney Barrett. (I don't know anything special about Barrett's legal decisions or whether or not she's a bigot; I also think that sexual orientation isn't a choice for basically anyone at the moment; I also don't think 'preference' implies that it was a choice, any more than my 'flavor preferences' are my choice instead of being an uncont... (read more)

[-]DirectedEvolution4y140

This is a helpful addendum. I didn't want to bust out the slippery slope argument because I didn't have clarity on the gears-level mechanism. But in this case, we seem to have a ratchet in which X is deemed newly offensive, and a lot of attention is focused on just this particular word or phrase X. Because "it's just this one word," resisting the offensive-ization is made to seem petty - wouldn't it be such a small thing to give up, in exchange for inflicting a whole lot less suffering on others?

Next week it'll be some other X though, and the only way this ends is if you can re-establish some sort of Schelling Fence of free discourse and resist any further calls to expand censorship, even if they're small and have good reasons to back them up.

I think that to someone who disagrees with me, they might say that what's in fact happening is an increase in knowledge and an improvement in culture, reflected in language. In the same way that I expect to routinely update my picture of the world when I read the newspaper, why shouldn't I expect to routinely update my language to reflect evolving cultural understandings of how to treat other people well?

My response to this objection would be ... (read more)

[-]steven04614y150

My observation tells me that our culture is currently in need of marginally more risky spaces, even if the number of safe spaces remains the same.

Our culture is desperately in need of spaces that are correct about the most important technical issues, and insisting that the few such spaces that exist have to also become politically risky spaces jeopardizes their ability to function for no good reason given that the internet lets you build as many separate spaces as you want elsewhere.

[-]DirectedEvolution4y270

I’m going to be a little nitpicky here. LW is not “becoming,” but rather already is a politically risky space, and has been for a long time. There are several good reasons, which I and others have discussed elsewhere here. They may not be persuasive to you, and that’s OK, but they do exist as reasons. Finally, the internet may let you build a separate forum elsewhere and try to attract participants, but that is a non-trivial ask.

My position is that accepting intellectual risk is part and parcel of creating an intellectual environment capable of maintaining the epistemic rigor that we both think is necessary.

It is you, and others here, who are advocating a change of the status quo to create a bigger wall between x-risk topics and political controversy. I think that this would harm the goal of preventing x-risk, on current margins, as I’ve argued elsewhere here. We both have our reasons, and I’ve written down the sort of evidence that would cause me to change my point of view.

Fortunately, I enjoy the privilege of being the winner by default in this contest, since the site’s current norms already accord with my beliefs and preferences. So I don’t feel the need to gather evidence to pe... (read more)

[-]Vaniver4y240

Our culture is desperately in need of spaces that are correct about the most important technical issues

I also care a lot about this; I think there are three important things to track.

First is that people might have reputations to protect or purity to maintain, and so want to be careful about what they associate with. (This is one of the reasons behind the separate Alignment Forum URL; users who wouldn't want to post something to Less Wrong can post someplace classier.)

Second is that people might not be willing to pay costs to follow taboos. The more a space is politically safe, the less people like Robin Hanson will want to be there, because many of their ideas are easier to think of if you're not spending any of your attention on political safety.

Third is that the core topics you care about might, at some point, become political. (Certainly AI alignment was 'political' for many years before it became mainstream, and will become political again as soon as it stops becoming mainstream, or if it becomes partisan.)

The first is one of the reasons why LW isn't a free speech absolutist site, even tho with a fixed population of posters that would probably help us be more correct. But the second and third are why LW isn't a zero-risk space either.

6steven04614y

Some more points I want to make: * I don't care about moderation decisions for this particular post, I'm just dismayed by how eager LessWrongers seem to be to rationalize shooting themselves in the foot, which is also my foot and humanity's foot, for the short term satisfaction of getting to think of themselves as aligned with the forces of truth in a falsely constructed dichotomy against the forces of falsehood. * On any sufficiently controversial subject, responsible members of groups with vulnerable reputations will censor themselves if they have sufficiently unpopular views, which makes discussions on sufficiently controversial subjects within such groups a sham. The rationalist community should oppose shams instead of encouraging them. * Whether political pressure leaks into technical subjects mostly depends on people's meta-level recognition that inferences subject to political pressure are unreliable, and hosting sham discussions makes this recognition harder. * The rationalist community should avoid causing people to think irrationally, and a very frequent type of irrational thinking (even among otherwise very smart people) is "this is on the same website as something offensive, so I'm not going to listen to it". "Let's keep putting important things on the same website as unimportant and offensive things until they learn" is not a strategy that I expect to work here. * It would be really nice to be able to stand up to left wing political entryism, and the only principled way to do this is to be very conscientious about standing up to right wing political entryism, where in this case "right wing" means any politics sufficiently offensive to the left wing, regardless of whether it thinks of itself as right wing. I'm not as confident about these conclusions as it sounds, but my lack of confidence comes from seeing that people whose judgment I trust disagree, and it does not come from the arguments that have been given, which have not seemed to me to be g

[-]jessicata4y390

It would be really nice to be able to stand up to left wing political entryism, and the only principled way to do this is to be very conscientious about standing up to right wing political entryism, where in this case “right wing” means any politics sufficiently offensive to the left wing, regardless of whether it thinks of itself as right wing.

"Stand up to X by not doing anything X would be offended by" is obviously an unworkable strategy, it's taking a negotiating stance that is maximally yielding in the ultimatum game, so should expect to receive as little surplus utility as possible in negotiation.

(Not doing anything X would be offended by is generally a strategy for working with X, not standing up to X; it could work if interests are aligned enough that it isn't necessary to demand much in negotiation. But given your concern about "entryism" that doesn't seem like the situation you think you're in.)

8gjm4y

steven0461 isn't proposing standing up to X by not doing things that would offend X. He is proposing standing up to the right by not doing things that would offend the left, and standing up to the left by not doing things that would offend the right. Avoiding posts like the OP here is intended to be an example of the former, which (steven0461 suggests) has value not only for its own sake but also because it lets us also stand up to the left by avoiding things that offend the right, without being hypocrites. (steven0461's comment seems to treat "standing up to left-wing political entryism" as a thing that's desirable for its own sake, and "standing up to right-wing political entryism" as something we regrettably have to do too in order to do the desirable thing without hypocrisy. This seems kinda strange to me because (1) standing up to all kinds of political entryism seems to me obviously desirable for its own sake, and because (2) if for some reason left-wing political entryism is fundamentally worse than right-wing political entryism then surely that makes it not necessarily hypocritical to take a stronger stand against the former than against the latter.)

[-]jessicata4y170

If someone proposes to do A by doing B, and B by doing C, they are proposing doing A by doing C. (Here A = "stand up to left wing entryism", B = "stand up to right wing entryism", C = "don't do things that left wing people are offended by")

EDIT: Also, the situation isn't symmetrical, since Steven is defining right-wing to mean things the left wing is offended by, and not vice versa. Hence it's clearly a strategy for submitting to the left, as it lets the left construct the left/right dichotomy.

5gjm4y

I'm not sure there's a definite fact of the matter as to when something is "doing X by doing Y" in cases like this where it's indirect, but I think either we shouldn't use that language so broadly as to apply to such cases or it's not obvious that it's unworkable to "stand up to X by not doing things that offend X", since the obvious unworkability of that is (unless I'm misunderstanding your earlier comment) predicated on the idea that it's a sort of appeasement of X, rather than the sort of indirect thing we're actually talking about here. Maybe I am also being too indirect. Regardless of whether there's some sense in which steven0461 is proposing to "stand up to X by not doing things that would offend X", he was unambiguously not proposing "a negotiating stance that is maximally yielding in the ultimatum game"; "not doing things that would offend X" in his comment is unambiguously not a move in any game being played with X at all. Your objection to what he wrote is just plain wrong, whether or not there is a technical sense in which he did say the thing that you objected to, because your argument against what he said was based on an understanding of it that is wrong whether or not that's so. [EDITED to add:] As I mention in a grandchild comment, one thing in the paragraph above is badly garbled; I was trying to say something fairly complicated in too few words and ended up talking nonsense. It's not correct to say that "not doing things that would offend X" is not a move in any game being played with X. Rather, I claim that X in your original comment is standing in for two different albeit related Xs, who are involved in two different albeit related interactions ("games" if you like), and the two things you portray as inconsistent are not at all inconsistent because it's entirely possible (whether or not it's wise) to win one game while losing the other. The game with "left-wing entryists" is one where they try to make LW a platform for left-wing propaganda. Th

[-]jessicata4y410

The implied game is:

Step 1: The left decides what is offensively right-wing

Step 2: LW people decide what to say given this

Steven is proposing a policy for step 2 that doesn't do anything that the left has decided is offensively right-wing. This gives the left the ability to prevent arbitrary speech.

If the left is offended by negotiating for more than $1 in the ultimatum game, Steven's proposed policy would avoid doing that, thereby yielding. (The money here is metaphorical, representing benefits LW people could get by talking about things without being attacked by the left)

9steven04614y

I think an important cause of our disagreement is you model the relevant actors as rational strategic consequentialists trying to prevent certain kinds of speech, whereas I think they're at least as much like a Godzilla that reflexively rages in pain and flattens some buildings whenever he's presented with an idea that's noxious to him. You can keep irritating Godzilla until he learns that flattening buildings doesn't help him achieve his goals, but he'll flatten buildings anyway because that's just the kind of monster he is, and in this way, you and Godzilla can create arbitrary amounts of destruction together. And (to some extent) it's not like someone constructed a reflexively-acting Godzilla so they could control your behavior, either, which would make it possible to deter that person from making future Godzillas. Godzillas seem (to some extent) to arise spontaneously out of the social dynamics of large numbers of people with imperfect procedures for deciding what they believe and care about. So it's not clear to me that there's an alternative to just accepting the existence of Godzilla and learning as best as you can to work around him in those cases where working around him is cheap, especially if you have a building that's unusually important to keep intact. All this is aside from considerations of mercy to Godzilla or respect for Godzilla's opinions. If I make some substitutions in your comment to illustrate this view of censorious forces as reflexive instead of strategic, it goes like this: I think "wave your cloths at home or in another field even if it's not as good" ends up looking clearly correct here, and if this model is partially true, then something more nuanced than an absolutist "don't give them an inch" approach is warranted. edit: I should clarify that when I say Godzilla flattens buildings, I'm mostly not referring to personal harm to people with unpopular opinions, but to epistemic closure to whatever is associated with those people, which

[-]Zack_M_Davis4y450

The relevant actors aren't consciously being strategic about it, but I think their emotions are sensitive to whether the threat of being offended seems to be working. That's what the emotions are for, evolutionarily speaking. People are innately very good at this! When I babysit a friend's unruly 6-year-old child who doesn't want to put on her shoes, or talk to my mother who wishes I would call more often, or introspect on my own rage at the abject cowardice of so-called "rationalists", the functionality of emotions as a negotiating tactic is very clear to me, even if I don't have the same kind of deliberative control over my feelings as my speech (and the child and my mother don't even think of themselves as doing game theory at all).

(This in itself doesn't automatically negate your concerns, of course, but I think it's an important modeling consideration: animals like Godzilla may be less incentivizable than Homo economicus, but they're more like Homo economicus than a tornado or an avalanche.)

2steven04614y

I think simplifying all this to a game with one setting and two players with human psychologies obscures a lot of what's actually going on. If you look at people of the sneer, it's not at all clear that saying offensive things thwarts their goals. They're pretty happy to see offensive things being said, because it gives them opportunities to define themselves against the offensive things and look like vigilant guardians against evil. Being less offensive, while paying other costs to avoid having beliefs be distorted by political pressure (e.g. taking it elsewhere, taking pains to remember that politically pressured inferences aren't reliable), arguably de-energizes such people more than it emboldens them.

9Said Achmiz4y

This logic would fall down entirely if it turned out that “offensive things” isn’t a natural kind, or a pre-existing category of any sort, but is instead a label attached by the “people of the sneer” themselves to anything they happen to want to mock or vilify (which is always going to be something, since—as you say—said people in fact have a goal of mocking and/or vilifying things, in general). Inconveniently, that is precisely what turns out to be the case…

8steven04614y

"Offensive things" isn't a category determined primarily by the interaction of LessWrong and people of the sneer. These groups exist in a wider society that they're signaling to. It sounds like your reasoning is "if we don't post about the Bell Curve, they'll just start taking offense to technological forecasting, and we'll be back where we started but with a more restricted topic space". But doing so would make the sneerers look stupid, because society, for better or worse, considers The Bell Curve to be offensive and does not consider technological forecasting to be offensive.

1Said Achmiz4y

I’m sorry, but this is a fantasy. It may seem reasonable to you that the world should work like this, but it does not. To suggest that “the sneerers” would “look stupid” is to posit someone—a relevant someone, who has the power to determine how people and things are treated, and what is acceptable, and what is beyond the pale—for them to “look stupid” to. But in fact “the sneerers” simply are “wider society”, for all practical purposes. “Society” considers offensive whatever it is told to consider offensive. Today, that might not include “technological forecasting”. Tomorrow, you may wake up to find that’s changed. If you point out that what we do here wasn’t “offensive” yesterday, and so why should it be offensive today, and in any case, surely we’re not guilty of anything, are we, since it’s not like we could’ve known, yesterday, that our discussions here would suddenly become “offensive”… right? … well, I wouldn’t give two cents for your chances, in the court of public opinion (Twitter division). And if you try to protest that anyone who gets offended at technological forecasting is just stupid… then may God have mercy on your soul—because “the sneerers” surely won’t.

8Zack_M_Davis4y

But there are systemic reasons why Society gets told that hypotheses about genetically-mediated group differences are offensive, and mostly doesn't (yet?) get told that technological forecasting is offensive. (If some research says Ethnicity E has higher levels of negatively-perceived Trait T, then Ethnicity E people have an incentive to discredit the research independently of its truth value—and people who perceive themselves as being in a zero-sum conflict with Ethnicity E have an incentive to promote the research independently of its truth value.) Steven and his coalition are betting that it's feasible to "hold the line" on only censoring the hypotheses are closely tied to political incentives like this, without doing much damage to our collective ability to think about other aspects of the world. I don't think it works as well in practice as they think it does, due to the mechanisms described in "Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies" and "Dark Side Epistemology"—you make a seemingly harmless concession one day, and five years later, you end up claiming with perfect sincerity that dolphins are fish—but I don't think it's right to dismiss the strategy as fantasy.

[-]steven04614y120

due to the mechanisms described in "Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies" and "Dark Side Epistemology"

I'm not advocating lying. I'm advocating locally preferring to avoid subjects that force people to either lie or alienate people into preferring lies, or both. In the possible world where The Bell Curve is mostly true, not talking about it on LessWrong will not create a trail of false claims that have to be rationalized. It will create a trail of no claims. LessWrongers might fill their opinion vacuum with false claims from elsewhere, or with true claims, but either way, this is no different from what they already do about lots of subjects, and does not compromise anyone's epistemic integrity.

[-]Zack_M_Davis4y150

I'm not advocating lying.

I understand that. I cited a Sequences post that has the word "lies" in the title, but I'm claiming that the mechanism described in the cited posts—that distortions on one topic can spread to both adjacent topics, and to people's understanding of what reasoning looks like—can apply more generally to distortions that aren't direct lies.

Omitting information can be a distortion when the information would otherwise be relevant. In "A Rational Argument", Yudkowsky gives the example of an election campaign manager publishing survey responses from their candidate, but omitting one question which would make their candidate look bad, which Yudkowsky describes as "cross[ing] the line between rationality and rationalization" (!). This is a very high standard—but what made the Sequences so valuable, is that they taught people the counterintuitive idea that this standard exists. I think there's a lot of value in aspiring to hold one's public reasoning to that standard.

Not infinite value, of course! If I knew for a fact that Godzilla will destroy the world if I cite a book that I would otherwise would have cited as genuinely relevant, then fine, for the sake of the sa... (read more)

[-]steven04614y100

Your posts seem to be about what happens if you filter out considerations that don't go your way. Obviously, yes, that way you can get distortion without saying anything false. But the proposal here is to avoid certain topics and be fully honest about which topics are being avoided. This doesn't create even a single bit of distortion. A blank canvas is not a distorted map. People can get their maps elsewhere, as they already do on many subjects, and as they will keep having to do regardless, simply because some filtering is inevitable beneath the eye of Sauron. (Distortions caused by misestimation of filtering are going to exist whether the filter has 40% strength or 30% strength. The way to minimize them is to focus on estimating correctly. A 100% strength filter is actually relatively easy to correctly estimate. And having the appearance of a forthright debate creates perverse incentives for people to distort their beliefs so they can have something inoffensive to be forthright about.)

The people going after Steve Hsu almost entirely don't care whether LW hosts Bell Curve reviews. If adjusting allowable topic space gets us 1 util and causes 2 utils of damage distributed evenly acr... (read more)

4steven04614y

Another way this matters: Offense takers largely get their intuitions about "will taking offense achieve my goals" from experience in a wide variety of settings and not from LessWrong specifically. Yes, theoretically, the optimal strategy is for them to estimate "will taking offense specifically against LessWrong achieve my goals", but most actors simply aren't paying enough attention to form a target-by-target estimate. Viewing this as a simple game theory textbook problem might lead you to think that adjusting our behavior to avoid punishment would lead to an equal number of future threats of punishment against us and is therefore pointless, when actually it would instead lead to future threats of punishment against some other entity that we shouldn't care much about, like, I don't know, fricking Sargon of Akkad.

[-]Zack_M_Davis4y100

I agree that offense-takers are calibrated against Society-in-general, not particular targets.

As a less-political problem with similar structure, consider ransomware attacks. If an attacker encrypts your business's files and will sell you the encryption key for 10 Bitcoins, do you pay (in order to get your files back, as common sense and causal decision theory agree), or do you not-pay (as a galaxy-brained updateless-decision-theory play to timelessly make writing ransomware less profitable, even though that doesn't help the copy of you in this timeline)?

It's a tough call! If your business's files are sufficiently important, then I can definitely see why you'd want to pay! But if someone were to try to portray the act of paying as pro-social, that would be pretty weird. If your Society knew how, law-abiding citizens would prefer to coordinate not to pay attackers, which is why the U.S. Treasury Department is cracking down on facilitating ransomware payments. But if that's not an option ...

our behavior [...] punishment against us [...] some other entity that we shouldn't care much about

If coordinating to resist extortion isn't an option, that makes me very interested in trying t... (read more)

2steven04614y

My claim was: It's obvious to everyone in the discussion that the model is partially false and there's also a strategic component to people's emotions, so repeating this is not responsive.

3Said Achmiz4y

But of course there’s an alternative. There’s a very obvious alternative, which also happens to be the obviously and only correct action: Kill Godzilla.

5Ben Pace4y

(Appreciate you spelling it out like this, the above is a clear articulation of one of the main perspectives I have on the situation.)

3gjm4y

It still appears to me that you are completely missing the point. I acknowledge that you are getting a lot of upvotes and I'm not, suggesting that other LW readers disagree with me. I think they are wrong, but outside view suggests caution. ---------------------------------------- I notice one thing I said that was not at all what I intended to say, so let me correct that before going further. I said but what I actually meant to say was [EDITED to add:] No, that also isn't quite right; my apologies; let me try again. What I actually mean is that "standing up to X" and "not doing things that would offend X" are events in two entirely separate games, and the latter is not a means to the former. There are actually three separate interactions envisaged in Steven's comment, constituting (if you want to express this in game-theoretic terms) three separate games. (1) An interaction with left-wing entryists, where they try to turn LW into a platform for leftist propaganda. (2) An interaction with right-wing entryists, where they try to turn LW into a platform for rightist propaganda. (3) An interaction with leftists, who may or may not be entryists, where they try to stop LW being a platform for right-wing propaganda or claim that it is one. (There is also (4) an interaction with rightists, along the lines of #3, which I include for the sake of symmetry.) Steven claims that in game 1 we should strongly resist the left-wing entryists, presumably by saying something like "no, LW is not a place for left-wing propaganda". He claims that in order to do this in a principled way we need also to say "LW is not a place for right-wing propaganda", thus also resisting the right-wing entryists in game 2. And he claims that in order to do this credibly we need to be reluctant to post things that might be, or that look like they are, right-wing propaganda, thus giving some ground to the leftists in game 3. Game 1 and game 3 are entirely separate, and the same move could be a decla

2steven04614y

I agree it's desirable for its own sake, but meant to give an additional argument why even those people who don't agree it's desirable for its own sake should be on board with it. Not necessarily objectively hypocritical, but hypocritical in the eyes of a lot of relevant "neutral" observers.

3steven04614y

"Stand up to X by not doing anything X would be offended by" is not what I proposed. I was temporarily defining "right wing" as "the political side that the left wing is offended by" so I could refer to posts like the OP as "right wing" without setting off a debate about how actually the OP thinks of it more as centrist that's irrelevant to the point I was making, which is that "don't make LessWrong either about left wing politics or about right wing politics" is a pretty easy to understand criterion and that invoking this criterion to keep LW from being about left wing politics requires also keeping LessWrong from being about right wing politics. Using such a criterion on a society-wide basis might cause people to try to redefine "1+1=2" as right wing politics or something, but I'm advocating using it locally, in a place where we can take our notion of what is political and what is not political as given from outside by common sense and by dynamics in wider society (and use it as a Schelling point boundary for practical purposes without imagining that it consistently tracks what is good and bad to talk about). By advocating keeping certain content off one particular website, I am not advocating being "maximally yielding in an ultimatum game", because the relevant game also takes place in a whole universe outside this website (containing your mind, your conversations with other people, and lots of other websites) that you're free to use to adjust your degree of yielding. Nor does "standing up to political entryism" even imply standing up to offensive conclusions reached naturally in the course of thinking about ideas sought out for their importance rather than their offensiveness or their symbolic value in culture war.

5steven04614y

I agree that LW shouldn't be a zero-risk space, that some people will always hate us, and that this is unavoidable and only finitely bad. I'm not persuaded by reasons 2 and 3 from your comment at all in the particular case of whether people should talk about Murray. A norm of "don't bring up highly inflammatory topics unless they're crucial to the site's core interests" wouldn't stop Hanson from posting about ems, or grabby aliens, or farmers and foragers, or construal level theory, or Aumann's theorem, and anyway, having him post on his own blog works fine. AI alignment was never political remotely like how the Bell Curve is political. (I guess some conceptual precursors came from libertarian email lists in the 90s?) If AI alignment becomes very political (e.g. because people talk about it side by side with Bell Curve reviews), we can invoke the "crucial to the site's core interests" thing and keep discussing it anyway, ideally taking some care to avoid making people be stupid about it. If someone wants to argue that having Bell Curve discussion on r/TheMotte instead of here would cause us to lose out on something similarly important, I'm open to hearing it.

9Vaniver4y

Not within the mainstream politics, but within academic / corporate CS and AI departments.

2steven04614y

You'd have to use a broad sense of "political" to make this true (maybe amounting to "controversial"). Nobody is advocating blanket avoidance of controversial opinions, only blanket avoidance of narrow-sense politics, and even then with a strong exception of "if you can make a case that it's genuinely important to the fate of humanity in the way that AI alignment is important to the fate of humanity, go ahead". At no point could anyone have used the proposed norms to prevent discussion of AI alignment.

3Rafael Harth4y

I know you haven't implied that the someone could be me, but I thought I'd just clarify that I would vehemently oppose such an argument. My argument contra slippery slope is that I don't see evidence for it. If we look ten years into the past, there hasn't been another book like TBC every week; in fact there hasn't been one ever. I would bet against there being another one in the next 10 years. There may be some risk of a slippery slope on other issues, but honestly I want that to be a separate argument because I estimate this post to carry a lot more risk than the other < 4 posts/year that I mentioned. I don't know if this is true (and it's usually bad form to accuse others of lack of knowledge), but I genuinely wonder if others who've participated in this discussion just don't know how strongly many people feel about this book. (it is of course possible to acknowledge this and still (or especially) be against censorship.)

[-]DirectedEvolution4y*140

I'm fairly aware of Murray's public image, but wanted to go a little deeper before replying.

Here's a review from the Washington Post this year, of Murray's latest book. Note that, while critical of his book, it does not call him a racist. Perhaps its strongest critical language is the closing sentence:

He writes as if his conclusions are just a product of cold calculus and doesn’t pause long enough to consider that perhaps it’s the assumptions in his theorem that are antithetical to the soul of America.

It actually more portrays him as out of touch with the rise of the far right than in lockstep with it. The article does not call him a racist, predict his book will cause harm, or suggest that readers avoid it. This suggests to me that there is still room for Murray's output to be considered by a major, relatively liberal news media outlet.

The Standard-Examiner published a positive review of the same book. They are a newspaper with a circulation of about 30,000, based out of Ogden, UT.

Looking over other the couple dozen news articles that popped up containing "Charles Murray" and "The Bell Curve" from 2021, I see several that mention protests against him, or arguments over TBC, mentio... (read more)

3Rafael Harth4y

Agree with all of this, but my concern is not that the coupling of [worrying about AGI] and [being anti-social-justice] happens tomorrow. (I did have some separate concerns about people being put off by the post today, but I've been convinced somewhere in the comments under this post that the opposite is about equally likely.) It's that this happens when AGI saftey is a much bigger deal in the public discourse. (Not sure if you think this will never happen? I think there's a chance it never happens but that seems widely uncertain. I would put maybe 50% on it or something? Note that even if it happens very late, say 4 years before AGI poses an existential risk, I think that's still more than enough time for the damage to be done. EY famously argued that there is no firelarm for AGI; if you buy this then we can't rely on "by this point the danger is so obvious that people will take safety seriously no matter what".) If your next question is "why worry about this now", one reason is that I don't have faith that mods will react in time when the risk increases (I've updated upward on how likely I think this is after talking to Ruby but not to 100% and who knows who's mod in 20 years), and I have the opportunity to say something now. But even if I had full authority over how the policy changes in the future, I still wouldn't have allowed this post because people can dig out old material if they want to write a hit piece. This post has been archived, so from this point on there will forever be the opportunity to link LW to TBC for anyone wants to do that. And if you applied the analog of security mindset to this problem (which I think is appropriate), this is not something you would allow to happen. There is precedent for people losing positions over things that have happened decades in the past. One somewhat concrete scenario that seems plausible (but widely unlikely because it's concrete) is that Elon Musk manages to make the issue mainstream in 15 years; someone does

2steven04614y

I don't think it will be obvious, but I think we'll be able to make an imperfect estimate of when to change the policy that's still better than giving up on future evaluation of such tradeoffs and committing reputational murder-suicide immediately. (I for one like free speech and will be happy to advocate for it on LW when conditions change enough to make it seem anything other than pointlessly self-destructive.)

[-]Ruby4y260

We've have a norm against discussing politics since before LessWrong 2.0, which doesn't seem to have had any noticeable negative effects on our ability to discuss other topics.

I'm not sure whether that's true, but separately, the norm against politics has definitely impact our ability to discuss politics. Perhaps that's a necessary sacrifice, but it's a sacrifice. In this particular case, both the object level (why is our society the way it is) and the meta-level (what are the actual views in this piece that got severe backlash) are relevant to our modeling of the world and I think it'd be a loss to not have this piece.

I do think that if we order all posts by where they appear on this spectrum, I would put this farther to the right than any other post I remember, so we genuniely seem to differ in our judgment here.

I'm not sure where this post would fall in my ranking (along the dimension you're pointing at). It's possible I agree with you that it's at the extreme end–but there has to be a post at the extreme end. The posts that are imo (or other moderator's opinions) over the line are ones you wouldn't see.

I echo anon03 in that the title is extremely provocative, but minus the clai

... (read more)

2Rafael Harth4y

I agree that the politics ban is a big sacrifice (regardless of whether the benefits outweigh it or not), and also that this particular post has a lot of value. But if you look at the set of all books for which (1) a largely positive reivew could plausibly been written by a super smart guy like lsusr, and (2) the backlash could plausibly be really bad, I think it literally contains a single element. It's only TBC. There are a bunch of non-bookreview posts that I also wouldn't want, but they're very rare. It seems like we're talking about a much smaller set of topics than what's covered by the norm around politics. I feel like if we wanted to find the optimal point in the value-risk space, there's no way it's "ban on all politics but no restriction on social justice". There have got to be political areas with less risk and more payoff, like just all non-US politics or something.

2steven04614y

A global ban on political discussion by rationalists might be a big sacrifice, but it seems to me there are no major costs to asking people to take it elsewhere. (I just edited "would be a big sacrifice" to "might be a big sacrifice", because the same forces that cause a ban to seem like a good idea will still distort discussions even in the absence of a ban, and perhaps make them worse than useless because they encourage the false belief that a rational discussion is being had.)

[-]Ben Pace4y100

Just a short note that the title seems like the correct one so that it's searchable by the name of the book slash author. Relatedly, all book reviews on LW are called "Book Review: <Book Name>", this one didn't stand out as any different to me (except it adds the author's name, which seems pretty within reasonable bounds to me).

2Ruby4y

Fwiw, I bet adding the author's name was an intentional move because it'd be controversial.

6Ben Pace4y

Okay. Maybe not the ideal goal, not sure, but I think it's pretty within range of fine things to do. There's a fairly good case that people will search the author's name and want to understand their ideas because he's well-known, so it helps as a search term.

1[comment deleted]4y

[-]DirectedEvolution4y*210

I'll bite, but I can't promise to engage in a lot of back-and-forth.

The site is discussed somewhere, someone claims that it's a home for racism and points to this post as evidence. Someone else who would have otherwise become a valuable contributor reads it and decides not to check it out
A woke and EA-aligned person gets wind of it and henceforth thinks all x-risk related causes are unworthy of support

Let's generalize. A given post on LW's frontpage may heighten or diminish its visibility and appeal to potential newcomers, or the visibility/appeal of associated causes like X-risk. You've offered one reason why this post might heighten its visibility while diminishing its appeal.

Here's an alternative scenario, in which this post heightens rather than diminishes the appeal of LW. Perhaps a post about the Bell Curve will strike somebody as a sign that this website welcomes free and open discourse, even on controversial topics, as long as it's done thoughtfully. This might heighten, rather than diminish, LW's appeal, for a person such as this. Indeed, hosting posts on potentially controversial topics might select for people like this, and that might not only grow the website, but reinf... (read more)

[-]habryka4y400

I believe that LW must be have a readership two orders of magnitude lower than SSC/ACX (in the thousands, or even just the hundreds, for LW, in the hundreds of thousands for SSC/ACX)

LW's readership is about the same order of magnitude as SSC. Depending on the mood of the HN and SEO gods.

[-]DirectedEvolution4y110

Not that I don't believe you, but that's also really hard for me to wrap my head around. Can you put numbers on that claim? I'm not sure if ACX has a much smaller readership than I'd imagined, or if LW has a much bigger one, but either way I'd like to know!

[-]habryka4y200

https://www.similarweb.com/website/astralcodexten.substack.com/?competitors=lesswrong.com Currently shows ACX at something like 1.7x of LessWrong. At some points in the past LessWrong was slightly ahead.

LessWrong is a pretty big website. Here is a random snapshot of top-viewed pages from the last month from Google Analytics:

As you can see from the distribution, it's a long tail of many pages getting a few hundred pageviews each month, which adds up a lot.

7DirectedEvolution4y

That is vastly more readership than I had thought. A naive look at these numbers suggests that a small city’s worth of people read Elizabeth’s latest post. But I assume that these numbers can’t be taken at face value. It’s very hard for me to square the idea that these websites get roughly comparable readership with my observation that ACX routinely attracts hundreds of comments on every post. LW gets 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer comments than ACX. So while I’m updating in favor of the site’s readership being quite a bit bigger than I’d thought, I still think there’s some disconnect here between what I’m thinking of by “readership” and the magnitude of “readership” is coming across in these stats.

[-]Ben Pace4y170

Note that LW gets 1-2 OOM fewer comments on the average post, but not in total. I reckon monthly comments is same OOM. And if you add up total word count on each site I suspect LW is 1 OOM bigger each month. ACX is more focused and the discussion is more focused, LW is a much broader space with lots of smaller convos.

6DirectedEvolution4y

That makes a lot of sense. I do get the feeling that, although total volume on a particular topic is more limited here, that there's a sense of conversation and connection that I don't get on ACX, which I think is largely due to the notification system we have here for new comments and messages.

[-]Ruby4y170

This is weekly comments for LessWrong over the last year. Last we counted, something like 300 on a SSC post? So if there are two SSC posts/week, LessWrong is coming out ahead.

4philh4y

I think ACX is ahead of LW here. In October, it got 7126 comments in 14 posts, which is over 1600/week. (Two of them were private with 201 between them, still over 1500/week if you exclude them. One was an unusually high open thread, but still over 1200/week if you exclude that too.) In September it was 10350 comments, over 2400/week. I can't be bothered to count August properly but there are 10 threads with over 500 comments and 20 with fewer, so probably higher than October at least. Not too far separate though, like maybe 2x but not 10x. (E: to clarify this is "comments on posts published in the relevant month" but that shouldn't particularly matter here)

9habryka4y

I don't think LW gets at all fewer comments than ACX. I think indeed LW has more comments than ACX, it's just that LW comments are spread out over 60+ posts in a given week, whereas ACX has like 2-3 posts a week. LessWrong gets about 150-300 comments a day, which is roughly the same as what ACX gets per day.

5habryka4y

I think this number can be relatively straightforwardly taken at face value. Elizabeth's post was at the top of HN for a few hours, so a lot of people saw it. A small city's worth seems about right for the number of people who clicked through and at least skimmed it.

4hath4y

I'm surprised to see how many people view the Roko's Basilisk tag. Is that a trend over more than just the last month?

[-]Ben Pace4y110

It’s the norm, alas.

6Wei Dai4y

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=u7iYAQM7MkGdhyTL9

6Rafael Harth4y

I think the evidence that wokeism is a powerful force in the world we live in is abundant, and my primary reaction to your comment is that it feels like everything you said could have been written in a world where this isn't so. There is an inherent asymmetry here in how many people care about which things to what degree in the real world. (As I've mentioned in the last discussion, I know a person who falls squarely into the second category I've mentioned; committed EA, very technically smart, but thinks all LW-adjacent things are poisonous, in her case because of sexism rather than racism, but it's in the same cluster.) Sam Harris invited the author of the Bell Curve onto his podcast 4 years ago, and as a result has a stream of hateful rhetoric targeted his way that lasts to this day. Where is the analogous observable effect into the opposite direction? If it doesn't exist, why is postulating the opposite effect plausible in this case? My rough cost-benefit analysis is -5/-20/-20 for the points I've mentioned, +1 for the advantage of being able to discuss this here, and maybe +2 for the effect of attracting people who like it for the opposite symbolism (i.e., here's someone not afraid to discuss hard things) and I feel like I don't want to assign a number to how it impacts Isur's feelings. The reason I didn't spell this out was because I thought it would come across as unnecessarily uncharitable, and it doesn't convey much new information because I already communicated that I don't see the upside.

[-]DirectedEvolution4y180

Sam Harris has enormous reach, comparable to Scott’s. Also, podcasts have a different cultural significance than book reviews. Podcasts tend to come with an implicit sense of friendliness and inclusion extended toward the guest. Not so in a book review, which can be bluntly critical. So for the reasons I outlined above, I don’t think Harris’s experiences are a good reference class for what we should anticipate.

“Wokeism” is powerful, and I agree that this post elevated this site’s risk of being attacked or condemned either by the right or the left. I also agree that some people have been turned off by the views on racism or sexism they’ve been exposed to on by some posters on this site.

I also think that negativity tends to be more salient than approval. If lsusr’s post costs us one long-term reader and gains us two, I expect the one user who exits over it to complain and point to this post, making the reason for their dissatisfaction clear. By contrast, I don’t anticipate the newcomers to make a fanfare, or to even see lsusr’s post as a key reason they stick around. Instead, they’ll find themselves enjoying a site culture and abundance of posts that they find generally appealing. So... (read more)

6Rafael Harth4y

I agree that the risk of anything terrible happening right now is very low for this reason. (Though I'd still estimate it to be higher than the upside.) But is "let's rely on us being too small to get noticed by the mob" really a status quo you're comfortable with? This comment actually made me update somewhat because it's harder than I thought to find an asymmetry here. But it's still only a part of the story (and the part I've put the least amount of weight on.)

7DirectedEvolution4y

Let me rephrase that slightly, since I would object to several features of this sentence that I think are beside your main point. I do think that taking the size and context of our community into account when assessing how outsiders will see and respond to our discourse is among the absolute top considerations for judging risk accurately. On a simple level, my framework is that we care about three factors: object-level risks and consequences, and enforcement-level risks and consequences. These are analogous to the risks and consequences from crime (object-level), and the risks and consequences from creating a police force or military (enforcement-level). What I am arguing in this case is that the negative risks x consequences of the sort of enforcement-level behaviors you are advocating for and enacting seem to outweigh the negative risks x consequences of being brigaded or criticized in the news. Also, I'm uncertain enough about the balance of this post's effect on inflow vs. outflow of readership to be close to 50/50, and expect it to be small enough either way to ignore it. Note also that Sam Harris and Scott Alexander still have an enormous readership after their encounters with the threats you're describing. While I can imagine a scenario in which unwanted attention becomes deeply unpleasant, I also expect to be a temporary situation. By contrast, instantiating a site culture that is self-censoring due to fear of such scenarios seems likely to be much more of a daily encumbrance - and one that still doesn't rule out the possibility that we get attacked anyway. I'd also note that you may be contributing to the elevation of risk with your choices of language. By using terms like "wokeism," "mob," and painting scrutiny as a dire threat in a public comment, it seems to me that you add potential fuel for any fire that may come raging through. My standard is that, if this is your earnest opinion, then LW ought to be a good platform for you to discuss that, even i

[-]Rafael Harth4y210

After reading this, I realize that I've done an extremely poor job communicating with everything I've commented on this post, so let me just try to start over.

I think what I'm really afraid of is a sequence of events that goes something like this:

Every couple of months, someone on LW makes a post like the above
In some (most?) cases, someone is going to speak up against this (in this case, we had two), there will be some discussion, but the majority will come down on the side that censorship is bad and there's no need to take drastic action
The result is that we never establish any kind of norm nor otherwise prepare for political backlash
In ten or twenty or forty years from now, in a way that's impossible to predict because any specific scenario is extremely unlikely, the position to be worried about AGI will get coupled to being anti social justice in the public discourse, as a result it will massively lose status and the big labs react by taking safety far less seriously and maybe we have fewer people writing papers on alignment
At that point it will be obvious to everyone that not having done anything to prevent this was a catastrophic error

After the discussion on the datin... (read more)

[-]DirectedEvolution4y310

I will say that although I disagree with your opinion re: censoring this post and general risk assessment related to this issue, I don't think you've expressed yourself particularly poorly. I also acknowledge that it's hard to manage feelings of anxiety that come up in conversations with an element of conflict, in a community you care about, in regards to an issue that is important to the world. So go easier on yourself, if that helps! I too get anxious when I get downvoted, or when somebody disagrees with me, even though I'm on LW to learn, and being disagreed with and turning out to be wrong is part of that learning process.

It sounds like a broader perspective of yours is that there's a strategy for growing the AGI safety community that involves keeping it on the good side of whatever political faction is in power. You think that we should do pretty much whatever it takes to make AGI safety research a success, and that this strategy of avoiding any potentially negative associations is important enough for achieving that outcome that we should take deliberate steps to safeguard its perception in this way. As a far-downstream consequence, we should censor posts like this, out of a ... (read more)

6Rafael Harth4y

Thanks for this comment. I happily endorse this very articulate description of my perspective, with the one caveat that I would draw the line to the right of 'anything potentially controversial' (with the left-right axis measuring potential for backlash). I think this post falls to the right of just about any line; I think it hast he highest potential for backlash out of any post I remember seeing on LW ever. (I just said the same in a reply to Ruby, and I wasn't being hypothetical.) I'm probably an unusual case, but I got invited into the alignment forum by posting the Factored Cognition sequence on LW, so insofar as I count, LW has been essential. If it weren't for the way that the two forums are connected, I wouldn't have written the sequence. The caveat is that I'm currently not pursuing a "direct" path on alignment but am instead trying to go the academia route by doing work in the intersection of [widely recognized] and [safety-relevant] (i.e. on interpretability), so you could argue that the pipeline ultimately didn't work. But I think (not 100% sure) at least Alex Turner is a straight-forward success story for said pipeline. I think you probably want to respond on this on my reply to Rubin so that we don't have two discussions about the same topic. My main objection is that the amount of censorship I'm advocating for seems to me to be tiny, I think less than 5 posts per year, far less than what is censored by the norm against politics. Edit: I also want to object to this: I don't think anything of what I'm saying involves judging arguments based on their impact on the world. I'm saying you shouldn't be allowed to talk about TBC on LW in the first place. This seems like a super important distinction because it doesn't involve lying or doing any mental gymnastics. I see it as closely analogous to the norm against politics, which I don't think has hurt our discourse.

[-]DirectedEvolution4y160

I don't think anything of what I'm saying involves judging arguments based on their impact on the world.

What I mean here is that you, like most advocates of a marginal increase in censorship, justify this stance on the basis that the censored material will cause some people, perhaps its readers or its critics, to take an action with an undesirable consequence. Examples from the past have included suicidal behavior, sexual promiscuity, political revolution, or hate crimes.

To this list, you have appended "elevating X-risk." This is what I mean by "impact on the world."

Usually, advocates of marginal increases in censorship are afraid of the content of the published documents. In this case, you're afraid not of what the document says on the object level, but of how the publication of that document will be perceived symbolically.

An advocate of censorship might point out that we can potentially achieve significant gains on goals with widespread support (in our society, stopping hate crimes might be an example), with only modest censorship. For example, we might not ban sales of a certain book. We just make it library policy not to purchase them. Or we restrict purchase to a certain age g... (read more)

2Rafael Harth4y

The link thing was anon03's idea; I want posts about TBC to be banned outright. Other than that, I think you've understood my model. (And I think I understand yours except that I don't understand the gears of the mechanism by which you think x-risk increases.)

9DirectedEvolution4y

Sorry for conflating anon03's idea with yours! A quick sketch at a gears-level model: 1. X-risk, and AGI safety in particular, require unusual strength in gears-level reasoning to comprehend and work on; a willingness to stand up to criticism not only on technical questions but on moral/value questions; an intense, skeptical, questioning attitude; and a high value placed on altruism. Let's call these people "rationalists." 2. Even in scientific and engineering communities, and the population of rational people generally, the combination of these traits I'm referring to as "rationalism" is rare. 3. Rationalism causes people to have unusually high and predictable needs for a certain style and subject of debate and discourse, in a way that sets them apart from the general population. 4. Rationalists won't be able to get their needs met in mainstream scientific or engineering communities, which prioritize a subset of the total rationalist package of traits. 5. Hence, they'll seek an alternative community in which to get those needs met. 6. Rationalists who haven't yet discovered a rationalist community won't often have an advance knowledge of AGI safety. Instead, they'll have thoughts and frustrations provoked by the non-rationalist society in which they grew up. It is these prosaic frustrations - often with politics - that will motivate them to seek out a different community, and to stay engaged with it. 7. When these people discover a community that engages with the controversial political topics they've seen shunned and censored in the rest of society, and doing it in a way that appears epistemically healthy to them, they'll take it as evidence that they should stick around. It will also be a place where even AGI safety researchers and their friends can deal with the ongoing their issues and interests beyond AGI safety. 8. By associating with this community, they'll pick up on ideas common in the community, like a concern for AGI safety. Some of them will t

2Rafael Harth4y

What has gone into forming this model? I only have one datapoint on this (which is myself). I stuck around because of the quality of discussion (people are making sense here!); I don't think the content mattered. But I don't have strong resistance to believing that this is how it works for other people. I think if your model is applied to the politics ban, it would say that it's also quite bad (maybe not as bad because most politics stuff isn't as shunned and censored as social justice stuff)? If that's true, how would you feel about restructuring rather than widening the censorship? Start allowing some political discussions (I also keep thinking about Wei Dai's "it'll go there eventually so we should practice" argument) but censor the most controversial social justice stuff. I feel like the current solution isn't pareto optimal in the {epistemic health} x {safety against backlash} space.

[-][anonymous]4y270

Anecdotal, but about a year ago I committed to the rationalist community for exactly the reasons described. I feel more accepted in rationalist spaces than trans spaces, even though rationalists semi-frequently argue against the standard woke line and trans spaces try to be explicitly welcoming.

4DirectedEvolution4y

Just extrapolating from my own experience. For me, the content was important. I think where my model really meets challenges is that clearly, the political content on LW has alienated some people. These people were clearly attracted here in the first place. My model says that LW is a magnet for likely AGI-safety researchers, and says nothing about it being a filter for likely AGI-safety researchers. Hence, if our political content is costing us more involvement than it's retaining, or if the frustration experienced by those who've been troubled by the political content outweigh the frustration that would be experienced by those whose content would be censored, then that poses a real problem for my cost/benefit analysis. A factor asymmetrically against increased censorship here is that censorship is, to me, intrinsically bad. It's a little like war. Sometimes, you have to fight a war, but you should insist on really good evidence before you commit to it, because wars are terrible. Likewise, censorship sucks, and you should insist on really good evidence before you accept an increase in censorship. It's this factor, I think, that tilts me onto the side of preferring the present level of political censorship rather than an increase. I acknowledge and respect the people who feel they can't participate here because they experience the environment as toxic. I think that is really unfortunate. I also think that censorship sucks, and for me, it roughly balances out with the suckiness of alienating potential participants via a lack of censorship. This, I think, is the area where my mind is most susceptible to change. If somebody could make a strong case that LW currently has a lot of excessively toxic, alienating content, that this is the main bottleneck for wider participation, and that the number of people who'd leave if that controversial content were removed were outweighed by the number of people who'd join, then I'd be open-minded about that marginal increase in ce

5Vaniver4y

So, I both think that in the past 1) people have thought the x-risk folks are weird and low-status and didn't want to be affiliated with them, and in the present 2) people like Phil Torres are going around claiming that EAs and longtermists are white surpremacists, because of central aspects of longtermism (like thinking the present matters in large part because of its ability to impact the future). Things like "willingness to read The Bell Curve" no doubt contribute to their case, but I think focusing on that misses the degree to which the core is actually in competition with other ideologies or worldviews. I think there's a lot of value in trying to nudge your presentation to not trigger other people's allergies or defenses, and trying to incorporate criticisms and alternative perspectives. I think we can't sacrifice the core to do those things. If we disagree with people about whether the long-term matters, then we disagree with them; if they want to call us names accordingly, so much the worse for them.

3Rafael Harth4y

I mean, this works until someone in a position of influence bows the the pressure, and I don't see why this can't happen. The main disagreement seems to come down to how much we would give up when disallowing posts like this. My gears model still says 'almost nothing' since all it would take is to extend the norm "let's not talk about politics" to "let's not talk about politics and extremely sensitive social-justice adjacent issues", and I feel like that would extend the set of interesting taboo topics by something like 10%. (I've said the same here; if you have a response to this, it might make sense to all keep it in one place.)

2Ben Pace4y

Sorry about your anxiety around this discussion :(

-2anon034y

I like the norm of "If you're saying something that lots of people will probably (mis)interpret as being hurtful and insulting, see if you can come up with a better way to say the same thing, such that you're not doing that." This is not a norm of censorship nor self-censorship, it's a norm of clear communication and of kindness. I can easily imagine a book review of TBC that passes that test. But I think this particular post does not pass that test, not even close. If a TBC post passed that test, well, I would still prefer that it be put off-site with a linkpost and so on, but I wouldn't feel as strongly about it. I think "censorship" is entirely the wrong framing. I think we can have our cake and eat it too, with just a little bit of effort and thoughtfulness.

[-]Said Achmiz4y190

I like the norm of “If you’re saying something that lots of people will probably (mis)interpret as being hurtful and insulting, see if you can come up with a better way to say the same thing, such that you’re doing that.” This is not a norm of censorship nor self-censorship, it’s a norm of clear communication and of kindness.

I think that this is completely wrong. Such a norm is definitely a norm of (self-)censorship—as has been discussed on Less Wrong already.

It is plainly obvious to any even remotely reasonable person that the OP is not intended as any insult to anyone, but simply as a book review / summary, just like it says. Catering, in any way whatsoever, to anyone who finds the current post “hurtful and insulting”, is an absolutely terrible idea. Doing such a thing cannot do anything but corrode Less Wrong’s epistemic standards.

[-]anon034y180

Suppose that Person A finds Statement X demeaning, and you believe that X is not in fact demeaning to A, but rather A was misunderstanding X, or trusting bad secondary sources on X, or whatever.

What do you do?

APPROACH 1: You say X all the time, loudly, while you and your friends high-five each other and congratulate yourselves for sticking it to the woke snowflakes.

APPROACH 2: You try sincerely to help A understand that X is not in fact demeaning to A. That involves understanding where A is coming from, meeting A where A is currently at, defusing tension, gently explaining why you believe A is mistaken, etc. And doing all that before you loudly proclaim X.

I strongly endorse Approach 2 over 1. I think Approach 2 is more in keeping with what makes this community awesome, and Approach 2 is the right way to bring exactly the right kind of people into our community, and Approach 2 is the better way to actually "win", i.e. get lots of people to understand that X is not demeaning, and Approach 2 is obviously what community leaders like Scott Alexander would do (as for Eliezer, um, I dunno, my model of him would strongly endorse approach 2 in principle, but also sometimes he likes to troll... (read more)

[-]Said Achmiz4y160

Imagine that Person A believes that Charles Murray is a notorious racist, and TBC is a book that famously and successfully advocated for institutional racism via lies and deceptions. You don’t have to actually believe this—I don’t—I am merely asking you to imagine that Person A believes that.

If Person A believes this without ever having either (a) read The Bell Curve or (b) read a neutral, careful review/summary of The Bell Curve, then A is not a reasonable person.

All sorts of unreasonable people have all sorts of unreasonable and false beliefs. Should we cater to them all?

No. Of course we should not.

Now look at the OP through A’s eyes. Right from the title, it’s clear that OP is treating TBC as a perfectly reasonable respectable book by a perfectly reasonable respectable person.

The title, as I said before, is neutrally descriptive. Anyone who takes it as an endorsement is, once again… unreasonable.

Now A starts scanning the article, looking for any serious complaint about this book, this book which by the way personally caused me to suffer by successfully advocating for racism

Sorry, what? A book which you (the hypothetical Person A) have never read (and in fact have only... (read more)

[-]anon034y100

Sorry, what? A book which you (the hypothetical Person A) have never read (and in fact have only the vaguest notion of the contents of) has personally caused you to suffer? And by successfully (!!) “advocating for racism”, at that? This is… well, “quite a leap” seems like an understatement; perhaps the appropriate metaphor would have to involve some sort of Olympic pole-vaulting event. This entire (supposed) perspective is absurd from any sane person’s perspective.

I have a sincere belief that The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion directly contributed to the torture and death of some of my ancestors. I hold this belief despite having never read this book, and having only the vaguest notion of the contents of this book, and having never sought out sources that describe this book from a "neutral" point of view.

Do you view those facts as evidence that I'm an unreasonable person?

Further, if I saw a post about The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion that conspicuously failed to mention anything about people being oppressed as a result of the book, or a post that buried said discussion until after 28 paragraphs of calm open-minded analysis, well, I think I wouldn't read through the whole p... (read more)

[-]fourier4y120

Your analogy breaks down because the Bell Curve is extremely reasonable, not some forged junk like "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion".

If a book mentioned here mentioned evolution and that offended some traditional religious people, would we need to give a disclaimer and potentially leave it off the site? What if some conservative religious people believe belief in evolution directly harms them? They would be regarded as insane, and so are people offended by TBC.

That's all this is by the way, left-wing evolution denial. How likely is it that people separated for tens of thousands of years with different founder populations will have equal levels of cognitive ability. It's impossible.

9Said Achmiz4y

Yeah. “What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?” never stopped being the rationalist question. As for the rest of your comment—first of all, my relative levels of interest in reading a book review of the Protocols would be precisely reversed from yours. Secondly, I want to call attention to this bit: There is no particular reason to “give this book a chance”—to what? Convince us of its thesis? Persuade us that it’s harmless? No. The point of reviewing a book is to improve our understanding of the world. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a book which had an impact on global events, on world history. The reason to review it is to better understand that history, not to… graciously grant the Protocols the courtesy of having its allotted time in the spotlight. If you think that the Protocols are insignificant, that they don’t matter (and thus that reading or talking about them is a total waste of our time), that is one thing—but that’s not true, is it? You yourself say that the Protocols had a terrible impact! All the things which we should strive our utmost to understand, how can a piece of writing that contributed to some of the worst atrocities in history not be among them? How do you propose to prevent history from repeating, if you refuse, not only to understand it, but even to bear its presence? The idea that we should strenuously shut our eyes against bad things, that we should forbid any talk of that which is evil, is intellectually toxic. And the notion that by doing so, we are actually acting in a moral way, a righteous way, is itself the root of evil.

[-]anon034y190

Hmm, I think you didn't get what I was saying. A book review of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is great, I'm all for it. A book review of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which treats it as a perfectly lovely normal book and doesn't say anything about the book being a forgery until you get 28 paragraphs into the review and even then it's barely mentioned is the thing that I would find extremely problematic. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't that seem like kind of a glaring omission? Wouldn't that raise some questions about the author's beliefs and motives in writing the review?

Do you view those facts as evidence that I’m an unreasonable person?
Yeah.

Do you ever, in your life, think that things are true without checking? Do you think that the radius of earth is 6380 km? (Did you check? Did you look for skeptical sources?) Do you think that lobsters are more closely related to shrimp than to silverfish? (Did you check? Did you look for skeptical sources?) Do you think that it's dangerous to eat an entire bottle of medicine at once? (Did you check? Did you look for skeptical sources?)

I think you're holding people up to an unreasonable standard here. You can't do anything in life without havin... (read more)

[-]Said Achmiz4y120

Hmm, I think you didn’t get what I was saying. A book review of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is great, I’m all for it. A book review of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which treats it as a perfectly lovely normal book and doesn’t say anything about the book being a forgery until you get 28 paragraphs into the review and even then it’s barely mentioned is the thing that I would find extremely problematic. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t that seem like kind of a glaring omission? Wouldn’t that raise some questions about the author’s beliefs and motives in writing the review?

I agree completely.

But note that here we are talking about the book’s provenance / authorship / otherwise “metadata”—and certainly not about the book’s impact, effects of its publication, etc. The latter sort of thing may properly be discussed in a “discussion section” subsequent to the main body of the review, or it may simply be left up to a Wikipedia link. I would certainly not require that it preface the book review, before I found that review “acceptable”, or forebore to question the author’s motives, or what have you.

And it would be quite unreasonable to suggest that a post titled “Book Review: The Protocol... (read more)

1anon034y

A belief that "TBC was written by a racist for the express purpose of justifying racism" would seem to qualify as "worth mentioning prominently at the top" under that standard, right? I imagine that very few people would find the title by itself insulting; it's really "the title in conjunction with the first paragraph or two" (i.e. far enough to see that the author is not going to talk up-front about the elephant in the room). Hmm, maybe another better way to say it is: The title plus the genre is what might insult people. The genre of this OP is "a book review that treats the book as a serious good-faith work of nonfiction, which might have some errors, just like any nonfiction book, but also presumably has some interesting facts etc." You don't need to read far or carefully to know that the OP belongs to this genre. It's a very different genre from a (reasonable) book review of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", or a (reasonable) book review of "Mein Kampf", or a (reasonable) book review of "Harry Potter".

5Said Achmiz4y

No, of course not (the more so because it’s a value judgment, not a statement of fact). The rest of what you say, I have already addressed.

[-]Said Achmiz4y110

Approach 2 assumes that A is (a) a reasonable person and (b) coming into the situation with good faith. Usually, neither is true.

What is more, your list of two approaches is a very obvious false dichotomy, crafted in such a way as to mock the people you’re disagreeing with. Instead of either the strawman Approach 1 or the unacceptable Approach 2, I endorse the following:

APPROACH 3: Ignore the fact that A (supposedly) finds X “demeaning”. Say (or don’t say) X whenever the situation calls for it. Behave in all ways as if A’s opinion is completely irrelevant.

(Note, by the way, that Approach 2 absolutely does constitute (self-)censorship, as anything that imposes costs on a certain sort of speech—such as, for instance, requiring elaborate genuflection to supposedly “offended” parties, prior to speaking—will serve to discourage that form of speech. Of course, I suspect that this is precisely the goal—and it is also precisely why I reject your suggestion wholeheartedly. Do not feed utility monsters.)

5Lukas_Gloor4y

There's a difference between catering to an audience and proactively framing things in the least explosive way. Maybe what you are saying is that when people try to do the latter, they inevitably end up self-censoring and catering to the (hostile) audience? But that seems false to me. I not only think framing contoversial topics in a non-explosive way is a strategically important, underappreciated skill. In addition, I suspect that practicing the skill improves our epistemics. It forces us to engage with a critical audience of people with ideological differences. When I imagine having to write on a controversial topic, one of the readers I mentally simulate is "person who is ideologically biased against me, but still reasonable." I don't cater to unreasonable people, but I want to take care to not put off people who are still "in reach." And if they're reasonable, sometimes they have good reasons behind at least some of their concerns and their perspectives can be learnt from.

[-]Ruby4y140

As I mentioned elsethread, if I'd written the book review I would have done what you describe. But I didn't and probably never would have written it out of timidness, and that makes me reluctant to tell someone less timid who did something valuable that they did it wrong.

9Lukas_Gloor4y

I was just commenting on the general norm. I haven't read the OP and didn't mean to voice an opinion on it. I'm updating that I don't understand how discussions work. It happens a lot that I object only to a particular feature of an argument or particular argument, yet my comments are interpreted as endorsing an entire side of a complicated debate. FWIW, I think the "caving in" discussed/contemplated in Rafael Harth's comments is something I find intuitively repugnant. It feels like giving up your soul for some very dubious potential benefits. Intellectually I can see some merits for it but I suspect (and very much like to believe) that it's a bad strategy. Maybe I would focus more on criticizing this caving in mentality if I didn't feel like I was preaching to the choir. "Open discussion" norms feel so ingrained on Lesswrong that I'm more worried that other good norms get lost / overlooked. Maybe I would feel different (more "under attack") if I was more emotionally invested in the community and felt like something I helped build was under attack with norm erosion. I feel presently more concerned about dangers from evaporative cooling where many who care a not-small degree about "soft virtues in discussions related to tone/tact/welcomingness, but NOT in a strawmanned sense" end up becoming less active or avoiding the comment sections. Edit: The virtue I mean is maybe best described as "presenting your side in a way that isn't just persuasive to people who think like you, but even reaches the most receptive percentage of the outgroup that's predisposed to be suspicious of you."

6Said Achmiz4y

This is a moot point, because anyone who finds a post title like “Book review: The Bell Curve by Charles Murray” to be “controversial”, “explosive”, etc., is manifestly unreasonable.

4anon034y

My comment here argues that a reasonable person could find this post insulting.

6Ben Pace4y

(Upvote, but disagree.)

4steven04614y

A story I'm worried about goes something like: * LW correctly comes to believe that for an AI to be aligned, its cognitive turboencabulator needs a base plate of prefabulated amulite * the leader of an AI project tries to make the base plate out of unprefabulated amulite * another member of the project mentions off-hand one time that some people think it should be prefabulated * the project leader thinks, "prefabulation, wasn't that one of the pet issues of those Bell Curve bros? well, whatever, let's just go ahead" * the AI is built as planned and attains superhuman intelligence, but its cognitive turboencabulator fails, causing human extinction

1Ericf4y

Meta-meta note: Even if a theoretical author cares not one whit about appearing to endorse "bad things" #scarequotes, including preemptive disclaimers is still good practice to forestall this sort of meta-commentary and keep the comments focused on the content of the post, and not the method of delivery.

[-]anon034y*80

Strong-downvoted. I want lesswrong to be a peaceful place where we can have polite boring truth-seeking arguments without incurring reputational risk / guilt-by-association. I understand the benefit of having polite boring truth-seeking arguments about racism-adjacent topics that take sides in an incredibly incendiary culture war. However, there is also a cost—namely, there's a public good called "right now there is minimal reputational risk of being publicly IRL known as a lesswrong participant", and each time there's a post about racism-adjacent topics t... (read more)

[-]Daniel V4y270

I agree the post didn't address Murray's points that critically or look deeply into the long list of critiques of the book, but it's a useful summary of the main points (with some criticism here and there), which I think was the point.

I'm not sure how most of these options would ensure the benefit of summarizing without the cost of reputational risk: (1) This one might, until the connections are easily followed by, say, the NYT or any random internet sleuth; (2) Maybe the title has been edited (?), but I'm not seeing a provocative title or framing, most of it isn't even about race; (3) The example here isn't even about race and is obviously not about moral worth though the general point is good from an editing standpoint; (4) Certainly this would enhance the contribution (I wanted some of this myself), but particularly when it comes to The Bell Curve, people have this misconception that it's just a racist screed, so a summary from someone who actually read the book is helpful to start. Maybe a summary just isn't up to the contribution level of a LW post and one should hit a higher bar - but that's a norm that has yet to be established IMHO.

Intelligence and race are both uncomfortable topics, and mixing them together is even more uncomfortable. If LW wants a norm of not discussing particular uncomfortable topics, then okay! But at least let it be through topic-screening rather than overblowing what is actually being said in a post.

-5anon034y

6lc4y

Isusr actually wrote a post about this contention.

2Ruby4y

You might be interested in the comment I posted on the other thread.

-3fourier4y

People on this site should stop pretending to be rational and calling themselves "rationalists" if they're not willing to seek truth just because some people find it offensive. And it should change its name from "lesswrong".

[-]Aryeh Englander4y40

Could someone please steelman the position of people who disagree strongly with this book? Which parts of the book are considered factually or logically incorrect, which parts do people object to so strongly on moral grounds, etc.?

3Ape in the coat4y

There are a couple of books pointing out mistakes and methodological problems with the Bell Curve. Maybe we will get their reviews as well in the future. If you are not alergic to long youtube videos you may be interested in this fairly reasonable and thorough approach to critique of the Bell Curve from the left. In a nutshell, Murray bases his conclusions on a bunch of very epistemically poor research, often uses shady methodology, contradicts himself in a way that hints at writing the book in a bad faith and despite all his neutral tone, smuggles harmful political agenda. Probably the most obvious example of bad research is Richard Lynn's review, which Murray uses as a countrol group for Afro-Americans. Data for this review was cherry-picked, ironicaly didn't produce Bell Curve and wasn't supposed to be translated into IQ score, and was mainly collected in South Africans during apartheid. Murray's impressive claim that IQ score is a better predictor of success than parents social economic status, becomes much less impressive if we know that while computing SES Murray omits lots of possible factors and as soon as we include them in the calculation, social status becomes a better predictor of success than IQ. As for contradictions, the Bell Curves goes from stating that even if intelligence is 100% genetically determined it doesn't change anything in our society to claims that due to 60% heritability of intelligence we are to implement specific policies or else we are in trouble. In between Murray mixes heritability of a trait in a population with a degree to which a trait is genetically determined in a an individual, despite the fact that he mentions that these are different things. In general he is ready to aknowledge possible counterarguments but they doesn't seem to affect his conclusion in any way. This creates the impression that he has already written the bottom line, and just creates himself some plausible deniability.

[-]Mary Chernyshenko4y30

Please be alright, it's a horrible thing to be robbed. I don't think I can help from here, but still.

5lsusr4y

There's nothing to worry about, but thanks. I didn't even lose my phone.

[-]Zmavli Caimle4y30

Possible typo: "Being smart causes work-inhibiting disability." given that the chart you then show says the opposite.

2lsusr4y

It was a typo. Fixed. Thanks.

[-]burner25014y20

Archived.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211103174524/https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vvc2MiZvWgMFaSbhx/book-review-the-bell-curve-by-charles-murray

Groups Being Compared	Median Overlap
High school graduates with college graduates	7%
High school graduates with Ph.D.s, M.D.s, or LL.B.s	1%
College graduates with Ph.D.s, M.D.s, and LL.B.s	21%

Enlisted Military Skill Category	Percentage of Training Success Explained by $g$	Percentage of Training Success Explained by Everything Else
Nuclear weapons specialist	77.3	0.8
Air crew operations specialist	69.7	1.8
Weather specialist	68.7	2.6
Intelligence specialist	66.7	7.0
Fireman	59.7	0.6
Dental assistant	55.2	1.0
Security police	53.6	1.4
Vehicle maintenance	49.3	7.7
Maintenance	28.4	2.7

Predictor	Validity Predicting Job Performance Ratings
Cognitive test score	.53
Biographical data	.37
Reference checks	.26
Education	.22
Interview	.14
College grades	.11
Interest	.10
Age	-.01

IQ	Percentage of Whites Who Did Not Graduate of Pass a High School Equivalency Exam
>125	0
110-125	0 (actually 0.4)
90-110	6
75-90	35
<75	55

No. of White Males per 1,000 Who Reported Being Prevented from Working by Health Problems	IQ	No. of White Males Per 1,000 Who Reported Limits in Amount or Kind of Work by Health Problems
0	>125	13
5	110-125	21
5	90-110	37
36	75-90	45
78	<75	62

IQ	Percentage of Young White Women Who Have Given Birth to an Illegitimate Baby	Percentage of Births that are Illegitimate
>125	2	7
110-125	4	7
90-110	8	13
75-90	75-90	17
<75	32	42

IQ	Percentage of Children Growing Up in Homes in the Bottom Decile of the HOME Index
>125	0
110-125	2
90-110	6
75-90	11
<75	24

I was robbed at gunpoint last weekend. ↩︎
Interracial marriage was illegal in nearly every state before 1888. It remained illegal in 15 states all the way until 1967 when the laws were overturned by the Supreme Court ruling Loving v. Virginia. ↩︎
Unless Charles Murray believes that forces outlined in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (which, ironically, was written in opposition to race-based heritable theories of achievement differences) caused Eurasians to evolve higher $g$ than their African forbears. While writing this footnote, I realized that the hypothesis is worth considering. Rice-based peoples evolved alcohol intolerance. Indian, Iraqi, Chinese and Japanese men evolved small penises. Software advances faster than hardware. It would be weird if civilization didn't cause cognitive adaptations too. I want to predict that cognitive adaptations to happen faster than physiological adaptations but I don't know how they can be compared. ↩︎
In Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel context, Native Americans' sister relationship to East Asians does matter. ↩︎
As usual, this prediction is conditional on neither the singularity nor a civilizational collapse occurring. ↩︎

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

94

[Book Review] "The Bell Curve" by Charles Murray

94

94

Stratification

Educational Stratification

Occupational Stratification

Social Partitioning

Heritability of Intelligence

Negative Effects of Low Intelligence

Poverty

High School Graduation

Labor Force Participation

Family

Welfare Dependency

Parenting

Crime

Ethnicity and Cognition

Black and White Americans

Africa

Black-White Trends

How much is genetic?

Race and Employment

Projecting Demography

Raising Cognitive Ability

Affirmative Action

College Affirmative Action

Workplace Affirmative Action

Conclusion