“The rationalist community” =/= LessWrong. The set of things people might say in casual conversation is very different from the set of things those same people would post publicly on the internet.
Sure, but this is a pretty weak chain of evidence.
The relevant part of the post (as it is currently):
It frustrates me when people say “I don’t see people in terms of race”. I empathize with where they’re coming from. Talking about race isn’t any fun when you belong to the ethnic majority. Racial pride slips easily into prejudice. It is risky even to tell jokes.
The “people” saying (or, presumably, writing) the phrase in question aren’t obviously even members of “the rationalist community”.
“The rationalist community” is itself an extremely nebulous category.
And this post is ostensibly about ‘(harmful) generalizations of (individual) people based on their group membership’, so it seems sad that the post itself seems to be engaging in that same kind of behavior. (And the post title seems even more inflammatory, given that it starts with “imperialism”!)
I spoke both about what I heard in person (and I have hung out with a lot of rationalists in the last 7 years) and online.
At the same time someone saying “I don’t see race” seem to me from a rationality perspective like someone saying “I don’t suffer from hindsight bias”. The statement is not only problematic because it’s racist but also because it ignores the idea’s from Kahneman about how human cognition works.
From a rationalist who actually is racist I would expect much more likely to hear about stereotyp accuracy then hearing “I don’t see race”.
It sounds like we are on similar pages. I am unaware of any rationalists engaging in old-school blatant racism[1] (what you call stereotype accuracy). The problem isn’t rationalists saying “xs suck”. It’s the premature transhumanist idea that “whether you are an x doesn’t matter”. A world without racism would be nice. But we live in a world with racism. Therefore pretending race doesn’t matter exacerbates racial inequity and brings us further away from actually bringing about a transhumanist utopia.
I spoke both about what I heard in person (and I have hung out with a lot of rationalists in the last 7 years) and online.
I haven’t run into this particular type of bigotry in my own meatspace rationalist social circle. Meatspace rationalist communities are geographically-distributed. I expect there is a diversity of in the degree of different circles’ cultural sensitivity. I hope the letter referred to an exceptionally bad circle[2] and that most of our community is better than this sort of thing.
I’m not saying old-school racism doesn’t happen in the rationalist community. Every community large enough has bad eggs. But that is not the topic of my post.
Sampling bias predicts that the author of the original letter is more likely to have come from a rationalist circle at the awful end of our distribution.
“I don’t see race” is a fairly unsophisticated position. Rationalists usually hold positions that are much more sophisticated then that. If you want to make a good critique of the rationalist community it would make a lot more sense to argue against positions that people actually hold. If you are engaging in good faith then it makes sense to make that argument with the minimum amount of words and phrases that are politically charged because that allows the debate to happen more freely.
It’s the premature transhumanist idea that “whether you are an x doesn’t matter”.
While that idea does exist out in the world, it seems like one that’s 2-3 decades old and far from the rationalist discourse. The whole field of behavioral economics on which the early rationalist community drew heavily rests on humans being not just idealized rational agents. Books like Pinker’s The Blank Slate are about human nature mattering and that it’s denail is bad.
It’s the premature transhumanist idea that “whether you are an x doesn’t matter”. A world without racism would be nice. But we live in a world with racism. Therefore pretending race doesn’t matter exacerbates racial inequity and brings us further away from actually bringing about a transhumanist utopia.
To be charitable, in many types of human conversation, statements that sound like mere descriptions of people or society (“this is not who we are as a nation”, “adults don’t act like children”, “in life, friends are more important than money”) are frequently shorthand for normative ones (“I think our nation shouldn’t act that way”, “I think adults shouldn’t act the way I perceive is childish”, “people should value friendship in their lives much beyond mere economic transaction”), to the point where even people with the best of intentions don’t realize they’re conflating the usages. I think rationalists generally try to avoid this but even so it’s still possible to slip up and intend a normative statement when you use a descriptive one.
I would distinguish between someone saying “x doesn’t matter” as a sincere belief that “x shouldn’t matter” vs. “x doesn’t matter” as a cop-out or denial, even cover-up of situations where x mattering is unsavory to them and they wish to pretend things are hunky-dory.
I feel like the latter tarnished the reputation of the former.
I don’t know if this is the best analogy, but thinking on the fly, I can imagine someone saying “your personal happiness is more important than what people think” to justify being a jerk (after all, who cares what others think if I do something to piss them off) or “material things in life are overrated, the best things in life are free” as justification to not help the poor or solve inequality (after all, material things won’t make them happier, look the poor can learn to be satisfied living with what they have already have) all the while benefitting from material prosperity itself. That doesn’t mean the principles themselves don’t have any (or some reasonable) amount of goodness, even if people use them for nasty justifications.
“The rationalist community” =/= LessWrong. The set of things people might say in casual conversation is very different from the set of things those same people would post publicly on the internet.
Sure, but this is a pretty weak chain of evidence.
The relevant part of the post (as it is currently):
The “people” saying (or, presumably, writing) the phrase in question aren’t obviously even members of “the rationalist community”.
“The rationalist community” is itself an extremely nebulous category.
And this post is ostensibly about ‘(harmful) generalizations of (individual) people based on their group membership’, so it seems sad that the post itself seems to be engaging in that same kind of behavior. (And the post title seems even more inflammatory, given that it starts with “imperialism”!)
I spoke both about what I heard in person (and I have hung out with a lot of rationalists in the last 7 years) and online.
At the same time someone saying “I don’t see race” seem to me from a rationality perspective like someone saying “I don’t suffer from hindsight bias”. The statement is not only problematic because it’s racist but also because it ignores the idea’s from Kahneman about how human cognition works.
From a rationalist who actually is racist I would expect much more likely to hear about stereotyp accuracy then hearing “I don’t see race”.
It sounds like we are on similar pages. I am unaware of any rationalists engaging in old-school blatant racism[1] (what you call stereotype accuracy). The problem isn’t rationalists saying “xs suck”. It’s the premature transhumanist idea that “whether you are an x doesn’t matter”. A world without racism would be nice. But we live in a world with racism. Therefore pretending race doesn’t matter exacerbates racial inequity and brings us further away from actually bringing about a transhumanist utopia.
I haven’t run into this particular type of bigotry in my own meatspace rationalist social circle. Meatspace rationalist communities are geographically-distributed. I expect there is a diversity of in the degree of different circles’ cultural sensitivity. I hope the letter referred to an exceptionally bad circle[2] and that most of our community is better than this sort of thing.
I’m not saying old-school racism doesn’t happen in the rationalist community. Every community large enough has bad eggs. But that is not the topic of my post.
Sampling bias predicts that the author of the original letter is more likely to have come from a rationalist circle at the awful end of our distribution.
“I don’t see race” is a fairly unsophisticated position. Rationalists usually hold positions that are much more sophisticated then that. If you want to make a good critique of the rationalist community it would make a lot more sense to argue against positions that people actually hold. If you are engaging in good faith then it makes sense to make that argument with the minimum amount of words and phrases that are politically charged because that allows the debate to happen more freely.
While that idea does exist out in the world, it seems like one that’s 2-3 decades old and far from the rationalist discourse. The whole field of behavioral economics on which the early rationalist community drew heavily rests on humans being not just idealized rational agents. Books like Pinker’s The Blank Slate are about human nature mattering and that it’s denail is bad.
To be charitable, in many types of human conversation, statements that sound like mere descriptions of people or society (“this is not who we are as a nation”, “adults don’t act like children”, “in life, friends are more important than money”) are frequently shorthand for normative ones (“I think our nation shouldn’t act that way”, “I think adults shouldn’t act the way I perceive is childish”, “people should value friendship in their lives much beyond mere economic transaction”), to the point where even people with the best of intentions don’t realize they’re conflating the usages. I think rationalists generally try to avoid this but even so it’s still possible to slip up and intend a normative statement when you use a descriptive one.
I would distinguish between someone saying “x doesn’t matter” as a sincere belief that “x shouldn’t matter” vs. “x doesn’t matter” as a cop-out or denial, even cover-up of situations where x mattering is unsavory to them and they wish to pretend things are hunky-dory.
I feel like the latter tarnished the reputation of the former.
I don’t know if this is the best analogy, but thinking on the fly, I can imagine someone saying “your personal happiness is more important than what people think” to justify being a jerk (after all, who cares what others think if I do something to piss them off) or “material things in life are overrated, the best things in life are free” as justification to not help the poor or solve inequality (after all, material things won’t make them happier, look the poor can learn to be satisfied living with what they have already have) all the while benefitting from material prosperity itself. That doesn’t mean the principles themselves don’t have any (or some reasonable) amount of goodness, even if people use them for nasty justifications.