Having a policy of not permitting people to say overtly racist, misogynist, or queerphobic things because they’re wrong* isn’t any worse than shutting down talking about religion because it’s wrong. We have agreed this is a topic we’re not interested in discussing any more, and it does not have a place on Less Wrong.
*Of course, people will have different views on what qualifies for this. And that’s an entirely different discussion, that I don’t want to get into today.
Except that the broad umbrella of ideas which even a reasonable person might construe to be “racist, misogynist, or queerphobic” covers a lot of things which are nowhere close to being settled questions the way theism is.
And furthermore, that umbrella of ideas is a moving target anyways. Social justice movements have fighting X-ism as a terminal goal, so when they run out of X-ist things in a community to fight, they move the goalposts until there are X-ist things to fight.
I don’t think that’s necessarily an accurate assertion about “social justice movements” as a whole. It seems to me that almost all* of the X-isms that social justice movements attack are real, legitimately undesirable power imbalances and prejudices. The fact that they have yet to run out of such X-isms to fight probably says more about the typical structure of human societies than it does about the social justice movements.
*Obviously there are some pathological examples, like otherkin &c, although these are not particularly mainstream
IMHO, feminism has flat-out won. Women have the vote, they have reproductive rights, they have no-fault divorce, they have a majority of the collegiate student body, and they have equality of opportunity. Single, childless women who live in cities make more than their male counterparts. Wife-beating has been vilified. Society is hyper-vigilant about domestic violence.
What’s left for feminists to fight for are pretty much non-issues in comparison—especially given the institutional, social, and organizational power they wield. They’re still fighting for the rights of women, sure—but that’s more because they don’t have anything else to do with themselves.
I do think that street harassmeent is a serious issue. I however only have anedcotal reports. Can you point me to some statistics that describe the situation on a more general level?
Is it mainly an issue of the big cities where people don’t know each other? How do different countries compare against each other? How many cases of street harassment does the average woman experience per year?
Well, ours have produced data that’s useful at least for questions relating to LW. So I’m not going to say it’s impossible. But if you’re trying to answer a political question...
If you want data to understand whether the average woman who participate on Lesswrong are subject to substantial sexual harrasment the lesswrong data is okay. To the extend that we think about modifying how we talk about certain issues on Lesswrong that’s the demographic that we care about.
Having the question in the lesswrong data set also allows us to see whether the answer to the question correlates with other answers on the survey.
To the extend that we think about modifying how we talk about certain issues on Lesswrong that’s the demographic that we care about.
When we talk about these things, it’s most often in the context of potentially driving away demographics whose representatives might offer underrepresented insights or perspectives. Sampling from a set self-selected to not have been driven away yet isn’t going to give us the data we want.
When that’s not the context, we’re usually talking about issues depending on the general population, and the pitfalls of using LW data for that are obvious.
When that’s not the context, we’re usually talking about issues relevant to the general population, and the pitfalls of using LW data for that are obvious.
I don’t think we only care about the general population. We care about the people with whom we are interacting on a daily basis. We have a bunch of people in this community who want spend time with rational friends instead of spending time with an average member of society.
Even if we are not intending with rational people we are still unlikely to interact with the average person.
Most woman I meet, I meet during Salsa dancing. That activity selects for woman who are okay with strangers physically touching them during Salsa dancing.
Why? The survey allows for finding correlations with existing questions. It means that you get answers to questions such as whether being harrased correlates with IQ for free.
Those answers also tend to be more likely to generalize to the general population than the absolute values of the amount of people who report being harrased.
It seems to me that a good survey on street harassment would be fairly long and the survey is already long enough. Still, if there’s still interest when the next survey is being discussed, it’s a possible topic. Prediction
Just defining harassment is difficult.
IQ (especially at LW levels) doesn’t strike me as likely to give much information. IQ might correlate with spending time in better neighborhoods, or with being more distracted (less likely to notice minor harassment? more likely to get harassed by men who don’t like being ignored) or with being less distracted (more likely to notice harassment).
I’d like more research on the subject—I suspect that local culture makes a huge difference. I also realize that discussions of street harassment are more likely to attract women who’ve been harassed.
IQ is just an example. We also have questions about moral beliefs. We have questions about how likely you find various risks.
At this stage the results wouldn’t be conclusive but they would increase the grasp I would have on the issue. Having a question on the LW survey wouldn’t give the same level of detail as a in depth study, but it would be an improvement.
I’d like more research on the subject—I suspect that local culture makes a huge difference.
I think the local culture question is one of the questions that interests me most.
Should I expect that this is an issue for the woman I meet in daily life, given that I live in Germany? Women like my sister don’t bring the issue up, even in discussions about the value of feminism.
I know a bunch of women through the internet who report being troubled by street harassment and those don’t live in Germany. Given the reports of those woman, I do think that the issue is serious.
The chance of a 4Chan raid is the least of your worries, really. I don’t know where the links in the ancestor were posted, but you could end up with anything from bad—a bunch of random demographic filters that are next to impossible to control for—to terrible, roughly the equivalent of surveying a Young Republicans meeting about Barack Obama’s economic policy. Except ten percent of the attendees are only there for kicks and will answer every question with “fish”.
The chance of a 4Chan raid is the least of your worries, really.
Depends on what you are worried about, really :-/ And I don’t think it will be a raid, just, y’know, a field trip. The 4chan people are a helpful crowd and would love to leave lots of responses to the survey...
The survey says: “Nearly 95 percent of female respondents were honked at one or more times and 40 percent said they are honked at as frequently as monthly.”
This survey raises the question of what distinguishes those 5% of woman who were never honked at. Is it something like physical attractiveness? Is it about the locating at which the woman is living? Walking around with a confident posture?
If one considers this a serious issue than I would expect that someone has data that answers the question.
If I read about honking, it also not clear how seriously to take it. Sure it’s not fun if someone honks at you, but it’s not a big deal.
Then there are “sexist comments”. If good deconstructivist can label a lot of comments as sexist. You could label the act of open a door and saying: “After the lady.” as a sexist comment. I would where I now what the terms means.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some honks at women aren’t noticed by the woman they’re directed towards, and some honks are taken to be harassment that are directed at someone else.
Yes. But given that there are woman studies departments at universities and this seems to be a topic they ought to care about, I would expect at least some of those academics do serious work and running good surveys.
The key term is “useful”. They produce some data, but it’s likely to be misleading, primarily because of self-selection bias. So, no, you can NOT conclude that “there’s a good bit of street harassment, and it’s fairly frequent” on the basis of putting up a survey on a web page and keeping it there for a month or two.
What’s left for feminists to fight for are pretty much non-issues in comparison
Actually, there is a lot left for feminists to fight… but most of that is in other countries. Female genital mutilation being the most obvious example.
Two problems with that.
First, all humans are naturally selfish. My own hurt thumb feels like a greater tragedy than someone else being killed. In the same way, a sexist comment somewhere on internet feels like a greater issue than someone being mutilated on the other side of the planet, if the former is about me and the latter isn’t. It’s the same reason why Occupy is more popular than Effective Altruism; both are about people who have more giving to people who have less, but only in the former you are included in the list of possible recipients.
Second, there are political alliances, because the more applause lights you put together, the more applause you get. Unfortunately, at some moments some of the applause lights get in conflict. How can you believe “female genital mutilation is evil” and “all cultures are completely equal” or even “all native cultures are noble and perfect” at the same time? Let’s rather focus on the non-issues which avoid these paradoxes; you can always safely speak about the evil of the white hetero cis males.
Maybe we need another movement that will care about eradicating female genital mutilation in the world. Even if doing so requires saying politically incorrect things.
Oh, okay, I think I understand your original comment better now. I thought you were criticizing the constant move towards “new” X-isms to fight against. (i.e., moving from race to LGBT). I think it’s possible that feminist groups wield power disproportionate to the egregiousness of what they are now combating, serious though implicit sexism can be.
There a ban on talking about religion on Lesswrong that I’m aware off. I’m aware off a ban on talking about the basilisk and a ban from talking about advocating specific violence.
Could you point to an discussion in which Lesswrong supposedly agreed that talking about religion is wrong?
I think it’s more of a matter that this community lacks people who can make interesting arguments in favor of religion.
The last interesting discussion about religions on Lesswrong I remember was how the catholics scored best on the reverse ideological turing test.
I think that making arguments on that level about religion is welcome on LW.
“talking about the validity of religion because it’s wrong.”
The discussion I referenced was about that an ideological turing test is a way to test the validity of arguments.
I don’t think that you are forbidden to talk about the validity of religion because it’s wrong. It just that there aren’t many interesting things you can say about the issue.
If you write a boring post against religion that argues against a few strawman you get voted down, but that doesn’t mean that the topic is inherently forbidden.
Let’s say Nassim Taleb would come to Lesswrong and argue his position on religion. Do you really think that LW consensus would be: “Go away, because the topic is dealt with.”?
No, the discussion could be a fruitful discussion about how to choose bayesian priors.
Having a policy of not permitting people to say overtly racist, misogynist, or queerphobic things because they’re wrong* isn’t any worse than shutting down talking about religion because it’s wrong.
I have a simpler idea: How about a policy against saying wrong things regardless of topic, or since it’s hard to know ahead of time whether something is wrong a policy against making claims without evidence.
This response is why I put overtly in there. I think there are certain things we can agree on, and this is the de facto policy of LW, since these views getting heavily downvoted.
Ok, define “overtly”. What about saying that race is correlated with intelligence, propensity to commit violent crime, and a bunch of other important stuff?
That such things are often left hanging probably squicks out a lot of people. Being able to say that certain races are statistically more violent and less intelligent than others has historically been correlated with lynch mobs and skewed priorities when making arrests. Recurse a few levels, and what you’re really saying is “After the Renaissance, Europeans took over the world and its resources, and the resource distribution has been slow to change since”. African American’s tend to be descended from slaves who were treated poorly before and after emancipation, while the San Francisco Bay area still has all that money from the Gold Rush. Of course there are going to be statistical differences, given those starting points.
[edit: What I’m saying, I think, is that naked statistics on these topics is not new, and in the past, were used as excuses for things that were physically and emotionally harmful. To simply state them pattern-matches to nineteenth century style racism/sexism/etc, against which the underclass rebelled after sufficient abuse.]
Recurse a few levels, and what you’re really saying is “After the Renaissance, Europeans took over the world and its resources, and the resource distribution has been slow to change since”.
Remind me again, why do Han Chinese have higher IQ than Europeans?
There is an unfortunate American tendency to treat all issues of race in the purely white-and-black context.
The world is much more diverse than that. Most people are brown.
What you’ve said is reasonable (and I’ve read your link before). I’ve also read that issues such as poor nutrition during pregnancy can have heritable effects lasting for several generations (so by this model, even if all the impoverished people in the world were suddenly given all the best resources, one wouldn’t expect to see significant intelligence/behavior improvements until their great-great-grandchildren or so). The suggestion of environmental influences was more an argument against genetic explanations as a curiosity stopper (as you said, there is no reason that there should be a singular mechanism of effect for the observed disparities).
In the context of this thread, though, I was replying to the question of whether simply pointing out the statistics might be seen as overt racism by outsiders. “Blacks are over all less intelligent and more prone to violent crime as compared to whites and Asians” sounds very much like what the educated nineteenth century racists said, the same way “I like eugenics” sounds like “I like genocide” to someone who could reasonably expect to be victimized by policies based on those ideas.
(Similarly, “Blacks are less likely to be employed compared to whites, all things equal” and “blacks are disproportionately likely to be targeted by police” sound like naive progressivism, but they are also true statements.)
I’ve also read that issues such as poor nutrition during pregnancy can have heritable effects lasting for several generations (so by this model, even if all the impoverished people in the world were suddenly given all the best resources, one wouldn’t expect to see significant intelligence/behavior improvements until their great-great-grandchildren or so).
For a bayesian who thinks about whether to hire a black person or a white one, it’s irrelevant whether intelligence difference are due to parents being poor and haven’t eaten enough food during pregnance or whether they are due to genetic differences.
As far as I understand the social justice movement they would approve of both justifications because both are essentially that the person gets judged by their background and get’s treated as a member of an underclass.
I can’t remember someone on lesswrong making a claim as strong as claiming that black should be stopped from procreating by eugenic measures. You find people who argue that overpopulation and African getting children is the central problem of humanity at the moment but nobody is making the argument directly.
Nutrition is discussed in the link as a possible explanation.
In the context of this thread, though, I was replying to the question of whether simply pointing out the statistics might be seen as overt racism by outsiders. “Blacks are over all less intelligent and more prone to violent crime as compared to whites and Asians” sounds very much like what the educated nineteenth century racists said, the same way “I like eugenics” sounds like “I like genocide” to someone who could reasonably expect to be victimized by policies based on those ideas.
I think it’s less a curiosity stopper and more a controversy stopper? The idea being that if there’s an environmental cause of something bad AND a genetic cause, we can more easily and with less controversy start with addressing the environmental cause and still do a lot of good.
Being able to say that certain races are statistically more violent and less intelligent than others has historically been correlated with lynch mobs and skewed priorities when making arrests.
But that’s qualitatively different from the way a lot of people who are religious are wrong. Religious people are often wrong on many factual questions.
On Lesswrong I would see no case where religious views should get forbidden because they are dangerous and religious people do awful things.
Here’s my view:
Having a policy of not permitting people to say overtly racist, misogynist, or queerphobic things because they’re wrong* isn’t any worse than shutting down talking about religion because it’s wrong. We have agreed this is a topic we’re not interested in discussing any more, and it does not have a place on Less Wrong.
*Of course, people will have different views on what qualifies for this. And that’s an entirely different discussion, that I don’t want to get into today.
Except that the broad umbrella of ideas which even a reasonable person might construe to be “racist, misogynist, or queerphobic” covers a lot of things which are nowhere close to being settled questions the way theism is.
And furthermore, that umbrella of ideas is a moving target anyways. Social justice movements have fighting X-ism as a terminal goal, so when they run out of X-ist things in a community to fight, they move the goalposts until there are X-ist things to fight.
I don’t think that’s necessarily an accurate assertion about “social justice movements” as a whole. It seems to me that almost all* of the X-isms that social justice movements attack are real, legitimately undesirable power imbalances and prejudices. The fact that they have yet to run out of such X-isms to fight probably says more about the typical structure of human societies than it does about the social justice movements.
*Obviously there are some pathological examples, like otherkin &c, although these are not particularly mainstream
IMHO, feminism has flat-out won. Women have the vote, they have reproductive rights, they have no-fault divorce, they have a majority of the collegiate student body, and they have equality of opportunity. Single, childless women who live in cities make more than their male counterparts. Wife-beating has been vilified. Society is hyper-vigilant about domestic violence.
What’s left for feminists to fight for are pretty much non-issues in comparison—especially given the institutional, social, and organizational power they wield. They’re still fighting for the rights of women, sure—but that’s more because they don’t have anything else to do with themselves.
Street harassment takes some of the fun out of life.
Getting rape and murder threats on line really does distress and distract people, and it seems to be much more likely to happen to women.
I do think that street harassmeent is a serious issue. I however only have anedcotal reports. Can you point me to some statistics that describe the situation on a more general level?
Is it mainly an issue of the big cities where people don’t know each other? How do different countries compare against each other? How many cases of street harassment does the average woman experience per year?
The founder of an anti-street-harassment website conducted “two informal, anonymous online surveys”.
“Informal, anonymous online surveys” do not produce useful data.
Well, ours have produced data that’s useful at least for questions relating to LW. So I’m not going to say it’s impossible. But if you’re trying to answer a political question...
Perhaps we should add questions that measure street harassment to the next Lesswrong survey?
We’re no less demographically skewed than your average feminist site. More, probably.
Skrewing depends on the purpose of your data.
If you want data to understand whether the average woman who participate on Lesswrong are subject to substantial sexual harrasment the lesswrong data is okay. To the extend that we think about modifying how we talk about certain issues on Lesswrong that’s the demographic that we care about.
Having the question in the lesswrong data set also allows us to see whether the answer to the question correlates with other answers on the survey.
When we talk about these things, it’s most often in the context of potentially driving away demographics whose representatives might offer underrepresented insights or perspectives. Sampling from a set self-selected to not have been driven away yet isn’t going to give us the data we want.
When that’s not the context, we’re usually talking about issues depending on the general population, and the pitfalls of using LW data for that are obvious.
I don’t think we only care about the general population. We care about the people with whom we are interacting on a daily basis. We have a bunch of people in this community who want spend time with rational friends instead of spending time with an average member of society.
Even if we are not intending with rational people we are still unlikely to interact with the average person. Most woman I meet, I meet during Salsa dancing. That activity selects for woman who are okay with strangers physically touching them during Salsa dancing.
I don’t think it belongs in the survey, but it might be worth doing as a separate project.
Why? The survey allows for finding correlations with existing questions. It means that you get answers to questions such as whether being harrased correlates with IQ for free.
Those answers also tend to be more likely to generalize to the general population than the absolute values of the amount of people who report being harrased.
It seems to me that a good survey on street harassment would be fairly long and the survey is already long enough. Still, if there’s still interest when the next survey is being discussed, it’s a possible topic. Prediction
Just defining harassment is difficult.
IQ (especially at LW levels) doesn’t strike me as likely to give much information. IQ might correlate with spending time in better neighborhoods, or with being more distracted (less likely to notice minor harassment? more likely to get harassed by men who don’t like being ignored) or with being less distracted (more likely to notice harassment).
I’d like more research on the subject—I suspect that local culture makes a huge difference. I also realize that discussions of street harassment are more likely to attract women who’ve been harassed.
IQ is just an example. We also have questions about moral beliefs. We have questions about how likely you find various risks.
At this stage the results wouldn’t be conclusive but they would increase the grasp I would have on the issue. Having a question on the LW survey wouldn’t give the same level of detail as a in depth study, but it would be an improvement.
I think the local culture question is one of the questions that interests me most. Should I expect that this is an issue for the woman I meet in daily life, given that I live in Germany? Women like my sister don’t bring the issue up, even in discussions about the value of feminism.
I know a bunch of women through the internet who report being troubled by street harassment and those don’t live in Germany. Given the reports of those woman, I do think that the issue is serious.
A fair point. But then, imagine 4chan becoming interested in an online anonymous survey about sexual harassment… X-D
The chance of a 4Chan raid is the least of your worries, really. I don’t know where the links in the ancestor were posted, but you could end up with anything from bad—a bunch of random demographic filters that are next to impossible to control for—to terrible, roughly the equivalent of surveying a Young Republicans meeting about Barack Obama’s economic policy. Except ten percent of the attendees are only there for kicks and will answer every question with “fish”.
Depends on what you are worried about, really :-/ And I don’t think it will be a raid, just, y’know, a field trip. The 4chan people are a helpful crowd and would love to leave lots of responses to the survey...
They produce at least a little data. This one is admittedly filtered in a bunch of ways, both by internet access and interest in street harassment.
Still, it at least implies that there’s a good bit of street harassment, and it’s fairly frequent but not constant.
The survey says: “Nearly 95 percent of female respondents were honked at one or more times and 40 percent said they are honked at as frequently as monthly.”
This survey raises the question of what distinguishes those 5% of woman who were never honked at. Is it something like physical attractiveness? Is it about the locating at which the woman is living? Walking around with a confident posture?
If one considers this a serious issue than I would expect that someone has data that answers the question.
If I read about honking, it also not clear how seriously to take it. Sure it’s not fun if someone honks at you, but it’s not a big deal.
Then there are “sexist comments”. If good deconstructivist can label a lot of comments as sexist. You could label the act of open a door and saying: “After the lady.” as a sexist comment. I would where I now what the terms means.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some honks at women aren’t noticed by the woman they’re directed towards, and some honks are taken to be harassment that are directed at someone else.
It would take some work to design a good survey.
Yes. But given that there are woman studies departments at universities and this seems to be a topic they ought to care about, I would expect at least some of those academics do serious work and running good surveys.
The key term is “useful”. They produce some data, but it’s likely to be misleading, primarily because of self-selection bias. So, no, you can NOT conclude that “there’s a good bit of street harassment, and it’s fairly frequent” on the basis of putting up a survey on a web page and keeping it there for a month or two.
Actually, there is a lot left for feminists to fight… but most of that is in other countries. Female genital mutilation being the most obvious example.
Two problems with that.
First, all humans are naturally selfish. My own hurt thumb feels like a greater tragedy than someone else being killed. In the same way, a sexist comment somewhere on internet feels like a greater issue than someone being mutilated on the other side of the planet, if the former is about me and the latter isn’t. It’s the same reason why Occupy is more popular than Effective Altruism; both are about people who have more giving to people who have less, but only in the former you are included in the list of possible recipients.
Second, there are political alliances, because the more applause lights you put together, the more applause you get. Unfortunately, at some moments some of the applause lights get in conflict. How can you believe “female genital mutilation is evil” and “all cultures are completely equal” or even “all native cultures are noble and perfect” at the same time? Let’s rather focus on the non-issues which avoid these paradoxes; you can always safely speak about the evil of the white hetero cis males.
Maybe we need another movement that will care about eradicating female genital mutilation in the world. Even if doing so requires saying politically incorrect things.
Oh, okay, I think I understand your original comment better now. I thought you were criticizing the constant move towards “new” X-isms to fight against. (i.e., moving from race to LGBT). I think it’s possible that feminist groups wield power disproportionate to the egregiousness of what they are now combating, serious though implicit sexism can be.
There a ban on talking about religion on Lesswrong that I’m aware off. I’m aware off a ban on talking about the basilisk and a ban from talking about advocating specific violence.
Could you point to an discussion in which Lesswrong supposedly agreed that talking about religion is wrong?
I think it’s more of a matter that this community lacks people who can make interesting arguments in favor of religion.
The last interesting discussion about religions on Lesswrong I remember was how the catholics scored best on the reverse ideological turing test. I think that making arguments on that level about religion is welcome on LW.
Sorry, the ”...talking about religion because it’s wrong” should have said “talking about the validity of religion because it’s wrong.”
The discussion I referenced was about that an ideological turing test is a way to test the validity of arguments.
I don’t think that you are forbidden to talk about the validity of religion because it’s wrong. It just that there aren’t many interesting things you can say about the issue.
If you write a boring post against religion that argues against a few strawman you get voted down, but that doesn’t mean that the topic is inherently forbidden.
Let’s say Nassim Taleb would come to Lesswrong and argue his position on religion. Do you really think that LW consensus would be: “Go away, because the topic is dealt with.”?
No, the discussion could be a fruitful discussion about how to choose bayesian priors.
I have a simpler idea: How about a policy against saying wrong things regardless of topic, or since it’s hard to know ahead of time whether something is wrong a policy against making claims without evidence.
This response is why I put overtly in there. I think there are certain things we can agree on, and this is the de facto policy of LW, since these views getting heavily downvoted.
Ok, define “overtly”. What about saying that race is correlated with intelligence, propensity to commit violent crime, and a bunch of other important stuff?
That such things are often left hanging probably squicks out a lot of people. Being able to say that certain races are statistically more violent and less intelligent than others has historically been correlated with lynch mobs and skewed priorities when making arrests. Recurse a few levels, and what you’re really saying is “After the Renaissance, Europeans took over the world and its resources, and the resource distribution has been slow to change since”. African American’s tend to be descended from slaves who were treated poorly before and after emancipation, while the San Francisco Bay area still has all that money from the Gold Rush. Of course there are going to be statistical differences, given those starting points.
[edit: What I’m saying, I think, is that naked statistics on these topics is not new, and in the past, were used as excuses for things that were physically and emotionally harmful. To simply state them pattern-matches to nineteenth century style racism/sexism/etc, against which the underclass rebelled after sufficient abuse.]
Remind me again, why do Han Chinese have higher IQ than Europeans?
There is an unfortunate American tendency to treat all issues of race in the purely white-and-black context.
The world is much more diverse than that. Most people are brown.
.
Exposure to lead affects intelligence and criminality
More on the subject
Its very unfortunate that lead and lead are homographs, makes it hard to Google information on the subject.
What you’ve said is reasonable (and I’ve read your link before). I’ve also read that issues such as poor nutrition during pregnancy can have heritable effects lasting for several generations (so by this model, even if all the impoverished people in the world were suddenly given all the best resources, one wouldn’t expect to see significant intelligence/behavior improvements until their great-great-grandchildren or so). The suggestion of environmental influences was more an argument against genetic explanations as a curiosity stopper (as you said, there is no reason that there should be a singular mechanism of effect for the observed disparities).
In the context of this thread, though, I was replying to the question of whether simply pointing out the statistics might be seen as overt racism by outsiders. “Blacks are over all less intelligent and more prone to violent crime as compared to whites and Asians” sounds very much like what the educated nineteenth century racists said, the same way “I like eugenics” sounds like “I like genocide” to someone who could reasonably expect to be victimized by policies based on those ideas.
(Similarly, “Blacks are less likely to be employed compared to whites, all things equal” and “blacks are disproportionately likely to be targeted by police” sound like naive progressivism, but they are also true statements.)
For a bayesian who thinks about whether to hire a black person or a white one, it’s irrelevant whether intelligence difference are due to parents being poor and haven’t eaten enough food during pregnance or whether they are due to genetic differences.
As far as I understand the social justice movement they would approve of both justifications because both are essentially that the person gets judged by their background and get’s treated as a member of an underclass.
I can’t remember someone on lesswrong making a claim as strong as claiming that black should be stopped from procreating by eugenic measures. You find people who argue that overpopulation and African getting children is the central problem of humanity at the moment but nobody is making the argument directly.
Nutrition is discussed in the link as a possible explanation.
Fair enough.
test
I think it’s less a curiosity stopper and more a controversy stopper? The idea being that if there’s an environmental cause of something bad AND a genetic cause, we can more easily and with less controversy start with addressing the environmental cause and still do a lot of good.
But that’s qualitatively different from the way a lot of people who are religious are wrong. Religious people are often wrong on many factual questions.
On Lesswrong I would see no case where religious views should get forbidden because they are dangerous and religious people do awful things.