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?
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.)
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, mentioned as one of a handful of important examples of prominent debates about race and racism.
I also looked up protests against Murray. There have been a few major ones, most famously at Middlebury College, some minor ones, and some that did not attract protests. My view is that for college protests, the trigger is “close to home,” and the protest organizers depend on college advertising and social ties to motivate participation.
So we are in agreement that Murray is a prominent and controversial figure on this topic, and protests against him can provoke once-in-a-decade-level episodes of racial tension on a campus, or be viewed as arguments on par with debates over critical race theory. This isn’t just some book about a controversial topic—it was a bestseller, and is still referenced 25 years later as a major source of controversy, and which has motivated hundreds or even thousands of students to protest the author when he’s attempted to speak on their campus. There are many scholarly articles writing, and generally critically, about the book.
Despite the controversy, it’s possible in 2021 for a liberal journalist to publish a critical but essentially professional review of Murray’s new work, and for a conservative journalist to publish a positive review in their newspaper.
The way I see it, Murray is a touchstone figure, but is still only very rarely prominent in the daily news cycle. Just writing about him isn’t enough to make the article newsworthy. If lsusr was a highly prominent blogger, then this review might make the news, or be alarming enough to social media activists to outcompete other tweets and shares. But he’s not a big enough figure, and this isn’t an intense enough article, to even come close to making such a big splash.
If this article poses an issue, it’s by adding one piece of evidence to the prosecutor’s exhibit that LW is a politically problematic space. Given that, as you say, this is one of the most unusually controversy-courting posts of the year, my assessment that it is “only one more piece of evidence,” rather than a potential turning point in this site’s public image, strikes me as a point of evidence against censorship. It’s just not that big a deal.
If you would care to game out for me in a little more detail about what a long-term scenario in which AGI safety becomes tainted by association with posts such as this, to the serious detriment of humanity, please do!
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 a deep dive and links this to LW and LW to anti-social-jutice (even though LW itself still doesn’t have that many more readers); this gets picked up a lot of people who think worrying about AGI is bad; the aforementioned coupling occurs.
The only other thing I’d say is that there is also a substantial element of randomness to what does and doesn’t create a vast backlash. You can’t look at one instance of “person with popularity level x said thing of controversy level y, nothing bad happened” and conclude that any other instance (x′,y′) with x′<x and y′<y will definitely not lead to anything bad happening.
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.)
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:
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, mentioned as one of a handful of important examples of prominent debates about race and racism.
I also looked up protests against Murray. There have been a few major ones, most famously at Middlebury College, some minor ones, and some that did not attract protests. My view is that for college protests, the trigger is “close to home,” and the protest organizers depend on college advertising and social ties to motivate participation.
So we are in agreement that Murray is a prominent and controversial figure on this topic, and protests against him can provoke once-in-a-decade-level episodes of racial tension on a campus, or be viewed as arguments on par with debates over critical race theory. This isn’t just some book about a controversial topic—it was a bestseller, and is still referenced 25 years later as a major source of controversy, and which has motivated hundreds or even thousands of students to protest the author when he’s attempted to speak on their campus. There are many scholarly articles writing, and generally critically, about the book.
Despite the controversy, it’s possible in 2021 for a liberal journalist to publish a critical but essentially professional review of Murray’s new work, and for a conservative journalist to publish a positive review in their newspaper.
The way I see it, Murray is a touchstone figure, but is still only very rarely prominent in the daily news cycle. Just writing about him isn’t enough to make the article newsworthy. If lsusr was a highly prominent blogger, then this review might make the news, or be alarming enough to social media activists to outcompete other tweets and shares. But he’s not a big enough figure, and this isn’t an intense enough article, to even come close to making such a big splash.
If this article poses an issue, it’s by adding one piece of evidence to the prosecutor’s exhibit that LW is a politically problematic space. Given that, as you say, this is one of the most unusually controversy-courting posts of the year, my assessment that it is “only one more piece of evidence,” rather than a potential turning point in this site’s public image, strikes me as a point of evidence against censorship. It’s just not that big a deal.
If you would care to game out for me in a little more detail about what a long-term scenario in which AGI safety becomes tainted by association with posts such as this, to the serious detriment of humanity, please do!
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 a deep dive and links this to LW and LW to anti-social-jutice (even though LW itself still doesn’t have that many more readers); this gets picked up a lot of people who think worrying about AGI is bad; the aforementioned coupling occurs.
The only other thing I’d say is that there is also a substantial element of randomness to what does and doesn’t create a vast backlash. You can’t look at one instance of “person with popularity level x said thing of controversy level y, nothing bad happened” and conclude that any other instance (x′,y′) with x′<x and y′<y will definitely not lead to anything bad happening.