281–290 of 319 posts
Future of Humanity Final Report from Anders Sandberg here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/660e95991cf0293c2463b... and Google Doc version: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jgl2KqtiJ6lLkpoZ1I_VeniP...
- This report looks like it was put together in a week's time. - As an academic, I am sure the quality of the presentation is lower than that of 90% of the academic papers out there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true. sbf was about that, but EA is not. Are there other cases of EA fraud?
Well, that's the point in question. For its critics, the whole enterprise is a misguided sham. See Leif Wenar's stimulating recent piece, 'The Deaths of Effective Altruism', which sees SBF less as aberration, than symptom. https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/ I think EA was naive from the start, both in its unreflective moral realism, and its reduction of complicated questions of social theory do…
My perspective on this coming into the discussion is EA started off well and noble and I had a good impression of organizations like GiveWell and the Against Malaria Foundation. I was largely of the mind that EA was corrupted later on when it was taken over by long-termists and AI alarmists who Pascal's Wagered their way into making no possible cause more important than raising the probability of producing infinite future good by infinitesimal percentage points that are bullshit to begin with because nobody can estimate future probability to that many significant digits anyway. But the original "most charity money today goes to museums and universities that are already rich so they can buy paintings and build ornate classrooms - surely we can do better with poverty aid in developing nations" message was basically sound.
This guy is making me question whether any of it was ever sound. Unless this is all lies, it would appear GiveWell was, at best, selectively presenting data and making up a lot of it, at worst, flat-out lying, and poverty aid in and of itself may not even be effective, possibly not even net positive.
It's interesting to see myself going in the exact opposite direction of the supposed "all old people are conservative" trope. I was an avowed libertarian 20 years ago, but today, everything I see and learn has made me question whether concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny number of oligarchs who use shoddy data that might be made up to justify allocating resources toward pet projects they already found interesting in the first place is really the best way to organize the whole of human activity. Maybe, Marxist as it sounds, the real answer is distribute that power more evenly amongst all people and let those closest to each local purchasing decision decide what to allocate toward.
In theory, that is what free market economics was supposed to accomplish in the first place, but it doesn't work if you only have a few hundred out of 8 billion people making 99% of the world's purchasing decisions. You've just privatized a centralized command economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I"m British and can confirm this was the case Ok, so there's a single country that allegedly had one category for anybody who's "brown". This does not matter at all. >it makes just as much sense as any other categorisation of black. Its almost as if race is a made up social construct Until someone needs a transplant. Or takes a genetic test. Or a legitimate anthropology course. Or when you need to call someone a rac…
Bro race is still made up in those scenarios. Somalis, Ethiopians, Zulus and African Americans are all black. None of these groups are the same ethnicity at all. Categorising them as "black" means nothing about their genetics. It means nothing about their culture. It means nothing about their medical outcomes.
"Bro", race is a trivial fact to me. To you it's an ideological tenet.
>None of these groups are the same ethnicity at all.
I already explained this to you in another comment. You aren't saying anything new or interesting. Also, Somalis and Ethiopians are part of the same Northern East African genetic cluster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Dunno why i can't reply to your reply There's a timeout between when the comment is first posted and when the reply button is visible. >Others have tried to debunk this for me saying only the best emigrate to the US. It's not about the US specifically, but about some avenues for immigration costing significant money, time, educational attainment, etc. I don't know much about the UK immigration system, but probably B…
I agree there's more to be examined if we want a good picture. There's still no proven correlation between race and intelligence here. And that is all I'm arguing. Saying "blacks are stupider than whites" is a statement that is lazy to the point of being racist. It is definitely not "accurate and mild".
If you take race as just a grouping trait for a collection of individuals, then this is just plainly false. Black/White as a grouping trait does in fact correlate with measured average IQ differences. This result is not in doubt. If you're taking race as some abstract ideal then there is no evidence that the abstract concept of race correlates with IQ scores. But this just changes the subject.
>Saying "blacks are stupider than whites" is a statement that is lazy to the point of being racist. It is definitely not "accurate and mild".
If the argument is that he didn't take sufficient care and sensitivity to an issue he knew or should have known is highly inflammatory, then you should just say that. But this just sounds like a vibe check to me. Which is fair, but at least be honest about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
[flagged]
B) It wasn't a joke. You called it "fairly troll-ish". It was thus fairly serious. It is your mind child, such as it is. It's okay if you aren't any good at philosophy or deep thinking.
C) Google doesn't do anything serious in Liverpool.
D) Given we have humble intellect and status, let's try being a bit less pretentious and a bit kinder and more respectful. That way, we can make Hacker News and the world at large a more pleasant place :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
A) You did write it, even if it were a joke. Don't be a liar-pants. B) It wasn't a joke. You called it " fairly troll-ish". It was thus fairly serious. It is your mind child, such as it is. It's okay if you aren't any good at philosophy or deep thinking. C) Google doesn't do anything serious in Liverpool. D) Given we have humble intellect and status, let's try being a bit less pretentious and a bit kinder and more re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree there's more to be examined if we want a good picture. There's still no proven correlation between race and intelligence here. And that is all I'm arguing. Saying "blacks are stupider than whites" is a statement that is lazy to the point of being racist. It is definitely not "accurate and mild".
> There's still no proven correlation between race and intelligence here. If you take race as just a grouping trait for a collection of individuals, then this is just plainly false. Black/White as a grouping trait does in fact correlate with measured average IQ differences. This result is not in doubt. If you're taking race as some abstract ideal then there is no evidence that the abstract concept of race correlates…
It's like saying that black skin and lion attacks are correlated: while it is true that the correlation coefficient shows a number that correspond to a correlation, proper scientists don't do that, because it is not the skin color that is intrinsically correlated with the lion attacks, but the fact that lions and victims are both present in some specific regions. It is just bad science, or even pseudo-science, to call it "correlated", because you have done half the work and stop before the end. It's a bit like providing a result without the uncertainty bands when those uncertainty bands indicate we haven't reached statistical significance: it's bad science and it is not accepted for publication.
I guess you know it, but just in case: the stupid graph where you see a growing line between skin color and IQ is because the samples are not corrected for socio-economical status, which is itself clearly correlated with IQ. It's like taking blue-eyed people who are poor and stop their education early and brown-eyed people who have been to uni and then looking at the IQ.
Additionally, the stupid naive line is not the only method to check if it is genetic. You can also compare IQ score of twins separated at birth or look at the genome of the cluster that you pretend is "genetically less intelligent" and see if in this cluster there is less variance than in any other groups. In both case, the conclusion is that the IQ score appears to not be correlated to a specific genome. So via this approach, the conclusion is that "we cannot conclude it is correlated" because there is no mechanism to explain it and it can be spurious or a fluctuation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is saying that Bostrom is racist because his vibe was off? The fact is that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery just because he wanted to be cool and rebel. I personally don't think Bostrom is "racist", more that he is an idiot with edgelord tendencies (and I think this alone justifies to not consider him for intellectual jobs: in a similar way, it is sometimes funny how some people are arguing that they are…
>The fact is that Bostrom gave credit to science quackery The measured IQ difference between races is not science quackery. It's a fact accepted by most who seriously study the issue. For example, the American Psychological Association issued a review of the evidence and concluded there is a Black-White IQ testing gap[1]: > The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one sta…
The passage that you highlight does not say that there is a gap not explained by socio-economical status, it says "it is not ONLY socio-economical". It does not say there is no biases in the the test construction, it says "there is no OBVIOUS biases". And it ends up with "At present, no one knows". It was in 1996. Since then, more studies have been done, based on a black people sample that sees its socio-economical status evolving, and the picture became clearer, showing that what the authors did not know in 1996 are now understood, and it turns out it's mainly bias and socio-economical status.
So, yes, in 1996, believing in "Whites are smarter than Blacks" was quackery, the same way that few months ago, falling for the LK-99 superconductor craze was falling for quackery: you had to be an idiot to not notice you cannot jump to conclusion. The article you quote here is saying exactly that: you cannot reliably say "Whites are smarter than Blacks", because we don't know why we see a gap, it can be a simple statistical fluctuation or a spurious correlation that we haven't discovered yet. It is explicitly said in the article conclusion: "In a field where so many issues are unresolved and so many questions unanswered, the confident tone that has characterized most of the debate on these topics is clearly out of place". They say that Bostrom confident tone that Whites are smarter than Blacks is clearly out of place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the area that talks about race. 1. This only mentions African americans, who are mixed West Africans and are a tiny portion of the black race. 2. It specifically says that black people's scores on tests have improved since the 1970s. Around the time they got civil rights. So this is to do with poverty and systemic oppression (the combination of these, and cultural impacts of these, not JUST socioeconomic facto…
I mean, you're extrapolating much more than the evidence warrants. Everyone on all sides of this debate believe environment has some significant role in measured IQ. So the fact that the IQ gap has reduced since African American's material condition has improved does not imply the entire gap is due to environmental influences. You're also changing the subject. The issue is whether the widely accepted Black-White IQ g…
Even in 1996, it was obvious that "Blacks are less smart than Whites" is incredibly scientifically stupid, the same way that saying not long ago "LK-99 superconductor is a game changer, and people who are skeptics are wrong". In 1996, it was clear for anyone who look more than 10 minutes that the situation was way muddier than Bostrom realised, and that Bostrom is as stupid as the idiots who jumped on the LK-99 superconductor craze without waiting for more info.