I was honored to be invited again to this year’s LessOnline—I really enjoyed the last one. However, I’m going to turn down this invitation as I’m uncomfortable being in the same company of invited author guests as Cremieux.
I didn’t know who he was last year, so after hearing concerning murmurs from various places, I looked into his work. Hoo boy. I don’t think that being interested in genetic differences between ethnic groups necessarily makes one racist, but I think it’s the kind of area where you have to be extraordinarily careful to proceed with caution and compassion and not fall into racist fallacies (coexisting in a terrible cycle with shoddy scholarship). I do not think Cremieux meets this standard of care and compassion.
Also, I get the sense he’s generally a jerk to those around him, which is not as big of a deal but is not helping. He reacts to challenges or criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol.
I don’t like what he’s about, I think the rationalist community can do better, and I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he’s a special guest at.
I hope that LessOnline goes well and that those who do go have a great time, and that my assessment is completely off-base. I mean, I don’t think it is, but I hope so.
> Also, I get the sense he’s generally a jerk to those around him, which is not as big of a deal but is not helping. He reacts to challenges or criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol.
Since some people are questioning this comment, I’ll point out this has been my experience. Cremieux (I believe) plagiarized a post I wrote and then reacted with (I believe) “insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol” when I pointed this out.
I should say I’m not questioning the assertion that he plagiarized you or reacted to your challenge/criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol. I do dispute the claim that he has a general tendency towards such reactions regardless of context and case.
[epistemic status: have heard a bunch about this from people with strong opinions, have not much read or at all interacted with the guy myself]
I want to note that I suspect that a lot of people in this thread are reasoning from different evidence than each other, in that much of the behavior people object to has happened in places like Discord and alt accounts and such. I don’t really have time to fix this state of affairs right now (might try later, idk) but wanted to flag that I think it is true—it’s not just that people draw radically different conclusions from the same content (though there might be some of that too).
I am familiar with his behavior on various alts. They paint a different picture than his twitter persona. Most notably, he was a longterm regular on r/theMotte as u/TrannyPornO.
While posting under this name, his posts did not seem to me to embody the virtues of rationality. Example:
I’m very curious about Aboriginals. As far as I can tell, they are one of the least intelligent, dullest, and most uncouth groups in the world (edit: average IQ seems to be sub-70, ie, mentally-retarded). They’re such dullards that government-sponsored PSAs have to be tailored to them so that they won’t sleep in the road and huff petrol. I have examined one administration of the WAIS given to a group of them and I found the test didn’t assess them well at all (we probably need new tests and norms for them), but naïvely correcting for bias, this sample of full-grown adults had the cognitive ability of young children. How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population composed of around 3% (and growing) mentally-retarded people whose vote matters just as much as yours (average reader, a university-educated White or Jewish male)? Never mind that they generate an incredible degree of sympathy whenever anyone tires of them! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/b2yko7/comment/eiwf51d/
He was also a regular on the Astral Codex Ten discord server under the name VB, where his behavior was similar and where he’s been permanently banned.
As a moderator of /r/TheMotte (back when it was on Reddit), I recognize that username immediately. He was tempbanned a few times (largely for those sorts of posts), but at the same time he was featured well over a dozen times in the “Quality Contributions” post we had to highlight the most informative/thoughtful posts. Just as a bit of a balanced perspective. Not to defend him entirely, though, I personally view his tantrum after being called out for plagiarism to be quite an indictment on his character, however insightful his blog posts are.
Dear people who read this and agreement-downvoted (ETA: wrote this cause above comment was well in the agreement-negatives at the time of writing): Do you think this isn’t Cremieux’s account, or that the quoted example is an acceptable thing to say, or what?
Meta: I probably won’t respond further in this thread, as it has obviously gone demon. But I do think it’s worth someone articulating the principle I’d use in cases like this one.
My attitude here is something like “one has to be able to work with moral monsters”. Cremieux sometimes says unacceptable things, and that’s just not very relevant to whether I’d e.g. attend an event at which he features. This flavor of boycotting seems like it would generally be harmful to one’s epistemics to adopt as a policy.
(To be clear, if someone says “I don’t want to be at an event at which Cremieux features because I’m worried that third parties will paint me as racist for it”, I’d consider that a reasonable concern sometimes. But it’s notably a concern which does not route through one’s own moral inclinations.)
There are simply too many people out there who are competent and smart and do useful work, but nonetheless have utility functions very different from mine, such that they will sometimes seem monstrous to me. As a practical matter, I need to be able to work with them anyway; otherwise I’m shooting myself in the foot.
Man, I’m a pretty committed utilitarian, but I feel like your ethical framework here seems way more naive consequentialist than I’m willing to be. “Don’t collaborate with evil” seems like a very clear Chesterton’s fence that I’d very suspicious about removing. I think you should be really, really skeptical if you think you’ve argued yourself out of it.
Attending an event with someone else is not “collaborating with evil”!
I think people working at frontier companies are causing vastly more harm and are much stronger candidates for being moral monsters than Cremieux is (even given his recent IMO quite dickish behavior). I think it would be quite dumb of me to ban all frontier lab employees from Lightcone events, and my guess is you would agree with this even if you agreed with my beliefs on frontier AI labs.
Many events exist to negotiate and translate between different worldviews and perspectives. LessOnline more so than most. Yes, think about when you are supporting evil, or giving it legitimacy, and it’s messy, but especially given your position at a leading frontier lab, I don’t think you would consider a blanket position of “don’t collaborate with evil” in a way that would extend as far as “attending an event with someone else” as tenable.
A possible reason to treat “this guy is racist in ways that both the broader culture and I agree is bad” more harshly than “this guy works on AI capabilities” is something like Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness—it makes sense to act differently when you’re enforcing an existing norm vs. trying to create a new one or just judging someone without engaging with norms.
A possible issue with that is that at least some broader-society norms about racism are bad actually and shouldn’t be enforced. I think a possible crux here is whether any norms against racism are just and worth enforcing, or whether the whole complex of such norms is unjust.
(For myself I take a meta-level stance approximately like yours but I also don’t really object to people taking stances more like eukaryote’s.)
To be clear, I’m responding to John’s more general ethical stance here of “working with moral monsters”, not anything specific about Cremieux. I’m not super interested in the specific situation with Cremieux (though generally it seems bad to me).
On the AI lab point, I do think people should generally avoid working for organizations that they think are evil, or at least think really carefully about it before they do it. I do not think Anthropic is evil—in fact I think Anthropic is the main force for good on the present gameboard.
I think John’s comment, in the context of this thread, was describing a level of “working with” that was in the reference class of “attending an event with” and less “working for an organization” and the usual commitments and relationship that entails, so extending it to that case feels a bit like a non-sequitur. He explicitly mentioned attending an event as the example of the kind of “working with” he was talking about, so responding to only a non-central case of it feels weird.
It is also otherwise the case that in our social circle, the position of “work for organizations that you think are very bad for the world in order to make it better” is a relatively common take (though in that case I think we two appear be in rough agreement that it’s rarely worth it), and I hope you also advocate for it when it’s harder to defend.
Given common beliefs about AI companies in our extended social circle, I think it illustrates pretty nicely why extending an attitude about association-policing that extends all the way to “mutual event attendance” would void a huge number of potential trades and opportunities for compromise and surface area to change one’s mind, and is a bad idea.
I agree that attending an event with someone obviously shouldn’t count as endorsement/collaboration/etc. Inviting someone to an event seems somewhat closer, though.
I’m also not really sure what you’re hinting at with “I hope you also advocate for it when it’s harder to defend.” I assume something about what I think about working at AI labs? I feel like my position on that was fairly clear in my previous comment.
Inviting someone to an event seems somewhat closer, though.
Yeah, in this case we are talking about “attending an event where someone you think is evil is invited to attend”, which is narrower, but also strikes me as an untenable position (e.g. in the case of the lab case, this would prevent me from attending almost any conference I can think of wanting to attend in the Bay Area, almost all of which routinely invite frontier lab employees as speakers or featured guests).
To be clear, I think it’s reasonable to be frustrated with Lightcone if you think we legitimize people who you think will misuse that legitimacy, but IMO refusing to attend any events where an organizer makes that kind of choice seems very intense to me (though of course, if someone was already considering attending an event as being of marginal value, such a thing could push you over the edge, though I think this would produce a different top-level comment).
I’m also not really sure what you’re hinting at with “I hope you also advocate for it when it’s harder to defend.” I assume something about what I think about working at AI labs? I feel like my position on that was fairly clear in my previous comment.
It’s mostly an expression of hope. For example, I hope it’s a genuine commitment that will result in you saying so, even if you might end up in the unfortunate position of updating negatively on Anthropic, or being friends and allies with lots of people at other organizations that you updated negatively on.
As a reason for this being hope instead of confidence: I do not remember you (or almost anyone else in your position) calling for people to leave their positions at OpenAI when it became more clear the organization was likely harming the world, though maybe I just missed it. I am not intending this to be some confident “gotcha”, just me hinting that people often like to do moral grandstanding in this domain without actual backing deep commitments.
To be clear, this wasn’t an intention to drag the whole topic into this conversation, but was trying to be a low-key and indirect expression of me viewing some of the things you say here with some skepticism. I don’t super want to put you on the spot to justify your whole position here, but also would have felt amiss to not give any hints of how I relate to them. So feel free to not respond, as I am sure we will find better contexts in which we can discuss these things.
I’m responding to John’s more general ethical stance here of “working with moral monsters”, not anything specific about Cremieux
For what it’s worth I interpreted it as being about Cremieux in particular based on the comment it was directly responding to; probably others also interpreted it that way
You can work with them without inviting them to hang out with your friends.
This flavor of boycotting seems like it would generally be harmful to one’s epistemics to adopt as a policy.
Georgia did not say she was boycotting, nor calling for others not to attend—she explained why she didn’t want to be at an event where he was a featured speaker.
When someone criticizes a statement as offensive, bad, or other negative terms besides “false”, I ask myself, “Is the statement true or false?” (I tend to ask that about any statement, really, but I think I make a point of doing so in emotionally-charged circumstances.)
He does make word choices like “dullards” and say some things that one could call unnecessarily insulting. But most of it sounds like factual data that he got from reading scientific literature (clicking through to the comment—yup). Is it true or false that there was a set of IQ tests given to aboriginals and the average score was <70? Is it true or false that the (Australian, I assume) government put out a PSA for the purpose of getting aboriginals to not sleep in the road—caused, presumably, by cases of them doing it? (Make a prediction, then google it.)
And if all the above is true, then that seems like a potentially important problem, at least for anyone who cares about the people involved. Are the low IQ test results caused by difficulties in testing people from a very different culture and language, or do they mostly reflect reality? If the latter, what causes it, and can anything be done about it? (Have the aboriginals grown up in a very nutrient-poor or idea-poor environment? If so, then it should be reasonably straightforward to fix that in future generations. If, on the other hand, it’s mostly genetic, then we can add that to the list of reasons it’s important to develop genetic technologies like embryo selection.)
If it’s both true and important, then, taking “important” as roughly implying “necessary”, that means it passes the rule of “At least 2 of 3: necessary, kind, true”.
The question “How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?”—if you take it as a rhetorical question, then that sounds pretty bad. But if you assume the premise is correct (that there’s a subpopulation whose “full-grown adults had the cognitive ability of young children”), then it does seem like a genuine question. Are there basic assumptions about democracy, or in our implementation of it, that break down in the presence of such a population? (If not at that level, then is there some level where it does?) What accommodations can be made?
(Whether the question is rhetorical or not—I wonder if this is a case where, if you have a negative prior about someone, you’ll take an ambiguous signal and decide it’s bad, and use that to justify further lowering your opinion of them, whereas someone with a positive prior will do the opposite.)
The upthread statement I disagreed with is “his posts did not seem to me to embody the virtues of rationality”. Looking at the full comment, he brings in data, mentions caveats, makes some calculations and cross-checks them against other sources.
There’s more than zero inflammatory rhetoric. But the ratio of facts to inflammatory rhetoric seems ok to me, and I don’t see strong evidence that he’s operating in bad faith (although the plagiarism thing seems somewhat bad) or that he’s in favor of forcibly sterilizing the aboriginals. I note that the comment was posted on a subreddit for people who enjoy arguing.
(Whether the question is rhetorical or not—I wonder if this is a case where, if you have a negative prior about someone, you’ll take an ambiguous signal and decide it’s bad, and use that to justify further lowering your opinion of them, whereas someone with a positive prior will do the opposite.)
This does seem likely true. As TheSkeward noted, he has a lot of previous experience with Cremieux that he’s drawing from and is informing his view here (which is harder to cite since it was on Discord rather than the public Internet, integrated into conversational contexts, and in many cases now deleted). You could say this is a bias causing him to be uncharitable, but on the other hand it’s also a prior with a lot of information integrated into it already which people without that experience don’t have. Personally I think you are being so charitable that it slides into outright ignoring evidence just because any given bit of it isn’t ironclad proof—which is a really important decoupling skill in situations of disagreement but also will lead you astray if you don’t also step back and evaluate the less certain evidence too.
(maybe the “court of public opinion” should stick only to ironclad-proof kinds of evidence like literal courts do? idk, I think that’s a good idea for some kinds of actions and not others)
(disclosure, TheSkeward is a close friend of mine and I’ve talked to him about this a fair bit)
The question “How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?”—if you take it as a rhetorical question, then that sounds pretty bad. [...] and I don’t see strong evidence that he’s operating in bad faith (although the plagiarism thing seems somewhat bad) or that he’s in favor of forcibly sterilizing the aboriginals.
From elsewhere on Reddit, we have also this list of some of his preferred policies. It does not have precisely “ethnic groups that are on average less intelligent should not vote” or “forcible sterilization of such groups”, but it does have some other things that are kind of relevant and to me kind of horrifying, such as:
Jus Sanguinis (with removal of citizenship for people who marry/procreate with foreigners—but otherwise, they’re free to stay, work, w.e—obviously subject to local government whims, but allow this to be an option that exists for, e.g., an ethnonationalist state, city, or patchwork bracket).
[...]
Mandatory abortions of the congenitally ill.
(bonus things that are not relevant but also kind of horrifying:)
Complete removal of the prison, replacement with corporal and capital punishment including slavery (with conscription as an option) and medical experimentation depending on the severity of the crime (and in the case of slavery, usually not permanent unless it’s a life sentence). Exile as a first option.
[...]
Having to have kids as a requirement for voting/being a politician.
Having to be married to vote/be a politician.
[...]
Mental illness/having mental health medication prescribed disqualifying voting.
(note this is selected for being particularly horrifying to me; list also has some reasonable stuff and some stuff that’s more baffling than horrifying)
This is again more like “bayesian evidence of what kinds of things this guy likes” than “look he said this exact thing” but like. it does not to me paint a picture of a guy who’s reasoning from a careful or compassionate place or going to be careful about e.g. policies he pushes for not ruining a lot of people’s lives willy-nilly!
He does make word choices like “dullards” and say some things that one could call unnecessarily insulting. [...] There’s more than zero inflammatory rhetoric.
yeah I think this is pretty bad and causes me to not respect someone or think others should respect them? It’s not just that he makes factual claims about an ethnic group and those factual claims are unflattering; his rhetoric oozes contempt for them. I think it’s… bad to ooze contempt for an ethnic group? There’s a thing that “racist” means and I don’t think it necessarily ought to include beliefs about IQ but it very clearly includes “oozes contempt for some ethnic groups”! (For that matter I think it’s also bad to ooze contempt at intellectually disabled people per se too.)
And I think this in fact muddies his epistemics, or at least his rhetoric! I admit that when I first read the comment I thought it was more factually bullshit than it in fact is, and I agree this matters. But also here are some more questions whose answers matter -
how many cases of this “sleeping on the road” thing have actually occurred?
what happened in those cases?
how representative are those cases of the relevant groups as a whole?
should you model this set of people as “basically like people you know with some adjustments” or “basically incomprehensible aliens”?
Another friend of mine looked into this a bit and basically found that there were a handful of cases like this (which is indeed more than I expected! but not, like, ubiquitous) but also they mostly seemed to be either explicitly drugs/alcohol-related (sometimes better described as “person was walking on the road while drunk or high and fell asleep”) or just very likely so (see e.g. this graph for some info re: base rates of being drunk in pedestrian fatalities in this population, though caveat it’s from 2006). (sorry this is not better cited, source is a small Discord conversation) This is… a different situation than if sober people just routinely decided to take a nap in the road like shown in that PSA video! It also much more matches my model of the world where, yknow, people are people, they can be not very smart but they are mostly not THAT dumb unless they’re way out of distribution or there’s drugs involved. (I mean, like, animals learn not to sleep on the road.)
I agree that the object-level non-rhetorical question is an interesting one, and an important one if the premises are true (which I am not convinced they meaningfully are as stated, I think?). I… don’t really want the people exploring it to be so obviously devoid of compassion for the people in question!
--
Caveats -
I do kind of hate the idea of, like, having something that smells like a political test for whether someone gets to be a respected rationalist. I don’t really know how to get around the fact that there are ways people can be odious that have a political valence. I will just note that there are many political beliefs I think are terrible and which I might personally judge someone for but would not feel that there’s something particularly distasteful about my community respecting (e.g. opposition to same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration; opposition to building housing; standard communism).
Similarly I kind of hate the exercise of dissecting someone’s words to determine whether they Really Suck and Should Be Shunned. Again I’m not really sure how to get around the situation where sometimes people suck and this is mostly visible in how they talk and while I don’t think this means they should be ostracized I do think it bears on how much respect they ought to be afforded. (Not purely a political thing; see also the recent conflict around the plagiarism allegations & his response to them.)
The Reddit comment we’re arguing about here is 6 years old; he’s not active on that account anymore; maybe this no longer reflects how he thinks about things, idk. (My understanding is that his allegedly similar Discord activity is more recent than that but I haven’t personally seen it so can’t really comment with good knowledge.)
I can feel the “taking a side and feeling the need to defend it as hard as I can, including internally defending against changing my mind” machinery whir into action in my head. I’m trying not to let it control what I think/say too much, but also I kind of think even a possibly biased case is worth making here because it frustrates me that a lot of good arguments and evidence on this “side” are going unreported in this thread because sensible people with good arguments and evidence look at it and say “nope, no thank you” so I guess as a less sensible person I am wading in in their stead. If the discourse were slanted the other way I would be advancing a different set of considerations.
Suppose that someone has views that I think are “odious”, but which have a totally different political slant (either on the opposite side of the standard political spectrum, or just largely orthogonal) than all this stuff with Cremieux.
Should rationalist gatherings shun this person? If not, why not?
We can even make this more personal: suppose that you have views that I think are “odious”. Should rationalist gatherings shun you? If not, why not?
(I mostly don’t know your political views, and I don’t currently have any reason to think that you should be shunned. But you can easily enough imagine the scenario, I expect.)
Presumably you will answer “no” to both questions. But why? You’re giving reasons why you think that Cremieux is “odious”, on the basis of his views and his public comments about his views—just that, not anything else![1] Well, surely I could give reasons why someone (perhaps even you!) is “odious”, on the basis of that person’s views and comments thereon.
So why shouldn’t rationalists shun this hypothetical person? Why shouldn’t rationalists shun hypothetical-you?
Is it a matter of majoritarianism? We should shun anyone whom the majority of rationalists consider “odious”? (But if so—what is the denominator? Who gets to vote in this referendum?)
And if not that—then what? (Note that object-level arguments—“but you see, clearly, this guy really is odious!”—will obviously not suffice.)
This is especially hilarious given that there genuinely seem to be good reasons to, if not disinvite the guy, at least to remove him from the featured-speaker list—the plagiarism, and the exceedingly hostile response to the (quite credible) accusation thereof.
First, I don’t think rationalists should shun Cremieux. The only cases I’m aware of where there was a push to get someone actually banned from rationalist stuff and truly “cancelled” are cases of, like, abuse, theft, murder, and I think this is good. I don’t think Cremieux should be banned from rationalist events, I don’t think people should refuse to read his blog or anything. He has good Twitter threads sometimes. (though after the Dynomight thing I’m a little suspicious of how much of that is his work)
What I do think is that his character as a person (which includes the blowup in response to the plagiarism accusation, and also the posts we’re talking about here) should inform to what extent we hold him up as an exemplar of how to be. I wish we wouldn’t. I am not myself lodging any kind of big protest about this, I am going to LessOnline myself (though not as any sort of featured guest), but it does make me a little less happy about how my community works.
Anyway, if someone is, say, a diehard communist who likes to post “kill all landlords” and argue that we need to immediately have a communist revolution and put a lot of people in gulags, that would
(a) be a very different valence from Cremieux’s takes
(b) not warrant banning them from rationalist meetups (assuming they’re not constantly going on about this at the meetups—if they are, ask them to cut it out and ban them if they won’t)
(c) cause me to not want to be friends with them or respect their opinions
(d) cause me to think that if e.g. LessOnline organizers are holding them up as an example of how one should be, they are wrong and have worse judgment than I thought
I haven’t looked into this, but I’m guessing the IQ results are from some form of language barrier?
I think he’s wrong on the facts, but in this case his tone actually matters and is totally unacceptable for anyone who might be viewed as a “community representative.” I think it’s worth being pragmatic (ie not religiously pednantic about accuracy and only accuracy) on this point. If he were just a regular attendee that would be a different story.
Why would Cremieux be viewed as a “community representative”…? And what exactly about his “tone” is “totally unacceptable”…? Both of these claims seem very weird to me.
Why would Cremieux be viewed as a “community representative”…?
On less.online, the list of invited guests is titled “SOME WRITINGS WE LOVE” and subtitled “The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating. Each author below has been offered a free ticket to LessOnline.” [emphasis mine]
I guess technically that says his site embodies these virtues, not that he as a person does, but I think that’s a pretty hairsplitty distinction.
I don’t get it. How does any of that make someone a “community representative”?
Suppose I start a baking forum for people who like to apply careful analysis to baking, and I decide to run an event for “rational baking” aficionados. On the announcement page, I write that I love Christopher Kimball’s writings, that he embodies the virtues that we are celebrating, and that he has been offered a free ticket to LessFondant. Would you conclude from this that Kimball is a “community representative” of my forum for baking nerds…?
Seems pretty clear to me that this would be a quite ridiculous conclusion to draw.
I think that would be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw! I think we must be understanding the meaning of “community representative” differently.
How can it possibly be a perfect conclusion?? In my scenario, you don’t even know if Christopher Kimball has ever heard of my forum! (Sure, I say that he’s been offered a free ticket, but how do you know whether he’s even gotten the email, or whatever?)
Are you suggesting that I might, right now, at this very moment, be a “community representative” of some community that I’ve never heard of, because they put a link to my blog on their event announcement page, and sent me some sort of offer which went straight to my junk mail folder?
I actually think that distinction is not very hairsplitty here. One of the most striking things from this whole discussion is that the Cremieux who writes the blog actually does seem very different from the Cremieux who appears on Twitter/X and Reddit and Discord. My exposure to him is primarily through the blog, which I do like, which does not seem to say offensive things about race, which doesn’t even seem to have race as a dominant theme. Whereas there do seem to be some more questionable statements and interactions from him on these other platforms.
I haven’t looked into this, but I’m guessing the IQ results are from some form of language barrier?
Many people have tried very hard to find explanations for the IQ results that are something other than “low intelligence” for decades. If a replicating result that provides such an explanation had been established, it would have been broadly publicized in popular media and even laymen would know about it. Instead, we’re being told we are not supposed to look into this topic at all.
“How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?”
easy: we already do this. Definitionally, 2 percent of people are <70 IQ. I don’t think we would commonly identify this as one of the biggest problems with democracy.
I think this demonstrates a failure mode of the ‘is it true?’ heuristic as a comprehensive methodology for evaluating statements. I can string together true premises (and omit others) to support a much broader range of conclusions than are supported by the actual preponderance of the evidence. (i.e., even if we accept all the premises presented here, the suggestion that letting members of a certain racial group vote is a threat to democracy completely dissolves with the introduction of one additional observation).
[for transparency: my actual belief here is that IQ is a very crude implement with results mediated by many non-genetic population-level factors, but I don’t think I need to convince you of this in order to update you toward believing the author is engaged in motivated reasoning!]
Definitionally, 2 percent of people are <70 IQ. I don’t think we would commonly identify this as one of the biggest problems with democracy.
I think that many people would, in fact, identify this (and the more general problem of which it is an extreme example) as one of the biggest problems with democracy!
Low-IQ voters can’t identify good policies or wise politicians; democracy favors political actors who can successfully propagandize and mobilize the largest number of people, which might not correspond to good governance. A political system with non-democratic elements that offers more formalized control to actors with greater competence or better incentives might be able to choose better policies.
I say “non-democratic elements” because it doesn’t have to be a strict binary between perfect democracy and perfect dictatorship. Consider, e.g., how the indirect election of U.S. Senators before the 17th Amendment was originally intended to make the Senate a more deliberative body by insulating it from the public.
(Maybe that’s all wrong, but you asked “what’s the model”, and this is an example model of why someone might be skeptical of democracy for pro-social structural reasons rather than just personally wanting their guy to be dictator.)
I do not expect voters to actually become much smarter just because in principle they have access to intelligent advice (in some domains, which is sometimes totally wrong). In fact, I think voters have a time-honored tradition of ignoring intelligent advice, particularly when it is hard to distinguish from unintelligent advice.
So, even if this is true in theory, it will not manifest how you’re suggesting in practice.
Advice can’t be intelligent or unintelligent; it’s too inanimate for that. And I didn’t suggest any particular manifestation.
I kind of feel like you are using the word “intelligence” as an effective synonym for “good”, such that you were interpreting the subtext of my claim as saying that voters will now be good, whereas I rather intend the subtext of my claim to be that theories about lack of voter intelligence are now uninteresting because other dynamics are dominating.
I don’t know if other dynamics are dominating, but I seriously doubt that LLMs are qualitatively changing the dynamics of voting through the mechanism you seem to be suggesting—possibly loose persuasion bots on the internet are affecting voting behavior somewhat, but I don’t think people are intentionally using chatbots to make smarter voting decisions.
Honestly, I am no longer sure I understand what you’re trying to claim at all.
TheSkeward is trying to unspecifically shame Cremieux for criticizing multiethnic democracy with very low-IQ demographics. localdeity inferred that TheSkeward’s criticism was probably about how Cremieux was talking about taboo racist stuff, and pointed out how TheSkeward’s shaming doesn’t make sense in the light of that. yams pointed out that basic numeracy would show the problem to be overstated and also that the general discourse is pretty sketchy.
Said Achmiz and Zack Davis were objecting to the basic numeracy point by arguing that unspecified people (presumably including Cremieux but excluding Said Achmiz and Zack Davis) might think that one of the biggest problems with democracy in general is lack of voter intelligence, not just when restricting consideration to a few % of the population.
It’s unclear whether [intelligence being the constraint] has ever been true. Today it’s more likely that voters are constrained by something else (e.g. tribal dynamics or wisdom or intrinsic conflicts or mental illness or etc.; even excess voter intelligence is more likely of a problem than insufficient voter intelligence), either because intelligence was never the constraining factor or because AI etc. has made intelligence too cheap to meter. So while the unspecified people might still believe that one of the biggest problems with democracy is lack of voter intelligence, we don’t really need to consider their opinion anymore, since even if it was ever true, it’s clearly outdated.
I agree that we’re not seeing improvements in voter behavior, on the contrary it seems to be getting worse. I think that’s because it was never a big problem to begin with, but I’m open to alternatives e.g. that there’s new exogenous factors that cause a deviation from the trend of improving access to intelligence.
easy: we already do this. Definitionally, 2 percent of people are <70 IQ. I don’t think we would commonly identify this as one of the biggest problems with democracy.
But those people are distributed fairly evenly throughout society. Each one is surrounded by lots of people of >100 IQ, and probably knows at least a few of >115 IQ, etc. Whereas if it’s an entire indigenous population, and integration is far from complete, then there are likely whole villages that are almost entirely aboriginal. That’s an important difference.
One consequence: I expect that, in order to do a good job at various important management roles (managing a power plant, a sewer system, etc.), you basically need a high enough IQ. A hard cutoff is an oversimplification, but, to illustrate, Google results suggest that doctors’ average IQ is between 120 and 130, and there might be villages of 1000 people with no one fitting that description. (And even if you think the IQ test results are, say, more reflective of a “Western Quotient”—the ability+willingness to work well with Western ideas and practices—it seems that lots of these jobs require precisely that. Using and maintaining Western machines; negotiating on behalf of the village with mostly-Western cities and higher levels of government; evaluating land development proposals; and so on.)
Then, running with the above scenario, either the village doesn’t have modern infrastructure, or it has modern infrastructure managed badly, or it has modern infrastructure managed by Westerners. The first two are bad, and the third might be a constant source of ethnic grievances if anyone is unhappy with the arrangement. (Exercise: ask an AI for historical examples of each of the above, and see if they’re genuine.) Thus: a problem with democracy. And voting, in particular, might turn the third case into the second case.
I think this demonstrates a failure mode of the ‘is it true?’ heuristic as a comprehensive methodology for evaluating statements.
I didn’t call it comprehensive. It’s a useful tool, and often the first one I reach for. but not always the only tool.
I can string together true premises (and omit others) to support a much broader range of conclusions than are supported by the actual preponderance of the evidence.
Then your opponent can counter-argue that your statements are true but cherry-picked, or that your argument skips logical steps xyz and those steps are in fact incorrect. If your opponent instead chooses to say that for you to make those statements is unacceptable behavior, then it’s unfortunate that your opposition is failing to represent its side well. As an observer, depending on my purposes and what I think I already know, I have many options, ranging from “evaluating the arguments presented” to “researching the issue myself”.
the suggestion that letting members of a certain racial group vote is a threat to democracy completely dissolves with the introduction of one additional observation
OP didn’t use the word “threat”. He said he was “very curious about aboriginals” and asked how do you live with them. You can interpret it as a rhetorical question, meaning he’s saying it’s impossible to live with them, and his “very curious” was disingenuous; or you can interpret it as a genuine question. I think I’ve countered your argument about “completely dissolves”; for illustration, you can even forget IQ and substitute “familiarity with Western technology”, and imagine a village consisting of 10% Westerners and 90% indigenous people who have never owned a car or a computer. Surely that has the potential to cause problems; and it could indeed be interesting to know more specifics about what has gone wrong in practice, how people have addressed it, and how well it’s working.
Then your opponent can counter-argue that your statements are true but cherry-picked, or that your argument skips logical steps xyz and those steps are in fact incorrect. If your opponent instead chooses to say that for you to make those statements is unacceptable behavior, then it’s unfortunate that your opposition is failing to represent its side well. As an observer, depending on my purposes and what I think I already know, I have many options, ranging from “evaluating the arguments presented” to “researching the issue myself”.
My entire point is that logical steps in the argument are being skipped, because they are, and that the facts are cherrypicked, because they are, and my comment says as much, as well as pointing out a single example (which admits to being non-comprehensive) of an inconvenient (and obvious!) fact left out of the discussion altogether, as a proof of concept, precisely to avoid arguing the object level point (which is irrelevant to whether or not Crimieux’s statement has features that might lead one to reasonably dis-prefer being associated with him).
We move into ‘this is unacceptable’ territory when someone shows themselves to have a habit of forcefully representing their side using these techniques in order to motivate their conclusion, which many have testified Cremieux does, and which is evident from his banning in a variety of (not especially leftist, not especially IQ and genetics hostile) spaces. If your rhetorical policies fail to defend against transparently adversarial tactics predictably pedaled in the spirit of denying people their rights, you have a big hole in your map.
OP didn’t use the word “threat”. He said he was “very curious about aboriginals” and asked how do you live with them.
You quoted a section that has nothing to do with any of what I was saying. The exact line I’m referring to is:
How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population composed of around 3% (and growing) mentally-retarded people whose vote matters just as much as yours?
The whole first half of your comment is only referencing the parenthetical ‘society in general’ case, and not the voting case. I assume this is accidental on your part and not a deliberate derailment. To be clear about the stakes:
This is the conclusion of the statement. This is the whole thrust he is working up to. These facts are selected in service of an argument to deny people voting rights on the basis of their race. If the word ‘threat’ was too valenced for you, how about ‘barrier’ or ‘impediment’ to democracy? This is the clear implication of the writing. This is the hypothesis he’s asking us to entertain: Australia would be a better country if Aborigines were banned from voting. Not just because their IQs are low, or because their society is regressive, but because they are retarded.
He’s not expressing curiosity in this post. He’s expressing bald-faced contempt (“Uncouth.. dullards”). I’m not a particularly polite person, and this is language I reserve for my enemies. Hisusername is a transphobic slur. Why are you wasting your charity on this person?
Decoupling isn’t ignoring all relevant context within a statement to read it in the most generous possible light; decoupling is distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant to better see the truth. Cremieux has displayed a pattern of abhorrent bigotry, and I am personally ashamed that my friends and colleagues would list him as an honored guest at their event.
for posterity, this is a new article on Lasker about a separate reddit account // more narrative details around his various proclaimed positions and identities over time
by default I don’t put a lot of stock in articles of this kind, and I think this one gets into some weird territory (like shaming him for being kind of a know-it-all teen for some reason?). still, seems good to share for added context.
But those people are distributed fairly evenly throughout society. Each one is surrounded by lots of people of >100 IQ, and probably knows at least a few of >115 IQ, etc.
-While this is plausibly true geographically, my understanding is that… most people in the US bubble the people they interact with regularly pretty heavily, such that I’m not sure I would expect this statement to be meaningfully true for a lot of people?
How many people over 3-4 standard deviations of IQ away from you do you feel like you interact with at a level where you feel confident that you could steer them away from an effective propaganda campaign / conspiracy theory rabbithole they’d fallen into? I don’t think that’s a nonzero number for me, and if it is, it’s low-single-digits...
His much more recent blog post on national IQs makes the point that a sub-70 IQ is not equivalent to mental retardation, so it seems his views have at least somewhat changed since he wrote this particular comment. https://substack.com/@cremieux/p-153828779
Meta: If you present a paragraph like that as evidence of banworthiness and unvirtue, I think you incur an obligation to properly criticize it, or link to criticism of it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be much, but it does have to at least include sentence that contradicts something in the quoted passage, which your comment does not have. If you say that something is banworthy but forget to say that it’s false, this suggests that truth doesn’t matter to you as much as it should.
This seems wrong in general. If something is obviously false, you don’t have to say that. I don’t actually know which posts resulted in a ban in this case.
I find this attitude sad. I think his blog is currently clearly one of the best ones on the Internet. Even if you don’t agree with some of his positions, I take it to be a deeply anti-rational attitude to try to shun or shame people for saying things that are outside the Overton window. Especially when he has clearly proven on his website that he has highly nuanced takes on various other, less controversial, topics. It reminds me of people trying to shame Scott Alexander for daring to step a little outside the Overton window himself.
In my opinion, true rationalists should exactly not react to such takes with “he said something taboo, let’s boycott things where he is involved”. If you disagree with him, a better attitude would be to write a post about one of the articles on his website, concretely indicating and rebutting things where you think he is wrong. Only claiming “I do not think Cremieux meets this standard of care and compassion” is so vague of an accusation that I don’t know whether you even disagree with anything he said. It sounds like low decoupling and tone policing. I wrote more on rationalist discourse involving taboos here.
There is a strong correlation between someone boycotting a person for saying X and X being outside the Overton window. So a causal link is likely. People rarely boycott people for expressing things they disagree with but which are inside the Overton window.
Overtly, OP is trying to shun Cremieux for failing to meet an assumed-widely-agreed “standard of care and compassion”. This is obviously based on OP’s belief that Cremieux’s conduct is unacceptably outside the Overton window, even if they used the word “standard” instead of the word “Overton window”. The only point of deploying phrases like “Hoo boy” and “do better” is to appeal to a social consensus. OP isn’t being sneaky here or anything, you’re just misinterpreting their dialect.
Especially when he has clearly proven on his website that he has highly nuanced takes on various other, less controversial, topics. It reminds me of people trying to shame Scott Alexander for daring to step a little outside the Overton window himself.
It may be rational of you to interpolate the quality of one facet of someone’s behavior from other facets, or to interpolate from one social controversy to another, but it’s certainly not adversarially robust. You can’t reasonably expect people not to focus on his narrower behavior in one area.
I think this is a weird misunderstanding of my issue here. I believe and endorse people saying a lot of things that are outside of the overton window and are taboo in many places. For instance: “Factory farming is immoral.” “It’s bad when wild animals feel pain.” “People should be able to get literally any surgery they want at any time.” “Every golf course in large cities should be destroyed and have checkerboarded apartments-and-parks put up over it.”
My issue is with the specific takes Cremieux has and ways he acts, which are racist, and harmful, and bad.
It’s hardly unusual to believe that people should be shunned and shamed for saying things that are outside of the Overton window except when those things agree with your own beliefs. (Another way of putting it would be “people should be shunned and shamed for saying things that are outside of the Overton window, and also I think that the Overton window should include my own views”.)
(Obviously tolerance is not actually tolerance if you only tolerate people who agree with you and not people who disagree with you. I mean, come on.)
I think I see. I mean, I did post this hoping some people might agree with it or decide they agree with it. I mean, I guess my take is “some things outside the Overton window are bad and broader society is correct not to tolerate them.”
I mean, I did post this hoping some people might agree with it or decide they agree with it.
Well, yes. I expect most people who read your post understood that. This is the standard way of starting a… shall we say, a deliberate movement toward social-consensus judgment, yes? You voice your opinion, which you expect enough people will publicly agree with to make it common knowledge that this view constitutes the judgment of the collective.
I mean, I guess my take is “some things outside the Overton window are bad and broader society is correct not to tolerate them.”
No doubt most people here will readily agree with you on this. The trouble is that they won’t all agree on just which things those are.
These are more or less controversial, but range from not outside the Overton window at all (saying that factory farming is immoral) to being a little outside. But they are by no means “taboo” in the sense that you would face serious social cost for expressing them. Saying “there are heritable statistical group differences in mean IQ” is on a completely different level. People had their careers ended and reputation ruined because of this. In comparison, saying that golf courses should be replaced with apartments carries almost zero personal risk.
My issue is with the specific takes Cremieux has and ways he acts, which are racist, and harmful, and bad.
I think it is defamatory, bad and counter to the spirit of rationalist discourse to accuse someone of racism when they have put forward an empirical hypothesis including evidence to back it up. The term “racist” has an implication of being merely based on an irrational prejudice, which is clearly not the case for Cremieux.
I think it’s counter to the spirit of rationalist discourse to ban the hypothesis that someone is racist. Rationalism is about following the evidence wherever it leads, not about keeping people’s feelings from being hurt.
The problem is not simply the accusation of being racist. The problem is the accusation of being racist, in response to an empirical claim, as a substitute for addressing the empirical claim (and with the implication that the accusation constitutes a sufficient reply to the empirical claim).
Suppose that I say “Jews are more greedy than Gentiles; this is established by the following studies”. Now consider the following possible responses:
“You’re an antisemite.”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ], which I know because [ the studies have poor methodology / they don’t replicate / the operationalization makes no sense / publication bias / etc. ].”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ], but I have no evidence to back up this disagreement, nor can I provide any good reason to reject the evidence you offer; nevertheless, I claim that you are wrong.”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ] (which I know because [reasons, as above]); also you’re an antisemite (which I conclude from the fact that you have made this false claim, and other similar evidence).”
Reply #2 is clearly “in the spirit of rationalist discourse”.
Reply #3 is epistemically void—we can and should dismiss it as a basically contentless utterance for the purpose of the object-level discussion (but perhaps it is useful for its author to publicly stake out the position in question, and it provides a data point on the question of “what and how do people think about this topic”). But on the meta level it is at least honest, neither making any unjustified claims nor subverting the discussion itself.
Reply #4 is like reply #2, but with the added claim (accusation) of antisemitism. Is that claim “in the spirit of rationalist discourse”? Eh. It would be counter to that spirit to ban the hypothesis, sure, but what is it actually adding? We seem (in this hypothetical scenario) to be doing fine discussing the object-level issue, so what’s the point of bringing accusations of racial animus into it? Then again, perhaps the question is important for other (social) reasons, so, sure, why not allow it. (But, as
with any accusation of some serious personal failing, it ought not be made lightly, and must be well-supported—otherwise, it is the accuser who has transgressed.)
But what the hell is reply #1?
It doesn’t address the empirical claim at all. If we’re talking about “the spirit of rationalist discourse”—well, that spirit has been well and truly violated already, in this case. What’s more, the accusation of antisemitism can’t be supported by the evidence of the accused having made the false empirical claim… because the accuser has not even troubled himself to establish that the empirical claim is false! This sort of reply is strictly an attempt to shut down the conversation.
If it’s “the spirit of rationalist discourse” that concerns you, then something like #1 should be the very last sort of reply that you ever find yourself making.
“Jews are more greedy than Gentiles; this is established by the following studies” can be blameworthily antisemitic even if the studies do show that this is true on average. Some ways this can be true -
bringing it up where not relevant, e.g. to criticize a Jewish politician
saying it in a way where you’re clearly oozing contempt about Jews
making it sound like this is an essential trait of all Jews vs. all non-Jews
bringing it up weirdly often
In all these cases it can be appropriate to object to that regardless of the validity of the studies.
Perhaps, perhaps. And do you have any examples of such facts (i.e., true claims) the mentioning of which is sometimes blameworthily racist/antisemitic/etc.?
(Presumably “Jews are more greedy than Gentiles” isn’t such a fact. Or is it, do you think? I am not aware of this actually being established by studies, but perhaps I am wrong about this?)
I ask, of course, because I am skeptical of this notion that the truth of the claim might be admitted by both sides, with only its “appropriateness” being, by itself, evidence of racial animus. It’s very convenient to be able to declare that “it’s not what you’re saying, it’s how [or when or why or how often] you’re saying it”. One notices that, somehow, those who make such declarations never quite get around to investigating the “what”. It’s never the right time, the right context, etc. (Meanwhile, with claims that are favored by such people, it always seems to be the right time and place and context.)
So, what’s an example (better yet, three examples) of such a thing? A true fact, which is sometimes inappropriate to bring up, because doing so would be racist, antisemitic, etc.?
Many of the truly radioactive claims I have not really investigated the truth of so cannot give as examples, but this does not mean I claim they are necessarily false either.
That said, of things I am pretty confident are true -
“Men are stronger than women.”—very true on a population level; typically not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply men are better than women
“Men are more physically aggressive than women.”—also true on a pouplation level, also not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply women are better than men
“Being fat is generally bad for your health.”—true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in response to an objection to fat people being bullied or discriminated against, not appropriate to bring up to imply fat people are contemptible
“Trans people are likelier to be mentally ill than cis people.”—true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in a discussion of discrimination against trans people, not appropriate to bring up to imply trans people are all delusional/contemptible
Many of the truly radioactive claims I have not really investigated the truth of
And this doesn’t strike you as being at all suspicious? You judge some claims to be “truly radioactive”, and you haven’t even checked whether they are true? (What, do you think that a topic being “truly radioactive” makes it less likely to be relevant to real-world outcomes?) But never mind that, let’s move on.
The first three claims you list are either politically anodyne or else have the valence of the dominant political faction. And one basically never sees anyone condemned and targeted for shunning on the basis of having such beliefs.
As for the fourth claim—of course it is relevant to bring this up in a discussion of discrimination against trans people! How could it possibly not be? (What, does discrimination against mentally ill people suddenly not exist? Or do you think that no trans person has ever been discriminated against for being mentally ill?) In general, serious mental illness has a pervasive effect on everything about a person’s life. To conclude that someone being mentally ill is not relevant at all to discussion of some major aspect of a person’s life should be quite surprising.
And this illustrates the larger point. Discussing “appropriateness” rather than truth is, in almost situations like this, injurious to our truth-seeking efforts. (Deliberately so, of course.)
I mean “radioactive” in a descriptive political sense. I agree that truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense and it is a bad thing about the political landscape than they are.
(What, does discrimination against mentally ill people suddenly not exist? Or do you think that no trans person has ever been discriminated against for being mentally ill?)
Yes, trans people can be discriminated against for being mentally ill. What I meant was that if someone says “trans people are often discriminated against and that’s bad” you should not respond with “well, trans people are mentally ill, what do you expect” as though (a) that’s universally true of trans people (b) that means the discrimination is justified.
(Additionally, I claim you could have understood that this was what I meant, by applying a modicum of interpretive labor and using mental motions like “I am confused about why someone would say this, can I try to build a model where it makes sense / pass their ITT internally”. My impression is that you are going around spamming attempted gotchas and refusing to engage even the slightest flexibility towards attempting to understand the views of people you think you disagree with; this is pretty annoying and bad for your truthseeking.)
The first three claims you list are either politically anodyne or else have the valence of the dominant political faction. And one basically never sees anyone condemned and targeted for shunning on the basis of having such beliefs.
Okay first of all, I have spent a fair bit of time in discourse contexts where they’re not really anodyne. But more importantly, …and??? I answered the question you asked (in a tone of confident assumption I would not be able to produce an answer)! I thought maybe you wanted existence proofs of me actually believing that saying a true thing can be bad rather than using that as a smokescreen for some reason, and I provided that even though it was a deeply obnoxious ask?
(Actually that would be a weird smokescreen. The type of person who I think you’re gesturing at would never want to admit that a radioactive claim might possibly be true and if anything might end up using smokescreens to try to avoid admitting that.)
I mean “radioactive” in a descriptive political sense.
… yes, obviously. (How else could you have meant it? What did you think I understood you to be saying…?)
I agree that truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense and it is a bad thing about the political landscape than they are.
This is all very good, and yet you still haven’t checked whether said claims are true. So what is this opinion (that “truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense”, etc.) worth, exactly?
Yes, trans people can be discriminated against for being mentally ill. What I meant was that if someone says “trans people are often discriminated against and that’s bad” you should not respond with “well, trans people are mentally ill, what do you expect” as though (a) that’s universally true of trans people (b) that means the discrimination is justified.
Yes, once again, this is just what I assumed that you meant…
But that response makes perfect sense! Yes, one should indeed expect that a population with a substantially above-average prevalence of mental illness will experience substantially above-average discrimination. What in the world does it have to do with anything being “justified”…? Nor is there any implication of universality.
(So your parenthetical is unjustified; I understood you just fine, as you see. I simply disagree.)
I answered the question you asked (in a tone of confident assumption I would not be able to produce an answer)! I thought maybe you wanted existence proofs of me actually believing that saying a true thing can be bad rather than using that as a smokescreen for some reason
To which point it surely is relevant that you (I claim) did not, in fact, produce an answer.
(Possibly you disagree. But then that’s the disagreement, right? Whether your answer was, in fact, sufficient to answer the question. You will agree, at least, that there can be disagreement on this point, yes?)
I wrote:
I ask, of course, because I am skeptical of this notion that the truth of the claim might be admitted by both sides, with only its “appropriateness” being, by itself, evidence of racial animus.
And your examples reinforce, rather than undermining, this skepticism.
The type of person who I think you’re gesturing at would never want to admit that a radioactive claim might possibly be true and if anything might end up using smokescreens to try to avoid admitting that.
You don’t see any connection whatsoever between this description and your comments about how some claims are “radioactive” and you haven’t investigated them?
The claim cubefox made was that eukaryote disliked Cremieux for saying things outside the overton window. By clarifying that she instead disliked Cremieux for being racist (and just generally interpersonally unpleasant) eukaryote was not dodging the point but directly addressing it.
Come now, you are being obtuse. What is the reason why eukaryote claims that Cremieux is racist? It’s his empirical claims, according to eukaryote herself.
According to eukaryote herself, it is not the fact that his claims are outside the overton window are not the reason she dislikes them, but rather that they are racist. I don’t think I am being obtuse; I think you’re pretending the two are synonymous.
I’m saying that it is a serious accusation, whose consequences are far more impactful (e.g. possible career end) than ones feelings being hurt. So one should be extra careful before making the accusation. In case of Cremieux we know that he is in fact defending an empirical hypothesis, and he has provided an extensive amount of evidence and arguments in its favor (e.g. on his blog). This provides strong reason to think that the accusation of racism is not justified.
High decoupling is an attempt to enforce anti-irrationalist norms through creating dissociative disorders. It’s obviously self-defeating, and combining it with a critique of “tone policing” and taboos causing asymmetric discourse/preventing people from speaking out is brazen hypocrisy.
I have repeatedly challenged and criticized Cremieux and he has never reacted with insults, over-the-top defensiveness or vitriol towards me.
(I have certainly heard concerning rumors about him, and I hope those responsible for the community do due diligence in investigating them. But this post feels kind of libelous, like an attempt to assassinate someone’s character to suppress discourse about race. People who think LessOnline shouldn’t invite racists could address this concern by explaining in more detail what racism is/why it’s so terrible and why racist fallacies should be so uncomfortable that one cannot go there, instead of just something that receives a quick rebuttal.)
I find already labelling someone who holds an empirical proposition (which is true or false) as “racist” (which is a highly derogatory term, not a value neutral label) is defamatory. The vague hinting about alleged “rumours” here also seems to just serve to make him appear in a bad light.
Huh, I noticed that I have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to “defamatory” which I conjecture is similar to a knee-jerk reaction some others here have about “racist”—something like “while this term has an explicit definition that refers to some stuff I mostly agree is bad, in practice it is so often used as a way to forcibly shut down speech (including some that I agree with) that I do not wish to grant the concept itself legitimacy”.
(I think I have this reaction to “defamatory” bc I encounter it mostly as a legal concept, where speech that has been ruled defamatory is to be suppressed (and of course I don’t always agree with such rulings). Even though, like, I agree you shouldn’t say false bad things about people.)
I think this maybe makes me a little more sympathetic to this kind of knee-jerk reaction about “racist”? I do already think we should often taboo this word in this kind of situation, but also I do think that at least some things best described as “racist” are in fact bad and ought to be avoided.
(Ironically I kind of wish the people with this knee-jerk reaction would do more decoupling and notice when accusations of racism are more like “this person believes something that is quite possibly true but that a social justice person would think is racist, so they should be shunned” and when they are more like “this person is an epistemically sloppy asshole about race, so I wish we wouldn’t hold them up as an ideal of how to be”. To be fair it can take some work to determine which is true even if you’re specifically trying to.)
Common explicit definitions of “racism” tend to include people who believe in racial differences (especially in socially valued traits, especially if they believe the racial differences are innate), and such beliefs are typical treated as some of the most central evidence of racism conceivable. Objecting to the designation purely on the basis that it is highly derogatory seems intellectually dishonest to me; it would be more honest to object to the derogatory element, for instance by asserting that non-racists are inattentive/delusional/lying.
My vague hinting about rumors is supposed to just serve to make him appear in a bad light, because my defense would make him appear in a good light, and I have heard rumors, so I don’t want to one-sidedly endorse him. At the same time, calling it “rumors” shows that I don’t have it first-hand and that there’s a need for a more accurate account than I can give.
I think the following resembles a motte-and-bailey pattern: Bailey: “He is a racist, people may want to explain why racism is terrible.” Motte: “Oh I just meant he argued for the empirical proposition that there are heritable statistical group differences in IQ.” Accusing someone of racism is a massively different matter from saying that he believes there are heritable group differences in IQ. You can check whether a term is value neutral by whether the accused people apply it to themselves, in this case they clearly do not. The term “racist” usually carries the implication or implicature of an attitude that is merely based on an irrational prejudice, not an empirical hypothesis with reference to a significant amount of statistical and other evidence.
The term “racist” usually carries the implication or implicature of an attitude that is merely based on an irrational prejudice, not an empirical hypothesis with reference to a significant amount of statistical and other evidence.
It is also possible that Bob is racist in the sense of successfully working to cause unjust ethnic conflict of some kind, but also Bob only says true things. Bob could selectively emphasize some true propositions and deemphasize others. The richer the area, the more you can pick and choose, and paint a more and more outrage-inducing, one-sided story (cf. Israel/Palestine conflict). If I had to guess, in practice racists do systematically say false things; but a lot of the effect comes from selective emphasis.
Things can get even more muddied if people are unepistemically pushing against arguments that X; then someone might be justified in selectively arguing for X, in order to “balance the scales”. That could be an appropriate thing to do if the only problem was that some group was unepistemically pushing against X—you correct the shared knowledge pool by bringing back in specifically the data that isn’t explained by the unepistemic consensus. But if X is furthermore some natural part of a [selective-emphasis memeplex aimed at generating political will towards some unjust adversariality], then you look a lot like you’re intentionally constructing that memeplex.
(Not implying anything about Cremieux, I’m barely familiar with his work.)
It is also possible that Bob is racist in the sense of successfully working to cause unjust ethnic conflict of some kind, but also Bob only says true things. Bob could selectively emphasize some true propositions and deemphasize others.
Sure, though this is equally possible for the opposite: When Alice is shunning or shaming or cancelling people for expressing or defending a taboo hypothesis, without her explicitly arguing that the hypothesis is false or disfavored by the evidence. In fact, this is usually much easier to do than the former, since defending a taboo hypothesis is attached to a large amount of social and career risk, while attacking a taboo hypothesis is virtually risk-free. Moreover, attacking a taboo hypothesis will likely cause you to get points from virtue signalling.
It would be a compromise between two factions: people who are hit by the incomplete narrative (whether they are bad actors or not) and centrists who want to maintain authority without getting involved in controversial stuff.
Certainly it would be better if the racists weren’t selective, and there’s a case to be made that centrist authorities should put more work into getting the entire account of what’s going on, but that’s best achieved by highlighting the need for the opposing side of the story, not by attacking the racists for moving towards a more complete picture.
I mean, I’m not familiar with the whole variety of different ways and reasons that people attack other people as “racist”. I’m just saying that only saying true statements is not conclusive evidence that you’re not a racist, or that you’re not having the effect of supporting racist coalitions. I guess this furthermore implies that it can be justified to attack Bob even if Bob only says true statements, assuming it’s sometimes justified to attack people for racist action-stances, apart from any propositional statements they make—but yeah, in that case you’d have to attack Bob for something other than “Bob says false statements”, e.g. “Bob implicitly argues for false statements via emphasis” or “Bob has bad action-stances”.
I can buy that often people are specifically opposed to racist bigots, i.e. people who are unreasonably attached to the idea of racial group differences. The essence of being unreasonable is to not be able to be reasoned with, and being reasoned with often involves presenting specific cruxes for discussion. It seems to me that Cremieux tends to do so, and so he is not a racist bigot.
I think part of what can get him persecuted for being a racist bigot is that a lot of rationalists follow him and more-or-less endorse (or at least defend) racist stuff without being willing to present cruxes, i.e. his fans are racist bigots. It’s hard for people to distinguish a writer from their fans, and I suspect this might be best addressed by writers being more internally oriented towards their fans rather than outwards oriented.
I think Cremieux is an honest[1], truthseeking, and intelligent guest speaker, and I would be extraordinarily disappointed in the organizers if they disinvited him. I also have a very high opinion of LessOnline’s organizers, so I’m not particularly worried about them cowtowing to attempts to chill speech.
are… are you sure you read the post you’re responding to?
I ask because what you wrote is really bizarre in response to someone saying “I don’t like this person and so will not go to X, but I hope that X goes well and everyone has fun”.
I don’t like what he’s about, I think the rationalist community can do better, and I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he’s a special guest at. I hope that LessOnline goes well and that those who do go have a great time, and that my assessment is completely off-base. I mean, I don’t think it is, but I hope so.
This sounds to me like “hint hint I think you guys should disinvite him, and if it goes badly I will say that I told you so”.
“I told you so” is correct if you told someone something, they ignore it, and you were right.
I had a good time at LessOnline last year and expect to have a good time this year, but if Cremieux somehow ruins it for me, Eukaryote is absolutely entitled to tell me “I told you so”.
I guess you could choose to read it that way, but I’m not sure why you would—seems like an assumption of bad faith that doesn’t feel justified to me, especially on LW.
Just ask directly if you think the author meant to say that, IMO. Less chance for weird internet grudges that way. :)
I guess you could choose to read it that way, but I’m not sure why you would—seems like an assumption of bad faith that doesn’t feel justified to me, especially on LW.
Saying “I don’t like that you invited this person, and I think you shouldn’t have, and I think you should reverse that decision, and it’s on you if you ignore my advice and it goes poorly” doesn’t seem like it’s in bad faith to me. Caving to such bids seems like it would invite more such bids in the future, but I don’t think making such bids is particularly norm-breaking.
In context, I took that to be a threat to try to get the event organizers and attendees “cancelled” as racists unless they capitulated and disinvited him.
I don’t think this is necessarily what eukaryote explicitly intended...
… But I also don’t think it particularly matters whether they meant it this way or not. “I dislike this person so I will boycott this event”, implemented at scale, is what cancelling is. If a whole bunch of people coordinate to boycott the event unless Alice is blacklisted, that creates a threat-like pressure on event organizers to blacklist Alice if they want to maximize the number of attendees.
If a community wants to avoid such dynamics, then “I will boycott the event if Alice is there, not because I expect Alice to make the event unpleasant, but because I disagree with some of Alice’s beliefs and think she should be deplatformed” is something that shouldn’t be considered acceptable behavior, at the group-norm level. The intent behind the behavior doesn’t matter; the behavior itself is the problem.
And indeed, in the Simulacrum Levels framework, it’s not a Simulacrum Level 1 move. It’s Simulacrum Level 3-4, fashioning a cudgel out of your social resources and trying to beat the social realities into shape using it.
The acceptable response is IMO starting a discussion regarding Alice’s character and openly questioning whether she’s the kind of person who deserves to be invited to rationalist events. But not unilaterally setting up a game-theoretic structure that decreases the event’s value iff your demands are not met.
It’s too bad you feel that way. I wasn’t planning on attending, and probably still won’t, but love Cremieux’s work, and knowing he’ll be there makes me want to go more.
It’s of course reasonable to skip an event because people you don’t like will be there.
However, it’s clear that many people have the opposite preference, and wouldn’t want LessOnline attendees or invited guests to have to meet a “standard of care and compassion,” especially one wherever you’re putting it.
LessOnline seems to be about collecting people interested in and good at rationality and high-quality writing, not about collecting people interested in care and compassion. For the latter I’d suggest one go to something like EA Global or church…
It’s clear that many people at least don’t mind Cremieux being invited [ETA: as a featured author-guest] to LessOnline, but it’s also clear (from this comment thread) that many people do mind Cremieux being invited to LessOnline, and some of them mind it quite strongly.
This is a (potential) reason to reconsider the invitation and/or explicitize some norms/standards that prospective LessOnline invitees are expected to meet.
Small ~nitpick/clarification: in my understanding, at issue is Crémieux being a featured guest at LessOnline, rather than being allowed to attend LessOnline; “invited to” is ambiguous between the two.
It is ambiguous, but it’s hinting more strongly towards being a featured author guest because “normal/usual/vanilla guests” are not Being Invited by the organizers to attend the conference in the sense in which this word is typically used in this context.
I don’t think “if discussing issues that have caused tremendous amounts of real world pain, you gotta avoid being contemptuous of the groups that were hurt” is a standard of care and compassion that is incompatible with rationality and high-quality writing. And not having any standard at all is flatly unworkable, and indeed not, actually, how the community actually functions.
Approximately every contentious issue has caused tremendous amounts of real-world pain. Therefore the choice of which issues to police contempt about becomes a de facto political standard.
I am not saying care and compassion is incompatible with rationality and high-quality writing.
Yes, perhaps it’s reasonable to require some standard, but personally I think there’s a place for events where that standard is as or more permissive than it is at LessOnline. This is my subjective opinion and preference, but I would not be surprised if many LessWrong readers shared it.
I am an outsider to this, but now you have made me curious, my first impression with Cremieux online has been genetic differences is only a part of his work, and as per less.online he hasn’t yet accepted the invitation? is the likelihood of him accepting it that high to make this call? or is the value of potentially having him overwhelming negative in your view?
Eh, he was there last year, I figure he might well go again. If I happen to hear that he’s definitively not attending this year (or, idk, if he ends up attending as a regular guest and not an Invited Author Guest, I take less umbrage with that) I’d love to go.
“I’m uncomfortable being in the same company of invited author guests as Cremieux… I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he’s a special guest at.”
Reading between the lines, it seems the crux might be that you don’t want to risk the reputational consequences of being featured alongside Cremieux as an Invited Author? (correct me if I’m wrong!)
If that’s the case, would you attend if the organizers removed your handle from the public list of invitees? Or would you still not want to attend as a regular guest as long as he’s distinguished as an Invited Author?
To use the exact words from the website, “The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating.”, that kinda implies that OP and Cremieux embody the same virtues.
I was an observer for the conversations that (I suspect) contributed to your opinion here. My perspective is that it seems in large part differences in communication style preferences, rather than object-level disagreements. He seems to enjoy the catharsis of being able to emphatically state positions that are non-politically correct in general discourse, which is a sentiment I understand. I don’t recall him responding with anything I would classify as insults or vitriol, though those are to some degree subjective. One person’s insult is another’s friendly banter, and I suspect he didn’t realize you took as the former what he had meant as the latter.
Would I be correct if I summarized your opinion as “He doesn’t treat controversial topics with enough tact and diplomacy” rather than specific factual or epistemic disagreements?
If his presence is the only thing stopping you from wanting to go, why not reach out to him? I suspect you’d be able to amicably smooth things over.
A related idea: For LessOnline would it be useful to start a norm where if a debate becomes excessively charged any participant could ask for it to be put on hold so that a time can be set aside to productively discuss it in a more structured setting? (i.e. with an impartial moderator mutually agreed upon.)
I was honored to be invited again to this year’s LessOnline—I really enjoyed the last one. However, I’m going to turn down this invitation as I’m uncomfortable being in the same company of invited author guests as Cremieux.
I didn’t know who he was last year, so after hearing concerning murmurs from various places, I looked into his work. Hoo boy. I don’t think that being interested in genetic differences between ethnic groups necessarily makes one racist, but I think it’s the kind of area where you have to be extraordinarily careful to proceed with caution and compassion and not fall into racist fallacies (coexisting in a terrible cycle with shoddy scholarship). I do not think Cremieux meets this standard of care and compassion.
Also, I get the sense he’s generally a jerk to those around him, which is not as big of a deal but is not helping. He reacts to challenges or criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol.
I don’t like what he’s about, I think the rationalist community can do better, and I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he’s a special guest at.
I hope that LessOnline goes well and that those who do go have a great time, and that my assessment is completely off-base. I mean, I don’t think it is, but I hope so.
> Also, I get the sense he’s generally a jerk to those around him, which is not as big of a deal but is not helping. He reacts to challenges or criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol.
Since some people are questioning this comment, I’ll point out this has been my experience. Cremieux (I believe) plagiarized a post I wrote and then reacted with (I believe) “insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol” when I pointed this out.
I should say I’m not questioning the assertion that he plagiarized you or reacted to your challenge/criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol. I do dispute the claim that he has a general tendency towards such reactions regardless of context and case.
[epistemic status: have heard a bunch about this from people with strong opinions, have not much read or at all interacted with the guy myself]
I want to note that I suspect that a lot of people in this thread are reasoning from different evidence than each other, in that much of the behavior people object to has happened in places like Discord and alt accounts and such. I don’t really have time to fix this state of affairs right now (might try later, idk) but wanted to flag that I think it is true—it’s not just that people draw radically different conclusions from the same content (though there might be some of that too).
I am familiar with his behavior on various alts. They paint a different picture than his twitter persona. Most notably, he was a longterm regular on r/theMotte as u/TrannyPornO.
Image and link for proof:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200807025145/https://reddit.com/user/TrannyPornO
While posting under this name, his posts did not seem to me to embody the virtues of rationality. Example:
He was also a regular on the Astral Codex Ten discord server under the name VB, where his behavior was similar and where he’s been permanently banned.
As a moderator of /r/TheMotte (back when it was on Reddit), I recognize that username immediately. He was tempbanned a few times (largely for those sorts of posts), but at the same time he was featured well over a dozen times in the “Quality Contributions” post we had to highlight the most informative/thoughtful posts. Just as a bit of a balanced perspective. Not to defend him entirely, though, I personally view his tantrum after being called out for plagiarism to be quite an indictment on his character, however insightful his blog posts are.
Thanks for sharing this.
Dear people who read this and agreement-downvoted (ETA: wrote this cause above comment was well in the agreement-negatives at the time of writing): Do you think this isn’t Cremieux’s account, or that the quoted example is an acceptable thing to say, or what?
Meta: I probably won’t respond further in this thread, as it has obviously gone demon. But I do think it’s worth someone articulating the principle I’d use in cases like this one.
My attitude here is something like “one has to be able to work with moral monsters”. Cremieux sometimes says unacceptable things, and that’s just not very relevant to whether I’d e.g. attend an event at which he features. This flavor of boycotting seems like it would generally be harmful to one’s epistemics to adopt as a policy.
(To be clear, if someone says “I don’t want to be at an event at which Cremieux features because I’m worried that third parties will paint me as racist for it”, I’d consider that a reasonable concern sometimes. But it’s notably a concern which does not route through one’s own moral inclinations.)
There are simply too many people out there who are competent and smart and do useful work, but nonetheless have utility functions very different from mine, such that they will sometimes seem monstrous to me. As a practical matter, I need to be able to work with them anyway; otherwise I’m shooting myself in the foot.
Able to… if necessary, yes.
Volunteer to, when not necessary… why?
Man, I’m a pretty committed utilitarian, but I feel like your ethical framework here seems way more naive consequentialist than I’m willing to be. “Don’t collaborate with evil” seems like a very clear Chesterton’s fence that I’d very suspicious about removing. I think you should be really, really skeptical if you think you’ve argued yourself out of it.
Attending an event with someone else is not “collaborating with evil”!
I think people working at frontier companies are causing vastly more harm and are much stronger candidates for being moral monsters than Cremieux is (even given his recent IMO quite dickish behavior). I think it would be quite dumb of me to ban all frontier lab employees from Lightcone events, and my guess is you would agree with this even if you agreed with my beliefs on frontier AI labs.
Many events exist to negotiate and translate between different worldviews and perspectives. LessOnline more so than most. Yes, think about when you are supporting evil, or giving it legitimacy, and it’s messy, but especially given your position at a leading frontier lab, I don’t think you would consider a blanket position of “don’t collaborate with evil” in a way that would extend as far as “attending an event with someone else” as tenable.
A possible reason to treat “this guy is racist in ways that both the broader culture and I agree is bad” more harshly than “this guy works on AI capabilities” is something like Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness—it makes sense to act differently when you’re enforcing an existing norm vs. trying to create a new one or just judging someone without engaging with norms.
A possible issue with that is that at least some broader-society norms about racism are bad actually and shouldn’t be enforced. I think a possible crux here is whether any norms against racism are just and worth enforcing, or whether the whole complex of such norms is unjust.
(For myself I take a meta-level stance approximately like yours but I also don’t really object to people taking stances more like eukaryote’s.)
The “greater evil” may be worse, but the “more legible evil” is easier to coordinate against.
To be clear, I’m responding to John’s more general ethical stance here of “working with moral monsters”, not anything specific about Cremieux. I’m not super interested in the specific situation with Cremieux (though generally it seems bad to me).
On the AI lab point, I do think people should generally avoid working for organizations that they think are evil, or at least think really carefully about it before they do it. I do not think Anthropic is evil—in fact I think Anthropic is the main force for good on the present gameboard.
I think John’s comment, in the context of this thread, was describing a level of “working with” that was in the reference class of “attending an event with” and less “working for an organization” and the usual commitments and relationship that entails, so extending it to that case feels a bit like a non-sequitur. He explicitly mentioned attending an event as the example of the kind of “working with” he was talking about, so responding to only a non-central case of it feels weird.
It is also otherwise the case that in our social circle, the position of “work for organizations that you think are very bad for the world in order to make it better” is a relatively common take (though in that case I think we two appear be in rough agreement that it’s rarely worth it), and I hope you also advocate for it when it’s harder to defend.
Given common beliefs about AI companies in our extended social circle, I think it illustrates pretty nicely why extending an attitude about association-policing that extends all the way to “mutual event attendance” would void a huge number of potential trades and opportunities for compromise and surface area to change one’s mind, and is a bad idea.
I agree that attending an event with someone obviously shouldn’t count as endorsement/collaboration/etc. Inviting someone to an event seems somewhat closer, though.
I’m also not really sure what you’re hinting at with “I hope you also advocate for it when it’s harder to defend.” I assume something about what I think about working at AI labs? I feel like my position on that was fairly clear in my previous comment.
Yeah, in this case we are talking about “attending an event where someone you think is evil is invited to attend”, which is narrower, but also strikes me as an untenable position (e.g. in the case of the lab case, this would prevent me from attending almost any conference I can think of wanting to attend in the Bay Area, almost all of which routinely invite frontier lab employees as speakers or featured guests).
To be clear, I think it’s reasonable to be frustrated with Lightcone if you think we legitimize people who you think will misuse that legitimacy, but IMO refusing to attend any events where an organizer makes that kind of choice seems very intense to me (though of course, if someone was already considering attending an event as being of marginal value, such a thing could push you over the edge, though I think this would produce a different top-level comment).
It’s mostly an expression of hope. For example, I hope it’s a genuine commitment that will result in you saying so, even if you might end up in the unfortunate position of updating negatively on Anthropic, or being friends and allies with lots of people at other organizations that you updated negatively on.
As a reason for this being hope instead of confidence: I do not remember you (or almost anyone else in your position) calling for people to leave their positions at OpenAI when it became more clear the organization was likely harming the world, though maybe I just missed it. I am not intending this to be some confident “gotcha”, just me hinting that people often like to do moral grandstanding in this domain without actual backing deep commitments.
To be clear, this wasn’t an intention to drag the whole topic into this conversation, but was trying to be a low-key and indirect expression of me viewing some of the things you say here with some skepticism. I don’t super want to put you on the spot to justify your whole position here, but also would have felt amiss to not give any hints of how I relate to them. So feel free to not respond, as I am sure we will find better contexts in which we can discuss these things.
For what it’s worth I interpreted it as being about Cremieux in particular based on the comment it was directly responding to; probably others also interpreted it that way
You can work with them without inviting them to hang out with your friends.
Georgia did not say she was boycotting, nor calling for others not to attend—she explained why she didn’t want to be at an event where he was a featured speaker.
When someone criticizes a statement as offensive, bad, or other negative terms besides “false”, I ask myself, “Is the statement true or false?” (I tend to ask that about any statement, really, but I think I make a point of doing so in emotionally-charged circumstances.)
He does make word choices like “dullards” and say some things that one could call unnecessarily insulting. But most of it sounds like factual data that he got from reading scientific literature (clicking through to the comment—yup). Is it true or false that there was a set of IQ tests given to aboriginals and the average score was <70? Is it true or false that the (Australian, I assume) government put out a PSA for the purpose of getting aboriginals to not sleep in the road—caused, presumably, by cases of them doing it? (Make a prediction, then google it.)
And if all the above is true, then that seems like a potentially important problem, at least for anyone who cares about the people involved. Are the low IQ test results caused by difficulties in testing people from a very different culture and language, or do they mostly reflect reality? If the latter, what causes it, and can anything be done about it? (Have the aboriginals grown up in a very nutrient-poor or idea-poor environment? If so, then it should be reasonably straightforward to fix that in future generations. If, on the other hand, it’s mostly genetic, then we can add that to the list of reasons it’s important to develop genetic technologies like embryo selection.)
If it’s both true and important, then, taking “important” as roughly implying “necessary”, that means it passes the rule of “At least 2 of 3: necessary, kind, true”.
The question “How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?”—if you take it as a rhetorical question, then that sounds pretty bad. But if you assume the premise is correct (that there’s a subpopulation whose “full-grown adults had the cognitive ability of young children”), then it does seem like a genuine question. Are there basic assumptions about democracy, or in our implementation of it, that break down in the presence of such a population? (If not at that level, then is there some level where it does?) What accommodations can be made?
(Whether the question is rhetorical or not—I wonder if this is a case where, if you have a negative prior about someone, you’ll take an ambiguous signal and decide it’s bad, and use that to justify further lowering your opinion of them, whereas someone with a positive prior will do the opposite.)
The upthread statement I disagreed with is “his posts did not seem to me to embody the virtues of rationality”. Looking at the full comment, he brings in data, mentions caveats, makes some calculations and cross-checks them against other sources.
There’s more than zero inflammatory rhetoric. But the ratio of facts to inflammatory rhetoric seems ok to me, and I don’t see strong evidence that he’s operating in bad faith (although the plagiarism thing seems somewhat bad) or that he’s in favor of forcibly sterilizing the aboriginals. I note that the comment was posted on a subreddit for people who enjoy arguing.
This does seem likely true. As TheSkeward noted, he has a lot of previous experience with Cremieux that he’s drawing from and is informing his view here (which is harder to cite since it was on Discord rather than the public Internet, integrated into conversational contexts, and in many cases now deleted). You could say this is a bias causing him to be uncharitable, but on the other hand it’s also a prior with a lot of information integrated into it already which people without that experience don’t have. Personally I think you are being so charitable that it slides into outright ignoring evidence just because any given bit of it isn’t ironclad proof—which is a really important decoupling skill in situations of disagreement but also will lead you astray if you don’t also step back and evaluate the less certain evidence too.
(maybe the “court of public opinion” should stick only to ironclad-proof kinds of evidence like literal courts do? idk, I think that’s a good idea for some kinds of actions and not others)
(disclosure, TheSkeward is a close friend of mine and I’ve talked to him about this a fair bit)
From elsewhere on Reddit, we have also this list of some of his preferred policies. It does not have precisely “ethnic groups that are on average less intelligent should not vote” or “forcible sterilization of such groups”, but it does have some other things that are kind of relevant and to me kind of horrifying, such as:
(bonus things that are not relevant but also kind of horrifying:)
(note this is selected for being particularly horrifying to me; list also has some reasonable stuff and some stuff that’s more baffling than horrifying)
This is again more like “bayesian evidence of what kinds of things this guy likes” than “look he said this exact thing” but like. it does not to me paint a picture of a guy who’s reasoning from a careful or compassionate place or going to be careful about e.g. policies he pushes for not ruining a lot of people’s lives willy-nilly!
yeah I think this is pretty bad and causes me to not respect someone or think others should respect them? It’s not just that he makes factual claims about an ethnic group and those factual claims are unflattering; his rhetoric oozes contempt for them. I think it’s… bad to ooze contempt for an ethnic group? There’s a thing that “racist” means and I don’t think it necessarily ought to include beliefs about IQ but it very clearly includes “oozes contempt for some ethnic groups”! (For that matter I think it’s also bad to ooze contempt at intellectually disabled people per se too.)
And I think this in fact muddies his epistemics, or at least his rhetoric! I admit that when I first read the comment I thought it was more factually bullshit than it in fact is, and I agree this matters. But also here are some more questions whose answers matter -
how many cases of this “sleeping on the road” thing have actually occurred?
what happened in those cases?
how representative are those cases of the relevant groups as a whole?
should you model this set of people as “basically like people you know with some adjustments” or “basically incomprehensible aliens”?
Another friend of mine looked into this a bit and basically found that there were a handful of cases like this (which is indeed more than I expected! but not, like, ubiquitous) but also they mostly seemed to be either explicitly drugs/alcohol-related (sometimes better described as “person was walking on the road while drunk or high and fell asleep”) or just very likely so (see e.g. this graph for some info re: base rates of being drunk in pedestrian fatalities in this population, though caveat it’s from 2006). (sorry this is not better cited, source is a small Discord conversation) This is… a different situation than if sober people just routinely decided to take a nap in the road like shown in that PSA video! It also much more matches my model of the world where, yknow, people are people, they can be not very smart but they are mostly not THAT dumb unless they’re way out of distribution or there’s drugs involved. (I mean, like, animals learn not to sleep on the road.)
I agree that the object-level non-rhetorical question is an interesting one, and an important one if the premises are true (which I am not convinced they meaningfully are as stated, I think?). I… don’t really want the people exploring it to be so obviously devoid of compassion for the people in question!
--
Caveats -
I do kind of hate the idea of, like, having something that smells like a political test for whether someone gets to be a respected rationalist. I don’t really know how to get around the fact that there are ways people can be odious that have a political valence. I will just note that there are many political beliefs I think are terrible and which I might personally judge someone for but would not feel that there’s something particularly distasteful about my community respecting (e.g. opposition to same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration; opposition to building housing; standard communism).
Similarly I kind of hate the exercise of dissecting someone’s words to determine whether they Really Suck and Should Be Shunned. Again I’m not really sure how to get around the situation where sometimes people suck and this is mostly visible in how they talk and while I don’t think this means they should be ostracized I do think it bears on how much respect they ought to be afforded. (Not purely a political thing; see also the recent conflict around the plagiarism allegations & his response to them.)
The Reddit comment we’re arguing about here is 6 years old; he’s not active on that account anymore; maybe this no longer reflects how he thinks about things, idk. (My understanding is that his allegedly similar Discord activity is more recent than that but I haven’t personally seen it so can’t really comment with good knowledge.)
I can feel the “taking a side and feeling the need to defend it as hard as I can, including internally defending against changing my mind” machinery whir into action in my head. I’m trying not to let it control what I think/say too much, but also I kind of think even a possibly biased case is worth making here because it frustrates me that a lot of good arguments and evidence on this “side” are going unreported in this thread because sensible people with good arguments and evidence look at it and say “nope, no thank you” so I guess as a less sensible person I am wading in in their stead. If the discourse were slanted the other way I would be advancing a different set of considerations.
Suppose that someone has views that I think are “odious”, but which have a totally different political slant (either on the opposite side of the standard political spectrum, or just largely orthogonal) than all this stuff with Cremieux.
Should rationalist gatherings shun this person? If not, why not?
We can even make this more personal: suppose that you have views that I think are “odious”. Should rationalist gatherings shun you? If not, why not?
(I mostly don’t know your political views, and I don’t currently have any reason to think that you should be shunned. But you can easily enough imagine the scenario, I expect.)
Presumably you will answer “no” to both questions. But why? You’re giving reasons why you think that Cremieux is “odious”, on the basis of his views and his public comments about his views—just that, not anything else![1] Well, surely I could give reasons why someone (perhaps even you!) is “odious”, on the basis of that person’s views and comments thereon.
So why shouldn’t rationalists shun this hypothetical person? Why shouldn’t rationalists shun hypothetical-you?
Is it a matter of majoritarianism? We should shun anyone whom the majority of rationalists consider “odious”? (But if so—what is the denominator? Who gets to vote in this referendum?)
And if not that—then what? (Note that object-level arguments—“but you see, clearly, this guy really is odious!”—will obviously not suffice.)
This is especially hilarious given that there genuinely seem to be good reasons to, if not disinvite the guy, at least to remove him from the featured-speaker list—the plagiarism, and the exceedingly hostile response to the (quite credible) accusation thereof.
First, I don’t think rationalists should shun Cremieux. The only cases I’m aware of where there was a push to get someone actually banned from rationalist stuff and truly “cancelled” are cases of, like, abuse, theft, murder, and I think this is good. I don’t think Cremieux should be banned from rationalist events, I don’t think people should refuse to read his blog or anything. He has good Twitter threads sometimes. (though after the Dynomight thing I’m a little suspicious of how much of that is his work)
What I do think is that his character as a person (which includes the blowup in response to the plagiarism accusation, and also the posts we’re talking about here) should inform to what extent we hold him up as an exemplar of how to be. I wish we wouldn’t. I am not myself lodging any kind of big protest about this, I am going to LessOnline myself (though not as any sort of featured guest), but it does make me a little less happy about how my community works.
Anyway, if someone is, say, a diehard communist who likes to post “kill all landlords” and argue that we need to immediately have a communist revolution and put a lot of people in gulags, that would
(a) be a very different valence from Cremieux’s takes
(b) not warrant banning them from rationalist meetups (assuming they’re not constantly going on about this at the meetups—if they are, ask them to cut it out and ban them if they won’t)
(c) cause me to not want to be friends with them or respect their opinions
(d) cause me to think that if e.g. LessOnline organizers are holding them up as an example of how one should be, they are wrong and have worse judgment than I thought
I haven’t looked into this, but I’m guessing the IQ results are from some form of language barrier?
I think he’s wrong on the facts, but in this case his tone actually matters and is totally unacceptable for anyone who might be viewed as a “community representative.” I think it’s worth being pragmatic (ie not religiously pednantic about accuracy and only accuracy) on this point. If he were just a regular attendee that would be a different story.
Why would Cremieux be viewed as a “community representative”…? And what exactly about his “tone” is “totally unacceptable”…? Both of these claims seem very weird to me.
On less.online, the list of invited guests is titled “SOME WRITINGS WE LOVE” and subtitled “The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating. Each author below has been offered a free ticket to LessOnline.” [emphasis mine]
I guess technically that says his site embodies these virtues, not that he as a person does, but I think that’s a pretty hairsplitty distinction.
I don’t get it. How does any of that make someone a “community representative”?
Suppose I start a baking forum for people who like to apply careful analysis to baking, and I decide to run an event for “rational baking” aficionados. On the announcement page, I write that I love Christopher Kimball’s writings, that he embodies the virtues that we are celebrating, and that he has been offered a free ticket to LessFondant. Would you conclude from this that Kimball is a “community representative” of my forum for baking nerds…?
Seems pretty clear to me that this would be a quite ridiculous conclusion to draw.
I think that would be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw! I think we must be understanding the meaning of “community representative” differently.
How can it possibly be a perfect conclusion?? In my scenario, you don’t even know if Christopher Kimball has ever heard of my forum! (Sure, I say that he’s been offered a free ticket, but how do you know whether he’s even gotten the email, or whatever?)
Are you suggesting that I might, right now, at this very moment, be a “community representative” of some community that I’ve never heard of, because they put a link to my blog on their event announcement page, and sent me some sort of offer which went straight to my junk mail folder?
I actually think that distinction is not very hairsplitty here. One of the most striking things from this whole discussion is that the Cremieux who writes the blog actually does seem very different from the Cremieux who appears on Twitter/X and Reddit and Discord. My exposure to him is primarily through the blog, which I do like, which does not seem to say offensive things about race, which doesn’t even seem to have race as a dominant theme. Whereas there do seem to be some more questionable statements and interactions from him on these other platforms.
That’s a pretty standard thing with bigoted bloggers/speakers/intellectuals.
Have a popular platform where you say 95% things which are ok/interesting/entertaining. And 5% to 10% poison (bigotry).
Then a lead in to something that’s 90% ok/interesting/entertaining and 10% to 15% poison (bigotry).
Etc.
Atrioc explains it pretty well here, with Sam Hyde as an example:
Many people have tried very hard to find explanations for the IQ results that are something other than “low intelligence” for decades. If a replicating result that provides such an explanation had been established, it would have been broadly publicized in popular media and even laymen would know about it. Instead, we’re being told we are not supposed to look into this topic at all.
“How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?”
easy: we already do this. Definitionally, 2 percent of people are <70 IQ. I don’t think we would commonly identify this as one of the biggest problems with democracy.
I think this demonstrates a failure mode of the ‘is it true?’ heuristic as a comprehensive methodology for evaluating statements. I can string together true premises (and omit others) to support a much broader range of conclusions than are supported by the actual preponderance of the evidence. (i.e., even if we accept all the premises presented here, the suggestion that letting members of a certain racial group vote is a threat to democracy completely dissolves with the introduction of one additional observation).
[for transparency: my actual belief here is that IQ is a very crude implement with results mediated by many non-genetic population-level factors, but I don’t think I need to convince you of this in order to update you toward believing the author is engaged in motivated reasoning!]
I think that many people would, in fact, identify this (and the more general problem of which it is an extreme example) as one of the biggest problems with democracy!
What’s the model here?
Low-IQ voters can’t identify good policies or wise politicians; democracy favors political actors who can successfully propagandize and mobilize the largest number of people, which might not correspond to good governance. A political system with non-democratic elements that offers more formalized control to actors with greater competence or better incentives might be able to choose better policies.
I say “non-democratic elements” because it doesn’t have to be a strict binary between perfect democracy and perfect dictatorship. Consider, e.g., how the indirect election of U.S. Senators before the 17th Amendment was originally intended to make the Senate a more deliberative body by insulating it from the public.
(Maybe that’s all wrong, but you asked “what’s the model”, and this is an example model of why someone might be skeptical of democracy for pro-social structural reasons rather than just personally wanting their guy to be dictator.)
Oh, this is all familiar to me and I have my reservations about democracy (although none of them are race-flavored).
The thing I’m curious about is the story that makes the voting habits of 2-3 percent of the population The Problem.
Yep. The fact that 50% of people have IQ 100 or less is much greater problem in elections than the fact that 2-3% of people have IQ 70 or less.
Luckily now we have AI too cheap to meter, so voters aren’t constrained by lack of intelligence anymore.
This is not true in any operational sense
What do you mean by the qualifier “operational”?
I do not expect voters to actually become much smarter just because in principle they have access to intelligent advice (in some domains, which is sometimes totally wrong). In fact, I think voters have a time-honored tradition of ignoring intelligent advice, particularly when it is hard to distinguish from unintelligent advice.
So, even if this is true in theory, it will not manifest how you’re suggesting in practice.
Advice can’t be intelligent or unintelligent; it’s too inanimate for that. And I didn’t suggest any particular manifestation.
I kind of feel like you are using the word “intelligence” as an effective synonym for “good”, such that you were interpreting the subtext of my claim as saying that voters will now be good, whereas I rather intend the subtext of my claim to be that theories about lack of voter intelligence are now uninteresting because other dynamics are dominating.
I don’t know if other dynamics are dominating, but I seriously doubt that LLMs are qualitatively changing the dynamics of voting through the mechanism you seem to be suggesting—possibly loose persuasion bots on the internet are affecting voting behavior somewhat, but I don’t think people are intentionally using chatbots to make smarter voting decisions.
Honestly, I am no longer sure I understand what you’re trying to claim at all.
TheSkeward is trying to unspecifically shame Cremieux for criticizing multiethnic democracy with very low-IQ demographics. localdeity inferred that TheSkeward’s criticism was probably about how Cremieux was talking about taboo racist stuff, and pointed out how TheSkeward’s shaming doesn’t make sense in the light of that. yams pointed out that basic numeracy would show the problem to be overstated and also that the general discourse is pretty sketchy.
Said Achmiz and Zack Davis were objecting to the basic numeracy point by arguing that unspecified people (presumably including Cremieux but excluding Said Achmiz and Zack Davis) might think that one of the biggest problems with democracy in general is lack of voter intelligence, not just when restricting consideration to a few % of the population.
It’s unclear whether [intelligence being the constraint] has ever been true. Today it’s more likely that voters are constrained by something else (e.g. tribal dynamics or wisdom or intrinsic conflicts or mental illness or etc.; even excess voter intelligence is more likely of a problem than insufficient voter intelligence), either because intelligence was never the constraining factor or because AI etc. has made intelligence too cheap to meter. So while the unspecified people might still believe that one of the biggest problems with democracy is lack of voter intelligence, we don’t really need to consider their opinion anymore, since even if it was ever true, it’s clearly outdated.
I agree that we’re not seeing improvements in voter behavior, on the contrary it seems to be getting worse. I think that’s because it was never a big problem to begin with, but I’m open to alternatives e.g. that there’s new exogenous factors that cause a deviation from the trend of improving access to intelligence.
But those people are distributed fairly evenly throughout society. Each one is surrounded by lots of people of >100 IQ, and probably knows at least a few of >115 IQ, etc. Whereas if it’s an entire indigenous population, and integration is far from complete, then there are likely whole villages that are almost entirely aboriginal. That’s an important difference.
One consequence: I expect that, in order to do a good job at various important management roles (managing a power plant, a sewer system, etc.), you basically need a high enough IQ. A hard cutoff is an oversimplification, but, to illustrate, Google results suggest that doctors’ average IQ is between 120 and 130, and there might be villages of 1000 people with no one fitting that description. (And even if you think the IQ test results are, say, more reflective of a “Western Quotient”—the ability+willingness to work well with Western ideas and practices—it seems that lots of these jobs require precisely that. Using and maintaining Western machines; negotiating on behalf of the village with mostly-Western cities and higher levels of government; evaluating land development proposals; and so on.)
Then, running with the above scenario, either the village doesn’t have modern infrastructure, or it has modern infrastructure managed badly, or it has modern infrastructure managed by Westerners. The first two are bad, and the third might be a constant source of ethnic grievances if anyone is unhappy with the arrangement. (Exercise: ask an AI for historical examples of each of the above, and see if they’re genuine.) Thus: a problem with democracy. And voting, in particular, might turn the third case into the second case.
I didn’t call it comprehensive. It’s a useful tool, and often the first one I reach for. but not always the only tool.
Then your opponent can counter-argue that your statements are true but cherry-picked, or that your argument skips logical steps xyz and those steps are in fact incorrect. If your opponent instead chooses to say that for you to make those statements is unacceptable behavior, then it’s unfortunate that your opposition is failing to represent its side well. As an observer, depending on my purposes and what I think I already know, I have many options, ranging from “evaluating the arguments presented” to “researching the issue myself”.
OP didn’t use the word “threat”. He said he was “very curious about aboriginals” and asked how do you live with them. You can interpret it as a rhetorical question, meaning he’s saying it’s impossible to live with them, and his “very curious” was disingenuous; or you can interpret it as a genuine question. I think I’ve countered your argument about “completely dissolves”; for illustration, you can even forget IQ and substitute “familiarity with Western technology”, and imagine a village consisting of 10% Westerners and 90% indigenous people who have never owned a car or a computer. Surely that has the potential to cause problems; and it could indeed be interesting to know more specifics about what has gone wrong in practice, how people have addressed it, and how well it’s working.
My entire point is that logical steps in the argument are being skipped, because they are, and that the facts are cherrypicked, because they are, and my comment says as much, as well as pointing out a single example (which admits to being non-comprehensive) of an inconvenient (and obvious!) fact left out of the discussion altogether, as a proof of concept, precisely to avoid arguing the object level point (which is irrelevant to whether or not Crimieux’s statement has features that might lead one to reasonably dis-prefer being associated with him).
We move into ‘this is unacceptable’ territory when someone shows themselves to have a habit of forcefully representing their side using these techniques in order to motivate their conclusion, which many have testified Cremieux does, and which is evident from his banning in a variety of (not especially leftist, not especially IQ and genetics hostile) spaces. If your rhetorical policies fail to defend against transparently adversarial tactics predictably pedaled in the spirit of denying people their rights, you have a big hole in your map.
You quoted a section that has nothing to do with any of what I was saying. The exact line I’m referring to is:
The whole first half of your comment is only referencing the parenthetical ‘society in general’ case, and not the voting case. I assume this is accidental on your part and not a deliberate derailment. To be clear about the stakes:
This is the conclusion of the statement. This is the whole thrust he is working up to. These facts are selected in service of an argument to deny people voting rights on the basis of their race. If the word ‘threat’ was too valenced for you, how about ‘barrier’ or ‘impediment’ to democracy? This is the clear implication of the writing. This is the hypothesis he’s asking us to entertain: Australia would be a better country if Aborigines were banned from voting. Not just because their IQs are low, or because their society is regressive, but because they are retarded.
He’s not expressing curiosity in this post. He’s expressing bald-faced contempt (“Uncouth.. dullards”). I’m not a particularly polite person, and this is language I reserve for my enemies. His username is a transphobic slur. Why are you wasting your charity on this person?
Decoupling isn’t ignoring all relevant context within a statement to read it in the most generous possible light; decoupling is distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant to better see the truth. Cremieux has displayed a pattern of abhorrent bigotry, and I am personally ashamed that my friends and colleagues would list him as an honored guest at their event.
for posterity, this is a new article on Lasker about a separate reddit account // more narrative details around his various proclaimed positions and identities over time
by default I don’t put a lot of stock in articles of this kind, and I think this one gets into some weird territory (like shaming him for being kind of a know-it-all teen for some reason?). still, seems good to share for added context.
-While this is plausibly true geographically, my understanding is that… most people in the US bubble the people they interact with regularly pretty heavily, such that I’m not sure I would expect this statement to be meaningfully true for a lot of people?
How many people over 3-4 standard deviations of IQ away from you do you feel like you interact with at a level where you feel confident that you could steer them away from an effective propaganda campaign / conspiracy theory rabbithole they’d fallen into? I don’t think that’s a nonzero number for me, and if it is, it’s low-single-digits...
His much more recent blog post on national IQs makes the point that a sub-70 IQ is not equivalent to mental retardation, so it seems his views have at least somewhat changed since he wrote this particular comment. https://substack.com/@cremieux/p-153828779
Meta: If you present a paragraph like that as evidence of banworthiness and unvirtue, I think you incur an obligation to properly criticize it, or link to criticism of it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be much, but it does have to at least include sentence that contradicts something in the quoted passage, which your comment does not have. If you say that something is banworthy but forget to say that it’s false, this suggests that truth doesn’t matter to you as much as it should.
This seems wrong in general. If something is obviously false, you don’t have to say that. I don’t actually know which posts resulted in a ban in this case.
I find this attitude sad. I think his blog is currently clearly one of the best ones on the Internet. Even if you don’t agree with some of his positions, I take it to be a deeply anti-rational attitude to try to shun or shame people for saying things that are outside the Overton window. Especially when he has clearly proven on his website that he has highly nuanced takes on various other, less controversial, topics. It reminds me of people trying to shame Scott Alexander for daring to step a little outside the Overton window himself.
In my opinion, true rationalists should exactly not react to such takes with “he said something taboo, let’s boycott things where he is involved”. If you disagree with him, a better attitude would be to write a post about one of the articles on his website, concretely indicating and rebutting things where you think he is wrong. Only claiming “I do not think Cremieux meets this standard of care and compassion” is so vague of an accusation that I don’t know whether you even disagree with anything he said. It sounds like low decoupling and tone policing. I wrote more on rationalist discourse involving taboos here.
(emphasis mine) Is that what the OP is doing? Certainly not overtly. I fear that this is a fallacy I see all the time in politicized conversations:
X is outside the Overton window
A disapproves of B saying [some particular instance of X]
Therefore A’s disapproval must be motivated by X being outside the Overton window
There is a strong correlation between someone boycotting a person for saying X and X being outside the Overton window. So a causal link is likely. People rarely boycott people for expressing things they disagree with but which are inside the Overton window.
Overtly, OP is trying to shun Cremieux for failing to meet an assumed-widely-agreed “standard of care and compassion”. This is obviously based on OP’s belief that Cremieux’s conduct is unacceptably outside the Overton window, even if they used the word “standard” instead of the word “Overton window”. The only point of deploying phrases like “Hoo boy” and “do better” is to appeal to a social consensus. OP isn’t being sneaky here or anything, you’re just misinterpreting their dialect.
It may be rational of you to interpolate the quality of one facet of someone’s behavior from other facets, or to interpolate from one social controversy to another, but it’s certainly not adversarially robust. You can’t reasonably expect people not to focus on his narrower behavior in one area.
I think this is a weird misunderstanding of my issue here. I believe and endorse people saying a lot of things that are outside of the overton window and are taboo in many places. For instance: “Factory farming is immoral.” “It’s bad when wild animals feel pain.” “People should be able to get literally any surgery they want at any time.” “Every golf course in large cities should be destroyed and have checkerboarded apartments-and-parks put up over it.”
My issue is with the specific takes Cremieux has and ways he acts, which are racist, and harmful, and bad.
It’s hardly unusual to believe that people should be shunned and shamed for saying things that are outside of the Overton window except when those things agree with your own beliefs. (Another way of putting it would be “people should be shunned and shamed for saying things that are outside of the Overton window, and also I think that the Overton window should include my own views”.)
(Obviously tolerance is not actually tolerance if you only tolerate people who agree with you and not people who disagree with you. I mean, come on.)
I think I see. I mean, I did post this hoping some people might agree with it or decide they agree with it. I mean, I guess my take is “some things outside the Overton window are bad and broader society is correct not to tolerate them.”
Well, yes. I expect most people who read your post understood that. This is the standard way of starting a… shall we say, a deliberate movement toward social-consensus judgment, yes? You voice your opinion, which you expect enough people will publicly agree with to make it common knowledge that this view constitutes the judgment of the collective.
No doubt most people here will readily agree with you on this. The trouble is that they won’t all agree on just which things those are.
These are more or less controversial, but range from not outside the Overton window at all (saying that factory farming is immoral) to being a little outside. But they are by no means “taboo” in the sense that you would face serious social cost for expressing them. Saying “there are heritable statistical group differences in mean IQ” is on a completely different level. People had their careers ended and reputation ruined because of this. In comparison, saying that golf courses should be replaced with apartments carries almost zero personal risk.
I think it is defamatory, bad and counter to the spirit of rationalist discourse to accuse someone of racism when they have put forward an empirical hypothesis including evidence to back it up. The term “racist” has an implication of being merely based on an irrational prejudice, which is clearly not the case for Cremieux.
I think it’s counter to the spirit of rationalist discourse to ban the hypothesis that someone is racist. Rationalism is about following the evidence wherever it leads, not about keeping people’s feelings from being hurt.
The problem is not simply the accusation of being racist. The problem is the accusation of being racist, in response to an empirical claim, as a substitute for addressing the empirical claim (and with the implication that the accusation constitutes a sufficient reply to the empirical claim).
Suppose that I say “Jews are more greedy than Gentiles; this is established by the following studies”. Now consider the following possible responses:
“You’re an antisemite.”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ], which I know because [ the studies have poor methodology / they don’t replicate / the operationalization makes no sense / publication bias / etc. ].”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ], but I have no evidence to back up this disagreement, nor can I provide any good reason to reject the evidence you offer; nevertheless, I claim that you are wrong.”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ] (which I know because [reasons, as above]); also you’re an antisemite (which I conclude from the fact that you have made this false claim, and other similar evidence).”
Reply #2 is clearly “in the spirit of rationalist discourse”.
Reply #3 is epistemically void—we can and should dismiss it as a basically contentless utterance for the purpose of the object-level discussion (but perhaps it is useful for its author to publicly stake out the position in question, and it provides a data point on the question of “what and how do people think about this topic”). But on the meta level it is at least honest, neither making any unjustified claims nor subverting the discussion itself.
Reply #4 is like reply #2, but with the added claim (accusation) of antisemitism. Is that claim “in the spirit of rationalist discourse”? Eh. It would be counter to that spirit to ban the hypothesis, sure, but what is it actually adding? We seem (in this hypothetical scenario) to be doing fine discussing the object-level issue, so what’s the point of bringing accusations of racial animus into it? Then again, perhaps the question is important for other (social) reasons, so, sure, why not allow it. (But, as with any accusation of some serious personal failing, it ought not be made lightly, and must be well-supported—otherwise, it is the accuser who has transgressed.)
But what the hell is reply #1?
It doesn’t address the empirical claim at all. If we’re talking about “the spirit of rationalist discourse”—well, that spirit has been well and truly violated already, in this case. What’s more, the accusation of antisemitism can’t be supported by the evidence of the accused having made the false empirical claim… because the accuser has not even troubled himself to establish that the empirical claim is false! This sort of reply is strictly an attempt to shut down the conversation.
If it’s “the spirit of rationalist discourse” that concerns you, then something like #1 should be the very last sort of reply that you ever find yourself making.
“Jews are more greedy than Gentiles; this is established by the following studies” can be blameworthily antisemitic even if the studies do show that this is true on average. Some ways this can be true -
bringing it up where not relevant, e.g. to criticize a Jewish politician
saying it in a way where you’re clearly oozing contempt about Jews
making it sound like this is an essential trait of all Jews vs. all non-Jews
bringing it up weirdly often
In all these cases it can be appropriate to object to that regardless of the validity of the studies.
Perhaps, perhaps. And do you have any examples of such facts (i.e., true claims) the mentioning of which is sometimes blameworthily racist/antisemitic/etc.?
(Presumably “Jews are more greedy than Gentiles” isn’t such a fact. Or is it, do you think? I am not aware of this actually being established by studies, but perhaps I am wrong about this?)
I ask, of course, because I am skeptical of this notion that the truth of the claim might be admitted by both sides, with only its “appropriateness” being, by itself, evidence of racial animus. It’s very convenient to be able to declare that “it’s not what you’re saying, it’s how [or when or why or how often] you’re saying it”. One notices that, somehow, those who make such declarations never quite get around to investigating the “what”. It’s never the right time, the right context, etc. (Meanwhile, with claims that are favored by such people, it always seems to be the right time and place and context.)
So, what’s an example (better yet, three examples) of such a thing? A true fact, which is sometimes inappropriate to bring up, because doing so would be racist, antisemitic, etc.?
Many of the truly radioactive claims I have not really investigated the truth of so cannot give as examples, but this does not mean I claim they are necessarily false either.
That said, of things I am pretty confident are true -
“Men are stronger than women.”—very true on a population level; typically not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply men are better than women
“Men are more physically aggressive than women.”—also true on a pouplation level, also not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply women are better than men
“Being fat is generally bad for your health.”—true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in response to an objection to fat people being bullied or discriminated against, not appropriate to bring up to imply fat people are contemptible
“Trans people are likelier to be mentally ill than cis people.”—true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in a discussion of discrimination against trans people, not appropriate to bring up to imply trans people are all delusional/contemptible
And this doesn’t strike you as being at all suspicious? You judge some claims to be “truly radioactive”, and you haven’t even checked whether they are true? (What, do you think that a topic being “truly radioactive” makes it less likely to be relevant to real-world outcomes?) But never mind that, let’s move on.
The first three claims you list are either politically anodyne or else have the valence of the dominant political faction. And one basically never sees anyone condemned and targeted for shunning on the basis of having such beliefs.
As for the fourth claim—of course it is relevant to bring this up in a discussion of discrimination against trans people! How could it possibly not be? (What, does discrimination against mentally ill people suddenly not exist? Or do you think that no trans person has ever been discriminated against for being mentally ill?) In general, serious mental illness has a pervasive effect on everything about a person’s life. To conclude that someone being mentally ill is not relevant at all to discussion of some major aspect of a person’s life should be quite surprising.
And this illustrates the larger point. Discussing “appropriateness” rather than truth is, in almost situations like this, injurious to our truth-seeking efforts. (Deliberately so, of course.)
I mean “radioactive” in a descriptive political sense. I agree that truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense and it is a bad thing about the political landscape than they are.
Yes, trans people can be discriminated against for being mentally ill. What I meant was that if someone says “trans people are often discriminated against and that’s bad” you should not respond with “well, trans people are mentally ill, what do you expect” as though (a) that’s universally true of trans people (b) that means the discrimination is justified.
(Additionally, I claim you could have understood that this was what I meant, by applying a modicum of interpretive labor and using mental motions like “I am confused about why someone would say this, can I try to build a model where it makes sense / pass their ITT internally”. My impression is that you are going around spamming attempted gotchas and refusing to engage even the slightest flexibility towards attempting to understand the views of people you think you disagree with; this is pretty annoying and bad for your truthseeking.)
Okay first of all, I have spent a fair bit of time in discourse contexts where they’re not really anodyne. But more importantly, …and??? I answered the question you asked (in a tone of confident assumption I would not be able to produce an answer)! I thought maybe you wanted existence proofs of me actually believing that saying a true thing can be bad rather than using that as a smokescreen for some reason, and I provided that even though it was a deeply obnoxious ask?
(Actually that would be a weird smokescreen. The type of person who I think you’re gesturing at would never want to admit that a radioactive claim might possibly be true and if anything might end up using smokescreens to try to avoid admitting that.)
… yes, obviously. (How else could you have meant it? What did you think I understood you to be saying…?)
This is all very good, and yet you still haven’t checked whether said claims are true. So what is this opinion (that “truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense”, etc.) worth, exactly?
Yes, once again, this is just what I assumed that you meant…
But that response makes perfect sense! Yes, one should indeed expect that a population with a substantially above-average prevalence of mental illness will experience substantially above-average discrimination. What in the world does it have to do with anything being “justified”…? Nor is there any implication of universality.
(So your parenthetical is unjustified; I understood you just fine, as you see. I simply disagree.)
To which point it surely is relevant that you (I claim) did not, in fact, produce an answer.
(Possibly you disagree. But then that’s the disagreement, right? Whether your answer was, in fact, sufficient to answer the question. You will agree, at least, that there can be disagreement on this point, yes?)
I wrote:
And your examples reinforce, rather than undermining, this skepticism.
You don’t see any connection whatsoever between this description and your comments about how some claims are “radioactive” and you haven’t investigated them?
The claim cubefox made was that eukaryote disliked Cremieux for saying things outside the overton window. By clarifying that she instead disliked Cremieux for being racist (and just generally interpersonally unpleasant) eukaryote was not dodging the point but directly addressing it.
Come now, you are being obtuse. What is the reason why eukaryote claims that Cremieux is racist? It’s his empirical claims, according to eukaryote herself.
According to eukaryote herself, it is not the fact that his claims are outside the overton window are not the reason she dislikes them, but rather that they are racist. I don’t think I am being obtuse; I think you’re pretending the two are synonymous.
…?
This reply seems like a non sequitur. How is it at all responsive to what I wrote?
I’m saying that it is a serious accusation, whose consequences are far more impactful (e.g. possible career end) than ones feelings being hurt. So one should be extra careful before making the accusation. In case of Cremieux we know that he is in fact defending an empirical hypothesis, and he has provided an extensive amount of evidence and arguments in its favor (e.g. on his blog). This provides strong reason to think that the accusation of racism is not justified.
High decoupling is an attempt to enforce anti-irrationalist norms through creating dissociative disorders. It’s obviously self-defeating, and combining it with a critique of “tone policing” and taboos causing asymmetric discourse/preventing people from speaking out is brazen hypocrisy.
I have repeatedly challenged and criticized Cremieux and he has never reacted with insults, over-the-top defensiveness or vitriol towards me.
(I have certainly heard concerning rumors about him, and I hope those responsible for the community do due diligence in investigating them. But this post feels kind of libelous, like an attempt to assassinate someone’s character to suppress discourse about race. People who think LessOnline shouldn’t invite racists could address this concern by explaining in more detail what racism is/why it’s so terrible and why racist fallacies should be so uncomfortable that one cannot go there, instead of just something that receives a quick rebuttal.)
I find already labelling someone who holds an empirical proposition (which is true or false) as “racist” (which is a highly derogatory term, not a value neutral label) is defamatory. The vague hinting about alleged “rumours” here also seems to just serve to make him appear in a bad light.
Huh, I noticed that I have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to “defamatory” which I conjecture is similar to a knee-jerk reaction some others here have about “racist”—something like “while this term has an explicit definition that refers to some stuff I mostly agree is bad, in practice it is so often used as a way to forcibly shut down speech (including some that I agree with) that I do not wish to grant the concept itself legitimacy”.
(I think I have this reaction to “defamatory” bc I encounter it mostly as a legal concept, where speech that has been ruled defamatory is to be suppressed (and of course I don’t always agree with such rulings). Even though, like, I agree you shouldn’t say false bad things about people.)
I think this maybe makes me a little more sympathetic to this kind of knee-jerk reaction about “racist”? I do already think we should often taboo this word in this kind of situation, but also I do think that at least some things best described as “racist” are in fact bad and ought to be avoided.
(Ironically I kind of wish the people with this knee-jerk reaction would do more decoupling and notice when accusations of racism are more like “this person believes something that is quite possibly true but that a social justice person would think is racist, so they should be shunned” and when they are more like “this person is an epistemically sloppy asshole about race, so I wish we wouldn’t hold them up as an ideal of how to be”. To be fair it can take some work to determine which is true even if you’re specifically trying to.)
Common explicit definitions of “racism” tend to include people who believe in racial differences (especially in socially valued traits, especially if they believe the racial differences are innate), and such beliefs are typical treated as some of the most central evidence of racism conceivable. Objecting to the designation purely on the basis that it is highly derogatory seems intellectually dishonest to me; it would be more honest to object to the derogatory element, for instance by asserting that non-racists are inattentive/delusional/lying.
My vague hinting about rumors is supposed to just serve to make him appear in a bad light, because my defense would make him appear in a good light, and I have heard rumors, so I don’t want to one-sidedly endorse him. At the same time, calling it “rumors” shows that I don’t have it first-hand and that there’s a need for a more accurate account than I can give.
I think the following resembles a motte-and-bailey pattern: Bailey: “He is a racist, people may want to explain why racism is terrible.” Motte: “Oh I just meant he argued for the empirical proposition that there are heritable statistical group differences in IQ.” Accusing someone of racism is a massively different matter from saying that he believes there are heritable group differences in IQ. You can check whether a term is value neutral by whether the accused people apply it to themselves, in this case they clearly do not. The term “racist” usually carries the implication or implicature of an attitude that is merely based on an irrational prejudice, not an empirical hypothesis with reference to a significant amount of statistical and other evidence.
It is also possible that Bob is racist in the sense of successfully working to cause unjust ethnic conflict of some kind, but also Bob only says true things. Bob could selectively emphasize some true propositions and deemphasize others. The richer the area, the more you can pick and choose, and paint a more and more outrage-inducing, one-sided story (cf. Israel/Palestine conflict). If I had to guess, in practice racists do systematically say false things; but a lot of the effect comes from selective emphasis.
Things can get even more muddied if people are unepistemically pushing against arguments that X; then someone might be justified in selectively arguing for X, in order to “balance the scales”. That could be an appropriate thing to do if the only problem was that some group was unepistemically pushing against X—you correct the shared knowledge pool by bringing back in specifically the data that isn’t explained by the unepistemic consensus. But if X is furthermore some natural part of a [selective-emphasis memeplex aimed at generating political will towards some unjust adversariality], then you look a lot like you’re intentionally constructing that memeplex.
(Not implying anything about Cremieux, I’m barely familiar with his work.)
Sure, though this is equally possible for the opposite: When Alice is shunning or shaming or cancelling people for expressing or defending a taboo hypothesis, without her explicitly arguing that the hypothesis is false or disfavored by the evidence. In fact, this is usually much easier to do than the former, since defending a taboo hypothesis is attached to a large amount of social and career risk, while attacking a taboo hypothesis is virtually risk-free. Moreover, attacking a taboo hypothesis will likely cause you to get points from virtue signalling.
This seems like a cope because others could go fill in the missing narrative, so selectively saying stuff shouldn’t be a huge issue in general...?
Huh? No? Filling in the missing narrative can take a bunch of work, like days or months of study. (What is it even a cope for?)
It would be a compromise between two factions: people who are hit by the incomplete narrative (whether they are bad actors or not) and centrists who want to maintain authority without getting involved in controversial stuff.
Certainly it would be better if the racists weren’t selective, and there’s a case to be made that centrist authorities should put more work into getting the entire account of what’s going on, but that’s best achieved by highlighting the need for the opposing side of the story, not by attacking the racists for moving towards a more complete picture.
I mean, I’m not familiar with the whole variety of different ways and reasons that people attack other people as “racist”. I’m just saying that only saying true statements is not conclusive evidence that you’re not a racist, or that you’re not having the effect of supporting racist coalitions. I guess this furthermore implies that it can be justified to attack Bob even if Bob only says true statements, assuming it’s sometimes justified to attack people for racist action-stances, apart from any propositional statements they make—but yeah, in that case you’d have to attack Bob for something other than “Bob says false statements”, e.g. “Bob implicitly argues for false statements via emphasis” or “Bob has bad action-stances”.
I can buy that often people are specifically opposed to racist bigots, i.e. people who are unreasonably attached to the idea of racial group differences. The essence of being unreasonable is to not be able to be reasoned with, and being reasoned with often involves presenting specific cruxes for discussion. It seems to me that Cremieux tends to do so, and so he is not a racist bigot.
I think part of what can get him persecuted for being a racist bigot is that a lot of rationalists follow him and more-or-less endorse (or at least defend) racist stuff without being willing to present cruxes, i.e. his fans are racist bigots. It’s hard for people to distinguish a writer from their fans, and I suspect this might be best addressed by writers being more internally oriented towards their fans rather than outwards oriented.
I think Cremieux is an honest[1], truthseeking, and intelligent guest speaker, and I would be extraordinarily disappointed in the organizers if they disinvited him. I also have a very high opinion of LessOnline’s organizers, so I’m not particularly worried about them cowtowing to attempts to chill speech.
(In the sense of e.g. his work output being factually correct, not speaking to his character personally)
are… are you sure you read the post you’re responding to?
I ask because what you wrote is really bizarre in response to someone saying “I don’t like this person and so will not go to X, but I hope that X goes well and everyone has fun”.
We definitely read the same words!
Did we read the same OP?
This sounds to me like “hint hint I think you guys should disinvite him, and if it goes badly I will say that I told you so”.
“I told you so” is correct if you told someone something, they ignore it, and you were right.
I had a good time at LessOnline last year and expect to have a good time this year, but if Cremieux somehow ruins it for me, Eukaryote is absolutely entitled to tell me “I told you so”.
I guess you could choose to read it that way, but I’m not sure why you would—seems like an assumption of bad faith that doesn’t feel justified to me, especially on LW.
Just ask directly if you think the author meant to say that, IMO. Less chance for weird internet grudges that way. :)
Saying “I don’t like that you invited this person, and I think you shouldn’t have, and I think you should reverse that decision, and it’s on you if you ignore my advice and it goes poorly” doesn’t seem like it’s in bad faith to me. Caving to such bids seems like it would invite more such bids in the future, but I don’t think making such bids is particularly norm-breaking.
sure
This seems a bit speculative to me. If OP didn’t believe that would the post have looked any different?
Suppose I tell you that you have a nice house, and it would be a shame if anything happened to it.
What do I mean?
In context, I took that to be a threat to try to get the event organizers and attendees “cancelled” as racists unless they capitulated and disinvited him.
I don’t think this is necessarily what eukaryote explicitly intended...
… But I also don’t think it particularly matters whether they meant it this way or not. “I dislike this person so I will boycott this event”, implemented at scale, is what cancelling is. If a whole bunch of people coordinate to boycott the event unless Alice is blacklisted, that creates a threat-like pressure on event organizers to blacklist Alice if they want to maximize the number of attendees.
If a community wants to avoid such dynamics, then “I will boycott the event if Alice is there, not because I expect Alice to make the event unpleasant, but because I disagree with some of Alice’s beliefs and think she should be deplatformed” is something that shouldn’t be considered acceptable behavior, at the group-norm level. The intent behind the behavior doesn’t matter; the behavior itself is the problem.
And indeed, in the Simulacrum Levels framework, it’s not a Simulacrum Level 1 move. It’s Simulacrum Level 3-4, fashioning a cudgel out of your social resources and trying to beat the social realities into shape using it.
The acceptable response is IMO starting a discussion regarding Alice’s character and openly questioning whether she’s the kind of person who deserves to be invited to rationalist events. But not unilaterally setting up a game-theoretic structure that decreases the event’s value iff your demands are not met.
It’s too bad you feel that way. I wasn’t planning on attending, and probably still won’t, but love Cremieux’s work, and knowing he’ll be there makes me want to go more.
I recommend those unfamiliar with his work to view some of his posts on X: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil
This is getting a lot of pushback but seems pretty overdetermined to me based on the comments.
Do you mean that the concrete evidence of Cremieux’s past behavior presented in the comments justifies the OP?
Yeah it seems sufficient, particularly the Reddit post is highly irresponsible.
It’s of course reasonable to skip an event because people you don’t like will be there.
However, it’s clear that many people have the opposite preference, and wouldn’t want LessOnline attendees or invited guests to have to meet a “standard of care and compassion,” especially one wherever you’re putting it.
LessOnline seems to be about collecting people interested in and good at rationality and high-quality writing, not about collecting people interested in care and compassion. For the latter I’d suggest one go to something like EA Global or church…
It’s clear that many people at least don’t mind Cremieux being invited [ETA: as a featured author-guest] to LessOnline, but it’s also clear (from this comment thread) that many people do mind Cremieux being invited to LessOnline, and some of them mind it quite strongly.
This is a (potential) reason to reconsider the invitation and/or explicitize some norms/standards that prospective LessOnline invitees are expected to meet.
Small ~nitpick/clarification: in my understanding, at issue is Crémieux being a featured guest at LessOnline, rather than being allowed to attend LessOnline; “invited to” is ambiguous between the two.
It is ambiguous, but it’s hinting more strongly towards being a featured author guest because “normal/usual/vanilla guests” are not Being Invited by the organizers to attend the conference in the sense in which this word is typically used in this context.
But fair, I’ll ETA-clarify.
I don’t think “if discussing issues that have caused tremendous amounts of real world pain, you gotta avoid being contemptuous of the groups that were hurt” is a standard of care and compassion that is incompatible with rationality and high-quality writing. And not having any standard at all is flatly unworkable, and indeed not, actually, how the community actually functions.
Approximately every contentious issue has caused tremendous amounts of real-world pain. Therefore the choice of which issues to police contempt about becomes a de facto political standard.
I am not saying care and compassion is incompatible with rationality and high-quality writing.
Yes, perhaps it’s reasonable to require some standard, but personally I think there’s a place for events where that standard is as or more permissive than it is at LessOnline. This is my subjective opinion and preference, but I would not be surprised if many LessWrong readers shared it.
I am an outsider to this, but now you have made me curious, my first impression with Cremieux online has been genetic differences is only a part of his work, and as per less.online he hasn’t yet accepted the invitation? is the likelihood of him accepting it that high to make this call? or is the value of potentially having him overwhelming negative in your view?
Eh, he was there last year, I figure he might well go again. If I happen to hear that he’s definitively not attending this year (or, idk, if he ends up attending as a regular guest and not an Invited Author Guest, I take less umbrage with that) I’d love to go.
There was some talk of disinviting him for plagiarism
I strongly disagree with this. I think that this is a pernicious view, and a terrible approach to scholarship of any sort.
(This comment is entirely orthogonal to any questions of any individual’s character, to be clear.)
“I’m uncomfortable being in the same company of invited author guests as Cremieux… I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he’s a special guest at.”
Reading between the lines, it seems the crux might be that you don’t want to risk the reputational consequences of being featured alongside Cremieux as an Invited Author? (correct me if I’m wrong!)
If that’s the case, would you attend if the organizers removed your handle from the public list of invitees? Or would you still not want to attend as a regular guest as long as he’s distinguished as an Invited Author?
To use the exact words from the website, “The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating.”, that kinda implies that OP and Cremieux embody the same virtues.
I was an observer for the conversations that (I suspect) contributed to your opinion here. My perspective is that it seems in large part differences in communication style preferences, rather than object-level disagreements. He seems to enjoy the catharsis of being able to emphatically state positions that are non-politically correct in general discourse, which is a sentiment I understand. I don’t recall him responding with anything I would classify as insults or vitriol, though those are to some degree subjective.
One person’s insult is another’s friendly banter, and I suspect he didn’t realize you took as the former what he had meant as the latter.
Would I be correct if I summarized your opinion as “He doesn’t treat controversial topics with enough tact and diplomacy” rather than specific factual or epistemic disagreements?
If his presence is the only thing stopping you from wanting to go, why not reach out to him? I suspect you’d be able to amicably smooth things over.
A related idea: For LessOnline would it be useful to start a norm where if a debate becomes excessively charged any participant could ask for it to be put on hold so that a time can be set aside to productively discuss it in a more structured setting? (i.e. with an impartial moderator mutually agreed upon.)