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 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.