Hordes of Vultures Descend on Bostrom
Bostrom said an offensive thing in the mid-nineties--people think now that he's a horrific racist based on this
Context
CW: Contains a screenshot of an email containing the N word.
Occasionally, a writer will have a clear, solid vindication of that which they’ve been writing about for quite a while. They’ll see people making an error, with dramatic negative consequences, and the error will be exactly one that they warned about. Perhaps some will have claimed that no one will really make the error. But now, they have a solid proof that such errors are widespread.
I feel like the recent Bostrom affair provides this fitting vindication for at least two of my articles.
Nick Bostrom is quite a good philosopher. He’s one of the people who popularized the arguments about existential risk—and has made lots of other interesting and important contributions. Bostrom has recently been under fire as a result of having said things that are offensive to modern sensibilities, in the mid-nineties.
Bostrom has apologized for this, and he clarifies his view here.
I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
What are my actual views? I do think that provocative communication styles have a place—but not like this! I also think that it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity. This is a huge moral travesty that we should not paper over or downplay. Much of my personal charitable giving over the years has gone to fighting exactly this problem: I’ve given many thousands of pounds to organizations including to the SCI Foundation, GiveDirectly, the Black Health Alliance, the Iodine Global Network, BasicNeeds, and the Christian Blind Mission.
Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role
What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood. Some of the most horrific atrocities of the last century were carried out under the banner of eugenic justifications and racist rationalizations. In contemporary academic bioethics, the word “eugenics” is sometimes used in different and much broader sense, as including for example the view that prospective parents undergoing IVF should have access to genetic screening and diagnostic tools (as is currently the established practice in many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom). There is a rich bioethical literature on these issues (see e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eugenics/), and it involves many complex moral considerations that cannot be captured in a single word or a slogan. I would be in favor of some uses and against others. Broadly speaking, I’m favorable to wide parental choice in these matters, including for some applications that would qualify as “enhancements” rather than “therapies”—to the extent that this distinction makes sense. I have written several papers about the ethics of enhancement, e.g. “The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics” (Ethics, 116, 2006); “Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges” (Sci Eng Ethics, 15, 2009); “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity” (Bioethics, 19, 2005), and one edited volume “Human Enhancement” (Oxford University Press, 2011).
I think for people interested in the societal consequences of genetic medicine, or in the ethics of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, selection, or engineering, or in human enhancement ethics more generally, either on the side of pro or con, we are more likely to improve our collective understanding and wisdom and by open-minded and thoughtful engagement with the arguments and the existing literature, rather than by name-calling or sloganeering—let alone by idiotic and offensive emails like the one I wrote 26 years ago, and for which, again, I truly and sincerely apologize.
So, he said something offensive roughly 8 years before I was born, has continually apologized for it and walked it back for the past 30 or so years. Issue settled, right? As Sandberg said “The context is a thread on a mailing list in 1995 talking about offensive communication styles where he did the classic freshman philosophy student trick of writing something deliberately offensive to make a point. It didn’t turn out well (it never does): he promptly apologized.” Nothing to worry about, beyond showing that Bostrom wrote an offensive email in the mid 90s. Right??
Wrong, according to many on Twitter and elsewhere. Many generic critics of EA have swooped in to argue that this shows what they knew all along—that the man who donates lots of money to “GiveDirectly, the Black Health Alliance, the Iodine Global Network, BasicNeeds, and the Christian Blind Mission” secretly hates black people and holds other reprehensible views.
Here, I’ll explain why Bostrom is not some horrible monster who must be repudiated. The things Bostrom said, while somewhat crass and certainly ill-advised, are less horrific than one might think. Furthermore, if you’ve consistently walked back something for roughly 30 years, you get a grace period.
Criticism
This person prefers Bostrom to the Democratic party…so that’s something.
The claim that Bostrom made is that “black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general.” This is undeniably true—now, it may very well be do to environmental factors, but no one seriously denies this result. To quote Brookings
African Americans score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. The gap appears before children enter kindergarten and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on almost every standardized test. This statistic does not imply, of course, that all blacks score below all whites. There is a lot of overlap between the two groups. Nonetheless, the test score gap is large enough to have significant social and economic consequences.
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones says
First off, there is a black-white gap in IQ scores.² Nobody thinks otherwise. Nor is it likely that this is due to test bias or other test construction issues. The gap really does exist. The only question is: what causes it? Is it possible that it’s due entirely to genetic differences between blacks of African ancestry and whites of European ancestry? I doubt it for these reasons:
Here’s one proof that there’s a gap. We know that poorer countries tend to have lower IQs—when one is afflicted by pollution and parasites, for example, their IQ goes down. But Africa is the poorest continent—so we’d expect just from poverty for black people to have lower IQs than others.
The dispute among scholars is whether the gap is environmental or genetic. No one denies that there’s a gap. Or at least, no one serious.
The problem is that, by phrasing his statement in the most offensive way possible—after all, Bostrom was giving an example of an offensive-sounding statement that he believes—now Bostrom’s critics are replying by saying “well, he still believes that black people are stupider than non-black people, on average.” That, while technically true, is a reprehensible-sounding statement, assuming we use the terms in an ordinary way. For example, we get replies like these.
But Bostrom’s entire point was that, if you think that there are mean differences in IQ—assuming you think IQ roughly tracks intelligence—then you’ll think the horrific-sounding statement that black people are stupider on average than non-black people. The worry with Bostrom’s statement wasn’t that he said anything strictly false, it was that he phrased things in horribly offensive ways. Denying an obvious claim by rephrasing it offensively is ridiculous.
This next criticism of Bostrom is a doozy.
It’s funny how the person starts out claiming something false, and then describes that they’re just as confident in it as another false thing—namely, the desirability of prison abolition. To quote Scientific American
IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality.
Vox says
Dismissive slogans like "IQ just measures how well you take tests" have been replaced by a growing understanding of how IQ is real, partially hereditary, and predictive of important life outcomes.
Scientific sources like Nature argue that "what most people know about intelligence must be updated,” and popular media including Vox itself reports on the "mountain of research showing that it's a genuinely powerful predictor of your health, prosperity, and well-being.”
IQ denialism seems to be going the same way as climate denialism — complete with overwhelming scientific consensus on one side — and it's about time.
In official studies, IQ tests correlate very well with other IQ tests, the same IQ test repeated later on, and other tests of intellectual ability like the SAT. For example, IQ scores and SAT scores tend to correlate at around 0.7, a very impressive match. But I surveyed readers of my blog on their IQs and SAT scores. I told them to only report their scores on real professional tests — none of those internet IQ tests you get to from flashing banner ads with pictures of Einstein's face on them. I got about 500 data points. And the correlation was only about 0.3: far lower than it was supposed to be.
This isn't to say true scientific genius can't be measured by IQ. Someone formally IQ tested a group of eminent physicists and found IQs in the 150s and above — exactly what you would expect from a bunch of geniuses.
But there’s a much more fundamental problem: it turns out that, even if you don’t think that IQ measures intelligence at all, you should still think that there will be an intelligence gap between the races. This is for the reasons I described before—there are enormous environmental factors that lead to vast differences between different races. Africans, being much poorer on average, and having higher rates of malnutrition, should be expected to have less intelligence. It turns out that, when one is ravaged by parasites, pollution, and is severely malnourished, their intelligence drops.
This is exactly what I criticized in my article “Many Things That Sound Racist or Transphobic Aren't.” It turns out that many things that make us uncomfortable and sound racist just turn out to be true, for example, intelligence gaps between races. The truth cannot be racist—and that’s a good reason not to rely on our cringing reaction to determine whether or not something is racist. To quote my earlier article, where I argued that thinking that it’s not racist to entertain the idea that there might be a genetic component to IQ differences—it may be false, but it’s not racist.
Or what about the view that black people have lower average IQs. I won’t delve into the science here, but if one believes this for valid scientific reasons — even if those reasons ultimately end up being wrong — it’s unclear whether this is racist. One natural thought it that it is. But it’s hard to figure out why. Suppose one thought that, for non-genetic reasons related purely to chance, IQs of black people were lower. This is plausible — after all, it will be incredibly unlikely that all IQs will happen to be exactly equal of all groups, just as it will be incredibly unlikely that any two quantities will be exactly the same. But if this is true, then one will have to hold that, just by chance, racism could be true.
Additionally, there will be some possible worlds in which black people have lower IQs — maybe it’s not true of the actual world, but it’s certainly true of some possible worlds. But it seems like racism would be wrong in all possible worlds — at least, barring outlandish ones where a genie tortures everyone unless you’re racist — so this does seem to put pressure on the idea that it’s racist.
Maybe the idea is that it’s racist to believe that black people have lower IQs than white people if and only if they don’t have lower IQs than white people. But this has some clear counterexamples. Suppose that we live in a possible world in which it appears that black people have lower IQs by the available science. However, the available science turns out to be wrong for some strange, unforeseeable reason — maybe space aliens abducted most smart black people so that their average IQ is lower. In this world, it seems odd to claim that the fact that those aliens abducted smart black people in the womb would make believing the mainstream available science racist.
Here’s another example of how much our intuitions on this topic misfire — it was originally thought that non-Africans had lots of neanderthal DNA, but Africans had minimal neanderthal DNA. However, more recent studies are putting pressure on this idea — providing evidence that Africans have more neanderthal DNA than was previously though, though less than non-Africans.
If a study provided evidence that black people have more neanderthal DNA than non-Africans, many people would find this idea racist. The idea that Africans have more in common with non-humans is one that many people would find odious, even if it were true. The truth cannot be racist. Yet if we hold that this is racist, then there would have to be a possible world in which the truth is racist, in which black people have more, rather than less, neanderthal DNA.
Yet no one would claim that saying white people have more neanderthal DNA is racist. Why is that? Well, the theory I gave above of how people decide whether something is racist explains this — we cringe when we hear the idea that black people have more neanderthal DNA more than we do when we hear the idea that white people have more neanderthal DNA.
And it seems that there’s some scientific dispute about whether the gap is entirely environmental. As Mother Jones notes
Two warnings before I start. First, the evidence isn’t bulletproof on either side. It just isn’t, and I’m afraid we have to put up with that uncertainty until neurobiologists figure out where intelligence really comes from. Second, I’m not trying to prove my side of the argument here. That’s not possible. I merely want to make a few points that should allow you to see that there’s plenty of reason to believe that genes probably aren’t responsible for IQ differences between racial groups.¹ Here goes:
Sorry, but you can’t just declare a heated scientific dispute to be decided because one way that it could be resolved isn’t PC. That’s not a good way of arriving at the truth, or being reasonable or sane.
I haven’t looked into the science at all. Neither has Bostrom. So now, Bostrom is being castigated for not having an opinion on a complex scientific question that he hasn’t looked into. Maybe the science is settled—maybe it is not. I have no idea. But not having an opinion on a scientific dispute where it’s hard to figure out even whether it’s been settled is not an objectionable thing. It’s irresponsible to claim that one should claim to have deduced, from the arm-chair, without looking into the science, whether the difference is entirely environmental.
It-that-must-not-be-named
Now, some people’s objection to this is that Bostrom used the N word.
Well, if people are attacking you for a statement, it seems reasonable to quote the statement. Is it really impermissible to take a screenshot of racist statements? Would it be objectionable if Bender took a screenshot of the article before talking about how terrible it was.
Now, while Bostrom’s statement was probably offensive by 1990 standards, it’s worth noting that our attitudes towards the N-word have shifted dramatically. They’ve shifted from “it’s a word that you can use descriptively, such as when reading Huck Finn in class” to “it’s a word unutterable in any context.” It is foolish to apply the standards of 2022 to 1995. As McWhorter notes.
That was in 1995, and in the fall of that year I did a radio interview on the word, in which the guests and I were free to use it when referring to it, with nary a bleep. That had been normal until then but would not be for much longer, such that the interview is now a period piece.
It’s safe to say that the transition to “the N-word” wasn’t driven by the linguistic coarseness of a Los Angeles detective or something a prosecutor said one day during a monthslong trial. Rather, Mr. Darden’s reticence was a symptom of something already in the air by 1995: the larger shift in sensibility that rendered slurs, in general, the new profanity.
This occurred as Generation X, born from about 1965 to 1980, came of age. These were the first Americans raised in post-civil-rights-era America. To Generation X, legalized segregation was a bygone barbarism in black-and-white photos and film clips. Also, Generation X grew up when overt racist attitudes came to be ridiculed and socially punished in general society. Racism continued to exist in endless manifestations. However, it became complicated — something to hide, to dissemble about and, among at least an enlightened cohort, something to check oneself for and call out in others, to a degree unknown in perhaps any society until then.
In a different article, McWhorter says
However, since the 1990s this rule has undergone mission creep, under which whites are not only not supposed to level the word as a slur, but are also not supposed to even refer to it. That idea has been entrenched for long enough now that it is coming to feel normal, but then normal is not always normal. It borders, as I suggested above, on taboo.
There are societies—such as many in Australia—in which it is forbidden to use ordinary language with in-laws, and this taboo is often extended even to referring to in-laws in conversation. Upon marrying, one must master a whole different vocabulary for talking to and/or about, for example, one’s mother-in-law. Many are familiar with the click sounds in Xhosa. However, clicks didn’t originate in Xhosa, but in lesser-known languages spoken by hunter-gatherers. Xhosa speakers, it is thought, adopted clicks from these other communities as part of an effort to create avoidance language, substituting them for ordinary sounds in Xhosa.
Practices like this sound neat to Americans—but also arbitrary. We understand that the practice is rooted in respect, but can’t help thinking that the official practice has drifted somewhat beyond what logic would dictate. The idea that nonblacks cannot even soberly refer to the N-word verges on this kind of thing. Note the word verges: The N-word is a slur and loaded in a way that, say, asking your mother-in-law what she’d like for dinner is not; sparing usage and serious caution are warranted. Respect, nevertheless, has morphed into a kind of genuflection that an outsider might find difficult to understand.
That outsider could be an American time-traveler from as recently as the 1990s. Many of us still harbor a small collection of cassettes we just can’t bear to chuck—mixtapes, toddlers telling stories, etc. One of mine is the first media interview I ever did, a radio talk-show episode on the N-word, in 1995. The host was white, the other guest was as well, and we had a discussion about the origins and current usage of that word, except that we used the real one.
The idea that we would euphemize the word as “the N-word” when we were talking about it rather than using it would not have occurred to any of us. It was a perfectly ordinary interview of the period. Sheck, who is in her 60s, was mature and working during this time and thus must remember when we were not so peculiarly uptight.
(Unrelated, but McWhorter is brilliant and a delightful writer—very worth reading).
Thus, the castigation of Bostrom for uttering the world is utterly unreasonable. It is only in recent decades—after Bostrom’s—that the term has become unutterable, to refer to, not merely to use. This is a contingent norm; Bostrom could not be reasonably expected to predict how linguistic tides would change.
If anything, the problem with Bostrom’s apology is that it’s too groveling. Bostrom made a statement that sounds objectionable now because linguistic taboos have changed. The thing he was saying was his best example of a thing that’s technically true but sounds wildly offensive. He did manage to say something technically true but wildly offensive. And now, he’s being castigated for it, because he used language that’s now taboo and produced something that sounds wildly offensive.
This fury around Bostrom’s statement is absurd. And it’s being used to tar quite a good philosopher.
But even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t matter. You get a grace period—if you’ve consistently denounced something for 30 years, then you oughtn’t be continually castigated for it.
But what about the eugenics
The next claim made by Bostrom’s critics is that what he said is awful because he endorsed eugenics.
One thing that’s very clear is that these people are not avid readers of my blog. Because if they were, they’d know that it’s generally not helpful to call otherwise good ideas eugenics—there’s a big difference between genetic engineering, at the request of parents, to make people smarter and happier and forced sterilization. Bostrom’s clarified his views, so I feel as though I don’t need to add anything—call it eugenics if you like, but it it’s eugenics, it is, unlike bad eugenics, the type that gives parents options to make their children’s lives better. You can’t just tar it by word association—to object to it, you’ll have to actually make an argument as to why it’s bad.
Ultimately, these people attacking Bostrom aren’t being intellectually serious. They’re thinking in words rather than ideas. They’re playing a desperate game—trying to find Bostrom saying offensive things, and painting his new ideas as offensive sounding. Who cares about their truth, as long as they sound bad out of context? Well, we mustn’t give in to this slanderous crap. May Bostrom’s reputation survive this unscathed.
>But there’s a much more fundamental problem: it turns out that, even if you don’t think that IQ measures intelligence at all, you should still think that there will be an intelligence gap between the races.
Just as a general principle you should expect there to be inequities in all areas between any groups you pick out whatsoever. I don't think there's any grounds for supposing complete equality between groups rather than radical divergence from it. Even apparent truths about morphology like "All groups of humans have two arms" will diverge pretty quickly if factors like military-participation, availability of surgery, genetic defects, etc aren't accounted for.
"And it seems that there’s some scientific dispute about whether the gap is entirely environmental ..... Sorry, but you can’t just declare a heated scientific dispute to be decided because one way that it could be resolved isn’t PC"
This is absolutely wrong. There is no heated scientific debate. There has been a scientific consensus for decades, going across many fields. For pretty obvious reasons - race has no genetic definition. "Black" is a social group. So, it's ludicrous to suggest "black" people are genetically less intelligent. You don't have to go deep into the science to understand this.
Also, saying IQ measures important things that correlate well with educational and health outcomes, which no one really denies, is very different from saying it's a direct measure of intelligence, which no serious scientist believes. It's quite a leap to say "IQ roughly tracks intelligence." Saying black people are dumb because they have lower average IQ is taking an extremely simplistic view of what intelligence is.