EA - A personal response to Nick Bostrom's "Apology for an Old Email" by Habiba

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A personal response to Nick Bostrom's "Apology for an Old Email", published by Habiba on January 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.On 9th January 2023, Nick Bostrom posted this apology for an email he sent on the Extropians listserv in the 90s. On 11th January 2023, Anders Sandberg linked to it on Bostrom's behalf in this twitter thread.I recommend you read those first as I don't summarise or explain the contents below.This is my personal response to reading Bostrom's apology and email and is (bar some minor changes) a cross-post of my tweet thread.As a meta-point I would like to flag that I do find discussion of the topic to be incredibly stressful. I have almost never posted here on the forum about even straightforward things. And debating race and IQ is something I find exceptionally emotionally tough. So I don't plan to participate in any extensive debates in the comments, hope that you understand why.My thoughtsIn my view, Bostrom's email would have been offensive in the 90s and it is offensive now, for good reason. His apology fails badly to fully take responsibility or display an understanding of the harm the views expressed represent.I think that being deliberately offensive to make a point is gross. When people in positions of privilege use or mention slurs lightly they are able to do so because they are blinkered to the lived experience of others and disengaged from empathy with those different to them.Note that I’m not generally in the business of picking people apart for small one-off past infractions. But I do think it would be virtuous to apologise for and to truly take responsibility for one’s past actions.Bostrom’s apology is defensively couched - emphasising the age of the email, what others wrote on the listserv, that it would be best forgotten, that fear that people might smear him. I think that is cowardly and shows a disappointing lack of ownership of his actions.But I don’t just care about the inclusion of a slur in the email. I am deeply uncomfortable with a discussion of race and intelligence failing to acknowledge the historical context of the ideas’ origin and the harm they can and have caused.To be clear, I think the view Bostrom expressed was wrong, and wrong in a harmful and reckless way.When you argue a point like this without addressing the context of how those ideas came about you will likely be missing something important we should learn from history and be badly wrong.When you are willfully disengaged from the empathy that underlies common decency you will have a massive blindspot in your reasoning and you will likely be badly wrong.I do not think that there is only one acceptable way to express thoughts about this issue, nor do I think this issue could never be discussed sensitively. And I do think it is okay for people to sometimes say things online that I think are plain wrong.But we all know that this issue is high stakes - ideas about racial superiority in the UK, America, and Germany led to some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. And eugenists historically espoused utterly wrong views on race and intelligence wearing the guise of science.There were c.60,000 sterilisations in US eugenics programmes - focused on women of colour. Including those who were young, poor, victims of sexual abuse, labelled “feeble minded” (allegedly inherited via a recessive gene), and had their fates decided by committees of white men.Hitler was a fan of eugenicist Madison Grant. And at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi defendants entered Grant’s book - The Passing of the Great Race - in their defence tracing the lineage of their genocidal ideas to a popular American author.And we know now there are very good reasons to think that scores on IQ tests are affected by cultural factors, that global IQ databases are poor sour...