An EA freed from the shackles of wokeness will be better able to live up to its highest ideals by taking seriously important threats to human well-being that the movement currently ignores for purely political reasons. What does it mean that birthrates are decreasing at the same time there is a negative relationship between IQ and fertility across much of the developed world? And, speaking from a strictly utilitarian perspective, why exactly do we let a tiny minority of violent criminals make large swaths of what are potentially some of our most economically productive urban areas uninhabitable, instead of simply getting rid of them in full confidence that we’re doing the greatest good for the largest number of people? These are the kinds of questions an honest movement either has to ignore or become obsessed with.
Richard Hanania, “Why EA will be anti-woke or die“
Content warning: This post discusses racism, sexism and a variety of related prejudices. The post directly quotes a number of authors who have been described by reputable publications as racists or white supremacists. Some of the quoted remarks are quite disturbing.
1. Introduction
This is Part 3 in a series on Human Biodiversity. Human biodiversity (HBD) is the latest iteration of modern race science. This series discusses the impact of HBD on effective altruism and adjacent communities, as well as the harms done by debating and propounding race science.
Part 1 introduced the series, explaining what HBD is and why propounding HBD is wrong. Part 2 discussed events at Manifest.
We saw in Part 2 that the controversy surrounding Manifest was begun, in large part, by invitations to Richard Hanania. Hanania is a far-right political commentator and the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.
This post continues my discussion of Richard Hanania’s views and his relationship to the effective altruism movement.
2. Methodological remarks
I want to begin by making two methodological remarks. First, to the best of my knowledge, all of the views and quotations attributed to Hanania are accurately attributed. However, readers should use their own judgment in evaluating sources. In particular, many of the worst views were posted pseudonymously. I take investigative journalism by the Huffington Post to have provided credible evidence that the remarks were those of Richard Hanania, and I am not aware of strong evidence to the contrary. However, there remains the possibility of error.
Second, this post will overlap to some degree with Part 2 of this series, which discussed Manifest. While most of the content is new, I have not attempted to remove overlaps with Part 2, because I want this post to stand on its own.
3. Relationship to effective altruism
I said in Part 1 of this series that I would proceed from the outside in, beginning with the worst offenders and moving towards those whose behavior is comparatively more moderate. I also said that this would, in rough outline, mean starting with the thinkers furthest away from effective altruists.
To that end, I am pleased to say that Richard Hanania is probably, of any figure discussed at post-length in this series, the most tangential to effective altruism. But that is not to say that Hanania has not had problematic involvements with the movement.
Many of these involvements were discussed in Part 2 of this series, which discussed Manifest. I won’t repeat these involvements, but I do want to highlight other areas of involvement below.
3.1 “Why EA will be anti-woke or die”
My series on Belonging discussed a TIME Magazine investigation into sexual harassment and abuse within the effective altruism movement. I discussed a number of troubling reactions to this investigation, perhaps the worst of which was an essay written by Richard Hanania entitled “Why EA will be anti-woke or die”. Hanania envisioned an effective altruism movement that was:
Able to live up to its highest ideals by taking seriously important threats to human well-being that the movement currently ignores for purely political reasons. What does it mean that birthrates are decreasing at the same time there is a negative relationship between IQ and fertility across much of the developed world? And, speaking from a strictly utilitarian perspective, why exactly do we let a tiny minority of violent criminals make large swaths of what are potentially some of our most economically productive urban areas uninhabitable instead of simply getting rid of them … ?
After challenging the intellectual capacities of women and the need to take sexual assault allegations seriously, Hanania urged the adoption of a free market in ideas, arguing that:
A free market in ideas is like a free market in any other good or service. It ends up with Asian and white men on top who are there because they’re simply better than everyone else.
This essay was posted on the EA Forum by an “anonymous rationalist”, and to this day enjoys near-neutral karma after almost a hundred votes. Reactions are mixed, and while the top comment calls out Hanania, it is nearly edged out by a comment urging “EAs to read the entire original piece for full context” and conceding that although “Hanania is writing as a trollish edgelord” there is a “tendency in EA to show exactly the kind of gutless, cringing, defensive deference to woke critiques of EA that Hanania talks about“. This comment urges that “If we don’t develop robust defenses against wokeness, we will suffer the same fate as every other organization that values emotional victimization rhetoric over scope-sensitive rationality.” The comment enjoys 36 karma and 17 agreement votes against 7 disagreement votes as of August 11, 2024.
A number of effective altruists commented approvingly on the original post at Hanania’s blog. For example, Geoffrey Miller wrote:
Richard — excellent post. I wrote a comment about it in EA Forum here … There’s quite a bit of discussion of your piece over on EA Forum. Much of the discussion, by the woke-adjacent, misses your key points. But IMHO a surprisingly high number of EAs understand the existential threat from wokeness, and do take it seriously.
And the then vice president of University of Waterloo Effective Altruism (now director of Alliance for the Future) wrote:
This is a very good post … EA, practically, is a very large dragnet that picks up ambitious people, a subset of whom have the talent to pull off their ambition … It’s extremely easy to become heavily invested in EA while not having the talent to contribute meaningfully. Even students who don’t follow rationalist reasoning norms at all can go pretty far down this pipeline. This produces a large number of people who feel like they are part of EA while not really practicing anything related to what EA is about, hence Bostr[o]m cancellation, dishonesty around group differences, etc.
I think it would be fair to say that the community reaction to Hanania’s post was decidedly mixed.
3.2 Scott Alexander
Scott Alexander’s blog, Astral Codex Ten, is a hub for activity within the rationalist community, and is widely read among effective altruists. The New Yorker called the previous iteration of the blog “perhaps the premier public-facing venue of the `rationalist’ community”. That blog was deleted, then migrated to its current form when the New York Times called Alexander out for flirting with race science, and in the next post in this series we will see that Alexander goes considerably beyond flirtation.
This May, Alexander published an extensive review of Hanania’s book, The origins of woke. Alexander then followed up with a second post, discussing highlights from the comments section of the first post. Alexander publishes an extensive response by Hanania, then goes out of his way to highlight a comment by Steven Sailer, who as we saw in the first post of this series has been called a white supremacist by the Southern Poverty Law Center and who popularized the modern racist usage of the term `human biodiversity’ that is the focus of this series. In his comment, Sailer shares his “personal experience” in which direct scrutiny by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission led a firm that he was employed with to drop use of a test to screen applicants during hiring. Sailer is, apparently, frustrated with the experience, and Alexander expresses muted sympathy for Sailer’s complaint without rebuke: “If this is true, it sounds like the burden of proof is on the test-giver, and it’s a pretty high burden.”
3.3 Everything else
It is, by now an open secret that Hanania is often read by, and sometimes interacts with effective altruists and their rationalist allies. This year, David Mathers wrote a quick post begging:
Please people, do not treat Richard Hannania as some sort of worthy figure who is a friend of EA. He was a Nazi, and whilst he claims he moderated his views, he is still very racist as far as I can tell.
As of August 11, 2024 the post enjoys 52 agreement votes, though also 20 disagreement votes.
Mathers also called out the philosopher Richard Chappell for listing Hanania on his blogroll. Chappell’s substack, Good Thoughts, is widely read by effective altruists. Chappell did not apologize, but rather argued that listing Hanania on his blogroll was not an endorsement: his blogroll is just a list of “blogs I find often interesting and worth reading. No broader moral endorsement implied!”
Chappell then said that he “found TracingWoodgrains’ thoughts” on the matter “fairly compelling,” indicating particular agreement with TracingWoodgrans’ statement that “I have little patience with polite society, its inconsistencies in which views are and are not acceptable, and its games of tug-of-war with the Overton Window.”
Hanania not infrequently writes about effective altruism. We spoke above about his rather unfortunate essay “Why EA will be anti-woke or die“, which had substantial uptake on the EA Forum. Another defense of effective altruism penned by Hanania, “Effective altruism thinks you’re Hitler” argued that, in the words of Hanania’s own blurb:
Why does everyone hate Effective Altruism? As I explain, it’s an entire movement based on the idea that all other people are stupid and immoral. And many of their arguments are irrefutable, which only makes people hate them more.
This post, fortunately, had less uptake, though a supportive and upvoted reference to this post on the EA Forum was the trigger for Mathers’ criticism of Hanania, discussed above.
Beyond this, while many rationalists and effective altruists have had the sense to limit interactions with Hanania, some have not. For example, Robin Hanson, one of the very most foundational figures in the rationalism movement and formerly an affiliate of the Future of Humanity Institute, was a guest on Hanania’s podcast in 2021 and again in 2023. The podcast has also hosted Leopold Aschenbrenner, and perhaps unsurprisingly has hosted many of the most controversial Manifest attendees including Jonathan Anomaly, Brian Chau, Steven Hsu, and Razib Khan.
3.4 Taking stock
As I have said, Hanania is probably the furthest removed from effective altruism of any figure to be discussed in this series. That is good, although we have seen that effective altruists and their allies often interact with Hanania.
We saw that Hanania has several times attempted to influence the direction of effective altruism, and in one case succeeded in provoking perhaps the worst incident of the community’s response to the TIME Magazine exposé. We saw in Part 2 of this series that Hanania sponsored and administered a tournament with Manifold Markets, then was invited to speak at Manifest the next year and eventually settled for signing copies of his book. We saw that the same book was given a detailed review and follow-up discussion by Scott Alexander this year. We saw that a prominent effective altruist philosopher listed Hanania on his blogroll, and that one of the founding figures of the rationalist movement has twice been a guest on Hanania’s podcast.
These links are concerning to the extent that Hanania’s behavior is concerning. Let’s look at some of Hanania’s most concerning behaviors, beginning with his views on race, then looking at the policy recommendations Hanania draws from these views.
4. Views on race
Let’s start with the obvious. Hanania has endorsed HBD. In fact, Hanania used to run the website HBDbooks.com on which he reviewed and endorsed a variety of HBD-related books.
Hanania has unambiguously endorsed the view that people of color are genetically disposed to be significantly less intelligent than others. In an article entitled “Why an alternative right is necessary,” Hanania writes that:
We’ve known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies–if common sense wasn’t enough–that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom.
Hanania is quite firm in his views on the matter. In one discussion with Steven Sailer, the founder of the modern HBD movement, Hanania writes:
Tell us what you think that the odds are that say there is at least a 5-10 point natural gap in IQ between blacks and whites in identical conditions. I’d say I’m at least 99% certain.
In a post on his HBDbooks website entitled “Why are black people so loud?“, Hanania proposes a simple answer:
I’ll tell you. They have lower IQs and less inhibitions because they evolved in a less demanding environment.
When this post attracted visitors, Hanania edited it to add:
Since many people have found this page through Google, I must recommend that everybody coming here read Race, Evolution and Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton. It’s a short book and available for free here. It’ll answer all your questions about race differences and how we know they have a biological basis.
We saw in Part 1 of my series on Belonging that Rushton’s work was denounced as racist and pseudoscientific by his own department.
Hanania has not merely said that people of color are genetically disposed to be unintelligent and loud. Hanania has a very definite picture of how people of color live:
Not too long ago I got lost in a black neighborhood and felt so unsafe that I turned around and took the longer way where I was going to avoid driving through the place. I saw blacks yelling at one another at the top of their lungs, walking out in front of cars, menacingly strutting with their pants hanging down. I felt a deep revulsion and found myself thankful that I could get out of there and leave the area behind. I can’t imagine what White South Africans go through, in a country politically, socially and culturally dominated by blacks. Even whites who’ve lived under tyrannies in the past must’ve felt less fear because of the similarities they felt between themselves and the rulers. I can only shudder at the thought of what life under black rule must be like.
People of color are not, for Hanania, merely doomed to live in this way amongst themselves. They are, Hanania regrets, doomed to be criminals. Just last year, Hanania writes (under his own name):
I grew up just outside of Chicago, and data on black criminality is to me just as unnecessary as sex comparisons of grip strength. Chicago is about a third black. Like many midwestern cities, it is extremely violent, with nearly all of the crime concentrated in black neighborhoods. When crime does spill over into the nicer areas, it’s committed by the people from those neighborhoods. I knew many family friends who were Middle Eastern immigrants and store owners in the city. Every now and then, some distant relation or acquaintance would get their store looted or, in at least one instance I remember, shot and killed. Michael Jordan’s greatness was much appreciated and respected but its consequences used to fill the community with fear, because another championship tended to create another possibility that stores would go up in flames. The Arabs would speak in shorthand. “What happened to Walid’s store?” “You know, the blacks…” “Ah.” Actually, they would say “the slaves,” if you want to really know how Arabs talk.
There is more to be said about Hanania’s views on race. Readers will be unsurprised to know that Hanania has held repulsive views on any number of other matters. But this is a series about human biodiversity, and I think we have seen enough to know where Hanania stands on the matter.
5. Policy recommendations
In Part 1 of this series, we saw that one of the problems with HBD is that it recommends a number of distasteful policies. We also saw that many of those engaging in dialogue about HBD are well aware of this fact. For example, we saw that Scott Alexander says in a review of Hanania’s book that:
He’s not writing this for you or me. He’s writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.
Hanania does want to gut civil rights law. But Hanania also uses his views on race to motivate a number of other policy proposals. For example, in his article “Why an alternative right is necessary,” Hanania quickly proposes a number of rather interesting policies:
Low-IQ Mexican immigration is the greatest threat to America. Anti-discrimination laws should be repealed not only because they’re unconstitutional and infringe on the right to free association, but because whites have very good reasons for avoiding NAMs [non-Asian minorities]. Schools should stop wasting time trying to close achievement gaps. And not only do whites have nothing to feel guilty about, they are the best thing to ever happen to blacks. Even ignoring race, humanity will not move forward through equality or by raising up the really stupid to the level of just plain stupid.
Elsewhere, Hanania is more specific. In an article entitled “Answering objections to eugenics“, Hanania confronts a conundrum:
Whenever I tell people I favor eugenics they tell me that the state shouldn’t have such power.
Hanania responds that the state should not only have this power, but also should use it to forcibly sterilize anyone with an IQ under 90.
It would be hard to abuse a law that forcibly sterilized everybody with an IQ under 90 provided that the person scored that low on an objective test blindly graded. Somebody who wants to argue that he had a bad day would have the right to an appeal, which would consist of another IQ test … Whatever we classify as the new [redacted slur], and I think it should be at least IQ 80 and probably 90 and below, we need to make sure that there are less of these people so that a free society can continue to exist.
Elsewhere, Hanania advocated a more pragmatic solution:
Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population?
This is frightening, because as we will see in the next post there does exist a charity which pays drug addicts to sterilize themselves, and Scott Alexander has offered to donate money to this very charity.
Like most of his ilk, Hanania has quite strong views about immigration. At one point, he said the quiet part out loud:
The ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.
There is a good deal more to be said here. But I am tired, I think we have seen enough, and there is still one more issue to address before closing.
6. Apology and reform
Last year, the Huffington Post published an investigation into Hanania’s racist views. With remarkably suspicious timing, Hanania posted an apology and recantation.
One thing to say is that this apology came far later than many of the interactions described in Section 3 of this post. But the most important thing to say about this apology is that it is both half-hearted and likely untrue.
After discussing “the nature of the recent journalistic attack and what it is trying to accomplish, and why I think it’s likely to fail,” Hanania goes on to explain how “over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.”
Most readers have been deeply suspicious of Hanania’s apology. In a moment eerily reminiscent of the Bostrom apology, Hanania finds himself unable to repudiate race science at the very place where it is mentioned in his apology:
One of the most dishonest parts of the Huffington Post hitpiece is the argument that I maintain “a creepy obsession with so-called race science” and talk about blacks being inherently more prone to crime. I do no such thing, and ultimately believe that what the sources of such disparities are doesn’t matter. We simply need to come down hard on crime.
Even this claim is more moderate than the sentiments expressed elsewhere in the apology, where Hanania describes race science as delivering “undeniable facts”.
The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races. My mistake in a previous life was assigning collective guilt based on certain undeniable facts.
I think that readers may place more trust in my assessment of Hanania’s recent views if that assessment is supported by others, so let me review a few of the many reactions which have questioned the sincerity of Hanania’s apology.
Jeet Heer, The Nation: The bigotry Hanania voiced earlier hasn’t disappeared; indeed, it is still explicit (although more politely expressed) in his writing … The younger writer is more callow and explicit, the current one adept at using the jargon of economics. But the essential idea being expressed is the same: The smart “groups” (whites and almost-whites like Hanania) should do intellectual work, while “Blacks and Mexicans” can be relegated to low-wage and low-status service jobs. It’s true that forgiveness is a virtue—and that we need to offer bigots a path to giving up their past prejudices. But forgiveness requires contrition … There’s zero evidence that Hanania has given up his core past beliefs.
Jack Crosbie (Discourse Blog): What makes all of this so disheartening is that most critical (or, really, even casual) readers of Hanania’s work can see that he hasn’t really changed a bit. He’s just gotten smarter.
Parker Molloy (The Present Age): This was not the story of someone who once held and pushed extreme white supremacist views and has since changed, but the story of a society that’s gotten significantly uglier over the past 15 years. Hanania hasn’t changed his views. In fact, he’s barely even moderated them for wider public consumption … Hanania claimed just last month that college African American Studies departments had been run by “street hustlers and illiterates.” In May, he tweeted that “we need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people,” lamenting that “Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it,” in defense of a wildly misleading and racist chart about “interracial crime.” Also in May, he referred to Black people as “animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.” Also in May, Hanania published a blog post titled, “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?” about why he treats the mere existence of trans people as worse than genocide (something others on the right have more-than-hinted they would be happy to carry out against trans people if given the opportunity), because he is “an individual concerned with truth.”
Lest it be objected that this is some kind of left-wing frame job, let’s look at what Counter Currents (described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “an epicenter of `academic’ white nationalism”) has to say about Hanania’s apology.
It is also clear that Hanania has not repudiated his race-realist beliefs. In a recent tweet, he pointed out that Hispanic children in America have higher IQs than the children of black African and Caribbean immigrants despite the fact that the latter are more likely to be well educated, insinuating that he believes there is a biological basis for this gap. The data he cited was from Human Varieties, an HBD blog that makes frequent mention of race and IQ. A few months ago, he critiqued the mainstream conservative argument that “culture” and “values” are responsible for East Asians’ high levels of academic achievement and economic growth and low levels of crime. Hanania has also written about black crime and mocked the notion that racism is the cause of black criminality. It makes sense; once one has become aware of racial differences, it is impossible to return to a state of blissful ignorance. But whereas Hanania’s race-realist beliefs once compelled him to oppose immigration, they now have become integrated into a classical liberal, capitalist, pro-open borders worldview.
Commentators from all sides of the aisle are nearly unanimous in thinking that Hanania has not changed his racist views, but rather wrapped them up into a more polite and acceptable package with a good chance of influencing public policy.
This does not stop Hanania’s defenders from using his alleged apology as an excuse for engagement. For example, the organizer who invited Hanania to Manifest cites as the second of three justifications for this invitation that:
“To err is human, to forgive, divine.” I believe in second chances; he’s publicly denounced his past views and announced an intention to do better. Such admission of wrongdoing strikes me as in keeping with the spirit of making public predictions. I’ve personally (and occasionally, publicly) held radioactive opinions, and I’m grateful to my friends and communities for calling me out while continuing to work with me.
Here, Hanania’s apology takes up a political purpose as a convenient excuse for reintegration into polite society, whatever the evidence of an actual change of heart.
7. Wrapping up
Today’s post discussed Richard Hanania. Although Hanania is probably the furthest removed from effective altruism of any figure to be discussed in this series, we have seen that effective altruists and their allies often interact with Hanania.
That is concerning, because we saw that Hanania expresses a number of vehemently racist views (including, but not limited to direct endorsement of HBD) and uses these views to ground troubling policy recommendations.
Hanania has, it is true, claimed to repudiate his previous beliefs. But we saw little evidence of genuine repudiation, and Hanania’s apology has widely been dismissed as insincere by commentators on all sides of the aisle.
The next post in this series will discuss the influence of HBD on Astral Codex Ten.