HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not correct … This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct … The public response to this is abysmally horrible … Reactionaries are almost the only people discussing the object-level problem AND the only people discussing the meta-level problem. Many of their insights seem important.
Scott Alexander, (Alleged) email to Topher Brennan
1. Introduction
This is Part 4 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. Part 3 discussed Richard Hanania.
Today’s post is the first of two discussing Scott Alexander. Through his blog, Astral Codex Ten (previously Slate Star Codex), Alexander has become a pillar of the rationalist community and an influential voice in the effective altruism movement. Beyond this, Alexander is widely read in Silicon Valley.
Alexander sees himself as providing one of the last true public forums in which those of any beliefs and persuasions can come together to talk honestly about what they believe and what matters most. This is, to a nontrivial extent, true of Alexander’s community, and that is to his credit.
However, communities that are open to all do tend to attract unsavory types, and it is perhaps unsurprising that purveyors of race science have slipped in. That will be the subject of the next post.
Today, I want to focus on Astral Codex Ten, as well as on Alexander’s own views. It has not escaped notice that Alexander himself exhibits some degree of sympathy for HBD and has given significant attention to both the topic and several of its leading proponents. I want to do what I can to explain what Alexander has said and done about HBD and how it relates to the effective altruism movement.
2. Preliminary notes
I want to begin with two notes. First, a content warning. This post explicitly discusses racism and sexism, including the work of prominent advocates of race science. There is also discussion of the potential policy implications of these views, many of which are rather extreme. There is a strong prevalence of dehumanizing language, views, and other content that many readers may find offensive. I have not made any effort to censor this content; indeed, I have sought it out.
Second, a note about authenticity. I have done my best to verify that the cited views in this post are the work of the authors they are attributed to. This is difficult because Alexander has alleged that some of the most troubling comments attributed to him are not his. My policy has been to stick with the sources whose authenticity I am most confident in, and to the best of my knowledge the authenticity of all passages quoted in this post has not been publicly disputed by their alleged authors. (Alexander declined a request for comment on the authenticity of passages quoted in this post). However, I am conscious of the possibility of error.
While I have closed comments on all posts in this series, I am highly open to correction on any matters of fact, and if I am wrong in attributing any views to an individual I will correct them and publicly apologize. You can reach me at reflectivealtruismeditor@gmail.com.
3. Relationship to effective altruism
Scott Alexander exercises enormous influence on the effective altruism movement. Part of Alexander’s influence is direct: we will see in Section 3.1 that Alexander is a substantial source of recruitment for effective altruism. Much of Alexander’s influence is indirect: we will see in Section 3.2 that The New Yorker is not exaggerating when it calls Scott Alexander’s blog “perhaps the premier public-facing venue of the `rationalist’ community.” This allows Alexander to influence effective altruism through his relationship to the rationalist community.
Alexander also writes directly about effective altruism on a number of occasions. I will discuss some of this writing in Section 3.3.
3.1 Direct migration
Scott Alexander is one of the most significant boosters of effective altruism. A consequence of this is that a measurable proportion of effective altruists were first exposed to effective altruism through the work of Scott Alexander, and consequently there is substantial overlap between the effective altruist community and readers of Astral Codex Ten.
The Effective Altruism Survey finds that between 5 to 10% of effective altruists first heard about effective altruism through Scott Alexander’s blog. Here are the proportion of respondents who first heard about EA through Slate Star Codex (SSC) or Astral Codex Ten (ACX) in the five most recent survey years, descending (2022, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017).
In some ways, this may understate the influence of Scott Alexander’s work on effective altruism. For example, when the latest (2022) version of the EA Survey asked respondents to select factors that were important for them getting involved with effective altruism, over 17% selected SSC/ACX.
Lest it be thought that these are idle causal relationships, it is worth mentioning that the top comment on the EA Forum thread introducing this section of the EA Survey is by Scott Alexander. Alexander complains that key effective altruist organizations such as Giving What We Can, Less Wrong and GiveWell are becoming less effective at recruiting effective altruists (indeed, many are not much more effective than Alexander himself).
Alexander is, I think, clearly aware of his influence on the effective altruist community and proud of it.
3.2 Migration through LessWrong
Many effective altruists came to effective altruism through the rationalist community, and in particular through LessWrong. Here are the results by year for sources where respondents first heard of effective altruism, with a particularly strong influence during the rationalist diaspora around 2014, focusing for concreteness on the comparison between Giving What We Can (a key effective altruist organization) and LessWrong.
I will discuss LessWrong in a separate post later in this series. However, it may be worth noting the very strong influence that Alexander exerts on the rationalist community, since the rationalist community has been so strongly involved with effective altruism.
Scott Alexander literally founded the LessWrong Community Census and ran the census for many years. The most recent census was not run by Alexander, but it nonetheless shows a sizable influence of Alexander’s thought on the community at large.
The Codex is a collection of 100 essays by Alexander. Lesswrong says that “the essays contained have been widely read within the rationality and effective altruism communities,” and they are not exaggerating. In the 2023 Lesswrong Community Census, a whopping 88% of respondents had heard of The Codex, 81% had read some of them, and almost half had read 50% or more. (The Codex is not a short read).
Over 3/4 of readers expressed some willingness to pay for a hard copy of The Codex, and over 1/4 expressed a willingness to pay at least fifty dollars for it.
Alexander’s strong degree of influence within the rationalist community gives him an indirect influence on effective altruism through rationalist migration into effective altruism. Alexander’s influence on rationalists also gives him a direct pathway to influence effective altruists, many of whom read and engage regularly with members of the rationalist community.
3.3 Writings about effective altruism
Alexander has engaged thoroughly with effective altruists throughout his career. Indeed, Alexander lists the EA Forum on his blogroll, and the previous iteration of his blog dedicated an entire section of links to effective altruist organizations and fora.
Alexander has consistently written in support of effective altruism.
This year, Alexander responded to Lyman Stone’s criticisms of effective altruism in an essay “Contra Stone on EA“.
In late 2023, in response to the boardroom drama at OpenAI and subsequent backlash against effective altruism, Alexander penned an essay “In continued defense of effective altruism” explaining why ” the movement is worth fighting for” and listing the movement’s accomplishments. The essay was, predictably, much-discussed and well-received on the EA Forum, and followed up by a second post on Alexander’s own blog.
In late 2022, following continued reporting on scandals within the effective altruism movement, Alexander wrote an essay entitled “If the media reported on other movements like it does effective altruism.” Alexander suggested that a variety of ridiculous results would follow, for example:
Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation.
A few months earlier, Alexander’s “Effective altruism as a tower of ideologies” suggested a metaphor for responding to critiques of effective altruism.
A few months earlier, Alexander’s “Criticism of criticism” suggested that effective altruists are, if anything, too receptive to criticism, motivated by the fact that his readers had asked him to feature a book review critical of effective altruism, of which Alexander remarks:
I wasn’t happy about it. I hate having to post criticism of EA. Not because EA is bad at taking criticism. The opposite: they like it too much. It almost feels like a sex thing.
This takes us back to mid-2022. There are, as readers might imagine, ongoing engagements between Alexander and effective altruists for many years before this. Interested readers can review the archives of Astral Codex Ten and Slate Star Codex for a more complete picture.
This completes our discussion of Alexander’s relationship to effective altruism. Now I turn to the main topic of this post: what does Alexander say about HBD?
4. Alexander’s views: The Brennan email
In 2021, the New York Times published an article about Alexander’s blog, Slate Star Codex. One of the article’s chief complaints centered on allegations of racism and sexism by Alexander. The article wrote:
As he explored science, philosophy and A.I., he also argued that the media ignored that men were often harassed by women. He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books. He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”
In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
In 2017, Mr. Siskind published an essay titled “Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes.” The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else — a memo he was later fired over. One Slate Star Codex reader on Reddit noted the similarities to the writing on the blog. Mr. Siskind, posting as Scott Alexander, urged this reader to tone it down. “Huge respect for what you’re trying, but it’s pretty doomed,” he wrote.
Alexander and his supporters denied the allegations, often effusively. In response, Topher Brennan leaked an email (allegedly) by Scott Alexander in which Alexander explicitly claims that HBD is “probably partially correct” and “important,” urging investigation into “a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses” as well.
I am not able to confirm the veracity of the email, so readers are asked to use their own judgment, but I am also not aware of credible attempts by anyone, including Alexander, to deny the veracity of this email (Alexander declined to comment on the veracity of the email. I did check for other credible attempts to deny its veracity.). Here are the contents of the email:
I said a while ago I would collect lists of importantly correct neoreactionary stuff to convince you I’m not wrong to waste time with neoreactionaries. I would have preferred to collect stuff for a little longer, but since it’s blown up now, let me make the strongest argument I can at this point.
1. HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not correct
http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/the-facts-that-need-to-be-explained/
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/survey-of-psychometricians-finds-isteve.html
This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct. See eg
http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/theorie/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed.
(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by “appreciate”, I mean that if you ever do, I will probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)
2. The public response to this is abysmally horrible
See for example Konk’s comment http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jpj/open_thread_for_february_1824_2014_ala7, which I downvoted because I don’t want it on LW, but which is nevertheless correct and important.
See also http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/crazy-talk
3. Reactionaries are almost the only people discussing the object-level problem AND the only people discussing the meta-level problem. Many of their insights seem important. At the risk (well, certainty) of confusing reactionary insights with insights I learned about through Reactionaries, see:
http://cthulharchist.tumblr.com/post/76667928971/when-i-was-a-revolutionary-marxist-we-were-all-in
http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/review-of-exodus-by-paul-collier/
4. These things are actually important
I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).
I think they’re correct that “you are racist and sexist” is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream – like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionally white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I’m not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is “a lot”.
5. They are correct about a bunch of scattered other things
– the superiority of corporal punishment to our current punishment system (google “all too humane” in http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/). Robin Hanson also noted this, but there’s no shame in independently rediscovering a point made by Robin Hanson. I think the Reactionaries are also correct about that it is very worrying that our society can’t amalgamate or discuss this belief.
– various scattered historical events which they seem to be able to parse much better than anyone else. See for example http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/review-of-the-last-lion-by-paul-reid/
– Moldbug’s theory of why modern poetry is so atrocious, which I will not bore you by asking you to read.
– Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing that more people than just Michael should be paying attention to.
6. A general theory of who is worth paying attention to.
Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t work. Even things of theirs I didn’t know – let’s say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn’t work that I had never read before – doesn’t provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new (ie I so strongly assume such studies should exist that learning they actually exist changes nothing for me).
The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of.
The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.
7. My behavior is the most appropriate reaction to these facts
I am monitoring Reactionaries to try to take advantage of their insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing Reactionaries for several reasons.
First is a purely selfish reason – my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.
Second is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and social justice, and a few other things – while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional-gender-talk and the feudalism-talk – would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working – as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven’t gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought. Becoming a Reactionary would be both stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts of Reaction while almost mentioning my appreciation for the good parts of their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And in fact I think it’s possible (though I can’t prove) that my FAQ inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries.
Finally, there’s a social aspect. They tend to be extremely unusual and very smart people who have a lot of stuff to offer me. I am happy to have some of them (not Jim!) as blog commenters who are constantly informing me of cool new things (like nydwrace linking me to the McDonalds article yesterday)
8. SERIOUSLY, SERIOUSLY, the absurdity heuristic doesn’t work
You’re into cryonics, so you’ve kind of lost the right to say “These people, even though they’re smart, are saying something obviously stupid, so we don’t have to listen to them”
Drew has even less of a right to say that – he seems to be criticizing the Reactionaries on the grounds of “you wouldn’t pay attention to creationists, would you?” even while he discovered Catholic philosophy and got so into it that he has now either converted to Catholicism or is strongly considering doing so.
If there is a movement consisting of very smart people – not pseudo-intellectual people, like the type who write really clever-looking defenses of creationism – then in my opinion it’s almost always a bad idea to dismiss it completely.
Also, I should have mentioned this on your steelmanning creationism thread, but although I feel no particular urge to steelman young earth creationism, it is actually pretty useful to read some of their stuff. You never realize how LITTLE you know about evolution until you read some Behe and are like “I know that can’t be correct … but why not?” Even if it turned out there was zero value to anything any Reactionary ever said, by challenging beliefs of mine that would otherwise never be challenged they have forced me to up my game and clarify my thinking. That alone is worth ten thousand hours reading things I already agree with on RationalWiki.
I think it is worth taking some time to unpack what Alexander says here, and what can be learned from it.
5. Learning from the Brennan email
In this section, I ask what is wrong with Alexander’s (alleged) email to Brennan and what can be learned from the email. Let’s start with what is wrong with the email. I want to discuss six points in particular, although there is more to be said.
First, Alexander more or less explicitly endorses the truth of HBD. Alexander leads with the claim that “HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not correct,” and lists HBD as one of the “new and important things” he learns from neoreactionaries. We saw in Part 1 of this series why it is wrong to accept or propound HBD.
Second, Alexander cites a familiar range of HBD advocates as “evidence” for his views. One of those cited is Steven Sailer, who we saw in Part 1 of this series was the originator of the modern racist usage of the term “human biodiversity” and is described by leading watchdogs as a white nationalist and a racist. Others include hbdchick (one of the most prominent HBD bloggers), and John Fuerst, whose blog Occidental Ascent promotes the usual range of reprehensible views. Fuerst has, for example, argued that “Because Blacks are cognitively less apt, colonialism was a net good; it jump started African societal development”. Giving a platform to these figures helps them to further their racist agendas, and treating their writings as serious evidence in favor of scientific theories paints a dim picture of Alexander’s ability to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information.
Third, Alexander is entirely too close to neoreactionaries on many issues. As background the neoreactionary (“dark enlightenment”) movement advocates a return to authoritarian government and the foundation of a white ethno-state, among other rather heretical views. Its chief proponents, Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, are well-known racists. This is not a movement that civilized society should want anything to do with. To his credit, Alexander has penned well-known criticisms of a number of neoreactionary beliefs. However, Alexander is also uncomfortably close to the neoreactionaries in many ways, as are many members of the rationalist community: we saw in Part 3 of this series that Manifest 2024 was followed by an afterparty at Moldbug’s house
Alexander expresses his desire “to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought” and sends “goodwill to the Reactionary community” as well as a wish “to improve their thinking so that they become stronger”. Among the “good parts” of Reactionary thought, Alexander explicitly lists HBD along with “the crime stuff, or the WWII history”. I think that, by now, readers can guess what “the crime stuff” is, but the WWII history is no better. As one of various “scattered historical events which they [neoreactionaries] seem able to parse much better than anyone else,” Alexander cites a book review arguing that Churchill should have allied with Hitler against Stalin.
Alexander also suggests keeping neoreactionaries’ “correct criticisms of … social justice.” I spoke in my series on belonging about effective altruists’ lukewarm-at-best response to the Black Lives Matter movement and other important social justice movements of our time. I suspect that views like Alexander’s go some way towards explaining why the reaction has been so cold.
Fourth, Alexander endorses troubling policy suggestions. We saw in Part 1 of this series that HBD has motivated a number of troubling policy proposals typically associated with the far right. In this email, Alexander endorses at least four troubling suggestions with policy relevance, or as Alexander puts it, “a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct.”
(1) Echoing calls to stem a nonwhite crime wave, Alexander holds that the neoreactionaries “successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT”.
(2) Alexander calls for serious investigation into HBDchick’s suggestion that genetic in-breeding might increase what HBDchick calls the “altruism genes” in the human population.
(3) We saw above that Alexander agrees with neoreactionaries’ “correct criticisms of … social justice”.
(4) Alexander laments that “race issues” discredited IQ tests, suggesting that many societal ills would be solved by using IQ tests as a credential. Alexander and those he cites are quite fond of arguing that IQ tests, which were literally introduced by eugenicists, produce lower scores for people of color. This would imply a form of reverse affirmative action, in which a credential known to disfavor people of color were to take the place of, if I am reading Alexander correctly, a more substantive credential: college education. It is one thing to be opposed to affirmative action, but quite another to propose policies that push in the opposite direction.
Fifth, Alexander laments that groups far from the mainstream are “For complicated reasons … disproportionally white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this”. I must say that in many cases, these reasons do not appear overly complicated to me. The neoreactionaries, for example, are fond of what Alexander euphemistically terms “traditional-gender-talk,” and Alexander himself complains that “the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”.
(Alexander does, of course, complain that there is “NO NEED TO TAKE THIS ONE SENTENCE OUT OF CONTEXT AND TRY TO SPREAD IT ALL OVER THE INTERNET,” but readers are welcome to read the sentence in context and see if it has been misrepresented. He has said similar things elsewhere, for example:
The object level beliefs [of feminism] are almost entirely unobjectionable, but when you look at the meta-level beliefs it starts looking like the entire philosophy is centered around figuring out clever ways to insult and belittle other people and make it impossible for them to call you on it. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ is my attempt to barely scratch the surface of this. The Meditations have more. I know you’re going to say I’m reading the wrong Tumblrs, and some particular scholarly feminist book hidden in a cave in Bangladesh and guarded by twelve-armed demons contains brilliant meta-level insights. But every time I trek to Bangladesh and slay the demons to get it, the book turns out to be more complicated techniques for insulting people and muddying issues, and then the person claims okay, fine, but there’s another even better book hidden in Antarctica and guarded by ice trolls where all the great insights lie. At this point I’m done with it.
There are two natural explanations for this stance towards feminist authors, and neither is especially appealing. One explanation would be that Alexander has simply given up on treating feminists as reasonable people worth engaging with. This explanation is offered by Nathan Robinson for Current Affairs:
I have no doubt that writers like … Scott Alexander enjoy talking to “people who disagree with them.” I am sure that Alexander would be charitable and fair-minded and polite to me, as he was in his email. But my whole point is that this fair-mindedness and charity is applied selectively, that I get it as an educated white guy who enjoys arguing, but the “social justice warriors” are treated as “beyond reason” in the same way that they are accused of treating others as “beyond reason.”
A second and potentially complementary explanation would be that Alexander sympathizes with many of the views that feminists criticize. For example, in “Radicalizing the romanceless,” Alexander claims that “everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate” and suggests that single men seeking advice and reading material might turn to the manosphere for help:
I think a lot of the appropriate material is concentrated in the manosphere, ie the people who do not hate your guts merely for acknowledging the existence of the issue. Yes, it is interspersed with poisonous beliefs about women being terrible, but if you have more than a quarter or so of a soul, it is pretty easy to filter those out and concentrate on the good ones … Stop blaming the men’s movement for the problem and notice the more fundamental problem that some parts of the men’s movement – as well as some parts of feminism are honestly trying to work on.
Such remarks lend one to believe that Alexander’s stance on the comparative merits of feminist scholarship and online material from the manosphere may have more to do with his dismissal of feminists or his enthusiasm for the views they reject than with an impartial assessment of the quality and rigor of sources contained in each group.
End digression.)
This goes far beyond the crises around race and gender in the effective altruist community, which have already been covered in leading media outlets, creating a hostile climate which quite handily explains why many of the target groups are disproportionately white and male. Alexander is quite right that groups who behave in these ways “have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for” their behaviors. Perhaps one day they will be so good as to change these behaviors. They might start by changing their reading materials.
Sixth, Alexander seems more concerned with the quantity than the quality of his followers. Alexander justifies engaging with racists by arguing that such posts gain him followers:
My blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.
The problem is that most people encouraged to follow Alexander’s blog in light of Alexander having engaged seriously with race science and other troubling topics are quite likely to be on the wrong side of these topics. This creates, as we will see later, an environment in which blog comments become increasingly disturbing, and may push Alexander himself to write more troubling content in an effort to please readers. Further, to the extent that many readers of Alexander’s blog have been drawn into the rationalist and effective altruist movements, attracting readers by engaging with race science may tend to increase the number of such individuals who go on to engage with the rationalist and effective altruist movements.
Before closing, let’s pause to draw a lesson from Alexander’s email. Alexander pinpoints the mechanism by which he has gone wrong. Alexander believes that he can seriously engage with racists and fascists without being swayed to adopt their mistaken views: “The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out”. However, we saw above that Alexander’s examples of “new and important things” he has learned from the neoreactionaries are decidedly terrible. This suggests that Alexander may have been overconfident in his ability to deal rationally with exposure to corrupting stimuli. (While at Oxford, I heard a similar story about a group of rationalists who decided that they were rational enough to enjoy the benefits of addictive drugs without becoming addicted. They did, of course, end up thoroughly addicted). The broader lesson is that effective altruists would do well to be wary of detailed engagement with racists and fascists, lest some of these individuals’ views should rub off on the community, as we will see throughout the series that they have.
6. Further behaviors
I would be remiss if I did not remind readers that not all of Alexander’s contributions to this space are bad. Alexander has penned one of the most successful and best-known criticisms of the excesses of the reactionary movement, in the form of his 2013 “Anti-reactionary FAQ“, which has inspired useful follow-ups from others. Alexander does write some posts supportive of the cause of social justice, such as his “Social justice for the highly demanding of rigor,” though the implication that rigor is not already present in discussions of social justice may not be appreciated by all readers. Alexander has drawn attention to the real and important phenomenon of sexual harassment perpetrated by women, or against men. And we will see below that Alexander calls out Richard Hanania for his strange obsession with office romance.
At the same time, Alexander has said and done a number of concerning things in this space. Let’s review a few of the worst examples.
6.1. Project prevention
Project Prevention is a non-profit organization that offers cash to drug addicts in exchange for accepting long-term birth control, including permanent sterilization. In the words of their founder Barbara Harris:
We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children.
Harris does not merely want to sterilize drug addicts. She also echoes longstanding plans to sterilize people of color, telling The Guardian that she would like to expand into Haiti:
We’re going to offer depo [contraceptive] injections every three months to women in exchange for food cards. The women in Haiti are having children they can’t even feed, so why are they getting pregnant? Just think about how much suffering that’s going to prevent.
This is the type of slide into open eugenics that often befalls proponents of HBD. It would not do to treat such a project as a viable charitable endeavor, yet Alexander appears to have done exactly that.
In his livejournal (squid314), Alexander writes a post entitled “Constructing fictional eugenics“. The post asks “if you had to design a eugenics program, how would you do it?“. This is, Alexander hastens to add, merely an imaginative exercise.
A reader replies: “Paying undesirables to be sterilised is happening! There’s a charity that pays drug addicts £200 to be snipped: Project Prevention. Seems like a good idea to me.”
Surprising no one, Alexander’s hypothetical exercise in imaginative eugenics becomes a bit less hypothetical at this point. Alexander replies: “I…actually think I am probably going to donate to that charity next time I get money.” To his credit, Alexander continues with a qualification: “I’d feel better if it were something more reversible.” But this is hardly enough to redeem Alexander here.
(Julia Wise – who works on the Community Health Team and formerly served as president of Giving What We Can – also chimes in on the same thread to express interest:
Actually, they offer recipients a choice of long-term birth control methods, and most don’t choose sterilization: http://www.projectprevention.org/statistics/
It seems like a really good idea, but I want to know more about what it costs. The $200 that they give the birth control recipients, not what it costs to run the whole thing. I’m contacting them for their financial info.
Wise asked me to include the following remarks on this comment:
I wrote this comment 12 years ago. At the time, I was working as a social worker in a jail, providing mental health services primarily to women with both substance abuse and mental health diagnoses. I saw the difficulty they had in accessing any kind of healthcare, including birth control. I thought that free access to reversible long-lasting birth control like IUDs or implants, which I myself have used, would be helpful for the women I was working with. I still think that.
It was important to me that the charity offered a choice of birth control methods, and that recipients mostly chose reversible methods. I regret that my comment didn’t make clear that I oppose coercing anyone’s use of birth control, and I think permanent sterilization would be especially inappropriate to push. I also find it repulsive to call any human beings “undesirables,” as someone else’s comment did. I wish I could edit my comment to make this clear, but the site has been down for years.
My memory is that I looked at the charity in question, but was unable to get financial information on what it cost them to provide birth control. I never donated to that charity or to any other project doing anything like this, except I think once to the UN Population Fund. I don’t remember seeing anything like the Barbara Harris quotes you cite.
I don’t want my words to be taken to mean I ever supported coercing people in their reproductive decisions, or that I ever viewed disadvantaged people (like the clients I worked with) as being less worthy of human decency. That’s not true.
)
This isn’t the first time that Alexander has had a brush with eugenics. In a discussion of universal basic income, Alexander writes:
I’ve said many times that I think the Reactionaries have some good ideas, but the narrative in which they place them turns me off … Even though I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics, I don’t think these are two things that go well together – making the income conditional upon sterilization is a little too close to coercion for my purposes. Still, probably better than what we have right now.
Let’s be clear about what is said. Alexander did not merely say that he likes eugenics. He said that it would be better to make the poor accept sterilization in order to receive a guaranteed basic income than to maintain the system that we have now. To his credit, Alexander expresses some trepidation about the coercive aspects of such a system, but Alexander’s hesitation towards such a policy is orders of magnitude beneath what it should be.
Alexander has elsewhere been quite clear that he supports open dialogue about eugenics. For example, the final line in a long fictional dialogue about eugenics written by Alexander is delivered by a character named Beroe:
Beroe: … I cannot deny that past atrocities cast deontological shadows, making us wary of doing anything in their vicinity. Indeed, it seems like this is the origin of deontology, and all moral systems beyond a naive act utilitarianism – that sometimes our attempts to do good will end in evil, and so we shut off large categories of apparently-good things because they resemble those that have historically ended in evil more often than we expected. If I have any argument at all here, beyond a simple “well, my intuitions about whether to do this say no in this particular case”, it’s that we should rarely let an atrocity cast shadows over speech, belief, or opinion, because once we ban those things, we lose the capacity for self-correction. I may deny your right to save the whales, but I will defend to the death your right to argue that the whales should be saved without facing the least bit of social sanction for your views.
The dialogue concludes in Alexander’s own voice:
Character views are not author views, but I will admit to agreeing with Beroe’s final paragraph above.
It will doubtless be claimed that Alexander is merely endorsing open dialogue. Perhaps that is true. However, if this were the case, Alexander would certainly have missed a clear opportunity to distance himself from some of the other, more extreme positions discussed in this dialogue.
This failure of distancing becomes more ominous given the opinions about Project prevention and about tying universal basic income to sterilization expressed above. Matters get worse when we consider what Alexander thinks about Charles Murray.
6.2. Charles Murray
Charles Murray is a political scientist. His book, The bell curve, co-authored with Richard Herrnstein, defended the core claim of HBD: that IQ differences between racial groups have a substantial genetic basis, and expressed concern about “dysgenic pressures” within the United States. Since then, Murray’s behavior has not been much better.
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Murray’s work as “using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor”
Murray’s work has been described by the New York Times as “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship.” It has, on the other hand, been given a moderately positive and well-received review on LessWrong, a point to which we will return later in this series.
Scott Alexander was once asked whom he would name to various high positions in the US government if Alexander were the president of the United States. A number of Alexander’s picks are troubling, but most to the point, Alexander says that he would appoint Charles Murray as welfare czar. (After listing a few more picks, including Stephen Hsu, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, Alexander says that: “Everything else can be filled by randomly selected black women so that I can brag about how diverse I am.“)
In case it is not already clear what Murray might do as welfare czar, here are some comments that Murray made about the prospects of providing job training for mothers receiving welfare:
You want to have a job training program for welfare mothers? You think that’s going to cure the welfare problem? Well, when you construct that job training program and try to decide what jobs they might qualify for, you had better keep in mind that the mean IQ of welfare mothers is somewhere in the 80s, which means that you have certain limitations in what you’re going to accomplish.
I hope it is clear that an individual with such opinions would not make a good welfare czar.
6.3. Review of Hanania
We spoke in Part 3 of this series about Richard Hanania. We saw there that Hanania endorses a number of troubling views, including an expressed 99% confidence in the reality and genetic basis for a black-white IQ gap of at least 5-10 points, a proposal to forcibly sterilize everyone with an IQ under 90, and a suggestion that we should aim to force all post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave the United States. This is not a person with whom one should engage sympathetically. Alexander’s treatment of Hanania has been, however, rather warmer than one might expect.
Let’s compare two reviews of Hanania’s most recent book, The origins of woke. The first review is by Professor Tyler Austin Harper, at The Atlantic. The second review is by Scott Alexander on his blog.
Harper argues that Hanania’s book is:
Part of a broader far-right trend that we might call “Trojan-horsing”: using the trappings of scholarship to lure college-educated readers who are put off by the excesses of “woke” culture down a reactionary or racist rabbit hole.
On the surface, Hanania argues in an almost-scholarly fashion for historical claims about the origins of US civil rights law, and catalogs some downsides of current laws. But that isn’t really Hanania’s project: what Hanania really wants is to use this surface discussion of civil rights law as a Trojan horse to introduce more radical ideas. Harper continues:
Hanania has a habit of punctuating dense, judiciously footnoted paragraphs—which cite academic books, law reviews, and government documents—with racist or sexist claims that aren’t backed up with evidence. For example, a section on the paradoxes of “disparate impact” laws provides several pages of properly cited legal history before arriving at this claim: “An employer who wants to use intelligence tests to hire is potentially barred from doing so because whites could do too well.” This claim, that white candidates would be likely to outscore Black candidates on intelligence tests, is not footnoted or otherwise supported with evidence. Another well-footnoted paragraph about the increasing prominence of equity discourse in university admissions, government institutions, and grant-awarding organizations ends with an unsupported, sexist assertion. “While there may be some women able to meet the same standards as men,” Hanania declares, “it strains credulity to believe that, given the gender gap in math and science proficiency, a meritocratic system would produce a perfect equality of outcomes.” Again, a paragraph full of footnotes and well-supported claims ends with a piece of bigotry unsupported by evidence. This pattern repeats throughout the book: Evidence-free racist and sexist claims are nestled amidst properly cited history and legal analysis, providing the former with the veneer of scholarly respectability. In the cases where Hanania does go through the motions of tacking on a footnote to one of his racist musings, the source cited tends to be another white supremacist.
(Indeed, the unfootnoted claims about intelligence tests mask an uncomfortable history: Hanania’s primary example of a company prevented from using intelligence tests to screen applicants turns out to be a company which had explicitly banned black workers from holding senior positions until the passage of the Civil Rights act, and then deliberately and demonstrably instituted a series of tests to help keep black workers out of these positions in a nominally objective manner).
Harper continues:
He frequently expresses frat-boy nostalgia for a world where offensive jokes and ass-pinching are part of office life. He asserts that “the workplace has been cleansed of heterosexual relationships” by policies that discourage office romance, laments that hiring and firing women on the basis of hotness is no longer legal, suggests that the idea that bosses cannot solicit sexual favors from their employees rests on a “badly reasoned” interpretation of the law, and heavily implies that sexual harassment should count as free speech.
Hanania himself is open about his strategy. In a response to Alexander’s review of his book, also published on Alexander’s blog, Hanania writes:
I prefer what Scott calls the “meta-honesty” approach, where you tell people exactly what you’re not going to talk about and why. This means that the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out what you think, while making things hard for the cancellers and political opponents. This is a political book, and I sometimes do politics, which I justify with the meta-honesty approach.
Hanania knows exactly what he is doing in writing this book, and so, I presume, does Alexander. Indeed, Alexander writes:
My impression of Hanania’s place in the ecosystem is 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.
Given this understanding, it is deeply troubling that Alexander would choose to write a neutral review of Hanania’s book on a well-trafficked blog, focusing primarily on the first-order arguments made by Hanania, and concluding:
Read this book if you want a well-written expose of the past fifty years of civil rights decisions. Or read it in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order 11246 gets repealed on January 21, 2025.
Alexander knows full well that Hanania cares little for academic discussion of civil rights law, and more for using civil rights law to generate discussion around reactionary ideas about race, sex, gender and related issues. Alexander knows that reviewing the book in this way, on a blog with readers like his, will generate exactly the wrong type of discussion and lend publicity to far-right ideas. But Alexander goes on and reviews the book anyways.
Alexander does, to his credit, call out Hanania for his fetishistic obsession with office relationships, writing:
I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here.
But Alexander does not similarly call out the race science underlying Hanania’s work. Why not? Alexander seems to suggest that he refrains from calling Hanania out on racism in part because he has sympathy for some of Hanania’s racist views:
I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn’t talk about it, because it scares people. (I’m generally against “calling people out” for believing in race realism. I think people should be allowed to hide beliefs that they’d get punished for not hiding. I sympathize with some of these positions and place medium probability on some weak forms of them.
It should, in this light, be no surprise that Steven Sailer himself shows up in the comments section of Alexander’s review, and that Sailer’s comments are then highlighted by Alexander in a follow-up thread to the original review. Sailer “describes his personal experience” of being investigated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for which Alexander expresses moderate sympathy.
Alexander does, somewhat conveniently, fail to mention an internal dispute between two alt-right strategies raised by Sailer in reply to Alexander’s review. Sailer writes:
Hanania goes on to outline his political strategy for rolling back the current legal/regulatory regime. But perhaps what we need is to roll forward civil rights law to actively protect whites in this era of institutionalized racist antiwhite hate. For example, mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training should be seen as prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment for whites. I outlined some principles to guide legal reform.
I will omit Sailer’s rather unorthodox principles for legal reform, which follow below the quoted paragraph. The point is this: Sailer’s comment and the discussion that follows show precisely how a surface-level discussion of civil rights law quickly descends into an opportunity to spread racist ideas and discuss how those ideas may be enshrined into policy. Alexander’s engagement with Sailer shows a talent for focusing pointedly on the surface-level discussion while leaving the rest unsaid.
Just which “weak forms” of these more troubling positions does Alexander place “medium probability” on? As Hanania would put it, the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out, but it is at the same time frustratingly hard for critics to prove anything definite.
6.4 Views about racism
One of the favorite strategies of those with questionable beliefs about race is to claim that racism is a matter of intention rather than belief. As long as you do not actively and visibly harbor ill intentions towards racial minorities, you can believe whatever you want without being racist towards them.
We saw some echoes of this position in my discussion of Bostrom’s email and apology. In his original email, Bostrom worries that people:
Would think that I were a “racist”: that I disliked black people and thought that it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t. It’s just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by “smart” and “stupid”.
Here Bostrom proposes to distance beliefs about the intelligence of people of color from dislike of people of color and suggests that beliefs, decoupled from dislike, avoid racism. Indeed, we saw that even in his apology Bostrom refuses to distance himself from racist beliefs about race and intelligence:
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.
This move to create a separation between belief and intention creates a space in which racist beliefs can be excused as mere scientific speculation or question-asking, so long as they are not accompanied by racist intentions. We see a similar move by Alexander in his “Against murderism.” Here Alexander considers three definitions of racism:
1. Definition By Motives: An irrational feeling of hatred toward some race that causes someone to want to hurt or discriminate against them.
2. Definition By Belief: A belief that some race has negative qualities or is inferior, especially if this is innate/genetic.
3. Definition By Consequences: Anything whose consequence is harm to minorities or promotion of white supremacy, regardless of whether or not this is intentional.
Alexander argues that “in real life, definition by motive usually trumps definition by belief” and that motives both do and should usually be determinative in allegations of racism. That is, one can believe without racism that people of color are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent or more criminal than others, so long as one does not dislike them or believe that these unfortunate facts can be held against them.
Elsewhere, Alexander has expressed quite strong opinions about allegations of racism. In his “Social justice and words, words words“, Alexander writes:
“Racism” and “privilege” and all the others are exactly what everyone loudly insists they are not – weapons – and weapons all the more powerful for the fact that you are not allowed to describe them as such or try to defend against them. The social justice movement is the mad scientist sitting at the control panel ready to direct them at whomever she chooses. Get hit, and you are marked as a terrible person who has no right to have an opinion and who deserves the same utter ruin and universal scorn as Donald Sterling. Appease the mad scientist by doing everything she wants, and you will be passed over in favor of the poor shmuck to your right and live to see another day. Because the power of the social justice movement derives from their control over these weapons, their highest priority should be to protect them, refine them, and most of all prevent them from falling into enemy hands … If I am right, then people’s response to these words should be a frantic game of hot potato where they attack like a cornered animal against anyone who tries to use the words on them, desperately try to throw them at somebody else instead, and dispute the definitions like their lives depend on it.
Here Alexander suggests that allegations of racism are weapons, and that the proper reaction to them is to fight at all costs.
Other posts by Alexander, such as his “Kolmogorov Complicity,” have been widely regarded as masked defenses of engagement with race science. In a surface discussion of Church heretics and skeptical Stalinist bureaucrats, Alexander suggests we might aim:
To build a whisper network … a system that reliably communicates the state of society … They have to help people get through their edgelord phase as quickly as possible. “No, you’re not allowed to say this. Yes, it could be true. No, you’re not allowed to say this one either. Yes, that one also could be true as best we can tell. This thing here you actually are allowed to say still, and it’s pretty useful, so do try to push back on that and maybe we can defend some of the space we’ve still got left … They have to find at-risk thinkers who had started to identify holes in the orthodoxy, communicate that they might be right but that it could be dangerous to go public, fill in whatever gaps are necessary to make their worldview consistent again, prevent overcorrection, and communicate some intuitions about exactly which areas to avoid. For this purpose, they might occasionally let themselves be seen associating with slightly heretical positions, so that they stand out to proto-heretics as a good source of information. They might very occasionally make calculated strikes against orthodox overreach in order to relieve some of their own burdens. The rest of the time, they would just stay quiet and do good work in their own fields.
Alexander could, of course, have been talking about any number of whisper networks. On the surface, Alexander is talking about heretical Catholic monks and concerned Stalinist bureaucrats. Alexander could have been talking about them. It is, after all, well known that Catholic monks and Stalinist bureaucrats must be helped through their edgelord phases. And one does know how the Orthodox Church tends to overreach. Alexander could have been talking about that. He could have been.
7. Conclusion
Today’s post discussed views expressed by Scott Alexander on his blogs Astral Codex Ten and Slate Star Codex, as well as a variety of other venues. We saw that, if leaked emails are to be believed, Alexander has considerable sympathy for HBD, urges investigation into a variety of other HBD-like hypotheses, and draws some other intriguing lessons from the reactionaries.
We saw that elsewhere Alexander demonstrated an intention to donate to a charity which paid drug addicts to chemically sterilize themselves, that he suggested he might nominate Charles Murray as welfare czar if he woke up as the president of the United States, that he somewhat sympathetically reviewed Hanania’s book which he acknowledged to be aiming at the overturning of US civil rights law, and that Alexander has worked to promote the idea that beliefs about intelligence are not sufficient grounds to make one’s views racist.
This is not the kind of behavior that one hopes to see from a figure whose influence is as great as Alexander’s. It is, regrettably, behavior that has rubbed off on many members of Alexander’s immediate community, and more broadly on some elements of the rationalist and effective altruist movements. The next post in this series will discuss the prevalence of, and attitudes towards race science within the community surrounding Alexander’s blog.