What’s now “The Motte” was a single weekly Culture War thread on r/slatestarcodex. People would typically post links to a news story or an essay and share their thoughts. It was by far the most popular thread any given week, and it totally dominated the subreddit. You came to r/slatestarcodex for the Culture War thread. If I’m not being generous, I might describe it as an outlet for people to complain about the excesses of “social justice.” … Eventually, Scott and the other moderators decided they didn’t want to be associated with the Culture War thread anymore … So the Culture War thread moved to its own subreddit called r/TheMotte.
Trexofwanting, “The Motte Postmortem“
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.
1. Introduction
This is Part 6 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.
Part 4 discussed work by Scott Alexander. Part 5 discussed the community surrounding Alexander’s blog.
(Some readers have expressed skepticism about my concerns regarding Alexander’s writing. I would direct those readers to Alexander’s recent post entitled “How to stop worrying and love Lynn’s national IQ estimates.”)
Today’s post picks up where Part 5 left off, with the cancellation of the culture war threads on the Slate Star Codex subreddit. Did “culture war” discussions cease when the thread was canceled? Unfortunately, they did not. They moved to a new home. Today’s post is about that new home.
2. Origins
2.1 Subreddit
In Part 5 of this series, we discussed the subreddit associated with Slate Star Codex. We saw that this subreddit came to be associated with a “culture war” series of weekly posts, which featured some of the edgiest content on the subreddit.
We also saw that Alexander eventually put an end to the culture war series. In closing the series, Alexander may have been concerned about reputational risks, but he was hardly apologetic, proclaiming “the thread is dead, long live the thread” and advertising:
As a final middle-finger at the people who killed the Culture War thread, I’d like to advertise r/TheMotte, its new home, in the hopes that this whole debacle Streisand-Effects it to the stratosphere.
With these words, a new subreddit called The Motte formed with the express purpose of preserving the Culture War Thread.
This is not just Alexander’s version of events. This version of events is expressly confirmed by a number of individuals associated with The Motte. Most directly, one frequent poster Vincent Waters, who we will meet later in this post, writes:
What is The Motte? There’s the obvious historical answer: We used to post in the culture war threads on /r/slatestarcodex, but Scott did not want to be associated with us for various reasons, so a spin-off subreddit called The Motte was formed.
A moderator of The Motte (who we will also encounter later in this post) describes The Motte as:
A splinter group that initially rose organically out of a thread in the SSC subreddit intended to contain “Culture War” issues, the range of social and political topics that involve intense societal disagreement and polarization.
And a famous postmortem of The Motte writes:
What’s now “The Motte” was a single weekly Culture War thread on r/slatestarcodex. People would typically post links to a news story or an essay and share their thoughts.
As might have been expected, behavior in this splinter group soon became worse than even the behavior witnessed on the original Slate Star Codex culture war threads.
2.2 Website
That was, however, not the end of it. Around 2022, The Motte came under fire by Reddit administrators for its rather unusual content.
In a post eerily reminiscent of Alexander’s original presentation of The Motte, the lead moderator of The Motte proclaimed, “The Motte is dead. Long live the Motte” and announced the formation of an independent website where The Motte could proceed without oversight. Again, the connection to the culture war thread was explicit:
We have, once again, a blank canvas; once again, we need you to fill it in. The first week or two is vital to getting this thing off the ground. Visit, register, post in the Culture War thread, post non-Culture-War stuff elsewhere; you know the drill by now, and we haven’t made any major changes to the basic concept of this community. This has been a really weird ride, and with luck, it will keep being a weird ride for at least a few more years. Re-join The Motte.
Discussion soon became ever more extreme. We were told, for example, that “Black people are to other people of color what white people are to black people” and treated to reviews of books such as Terry Martin’s The affirmative action empire. [Edit: A reader suggests that the Martin review wasn’t that bad, and recommends the following example instead.] And some users who had followed The Motte this far refused to follow further. For example, the author of the above-mentioned postmortem writes:
Eventually, Scott and the other moderators decided they didn’t want to be associated with the Culture War thread anymore … So the Culture War thread moved to its own subreddit called r/TheMotte. All of the same criticisms persisted. Eventually, even I started to feel the shift. Things were a little more “to the right” than I perceived they had been before. Things seemed, to me, a little less thoughtful … A few months ago, The Motte’s moderators announced that Reddit’s admins were at least implicitly threatening to shut the subreddit down. The entire subreddit moved to a brand new Reddit clone. I still visit it, but I don’t have an account, and I visit it much less than I visited the subreddit. A few days ago I saw a top-level comment wondering why prostitutes don’t like being called whores and sluts, since “that’s what they are.” Some commentators mused about why leftist women are such craven hypocrites. I think there was a world five years ago when that question could have been asked in a slightly different way on r/slatestarcodex in the Culture War thread, and I could have appreciated it. It might have been about the connotations words have and why they have them, about how society’s perceptions slowly (or quickly) shift, and the relationship between self-worth and sex. Yeah. Well. Things have changed.
This post discusses the evolution of The Motte through its various iterations, beginning with the subreddit and moving through its current life as an independent website. I hope that by the end of this post, many readers will share the view of the postmortem above, that somewhere along the way things went too far.
3. Views
What do Motte readers believe? As with readers of LessWrong or Astral Codex Ten, there is no need to speculate. Here are the results of a survey of Motte users by an administrator of The Motte, Tracing Woodgrains (discussion here).
Users were asked to rate the degree to which “I, personally, believe” a range of statements, ranging from 1 (“disagree”) to 5 (“agree”). Here are some relevant responses.
Regarding sex and gender, respondents are highly confident that most non-physical differences between men and women are primarily due to socialization. They are generally opposed to aiming for greater gender balance in STEM professions and in K-12 teachers, though with weaker opposition in the case of K-12 teachers. They are fairly opposed to the idea that prejudice against women is a serious problem in the US today, though a significant number weakly agreed with this statement. Strikingly, they were slightly more likely to think that prejudice against men is a serious problem in the US today.
Regarding race and ethnicity, readers were relatively confident that average intelligence differs between ethnic groups. Opinion slightly favored the hypothesis that group intelligence differences are primarily genetic in origin. That is quite a striking level of support for one of the key contentions of HBD. Fortunately, many of those who accepted this claim about group intelligence were not willing to draw the political consequence that immigration from purportedly low-IQ countries should be limited, though a significant number of respondents were open to, or even favored this possibility.
Users were also asked to rate their opinions of various figures and movements on a scale from 1 (“worst”) to 5 (“best”).
Quite concerningly, opinions were split regarding Mencius Moldbug (the pen-name of Curtis Yarvin) who we first encountered in Part 2 of this series. There we saw that Moldbug, one of the founders of the neoreactionary (“dark enlightenment”) movement, hosted an unofficial afterparty at Manifest 2024. Although I am sure that Manifest organizers will be eager to point out that the event was unofficial, many months have passed and they have yet to publicly condemn it.
Opinions were also split regarding Steven Sailer, who we saw in Part 1 of this series is the originator of the modern racist usage of the term “human biodiversity.”
Respondents held strongly negative attitudes towards the Black Lives Matter movement and intersectional feminism. They didn’t think much better of “social justice”, framed as a movement.
A frighteningly nontrivial number of readers rated white identitarianism positively. Just to be clear about what that involves, the Anti-Defamation League characterizes identitarianism as:
A racist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant movement … roughly analogous to the alt right segment of the white supremacist movement in the United States.
and the European Center for Populism Studies characterizes identitarianism as follows:
The term of “Identitarians” originated in France with the founding of the Bloc Identitaire movement and its youth counterpart, Generation Identitaire. Identitarians espouse racism and intolerance under the guise of preserving the ethnic and cultural origins of their respective counties. American Identitarians such as Richard Spencer claim to want to preserve European-American (i.e., white) culture in the US. As Michael McGregor, a writer and editor for Radix wrote in an article in the publication, Identitarians want “the preservation of our identity–the cultural and genetic heritage that makes us who we are.” Identitarians reject multiculturalism or pluralism in any form.
This is not a movement that altruists should want anything to do with.
I am sure that many readers will insist that the demographics of survey respondents should not matter. I am sure that many other readers will be unsurprised to know that 95.4% of respondents were assigned male at birth, 87.5% reported their race or ethnicity as white, and more than half of the remainder (7.2%) reported their race or ethnicity as Jewish.
(Presumably, this move comes in response to views claiming a genetic basis for Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence, which are popular among HBD circles. At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to remind those 7.2% of respondents that when religions are racialized into racial or ethnic groups, particularly our religion, things don’t tend to go well for us.)
4. Self-descriptions
There are a few ways to tell the story of The Motte. On the first story, The Motte is a group aspiring to promote Alexander’s ideal of the last truly public forum in which people of all stripes can come together and honestly discuss what matters. On the second story, The Motte is a forum increasingly dominated by neoreactionaries, HBD advocates, and members of the alt-right.
The survey data linked in Section 3 suggests that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. There is little evidence, for example, that the majority of Motte members are neoreactionaries or members of far-right groups. There is, however, good evidence that a significant number belong to such groups and many more sympathize with a number of their ideas.
If this is right, then one should expect to see both stories in Motte users’ own depictions of the forum. Let us survey two such depictions, one corresponding to each story.
4.1. The motte as public forum
Tracing Woodgrains is a moderator [edit: of r/TheMotte, an administrator of TheMotte.org] and longtime user of The Motte. A former Mormon, he was moved to question Church doctrines and surprised by the dogmatism of those who resisted his questioning. This experience left him firmly convinced of the value of dialogue about core beliefs, and of openness to the possibility that we might be radically wrong about the world.
His personal blog contains a post, “On Mottes and mythologies: An introduction to The Motte,” which largely characterizes The Motte as an open public forum. Tracing Woodgrains describes The Motte as:
A place committed to the goal of allowing fervent enemies to “lay down their weapons and be nice to each other”, where as long as they’re willing to follow strict standards on courtesy, effort, and engagement, people with deep disagreements can candidly present and argue through their perspectives.
When asked to describe The Motte’s userbase, Tracing Woodgrains emphasizes the diversity of opinion:
In practice, it tends to attract a distinct and peculiar subset of the population, a group that universally respects Scott Alexander, unconditionally opposes Stalin, and can’t seem to agree on all that much else. No single ideological label covers more than half of the people there, but more than a third identify as any or all of capitalist, classical liberal, and libertarian. Other popular labels include moderate, liberal, centrist, transhumanist, conservative, democratic, civic nationalist, and progressive. Passionate but smaller groups, in turn, identify with a range of more extreme labels, including a handful of anarchists, a couple of communists — and, yes, a few reactonaries and alt-right.
Tracing Woodgrains closes by summarizing what he sees as The Motte’s founding ideals:
If you fundamentally believe that there should not be open discussion spaces for candid discussion and disagreement on controversial issues, you simply will not be happy with The Motte. To the rest who go there and notice ways the group falls short of its claimed ideals, I present the same, admittedly cliche, challenge I’ve given before: Be the change you want to see. It’s a small community eager for high-effort, informative, fresh content. If you have something to say, something you think people there are overlooking or should prioritize more, put in some time and research and say it. The community will thank you. One of the most valuable features of the space is its open audience, willing to discuss almost anything that can be made compelling. If you’d like to see better topics, give people something better to talk about. The Motte is far from perfect, but its ideals are sincere.
There is, no doubt, some truth to this story.
4.2. The Motte and HBD
On the second story, there is a striking predominance of HBD, neoreaction and related views on The Motte that cannot be explained by the ideal of an open public forum.
Vincent Waters is a long-time user of The Motte whose blog presents, in its own words, “Miscellaneous thoughts on politics and culture from a vaguely neoreactionary perspective.”
For context, we first discussed the neoreactionary movement in Part 2 of this series. There, we saw that the sociologist Roger Burrows outlines five key tenets of the neoreactionary movement:
(1) An opposition to democratic forms of governance; (2) an attempt to construct a new patchwork of (city-) state forms in which ‘exit’ is the only ‘human right’ (3) an attack on discourses that foreground notions of human equality; (4) a (welcoming) belief in the inevitability of an approaching singularity in which AI and bio-technologies begin to meld with the human form; (5) and, for now, the necessity to undermine actors who promulgate ideologies of democracy, equality or who advocate for the regulation of science and technology.
We also saw that the neoreactionary movement is deeply committed to HBD and other racist ideals. Burrows continues:
The Dark Enlightenment is, at its core, a eugenic philosophy of what [Nick] Land has termed ‘hyper-racism’. In Land’s schema, the consumers ‘exiting’ from competing gov-corps quickly form themselves into, often racially based, microstates. Capitalist deterritorialization combines with on-going genetic separation between global elites and the rest of the population resulting in complex new forms of ‘Human Bio-diversity’ (HBD).
We saw in Part 2 of this series that Manifest 2024 was followed by an unofficial afterparty hosted by Curtis Yarvin (penname: Mencius Moldbug), one of the two most influential neoreactionaries.
We might expect a reactionary reader of The Motte to be a bit more direct about potential neoreactionary connections, and indeed that is the case. Whereas Tracing Woodgrains presented the influence of neoreactionaries parenthetically “… and, yes, a few reactionaries,” Waters sees the influence as much more central. In his introduction to The Motte, Vincent Waters writes:
One particular influence that is difficult to ignore is the influence of the [neoreactionary] NRx “movement,” and in particular Curtis Yarvin’s writing at the blog Unqualified Reservations (UR). This is hardly ever given as a suggestion when somebody asks for an introduction to The Motte, but I don’t think anyone can seriously deny its influence. In order to provide plausible deniability, we link to Scott’s Anti-Reactionary FAQ and call it a day, but at the same time, we all know that UR is about far more than the parts that Scott refuted. It’s not even clear that most readers ever took the parts about monarchy or joint-stock republics seriously. Probably the single most influential idea from UR is the idea of “the Cathedral,” a concept which even got repeated on Fox News (I would link to the clip, but I can’t find it). You all know about it.
The neoreactionary concept of the Cathedral alleges that society is controlled by a Church-like collection of organizations dominated by educational institutes and mainstream media. For example, Moldbug writes:
The left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at [Unqualified Reservations], we sometimes call it the Cathedral.
As for discussion of HBD, Waters thinks that some version of the view is so universally acknowledged among posters that it is rarely discussed:
Most of the long-time posters have long-since acknowledged that the effect size of HBD is greater than zero. It doesn’t get debated much anymore, because it doesn’t need to be. HBD is quite literally racism, in the original sense of “belief in racial difference,” and is the single greatest sin under the Cathedral’s religion.
However, Waters acknowledges that some form of double-talk is necessary, allowing Motte users to deny the influence of HBD when confronted. Waters continues:
(If you’re reading this from the Cathedral: The above is a crazy unfalsifiable conspiracy theory about The Motte that only kooks believe. Here at The Motte, the vast majority of us believe, in the words of Chipotle Mexican Grill, that “racial and social injustice is unacceptable and we want to do our part to create an equal society. With that said, we still believe America stands for hope and opportunity and we see lots of brave people finding ways to create positive change.” Furthermore, we share the view of our friends at Yelp that “our country has a long and fraught history of systemic oppression and anti-Black racism that we have shamefully not yet come close to overcoming. Recent events, starting with the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, have made racial injustice something that we must deal with immediately as a society.” I just wanted to make this clear.)
We saw in survey data that many Motte stress not only purported genetic differences between races, but also purported genetic differences between sexes. Waters continues:
Similar with sex differences. You don’t have to go all [pick up artist], but there’s some truth to the difference in reproductive strategies between men and women. How could you believe otherwise, unless you’re caught in the grips of religious dogma? Here’s another one: Many people here believe incels, extremism aside, have a legitimate grievance. The sex drought is an empirical fact. None of these beliefs are debated here actively anymore because 1) it’s a bad look, and 2) some flavor of them are essentially background assumptions at some and there’s no need. Do we need to legislate Jensen vs. Flynn for the 666th time? No, we’re good. Can you say that about literally anywhere else on the internet?
These views are understandably denied by leading scientific experts. As discussed in Part 7 of my series on epistemics, this leads to alarming levels of community distrust of established experts. Waters writes:
This distrust of experts dates back at least to Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong. Eliezer pointed out, rather convincingly, that mainstream philosophy is a total mess, and that taking a philosophy course is not a great way to improve your thinking. Most likely you’ll waste your time learning about Pythagoras or something. Many of us have realized that slowly incorporating “mainstream” historical philosophers can be profoundly rewarding. Read the History of Philosophy Backwards emphasizes some of these benefits. Some may even say this was the point of LessWrong. The sanity waterline of the official religion of the Cathedral is shockingly low. Even university professors, how can you put it… They’re not idiots, many just seem to know so little. They’re nothing more than specialists. They don’t deserve the title of Doctor of Philosophy. Most probably don’t even know how to give philosophy its yearly exam, never mind perform advanced philosophical surgery.
What is the effect of an environment in which reactionary views are taken seriously and established expertise is not given sufficient respect? Some users come out unscathed, but many do turn towards the alt right. In describing his own pathway to the alt right, Water directly cites the influence of rationalism, Scott Alexander, and the Culture War threads:
The rationalist -> “alt-right” pipeline is real. Eliezer’s writings influenced me in my distrust of Official Scientists. This led me to Scott. Scott’s blogpost on reaction is a ridiculous straw man, but it nevertheless represents an alternative to the US’s official liberal narrative that is taught in schools and on the news. This of course led me to Moldbug, who eloquently described many true concepts. The Culture War threads on the old subreddit changed my views on race and other topics. I believe in equality under the law, and individual meritocracy, but no longer believe it is possible even in theory to bring black Americans up to parity with white Americans through social interventions. Reading the desperate attempts of scientists like James Flynn to avoid the race IQ problem only served to solidify my understanding that geneticists had no answer.
Summing up, where Tracing Woodgrains presents The Motte as an open public forum allowing users to openly discuss the issues that matter, Waters also emphasizes what he sees as a strong neoreactionary element to the forum, including widespread acceptance of views about the existence and importance of genetic differences between races and sexes, a shared distrust of experts, and a pathway for some users to become more involved with the alt-right.
5. Quality posts
One of the challenges involved in criticizing a diffuse movement is that all of the words I cite will be the words of one or a handful of individuals. It is always possible to claim that these words should be blamed on those individuals and not on the movement or forum that hosted them.
I have many things to say about this response, but perhaps the least controversial response, and the response I favor in this series, would be to restrict attention to words that were in an important way endorsed by community members. In this case, it is much more difficult to blame the problem only on those few individuals who wrote these words.
The Motte maintains a Quality Vault which it uses to collect what administrators judge to be especially high-quality contributions to The Motte. While inclusion in the Quality Vault does not imply moderator endorsement of the views contained in a post, it does imply that these contributions are not only welcome but seen to contain important virtues and to be worth highlighting.
How do posts within the Quality Vault discuss HBD? Here are a few examples.
5.1 Belief against an intelligence gap
Julius Branson is a blogger and frequent contributor to The Motte. His blog contains direct defenses of HBD, including the following: “The philosophy of HBD and why our model of genetics implies hereditarianism.”
Branson’s “Belief against an intelligence gap,” archived in the quality vault, begins with the statement that
Almost everyone here believes HBD.
and seeks to explain why it is true. In Branson’s view, this is because no one who is both well-informed and truth-seeking could deny HBD.
On the one hand, Branson argues, there are anti-HBD “followers” who deny HBD but do not know enough to say why it is false. On the other hand, Branson argues, there are anti-HBD “leaders” who argue against HBD. These, Branson argues, have little interest in truth and deliberately mis-represent facts to make the case against HBD.
Focusing on a Vox article by three very well-respected psychologists, Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard Nisbett, Branson argues that these authors repeatedly obscure evidence favorable to HBD for political reasons. For example:
Turkheimer has stated twice that he has the motive to obscure the truth regarding HBD
[Turkheimer] generally just ignores data that contradicts his reasoning (which is fallacious), like that in The Bell Curve which shows that the IQ gap between blacks and whites persists at the highest [socioeconomic status] levels
Branson concludes that:
Based on his biased comments and his non-sequiturs, I conclude that Turkheimer does not genuinely, descriptively believe in anti-HBD. He is motivated by something other than hard data … There are those who are uninformed and therefore cannot debate HBD, and there are those who become informed. Frankly, this analysis of Turkheimer and my own beliefs suggest that those become informed will become pro-HBD to some degree, because it is the side the evidence is more for.
And returning to his original question, Branson explains the lack of opposition to HBD on The Motte by the fact that Motte users are truth-seeking:
I conclude that we have no “woke”/anti-HBD people here because pretty much no one interested in arguing for truth on an inconsequential internet forum is anti-HBD. Those who are anti-HBD are either informed like Turkheimer or just don’t care enough to bother with politics in general. I think this solves the great mystery that has grasped this forum in the last week, and hopefully it is put to rest.
This analysis of the support for HBD among Motte users is a bit more reminiscent of Vincent Waters’ analysis above than of Tracing Woograins’ analysis, or of the more moderate survey data quoted above.
5.2 Critical race theorists, grievance studies, and alchemists
One contributor to the Culture War Thread mentioned an Atlantic article by the historian Ibram Kendi. The commentator praised Kendi for clarifying some misunderstandings of the Black Lives Matter movement, and for pushing back on the idea that we have entered a post-racial society.
This contributor did point out what they saw as “some obvious flaws” in Kendi’s work. For example, Kendi suggests that racial disparities in vaccination rates are the result of systemic factors rather than “something wrong with” minorities, presumably understood as a genetic defect. The contributor suggests that this “false dichotomy” is an obvious flaw of Kendi’s work.
As might have been expected, the original commentator was soon mobbed by others who demanded far more striking criticism of Kendi. Kendi wrote, of his doctoral studies, that:
I was readying myself to join a guild of intellectuals with expertise on the structures of racism. This guild studies, diagnoses, and strives to eliminate racism. The believers call us “race hustlers,” but they would never call oncologists “cancer hustlers.” They’ll do anything to delegitimize our training and expertise, which veils their absence of training and expertise, which legitimizes their postracial fairy tales.
Given what we saw in Vincent Waters’s discussion about the lack of respect paid to established expertise by Motte members, it should perhaps be unsurprising that a post highlighted in the quality vault begins by attacking precisely these words of Kendi’s.
The poster suggests that oncologists are trusted based on their track records:
People trust in Oncologists and Scientists because science WORKs. The treatment recommendations from scientists work to make cancer patients live longer, happier and more healthy lives, according to objective measurements.
On the other hand, this commentator suggested, anti-discriminatory policies do not work:
Kendi and his grifter friends … claim to possess a magical set of policies that will actually correct for bad black outcomes…. but we’ve tried a LOT in the past 50+ years to correct for black-white disparities already, to no real effect. Why should we continue to invest in these policies when they have shown repeatedly to not correct for this measurable difference in test scores, or differences in educational/career outcomes?
Here the commentator asserts (entirely without evidence) that policies used during the past half-century to correct racial disparities have had “no real effect.” On this basis, he suggests that Kendi is not an expert but a “grifter,” and questions whether further investment in closing racial gaps is worthwhile.
Then, the commentator decides that the comparison to grifters is too kind. Kendi is not a grifter but an alchemist, purveying bunk science that needs to be abandoned.
Alchemy was trying to solve real problems: People age, Steel/Lead is less pretty, less expensive and less beautiful than gold. It would be great if Alchelmy succeeded in stopping aging, or converting lead to gold. But it didn’t. So we cut our losses and moved on. I think that society will be much better off when we realize that these racial disparities are not going away anytime soon, and we need to give the Critical Race Theorists and Grievance Studies the same treatment that we gave Alchemists.
Here, the suggestion is not only that anti-racist policies should be abandoned, but that those studying racism and other forms of disagreement are pseudoscientific alchemists who should be shown the door.
5.3 Sisyphus at anti-racism
On the weekly Culture War thread, one user complained that “the progressive left is a kind of liberalism that forgets that it can do damage, and so attempts to reorganize behavior on a society-wide scale.” A reply, featured in the Quality Vault under the title of “Sisyphus at anti-racism,” Went a bit further. This reply alleged that progressive liberalism “doesn’t just forget it can do damage, it forgets it can have any effect at all.”
In support of their claim, the poster cited the following evidence:
For example, in a past life, some coworkers admitted that when they interviewed candidates, they illegally gave higher ratings to people from certain “underrepresented” groups. This was, nominally, meant to “correct for” discrimination against those groups, the existence of which they inferred from the company’s diversity stats.
But they didn’t think about whether any hypothetical past discrimination (which is what would’ve shown up in the present stats) had already been cleaned up by past efforts. They didn’t think about whether anyone else in the hiring pipeline was also applying the same “correction” and making their efforts redundant. And they didn’t think about how much “correction” they needed to apply to fit the amount of discrimination, or when they’d know it was time to stop.
It is certainly important to think about whether the effects of past discrimination have been erased, whether others are applying similar correctives, and how much correction is needed. It is, however, a bit odd to allege entirely without argument that liberals do not think about such things, since most liberals think a great deal about them and are led to their views precisely because they believe more correction is needed. For example, here is the second paragraph of the article by Ibram Kendi which we discussed in the previous subsection:
Black babies die at twice the rate of white babies. Roughly a fifth of Native Americans and Latino Americans are medically uninsured, almost triple the rate of white Americans and Asian Americans (7.8 and 7.2 percent, respectively). Native people (24.2 percent) are nearly three times as likely as white people (9 percent) to be impoverished. The life expectancy of Black Americans (74.5 years) is much lower than that of white Americans (78.6 years). White Americans account for 77 percent of the voting members of the 117th Congress, even though they represent 60 percent of the U.S. population.
This certainly looks like critical reflection on the effects of past discrimination and present policy. Let us think in more detail about what kinds of reflection have been done.
Begin with the question of whether the effects of “hypothetical” past discrimination have been erased. There is a large and persisting racial gap in income, wealth, employment, health, and any number of other components of a flourishing life. While the original poster would perhaps like to explain these gaps in terms of inherent genetic differences between races, we have seen that this is not the consensus of the scientific community. Progressives take the scientific consensus at face value as suggesting that gaps in employment outcomes are the result of systematic discrimination and work to close those gaps.
Turn next to the questions of whether someone else in the hiring pipeline was also concerned with employment gaps, or how much concern is appropriate. All of these questions have been given a great deal of thought. In many organizations, they are largely redundant as the size of the gap is so large that it is clear more work is needed: for example, in my own field, between 1-4% of PhDs are awarded to black students. It is hard to look such a statistic seriously in the eye and suggest that no more work is needed.
What is a bit more concerning is that a tirade against affirmative action, coupled with the unevidenced and patently false assertion that liberals have not been concerned with measuring the effects of discrimination and policies meant to correct discrimination, was viewed by moderators as a quality post worth highlighting.
6. Conclusion
The past several posts in this series have followed the work of Scott Alexander (Part 4) and his followers (Part 5), together with their descendants at The Motte (today). Together with our discussions of Manifest (Part 2) and Richard Hanania (Part 3), this puts us in a good position to understand the background influence of HBD in and around the rationalist community.
It was important to survey these influences in detail because when we move into mainstream rationalist forums such as LessWrong, there will be a much heavier effect of moderation and communal discussion norms, with the result that many of the influences of HBD which have been on clear display so far in this series will become more muted. This is, no doubt, in part because they are less prevalent in mainstream spaces. However, reading the explicit and emergent behaviors in these spaces in light of explicit misbehavior elsewhere will help us to see the influence of HBD as its ideas, advocates, organizations and gathering places creep into many aspects of mainstream rationalist spaces such as LessWrong, and to a lesser extend into mainstream effective altruist spaces such as the EA Forum.
The next post in this series will discuss behavior on LessWrong. It will, by comparison, be comparatively tame, but we will nonetheless see clear echoes of many themes from earlier parts of this series in discussions on LessWrong.