Rationalists have historically tended to be less concerned about the Overton window than most, even to the point of actively bucking it. To the extent rationalists encounter something like Singer’s morally permissible infanticide or arguments that sex offenders are mistreated, they are kind of supposed to take them seriously. To the extent they can’t, they are admitting they are less rationalist than the ideal.
Resident Contrarian, “The Nick Bostrom Scandal differentiates effective altruism from rationalism“
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 7 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, and Part 6 followed the migration of an important part of that community to its new home at The Motte.
Today’s post covers discussions of HBD on LessWrong. The reason why this discussion was prefaced by such an extensive background survey is that, while advocacy and discussion of HBD is often very explicit in other venues, it is much more occasional and restrained in venues such as LessWrong and the EA Forum.
This contrast can give the impression that HBD has had substantially less impact on LessWrong and the EA Forum than in other communities, and to some extent that is true. On the other hand, armed with a good background understanding of the views in question and their prevalence among communities overlapping with the rationalist and effective altruist movements, we will be in a better position to identify nascent discussions of HBD within these communities, to understand where these discussions are coming from, and to grasp many of the background views and debates that give rise to them.
2. The LessWrong Community Census
What do LessWrong users think about human biodiversity? As before, there is no need to speculate. They have been directly asked their opinions on this topic in at least two iterations of the LessWrong Community Census.
Originally run by Scott Alexander, the LessWrong Community Census has since passed into other hands. Those hands have not always asked users their opinions on human biodiversity theory. However, when users have been asked, their answers have been remarkably similar to those found in the annual Astral Codex Ten Survey.
Most recently the 2022 survey asked users to rate their level of agreement from 1 (very unfavorable) to 5 (very favorable) with the following question:
How would you describe your opinion of the idea of “human biodiversity”, as you understand the term? No Wiki page available, but essentially it is the belief that there are important genetic differences between human populations and that therefore ideas generally considered racist, such as different races having different average intelligence or personality traits, are in fact scientifically justified.
The mean favorability was 2.9, with a standard deviation of 1.2. By contrast, the most recent ACX Survey (2024) found a mean favorability of 2.8 with a standard deviation of 1.2, a nearly identical result.
The 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey asked respondents within LessWrong and the broader LessWrong diaspora community the same question. Mean favorability was 2.9, with a standard deviation of 1.2, coinciding with the 2022 LessWrong Community Census result.
The 2016 survey also asked respondents their opinions on social justice and feminism:
Feminism: How would you describe your opinion of feminism, as you understand the term? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism for more information:
Social justice: How would you describe your opinion of social justice, as you understand the term? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice for more information:
On social justice, the mean favorability was 2.9, with a standard deviation of 1.3. On feminism, mean favorability was 3.5 with a standard deviation of 1.3.
These responses are a bit better on social justice than the ACX survey discussed in Part 5, which had a mean favorability of 2.3 towards social justice (standard deviation 1.2), and much better than The Motte’s survey discussed in Part 6, which had a mean favorability of 1.8 (standard deviation 1.0). Neither of these surveys asked a directly comparable question about feminism.
We saw in Part 5 of this series that the ACX community has had frequent and troubling brushes with HBD. The figures above may lead us to suspect that opinions about HBD held by the average LessWrong user may not be considerably different from those of the average ACX reader. (By contrast, LessWrong users do seem moderately less willing to take those views as condemnation of political causes such as social justice and potentially also feminism).
That is not to say that the expressed views on LessWrong are equivalent to those expressed in the community surrounding ACX. However, it may be worth considering how much of the difference in expressed views can be attributed to tighter moderation policies and discourse norms, rather than to underlying differences of opinion.
3. The heart of the issue
What is it about LessWrong and other rationalist spaces that attracts discussion and advocacy of HBD? Let us focus first on the question of how HBD comes to be discussed.
One of the clearest answers to this question comes from the blogger Resident Contrarian. In a post comparing rationalist and effective altruist responses to the now infamous Bostrom email and apology, Resident Contrarian discusses a set of views about thought and discourse that are central to the rationalist worldview:
Rationalism is supposed to be – in a stripped-down technical sense, at least – a way of approaching thinking and belief. They tend to represent themselves as approaching both things in an emotionless, stripped-down way driven by data, reason, and provable fact.
These commitments are interpreted by many rationalists to suggest that ideas outside the Overton window of allowable topics for discussion should nonetheless be discussed and seriously examined. Resident Contrarian continues:
Rationalists have historically tended to be less concerned about the Overton window than most, even to the point of actively bucking it. To the extent rationalists encounter something like Singer’s morally permissible infanticide or arguments that sex offenders are mistreated, they are kind of supposed to take them seriously. To the extent they can’t, they are admitting they are less rationalist than the ideal.
By way of illustration, a recent LessWrong post reports on a game of Overton Gymnastics designed and run at a LessWrong community weekend (“It’s basically like Cards Against Humanity for rationalists.”).
This emphasis on serious engagement with ideas outside of the Overton window means that rationalists have a hard time turning away from discussions of race science in a way consistent with their worldview. Speaking in particular about the Bostrom controversy, Resident Contrarian writes:
If a rationalist disagrees with Bostrom on a factual level, it’s not necessarily a litmus test failure in and of itself … But if they … [say] “Listen, he might be right or wrong, but you just don’t talk about that shit, so he’s wrong”, that turns the litmus strip bright red. In bowing to the dictates of the Overton window, they melt the entire framework their philosophy sits on.
This, in turn, answers our first question of how HBD comes to be discussed within rationalist circles. A deeply held emphasis on serious engagement with unpalatable ideas leads many rationalists to hone in on those ideas. Those sympathetic to HBD put the point even more strongly. One commentator writes:
I think HBD is a fantastic test for true rationality. It’s a rare case where a scientific fact conflicts with deeply ingrained political and cultural values.
The second sentence is hotly disputed on LessWrong, but the first sentence at most moderately so.
The consequence of this rationalist emphasis on entertaining unpalatable ideas is that it leads to a significant bias not only in discussion topics, but also in sources of information. As one LessWrong discussion has it:
There are a lot of people like Steve Sailer and Emil Kierkegaard arguing that there are racial gaps in intelligence, based on genetics … Many more people read Kirkegaard and Sailer [as opposed to scientific refutations of their work] because expressing the conformist view on the topic is much less interesting than expressing the contrarian view. Most of the people who believe the gap is environmental don’t much want to argue about it, so almost all the people who write things about it are people who believe the genetic explanation of the gap. Very few people want to read articles saying “here are 10,000 words showing that the view you reject by calling it racist pseudoscience is actually conflicted by the majority of the evidence.”
The effect of this bias towards consulting contrarian sources on contrarian topics is to do two things. First, a nontrivial fraction of people who investigate fringe views inevitably come to believe them, no matter their evidential support. And second, advocates of fringe views, upon finding themselves invited to share their perspectives, soon migrate in to the community. These effects combine with other effects, such as pushing out those who are rightly offended by racism, to create a community that, while definitely not dominated by racists, ultimately comes to have far too much sympathy for racist views and willingness to engage with them.
The next four sections of this post look at four examples of how discussions of race and racism have played out in a review of The bell curve (Section 4), a suggestion that the poor should have fewer children (Section 5), a review of White fragility (Section 6), and a variety of comments from across LessWrong (Section 7).
4. Review of The bell curve
One of the most extensive brushes with race science on LessWrong comes in a 2021 review of The Bell Curve. In this review and the ongoing discussion, we see a clear willingness to discuss race science, moderate sympathy for some of its empirical contentions and policy consequences, and a moderation team that, although concerned, does not feel it can shut down the discussion in a way consistent with LessWrong norms.
4.1. Background
In 1994, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray wrote The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. In this book, Murray and Herrnstein argue that the United States was increasingly home to a high-IQ cognitive elite. After an explicit discussion of racial differences in intelligence, they sympathetically discuss the hypothesis that immigration and high birth rates among ethnic minorities may negatively affect future average IQs. In their final chapter, Murray and Herrnstein use their views about the racial distribution of intelligence to criticize affirmative action and welfare policies.
Since the publication of The bell curve, Murray has gone on to become, in the words of the Southern Policy Law Center:
One of the most influential social scientists in America, 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.
In the same year that he published The bell curve, Murray famously defended his views on welfare reduction as follows:
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.
As might be expected, The bell curve met with substantial pushback.
The eminent paleontologist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that:
The Bell Curve, with its claims and supposed documentation that race and class differences are largely caused by genetic factors and are therefore essentially immutable, contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism, so I can only conclude that its success in winning attention must reflect the depressing temper of our time.
Bob Herbert of the New York Times is more direct, calling the book “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship” and “just a genteel way of calling somebody a [redacted slur]”.
The book received a more mixed treatment on LessWrong.
4.2. Review
In 2021, LessWrong featured a review of The bell curve. As of March 8, 2025, the review sits at +94 karma.
Towards the end of The bell curve, the book takes a sharp turn towards discussions of race and IQ. In similar fashion, the LessWrong review takes a sharp turn towards these issues:
The review then goes on to argue, almost entirely in agreement with Herrnstein and Murray, that leading arguments for bias are not substantially persuasive. (It does, hedging a bit, conclude that “It might be that the black-white difference comes from a mix of socioeconomic status plus systemic racism,” but this sentence comes a bit out of the blue and is not followed up on).
That is not to say that the review endorses Herrnstein and Murray’s views without qualification. The review does go on to push back against Herrnstein and Murray in a few places. For example:
Charles Murray’s analysis of Africa-Africans bothers me for the same reason his analysis of Asians bothers me. In this case, he assumes African-Americans are representative of Africa-Africans.
and:
Even if racism ended in 1965 (it didn’t), 29 years is not enough time to complete[ly] erase the damage caused by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow.
In other places, the pushback is mixed. For example:
The black-white gap narrowed in the years leading up to the publication of The Bell Curve. This is exactly what we would expect to observe if IQ differences are caused by social conditions because racism has been decreasing over the decades.
Charles Murray acknowledges that rising standards of living increase the intelligence of the economically disadvantaged because improved nutrition, shelter and health care directly removes impediments to brain development. The biggest increase in black scores happened at the low end of the range. This is evidence that improved living conditions of life improved IQ because the lowest hanging fruit hangs from the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder.
In other places, the pushback is decidedly wanting. On affirmative action, the review writes:
I’m not going to dive deep into Charles Murray[‘]s thoughts on affirmative action because they’re incontrovertible. Affirmative action in college admissions prioritizes affluent blacks over disadvantaged whites. It’s also anti-Asian.
The review contains a one-sentence section on race and employment:
Lots of (but not all) racial differences in life outcomes can be explained by controlling for IQ.
A one-sentence section on IQ and crime:
High IQ correlates with not getting involved with the criminal justice system. Move along.
And a two-sentence section on welfare:
Charles Murray gives a bunch of graphs and charts about how IQ affects welfare dependency. I bet you can guess what kind of a relationship they show.
In general, the view contains only moderate pushback against Herrnstein and Murray’s direct views on race and IQ, and considerably less pushback against many of their more extreme policy suggestions, such as strong cuts to welfare and a reduction in affirmative action based on pessimism about the ability to reduce what Herrnstein and Murray see as persistent intelligence differences between races.
4.3. Discussion
This post attracted no shortage of discussion. In response to a comment wondering at the decision to allow posts of this nature on LessWrong, a moderator explained their decision to allow the post:
In my capacity as moderator, I saw this post this morning and decided to leave it posted (albeit as Personal blog with reduced visibility).
I think limiting the scope of what can be discussed is costly for our ability to think about the world and figure out what’s true (a project that is overall essential to AGI outcomes, I believe) and therefore I want to minimize such limitations. That said, there are conversations that wouldn’t be worth having on LessWrong, topics that I expect would attract attention just not worth it–those I would block. However, this post didn’t feel like where I wanted to draw the line. Blocking this post feels like it would be cutting out too much for the sake of safety and giving the fear of adversaries too much control over of us and our inquiries. I liked how this post gave me a great summary of controversial material so that I now know what the backlash was in response to. I can imagine other posts where I feel differently (in fact, there was a recent post I told an author it might be better to leave off the site, though they missed my message and posted anyway, which ended up being fine).
This decision is in keeping with a broader rationalist emphasis on allowing or encouraging discussion of unpalatable topics.
Many of the leading comments on this post do not directly push back against its moderately sympathetic treatment of The bell curve. The top comment consists largely of an extensive positive discussion of Murray’s concept of an invisible migration. This comment does suggest that “after thinking about it … Murray should have left out the one chapter about race” because “that discussion consumed all the oxygen,” but there is no pushback beyond this, nor any acknowledgment that Murray’s subsequent behavior suggests that the inclusion of this last chapter was anything but accidental or orthogonal to his project.
After a procedural comment about omitted coauthors, the next comment opines: “I mostly agree with this review, but it endorses some rather poor parts of the book.” This comment does, rightly, take Murray and the reviewer to task for their faith in the cultural neutrality of IQ tests and some interpretive assumptions about adoption studies. But this is the extent of the pushback, and the commentator openly claims to mostly agree with the review.
Some users do push back against platforming of The bell curve. As often happens within effective altruist and rationalist circles, this pushback is couched primarily in terms of reputational risks rather than opposition to racism and pseudoscience.
The first such comment, sitting at +8 Karma as of March 10th, 2025, writes:
Imagine a world where having [a post mentioning the bell curve] visible on the frontpage runs a risk of destroying a lot of value. This could be through any number of mechanisms like
- The site is discussed somewhere, someone claims that it’s a home for racism and points to this post as evidence. [Someone who in another universe would have become a valueable contributor to LW] sees this (but doesn’t read the post) it and decides not to check LW out.
- A woke and EA-aligned person gets wind of it and henceforth thinks all x-risk related causes are unworthy of support
- Someone links the article from somewhere, it gets posted on far right reddit board, a bunch of people make accounts on LessWrong to make dumb comments, someone from the NYT sees it and writes a hit piece. By this time all of the dumb comments are downvoted into invisibility (and none of them ever had high karma to begin with), but the NYT reporter just deals with this by writing that the mods had to step in and censor the most outrageous comments or something.
Question: If you think this is not worth worrying about — why? What do you know, and how do you think you know it? And in what way would a world-where-it-is-worth-worrying-about look different?
The irony of this comment is not lost on me. The next comment concurs:
Strong-downvoted. I want lesswrong to be a peaceful place where we can have polite boring truth-seeking arguments without incurring reputational risk / guilt-by-association. I understand the benefit of having polite boring truth-seeking arguments about racism-adjacent topics that take sides in an incredibly incendiary culture war. However, there is also a cost—namely, there’s a public good called “right now there is minimal reputational risk of being publicly IRL known as a lesswrong participant”, and each time there’s a post about racism-adjacent topics that takes sides in an incredibly incendiary culture war, we’re shooting a flaming arrow at that public good, and hoping we get lucky and the whole thing doesn’t burn to the ground.
Again, it is good to see pushback, though one would like to see that pushback framed in terms of opposition to racism and support for scientific consensus rather than reputation-building.
Summing up, we have seen that LessWrong published a moderately supportive review of The bell curve, a book deemed substantially racist by many. We have seen that the top comments, while pushing back against some aspects of the review, do not substantially take the review to task for its flirtations with race science. Lower down, some commentators take the review sharply to task, but focus primarily on reputational risks.
This is better behavior than we have seen in some previous posts in this series. By comparison to The Motte, it is positively civilized. But there is, I think, a long way to go before posts like this can be cleared of the charge of open flirtation with race science.
5. Equality and natalism
One of the recurring themes of HBD advocates has been that growing nonwhite populations threaten the intelligence, welfare, and other important traits of our future descendants. For example, we saw in Part 1 of this series that Steven Sailer, the founder of the modern racist usage of HBD, describes the following projection of European and Sub-Saharan African populations as the “most important graph” in the world, holding that “The Sub-Saharan African population bomb is the most obvious long-term problem facing global peace and prosperity.”
In 2012, an anonymous user began a post entitled “Equality and natalism” by quoting at length some remarks by Steven Sailer in Taki Magazine, a venue which Dylan Matthews describes as “openly racist.” The quoted remarks contain an explicit endorsement of policies aimed at reducing the number of children born to poor parents:
We should aim for fewer—but better—poor children. Encourage poor people to conscientiously concentrate their scant parental resources on one child rather than three or six.
The anonymous LessWrong user ends their post by wondering rhetorically why such a policy would be wrong:
Yet a policy of “poor people should have fewer children, rich people more” sounds heartless despite increasing general welfare both by making poor children better off and by reducing the privilege of rich children thus increasing equality which we seem to think is ceteris paribus a good thing. Why is that?
As of March 18, 2025, this post stands at +18 Karma. The top-rated comment, with 15 Karma, is far from appalled:
You know, I was going to reply that obviously the answer is that people don’t like intervention in evolutionarily ancient processes like who to marry and how many kids to have. Then I remembered that eugenics was hugely popular in the early 1900s, with only the “backwards, ignorant” Church railing against the “progressive, scientific” idea. This suggests that humans are willing to accept such intervention, at least to a similar extent to which they accept wealth redistribution (“I’ll do it if I get to tell other people how to do it, too.”) I wonder if the backlash against eugenics means we’ve permanently poisoned the well with regards to mating and childbirth intervention, from a baseline where we were actually fairly okay with it.
As of March 10, 2025, it is not until the eighth-ranked comment that we get some form of pushback:
Because it is historically associated with policies of compulsory sterilization.
And the eleventh-ranked comment echoes this line:
You can safely make arguments for contraception by talking about having children later, but actively recommending how many children different subsets of people should have smacks of eugenics.
While it is good to see pushback against this sort of post, one might have hoped to see sharper, earlier and more coordinated pushback.
6. Review of White fragility
Sometimes it is easier to detect the slant of community attitudes when we examine topics that are a bit less charged than outright race science, and therefore easier for users to express their genuine views on. One such topic is Robin DiAngelo’s book White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism.
In 2021, LessWrong featured a review of White fragility entitled “I read “White Fragility” so you don’t have to (but maybe you should).” Following DiAngelo, the review helpfully distinguishes two definitions of racism. According to the folk definition:
(racismF) “There are essentially different human races and … some are better than others”
However, DiAngelo prefers a structural definition of racism, which the reviewer defines as follows:
(racismS) “A systemic, usually (nowadays) non-explicit or euphemistic, often subconscious, interlocking and pervasive set of social, cultural, and political devices that reinforce white supremacy. RacismS is impossible to avoid. It’s everywhere, and is drilled into everyone in a multitude of ways, day in and day out.”
The review goes on to summarize DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility and methods for moving beyond fragility to think meaningfully about structural racism.
The first half of the review is generally positive, though the reviewer struggles a great deal with DiAngelo’s insistence that a false pretense of race-blindness is not a good way to have meaningful conversations about race and racism.
The conclusion of the review takes DiAngelo to task for “the tone of woke intellectual arrogance and rhetorical aggression throughout,” “deceptive oversimplification and caricature,” and “an assumption that People of Color are preternaturally clear-sighted and of one mind on racial issues,” among other faults. It also alleges that “DiAngelo is also weirdly oblivious about the actual power dynamics in many of the scenarios in which she describes encountering white fragility: the corporate training seminars she helps to put on.” The review concludes on a mixed note:
But all this criticism adds up to me wishing it were a better book. It was worth reading and wrestling with. I think there is a lot of validity to its key points, and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it. If white people are to finally overcome racismS and stand on our own two feet, it will require that we talk more frankly about race and be willing to make uncomfortable, difficult changes. This book might be a good place to start for a lot of us.
This mixed review did not sit well with commentators. The top comment, after having been edited to tone down its harshest criticisms, contends that:
This was quite painful to read, and I see the dynamic of these ideas as problematic.
although it does express sympathy for some of DiAngelo’s underlying views about race and racism.
The next comment writes:
It seems to me this book is largely a manual for obedience to a political faction; a long list of the details of how one ought to act in different scenarios in order to signal obeisance.
Continuing the theme of explaining away DiAngelo’s views, the third comment alleges:
I think it’s important to keep in mind the reasons why Robin DiAngelo became a multimillionare. The value of her seminars is that they shift the burden of responsibility for “systemic” racism away from employers and onto employees as individuals. That is, diversity seminars are seen as an effective defense against discrimination lawsuits. But in exchange for protection against legal accountability for patterns of discrimination, an environment of paranoia and scapegoating is fostered, where individual employees are singled out for discipline or firing for perpetuating systemic racism through their personal interactions.
The next comment takes DiAngelo to task for understanding racism as a systemic phenomenon, again suggesting that DiAngelo is writing for political gain:
I would maintain … that racismF is the original definition of racism, which deservedly acquired its strong negative connotations (think of the image of a good, virtuous, even altruistic minority member, consistently better behaved than most white people, and a white person saying “Yeah, well, he’s still bad and not to be trusted because he isn’t white”); and that activists like DiAngelo are trying to push their own new definition of racism as racismS, probably for political purposes. (Ask yourself why they don’t just use a different term to avoid confusion.
They could consistently say “structural racism”, but do they?) Specifically, it seems that they’re trying to take advantage of the negative affect towards racismF and everyone’s intuitive reaction of “Well, of course racism is bad and no one should be racist”, by claiming that being against racism means being on board with all of their increasingly extreme proposals, and threatening to tar any opposition as racist. It seems to be a disappointingly effective tactic.
When the stakes are high, as in explicit discussions of race science, many LessWrongers have learned to avoid speaking out. But given the opportunity to attack books aimed at reducing racism, they do not appear to have held back.
7. Comments
Direct posts about HBD are less frequent and less extreme on LessWrong than in many of the other venues considered in this series. However, more extreme sentiments often leak out in the comments section.
To say that these views are openly voiced, engaged with, left standing by moderators and often upvoted is not to say that their contents are endorsed by the majority of LessWrong readers. However, these facts do give some sense of the views held by a nontrivial minority of readers and the tolerance for those views expressed by many others.
7.1. LessWrong Diaspora Survey
We saw in Section 2 that a 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey asked users to rate their opinion of HBD. The post analyzing this component of the survey generated no shortage of discussion.
One user opined:
I think HBD is a fantastic test for true rationality. It’s a rare case where a scientific fact conflicts with deeply ingrained political and cultural values.
Another concurred:
Unfortunately it might also be an area where epistemic and instrumental rationality clash. In fact, most of the world does not have freedom of speech in the same way the US does – if one advocated HBD in, say, Germany, could one be thrown in prison in the same way people are imprisoned for saying ‘seig heil’?
And the first user then elaborated:
I’m mostly skeptical of the people that put “strongly disagree” on that question [about HBD]. As opposed to “disagree” or “neutral”. The fact that it’s so correlated with political ideology is more evidence that it’s just political bias.
7.2. Politics discussion thread, January 2013
In 2012 and 2013, LessWrong featured a number of politics discussion threads. These threads were discontinued, perhaps in part for similar reasons to the discontinuation of the /r/SlateStarCodex culture war threads.
On the January 2013 thread, within a discussion of neoreaction, one commentator suggested that progressive thought may arise from mating patterns, linking to a post by the blogger HBD Chick.
A second replied by strongly endorsing HBD chick’s work and adding a link to a second HBD blogger, Peter Frost, to the mix.
hbd* chick has built a compelling case with rather high quality scholarship over the past few years and I strongly recommend her blog. You shouldn’t however neglect other forms of selection that have shaped humans recently and are relevant to the question. For example see Peter Frosts’ arguments on genetic pacification and the fall of the Roman Empire.
A different thread on the same post asks for reactions to the HBD blogger Half-Sigma’s post, “HBD has no future“. Half-Sigma’s post bemoans their view that:
The taboo against HBD will last indefinitely. As the scientific evidence mounts ever more so in favor of HBD, the taboos against speaking about it only seem to grow stronger.
Half-Sigma suggests that HBD may be saved by the perceived greater willingness of Chinese researchers to entertain it.
Yet another thread on the same post links an article from VDare, wondering, “Is HBD over?,” also citing the above-mentioned post by Half-Sigma and a similar discussion by HBD Chick. (To be fair, this comment has since been marked as no longer endorsed by the author. That is a good sign.)
7.3. Assorted comments
Many discussions of HBD can be found on the most likely threads. For example, in a discussion of work by the neoreactionary writer Mencius Moldbug, one commentator suggests that Moldbug’s work is not very good and that the work of other similar writers is considerably better. Asked for examples, they write:
I like HBDish authors a lot so my list will be biased to those blog[s]. Gregory Cochran & Henry Harpending, hbd* chick (~_^) and Derbyshire are cool. Foseti is a must for Reactionaries. Over in the interesting but scary corner we have Federico who seems to have managed among other things to steel man the straw Vulcan (see his now probably deleted Emotion is The Mindkiller post) and Nick Land is the best transhumanist academic continental philosopher I’ve read in years, which is really low praise but his Reactionary writing is very much knurd.
Enjoy your corruption to the Dark Side! (^_^)
Likewise, in a discussion of the widely-read blog post “Why I’m not on the rationalist masterlist,” one commentator suggests that HBD is “a euphemism for racism.” Another commentator immediately takes them to task:
What do you mean by racist?
Edit: If by racist you mean “hate people who don’t share the same skin color with them” then I would guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean “think that some racial groups are superior and others inferior” then I would also guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean “think that different populations of people differ significantly along various axes such as athletic ability, intelligence, memory etc.” then yes there are a lot of racists on LW.
The third option does not imply either of the first two.
This comment sits at +20 karma as of March 16, 2025.
Other discussions of HBD are a bit more unexpected. For example, in a post about “Scientific self-help,” the topic of HBD is soon raised as one which LessWrong readers might benefit from learning about. Asked to explain what HBD means, one user replies:
Also known as race-realism, commonly associated with politically-incorrect but factually-supported statements like “blacks have lower IQs than whites”, often found making the point that everybody accepts human biodiversity when it doesn’t offend a minority – ie, recognising that West African heritage is advantageous for short-distance sprint running.
This comment sits at +25 Karma as of March 16, 2025.
In another discussion of “Rationality quotes,” one user asks: “Have you tried getting sense out of an NRx or HBD.er?” This user was downvoted, but most replies to them were not, including this one:
Yes, what they say frequently makes a lot more sense than the mainstream position on the issue in question.
The first user may have been downvoted in part for breaching discourse norms, but this reply is a direct and unevidenced endorsement of troubling ideologies, and it was not similarly downvoted.
8. Conclusion
This post discussed the incidence of HBD and other problematic discussions of race and racism on LessWrong.
Section 2 discussed survey data on which expressed opinions about HBD were similar to those expressed in ACX surveys, albeit with decreased willingness to draw some of the most troubling political conclusions from this data.
Section 3 discussed some of the underlying dynamics driving discussion and endorsement of HBD on LessWrong and in other rationalist-coded venues.
Sections 4-7 showed how these dynamics emerged in discussions of The bell curve (Section 4), poverty and fertility (Section 5), White fragility (Section 6) and assorted comments (Section 7).
There is, of course, much more to be said, some of which has been covered in earlier discussions of rationalist reactions to the Bostrom email (Parts 1-3 of my series on Belonging) and the reporting around Slate Star Codex (Part 5 of this series). But I hope the general trends are clear. Behavior on LessWrong, while considerably better than that on some other rationalist venues, shows a good deal of willingness to discuss and more-than-occasional willingness to endorse race science, as well as a moderate tolerance by moderators for such discussions. Opinion surveys showed attitudes towards HBD closely resembling those in ACX surveys, and a number of discussions and comments gave rise to quite strong sentiments about race and intelligence.
The next post in this series will discuss how HBD figures in discussions on the EA Forum. As in this post, we will see an improvement in behavior and to some extent in user attitudes alongside a considerable strengthening of moderation, but also a number of public lapses towards the same kinds of behaviors and beliefs that we have seen elsewhere in this series.