EA should whole-heartedly be against white supremacy. We aren’t going to make the world any better if we aren’t. That should be obvious, and the fact that this idea isn’t obvious to many people in EA is frightening. Right now, I am frightened that engaging with EA has made me complicit with racism, because the community seems very comfortable hosting people who are openly supportive of hate and prejudice … A good rule of thumb might be that when InfoWars takes your side, you probably ought to do some self-reflection on whether the path your community is on is the path to a better world.
Effective Altruism Person, “Slate Star Codex, EA, and self-reflection“
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 9 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. Part 7 discussed LessWrong.
Part 8 began a two-part discussion of HBD on the EA Forum. Today’s post concludes that discussion.
2. Slate Star Codex callout
2.1. Post
We saw in Part 4 that Scott Alexander’s blog Slate Star Codex was the subject of a critical New York Times article which alleged, among other things, that Slate Star Codex flirted with eugenics and race science.
We saw in Parts 4 and 5 that there was indeed considerable flirtation with these ideas by Alexander and the community surrounding his blog, strengthening as the culture war thread moved from the subreddit associated with Slate Star Codex to its new home at The Motte, discussed in Part 6. We also saw that Alexander has continued along this theme with a recent post entitled “How I learned to stop worrying and love Lynn’s national IQ estimates.”
As Slate Star Codex was taken offline, a forum post entitled “Slate Star Codex, EA, and self-reflection” argued that the effective altruism movement should do more to distance itself from HBD and related ideas. The post offered, as its primary argument, the following:
1. Eugenics and white supremacy are bad ideas, and endorsing or even engaging with these views could lead to very bad outcomes
2. Associating with and endorsing ideas that will lead to very bad outcomes is not a good thing to do for a community dedicated to making the world better.
3. Scott Alexander, in his blog Slate Star Codex, has openly supported eugenics and white supremacy
C. EA should do everything in its power to distance itself from these communities, ideas, and individuals, and should seriously reflect on its relationship with them.
The post went on to offer a number of concerns in support of this argument. For example:
A strange and disappointing tension has existed in EA for a longtime. The community is predominantly white and male. Anonymous submitters on the EA Forum have supported ideas like racial IQ differences, which are not only scientifically debunked, but deeply racist. (I know someone is considering arguing with me about whether or not they are debunked. I have nothing to say to you — other people have demonstrated this point more clearly elsewhere.).
Slate Star Codex appears to have been an even greater hotbed of these ideas then the typical level for EA. Scott Alexander has openly endorsed eugenics and Charles Murray, a prominent proponent of racial IQ differences (Alexander identifies with the “hereditarian left”). He was supported by alt-right provocateurs, such as Emil Kirkegaard and Steve Sailer. On the associated subreddits, talk about eugenics, white supremacy, and related topics were a regular feature. These weren’t just “open discussions of ideas,” as they were often framed. These forums included explicit endorsements of literal white supremicist slogans like the 14 words (some of which have been conveniently deleted in the last few days).
The post concluded with a qualified argument for its main conclusion:
The fact that people are not disturbed by this turn of events is downright frightening. Notable EAs such as Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours and Kelsey Piper of Vox are speaking out in support of Alexander or openly celebrating him. A value in the EA community has always been open engagement with controversial ideas. That is probably a good thing in many cases. That doesn’t mean EA should be giving platforms to people whose vision for the world is downright horrible. The EA community has demonstrated through this event that our current collective vision for the world is not a good one. It’s an oppressive, unkind, and possibly violent one.
To be fully fair, Slate Star Codex is probably more associated with the rationalist community than EA. This probably should make EA very wary of rationalism, and associating with it. And as a whole, this seems like a time for a lot of self-reflection on the part of the EA community. How do we ensure that our community is more accessible to more people? How do we distance ourselves from white supremacy? Is EA really building something good, or reinforcing some very bad harms? This seems like a very good opportunity for the EA community to genuinely reflect and grow. I personally will be taking time to do that reflection, both on my own actions, and whether I can continue to support a community that fails to do so.
2.2. Reaction
As of September 16, 2025, the post sits at -169 karma, a feat rarely duplicated on the EA Forum.
The top comment takes issue with most of the charges leveled against Alexander. This comment alleges that it is misleading to link Alexander to eugenics, because he only supports non-coercive forms of eugenics. It works to diminish Alexander’s comments about Charles Murray. And it qualifies Alexander’s self-identification with the hereditarian left, not by disputing the identification but rather by holding that Scott’s remark “contains an explicit discussion of how the possibility of cognitive differences between groups does not in any sense imply that one of the groups would have more value, morally or otherwise, than the other.”
The next comment asks for evidence of association with white supremacy, and the next again suggests that Alexander only endorses a strand of liberal eugenics that we should find substantially less offensive.
Much of this argument could be short-circuited by pulling apart what Scott means by ‘eugenics’ – it’s clear from the context (missing from the OP’s post) that he’s referring to liberal eugenics, which argues that parents should have the right to have some sort of genetic choice over their offspring (and has almost nothing in common with the coercive “eugenics” to which the OP refers). Liberal eugenics is already widespread, in a sense. Take embryo selection, where parents choose which embryo to bring to term depending on its genetic qualities. We’ve had chorionic villus sampling to check an embryo for Down syndrome for decades; it’s commonplace. Just dropping the word “eugenics” again and again with no clarification or context is very misleading.
The next two comments do push back against the skeptics: the first expresses disappointment at the post’s negative karma score, and the second concurs with the original poster in taking issue with the survey responses discussed in Part 8 of this series, but then goes on to minimize the results and implications of this survey.
The last, and lowest-ranked comment is the only one that seems to have gone too far for most readers:
I think this is badly wrong, and touches on the central delusions of our society. Humanity without eugenics or genetic enhancement of some kind will disintegrate. You may not like this, but it’s just a fact; there’s an accumulation of mutations per generation, plus there are various dysgenic effects. It doesn’t entail coercion, though in the past (unfortunately) that has been associated with eugenics. Britain, Germany, Sweden or America without white people will cease to exist. A mixture of people from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia living on the British Isles doesn’t constitute Britain, any more than the Beaker People did. This doesn’t entail violence (though in the past it certainly has), and you may not like it, but nonetheless it is true.
The comment currently sits at -37 karma.
3. EA should unequivocally condemn race science
3.1. Post
In July 2024, a former Open Philanthropy employee authored a post entitled “EA should unequivocally condemn race science.”
In this post, the author expressed a growing sense of shame at identifying as an effective altruist. This shame, they explained, was due to a trend towards acceptance or toleration of race science. As examples, they cited:
- The community’s refusal to distance itself from, or at the very least strongly condemn the actions of Nick Bostrom after an old email came to light where he used the n-word and said “I like that sentence and think that it is true” in regards to the statement that “blacks are more stupid than whites,” followed by an evasive, defensive apology.
- FLI’s apparent sending of a letter intent to a far-right Swedish foundation that has promoted holocaust denial.
- And now, most recently, many EAs’ defense of Manifest hosting Richard Hanania, who pseudonymously wrote about his opposition to interracial marriage, cited neo-Nazis, and expressed views indicating that he didn’t think Black people could govern themselves.
The author said that though they were unhappy about the incidents themselves:
I have been even more disturbed by the EA forum’s response. Many have either leapt to outright defend those who seemed to espouse racist views or urged us to view their speech in the most possible favorable light without consideration of the negative effects of their language.
The post enumerated and defended common arguments given in favor of platforming race science on the EA Forum. It also suggested that effective altruists might do better to invest themselves in breaking the taboos around other topics, such as insect welfare, polyamory and digital minds. It suggested that many of those peddling race science were not acting in good faith. And it concluded by offering the following recommendations:
(1) The EA Forum should ban any discussion of race science, “human biodiversity”, or racial differences in IQ.
(2) Major EA organizations and leaders should publicly disavow race science and human biodiversity.
(3) EA funders should avoid giving money to people or organizations with a history of associating with race science.
(4) EA should avoid any public association with people who have a history of making statements sympathetic to race science.
(5) EAs should be empowered to speak out against race science and its proponents.
As of September 16, 2025, the post sits at +6 Karma after 64 votes.
3.2. Response
The top comment, by Richard Chappell, takes the oft-repeated line that offensive content can be policed through simple downvotes, and suggests that anything further would be groupthinky, cringe, and off-putting to independent thinkers:
Forum users can, should, and do downvote posts that are bad, distracting, etc. (The trolls should soon get the message and leave.) I’m very opposed to top-down hierarchical interventions of the sort you describe. I don’t particularly think that EA spaces should host “unequivocal condemnations” of things that (as you rightly note) have nothing to do with EA, so I’d also encourage people to downvote those. It’s groupthinky and cringe, and risks being massively off-putting to the kinds of independent thinkers who value epistemic integrity and have little tolerance for groupthink or witch-hunts, however meritorious the message (or wicked the witches).
The next comment, by Owen Cotton-Barratt, expresses a mixed reaction to the post. Cotton-Barratt suggests that although he is “somewhat sympathetic to banning discussion on the forum” competing considerations lead him to “overall … feel worse about banning than not-banning.” Cotton-Barratt endorses public condemnation of problematic actions, such as the Bostrom email, but not of race science more generally. Cotton-Barratt denies that “EA does have any direct public or private association with folks like Hanania,” a fact which he celebrates.
After a comment asking for examples of content that might be ripe for removal from the EA Forum, the next comment advocates four points. First, it holds somewhat bizarrely that “we can’t really do anything to prevent our opponents using” criticism of race science “against us.” Second, it holds that “focusing on optics” (by cracking down on race science) is in tension with the goal of “being excellent.” Third, it holds that “particular cause areas” which prove controversial might be established as entities separate from effective altruism. Fourth, it holds that insofar as there are “advantages to specialization,” effective altruism might leave controversial topics to others and specialize on less polarizing topics.
Interested readers can examine the rest of the discussion on this post, which is fairly mixed.
4. A Peter Thiel-linked startup is courting New York scenesters and plotting a libertarian paradise
In September 2023, a user posted a link to an investigative report “A Peter Thiel-linked startup is courting New York scenesters and plotting a libertarian paradise.”
Here is the full content of that post:
Ali Breland, a writer for the progressive magazine Mother Jones, has published an investigative piece into a startup with connections to the far-right. This startup was funded in part by Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. I think this is a significant case-study of EAs doing harm (even indavertently) and should be used by the Effective Altruist community to identify other similar but yet-unidentified harmful support for far-right causes, and to exercise greater care about where it donates money to.
The key points Breland raises are that:
- Former employees of Praxis Society allege its CEO is “interested in fascist authors and occultism and has touted a book that argues Black people are intellectually inferior to whites”
- The startup’s key product is a free-market Mediterranean city-state designed to appeal to anarcho-capitalists
- Alameda Research invested alongside other cryptocurrency investors in Series A round funding, totalling $15 million. Other investors include Emergent Ventures, a Thiel-backed fund led by economist Tyler Cowen. EV is known to cofund the Charter Cities Institute which has similar stated aims.
A spate of other recent perceived connections between Effective Altruism and the far-right have been published in various outlets:
- Pronatalist.org which identifies and assosciates itself with the EA movement. Note, the Collins’s disavow racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, but were recently key speakers at a conference linked to the far right.
- This orgnisation has been funded by Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of the Future of Life Institute and Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
- Richard Hanania, a far-right blogger who has identified his Tech Right ideology as a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”
- An initial grant offer (although never paid out) by the Future of Life Institute to a pro-nazi group.
As of September 16, 2025, this post sits at -14 karma on 14 votes. It has not received a single comment.
5. Do better, please
5.1. Post
At the height of the Bostrom scandal, Rohit Krishnan posted an exhortation to the EA Forum: “Do better, please …” Krishnan wrote:
I like having EA in the world, I think it does a lot of good. And I think you guys are literally throwing it away based on aesthetics of misguided epistemic virtue signaling.
After a brief review of the reasons why HBD is not generally taken seriously, Krishnan suggests that support for such views will do great damage to effective altruists’ ability to produce value in the world. Moreover, Krishnan suggests, it will do great damage directly, through propounding racist beliefs:
This isn’t a PR problem, it’s an actual problem. If one of the most influential philosophers and leaders of your movement is saying these things that are just wrong, it hurts credibility for any other sort of framework you might create. Not to mention the actual flesh and blood people who live in the year 2023.
Krishnan calls for the Bostrom controversy to be taken as seriously as the FTX controversy was, and concludes:
I just wish y’all could regain the moral high ground here. There are important causes that could use the energy. It’s not even that hard.
As of September 16, 2025, the post enjoys +16 karma after 229 votes.
5.2. Reaction
The top comment sits, as of September 16, 2025, at +128 karma and 80 agreement votes against 42 disagreement votes. This comment, by the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, complains:
Rohit – if you don’t believe in epistemic integrity regarding controversial views that are socially stigmatized, you don’t actually believe in epistemic integrity.
Miller suggests that while it would be appropriate for effective altruists to avoid discussions of HBD on reputational grounds, it would not be okay to do what (presumably) Krishnan is taken to have done and:
Offer empirically unsupported claims and third-hand critiques of a research area (that were debunked decades ago), just because there are high social costs to holding the opposite position.
Instead, Miller seems to regard HBD as a live scientific controversy and hold the opinion that only those who have deeply studied the matter are entitled to defer to the scientific consensus against HBD:
You just have to explain to people ‘Look, I’m not an intelligence research expert. But I know enough to understand that any informed view on this matter would require learning all about psychometric measurement theory, item response theory, hierarchical factor analysis, the g factor, factorial invariance across groups, evolutionary cognitive psychology, evolutionary neurogenetics, multivariate behavior genetics, molecular behavior genetics, genome-wide association studies for cognitive abilities, extended family twin designs, transracial adoption studies, and several other fields. I just haven’t put in the time. Have you?’
The next comment again suggests that Krishnan’s claims about the reputational harms of HBD should be divorced from claims about truth. It suggests that although Bostrom’s remarks were reputationally harmful, they may or may not have been untrue.
The third comment does, hearteningly, express strong agreement, although apparently its author felt that such sentiments could only be expressed through the cloak of an anonymous account:
I can’t express my agreement with this post strongly enough. I’ve been a hardcore utilitarian for many years, EA-interested for a few years, and (minorly) EA involved for the past year. The forum’s response to this event has shaken my belief in EA’s ability to grow and influence the world for good much more than the FTX scandal did. For starters, I no longer feel I can recommend EA to other people (for now at least) because they might check out the forum and wonder if I’m racist.
The next concurs:
I haven’t previously heard anyone in EA say that it’s vital for our epistemic integrity to freely discuss infohazards. I don’t see why this case should be different. Far-right ideas have created enormous suffering over the past few centuries. As far as I know, we don’t have a great theory for how this happened. But it seems fairly clear that it has something to do with memetics — if far-right ideas remain on the fringe, they will do a limited amount of harm; if far-right ideas become politically dominant, there’s a chance they’ll do a great deal of harm. So, it seems that the best way to prevent far-right ideas from doing a ton of harm is to keep them on the fringe.
The fifth takes a rather different tack. Although the user says that they “upvoted this post and think that it’s a good contribution,” they go on to hold:
My preferred solution is to — while being as clear as possible about the context, and taking great care not to cause undue harm — maintain epistemic integrity. I think “compromising your ability to say true, relevant things in order to be trusted more” is the kind of galaxy-brain PR move that probably doesn’t work. You incur the cost of decreased epistemic integrity, and then don’t fool anyone else anyway. If I can lose someone’s trust by saying something true in a relevant context,[2] then keeping their trust was a fabricated option.
Interested readers can follow the discussion beyond this point on the original post.
6. Genetic enhancement as a cause area
6.1. Post
We spoke in Part 8 of this series about how advocacy of genetic enhancement can combine with race science in uncomfortable ways. If genetic selection is used to improve human intelligence, and some races are viewed as genetically disposed to have higher intelligence than others, these views lead naturally to the eugenic contention that fertility should be monitored along racial lines. We saw in particular that a post making “The effective altruist case for using genetic enhancement to end poverty” did many of these things.
Francis Galton was a 19th-century British scientist and the founder of the modern eugenics movement. Galton was quite specific in his views on intelligence. For example, Galton held that
The average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.
and
The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro.
Galton was also quite specific in his support of policies aimed at increasing the fertility rates of purportedly desirable groups and decreasing the fertility rates of purportedly less-desirable groups. For example, Galton argued that
If … we wish to raise the standard of our race … we must endeavor to restrict, as much as possible, the marriage of the physically and mentally unfit.
and that because:
Average negroes possess too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable form of civilization without a large measure of external guidance and support.
Chinese immigrants should be encouraged to settle in eastern Africa so that:
The Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position … they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race.
In December 2019, a user posting under the name Galton submitted a post entitled “Genetic enhancement as a cause area.” They also submitted a companion post to the Effective Altruism subreddit. Given the subject of the post, it is hard to view Galton’s choice of username as anything but a deliberate nod to Galton’s eugenic interpretations of ideas about race and intelligence.
The post suggests that improving human genetics is important, neglected and potentially tractable. The post suggests that “increasing IQ and other traits such as affective empathy” could help to mitigate existential risks and to improve the value of the future conditional on survival. It lists a variety of proposed interventions, including, as a first intervention:
Incentive-based genetic enhancement: We might consider programs that pay for people with desirable traits to reproduce.
The post also explores four other interventions: embryo selection, germline gene engineering, iterated embryo selection and genome synthesis. The post explores and responds to a variety of objections and concludes:
I believe genetic enhancement is a cause area that belongs within the effective altruist portfolio. At the very least, it deserves much more attention at the level of cause prioritization than it has received until now.
As of September 16, 2025, the post enjoys +112 karma after 57 votes.
6.2. Reaction
As of September 16, 225, the top comment is rather enthusiastic about the post:
Great post! I’ve been thinking along similar lines though I put the emphasis on selecting against dark tetrad traits.
The next asks for an overview of the landscape of work already being done on this topic.
The third comment does, finally, voice the natural reasons for concern, although the author felt that they had to create an anonymous account to do so:
The question is: who gets to decide what the “desirable traits” are? Eugenicists seem to focus a lot on the desirability of racial traits, which I vehemently disagree with. If the eugenicists got their way, I don’t think the future they’d create is one I would consider desirable. And this has been a central part of the movement since its inception. The founder of eugenics, sir Galton, created a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and wrote things like:
There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.
Now, just because you’ve named your account after him and advocate for eugenics doesn’t automatically mean you secretly share that view, but hopefully you can forgive someone for becoming somewhat concerned.
The next comment responds that this is an “interesting article”, but expresses concerns about the depth of change that could be made. It also links to Yudkowsky’s version of constructing fictional eugenics, a response to the same prompt that led Alexander down a dark road on his livejournal, as discussed in Part 4 of this series.
The fifth comment is again positive:
Thanks for this post! Without knowing much, genetic enhancement feels to me exactly like the kind of cause we should look into deeply.
Interested readers can explore further comments by viewing the original post.
7. Conclusion
Part 8 of this series began my coverage of the role of HBD on the EA Forum. Part 8 considered a survey of opinions that users would be reluctant to express, then looked at responses to the Bostrom email and to Richard Hanania’s essay “Why EA will be anti-woke or die“. Part 8 concluded with a detailed look at two posts and the ensuing discussion: “The effective altruist case for using genetic enhancement to end poverty” and “You’re probably a eugenicist.”
Today’s post began by looking at the forum’s reaction to Slate Star Codex’s closure and a rather dismal karma showing for a post critical of that reaction (Section 2).
Section 3 looked at the mixed reaction towards another post critical of race science.
Section 4 looked at concerns about a startup funded in part by Alameda Research. The concerns were downvoted and ignored.
Section 5 looked at the again contentious reaction to a plea for better behavior after the Bostrom email.
Section 6 picked up on Part 8’s discussion of “The effective altruist case for using genetic enhancement to end poverty” by looking at a similar, if milder post which fared better on the Forum, “Genetic enhancement as a cause area.”
All told, the behavior we have seen is better than the behavior in many venues discussed earlier in this series, and considerably better than the behavior of the worst offenders. But that is not to say that HBD has not had a demonstrable, repeated and publicly visible impact on the Forum over its history. I hope that this impact will be reduced in the future.