philosophy

It do be like that :doomer:

The techno-utopian ideology gets its fuel, in part, from scientific racism.

Sometime last year, I happened to come across an email from 1996, written by a 23-year-old graduate student at the London School of Economics named “Niklas Bostrom.” Upon reading it, my jaw dropped to the floor, where it stayed for the rest of the day.

Here’s part of what Bostrom, now known as “Nick Bostrom,” an Oxford University philosopher who’s been profiled by The New Yorker and become highly influential in Silicon Valley, sent to the listserv of “Extropians”:

Blacks are more stupid than whites.

I like that sentence and think it is true. But recently I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that. They would think that I were [sic] a “racist”: that I disliked black people and thought that it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t. It’s just that based on what I have read, I think it is probable that black people have a lower average IQ than mankind in general, and I think that IQ is highly correlated with what we normally mean by “smart” and stupid” [sic]. I may be wrong about the facts, but that is what the sentence means for me. For most people, however, the sentence seems to be synonymous with:

I hate those bloody [the N-word, included in Bostrom’s original email, has been redacted]!!!!

My point is that while speaking with the provocativness [sic] of unabashed objectivity would be appreciated by me and many other persons on this list, it may be a less effective strategy in communicating with some of the people “out there”.

Although shocking, I honestly can’t say I was surprised. I wasn’t. In fact, I’d been working on a series of articles for Truthdig exploring the deep connections between longtermism, a bizarre, techno-utopian ideology that Bostrom helped establish, and eugenics, a pseudoscientific movement that inspired some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.1 The fact is that, as the artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru, one of TIME’s “100 most influential people of 2022,” has repeatedly pointed out on Twitter, longtermism is “rooted in eugenics” or even “eugenics under a different name.”

This is not hyperbole; it’s not an exaggeration. If anything, Gebru’s statement doesn’t go far enough: longtermism, which emerged out of the effective altruism (EA) movement over the past few years, is eugenics on steroids. On the one hand, many of the same racist, xenophobic, classist and ableist attitudes that animated 20th-century eugenics are found all over the longtermist literature and community. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that if the longtermist program were actually implemented by powerful actors in high-income countries, the result would be more or less indistinguishable from what the eugenicists of old hoped to bring about. Societies would homogenize, liberty would be seriously undermined, global inequality would worsen and white supremacy — famously described by Charles Mills as the “unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” — would become even more entrenched than it currently is. The aim of this article is to explore the first issue above; the second will be our focus in the next article of this series for Truthdig.

So, back to Bostrom. My first thought after reading his email was: Is this authentic? Has it been tampered with? How can I know if he really wrote this? I thus contacted everyone who participated in the email thread, and someone replied to confirm that Bostrom did indeed write those words. However, I also contacted Anders Sandberg, a long-time collaborator of Bostrom’s with whom I’d been acquainted for many years through conferences on “existential risk” — the most important concept of longtermist ideology. (Until 2019 or so, I identified as a longtermist myself, a fact that I deeply regret. But this has, at least, given me an intimate understanding of what I would now describe as a profoundly dangerous ideology.)

In response, Sandberg suggested to me that the email is probably authentic (we now know it is), and then, apparently, alerted Bostrom of the fact that I’m aware of his remarks. This prompted Bostrom to release a perfunctory, sloppily-written “apology” full of typos and grammatical errors that didn’t bother to redact the N-word and, if anything, has done more to alert the general public of this noxious ideology than anything I might have published about Bostrom’s email two weeks ago.

“I have caught wind,” Bostrom writes, “that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people.” He continues, writing as if he’s the victim: “I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.” It appears that he believes his “apology” is about public relations rather than morality; it’s about “cleaning out his closet” rather than making things right. He goes on to say that he thinks “the invocation of a racial slur was repulsive” and has donated to organizations like GiveDirectly and Black Health Alliance, though he leaves wide-open the possibility that there really might be genetically based cognitive differences between groups of people (there’s no evidence of this). “It is not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question,” he writes with a shrug. “I would leave to others [sic], who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role.”

Sandberg then casually posted this “apology” on Twitter, writing that Bostrom’s words do “not represent his views and behavior as I have seen them over the 25 years I have known him.” He further warns that “the email has become significantly more offensive in the current cultural context: levels of offensiveness change as cultural attitudes change (sometimes increasing, often decreasing). This causes problems when old writings are interpreted by current standards.” Sandberg seems to be suggesting that Bostrom’s statements weren’t that big a deal when they were written in 1996, at least compared to how our “woke” world of “overly sensitive” “social justice warriors” always on the hunt to “cancel” the next “beleaguered” white man will see them (my scare quotes).

This, of course, triggered an avalanche of protest from academics and onlookers, with one person replying, “I am the same age as Nick Bostrom and participated in many free-wheeling philosophical discussions. I never wrote anything like this, and it would have been shockingly racist at any point in my life.” Another said, “I was a student in the UK in the mid-90s and it was just as offensive then as it is now.” Still others took issue with the fact that Bostrom “never even backed down from the assertion that black people are intellectually inferior and instead went on to assert ‘it’s just not his area of expertise.’” Many simply dismissed it as “a study in a non-apology,” given that Bostrom “says he repudiates the horrific comments” he made, but “then goes right back into them.” As Gebru summarized the whole ignominious affair:

I don’t know what’s worse. The initial email, Bostrom’s “statement” about it, or [Sandberg’s Twitter] thread. I’m gonna go with the latter 2 because that’s what they came up with in preparation for publicity. Their audacity never ceases to amaze me no matter how many times I see it.

A coin has it stamped upon its body that it is to serve as a means of exchange and not as an object of use. Its weight and metallic purity are guaranteed by the issuing authority so that, if by the wear and tear of circulation it has lost in weight, full replacement is provided. Its physical matter has visibly become a mere carrier of its social function.

If, then, the ‘real abstraction’ has nothing to do with the level of ‘reality’, of the effective properties, of an object, it would be wrong for that reason to conceive of it as a ‘thought-abstraction’, as a process taking place in the ‘interior’ of the thinking subject: in relation to this ‘interior’, the abstraction appertaining to the act of exchange is in an irreducible way external, decentred – or, to quote Sohn-Rethel’s concise formulation: ‘The exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought.’

Here we have one of the possible definitions of the unconscious: the form of thought whose ontological status is not that of thought, that is to say, the form of thought external to the thought itself – in short, some Other Scene external to the thought whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance. The symbolic order is precisely such a formal order which supplements and/or disrupts the dual relationship of ‘external’ factual reality and ‘internal’ subjective experience; Sohn-Rethel is thus quite justified in his criticism of Althusser, who conceives abstraction as a process taking place entirely in the domain of knowledge and refuses for that reason the category of ‘real abstraction’ as the expression of an ‘epistemological confusion’. The ‘real abstraction’ is unthinkable in the frame of the fundamental Althusserian epistemological distinction between the ‘real object’ and the ‘object of knowledge’ in so far as it introduces a third element which subverts the very field of this distinction: the form of the thought previous and external to the thought – in short: the symbolic order.

:zizek-ok: We are now able to formulate precisely the ‘scandalous’ nature of Sohn-Rethel’s undertaking for philosophical reflection: he has confronted the closed circle of philosophical reflection with an external place where its form is already ‘staged’. Philosophical reflection is thus subjected to an uncanny experience similar to the one summarized by the old oriental formula ‘thou art that’: there, in the external effectivity of the exchange process, is your proper place; there is the theatre in which your truth was performed before you took cognizance of it. The confrontation with this place is unbearable because philosophy as such is defined by its blindness to this place: it cannot take it into consideration without dissolving itself, without losing its consistency.

This does not mean, on the other hand, that everyday ‘practical’ consciousness, as opposed to the philosophical-theoretical one – the consciousness of the individuals partaking in the act of exchange – is not also subjected to a complementary blindness. During the act of exchange, individuals proceed as ‘practical solipsists’, they misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market: ‘What the commodity owners do in an exchange relation is practical solipsism – irrespective of what they think and say about it’. Such a misrecognition is the sine qua non of the effectuation of an act of exchange – if the participants were to take note of the dimension of ‘real abstraction’, the ‘effective’ act of exchange itself would no longer be possible:

Thus, in speaking of the abstractness of exchange we must be careful not to apply the term to the consciousness of the exchange agents. They are supposed to be occupied with the use of the commodities they see, but occupied in their imagination only. It is the action of exchange, and the action alone, that is abstract … the abstractness of that action cannot be noted when it happens because the consciousness of its agents is taken up with their business and with the empirical appearance of things which pertain to their use. One could say that the abstractness of their action is beyond realization by the actors because their very consciousness stands in the way. Were the abstractness to catch their minds their action would cease to be exchange and the abstraction would not arise.

:zizek: This misrecognition brings about the fissure of the consciousness into ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’: the proprietor partaking in the act of exchange proceeds as a ‘practical solipsist’: he overlooks the universal, socio-synthetic dimension of his act, reducing it to a casual encounter of atomized individuals in the market. This ‘repressed’ social dimension of his act emerges thereupon in the form of its contrary – as universal Reason turned towards the observation of nature (the network of categories of ‘pure reason’ as the conceptual frame of natural sciences).

The crucial paradox of this relationship between the social effectivity of the commodity exchange and the ‘consciousness’ of it is that – to use again a concise formulation by Sohn-Rethel – ‘this non-knowledge of the reality is part of its very essence’: the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants – :zizek-joy: if we come to ‘know too much’, to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself.

:zizek-preference: This is probably the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’: ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. :zizek-preference: ‘Ideological’ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him – the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution. :zizek-fuck:

SOURCE: The Sublime Object of Ideology

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Bitch modern humans have been on this earth for six hundred thousand years creating an enormous number of distinct and unique cultures which shape the people living under them. The absolute arrogance to think you can generalize a hundred billion people's worth of experience based on what you've experienced in your one tiny lifetime. Humans are so fucking diverse there is VERY little you can say is "human nature." But no please tell me more about how people are just selfish by default despite all the fucking evidence to the contrary.