Top Oxford Philosopher Nick Bostrom Admits Writing ‘Disgusting’ N-Word Mass Email
One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers has apologized for writing a racist email in which he used an appalling racial slur and said he believed it was “true” that “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”
Oxford University Professor Nick Bostrom—the Swedish philosopher famed for his argument that we might be living in a simulation and popularizing the field of “existential risk”—shared the offensive message in an apology posted to his website. In the document dated Jan. 9, Bostrom wrote that he had “caught wind that somebody has been digging” through the archives of an old listserv mailing list called the Extropians, and that he wanted to “get ahead” of someone surfacing the “most offensive stuff” which could be used in “smear campaigns.”
“The Extropians mailing list was a forum in the mid-90s where people had conversations about science fiction, future technologies, society, and all sorts of random things,” Bostrom wrote in the apology. “It was not moderated, so the noise level was very high—occasional interesting ideas but also large quantities of silly, mistaken, or outright offensive stuff.”