-To me, this seems ... pretty naïve? I _also_ feel a lot of affection and loyalty to the previous ideological regime, but what made equality before the law such an effective marketing promise was the unstated premise that it would lead to, you know, _actual_ equality. If that's _empirically not true_, and people _aren't_ actually colorblind—if people notice ethnicity as a cluster in high-dimensional configuration space and tend to care more about people "like us"—then the classic ideal of individualist egalitarianism
+As a child of the previous ideological regime, I'm strongly in favor of this! Unfortunately, I am not feeling optimistic about the American creed's prospects. Murray notes that the ideal of individualism is unnatural—we evolved to be loyal to our ingroup and distrust outsiders. A dominant group serving its own interests at the expense of others is the natural form of government; the American experiment—to the extent it was ever real—was the exception that required careful cultivation. But part of what made equality before the law such an effective marketing promise was the unstated premise that it would lead to, you know, _actual_ equality. If that's empirically not true—if people don't _believe_ that it's true—what happens to our Society?
+
+I don't know.
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+----
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+... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_. Let me explain.
+
+When scholars like Murray write about "intelligence", they're talking about a summary of the differences _between_ humans: we can measure how well different humans perform at various verbal or spatial or mathematical thinking-tasks, and it turns out that, on average, people who are good at one thinking-task also tend to be good at others. Graph all the test scores on an appropriately high-dimensional plot, and the longest axis of the hyperellipsoid represents "general intelligence"—the dimension of human variation that we recognize as "smart" _vs._ "dumb."
+
+But this particular dick-measuring contest takes place in the context of a human civilization; it doesn't tell us very much about "intelligence" as a natural phenomenon—the capacity of an agent to achieve goals across a variety of environments. Maybe some humans read better than others, but from the standpoint of eternity, reading itself is a _recent_ cultural practice [(invented only 3500 years ago)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Prehistoric_and_ancient_literacy) that piggybacks off of natural language capabilities that _all_ developmentally normal humans share. Cats and crows and octopuses _do_ have "intelligence"—various cognitive abilities that let them integrate sensory information into a model of their environment, allocate attention, execute motor plans to seek prey or avoid predators, _&c._, but you can't give them a [Stanford–Binet IQ test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelligence_Scales), which was designed around the _specific_ set of abilties that humans have in common. But, in principle, humans aren't special.
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+And yet—it seems like humans _are_ special, in some ways. Of all the creatures on [the tree of life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology)), our lineage "took over the world" in the sense that if humans want a resource that cats or crows or octopuses are using, the nonhuman side of the ensuing conflict is predictably going to lose. (To the extent that we don't usually think of ourselves as engaging in a "conflict". Animals aren't _enemies_; they're just in the way.) This is not because humans are stronger or have sharper teeth than other creatures, but because of something about our "intelligence" in the natural-phenomenon (not the IQ-test variation) sense. It's not even necessarily about _individual_ human intelligence being a particularly formidable force: given no tools and no friends, and confronted by a hungry lion at ten paces, it doesn't seem easy to survive by thinking of some incredibly clever plan. If you had a gun, you could shoot the lion, but [no one individual knows how to make a gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil) all by themselves, starting from nothing.