+This is all very "reasonable" by the methods and epistemology of Murray's world, and I'm afraid—not a figure of speech, really afraid—that there's nothing I could say, no words I could possibly type to explain the cruel capriciousness of that world's "reasonableness" to those who haven't personally been on the other side, who have never been abused by a total institution like the "justice" system. Two three-day stints in the psych ward are [what did it to me](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/). Going to school might not be bad enough if you went to a good school.
+
+_The authorities are usually trying to get it right._ I mean, yes—_by the Authority's own corrupt standards_. The authorities are ordinary men and women trying to do their jobs as best they can. "Getting it right" means doing what's expected of people in your position by the power structure around you, which usually has _some_ connection with the written rules which are ostensibly supposed to prevent abuses of power. If the rules say that the police can't just kidnap people arbitrarily—there's paperwork to be filled out documenting _why_ an arrest was made—then, yes, the paperwork will tend to be filled out. That doesn't mean the things written on the paperwork are actually _true_.
+
+[TODO: I have paperwork from being in psych prison—yes, I know, they call it a "hospital"—that says I self-presented due to thoughts of sucide. That isn't true.]
+
+Notice how casually Murray mentions the decision of what charges are to be filed as "a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation"! As a description of the system as it actually exists, this is perfectly accurate, but it seems important to notice that the entire concept of plea bargaining is a perversion of justice. One would have hoped for a system that proportionately punishes people for the specific crimes that they _actually did_, in order to disincentivize crime. Instead, we have the Orwellian nightmare of a system that says, "We think you're guilty of something, but it'll be easier for you if you confess to being guilty of something less bad, [and swear under oath that no one threatened you to confess](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) (!!)."
+
+In calling the current system an Orwellian nightmare, I'm _not_ saying I personally know how to do better. (If abolishing the police would just result in anarchy and mob justice, that would just be a different kind of nightmare.) I'm trying to highlight how the statistics output by the actually-existing "justice" and "education" systems need to be understood as data about what's happening _within_ the current power structure managed by these systems, and shouldn't be naïvely seen as solely reflecting an independently existing reality of "education" and "crime." If there were no schools, people would still learn things (people still _do_ learn things outside of school); if there were no law enforcement, people would still take advantage of each other (people still _do_ take advantage of each other, outside the reaches of the law).
+
+[TODO: if police use drug crimes as a plea bargaining chip because they're easier to prosecute, that may be a pragmatic adaptation to it being hard to prove real crimes, but it also sets up a situation where the police as an entity are preying on communities that use drugs]
+
+[TODO: credentialism (I'm not writing this for school, and you're not reading it for school, either)]
+
+[TODO: "But I digress" transition sentence]
+
+In the chapters on first-order effects, Murray lays out some of the immediate and knowable consequences of the group trait differences that have just been argued to exist at all. You might think that groups would have approximately the same IQs _within_ a profession, but this turns out not to be true: the gaps are either the same or larger! The reason probably differs by job: for jobs that most people are capable of, like being a janitor, employers value non-cognitive traits like conscientiousness more, and the IQ gap from the general population "carries through" to the profession.
+
+For jobs that usually require credentials, another explanation takes prominence. For decades, colleges have been applying pretty aggressive affirmative action policies, admitting black and Latino students with much weaker scores than white or Asian candidates: as far as admission to elite colleges goes, being black is an advantage equivalent to about 180 points on the SAT. That has ripple effects: elite colleges "snap up" the most talented non-Asian minorities, who then tend to come in lower in the class rankings—and this _within_-institution racial inequality perpetuates itself at less-elite institutions (which are playing the same game with the students who didn't get admitted by their first choice), and down the pipeline to graduate school and the professions. If schools applied the same standards to everyone, you wouldn't see this distortionary effect where the same credential means different things based on race—Murray notes that the U.S. military, which makes heavy use of aptitude testing, has been strikingly successful in this regard—but that would come at the cost of lopsided diversity numbers. For exceptionally cognitively demanding jobs, the competition for which H.R. or the admissions office are not given the power to meddle in, we already see this anyway: as [Larry Summers (in)famously observed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes), small group differences in mean or variance result in much larger differences at the extreme tails of the distribution, such that there are just many _fewer_ non-Asian minorities who can perform at the level of elite CEOs and professors.
+
+As to crime, Murray argues that the consequences of criminality differences are a bigger deal in big cities where segregated higher-crime neighborhoods form, in contrast to smaller towns and cities that are more racially integrated simply because there aren't enough minorities to form an enclave. Businesses and real estate developers are less willing to invest in high-crime areas, and with a higher ambient threat level, police officers in those areas are incentivized to be more jumpy about the use of force.
+
+Murray wraps up with a chapter on "If We Don't Face Reality." The facts of IQ and crime differences don't imply any particular policy, but Murray wants researchers to at least be able to control for IQ as an independent variable, and for the targets of our ongoing Cultural Revolution to offer a little more resistance. Moreover, Murray contends, identity politics is an existential threat to the American system: it was one thing when just minorities thought of themselves as collective interest groups, but if the white working class picks up the same playbook, then the ideal of individualism will be truly lost within the tides of ethnic conflict. Murray identifies eliminating government-sponsored affirmative action as politically impossible, "not within our grasp", but that a partial solution would be for those on the center-left and center-right to reaffirm the American creed and the goal of equality before the law.
+
+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.