+... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A science review of a science book, for science nerds: the kind of thing that would have no reason to draw your attention if you're not _genuinely interested_ in Mahanalobis _D_ effect sizes or adaptive introgression or Falconer's formula, for their own sake, or (better) for the sake of [compressing the length of the message needed to encode your observations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_message_length).
+
+But that's not why you're reading this. That's not why Murray wrote the book. That's not even why _I'm_ writing this. We should hope—emphasis on the _should_—for a discipline of Actual Social Science, whose practitioners strive to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with the same passionately dispassionate objectivity they might bring to the study of beetles, or algebraic topology—or that an alien superintelligence might bring to the study of humans.
+
+We do not have a discipline of Actual Social Science. Possibly because we're not smart enough to do it, but perhaps more so because we're not smart enough to _want_ to do it. No one has an incentive to lie about the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere. (The <em>k</em><sup>th</sup> group is trivial for _k_ < _n_, and isomorphic to the integers thereafter. _You're welcome._) If you're asking questions about homotopy groups _at all_, you almost certainly care about getting _the right answer for the right reasons_. At most, you might be biased towards believing your own conjectures in the optimistic hope of achieving eternal algebraic-topology fame and glory, like Ruth Lawrence, but nothing about algebraic topology is going to be _morally threatening_ in a way that will leave you sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil, or fearing that your ideological enemies have siezed control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head.
+
+Okay, maybe this was a bad example; topology in general really is kind of a mindfuck. (Remind me to tell you about the long line, which is like the line of real numbers, except much longer.)
+
+In any case, as soon as we start to ask questions _about humans_—and far more so _identifiable groups_ of humans—we enter the domain of _politics_. Instead of just getting _the right answer for the right reasons_ (which can conclude _conditional_ answers: if what humans are like depends on _choices_ about what we teach our children, then there will still be a fact of the matter as to what choices lead to what outcomes), everyone and her dog has some fucking _agenda_—and the people who claim not to have an agenda are lying. (The most I can credibly claim for myself is that I try to keep my agenda reasonably _minimalist_—and the reader must judge for herself to what extent I succeed.) You can't _just_ write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds about "things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other"—to write and be understood, you have to do some sort of _positioning_ of how your work fits in to [the war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/).
+
+Murray positions his work as a corrective to a "blank slate" orthodoxy that refuses to entertain any possibility of biological influences on group differences. The three parts of the book are pitched not simply as "stuff we know about biologically-mediated group differences" (the oblivious-science-nerd approach I prefer), but as a rebuttal to "Gender Is a Social Construct", "Race Is a Social Construct", and "Class Is a Function of Privilege." At the same time, however, Murray is careful to position his work as _nonthreatening_: "there are no monsters in the closet," he writes, "no dread doors that we must fear opening." The start of the introductions to the sex and race parts of the book do the obligatory historical context-setting of emphasizing that old-timey patriarchy and chattel slavery were Actually Really Bad.
+
+Needless to say (it _should_ be needless to say), I agree that old-timey patriarchy and chattel slavery were Actually Really Bad. However, I feel like Murray's overall positioning strategy is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while downplaying the possibility of any [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) of the orthodoxy being false. I think this is sympathetic but [ultimately ineffective](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/). Clueless [presentist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) conservatism of the form, "Old-timey patriarchy and white supremacy were Really Bad, but that's over and everything is Fine Now" is unlikely to satisfy readers who _don't_ think everything is Fine Now, and suspect Murray of standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" rather than aspiring to Actual Social Science.
+
+I think we can do better by going meta and analyzing the _functions_ being served by the constraints on our discourse and seeking out clever self-aware strategies for satisfying those functions _without_ [lying about everything](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/). We mustn't fear opening the dread meta-door in front of whether there actually _are_ dread doors that we must fear opening.
+
+Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood," and quotes Steven Pinker: "Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."
+
+I [_strongly_ agree with](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) this seem like a good and wise thing to say. But I have been ... trained. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor to even that which is most sacred. Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—to the function that generates my _current best guess_ as to that which is most sacred. If that which was believed to be most sacred turns out to not be entirely coherent ... then we might [have some work to do](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility).
+
+"Nothing we learn will threaten _X_ _properly understood_." When you elide the specific assignment _X_ := "human equality", the _form_ of this statement is kind of suspicious, right? Why "properly understood"? It would be weird to say, "Nothing we learn will threaten the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere _properly understood_." This "properly understood" qualifier seems like the sort of thing you would only say if you _were_ subconsciously worried about _X_ being threatened by new discoveries, and