-"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_."
+Notice how the "not allowing sex and race differences in psychological traits to appear on shared maps is the Schelling point for resistance to sex- and race-based oppression" actually gives us an _explanation_ for _why_ one might reasonably have a sense that there are dread doors that we must not open. Undermining the "everyone is Actually Equal" Schelling point could [catalyze a preference cascade](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8q8p6n/culture_war_roundup_for_june_11/e0mxwe9/)—a [slide down the slippery slope to the the next Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes), which might be a lot worse than the _status quo_ on the "amount of rape and genocide" metric, even if it does slightly better on "estimating heritability coefficients." The orthodoxy isn't just being dumb for no reason. In analogy, Galileo and Darwin weren't _trying_ to undermine Christianity—they had much more interesting things to think about—but religious authorities were _right_ to fear heliocentrism and evolution: if the prevailing coordination equilibrium depends on lies, then telling the truth _is_ a threat and it _is_ disloyal. And if the prevailing coordination equilibrium is basically _good_, then you can see why purported truth-tellers striking at the heart of the faith might be believed to be evil.
+
+Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgements of the injustice of historical patriarchy ("When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start [...] women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total leagl subservience to men") and racial oppression ("slavery experienced by Africans in the New World went far beyond legal constraints [...] The freedom granted by emancipation in America was only marginally better in practice and the situation improved only slowly through the first half of the twentieth century"). It feels ... defensive? Coerced? It probably _is_ coerced. (To his credit, Murray is generally pretty forthcoming about how the need to write "defensively" shaped the book, as in a sidebar in the introduction that says that he's prefer to say a lot more about evopsych, but he chose to just focus on empirical findings in order to avoid the charge of telling "just-so stories.")
+
+But this kind of defensive half-measure satisfies no one. From the oblivious-science-nerd perspective—the view that agrees with Murray that "everyone should calm down"—you shouldn't _need_ to genuflect to the memory of some historical injustice before you're allowed to talk about Science. But from the perspective that cares about Justice and not just Truth, an _insincere_ gesture or a strategic concession is all the more dangerous insofar as it could function as camoflage for a nefarious hidden agenda. If your work is explicitly aimed at _destroying the anti-oppression Schelling-point belief_, a few hand-wringing historical interludes and bromides about human equality having no testable implications (!!) aren't going to clear you of the suspicion that you're _doing it on purpose_—trying to destroy the anti-oppression Schelling point in order to oppress, not because anything that can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
+
+And sufficient suspicion makes communication nearly impossible. (If you _know_ someone is lying, their words mean nothing, [not even as the opposite of the truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence).) As far as many of Murray's detractors are concerned, it almost doesn't matter what the text of _Human Diversity_ says, how meticulously researched of a psychology/neuroscience/genetics lit review it is. From their perspective, Murray is "hiding the ball": they're not mad about _this_ book; they're mad about specifically chapters 13 and 14 of a book Murray coauthored twenty-five years ago.