-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-> Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood.
-
-Murray quotes Stephen 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."
-
-[where I agree with the moral _sentiment_, but that platitude doesn't solve all the problems (notably, that's not how Bayesian reasoning works)]
-
-[my thought: but you need causality to know the effects of interventions! Maybe that's _why_ we don't have any useful outside interventions!]
-
-[polygenic scores are useful in the context of society's structure]
-
-> Women in combat? It's not an issue of female courage. But from early childhood into adulthood, males are far more attracted than females to physical contests, including ones involving violence, and are more physically aggressive and risk-taking than women.
-
-
-
-[...]
-
-> I think at the root is the new upper class's conflaction of intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth. Few admit it, of course. BUt the evolving zeitgeist of the new upper class has led to a misbegotten hierarchy whereby being a surgeon is _better_ in some sense of human worth than being an insurance salesman, being an executive in a high-tech firm is _better_ than being a housewife, and a neighborhood of people with advanced degrees is _better_ than a neighborhood of high-school graduates. To put it so baldly makes it obvious how senseless it is. There shouldn't be any relationship between these things and human worth. And yet, among too many in the new upper class, there is.
-
-
-
-
-As [Harold Lee points out](https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production),
-
-
-
-
-> The conflcation of intellectual ability with human worth helps to explain the new upper class's insistence that inequalities of intellectual ability must be the product of environmental disadvantage. Many people with high IQs really do feel sorry for people with low IQs. If the environment is to blame, then those unfortunates can be helped, and that makes people who want to help them feel good. If genes are to blame, it makes people who want to help them feel bad. People prefer feeling good to feeling bad, so they engage in confirmation bias when it comes to the evidence about the causes of human differences.
-
-
-https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production
-
-
-Moldbug's denying the moral worth of IQ: https://archive.is/9Ezk3
-
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
-
-http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/
-
+That's why we're not smart enough to want a discipline of Actual Social Science. The benefits of having a collective understanding of human behavior—a _shared_ map—could be enormous, but beliefs about our own qualities, and those of socially-salient groups to which we belong (_e.g._, sex, race, and class) are _exactly_ those for which we face the largest incentive to decieve and self-decieve. Counterintuively, I might not _want_ you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my friendship, for the same reason that I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my used car. That makes it a lot harder not just to _get the right answer for the reasons_, but also to _trust_ that your fellow so-called "scholars" are trying to get the right answer, rather than trying to sneak self-serving lies into the shared map in order to fuck you over.