+... 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.
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+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. Not 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_.
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+But as soon as we start to ask questions _about humans_—and far more so _identifiable groups_ of humans—we enter the domain of _politics_. 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.)
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+> Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood.
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+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."
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+[where I agree with the moral _sentiment_, but that platitude doesn't solve all the problems (notably, that's not how Bayesian reasoning works)]
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+[my thought: but you need causality to know the effects of interventions! Maybe that's _why_ we don't have any useful outside interventions!]
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+[polygenic scores are useful in the context of society's structure]
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+> 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.
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+[...]
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+> 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.
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+As [Harold Lee points out](https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production),
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+> 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.
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+https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production
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+Moldbug's denying the moral worth of IQ: https://archive.is/9Ezk3
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+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
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+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
+
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/
+