X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;ds=sidebyside;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fbook-review-facing-reality.md;h=038cd0e294df8dde29a4ddeada483e231bcef16d;hb=adf55d4645931135d3d3cf1f4e0886de519f7745;hp=d4758080d4181639ab8a4aedddfd8ec0373f9d15;hpb=d8593ca1a6872996bc141bc8ad99ed23c056cd74;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git
diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
index d475808..038cd0e 100644
--- a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
+++ b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
Date: 2021-06-30 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, genetics
Status: draft
Well, this is awkward.
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ Unfortunately, I fear Murray's project in _Facing Reality_ is _too_ focusedâto
It's important to notice that, contrary to Murray's self-presentation of being only concerned with facts and not causality, this _is_ implicitly making causal claims: it's just that it's specifically making claims about the "crime â imprisonment" and "intelligence â success" links in the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), while remaining silent about the equations underlying the "genes â intelligence â environment" and "genes â intelligence â environment" v-structures. But this is a technicality. (If someone with the requisite power and influence were trying to found a discipline of Actual Social Science in our world, one of the obvious first steps would be to hire [Judea Pearl](http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/) as a technical reviewer for Murray.) Murray's point is just that even if the trait differences were solely caused by environmental factors like poverty or the cultural legacy of slavery, the differences would still be real and still show up in statistics produced by procedurally fair and non-racist institutions; the strawman of "And the differences are 100% genetic" is expressly not implied. (Not that "And this looks likely to be somewhere between 40â80% genetic" would be more than 40â80% less unpalatable.)
-The problem is that this causality-blindnessâor not-quite-coherently _attempted_ causality-blindnessâis profoundly unsatisfying. The [difference between a causal model and a statistical model](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/45/6/1895/2999350) is _about_ how the system would respond to interventions; [this isn't something you can dodge](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) if you care about policy and possibilities, rather than just summarizing static facts about a static world. Compiling the stats and arguing that the stats aren't just lies is an important service, and educational to those who aren't already familiar with the stats, but no sophisticated advocate of structural-racism theories is going to have their worldview substantially altered by this book: it's very easy to concede that the trait differences Murray documents are real (not simply made up by lying teacher and cops), but that they would vanish in a sufficiently anti-racist Society, and Murray is _explicilty_ (and reasonably, given how difficult it is) declaring that question out-of-scope. Overall, my impression of _Facing Reality_ is favorable but restrained: I keep finding myself agreeing with Murray "as far as it goes", but thinking that it just doesn't go as far as Murray seems to suggest.
+The problem is that this causality-blindnessâor not-quite-coherently _attempted_ causality-blindnessâis profoundly unsatisfying. The [difference between a causal model and a statistical model](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/45/6/1895/2999350) is _about_ how the system would respond to interventions; [this isn't something you can dodge](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) if you care about policy and possibilities, rather than just summarizing static facts about a static world. Compiling the stats and arguing that the stats aren't just lies is an important service, and educational to those who aren't already familiar with the stats, but no sophisticated advocate of structural-racism theories is going to have their worldview substantially altered by this book: it's very easy to concede that the trait differences Murray documents are real (not simply made up by lying teachers and cops), but that they would vanish in a sufficiently anti-racist Society, and Murray is _explicitly_ (and perhaps reasonably, given how difficult it is) declaring that question out-of-scope. Overall, my impression of _Facing Reality_ is favorable but restrained: I keep finding myself agreeing with Murray "as far as it goes", but thinking that it just doesn't go as far as Murray seems to suggest.
After this overview, let me summarize the content of this pretty-short-for-a-book in the form of a pretty-long-for-a-blog-post. After introducing our topic, Chapter 2 covers the stats on American demographics. At present, the country is about 60% white, 18% Latino, 13% black, and 6% Asian, but the, um, black-and-white framing of American racial discourse makes more sense in this historical context that there were a lot fewer Latinos and Asians before a [1965 immigration reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965): in 1960, the figures were 87% white, 11% black. Big cities have become much more multiracial, whereas smaller cities and towns remain either monoracially white or biracial (the two races being white/black in the South, or white/Latino in the southwest and southern California).
@@ -38,6 +38,8 @@ Murray briefly addresses two popular (but mutually in tension) classes of object
Perhaps you could argue both that the tests are racist and that teachers are _even more_ racist?âbut you'd want to be specific about what alternative metric of "merit" you think they're being racist _with respect to_. The thing about tests is, a vast space of "objective" procedures can come up with a number, without giving anyone a reason to care about that particular number; if you care about group rank orderings, you _could_ come up with a measurement that gets the the group rank ordering you want. (Black people have more melanin than white people, on average! People with more letters in their name take longer to say their name out loud, on average! Cats do better than humans on a test of scratching, on average! "Hispanic" comes before "White" in alphabetical order!) The problem is that it looks like the "cognitive ability" thing that psychometricians are trying to measure is actually a pretty robust abstraction that summarizes variation _in individuals_ that people care about (like the ability to master a profession); if it were just a tool of racial oppression, it's hard to see why it would work so well _within_ groups.
+[TODO: mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity ]
+
In the chapter on violent crime, Murray presents a table of black/white and Latino/white ratios of arrests for violent crimes in thirteen cities for which data was available. The median black/white ratio was 9.0 (that is, 9 black people arrested for violent crimes per 1 white person so arrested) and the median Latino/white ratio was 2.4.
To argue that these ratios are driven by real differences in behavior rather than biased police, Murray attempts to "triangulate" the true crime rate with other data. For example, arrests for murder specifically are going to be less biased by selective enforcement or fraud: even evil and corrupt cops who don't consider themselves above, say, planting evidence of drugs, seem less likely or able to fake a human corpse. So if racial differences in murder charges match differences in violent-crime arrests more generally, that's probabilistic evidence that arrests are tracking a real difference in criminal behavior.
@@ -58,6 +60,18 @@ _The authorities are usually trying to get it right._ I mean, yesâ_by the Auth
[TODO: I have paperwork from being in psych prisonâyes, I know, they call it a "hospital"âthat says I self-presented due to thoughts of sucide. That isn't true.]
+[TODO: https://archive.is/HUkzY public defender
+
+The racist magazine _American Renaissance_ once published [an article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY) complaining about the behavior of his black clients.
+
+The lawyer
+
+> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
+
+I feel a lot of sympathy for the defendant
+
+]
+
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).
@@ -70,7 +84,7 @@ In calling the current system an Orwellian nightmare, I'm _not_ saying I persona
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 rankingsâand 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 raceâMurray notes that the U.S. military, which makes heavy use of aptitude testing, has been strikingly successful in this regardâbut 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 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.
+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 rankingsâand 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 raceâMurray notes that the U.S. military, which makes heavy use of aptitude testing, has been strikingly successful in this regardâbut 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.
@@ -79,149 +93,3 @@ Murray wraps up with a chapter on "If We Don't Face Reality." The facts of IQ an
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 unnaturalâwe 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 experimentâto the extent it was ever realâwas 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 trueâif people don't _believe_ that it's trueâwhat happens to our Society?
I don't know.
-
-----
-
-... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_.
-
-
-
-[What I actually care about: the intelligence explosion; the alignment problem might be solvable by von Neumann clones; a civilization at our tech level with a more functional state religion that wasn't afraid of genetics would be able to produce them faster than we will; this is really bad guys]
-
-[shut down tribalist thinking: it's not like white people (or even Jews) are the pinnicle of creation; imagine the space of possible minds and consider psychic unity and know how puny we all are]
-
-[amplifying ancestry differences
-https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/super-gaels/]
-
-
-group diff studies
-https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/01/what-you-cant-say-genetic-group-difference-edition/
-
-[the nutritional mismatch hypothesis]
-
-[Cognitive Creationism, Dodging Darwin, &c.]
-
-[the Georgetown law professor thing: "I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks."âthis is actually a very straightforward consequence of affirmative action (even if you don't believe in a genetic gap); it should be possible to reason about
-https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/12/georgetown-terminates-law-professor-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students
-]
-
-"rotation" of the class axis, as people sort by cognitive ability directly rather than race??
-
-Paul Christiano abstract story about what kind of agents steer the future
-https://rationalaltruist.com/2013/02/27/why-will-they-be-happy/
-
-https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education
-
-https://www.unz.com/isteve/nature-tackling-systemic-racism-requires-the-system-of-science-to-change/
-
-https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-not-so-great-reset-rolls-on/
-
-I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007
-
-The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
-
-"Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good?" (No!)
-https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf
-
-https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2017/3/13/21111588/it-s-official-new-york-s-prospective-teachers-will-no-longer-have-to-pass-controversial-literacy-exa
-
-For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-taboo-in-biology.html
-
-From my notebook circa November 2007â
-I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm male all the way down, no matter what I say or do or even feel. This is hard to deal with because my <> I'm special or the Difference is trivial. <> (But I've _always_ been <>)
-
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
-
-https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
-
-"No causal associations between childhood family income and subsequent psychiatric disorders, substance misuse and violent crime arrests"
-https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab099/6288123
-
-https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak
-
-https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/sperm-counts-decline-fertility-science-white-nationalism.html
-
-https://dynomight.net/are-tests-irrelevant/
-
-https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
-
-It's going to be the future soon; things aren't always going to be like this
-
-https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689
-> For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesnât mean it wouldnât work. Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.
-
-> While a limited form of selection in humans is acceptableâfor example, preventing a couple who are carriers of a recessive genetic defect or disease from producing an offspring with that conditionâthe kind of wholesale and directed selective breeding of humans suggested by the word "eugenics" is immoral, and I don't favor it at all.
-https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/discovery-institute-makes-hay-of-dawkins-tweet-and-a-geneticist-mistakenly-says-that-artificial-selection-wont-work-in-humans/
-
-> I hold eugenics to be completely immoral and we should not attempt to implement it.
-https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1229890352275955713
-
-https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838/
-https://biohackinfo.com/news-china-gene-editing-criminal-law-article-336-march-2021/
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
-
-https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/even-during-a-reckoning-mind-reading
-
-https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/left-targets-testing-gifted-programs/619315/
-
-> I don't want to hear about black thugs raping white women, but I'm going to hear it soon if you don't stop talking about white cops killing black kids
-Glenn Loury on Tucker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuPdPKHG18k
-
-https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his
-
-Coleman Hughes: it's possible to push back against Kendism without
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE5QcD_12fQ
-
-printing IQ in the NYT in 1969!!!
-https://www.unz.com/isteve/news-that-used-to-be-fit-to-print/
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X9Rk4rXSMnKfYLq5r/a-brief-review-of-current-and-near-future-methods-of-genetic
-
-http://web.archive.org/web/20201101001637/https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-murder-offender-ratio-for-blacks-nonblacks-ratio-for-males-females/
-
-https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-capture-the-full-extent-of-the-systemic-bias-in-policing/
-
-https://quillette.com/2021/07/29/charles-murrays-facing-reality-a-review/
-
-"Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images"
-https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10356
-https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/ai-has-the-worst-superpower-medical-racism/
-https://www.wired.com/story/these-algorithms-look-x-rays-detect-your-race/
-
-https://www.unz.com/isteve/military-discovers-that-stripping-photos-from-promotion-evaluations-hurts-blacks/
-
-"Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification"
-> mean heritable propensity for violence thus shifted 0.08 SD leftward with each passing generation
-> the most violent 1 to 2% should form a right-hand âtailâ that begins 2.33â2.05
-SD to the right of the mean propensity for homicide. If we eliminate this right-hand tail and leave only the other 98-99% to survive and reproduce, we have a selection differential of 0.027 to 0.049 SD per generation.
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rhg27MqkxJsnZwoYg/the-codex-skeptic-faq
-
-https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-the-conventional-wisdom-on-educational
-
-https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/tetlock-and-the-taliban
-
-Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse
-https://archive.is/aVTpr
-
-https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/observations-on-smarter-african-americans/
-
-https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354010004_Genetic_Ancestry_and_General_Cognitive_Ability_in_a_Sample_of_American_Youths
-
-"Human capital mediates natural selection in contemporary humans"
-https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/ueaeco/UEA-ECO-21-02_Updated.pdf
-
-[TODO: Scott Alexander on "involuntary": "This sounds super Orwellian, but it really is done with the patient's best interest at heart." https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/ ]
-
-[TODO: https://archive.is/HUkzY public defender
-
-The racist magazine _American Renaissance_ once published [an article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY) complaining about the behavior of his black clients.
-
-The lawyer
-
-> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
-
-I feel a lot of sympathy for the defendant
-
-]