X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2F2020%2Fbook-review-human-diversity.md;h=1407bcc9c91e7f716e55bb25033e20d593e0bce9;hb=e847e973c284aa18843d4a76cdfd4bf725546740;hp=20d5b0741db95568d2ad181c6ac6ce29288bb106;hpb=ad9f835b70707d46a8438c188a0e45ffd8289342;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git
diff --git a/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
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@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ These ancestry groupings _are_ a "construct" in the sense that the groupings are
Twentieth-century theorists like Fisher and Haldane and whatshisface-the-guinea-pig-guy had already figured out a lot about how evolution works (stuff like, a mutation that confers a fitness advantage of _s_ has a probability of about 2s of sweeping to fixation), but a lot of hypotheses about recent human evolution weren't easy to test or even formulate until the genome was sequenced!
-You might think that there wasn't enough _time_ in the 2â5k generations since we came forth out of Africa for much human evolution to take place: a new mutation needs to confer an unusually large benefit to sweep to fixation that fast. But what if you didn't actually need any new mutations? Natural selection on polygenic traits can also act on "standing variation": variation _already_ present in the population that was mostly neutral in previous environments, but is fitness-relevant to new selection pressures. The rapid response to selective breeding observed in domesticated plants and animals mostly doesn't depend on new mutations.
+You might think that there wasn't enough _time_ in the 2â5k generations since we came forth out of Africa for much human evolution to take place: a new mutation needs to confer an unusually large benefit to sweep to fixation that fast. But what if you didn't actually need any new mutations? Natural selection on polygenic traits can also act on "standing variation": variation _already_ present in the population that was mostly neutral in previous environments, but is fitness-relevant to new selection pressures. The rapid response to selective breeding observed in domesticated plants and animals mostly doesn't depend on new mutations.
Another mechanism of recent human evolution is _introgression_: early humans interbred with our Neanderthal and Denisovan "cousins", giving our lineage the chance to "steal" all their good alleles! In contrast to new mutations, which usually die out even when they're beneficial (that 2s rule again), alleles "flowing" from another population keep getting reintroduced, giving them more chances to sweep!
@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ What do these differences in SNP frequencies mean in practice?? We ... don't kno
Sorry, "the Tibetans did it with ..." is sloppy phrasing on my part; what I actually mean is that the Tibetans who weren't genetically predisposed to breathe faster were more likely to die without leaving children behind. That's how evolution works!
-The third part of the book is about genetic influences on class structure! Untangling the true causes of human variation is a really hard technical philosophy problem, but behavioral geneticists have at least gotten started with their simple _ACE_ model. It works like this: first, assume (that is, "pretend") that the genetic variation for a trait is _additive_ (if you have the appropriate SNP, you get more of the trait), rather than exhibiting _epistasis_ (where the effects of different loci interfere with each other) or Mendelian _dominance_ (where the presence of just one copy of an allele (of two) determines the phenotype, and it doesn't matter whether you heterozygously have a different allele as your second version of that gene). Then we pretend that we can partition the variance in phenotypes as the sum of the "additive" genetic variance _A_, plus the environmental variance "common" within a family _C_, plus "everything else" (including measurement "error" and the not-shared-within-families "environment") _E_. Briefly (albeit at the risk of being _cliché_): nature, nurture, and _noise_.
+The third part of the book is about genetic influences on class structure! Untangling the true causes of human variation is a really hard technical philosophy problem, but behavioral geneticists have at least gotten started with their simple _ACE_ model. It works like this: first, assume (that is, "pretend") that the genetic variation for a trait is _additive_ (if you have the appropriate SNP, you get more of the trait), rather than exhibiting _epistasis_ (where the effects of different loci interfere with each other) or Mendelian _dominance_ (where the presence of just one copy of an allele (of two) determines the phenotype, and it doesn't matter whether you heterozygously have a different allele as your second version of that gene). Then we pretend that we can partition the variance in phenotypes as the sum of the "additive" genetic variance _A_, plus the environmental variance "common" within a family _C_, plus "everything else" (including measurement "error" and the not-shared-within-families "environment") _E_. Briefly (albeit at the risk of being _cliché_): nature, nurture, and _noise_.
Then we can estimate the sizes of the _A_, _C_, and _E_ components by studying fraternal and identical twins. (If you hear people talking about "twin studies", this is what they meanâ_not_ case studies of identical twins raised apart, which _are_ really cool but don't happen very often.) Both kinds of twins have the same family environment _C_ at the same time (parents, socioeconomic status, schools, _&c._), but identical twins are twice as genetically related to each other as fraternal twins, so the extent to which the identical twins are more similar is going to pretty much be because of their genes. "Pretty much" in the sense that while there are ways in which the assumptions of the model aren't quite true (assortative mating makes fraternal twins more similar in the ways their parents were _already_ similar before mating, identical twins might get treated more similarly by "the environment" on account of their appearance), Murray assures us that the experts assure us that the _quantitative_ effect of these deviations are probably pretty small!
@@ -91,7 +91,7 @@ Murray positions _Human Diversity_ as a corrective to a "blank slate" orthodoxy
I think this strategy is sympathetic but [ultimately ineffective](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/). Murray is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while denying the possibility of any [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) of the orthodoxy being false. It's like ... [theistic evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution): satisfactory as long as you _don't think about it too hard_, but among those with a high [need for cognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition), who know what it's like to truly believe (as I once believed), it's not going to convince anyone who hasn't _already_ broken from the orthodoxy.
-Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood." I _strongly_ agree with the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
+Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood." I _strongly_ agree with the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](http://web.archive.org/web/20200416104807/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
And yet I have been ... [trained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/teaxCFgtmCQ3E9fy8/the-martial-art-of-rationality). Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism [to even that which is most sacred](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points). Because my true loyalty is to the axiologyâ[to the _process_ underlying my _current best guess_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) 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 philosophical work to do, to [_reformulate_ the sacred moral ideal in a way that's actually coherent](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility).
@@ -105,7 +105,7 @@ Why _is_ the blank slate doctrine so compelling, that so many feel the need to p
If the blank slate doctrine isn't _scientifically_ compellingâit's not something you would invent while trying to build shared maps that reflect the territoryâthen its appeal must have something to do with some function it plays in _conflicts_ over the shared map, where no one trusts each other to be doing Actual Social Science rather than lying to fuck everyone else over.
-And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely _shines_âit's the [Schelling point](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point) for preventing group conflicts! (A [_Schelling point_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) is a choice that's salient as [a focus for mutual expectations](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/): what I think that you think that I think ... _&c._ we'll choose.) If you admit that there could differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitudes, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by [establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) as some "inevitable" natural order.
+And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely _shines_âit's the [Schelling point](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point) for preventing group conflicts! (A [_Schelling point_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) is a choice that's salient as [a focus for mutual expectations](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/): what I think that you think that I think ... _&c._ we'll choose.) If you admit that there could differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitudes, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by [establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) as some "inevitable" natural order.
If you're afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to _make the question un-askable_. Can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist!_ Denying the existence of sex is harderâwhich doesn't stop people from occasionally trying. "I realize I am writing in an LGBT era when some argue that 63 distinct genders have been identified," Murray notes at the beginning of Appendix 2. But this oblique acerbity fails to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). The language of _has been identified_ suggests an attempt at scientific taxonomyâa project, which I share with Murray, of fitting categories to describe a preexisting objective reality. But I don't think the people making 63-item typeahead select "Gender" fields for websites are thinking in such terms to begin with. The specific number 63 [is ridiculous and can't exist](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/); it might as well be, and often is, a fill-in-the-blank free text field. Despite being insanely evil (where I mean the adjective literally rather than as a generic intensifierâevil in a way that is of or related to insanity), I must acknowledge this is at least good game theory. If you don't trust taxonomists to be acting in good faithâif you think we're trying to bulldoze the territory to fit a preconceived mapâthen [destroying the language](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction) that would be used to be build oppressive maps is a smart move.
@@ -125,7 +125,7 @@ It's important not to overinterpret the _g_ factor as some unitary essence of in
Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how Society is becoming increasingly stratified by cognitive abilities, as school credentials become the ticket to the new upper class.
-This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". Andâthis is the part that no one is happy aboutâthe difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ â 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
+This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](http://web.archive.org/web/20200620184942/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". Andâthis is the part that no one is happy aboutâthe difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ â 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to "play up" group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn't be [relevant](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling). As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cognitive abilities decline with _age_, and yet we don't see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed by the white majority as an "us"âour mothers and fathersârather than an outgroup. _Individual_ differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because "smart people" as a group aren't construed as a natural political coalitionâalthough Murray's work on cognitive class stratification would seem to suggest this intuition is mistaken.