Murray also addresses the issue of aggregating effect sizes—something [I've been meaning to get around to blogging about](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#high-dimensional-social-science-and-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes) more exhaustively for a while in this context of group differences (although at least, um, my favorite author on _Less Wrong_ [covered it in the purely abstract setting](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy)): small effect sizes in any single measurement can amount to a _big_ difference when you're considering many measurements at once. That's how people can distinguish female and male faces at 96% accuracy, even though there's no single measurement (like "eye width" or "nose height") offers that much predictive power.
-Subsequent chapers address sex differences in personality, cognition, interests, and the brain. It turns out that women are more warm, empathetic, æsthetically discerning, and cooperative than men are! You might think that this is due to socialization, but then it's hard to explain why the same differences show up in different countries—and why the differences are seem _larger_ in richer, more feminist countries.
+Subsequent chapers address sex differences in personality, cognition, interests, and the brain. It turns out that women are more warm, empathetic, æsthetically discerning, and cooperative than men are! They're also more into the Conventional, Artistic, and Social dimensions of the [Holland occupational-interests model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Codes).
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+You might think that this is all due to socialization, but then it's hard to explain why the same differences show up in different cultures—and why the differences seem _larger_ in richer, more feminist countries. (Although as evolutionary anthropologist [William Buckner](https://traditionsofconflict.com/) points out in [his](https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1228124441944584192) [social-media](https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1228860328483491840) [criticism](https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1228947493309698050) of _Human Diversity_, [W.E.I.R.D.](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird) samples from different countries aren't capturing the full range of human cultures.)
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+You might think that the "larger differences in rich countries" result
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[TODO: differences in perception, or just more sexual dimorphism in general?]
The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".
-Ask the computer to assume that an individual's ancestry came from _K_ fictive ancestral populations where _K_ := 2, and it'll infer that sub-Saharan Africans are descended entirely from one, East Asians and some native Americans are descended entirely from the other, and everyone else is an admixture. But if you set _K_ := 3, populations from Europe and the near East (which were construed as admixtures in the _K_ := 2 model) split off as a new "pure" cluster. And so on.
+Ask the computer to assume that an individual's ancestry came from _K_ fictive ancestral populations where _K_ := 2, and it'll infer that sub-Saharan Africans are descended entirely from one, East Asians and some native Americans are descended entirely from the other, and everyone else is an admixture. But if you set _K_ := 3, populations from Europe and the near East (which were construed as admixtures in the _K_ := 2 model) split off as a new inferred population cluster. And so on.
-These ancestry groupings _are_ a "construct" in the sense that the groupings aren't "ordained by God"—the algorithm can find _K_ groupings for your choice of _K_—but _where_ it [draws those category boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) is a function of the data. The construct is doing _cognitive work_, concisely summarizing statistical regularities in the dataset, which is _too large_ for humans to hold in their heads all at once: a map that reflects a territory.
+These ancestry groupings _are_ a "construct" in the sense that the groupings aren't "ordained by God"—the algorithm can find _K_ groupings for your choice of _K_—but _where_ it [draws those category boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) is a function of the data. The construct is doing _cognitive work_, concisely summarizing statistical regularities in the dataset (which is _too large_ for humans to hold in their heads all at once): a map that reflects a territory.
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 2<em>s</em> 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!
[Murray says social science is about explaining variance, not causality]
-There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from one of Murray's earlier books) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the topic scope of this blog—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically _correct_, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least _mentioned_ alternative views (Serano? Veale?), if only to explain _why_ they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.)
+There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from one of Murray's earlier books) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the [topic scope of this blog](/tag/two-type-taxonomy/)—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically _correct_, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least _mentioned_ alternative views ([Serano](http://www.juliaserano.com/)? [Veale](https://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/about/staff/jveale)?), if only to explain _why_ they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.)
Then Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance") has tables of brain-size data, and an explanation of the greater-male-variance hypothesis. Cool!
> 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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[...]
> 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.
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
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff