I don't want to be complicit with hatred or oppression. I want to stay loyal to the underlying egalitarian–individualist axiology that makes the blank slate doctrine _sound like a good idea_. But I also want to understand reality, to make sense of things. I want a world that's not lying to me. Having to believe false things—or even just not being able _say_ certain true things when they would otherwise be relevant—extracts a _dire_ cost on our ability to make sense of the world, because you can't just censor a few forbidden hypotheses—[you have to censor everything that _implies_ them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), and everything that implies _them_: the more adept you are at making logical connections, [the more of your mind you need to excise to stay in compliance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
-We can't talk about group differences, for fear that anyone arguing that differences exist is just trying to shore up oppression. But ... structural oppression and actual group differences can _both exist at the same time_. They're not contradicting each other! Like, the fact that men are physically stronger than women (on average, but the effect size is enormous, like _d_ ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to _credibly threaten_ to physically overpower someone, [gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/#threatpoints-and-bargaining), even if the threat is typically unrealized.) That doesn't mean patriarchy is good; to think so would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy of [attempting to derive an _ought_ from an _is_](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io). No one would say that famine and plague are good just because they, too, are subject to scientific explanation. This is pretty obvious, really? But similarly, genetically-mediated differences in cognitive repertoires between ancestral populations are probably going to be _part_ of the explanation for _why_ we see the particular forms of inequality and oppression that we do, just as a brute fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and went smoother for the invaders than the colonization of Africa had to do with the disease burden going the other way (Native Americans were particularly vulnerable to smallpox, but Europeans were particularly vulnerable to malaria).
+We can't talk about group differences, for fear that anyone arguing that differences exist is just trying to shore up oppression. But ... structural oppression and actual group differences can _both exist at the same time_. They're not contradicting each other! Like, the fact that men are physically stronger than women (on average, but the effect size is enormous, like _d_ ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to _credibly threaten_ to physically overpower someone, [gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/#threatpoints-and-bargaining), even if the threat is typically unrealized.) That doesn't mean patriarchy is good; to think so would be to commit the [naturalistic fallacy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#NatFal) of [attempting to derive an _ought_ from an _is_](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io). No one would say that famine and plague are good just because they, too, are subject to scientific explanation. This is pretty obvious, really? But similarly, genetically-mediated differences in cognitive repertoires between ancestral populations are probably going to be _part_ of the explanation for _why_ we see the particular forms of inequality and oppression that we do, just as a brute fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and went smoother for the invaders than the colonization of Africa had to do with the disease burden going the other way (Native Americans were particularly vulnerable to smallpox, but Europeans were particularly vulnerable to malaria).
Again—obviously—_is_ does not imply _ought_. [TODO: explain that you should imagine yourself in the inferior group]
Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be unhappy about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on. Nelson _et al._ also found that when the people in the photographs were pictured sitting down, then judgements of height depended much more on sex than when the photo-subjects were standing. This also makes Bayesian sense: if it's harder to tell how tall an individual is when they're sitting down, you rely more on your demographic prior. In order to reduce injustice to people who are an outlier for their group, one could argue that there's a moral imperative to seek out interventions to get more fine-grained information about individuals, so that we don't need to rely on the coarse, vague information embodied in demographic stereotypes. The _moral spirit_ of egalitarian–individualism mostly survives in our efforts to [hug the query](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query) and get [specific information](/2017/Nov/interlude-x/) with which to discriminate amongst individuals. (And _discriminate_—[to distinguish, to make distinctions](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/discriminate)—is the correct word.) If you care about someone's height, it is _better_ to precisely measure it using a meterstick than to just look at them standing up, and it is better to look at them standing up than to look at them sitting down. If you care about someone's skills as potential employee, it is _better_ to give them a work-sample test that assesses the specific skills that you're interested in, than it is to rely on a general IQ test, and it's _far_ better to use an IQ test than to use racism. If our means of measuring individuals aren't reliable or cheap enough, such that we still end up using prior information from immutable demographic categories, that's a problem of grave moral seriousness—but in light of the [_mathematical laws_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) governing reasoning under uncertainty, it's a problem that can realistically only be solved with _better tests_ and _better signals_, not by _pretending not to have a prior_.
+
+
+
The other place where I think Murray is hiding the ball (even from himself) is in his discussion of the value of cognitive abilities. Murray writes—
> I think at the root [of the reluctance to discuss immutable human differences] is the new upper class's conflation 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.
I agree with Murray that this kind of psychology explains a lot of the resistance to hereditarian explanations. But as long as we're accusing people of motivated reasoning, I think Murray's solution is engaging in a similar kind of denial, but just putting it in a different place. The idea that people are unequal in ways that matter is [legitimately too horrifying to contemplate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok), so liberals [deny the inequality](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/), and conservatives deny [that it matters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter).
+
+
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
Each of us in her own way.
Title: "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: discourse, meta, procrastination
+Tags: categorization, epistemology, sex differences
Status: draft
> But all of us know much more than we can say, and many times we cannot really put it into words at all.
Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?!—I've been thinking a lot lately about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the ["B"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotThreads) [story](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting) of Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_.
-Our protagonists are spider-like nonhuman aliens native to a planet whose star mysteriously "turns off" for [TODO] years out of every [TODO].
+Our protagonists are spider-like nonhuman aliens native to a planet whose star "turns off" for [TODO] years out of every [TODO].
Sherkaner Underhill (mad scientist extraordinaire), Gen. Victory Smith (military prodigy, and Underhill's wife), and Sgt. Hrunkner Unnerby (an engineer, and Underhill and Smith's friend and comrade from the Great War)
[^breakup]: I'm proud of my choice of breakup songs. My breakup song with institutionalized schooling was Taylor Swift's ["We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64), a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of [bad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [relationships](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) [UC Santa Cruz](https://www.ucsc.edu/) (2006–2007), [Heald College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) (2008), [Diablo Valley College](https://www.dvc.edu/) (2010–2012), and [San Francisco State University](https://www.sfsu.edu/) (2012–2013).
- My breakup song with my should've-been-best-friend-forever "Elmer", also by Taylor Swift, was ["The Story of Us"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN6VR92V70M), about the pain of not being on speaking terms with someone with someone you thought you were destined to be with, like how I felt when Elmer refused to see me for a year because of status/money tensions ("How I was losing my mind when I saw you here / But you held your pride like you should've held me") that were _another_ incredibly boring and petty story, but one which I don't need to blog about.
-
The song accompanying the story recounted in this post, Sara Bareilles's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) is about trying to move on from a relationship that was wanted but ... didn't work out.
- The fact that I've invested so much symbolic significance in carefully-chosen songs by female vocalists to mourn relationships with one male friend and two abstract institutional perceived-authorities, and conspicuously _not_ for any relationships with _actual women_, maybe tells you something about how my life has gone.
+ The fact that I've invested so much symbolic significance in carefully-chosen songs by female vocalists to mourn relationships with abstract institutional perceived-authorities, and conspicuously _not_ for any relationships with _actual women_, maybe tells you something about how my life has gone.
But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
[section: noncentral-fallacy / motte-and-bailey stuff, other posts about making predictions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world ]
-The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [Arthur Blair](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)—you _actually know the math_.
-
-If I have a "blegg" concept for blue egg-shaped objects—uh, this is [our](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) [standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yFDKvfN6D87Tf5J9f/neural-categories) [example](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside), just [roll with it](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)—what that _means_ is that (at some appropriate level of abstraction) there's a little [Bayesian network](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that if I see a black-and-white photograph of an egg-shaped object, I can use the observation of its shape to update my beliefs about its blegg-category-membership, and then use my beliefs about category-membership to update my beliefs about its blueness. This cognitive algorithm is useful if we live in a world where objects that have the appropriate statistical structure—if the joint distribution P(blegg, blueness, eggness) approximately factorizes as P(blegg)·P(blueness|blegg)·P(eggness|blegg).
-
-"Category boundaries" are just a _visual metaphor_ for the math: the set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than _p_ is conveniently _visualized_ as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space. If you _don't understand_ the relevant math and philosophy—or are pretending not to understand only and exactly when it's politically convenient—you might think you can redraw the boundary any way you want, but you can't, because the "boundary" visualization is _derived from_ a statistical model which corresponds to _empirically testable predictions about the real world_. Fucking with category boundaries corresponds to fucking with the model, which corresponds to fucking with your ability to interpret sensory data. The only two reasons you could _possibly_ want to do this would be to wirehead yourself (corrupt your map to make the territory look nicer than it really is, making yourself _feel_ happier at the cost of sabotaging your ability to navigate the real world) or as information warfare (corrupt shared maps to sabotage other agents' ability to navigate the real world, in a way such that you benefit from their confusion).
-
[section: started a pseudonymous secret blog; one of the things I focused on was the philosophy-of-language thing, because that seemed _really_ nailed down: "...To Make Predictions" was the crowning achievement of my sabbatical, and I was also really proud of "Reply on Adult Human Females" a few months later. And that was going OK, until ...]
[section: hill of meaning in defense of validity, and I _flipped the fuck out_]
Tags: categorization, ideology, sex differences
Status: draft
-As an atheist, I'm not really a fan of religions, but I'll give them one thing: at least their packages of delusions are _stable_. The experience of losing your religion is a painful one, but once you've overcome the trauma of finding out that everything you believed was a lie, the process of figuring out how to live among the still-faithful now that you are no longer one of them, is something you only have to do _once_; it's not like everyone will have adopted a new Jesus Two while you were off having your crisis of faith. And the first Jesus was invisible anyway; you won't be able to pray sincerely, and that does set you apart from your—the—community, but your day-to-day life will be mostly unaffected.
-
-The progressive _Zeitgeist_ does not even offer this respite. Getting over psychological-sex-differences denialism was painful, but after many years of study and meditation, I think I've finally come to accept the horrible truth: women and men really are psychologically different, and for biologically- and not merely culturally-mediated reasons. This sets me apart from the community, but not very much.
-
-The original lie wasn't _invisible_ exactly, but it never caused too many problems, because it's easy to doublethink around: most of the functional use of sex categories in Society is handled by seamless subconscious reference-classing, without anyone needing to consciously, verbally reason about sex differences. Women and men don't actually behave the same and we don't actually treat them the same, but
+> Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a _process_ of self-identification. Moreover, it is not a matter of affirming a self-identity that we possess. For a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all.
+>
+> —Joseph M. Whitmeyer, "How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research", in <em>The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society</em>
+As an atheist, I'm not really a fan of religions, but I'll give them one thing: at least their packages of delusions are _stable_. The experience of losing your religion is a painful one, but once you've overcome the trauma of finding out that everything you believed was a lie, the process of figuring out how to live among the still-faithful now that you are no longer one of them, is something you only have to do _once_; it's not like everyone will have adopted a new Jesus Two while you were off having your crisis of faith. And the first Jesus was invisible anyway; you won't be able to pray sincerely, and that does set you apart from your—the—community, but your day-to-day life will be mostly unaffected.
-But in the ten years I had my back turned reading science books, my former quasi-religion somehow came up with _new_ lies: now, it's not enough to believe that women and men are mentally the same, you're also supposed to accept that those words refer to
-
-[this breaks the mechanism for doublethinking around the first]
+The progressive _Zeitgeist_ does not even offer this respite. Getting over psychological-sex-differences denialism was painful, but after many years of study and meditation, I think I've finally come to accept the horrible truth: women and men really are psychologically different. This sets me apart from the community, but not very much. The original lie wasn't _invisible_ exactly, but it never caused too many problems, because it's easy to doublethink around. Most of the functional use of sex categories in Society is handled by seamless subconscious reference-classing, without anyone needing to consciously, verbally reason about sex differences: no one _actually_ makes the same predictions or decisions about women and men, but since you don't have direct introspective access to what computations your brain used to cough up a prediction or decision, you can just _assume_ that you're treating everyone equally, and only rarely does the course of ordinary events force you to acknowledge or even notice the lie.
-You really are expected to believe in Jesus Two! And it's _far more_ ridiculous than the first one! I'm never going to get over this!
+But in the decade I had my back turned reading science books, my former quasi-religion somehow came up with _new_ lies: now, it's not enough to believe that women and men are mentally the same, you're _also_ supposed to accept that those categories refer to some atomic mental property that can only be known by verbal self-report. But this actually breaks the mechanism that made the first lie so harmless: the shear stress of your prediction-and-decision classifier _disagreeing_ with the punishment signals that [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) is using to train your pronoun-selection classifier throws the previously-backgrounded existence of the former into sharp relief. You really are expected to believe in Jesus Two! And it's _far_ more ridiculous than the first one! I'm never going to get over this!
In all philosophical strictness, a [physicalist](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/) universe such as our own isn't going to have some objective morality that all agents are compelled to obey, but even if there is necessarily _some_ element of subjectivity in that we value (say) sentient life rather than (say) [tiling the universe with diamonds](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/), we usually expect morality to at least not be completely arbitrary: we want to _argue_ that a villain is in the _wrong_ because of _reasons_, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her.
-If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like a pretty arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead?—how do we break the symmetry? If the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question.
+If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like an arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead?—how do we break the symmetry? If the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question.
> —W. E. B. duBois (http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas102%20%28spring%2001%29/articles/names/dubois.htm)
-> "Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a _process_ of self-identification. Moreover, it is not a matter of affirming a self-identity that we possess. For a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all."
->
-> Joseph M. Whitmeyer, "How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research", in <em>The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society</em>
-
-
> Stuck, in the middle of fear and shame
> Everybody's looking for someone to blame
> Like it's a game, like it's a game
+http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/
+
+> Stage-4 (Depression): "Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?"
+
+> Stage-5 (Acceptance): "Blank slate liberalism really has been a mountain of dishonest garbage, hasn’t it? Guess it’s time for it to die ..."
+
+
+
—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.)
playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles
[Discord comment about creating a space where no one questions whether someone deserves real woman status]
+
+
+The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [Arthur Blair](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)—you _actually know the math_.
"gender modality" https://www.florenceashley.com/academic-publications.html
+I'm not usually—at least, not always—so much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles
+
+https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2019/12/are-cows-adult-bovine-females.html
+https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2020/01/gendered-animal-names-a-postscript.html
+
+marketing opportunity: https://www.peaktrans.org/contact/
+
+https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094634/http://mariacatt.com/2016/03/31/the-adult-baby-story/
-UUT—
-X Teleology
+Scheduled—
+X Peering Through Reverent Fingers
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity
+X Teleology
+
+
+Main path (important posts)—
+_ Intrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War (LW)
+_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
+_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
+_ Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
+_ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT)
+
+
+UUT—
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
-_ Peering Through Reverent Fingers
_ The Feeling Is Mutual
-
+_ Captions
_ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title)
-_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
_ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
-_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
-_ Sexual Dimorphism, Yudkowsky's Sequences, and Me
-_ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT)
LW/aAL—
_ Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle (LW)
_ Zoom vs. EMH (LW)
_ Comment on "Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization"
-_ Intrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War (LW)
_ Don't "Click Here"
_ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
_ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
+/count firing on individual post pages (suboptimal)
rework footnotes plugin!? (Markdown footnote format is better than [ref][/ref] tags)
self-host a copy of Source Sans Pro (I'm annoyed that my devserver preview fonts are ugly when I've killed my network connection so I can focus for once)
bigger click-target pagination links
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff