Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class</em>
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: review (book), race, sex differences
+Tags: review (book), race, sex differences, Emacs
Status: draft
[This is a pretty good book](https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/) about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other! In [my last book review](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), I mentioned that I had been thinking about broadening the topic scope of this blog, and this book review seems like an okay place to start!
Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores _don't_ explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for [_still_](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods) not having put in the hours to get farther into [_Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)) was that you need to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects—maybe our feeble state of knowledge is _why_ we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions.
-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](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model)? [Veale](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf)?), 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!
+There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from one of Murray's, um, 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](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model)? [Veale](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf)?), 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!
-----
Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood," and quotes Steven 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."
-I [_strongly_ agree with](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) this seem like a good and wise thing to say. But I have been ... trained. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor to even that which is most sacred. Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—to the function that generates my _current best guess_ 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 work to do](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility).
+I [_strongly_ agree with](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
-"Nothing we learn will threaten _X_ _properly understood_." When you elide the specific assignment _X_ := "human equality", the _form_ of this statement is kind of suspicious, right? Why "properly understood"? It would be weird to say, "Nothing we learn will threaten the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere _properly understood_." This "properly understood" qualifier seems like the sort of thing you would only say if you _were_ subconsciously worried about _X_ being threatened by new discoveries, and
+And yet I have been ... trained. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism to even that which is most sacred. Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—to the process underlying my _current best guess_ 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).
+
+"Nothing we learn will threaten _X_ _properly understood_." When you elide the specific assignment _X_ := "human equality", the _form_ of this statement is kind of suspicious, right? Why "properly understood"? It would be weird to say, "Nothing we learn will threaten the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere _properly understood_."
+
+This kind of [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) seems like the kind of thing you would only invent if you _were_ subconsciously worried about _X_ being threatened by new discoveries, and wanted to protect your ability to backtrack and re-gerrymander your definition of _X_ to protect your existing beliefs.
+
+It gets worse. Intuitively, "The moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group" seems self-evident—one cries out at the _monstrous injustice_ of the individual being oppressed on the basis of mere stereotypes of what other people who _look_ like them might statistically be like.
+
+I fear my training does not permit me to take the moral principle _literally_ as stated. The problem is _technical_ in nature: something that comes up when you try to understand people on a cognitive-scientific level, the way an AI researcher would understand her creations. (Even while "treat individuals as inviduals" might be a very good _English sentence_ to tell someone if you wanted them to behave ethically and didn't expect them to understand the technical problem I'm explaining.)
+
+When you "treat individuals as individuals", you do so on the basis of evidence about that individual's traits. If you see someone wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, you'll assume they probably use Emacs, and probably make and make use of all sorts of other implicit probabilistic predictions about them, in the sense that you [anticipate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) or dis-anticipate different behaviors from them than you would of someone who was _not_ wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, and those anticipations guide your decisions.
+
+[conditional probability "Emacs shirt" vs. "is female", no principled distinction]
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