Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), intelligence, race, sex differences, Emacs, politics, probability, topology, COVID-19
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, including differences in _cognitive repertoires_ (author Charles Murray's choice of phrase for saving nine syllables contrasted to "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). 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!
+[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, including differences in _cognitive repertoires_ (Murray's choice of phrase for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). 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!
Honestly, I feel like I already knew most of this stuff?—sex differences in particular are kind of _my bag_—but many of the details were new to me, and it's nice to have it all bundled together in a paper book with lots of citations that I can chase down later when I'm skeptical or want more details about a specific thing! The main text is littered with pleonastic constructions like "The first author was Jane Thisand-Such" (when discussing the results of a multi-author paper) or "Details are given in the note<sup>[n]</sup>", which feel clunky to read, but are _so much better_ than the all-too-common alternative of authors _not_ "showing their work".
The first (short) chapter is mostly about explaining [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cohen%27s_d) [effect sizes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size), which I think are solving a very important problem! When people say "Men are taller than women" you know they don't mean _all_ men are taller than _all_ women (because you know that they know that that's obviously not true), but that just raises the question of what they _do_ mean. Saying they mean it "generally", "on average", or "statistically" doesn't really solve the problem, because that covers everything between-but-not-including "No difference" to "Yes, literally all women and all men". Cohen's _d_—the difference between two groups' means in terms of their pooled standard deviation—lets us give a _quantitative_ answer to _how much_ men are taller than women: I've seen reports of _d_ ≈ 1.4–1.7 depending on the source, a lot smaller than the sex difference in murder rates (_d_ ≈ 2.5), but much bigger than the difference in verbal skills (_d_ ≈ 0.3, favoring women).
-If you have a quantitative effect size, then you can [visualize the overlapping distributions](https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/), and the question of whether the reality of the data should be summarized in English as a "large difference" or a "small difference" becomes _much less interesting_, bordering on meaningless.
+Once you have a quantitative effect size, then you can [visualize the overlapping distributions](https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/), and the question of whether the reality of the data should be summarized in English as a "large difference" or a "small difference" becomes _much less interesting_, bordering on meaningless.
-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](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even though there's no single measurement (like "eye width" or "nose height") offers that much predictive power.
+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 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 (whatever "small" means) 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](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), 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! They're also more into the Conventional, Artistic, and Social dimensions of the [Holland occupational-interests model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Codes).
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 (counterintuitively) 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.) You might think that the "larger differences in rich countries" result is an artifact: maybe people in less-feminist countries implicitly make within-sex comparisons when answering personality questions (_e.g._, "I'm competitive _for a woman_") whereas people in more-feminist countries use a less sexist standard of comparison, construing ratings as compared to people-in-general. Murray points out that this explanation still posits the existence of large sex differences in rich countries (while explaining away the unexpected cross-cultural difference-in-differences). Another possibility is that sexual dimorphism _in general_ increases with wealth, including, _e.g._, in height and blood pressure, not just in personality. (I notice that this is consilient with the view that [agriculture was a mistake](https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race) that suppresses humans' natural tendencies, and that people [revert to forager-like lifestyles](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/divide-forager-v-farmer.html) [in many ways](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/08/forager-v-farmer-elaborated.html) as the riches of the industrial revolution let them afford it.)
-Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas [men are better at visuospatial skills](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/alpha-gamma-phi/). The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that general intelligence ["masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"](/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf): overall levels of mental well-functioning lead to underestimates of the effect sizes of specific mental abilities, which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is _super gratifying_ to me personally, because [I independently had a very similar idea a few months back](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)—it's _super validating_ as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track!
+Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas [men are better at visuospatial skills](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/alpha-gamma-phi/). The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that general intelligence ["masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"](/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf): people's overall skill in using tools from the metaphorical mental toolbox leads to underestimates of differences in toolkits (that is, nonmetaphorically, the effect sizes of sex differences in specific mental abilities), which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is _super gratifying_ to me personally, because [I independently had a very similar idea a few months back](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)—it's _super validating_ as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track!
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".
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 too 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 mere stereotypes. 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 realistically needs to be solved with _better tests_ and _better signals_, not by _pretending not to have a prior_. This could take the form of _finer-grained_ stereotypes. If someone says of me, "Taylor Saotome-Westlake? Oh, he's a _man_, you know what _they're_ like," I would be offended—I mean, I would if I still believed that getting offended ever helps with anything. (It _never helps_.) I'm _not_ like typical men, I _don't like_ typical men, and I don't want to be confused with them. But if someone says, "Taylor Saotome-Westlake? Oh, he's one of those IQ 130, [mid-to-low Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, high Openness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits), left-libertarian American Jewish atheist autogynephilic male computer programmers; you know what _they're_ like," my response is to nod and say, "Yeah, pretty much." I'm not _exactly_ like the others, but I don't mind being confused with them.
-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—
+The other place where I think Murray is hiding the ball (even from himself) is in the section on "reconstructing a moral vocabulary for discussing human differences." (I agree that this is a very important project!) 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.
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