Murray's penultimate chapter summarizes the state of a debate between a "Robert Plomin school" and an "Eric Turkheimer school" on the impact and import of polygenic scores, where we tally up all the SNPs someone has that are associated with a trait of interest.
-The starry-eyed view epitomized by Plomin says that polygenic scores are _super great_ and everyone _and [her](TODO: linky "... and the Reverse Murray Rule") dog_ should be excited about them: they're causal in only one direction (the trait can't cause the score) and they let us assess risks in individuals before they happen. Clinical psychology will enter a new era of "positive genomics", where we understand how to work with the underlying dimensions along which people vary (including positively), rather than focusing on treated "diagnoses" that people allegedly "have".
+The starry-eyed view epitomized by Plomin says that polygenic scores are _super great_ and everyone _and [her](/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/) dog_ should be excited about them: they're causal in only one direction (the trait can't cause the score) and they let us assess risks in individuals before they happen. Clinical psychology will enter a new era of "positive genomics", where we understand how to work with the underlying dimensions along which people vary (including positively), rather than focusing on treated "diagnoses" that people allegedly "have".
The curmudgeonly view epitomized by Turkheimer says that Science is about understanding the _causal structure_ of phenomena, and that polygenic scores don't fucking tell us anything. [Marital status is heritable _in the same way_ that intelligence is heritable](http://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/the-ubiquity-problem-for-group-differences-in-behavior/), not because there are "divorce genes" in any meaningful biological sense, but because of a "universal, nonspecific genetic pull on everything": on average, people with more similar genes will make more similar proteins from those similar genes, and therefore end up with more similar phenotypes that interact with the environment in a more similar way, and _eventually_ (the causality flowing "upwards" through many hierarchical levels of organization) this shows up in the divorce statistics of a particular Society in a particular place and time. But this is completely opaque; the real work of Science is in figuring out what all the particular gene variations actually _do_.
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 belief in differences will be abused 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 really big, like _d_ ≈ [TODO: size] for [TODO: operationalization]) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! That doesn't mean patriarchy is good! [(You can't derive an _ought_ from an _is_.)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io) This is pretty obvious, really?
+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 really big, like _d_ ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! 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 material fact devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas 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).
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+I don't know how to build a better world.
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* need to talk about individual differences being non-threatening
-"I realize I am writing in an LGBT era when some argue that 63 distinct genders have been identified," Murray writes.
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-https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html
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+"I realize I am writing in an LGBT era when some argue that 63 distinct genders have been identified," Murray writes at the beginning of Appendix 2. But this is failing to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).
+The language of _has been identified_
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