The problem is, a lot of the blank-slatey environmentally-caused-differences-only hypotheses for group IQ differences start to look less compelling when you look into the details. "Maybe the tests are biased", for example, isn't an insurmountable defeater to the entire endeavor of IQ testing—it is _itself_ a falsifiable hypothesis, or can become one if you specify what you mean by "bias" in detail. One idea of what it would mean for a test to be _biased_ is if it's partially measuring something other than what it purports to be measuring: if your test measures a _combination_ of "intelligence" and "submission to the hegemonic cultural dictates of the test-maker", then individuals and groups that submit less to your cultural hegemony are going to score worse, and if you _market_ your test as unbiasedly measuring intelligence, then people who believe your marketing copy will be misled into thinking that those who don't submit are dumber than they really are. But if so, and if not all of your individual test questions are _equally_ loaded on intelligence and cultural-hegemony, then the cultural bias should _show up in the statistics_. If some questions are more "fair" and others are relatively more culture-biased, then you would expect the _order of item difficulties_ to differ by culture: the ["item characteristic curve"](/papers/baker-kim-the_item_characteristic_curve.pdf) plotting the probability of getting a biased question "right" as a function of _overall_ test score should differ by culture, with the hegemonic group finding it "easier" and others finding it "harder". Conversely, if the questions that discriminate most between differently-scoring cultural/ethnic/"racial" groups were the same as the questions that discriminate between (say) younger and older children _within_ each group, that would be the kind of statistical clue you would expect to see if the test was unbiased and the group difference was real.
-Hypotheses that accept IQ test results as unbiased, but attribute group differences in IQ to the environment, also make statistical predictions that can be falsified.
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-Controlling for parental socioeconomic status only cuts the black–white gap by a third. (And note, on the hereditarian model, some of the correlation between parental SES and child outcomes is due to both being causally downstream of genes.)
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-[TODO: sentence about sources of variation within/between groups based on Jensen]
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-Skin color is actually only controlled by a small number of alleles, so if you think Society's discrimination on skin color causes IQ differences,
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-And so on.
+Hypotheses that accept IQ test results as unbiased, but attribute group differences in IQ to the environment, also make statistical predictions that can be falsified. Controlling for parental socioeconomic status only cuts the black–white gap by a third. (And note, on the hereditarian model, some of the correlation between parental SES and child outcomes is due to both being causally downstream of genes.) The mathematical relationship between between-group and within-group heritability means that the conjunction of wholly-environmentally-caused group differences, and the within-group heritability, makes quantitative predictions about how much the environments of the groups differ. Skin color is actually only controlled by a small number of alleles, so if you think Society's discrimination on skin color causes IQ differences, you could maybe design a clever study that measures both overall-ancestry and skin color, and does statistics on what happens when they diverge. And so on.
In mentioning these arguments in passing, I'm _not_ trying to provide a comprehensive lit review on the causality of group IQ differences. (That's [someone else's blog](https://humanvarieties.org/2019/12/22/the-persistence-of-cognitive-inequality-reflections-on-arthur-jensens-not-unreasonable-hypothesis-after-fifty-years/).) I'm not that interested in this particular topic, and [without having mastered the technical literature, my assessment would be of little value](https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#mu). Rather, I am ... doing some context-setting for the problem I _am_ interested in, of fixing public discourse. The reason we can't have an intellectually-honest public discussion about human biodiversity is because good people want to respect the anti-oppression Schelling point and are afraid of giving ammunition to racists and sexists in the war over the shared map. "Black people are, on average, genetically less intelligent than white people" is the kind of sentence that pretty much only racists would feel _good_ about saying out loud, independently of its actual truth value. In a world where most speech is about manipulating shared maps for political advantage rather than _getting the right answer for the right reasons_, it is _rational_ to infer that anyone who entertains such hypotheses is either motivated by racial malice, or is at least complicit with it—and that rational expectation isn't easily cancelled with a _pro forma_ "But, but, civil discourse" or "But, but, the true meaning of Equality is unfalsifiable" [disclaimer](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html).
I take strong issue with Murray's specific examples here—as an [incredibly bitter](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) autodidact, I care not at all for formal school degrees, and as my fellow nobody pseudonymous blogger [Harold Lee points out](https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production), the domestic- and community-focused life of a housewife actually has a lot of desirable properties that many of those stuck in the technology rat race aspire to escape into. But after quibbling with the specific illustrations, I think I'm just going to bite the bullet here?
-_Yes_, intellectual ability _is_ a component of human worth! Maybe that's putting it baldly, but I think the _alternative_ is obviously senseless. The fact that I have the ability and motivation to (for example, among many other things I do) write this cool science–philosophy blog about my delusional paraphilia where I do things like summarize and critique the new Charles Murray book, is a big part of _what makes my life valuable_—both to me, and to the people who interact with me. If I were to catch COVID-19 next month and lose 40 IQ points due to oxygen-deprivation-induced brain damage and not be able to write blog posts like this one anymore, that would be _extremely terrible_ for me—it would make my life less-worth-living. (And this _kind_ of judgement is reflected in health and economic policymaking in the form of [quality-adjusted life years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year).) And my friends who love me, love me not as an irreplaceably-unique-but-otherwise-featureless atom of person-ness, but _because_ my specific array of cognitive repetoires makes me a specific person who provides a specific kind of company. There can't be such a thing as _literally_ unconditional love, because to love _someone in particular_, implicitly imposes a condition: you're only committed to love those configurations of matter that constitute an implementation of your beloved, rather than someone or something else.
+_Yes_, intellectual ability _is_ a component of human worth! Maybe that's putting it baldly, but I think the _alternative_ is obviously senseless. The fact that I have the ability and motivation to (for example, among many other things I do) write this cool science–philosophy blog about my delusional paraphilia where I do things like summarize and critique the new Charles Murray book, is a big part of _what makes my life valuable_—both to me, and to the people who interact with me. If I were to catch COVID-19 next month and lose 40 IQ points due to oxygen-deprivation-induced brain damage and not be able to write blog posts like this one anymore, that would be _extremely terrible_ for me—it would make my life less-worth-living. (And this kind of judgement is reflected in health and economic policymaking in the form of [quality-adjusted life years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year).) And my friends who love me, love me not as an irreplaceably-unique-but-otherwise-featureless atom of person-ness, but _because_ my specific array of cognitive repetoires makes me a specific person who provides a specific kind of company. There can't be such a thing as _literally_ unconditional love, because to love _someone in particular_, implicitly imposes a condition: you're only committed to love those configurations of matter that constitute an implementation of your beloved, rather than someone or something else.
Murray continues—
> The conflation 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.
-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).
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-But I think if you _really_ understand the fact–value distinction and see that the naturalistic fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy (and not even a tempting one), that the progress of humankind has consisted of using our wits to impose our will on an [indifferent universe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god), then "too horrifying to contemplate" fails to compute. The map is not the territory: _contemplating_ doesn't make things worse.
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-The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits [five stages of knowledge of human biodiversity](http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/) (in analogy to the famous, albeit [reportedly lacking in empirical support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model), five-stage Kübler-Ross model of grief), culminating in Stage 4: Depression ("Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?") and 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 ..."). I think I got stuck halfway between Stage 4 and 5.
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-You can't brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something _good_ in them.
+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). But I think if you _really_ understand the fact–value distinction and see that the naturalistic fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy (and not even a tempting one), that the progress of humankind has consisted of using our wits to impose our will on an [indifferent universe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god), then the very concept of "too horrifying to contemplate" becomes a grave error. The map is not the territory: _contemplating_ doesn't make things worse; not-contemplating that which is _already there_ can't make things better—and can blind you to opportunities to make things better.
+Recently, Richard Dawkins [spurred a lot of criticism on social media for pointing out that](https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/twitter-piles-on-richard-dawkins-over-eugenics-tweet/13333) selective breeding would work on humans (that is, succeed at increasing the value of the traits selected for in subsequent generations), for the same reasons it works on domesticated nonhuman animals—while stressing, of course, that he deplores the idea: it's just that our moral committments can't constrain the facts. Intellectuals with the reading-comprehension skill, [including Murray](https://archive.is/uaFFF), lept to defend Dawkins and [concur on both points](https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/16/dawkins-makes-a-tweet/)—that eugenics would work, and that it would obviously be terribly immoral. And yet no one seems to bother explaining or arguing _why_ it would be immoral. Yes, obviously _murdering and sterilizing_ people is bad. But if the human race is to continue and people are going to have children _anyway_, those children are going to be born with _some_ distribution of genotypes. There are probably going to be human decisions that do _not_ involve _murdering and sterilizing people_ that would affect that distribution—[perhaps involving](http://intelligence.org/files/EmbryoSelection.pdf) [selection of _in vitro_ fertilized embryos](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection). If the distribution of genotypes were to change in a way that made the next generation grow up happier, and healthier, and smarter, [that would be good](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism) for those children, and it wouldn't hurt anyone else! This is pretty obvious, really? But if no one except nobody pseudonymous bloggers can even say it, how are we to start the work?
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
+The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits [five stages of knowledge of human biodiversity](http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/) (in analogy to the famous, albeit [reportedly lacking in empirical support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model), five-stage Kübler-Ross model of grief), culminating in Stage 4: Depression ("Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?") and 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 ...").
-Each of us in her own way.
+I think I got stuck halfway between Stage 4 and 5? It can _simultaneously_ be the case that reality is evil, _and_ that blank slate liberalism _contains_ a mountain of dishonest garbage. That doesn't mean the whole thing is garbage. You _can't_ brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something _good_ in them. I would still be with the program, except that the current coordination equilibrium is [really not working out for me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). So it is with respect for the good works enabled by the anti-oppression Schelling point belief, that I set my sights on reorganizing at the other [Schelling point of _just tell the goddamned truth_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point)—not in spite of the consequences, but because of the consequences of what good people can do when we're fully informed. Each of us in her own way.
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