Tags: information theory, deniably allegorical
Status: draft
-You know what this blog needs? More vectors. You know, like, [lists of numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_(mathematics_and_physics))? Looking back over the archives, I find myself _mortified_ at how much time I've _wasted_ writing about things that _aren't math_. (The [effect-size-deflation post](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) was okay, I _guess_.)
+You know what this blog needs? _More vectors_. You know, like, [lists of numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_(mathematics_and_physics))? Looking back over the archives, I find myself _mortified_ at how much time I've _wasted_ writing about things that _aren't math_. (The [effect-size-deflation post](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) was okay, I _guess_.)
What was I thinking? Maybe I should just delete it all to spare myself the embarrassment. In any case, this is an information-theory fanblog now! Gender?—I barely _know_ her.
+[start by saying it takes 40 bits, then introduce the mass function that lets you compresss]
+
Let _V_ be a random variable over the sample space {0,1}<sup>20</sup>, the twenty-dimensional space of binary vectors, and suppose that P(V = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]) = ½, P(V = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]), and P(_V_ = _v_) = 0 for all other _v_ ∈ {0,1}<sup>20</sup>.
This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb compared to some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 have having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
-Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to "play up" group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn't be [relevant](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling). As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cognitive abilities decline with _age_, and yet we don't see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed as an "us"—our mothers and fathers—rather than an outgroup. _Individual_ differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because "smart people" as a group aren't construed as a natural political coalition—although Murray's work on cognitive class stratification seems to suggest this intuition is mistaken.
+Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to "play up" group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn't be [relevant](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling). As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cognitive abilities decline with _age_, and yet we don't see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed as an "us"—our mothers and fathers—rather than an outgroup. _Individual_ differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because "smart people" as a group aren't construed as a natural political coalition—although Murray's work on cognitive class stratification would seem to suggest this intuition is mistaken.
It's important not to overinterpret the IQ-scores-by-race results; there are a bunch of standard caveats that go here that everyone's treatment of the topic needs to include. Again, just because variance in a trait is statistically associated with variance in genes _within_ a population, does _not_ mean that differences in that trait _between_ populations are _caused_ by genes: [remember the illustrations about](#heritability-caveats) sun-deprived plants and internet-deprived red-haired children. Group differences in observed tested IQs are entirely compatible with a world in which those differences are entirely due to the environment imposed by an overtly or structurally racist society. Maybe the tests are culturally biased. Maybe people with higher socioeconomic status get more opportunities to develop their intellect, and racism impedes socio-economic mobility. 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 on the hereditarian model, some of the correlation between parental SES and child outcomes is due to the common effect of genes.)
+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.)
[TODO: sentence about sources of variation within/between groups based on Jensen]
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 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—
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 "too horrifying to contemplate" fails to compute. The map is not the territory: _contemplating_ doesn't make things worse.
+
+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.
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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
5. stages of HBD
-The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits [five stages of knowledge 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 ...").
6. I have an excuse; telling the truth is a Schelling point (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point)—and finish
* it's actually a _selective_ blank slate (Winegard: https://quillette.com/2019/03/09/progressivism-and-the-west/ )
* women and courage
* Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 398
-* need to talk about individual differences being non-threatening
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-(Okay, I was brainwashed by progressivism pretty hard, but ideologies need to appeal to something in human nature; you can't brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something good in them.)
+(Okay, I was brainwashed by progressivism pretty hard, but ideologies need to appeal to something in human nature; )
—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.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/g4mse5/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_20_2020/fo0oug1/
> a higher proportion of millionaires (5%) than women (4.9%). In addition, the proportion who want to have more than 4 children in the end (13.5%) is greater than the proportion who currently have more than 0 (13.3%)
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+----
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+https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10158118341274598?comment_id=10158118460954598&reply_comment_id=10158118537469598
+> it's not terribly surprising if many autistic people are like "please just stop with the gender stuff", in which case it seems insensitive to talk about the "autistic women" category when i don't mean exactly that.
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+https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/g53fgy/qt_which_pronouns_should_be_respected/fo6yk5i/
+> It's possible that I would grow acclimated to this usage of singular "they" after sufficient exposure, but there are other reasons that I try to minimize my social interactions with people who use singular "they"--basically the same reasons that I try to minimize my social interactions with hardline cultural conservatives and evangelical Christians. We fundamentally disagree about some very basic principles, which means that every interaction is an exercise in biting my tongue.
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it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
+Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time
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Vocabulary as Capital Investment
B.F. being smart-but-dense
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff