Title: Book Review: Cailin O'Connor's <em>The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution</em>
Date: 2020-01-20 22:20
Category: commentary
-Tags: categorization, feminism, game theory, review (book)
+Tags: categorization, convention, feminism, game theory, review (book)
[This is a _super-great book_](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-unfairness-9780198789970) about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender roles! (And also stuff like race and religion and caste, I guess, but I'm ignoring that because I haven't gotten around to broadening the topic scope of this blog yet.) I am _unreasonably excited about this book_ for supplying the glue of _analytical rigor_ to a part of my world-model that had previously been held together by threads of mere handwaving! (Three years ago on this blog, I wrote, ["social-role defaults are inevitably going to accrete around [sex differences]"](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/#views-have-changed), but I didn't, and couldn't, have told you _how and why_ in a form suitable for verification by computer simulation.)
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 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](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 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_.
Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squirrels were highly social animals. Much of their social lives
-(well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-than-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech species 9792 and 9794.)
+(well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech species 9792 and 9794.)
sharing secrets
And beside them, a friend or a mate
-"_I'm_ your friend. _I_ understand you. You can share your secrets with _me_."
+"But _I'm_ your friend. _I_ understand you. You can share your secrets with _me_."
"That's not what I meant."
(**SPOILERS** for _A Deepness in the Sky_)
-Apropos of absolutely nothing (and would I lie to you about that?), I've been thinking a lot lately about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the ["B"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotThreads) [story](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting) of Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_.
+Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?!—I've been thinking a lot lately about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the ["B"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotThreads) [story](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting) of Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_.
Our protagonists, Sherkaner Underhill (mad scientist extraordinaire), Gen. Victory Smith (military prodigy, and Underhill's wife), and Sgt. Hrunkner Unnerby (an engineer, and Underhill and Smith's friend and comrade from the Great War) are spider-like nonhuman aliens native to a planet whose star mysteriously "turns off" for [TODO] years out of every [TODO].
--- /dev/null
+Title: On Being Stereotyped Badly
+Date: 2021-01-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: categorization
+Status: draft
+
+> Somewhere within her, under the numbness that held her still to receive the lashing, she felt a small point of pain, hot like the pain of scalding. She wanted to tell him of the year she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle; she wanted to cry to him: I'm not one of them! But she knew that she could not do it.
+>
+> _Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
> A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities betweeen things which seem different.
>
> —Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
+
+> Odeen was selfishly pleased with his own flow and thought it graceful and impressive. He had mention that once to Losten, to whom as his Hard-teacher, he confessed everything, and Losten had said, "But don't you think an Emotional or a Parental feels the same about his own flow-pattern. If each of you think differently and act differently, ought you not to be pleased differently?"
+>
+> —_The Gods Themselves_ by Isaac Asimov
sneaking a copy of MTIMB into the MIRI library after visiting Eliezer (Jessica was outside), because it was what Harry would do (but notably, not Hermione)
playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles
+
+[Discord comment about creating a space where no one questions whether someone deserves real woman status]
13 June: re "lesbian [...] seems actually just implementable in behavior without other resources" ... not even hormone replacement therapy? Frankly, I think this attitude is cruel (in its effects, however benevolent the intentions). Transitioning, or not-transitioning, is a serious life decision with wide-ranging social and medical implications. In order to help people make the right decision—whatever that turns out to be—I want people to have the most accurate information possible and the most precise concepts possible. Getting this stuff right—not just stopping at the first answer that sounds good to your Tumblr followers—is actually decision-relevant to me. In twelve years, it could very well be decision-relevant to Merlin.
+"The problem is not social engineering! The problem is _incompetent_ social engineering! The problem is not experimenting on children! The problem is experimenting on children in the service of an ideological crusade rather than in the service of finding out what happens!" https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154963540980199 (Mike Liked it)
+
-----
smart fascism—
-_ The Reverse Murray Rule
-_ Teleology (UUT)
+UUT—
+X The Reverse Murray Rule
+X Teleology
_ Peering Through Reverent Fingers
-_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity (UUT)
+_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
+
_ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
+_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
+_ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class
+_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
+_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
_ Sexual Dimorphism, Yudkowsky's Sequences, and Me
_ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT)
-_ Intrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War (LW)
-Elision _vs_. Choice
+LW/aAL—
+_ Intrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War (LW)
_ Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle (LW)
_ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
_ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
-_ Selective Reporting and
+_ Selective Reporting and Clustering
-Discord comment about creating a space where no one questions whether someone deserves real woman status
+
+it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
+
+_ On Being Stereotyped Badly (working title)
Angelic Irony
The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated) https://nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
-The Strategy of "Apartment Patty"
+_ Product Review: FaceApp
+
+_ The Strategy of "Apartment Patty"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia "An important fantasy for some individuals is being transformed into the preferred object (such as a statue) and experiencing an associated state of immobility or paralysis."
-----
-_ Placeholder, February 2020 (UUT)
-
-
-
Positioning (don't want to prematurely alienate people you're trying to rescue)
conservatives complain about low-time preference ppl having too many kids—but from a evolutionary perspective, they're more evolutionarily fit
-creepy, crazy, or protected-class
-
-
A Science Fiction Story Idea I'm Not Skilled Enough to Write
Names and Genders Are Not Relevantly Analogous
(lit-search strategy: go through the del Guidice "Multivariate Misgivings" article and its citations; the Archer paper also mentioned this)
-Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
-
Commentary on "Blegg Mode"
Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
game theory pain
_ reply to Ozy on https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-is-bad-science/ (when marketing in Culture War thread, maybe hat tip https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9cir3w/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_03/e5c1h2c/ )
-_ Friendship Practices of ...
_ Q An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History ...
_ 5150
Q Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer; Or, Could Self-Reports Really Be That Wrong??
Q The Gender Czar's Compromise
"Love Like You"
Blindspot
-Product Review: FaceApp
Q Book Review: Nevada
Product Review: Oculus Go
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff