From 6b99b6b966043155f71ed3b79a381de9c2923e4e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 17:05:47 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 01/16] store Reddit icon in theme directory --- notes/tech_tasks.txt | 1 - {content/images => theme/static/images/icons}/reddit.svg | 0 theme/templates/article.html | 3 +-- 3 files changed, 1 insertion(+), 3 deletions(-) rename {content/images => theme/static/images/icons}/reddit.svg (100%) diff --git a/notes/tech_tasks.txt b/notes/tech_tasks.txt index 982c503..4b6b1e9 100644 --- a/notes/tech_tasks.txt +++ b/notes/tech_tasks.txt @@ -1,5 +1,4 @@ rework footnotes plugin!? (Markdown footnote format is better than [ref][/ref] tags) -store Reddit icon in theme directory self-host a copy of Source Sans Pro (I'm annoyed that my devserver preview fonts are ugly when I've killed my network connection so I can focus for once) bigger click-target pagination links verify my domain with Search Console so that I can see search keywords diff --git a/content/images/reddit.svg b/theme/static/images/icons/reddit.svg similarity index 100% rename from content/images/reddit.svg rename to theme/static/images/icons/reddit.svg diff --git a/theme/templates/article.html b/theme/templates/article.html index 9829434..2069815 100644 --- a/theme/templates/article.html +++ b/theme/templates/article.html @@ -25,8 +25,7 @@ Submit to Reddit + src="/theme/images/icons/reddit.svg" height="30px"/>

-- 2.17.1 From 30bfa073590fdae299bc1b4a7520d49853eb2c70 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 19:08:18 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 02/16] check in --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 7 +++++- ...d-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes.md | 2 +- ...unnerby-and-the-shallowness-of-progress.md | 2 +- ...-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 10 +------- .../peering-through-reverent-fingers.md | 15 +++++------- content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md | 2 +- notes/epigraph_quotes.md | 5 ---- notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 8 +++++++ notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt | 3 +++ notes/notes.txt | 8 +++++++ notes/post_ideas.txt | 24 ++++++++++++------- notes/tech_tasks.txt | 1 + 12 files changed, 51 insertions(+), 36 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index 22a0b9b..624ce07 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -144,7 +144,7 @@ To speak to those who aren't _already_ oblivious science nerds—or are committe 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 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 enormous, like _d_ ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to _credibly threaten_ to physically overpower someone, [gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/#threatpoints-and-bargaining), even if the threat is typically unrealized.) 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 fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and 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). +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 enormous, like _d_ ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to _credibly threaten_ to physically overpower someone, [gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/#threatpoints-and-bargaining), even if the threat is typically unrealized.) That doesn't mean patriarchy is good; to think so would be to commit the [naturalistic fallacy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#NatFal) 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 fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and 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). Again—obviously—_is_ does not imply _ought_. [TODO: explain that you should imagine yourself in the inferior group] @@ -176,6 +176,9 @@ Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about de Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be unhappy about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on. 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 also 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 racism. 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 can realistically only be solved with _better tests_ and _better signals_, not by _pretending not to have a prior_. + + + 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— > 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. @@ -190,6 +193,8 @@ 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). + + https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism Each of us in her own way. diff --git a/content/drafts/high-dimensional-social-science-and-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes.md b/content/drafts/high-dimensional-social-science-and-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes.md index 5cf4e92..f2864bc 100644 --- a/content/drafts/high-dimensional-social-science-and-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes.md +++ b/content/drafts/high-dimensional-social-science-and-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ Title: "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes Date: 2020-01-01 Category: commentary -Tags: discourse, meta, procrastination +Tags: categorization, epistemology, sex differences Status: draft > But all of us know much more than we can say, and many times we cannot really put it into words at all. diff --git a/content/drafts/hrunkner-unnerby-and-the-shallowness-of-progress.md b/content/drafts/hrunkner-unnerby-and-the-shallowness-of-progress.md index 39158bf..dcd973d 100644 --- a/content/drafts/hrunkner-unnerby-and-the-shallowness-of-progress.md +++ b/content/drafts/hrunkner-unnerby-and-the-shallowness-of-progress.md @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ Status: draft 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 are spider-like nonhuman aliens native to a planet whose star mysteriously "turns off" for [TODO] years out of every [TODO]. +Our protagonists are spider-like nonhuman aliens native to a planet whose star "turns off" for [TODO] years out of every [TODO]. 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) diff --git a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index 4ecf83b..cdb59f1 100644 --- a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -18,11 +18,9 @@ I haven't been doing so well for a lot of the last ... um, fifteen-ish months? [ [^breakup]: I'm proud of my choice of breakup songs. My breakup song with institutionalized schooling was Taylor Swift's ["We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64), a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of [bad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [relationships](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) [UC Santa Cruz](https://www.ucsc.edu/) (2006–2007), [Heald College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) (2008), [Diablo Valley College](https://www.dvc.edu/) (2010–2012), and [San Francisco State University](https://www.sfsu.edu/) (2012–2013). - My breakup song with my should've-been-best-friend-forever "Elmer", also by Taylor Swift, was ["The Story of Us"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN6VR92V70M), about the pain of not being on speaking terms with someone with someone you thought you were destined to be with, like how I felt when Elmer refused to see me for a year because of status/money tensions ("How I was losing my mind when I saw you here / But you held your pride like you should've held me") that were _another_ incredibly boring and petty story, but one which I don't need to blog about. - The song accompanying the story recounted in this post, Sara Bareilles's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) is about trying to move on from a relationship that was wanted but ... didn't work out. - The fact that I've invested so much symbolic significance in carefully-chosen songs by female vocalists to mourn relationships with one male friend and two abstract institutional perceived-authorities, and conspicuously _not_ for any relationships with _actual women_, maybe tells you something about how my life has gone. + The fact that I've invested so much symbolic significance in carefully-chosen songs by female vocalists to mourn relationships with abstract institutional perceived-authorities, and conspicuously _not_ for any relationships with _actual women_, maybe tells you something about how my life has gone. But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.) @@ -58,12 +56,6 @@ So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _c [section: noncentral-fallacy / motte-and-bailey stuff, other posts about making predictions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world ] -The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [Arthur Blair](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)—you _actually know the math_. - -If I have a "blegg" concept for blue egg-shaped objects—uh, this is [our](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) [standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yFDKvfN6D87Tf5J9f/neural-categories) [example](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside), just [roll with it](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)—what that _means_ is that (at some appropriate level of abstraction) there's a little [Bayesian network](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that if I see a black-and-white photograph of an egg-shaped object, I can use the observation of its shape to update my beliefs about its blegg-category-membership, and then use my beliefs about category-membership to update my beliefs about its blueness. This cognitive algorithm is useful if we live in a world where objects that have the appropriate statistical structure—if the joint distribution P(blegg, blueness, eggness) approximately factorizes as P(blegg)·P(blueness|blegg)·P(eggness|blegg). - -"Category boundaries" are just a _visual metaphor_ for the math: the set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than _p_ is conveniently _visualized_ as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space. If you _don't understand_ the relevant math and philosophy—or are pretending not to understand only and exactly when it's politically convenient—you might think you can redraw the boundary any way you want, but you can't, because the "boundary" visualization is _derived from_ a statistical model which corresponds to _empirically testable predictions about the real world_. Fucking with category boundaries corresponds to fucking with the model, which corresponds to fucking with your ability to interpret sensory data. The only two reasons you could _possibly_ want to do this would be to wirehead yourself (corrupt your map to make the territory look nicer than it really is, making yourself _feel_ happier at the cost of sabotaging your ability to navigate the real world) or as information warfare (corrupt shared maps to sabotage other agents' ability to navigate the real world, in a way such that you benefit from their confusion). - [section: started a pseudonymous secret blog; one of the things I focused on was the philosophy-of-language thing, because that seemed _really_ nailed down: "...To Make Predictions" was the crowning achievement of my sabbatical, and I was also really proud of "Reply on Adult Human Females" a few months later. And that was going OK, until ...] [section: hill of meaning in defense of validity, and I _flipped the fuck out_] diff --git a/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md b/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md index 51dbede..8520278 100644 --- a/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md +++ b/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md @@ -4,15 +4,12 @@ Category: other Tags: categorization, ideology, sex differences Status: draft -As an atheist, I'm not really a fan of religions, but I'll give them one thing: at least their packages of delusions are _stable_. The experience of losing your religion is a painful one, but once you've overcome the trauma of finding out that everything you believed was a lie, the process of figuring out how to live among the still-faithful now that you are no longer one of them, is something you only have to do _once_; it's not like everyone will have adopted a new Jesus Two while you were off having your crisis of faith. And the first Jesus was invisible anyway; you won't be able to pray sincerely, and that does set you apart from your—the—community, but your day-to-day life will be mostly unaffected. - -The progressive _Zeitgeist_ does not even offer this respite. Getting over psychological-sex-differences denialism was painful, but after many years of study and meditation, I think I've finally come to accept the horrible truth: women and men really are psychologically different, and for biologically- and not merely culturally-mediated reasons. This sets me apart from the community, but not very much. - -The original lie wasn't _invisible_ exactly, but it never caused too many problems, because it's easy to doublethink around: most of the functional use of sex categories in Society is handled by seamless subconscious reference-classing, without anyone needing to consciously, verbally reason about sex differences. Women and men don't actually behave the same and we don't actually treat them the same, but +> Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a _process_ of self-identification. Moreover, it is not a matter of affirming a self-identity that we possess. For a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all. +> +> —Joseph M. Whitmeyer, "How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research", in The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society +As an atheist, I'm not really a fan of religions, but I'll give them one thing: at least their packages of delusions are _stable_. The experience of losing your religion is a painful one, but once you've overcome the trauma of finding out that everything you believed was a lie, the process of figuring out how to live among the still-faithful now that you are no longer one of them, is something you only have to do _once_; it's not like everyone will have adopted a new Jesus Two while you were off having your crisis of faith. And the first Jesus was invisible anyway; you won't be able to pray sincerely, and that does set you apart from your—the—community, but your day-to-day life will be mostly unaffected. -But in the ten years I had my back turned reading science books, my former quasi-religion somehow came up with _new_ lies: now, it's not enough to believe that women and men are mentally the same, you're also supposed to accept that those words refer to - -[this breaks the mechanism for doublethinking around the first] +The progressive _Zeitgeist_ does not even offer this respite. Getting over psychological-sex-differences denialism was painful, but after many years of study and meditation, I think I've finally come to accept the horrible truth: women and men really are psychologically different. This sets me apart from the community, but not very much. The original lie wasn't _invisible_ exactly, but it never caused too many problems, because it's easy to doublethink around. Most of the functional use of sex categories in Society is handled by seamless subconscious reference-classing, without anyone needing to consciously, verbally reason about sex differences: no one _actually_ makes the same predictions or decisions about women and men, but since you don't have direct introspective access to what computations your brain used to cough up a prediction or decision, you can just _assume_ that you're treating everyone equally, and only rarely does the course of ordinary events force you to acknowledge or even notice the lie. -You really are expected to believe in Jesus Two! And it's _far more_ ridiculous than the first one! I'm never going to get over this! +But in the decade I had my back turned reading science books, my former quasi-religion somehow came up with _new_ lies: now, it's not enough to believe that women and men are mentally the same, you're _also_ supposed to accept that those categories refer to some atomic mental property that can only be known by verbal self-report. But this actually breaks the mechanism that made the first lie so harmless: the shear stress of your prediction-and-decision classifier _disagreeing_ with the punishment signals that [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) is using to train your pronoun-selection classifier throws the previously-backgrounded existence of the former into sharp relief. You really are expected to believe in Jesus Two! And it's _far_ more ridiculous than the first one! I'm never going to get over this! diff --git a/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md b/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md index 329e5ad..1ed9617 100644 --- a/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md +++ b/content/drafts/the-feeling-is-mutual.md @@ -12,4 +12,4 @@ Status: draft In all philosophical strictness, a [physicalist](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/) universe such as our own isn't going to have some objective morality that all agents are compelled to obey, but even if there is necessarily _some_ element of subjectivity in that we value (say) sentient life rather than (say) [tiling the universe with diamonds](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/), we usually expect morality to at least not be completely arbitrary: we want to _argue_ that a villain is in the _wrong_ because of _reasons_, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her. -If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like a pretty arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead?—how do we break the symmetry? If the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question. +If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like an arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead?—how do we break the symmetry? If the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question. diff --git a/notes/epigraph_quotes.md b/notes/epigraph_quotes.md index 33398c1..c65abab 100644 --- a/notes/epigraph_quotes.md +++ b/notes/epigraph_quotes.md @@ -303,11 +303,6 @@ https://xkcd.com/1942/ > —W. E. B. duBois (http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas102%20%28spring%2001%29/articles/names/dubois.htm) -> "Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a _process_ of self-identification. Moreover, it is not a matter of affirming a self-identity that we possess. For a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all." -> -> Joseph M. Whitmeyer, "How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research", in The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society - - > Stuck, in the middle of fear and shame > Everybody's looking for someone to blame > Like it's a game, like it's a game diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index 1eb1d9c..c80e7e8 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -21,6 +21,14 @@ The language of _has been identified_ +http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/ + +> Stage-4 (Depression): "Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?" + +> 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 ..." + + + —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.) diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt index 2514684..18bfd63 100644 --- a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt +++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt @@ -593,3 +593,6 @@ sneaking a copy of MTIMB into the MIRI library after visiting Eliezer (Jessica w 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] + + +The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [Arthur Blair](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)—you _actually know the math_. diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index 9e5d5e7..2d0ae4a 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -1768,3 +1768,11 @@ https://dsh.fyi/posts/2020-04-14-im-trans-call-me-daisy/ "gender modality" https://www.florenceashley.com/academic-publications.html +I'm not usually—at least, not always—so much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles + +https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2019/12/are-cows-adult-bovine-females.html +https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2020/01/gendered-animal-names-a-postscript.html + +marketing opportunity: https://www.peaktrans.org/contact/ + +https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094634/http://mariacatt.com/2016/03/31/the-adult-baby-story/ diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index 75ac794..aa5f950 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -1,24 +1,30 @@ -UUT— -X Teleology +Scheduled— +X Peering Through Reverent Fingers _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity +X Teleology + + +Main path (important posts)— +_ Intrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War (LW) +_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title) +_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture +_ Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems +_ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT) + + +UUT— _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress -_ Peering Through Reverent Fingers _ The Feeling Is Mutual - +_ Captions _ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title) -_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title) _ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces _ 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) LW/aAL— _ Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle (LW) _ Zoom vs. EMH (LW) _ Comment on "Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization" -_ Intrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War (LW) _ Don't "Click Here" _ 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 diff --git a/notes/tech_tasks.txt b/notes/tech_tasks.txt index 4b6b1e9..498c9dc 100644 --- a/notes/tech_tasks.txt +++ b/notes/tech_tasks.txt @@ -1,3 +1,4 @@ +/count firing on individual post pages (suboptimal) rework footnotes plugin!? (Markdown footnote format is better than [ref][/ref] tags) self-host a copy of Source Sans Pro (I'm annoyed that my devserver preview fonts are ugly when I've killed my network connection so I can focus for once) bigger click-target pagination links -- 2.17.1 From 5ea420a4c756cb1c8100228119a9885a71c3492b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:18:17 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 03/16] Human Diversity: line up for finishing push It's been two months; I'm really aching to just push this thing out the door. --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 30 +++++------ notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 51 +++++++++++++------ notes/notes.txt | 10 ---- 3 files changed, 48 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index 624ce07..14ab4c8 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ _Human Diversity_ is divided into three parts corresponding to the topics in the 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_ is the summary statistic that lets us _quantify_ statistical differences in standardized form: once you can [visualize the overlapping distributions](https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/), whether the reality of the data should be summarized in English words as a "large difference" or a "small difference" becomes a _much less interesting_ question. -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, 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 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. [TODO: more examples of sex difference effect sizes, elaborate on "big" doesn't mean anything] @@ -64,11 +64,11 @@ The starry-eyed view epitomized by Plomin says that polygenic scores are _super 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 opaque and banal; the real work of Science is in figuring out what all the particular gene variations actually _do_. -Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores _don't_ explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for [_still_](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods) not having put in the hours to get much farther into [_Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)) was that you _need_ to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects: variance in rain may be statistically "explained by" variance in mud puddles, but you can't make it rain by turning the hose on. Maybe our feeble state of knowledge is _why_ we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions. +Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores _don't_ explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. Murray compares polygenic scores to "economic indexes predicting GDP growth", which is not necessarily a reassuring analogy to those who doubt how much of GDP represents real production rather than the "exhaust heat" of zero-sum contests in an environment of [manufactured scarcity](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/there-is-a-war/) and [artificial demand](https://write.as/harold-lee/the-sliding-scale-of-bullshit-jobs). -There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from, um, one of Murray's earlier books with a coauthor) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the [topic scope of this blog](/tag/two-type-taxonomy/)—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically _correct_, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least _mentioned_ alternative views ([Serano](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model)? [Veale](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf)?), if only to explain _why_ they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.) Then Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance") has tables of brain-size data, and an explanation of the greater-male-variance hypothesis. Cool! +Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for [_still_](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods) not having put in the hours to get much farther into [_Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)) was that you _need_ to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects: variance in rain may be statistically "explained by" variance in mud puddles, but you can't make it rain by turning the hose on. Maybe our feeble state of knowledge is _why_ we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions. -[TODO: X chromosome greater male] +There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from, um, one of Murray's earlier books with a coauthor) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the [topic scope of this blog](/tag/two-type-taxonomy/)—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically _correct_, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least _mentioned_ alternative views ([Serano](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model)? [Veale](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf)?), if only to explain _why_ they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.) Then Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance") has tables of brain-size data, and an explanation of the greater-male-variance hypothesis. Cool! ----- @@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ If the blank slate doctrine isn't _scientifically_ compelling—it's not somethi And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely _shines_—it's the [Schelling point](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point) for preventing group conflicts! (A [_Schelling point_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) is a choice that's salient as [a focus for mutual expectations](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/): what I think that you think that I think ... _&c._ we'll choose.) If you admit that there could differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitude, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by [establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) as some "inevitable" natural order. -If you're afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to _make the question un-askable_. Can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist_! Denying the existence of sex is harder—which doesn't stop people from occasionally trying. But the taboo mostly only applies to _psychological_ trait differences, because those are more [politically sensitive](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/)—and easier to motivatedly _see what you want to see_: whereas things like height or skin tone can be directly seen and uncontroversially measured with well-understood physical instruments (like a meterstick or digital photo pixel values), psychological assessments are _much_ more complicated and therefore hard to detach from the eye of the beholder. (If I describe Mary as "warm, compassionate, and agreeable", the words mean _something_ in the sense that they change what experiences you anticipate—if you believed my report, you would be _surprised_ if Mary were to kick your dog and make fun of your nose job—but the things that they mean are a high-level statistical signal in behavior for which we [don't have a simple measurement device](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) like a meterstick to appeal to if you and I don't trust each other's character assessments of Mary.) +If you're afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to _make the question un-askable_. Can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist_! Denying the existence of sex is harder—which doesn't stop people from occasionally trying. But the taboo mostly only applies to _psychological_ trait differences, because those are a [sensitive subject](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/)—and easier to motivatedly _see what you want to see_: whereas things like height or skin tone can be directly seen and uncontroversially measured with well-understood physical instruments (like a meterstick or digital photo pixel values), psychological assessments are _much_ more complicated and therefore hard to detach from the eye of the beholder. (If I describe Mary as "warm, compassionate, and agreeable", the words mean _something_ in the sense that they change what experiences you anticipate—if you believed my report, you would be _surprised_ if Mary were to kick your dog and make fun of your nose job—but the things that they mean are a high-level statistical signal in behavior for which we [don't have a simple measurement device](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) like a meterstick to appeal to if you and I don't trust each other's character assessments of Mary.) Notice how the "not allowing sex and race differences in psychological traits to appear on shared maps is the Schelling point for resistance to sex- and race-based oppression" actually gives us an _explanation_ for _why_ one might reasonably have a sense that there are dread doors that we must not open. Undermining the "everyone is Actually Equal" Schelling point could [catalyze a preference cascade](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8q8p6n/culture_war_roundup_for_june_11/e0mxwe9/)—a [slide down the slippery slope to the the next Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes), which might be a lot worse than the _status quo_ on the "amount of rape and genocide" metric, even if it does slightly better on "estimating heritability coefficients." The orthodoxy isn't just being dumb for no reason. In analogy, Galileo and Darwin weren't _trying_ to undermine Christianity—they had much more interesting things to think about—but religious authorities were _right_ to fear heliocentrism and evolution: if the prevailing coordination equilibrium depends on lies, then telling the truth _is_ a threat and it _is_ disloyal. And if the prevailing coordination equilibrium is basically _good_, then you can see why purported truth-tellers striking at the heart of the faith might be believed to be evil. @@ -120,9 +120,11 @@ But this kind of defensive half-measure satisfies no one. From the oblivious-sci And sufficient suspicion makes communication nearly impossible. (If you _know_ someone is lying, their words mean nothing, [not even as the opposite of the truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence).) As far as many of Murray's detractors are concerned, it almost doesn't matter what the text of _Human Diversity_ says, how meticulously researched of a psychology/neuroscience/genetics lit review it is. From their perspective, Murray is "hiding the ball": they're not mad about _this_ book; they're mad about specifically chapters 13 and 14 of a book Murray coauthored twenty-five years ago. (I don't think I'm claiming to be a mind-reader here; the first 20% of [_The New York Times_'s review of _Human Diversity_](https://archive.is/b4xKB) is pretty explicit and representative.) -In 1994's _The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life_, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein argued that a lot of variation in life outcomes is explained by variation in intelligence. Some people think that folk concepts of "intelligence" or being "smart" are ill-defined and therefore not a proper object of scientific study. But that hasn't stopped some psychologists from trying to construct tests purporting to measure an "intelligence quotient" (or _IQ_ for short). It turns out that if you give people a bunch of different mental tests, the results all positively correlate with each other: people who are good at one mental task, like listening to a list of numbers and repeating them backwards ("reverse digit span"), are also good at others, like knowing what words mean ("vocabulary"). There's a lot of fancy linear algebra involved, but basically, you can visualize people's test results as a hyperellipsoid in some high-dimensional space where the dimensions are the different tests. (I rely on this ["configuration space"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) visual metaphor _so much_ for _so many_ things that when I started [my secret ("secret") gender blog](/), it felt right to put it under a `.space` [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain).) The longest axis of the hyperellipsoid corresponds to the "_g_ factor" of "general" intelligence—the choice of axis that cuts through the most variance in mental abilities. +In 1994's _The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life_, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein argued that a lot of variation in life outcomes is explained by variation in intelligence. Some people think that folk concepts of "intelligence" or being "smart" are ill-defined and therefore not a proper object of scientific study. But that hasn't stopped some psychologists from trying to construct tests purporting to measure an "intelligence quotient" (or _IQ_ for short). It turns out that if you give people a bunch of different mental tests, the results all positively correlate with each other: people who are good at one mental task, like listening to a list of numbers and repeating them backwards ("reverse digit span"), are also good at others, like knowing what words mean ("vocabulary"). There's a lot of fancy linear algebra involved, but basically, you can visualize people's test results as a hyper[ellipsoid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsoid) in some high-dimensional space where the dimensions are the different tests. (I rely on this ["configuration space"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) visual metaphor _so much_ for _so many_ things that when I started [my secret ("secret") gender blog](/), it felt right to put it under a `.space` [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain).) The longest axis of the hyperellipsoid corresponds to the "_g_ factor" of "general" intelligence—the choice of axis that cuts through the most variance in mental abilities. + +It's important not to overinterpret the _g_ factor as some unitary essence of intelligence rather than the length of a hyperellipsoid. It seems likely that [if you gave people a bunch of _physical_ tests, they would positively correlate with each other](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/03/07/what-the-general-factor-of-intelligence-is-and-isnt-or-why-intuitive-unitarianism-is-a-lousy-guide-to-the-neurobiology-of-higher-cognitive-ability/), such that you could extract a ["general factor of athleticism"](https://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/g-factor-of-sports.html). (It would be really interesting if anyone's actually done this using the same methodology used to construct IQ tests!) But _athleticism_ is going to be an _very_ "coarse" construct for which [the tails come apart](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart): for example, world champion 100-meter sprinter Usain Bolt's best time in the _800_ meters is [reportedly only around 2:10](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-fast-would-usain-bolt-run-the-mile) [or 2:07](https://archive.is/T988h)! (For comparison, _I_ ran a 2:08.3 in high school once.) -So Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" thingy, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how this has all sorts of implications for Society and inequality and class structure and stuff. [TODO: mention "Coming Apart" thesis?] +Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how this has all sorts of implications for Society and inequality and class structure and stuff. [TODO: mention "Coming Apart" thesis?] 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.) @@ -166,18 +168,11 @@ The problem that Bayesian reasoning poses for naïve egalitarian moral intuition I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I'll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of _making generalizations_ about _people_ just—doesn't make sense. Not that it _shouldn't_ be practiced (it's not that my heart wasn't in the right place), but that it _can't_ be practiced—that the people who think they're practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work. -Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average (I've seen _d_ ≈ 1.4–1.7 depending on the source), so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) because of [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](TODO: "Peering Through Reverent Fingers"): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context. - -Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look much less compelling. Maybe a Bayesian superintelligence could redesign the human brain to _not_ use Bayesian reasoning when contemporary egalitarians would find that ideologically disagreeable? But a world populated by such people, constitutionally incapable of reacting to statistical regularities that we, in our world, automatically take into account (without necessarily noticing that we do), would likely come off as creepy or uncanny. - -[TODO: elaborate on a specific uncanniness: maybe "Self-Made Man" and early-onset trans people?!] - -[TODO: really need to address "But choice!" or "But not for psychology!" objections] - -Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be unhappy about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on. 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 also 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 racism. 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 can realistically only be solved with _better tests_ and _better signals_, not by _pretending not to have a prior_. - +Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average (I've seen _d_ ≈ 1.4–1.7 depending on the source), so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) because of [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context. +Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn't exist under some other social equilibrium. +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_. 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— @@ -194,7 +189,6 @@ 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). - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism Each of us in her own way. diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index c80e7e8..2ef738c 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -1,23 +1,39 @@ - - I don't know how to build a better world, but my first step is to go a little meta and talk about why we can't talk, and take seriously the possible harms from talking, rather than just asserting that free speech and civil discourse is Actually Good the way - * the likes of Cofnas/Winegard/Murray do (being a nobody blogger probably helps; I have an excuse) +TODO— + + * need to clearly define before casually using later: "cognitive repetioires", "egalitarian", "renormalized" + * "genders have been identified" + +"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 I think this would fail to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). + +The language of _has been identified_ + + + +As economist Glenn 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. + - * women and courage * Embryo selection looks _really important_; I don't want to give amunition to racists, but I need to talk about that—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar -* "genders have been identified" -* Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 388 -* need to talk about individual differences being non-threatening -* need to clearly define before casually using later: "cognitive repetioires", "egalitarian", "renormalized" + + +* stages of HBD + + * 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) + + +------ + + * it's actually a _selective_ blank slate (Winegard: https://quillette.com/2019/03/09/progressivism-and-the-west/ ) -* work in "Can Race Be Erased" result -* Glenn Loury on stigma (older people are also dumber, but that's not a political firebomb) -* Usain Bolt and the general factor of athleticism: https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=7703577 https://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/g-factor-of-sports.html (I ran a 2:08.3 when I was sixteen years old.); the tails come apart ; https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-fast-would-usain-bolt-run-the-mile -* blank slate coordination hurt me personally; but just tell the damn truth is also a Schelling point ("Speaking Truth to Power is ...") + * women and courage +* Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 398 +* 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 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_ -* Murray says polygenic scores are like GDP ... I bet Ben and Michael would have something to say about that analogy! @@ -28,6 +44,9 @@ http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/ > 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 ..." +(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.) + + —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.) @@ -181,7 +200,9 @@ This was the linkpost description text I initially drafted, before deciding that A Book Review -Someone wrote a blog post reviewing a book by some sociologist named Murray. Never heard of him. Anyway, I couldn't get through the whole thing because the reviewer has this _really obnoxious_ writing style that uses way too many italics and exclamation points (as well as occasional weirdly out-of-place cuss words?!), but I did notice that he (?) links to _Less Wrong_ a few (or twenty) times, which is something I don't see "in the wild" very often these days, so I "thought it couldn't hurt" to share the link here in case one of you happens to find it interesting?? +(_Content warning_: [politics](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer). Read with caution, as always.) + +Someone wrote a blog post reviewing a book by some sociologist named Murray. Never heard of him. Anyway, I couldn't get through the whole thing because the reviewer has this _really obnoxious_ writing style that uses way too many italics and exclamation points (as well as occasional weirdly out-of-place cuss words?!), but I did notice that he (?) links to _Less Wrong_ a few times, which is something I don't see "in the wild" very often these days, so I "thought it couldn't hurt" to share the link here in case one of you happens to find it interesting?? ------ diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index 2d0ae4a..72a05ad 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -1048,8 +1048,6 @@ https://arcdigital.media/what-is-gender-identity-10ce0da71999 One way of describing the trigger for me having gone bezerk starting in February is that I'm horrified that my neoreactionary friends are visibly way smarter than my rationalist friends. This is terrible, because kabbalistically, neoreaction is about being evil, and rationality is about being smart. It is written that being smart is more important than being good for humans (because trying to be good typically involves artificially restricting your hypothesis space; if good people don't permit themselves to even consider X, then they'll have trouble modeling a world in which lots of people make their living off X). But I really didn't expect that, in practice, trying to be evil makes you smarter than trying to be smart does! -(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.) - the oscillation between "I'm embarrassed and upset about {thing} that I don't want to acknowledge or explain, but that makes me not want to acknowledge or explain the fact that I feel embarrassed an upset" vs. "Yes, {thing} is real; real things are allowed to appear on maps" Goodhart's Lawyer (credit "Wilhelm") @@ -1739,14 +1737,6 @@ You're always going to be dominated by _someone's_ memeplex. The question is, if ---- -"I don't think you're giving my past self enough credit." - -"You were brainwashed by the Malevolent Authority." - -"I mean, yes, but you can't brainwash a human with random bits; they have to be _specific_ bits with something _good_ in them." - ----- - https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/fmg5eps/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16488877 -- 2.17.1 From 1a2ddb43083f94d876752067a4cbd37a5b163bc4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 09:39:15 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 04/16] Human Diversity review: itemize finishing push Here's a list of 13 more things I want to hit with this post. If I diligently tackle them one by one, I might be able to get a draft out to my prereaders tonight?! --- notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 25 +++++++++++++++++++------ 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index 2ef738c..c0957ba 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -1,23 +1,36 @@ TODO— - * need to clearly define before casually using later: "cognitive repetioires", "egalitarian", "renormalized" - * "genders have been identified" + 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "cognitive repetioires", "egalitarian", "renormalized" + + 2. "genders have been identified" "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 I think this would fail to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). The language of _has been identified_ - +3. Loury— As economist Glenn 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. + 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_; I don't want to give amunition to racists, but I need to talk about that—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar + + 5. stages of HBD + + 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 + + 7. more examples of sex difference effect sizes, elaborate on "big" doesn't mean anything + + 8. tie into farmer/forager + + 9. mention "Coming Apart" thesis - * Embryo selection looks _really important_; I don't want to give amunition to racists, but I need to talk about that—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar + 10. Jensen sources of variation + 11. colorism -* stages of HBD + 12. explain imagine self in inferior group - * 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) + 13. work in individual-level stereotypes ------ -- 2.17.1 From 6aa1cac8b8cd72fbe68bb9b95a3f531e81452b36 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 14:04:53 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 05/16] Human Diversity review: nibbling at items --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 2 +- notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 29 +++++++++++++------ 2 files changed, 21 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index 14ab4c8..ae0834a 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -140,7 +140,7 @@ Hypotheses that accept IQ test results as unbiased, but attribute group differen 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. +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). To speak to those who aren't _already_ oblivious science nerds—or are committed to emulating such, as it is scientifically dubious whether anyone is really that oblivious—you need to put _more effort_ into your excuse for why you're interested in these topics. Here's mine, and it's from the heart, though it's up to the reader to judge for herself how credible I am when I say this— diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index c0957ba..cbb9d26 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -1,21 +1,36 @@ TODO— - 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "cognitive repetioires", "egalitarian", "renormalized" + 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "cognitive repetioires", "egalitarian", "renormalized", "human _bio_-diversity" +_cognitive repetioires_—the phrase being Murray's device for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior" + 2. "genders have been identified" -"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 I think this would fail to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). +"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 oblique acerbity fails to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). The language of _has been identified_ suggests an attempt at scientific taxonomy—a project, which I share with Murray, of fitting categories to describe a preexisting objective reality. I don't think the people making 63-item typeahead select "Gender" fields for websites are thinking in such terms to begin with. The specific number 63 [is ridiculous and can't exist](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/); it might as well be, and often is, a fill-in-the-blank free text field. + +If you don't trust taxonomists to be acting in good faith—if you think they're trying to bulldoze the territory to fit a preconcieved map— + -The language of _has been identified_ 3. Loury— +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling + As economist Glenn 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. - 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_; I don't want to give amunition to racists, but I need to talk about that—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar + 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar 5. stages of HBD +The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits five stages of human biodiversity + +http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/ + +> Stage-4 (Depression): "Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?" + +> 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 7. more examples of sex difference effect sizes, elaborate on "big" doesn't mean anything @@ -32,6 +47,7 @@ As economist Glenn Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cogni 13. work in individual-level stereotypes + 14. individual-level differences are less threatening because people don't perceive them as forming a coalition (Murray disagrees with this!) ------ @@ -50,11 +66,6 @@ As economist Glenn Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cogni -http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/ - -> Stage-4 (Depression): "Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?" - -> 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 ..." (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.) -- 2.17.1 From 466a818df55a62185ac4f48d7908907bcc8e3510 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 16:01:46 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 06/16] =?utf8?q?exceptional-case=20tag=20sorting=20to=20tr?= =?utf8?q?eat=20=C3=A6=20ligature=20as=20"ae"?= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit I would hope that Unicode has standardized support for this need?—but if I couldn't quickly find it, this will do. --- plugins/tag_cloud.py | 13 ++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/plugins/tag_cloud.py b/plugins/tag_cloud.py index 775977e..6672e2b 100644 --- a/plugins/tag_cloud.py +++ b/plugins/tag_cloud.py @@ -36,6 +36,15 @@ def init_default_config(pelican): set_default_settings(pelican.settings) +def alphabetic_sort_key(element): + tag = element[0].name + if tag[0] == "æ": # exceptional case + return "ae"+tag[1:] + # `.lower()` to avoid putting all uppercase tags lexicographically + # before lowercase tags —ZMD + return tag.lower() + + def generate_tag_cloud(generator): tag_cloud = defaultdict(int) for article in generator.articles: @@ -69,9 +78,7 @@ def generate_tag_cloud(generator): sorting = generator.settings.get('TAG_CLOUD_SORTING') if sorting == 'alphabetically': - # `.lower()` to avoid putting all uppercase tags lexicographically - # before lowercase tags —ZMD - tag_cloud.sort(key=lambda elem: elem[0].name.lower()) + tag_cloud.sort(key=alphabetic_sort_key) elif sorting == 'alphabetically-rev': tag_cloud.sort(key=lambda elem: elem[0].name, reverse=True) elif sorting == 'size': -- 2.17.1 From a02b9fc87b5ba3e97917b47900dba2917f3f2099 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 16:45:12 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 07/16] Human Diversity: 63 genders, purple invaders, fine-grained stereotypes --- ...sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md | 2 +- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 10 +++--- .../stereotypes-models-and-cognition.md | 11 ------- notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 33 +++++++------------ 4 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 38 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 content/drafts/stereotypes-models-and-cognition.md diff --git a/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md index e92daf5..73ee656 100644 --- a/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md +++ b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md @@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of [female intrasexual competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition) (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic). -Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex). +Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex). In contrast, post-_Obergefell_ gender theory belongs to simulacrum level 3: rather than having a non-circular truth condition, "gender" is just a free-floating Schelling point, a [role](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) or [costume](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender) to be [symbolically identified](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/) with, meaning no more (and no less) what one can predict that others will predict that others will predict ... _&c._ that it means. Biological sex would continue to be a decision-relevant variable if it were cognitively available (summarizing a variety of physical differences, who can get pregnant, various game-theoretic social consequences of who can get pregnant, [personality differences to the tune of](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265) [Mahanalobis _D_](https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/delgiudice_2013_is-d_valid_ep.pdf) ≈ 2.7, _&c._)—but _no_ culture can provide all the concepts that _would be_ decision-relevant _if available_. Definitionally, you don't know what you're missing. ["The limits of my language are the limits of my world."](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein) Some claim to have [_seen through_](https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html) to a world beneath the world, but without a way to _share_ what they've allegedly seen, to bring it within mutually-reinforcing consensus of the intersubjective, who's not to say that they only dreamed it? diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index ae0834a..54af271 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ Murray also addresses the issue of aggregating effect sizes—something [I've be 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 aggressive _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 wealth increases sexual dimorphism _in general_, including, _e.g._, height and blood pressure, not just in personality. +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 wealth increases sexual dimorphism _in general_, including, _e.g._, height and blood pressure, not just in personality. [TODO: tie into farmer/forager theory: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/divide-forager-v-farmer.html ] @@ -110,7 +110,9 @@ If the blank slate doctrine isn't _scientifically_ compelling—it's not somethi And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely _shines_—it's the [Schelling point](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point) for preventing group conflicts! (A [_Schelling point_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) is a choice that's salient as [a focus for mutual expectations](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/): what I think that you think that I think ... _&c._ we'll choose.) If you admit that there could differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitude, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by [establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) as some "inevitable" natural order. -If you're afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to _make the question un-askable_. Can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist_! Denying the existence of sex is harder—which doesn't stop people from occasionally trying. But the taboo mostly only applies to _psychological_ trait differences, because those are a [sensitive subject](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/)—and easier to motivatedly _see what you want to see_: whereas things like height or skin tone can be directly seen and uncontroversially measured with well-understood physical instruments (like a meterstick or digital photo pixel values), psychological assessments are _much_ more complicated and therefore hard to detach from the eye of the beholder. (If I describe Mary as "warm, compassionate, and agreeable", the words mean _something_ in the sense that they change what experiences you anticipate—if you believed my report, you would be _surprised_ if Mary were to kick your dog and make fun of your nose job—but the things that they mean are a high-level statistical signal in behavior for which we [don't have a simple measurement device](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) like a meterstick to appeal to if you and I don't trust each other's character assessments of Mary.) +If you're afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to _make the question un-askable_. Can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist_! Denying the existence of sex is harder—which doesn't stop people from occasionally trying. "I realize I am writing in an LGBT era when some argue that 63 distinct genders have been identified," Murray notes at the beginning of Appendix 2. But this oblique acerbity fails to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). The language of _has been identified_ suggests an attempt at scientific taxonomy—a project, which I share with Murray, of fitting categories to describe a preexisting objective reality. But I don't think the people making 63-item typeahead select "Gender" fields for websites are thinking in such terms to begin with. The specific number 63 [is ridiculous and can't exist](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/); it might as well be, and often is, a fill-in-the-blank free text field. Despite being insanely evil (where I mean the adjective literally rather than as a generic intensifier—evil in a way that is of or related to insanity), I must acknowledge this is at least good game theory. If you don't trust taxonomists to be acting in good faith—if you think we're trying to bulldoze the territory to fit a preconcieved map—then [destroying the language](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction) that would be used to be build oppressive maps is a smart move. + +The taboo mostly only applies to _psychological_ trait differences, because those are a [sensitive subject](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/)—and easier to motivatedly _see what you want to see_: whereas things like height or skin tone can be directly seen and uncontroversially measured with well-understood physical instruments (like a meterstick or digital photo pixel values), psychological assessments are _much_ more complicated and therefore hard to detach from the eye of the beholder. (If I describe Mary as "warm, compassionate, and agreeable", the words mean _something_ in the sense that they change what experiences you anticipate—if you believed my report, you would be _surprised_ if Mary were to kick your dog and make fun of your nose job—but the things that they mean are a high-level statistical signal in behavior for which we [don't have a simple measurement device](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) like a meterstick to appeal to if you and I don't trust each other's character assessments of Mary.) Notice how the "not allowing sex and race differences in psychological traits to appear on shared maps is the Schelling point for resistance to sex- and race-based oppression" actually gives us an _explanation_ for _why_ one might reasonably have a sense that there are dread doors that we must not open. Undermining the "everyone is Actually Equal" Schelling point could [catalyze a preference cascade](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8q8p6n/culture_war_roundup_for_june_11/e0mxwe9/)—a [slide down the slippery slope to the the next Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes), which might be a lot worse than the _status quo_ on the "amount of rape and genocide" metric, even if it does slightly better on "estimating heritability coefficients." The orthodoxy isn't just being dumb for no reason. In analogy, Galileo and Darwin weren't _trying_ to undermine Christianity—they had much more interesting things to think about—but religious authorities were _right_ to fear heliocentrism and evolution: if the prevailing coordination equilibrium depends on lies, then telling the truth _is_ a threat and it _is_ disloyal. And if the prevailing coordination equilibrium is basically _good_, then you can see why purported truth-tellers striking at the heart of the faith might be believed to be evil. @@ -148,7 +150,7 @@ I don't want to be complicit with hatred or oppression. I want to stay loyal to 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 enormous, like _d_ ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to _credibly threaten_ to physically overpower someone, [gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/#threatpoints-and-bargaining), even if the threat is typically unrealized.) That doesn't mean patriarchy is good; to think so would be to commit the [naturalistic fallacy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#NatFal) 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 fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and 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). -Again—obviously—_is_ does not imply _ought_. [TODO: explain that you should imagine yourself in the inferior group] +Again—obviously—_is_ does not imply _ought_. In deference to the historicially well-justified egalitarian fear that such hypotheses will primarily be abused by bad actors to portray their own group as "superior", I find it helpful to dwell on science-fictional scenarios in which the boot of history is one's own neck. If a race of lavender humans from an alternate dimension were to come through a wormhole and invade our Earth and cruelly subjugate _your_ people, you would probably be pretty angry, and maybe join a paramilitary group aimed at overthrowing lavender supremacy and re-instanting civil rights. The possibility of a partially-biological _explanation_ for _why_ the purple bastards discovered wormhole generators when we didn't (maybe they have _d_ ≈ 1.8 on us in visuospatial skills, enabling their population to be first to "roll" a lucky genius who could discover the wormhole field equations), would not make the conquest somehow justified. I don't know how to build a better world, but it seems like there are quite _general_ grounds on which we should expect that it would be helpful to be able to _talk_ about social problems in the language of cause and effect, with the austere objectivity of an engineering discipline. If you want to build a bridge (that will actually stay up), you need to study the ["the careful textbooks \[that\] measure \[...\] the load, the shock, the pressure \[that\] material can bear."](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm) If you want to build a just Society (that will actually stay up), you need a discipline of Actual Social Science that can publish textbooks, and to get _that_, you need the ability to _talk_ about basic facts about human existence and make simple logical and statistical inferences between them. @@ -172,7 +174,7 @@ Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn't exist under some other social equilibrium. -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_. +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— diff --git a/content/drafts/stereotypes-models-and-cognition.md b/content/drafts/stereotypes-models-and-cognition.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8ba03fe..0000000 --- a/content/drafts/stereotypes-models-and-cognition.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11 +0,0 @@ -Title: Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition -Date: 2020-01-01 -Category: commentary -Tags: epistemology -Status: draft - -fine-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. diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index cbb9d26..bef387c 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -4,51 +4,40 @@ TODO— _cognitive repetioires_—the phrase being Murray's device for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior" - 2. "genders have been identified" - -"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 oblique acerbity fails to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). The language of _has been identified_ suggests an attempt at scientific taxonomy—a project, which I share with Murray, of fitting categories to describe a preexisting objective reality. I don't think the people making 63-item typeahead select "Gender" fields for websites are thinking in such terms to begin with. The specific number 63 [is ridiculous and can't exist](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/); it might as well be, and often is, a fill-in-the-blank free text field. - -If you don't trust taxonomists to be acting in good faith—if you think they're trying to bulldoze the territory to fit a preconcieved map— - - +--- 3. Loury— https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling -As economist Glenn 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. +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. - 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar - - 5. stages of HBD + 9. mention "Coming Apart" thesis -The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits five stages of human biodiversity + 14. individual-level differences are less threatening because people don't perceive them as forming a coalition (Murray disagrees with this!) -http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/ +----- -> Stage-4 (Depression): "Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?" + 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar -> 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 ..." + 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 +------- + 7. more examples of sex difference effect sizes, elaborate on "big" doesn't mean anything 8. tie into farmer/forager - 9. mention "Coming Apart" thesis +---- 10. Jensen sources of variation 11. colorism - 12. explain imagine self in inferior group - - 13. work in individual-level stereotypes - - 14. individual-level differences are less threatening because people don't perceive them as forming a coalition (Murray disagrees with this!) - ------ -- 2.17.1 From 3b7118e1b186201c20de45c6baffce76edcf2131 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 21:17:18 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 08/16] Human Diversity: rework sex d's, farmer/forager, smart coalitions --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 24 +++++++++---------- notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 22 +---------------- 2 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 34 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index 54af271..039f789 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Category: commentary 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! 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_ (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! 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[n]", which feel clunky to read, but are _so much better_ than the all-too-common alternative of authors _not_ "showing their work". @@ -16,17 +16,15 @@ The second part of this blog post is irrelevant. _Human Diversity_ is divided into three parts corresponding to the topics in the subtitle! (Plus another part if you want some wrapping-up commentary from Murray.) So the first part is about things we know about some ways in which female people and male people are different from each other! -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_ is the summary statistic that lets us _quantify_ statistical differences in standardized form: once you can [visualize the overlapping distributions](https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/), whether the reality of the data should be summarized in English words as a "large difference" or a "small difference" becomes a _much less interesting_ question. +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). -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. +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. -[TODO: more examples of sex difference effect sizes, elaborate on "big" doesn't mean anything] +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. 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 wealth increases sexual dimorphism _in general_, including, _e.g._, height and blood pressure, not just in personality. - -[TODO: tie into farmer/forager theory: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/divide-forager-v-farmer.html ] +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! @@ -64,9 +62,7 @@ The starry-eyed view epitomized by Plomin says that polygenic scores are _super 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 opaque and banal; the real work of Science is in figuring out what all the particular gene variations actually _do_. -Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores _don't_ explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. Murray compares polygenic scores to "economic indexes predicting GDP growth", which is not necessarily a reassuring analogy to those who doubt how much of GDP represents real production rather than the "exhaust heat" of zero-sum contests in an environment of [manufactured scarcity](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/there-is-a-war/) and [artificial demand](https://write.as/harold-lee/the-sliding-scale-of-bullshit-jobs). - -Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for [_still_](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods) not having put in the hours to get much farther into [_Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)) was that you _need_ to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects: variance in rain may be statistically "explained by" variance in mud puddles, but you can't make it rain by turning the hose on. Maybe our feeble state of knowledge is _why_ we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions. +Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores _don't_ explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. (Murray compares polygenic scores to "economic indexes predicting GDP growth", which is not necessarily a reassuring analogy to those who doubt how much of GDP represents real production rather than the "exhaust heat" of zero-sum contests in an environment of [manufactured scarcity](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/there-is-a-war/) and [artificial demand](https://write.as/harold-lee/the-sliding-scale-of-bullshit-jobs).) Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for [_still_](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods) not having put in the hours to get much farther into [_Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)) was that you _need_ to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects: variance in rain may be statistically "explained by" variance in mud puddles, but you can't make it rain by turning the hose on. Maybe our feeble state of knowledge is _why_ we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions. There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from, um, one of Murray's earlier books with a coauthor) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the [topic scope of this blog](/tag/two-type-taxonomy/)—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically _correct_, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least _mentioned_ alternative views ([Serano](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model)? [Veale](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf)?), if only to explain _why_ they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.) Then Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance") has tables of brain-size data, and an explanation of the greater-male-variance hypothesis. Cool! @@ -124,12 +120,14 @@ And sufficient suspicion makes communication nearly impossible. (If you _know_ s In 1994's _The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life_, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein argued that a lot of variation in life outcomes is explained by variation in intelligence. Some people think that folk concepts of "intelligence" or being "smart" are ill-defined and therefore not a proper object of scientific study. But that hasn't stopped some psychologists from trying to construct tests purporting to measure an "intelligence quotient" (or _IQ_ for short). It turns out that if you give people a bunch of different mental tests, the results all positively correlate with each other: people who are good at one mental task, like listening to a list of numbers and repeating them backwards ("reverse digit span"), are also good at others, like knowing what words mean ("vocabulary"). There's a lot of fancy linear algebra involved, but basically, you can visualize people's test results as a hyper[ellipsoid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsoid) in some high-dimensional space where the dimensions are the different tests. (I rely on this ["configuration space"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) visual metaphor _so much_ for _so many_ things that when I started [my secret ("secret") gender blog](/), it felt right to put it under a `.space` [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain).) The longest axis of the hyperellipsoid corresponds to the "_g_ factor" of "general" intelligence—the choice of axis that cuts through the most variance in mental abilities. -It's important not to overinterpret the _g_ factor as some unitary essence of intelligence rather than the length of a hyperellipsoid. It seems likely that [if you gave people a bunch of _physical_ tests, they would positively correlate with each other](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/03/07/what-the-general-factor-of-intelligence-is-and-isnt-or-why-intuitive-unitarianism-is-a-lousy-guide-to-the-neurobiology-of-higher-cognitive-ability/), such that you could extract a ["general factor of athleticism"](https://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/g-factor-of-sports.html). (It would be really interesting if anyone's actually done this using the same methodology used to construct IQ tests!) But _athleticism_ is going to be an _very_ "coarse" construct for which [the tails come apart](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart): for example, world champion 100-meter sprinter Usain Bolt's best time in the _800_ meters is [reportedly only around 2:10](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-fast-would-usain-bolt-run-the-mile) [or 2:07](https://archive.is/T988h)! (For comparison, _I_ ran a 2:08.3 in high school once.) +It's important not to overinterpret the _g_ factor as some unitary essence of intelligence rather than the length of a hyperellipsoid. It seems likely that [if you gave people a bunch of _physical_ tests, they would positively correlate with each other](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/03/07/what-the-general-factor-of-intelligence-is-and-isnt-or-why-intuitive-unitarianism-is-a-lousy-guide-to-the-neurobiology-of-higher-cognitive-ability/), such that you could extract a ["general factor of athleticism"](https://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/g-factor-of-sports.html). (It would be really interesting if anyone's actually done this using the same methodology used to construct IQ tests!) But _athleticism_ is going to be an _very_ "coarse" construct for which [the tails come apart](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart): for example, world champion 100-meter sprinter Usain Bolt's best time in the _800_ meters is [reportedly only around 2:10](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-fast-would-usain-bolt-run-the-mile) [or 2:07](https://archive.is/T988h)! (For comparison, _I_ ran a 2:08.3 in high school once!) -Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how this has all sorts of implications for Society and inequality and class structure and stuff. [TODO: mention "Coming Apart" thesis?] +Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how Society is becoming increasingly stratified by cognitive abilities, as school credentials become the ticket to the upper and upper-middle classes. 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. + 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. 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. @@ -170,7 +168,7 @@ The problem that Bayesian reasoning poses for naïve egalitarian moral intuition I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I'll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of _making generalizations_ about _people_ just—doesn't make sense. Not that it _shouldn't_ be practiced (it's not that my heart wasn't in the right place), but that it _can't_ be practiced—that the people who think they're practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work. -Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average (I've seen _d_ ≈ 1.4–1.7 depending on the source), so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) because of [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context. +Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average, so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) [because of](https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/) [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context. Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn't exist under some other social equilibrium. diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index bef387c..f540d84 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -1,21 +1,7 @@ TODO— - 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "cognitive repetioires", "egalitarian", "renormalized", "human _bio_-diversity" + 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "egalitarian", "renormalized", "human _bio_-diversity" -_cognitive repetioires_—the phrase being Murray's device for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior" - ---- - -3. Loury— - -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. - - 9. mention "Coming Apart" thesis - - 14. individual-level differences are less threatening because people don't perceive them as forming a coalition (Murray disagrees with this!) - ----- 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar @@ -26,12 +12,6 @@ The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits [five stages of knowle 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 -------- - - 7. more examples of sex difference effect sizes, elaborate on "big" doesn't mean anything - - 8. tie into farmer/forager - ---- 10. Jensen sources of variation -- 2.17.1 From 7387440c2da417548130ecd7f1ce72a79a231265 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:49:21 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 09/16] "Beyond the Binary" stub --- content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md | 12 ++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md diff --git a/content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md b/content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ce223f9 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +Title: Beyond the Binary +Date: 2021-01-01 +Category: other +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_.) + +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. + +Let _V_ be a random variable over the sample space {0,1}20, 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}20. + -- 2.17.1 From 8bfc6b0eab0014f2bdbab7c6c86759e23c62536a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:53:29 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 10/16] check in --- .../2018/the-information-theory-of-passing.md | 2 +- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 9 ++++++--- .../phenotypic-identity-and-memetic-capture.md | 2 ++ ...l-dimorphism-yudkowskys-sequences-and-me.md | 2 ++ notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 5 ++++- notes/notes.txt | 18 +++++++++++------- notes/post_ideas.txt | 12 ++++++++---- 7 files changed, 34 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/2018/the-information-theory-of-passing.md b/content/2018/the-information-theory-of-passing.md index cf34e32..2f8f6e6 100644 --- a/content/2018/the-information-theory-of-passing.md +++ b/content/2018/the-information-theory-of-passing.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ Title: The Information Theory of Passing Author: Sophia Date: 2018-10-01 20:35 Category: commentary -Tags: epistemology +Tags: epistemology, information theory _(This is a guest post by friend of the blog Sophia!)_ diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index 039f789..d376aeb 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -132,15 +132,18 @@ It's important not to overinterpret the IQ-scores-by-race results; there are a b 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. Controlling for parental socioeconomic status only cuts the black–white gap by a third. +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.) [TODO: sentence about sources of variation within/between groups based on Jensen] -[TODO: sentence about colorism based on https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/17/htm "Skin color is actually only controlled by a small number of alleles, so if you think societal discrimination on skin color causes IQ differences"] + +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, 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). +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). To speak to those who aren't _already_ oblivious science nerds—or are committed to emulating such, as it is scientifically dubious whether anyone is really that oblivious—you need to put _more effort_ into your excuse for why you're interested in these topics. Here's mine, and it's from the heart, though it's up to the reader to judge for herself how credible I am when I say this— diff --git a/content/drafts/phenotypic-identity-and-memetic-capture.md b/content/drafts/phenotypic-identity-and-memetic-capture.md index b656123..601dd4e 100644 --- a/content/drafts/phenotypic-identity-and-memetic-capture.md +++ b/content/drafts/phenotypic-identity-and-memetic-capture.md @@ -29,3 +29,5 @@ I conflated "feminist" with the kind of woman I want https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/ http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/ + +vocabulary—I still say "dysphoria" because I don't have another word; I can't just drop "developmental sex" in a conversation because it's nonstandard diff --git a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-yudkowskys-sequences-and-me.md b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-yudkowskys-sequences-and-me.md index 2100f80..39b14d5 100644 --- a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-yudkowskys-sequences-and-me.md +++ b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-yudkowskys-sequences-and-me.md @@ -51,3 +51,5 @@ In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/ > Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is _No_? (To which I now realize the correct answer is: Yes, it's fucking cheating! The map is not the territory! You can't change the current _referent_ of "personal identity" with the semantic mind game of declaring that "personal identity" now refers to something else! How dumb do you think we are?! But more on this later.) + +changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index f540d84..d61f9c6 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -1,11 +1,14 @@ TODO— - 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "egalitarian", "renormalized", "human _bio_-diversity" + 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "egalitarian", "hereditarian", "renormalized", "human _bio_-diversity" ----- 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar +https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/twitter-piles-on-richard-dawkins-over-eugenics-tweet/13333 +Murray "Yes": https://archive.is/uaFFF + 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 ..."). diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index 72a05ad..bfa8061 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -1064,11 +1064,6 @@ Siezing the Means of Home Production: http://archive.li/9NRrS https://abc30.com/homeless-women-harassed-in-shower-lawsuit-says/3514544/ -If you ever find yourself saying, "Even if Hypothesis H is true, it doesn't have any decision-relevant implications," YOU ARE RATIONALIZING! The fact that H is interesting enough for you to be considering the question at all (it's not some arbitrary trivium like the 1923th binary digit of π, or the low temperature in São Paulo on September 17, 1978) means that it must have some relevance to the things you care about. It is VANISHINGLY IMPROBABLE that your optimal decisions are going to be the SAME in worlds where H is true and worlds where H is false. The fact that you're tempted to SAY they're the same is probably because some part of you is afraid of some of the imagined consequences of H being true. But H is already true or already false! If you happen to live in a world where H is true, and you make decisions as if you lived in a world where H is false, you are thereby missing out on all the extra utility you would get if you made the H-optimal decisions instead! - -If you can figure out exactly what you're afraid of, maybe that will help you work out what the H-optimal decisions are. Then you'll be a better position to successfully notice which world you ACTUALLY live in. http://lesswrong.com/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat/ - - "Jesse Singal is a transphobic piece of shit!" Separately, may also be worth considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification … when deciding what merits "piece of shit" status? Who knows if some of the ppl you follow are (e.g.) autogynephilia truthers, but don't write about it under their real name because they see the reaction to Singal? @@ -1411,8 +1406,6 @@ http://www.trans.cafe/posts/2016/6/27/17-signs-i-was-transgender-but-didnt-know- https://medium.com/@transstyleguide/alternatives-to-afab-and-amab-d7cf8fe20a72 -changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC - There are Facts About Males that neurotypicals probably don't explain in words? Something about how a gentleman who doesn't want to be more specific, if he were going to be more specific, might end up using the word curvature. But maybe I've already said too much. support group can't mention anatomy: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/bripts/peak_trans_ix_tell_your_story_here/f6wjry3/ @@ -1562,6 +1555,12 @@ then, everyone will understand "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) +20 Apr: "she didn't name herself after a fictional character, she was very heavily railroaded into that" + +reply: "I'm not sure she's old enough to understand the implications of naming yourself after a fictional character." (I didn't challenge, because I sensed I've already used up my latitude) + +20 Apr: "Honestly this is super unsurprising in hindsight / She likes trucks and power tools and children's TV" + ----- smart fascism— @@ -1766,3 +1765,8 @@ https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2020/01/gendered-animal-names-a-postscript.html marketing opportunity: https://www.peaktrans.org/contact/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094634/http://mariacatt.com/2016/03/31/the-adult-baby-story/ + +> If you want to change a culture, think in terms of the evolutionary aspects of it. You might be able to do it by just shaking things up and letting it slide into a new equilibrium, but this only works if there's an equilibrium where you want to be. Fighting the adaptation pressure is a losing game. —https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2020-02-28-06:33.html + +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%) diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index aa5f950..2e4088e 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -10,16 +10,18 @@ _ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title) _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture _ Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems _ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT) +_ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and ... UUT— +_ Beyond the Binary _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress _ The Feeling Is Mutual _ Captions _ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title) _ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces _ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels - +_ Answers on Great Divides: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/questions-for-great-divides.html LW/aAL— _ Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle (LW) @@ -27,8 +29,9 @@ _ Zoom vs. EMH (LW) _ Comment on "Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization" _ Don't "Click Here" _ 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 Clustering +_ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more + _ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures @@ -53,8 +56,9 @@ The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology _ Product Review: FaceApp -_ The Strategy of "Apartment Patty" +_ The Strategy of "Apartment Patty" — the outrage strategy only works if you have a coalition to back you up +you regress to your group's mean—but that depends on how you draw the category boundaries around group membership! This could be a good math post!! https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/ 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." @@ -166,7 +170,7 @@ Laser 13 a big essay about Batesian mimickry -_ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and ... + _ Codes of Convergence; Or, Smile More _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology _ "I Will Fight [...]": LGBT Patriotism and the Moral Fine-Tuning Objection -- 2.17.1 From e9350833b6d0196c622806a41756809f4fa28438 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:28:18 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 11/16] check in --- content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md | 4 +++- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 14 +++++++++++--- notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 16 +--------------- notes/notes.txt | 9 +++++++++ notes/post_ideas.txt | 2 ++ 5 files changed, 26 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md b/content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md index ce223f9..3759276 100644 --- a/content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md +++ b/content/drafts/beyond-the-binary.md @@ -4,9 +4,11 @@ Category: other 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}20, 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}20. diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index d376aeb..ecc3a77 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -126,7 +126,7 @@ Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and h 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. @@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ The problem is, a lot of the blank-slatey environmentally-caused-differences-onl 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] @@ -183,7 +183,7 @@ The other place where I think Murray is hiding the ball (even from himself) is i 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— @@ -191,6 +191,14 @@ 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. + + + +You can't brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something _good_ in them. + https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index d61f9c6..69de45c 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -11,7 +11,6 @@ Murray "Yes": https://archive.is/uaFFF 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 @@ -27,22 +26,9 @@ The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits [five stages of knowle * 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 - - - - - - - - - - - - -(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.) diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index bfa8061..f0d60e7 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -1770,3 +1770,12 @@ https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094634/http://mariacatt.com/2016/03/31/the-a 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%) + +---- + +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. + +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. + diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index 2e4088e..204d934 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -36,6 +36,8 @@ _ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem 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 + Vocabulary as Capital Investment B.F. being smart-but-dense -- 2.17.1 From 3ecd61d57775e770f9b0ede099fd22daa845ba17 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:09:42 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 12/16] "informed" and "informative" mean different things --- content/2017/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/content/2017/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89.md b/content/2017/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89.md index 53ec095..2001c9b 100644 --- a/content/2017/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89.md +++ b/content/2017/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89.md @@ -21,6 +21,6 @@ And really, the results so far are nothing to write home about. (Although they a And ... that's it, as far as I can tell. Not really a big deal, at all. Should I be disappointed, that I hoped to discover some True Secret of Ultimate Gender, only to find that the secret can't be had by taking other people's medicines? Should I be relieved that maybe there's not much of a secret to be discovered in the first place? Or do I just need to continue to be patient? -It should be noted that my 10 July lab results put my estradiol levels well below the expectation for transitioners, so I'll be increasing my dosage. The test result uninformedly just said "<50 pg/mL", with the standard range (for males, presumably) given as ≤50 pg/mL; the doctor says it should be over 100. (This information makes my earlier [patch-only-no-spiro phase](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/) of the experiment look even more useless than I knew at the time.) I asked for the higher dose in oral form (well, [sublingual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublingual_administration), anyway); the transdermal (no pun intended, one assumes) patches have _usually_ been lasting out the week that they're supposed to, but it was slightly annoying to feel the patch wrinkle when I twist or bend over. The spiro, however, does seem to be working as intended: the July lab puts my "free" testosterone at 20.8 pg/mL, with the standard range given as 59–166 pg/mL. +It should be noted that my 10 July lab results put my estradiol levels well below the expectation for transitioners, so I'll be increasing my dosage. The test result uninformatively just said "<50 pg/mL", with the standard range (for males, presumably) given as ≤50 pg/mL; the doctor says it should be over 100. (This information makes my earlier [patch-only-no-spiro phase](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/) of the experiment look even more useless than I knew at the time.) I asked for the higher dose in oral form (well, [sublingual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublingual_administration), anyway); the transdermal (no pun intended, one assumes) patches have _usually_ been lasting out the week that they're supposed to, but it was slightly annoying to feel the patch wrinkle when I twist or bend over. The spiro, however, does seem to be working as intended: the July lab puts my "free" testosterone at 20.8 pg/mL, with the standard range given as 59–166 pg/mL. Although the experiment so far may not _currently_ feel like directly throwing myself on a fire, as things progress, I will eventually have to _decide_ what I'm trying to do here, and which trade-offs (in health risks, in the social consequences of my appearance) are worth what. Like the frog in that story about a slowly boiling pot of water. Or the man who, attempting to split the difference between getting the girl and being the girl, achieved neither. -- 2.17.1 From 72ec617f6930bb2c45b49e444adcf335c8bc3acd Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:35:48 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 13/16] check in --- content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md | 2 +- notes/notes.txt | 2 ++ notes/post_ideas.txt | 7 ++++++- 3 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md b/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md index 8520278..c18e3d4 100644 --- a/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md +++ b/content/drafts/peering-through-reverent-fingers.md @@ -10,6 +10,6 @@ Status: draft As an atheist, I'm not really a fan of religions, but I'll give them one thing: at least their packages of delusions are _stable_. The experience of losing your religion is a painful one, but once you've overcome the trauma of finding out that everything you believed was a lie, the process of figuring out how to live among the still-faithful now that you are no longer one of them, is something you only have to do _once_; it's not like everyone will have adopted a new Jesus Two while you were off having your crisis of faith. And the first Jesus was invisible anyway; you won't be able to pray sincerely, and that does set you apart from your—the—community, but your day-to-day life will be mostly unaffected. -The progressive _Zeitgeist_ does not even offer this respite. Getting over psychological-sex-differences denialism was painful, but after many years of study and meditation, I think I've finally come to accept the horrible truth: women and men really are psychologically different. This sets me apart from the community, but not very much. The original lie wasn't _invisible_ exactly, but it never caused too many problems, because it's easy to doublethink around. Most of the functional use of sex categories in Society is handled by seamless subconscious reference-classing, without anyone needing to consciously, verbally reason about sex differences: no one _actually_ makes the same predictions or decisions about women and men, but since you don't have direct introspective access to what computations your brain used to cough up a prediction or decision, you can just _assume_ that you're treating everyone equally, and only rarely does the course of ordinary events force you to acknowledge or even notice the lie. +The progressive _Zeitgeist_ does not even offer this respite. Getting over psychological-sex-differences denialism was painful, but after many years of study and meditation, I think I've finally come to accept the horrible truth: women and men really are psychologically different. This sets me apart from the community, but not very much. The original lie wasn't _invisible_ exactly, but it never caused too many problems, because it's easy to doublethink around. Most of the functional use of sex categories in Society is handled by seamless subconscious reference-classing, without anyone needing to consciously, verbally reason about sex differences: no one _actually_ makes the same predictions or decisions about women and men—that would be crazy—but since you don't have direct introspective access to what computations your brain used to cough up a prediction or decision, you can just _assume_ that you're treating everyone equally, and only rarely does the course of ordinary events force you to acknowledge or even notice the lie. But in the decade I had my back turned reading science books, my former quasi-religion somehow came up with _new_ lies: now, it's not enough to believe that women and men are mentally the same, you're _also_ supposed to accept that those categories refer to some atomic mental property that can only be known by verbal self-report. But this actually breaks the mechanism that made the first lie so harmless: the shear stress of your prediction-and-decision classifier _disagreeing_ with the punishment signals that [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) is using to train your pronoun-selection classifier throws the previously-backgrounded existence of the former into sharp relief. You really are expected to believe in Jesus Two! And it's _far_ more ridiculous than the first one! I'm never going to get over this! diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index f0d60e7..93e5195 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -1561,6 +1561,8 @@ reply: "I'm not sure she's old enough to understand the implications of naming y 20 Apr: "Honestly this is super unsurprising in hindsight / She likes trucks and power tools and children's TV" +22 Apr: and she buried her face in her arms and was like "but I'm your son" in this pathetically squeaky voice. (I don't think she's updated to "daughter"?) + ----- smart fascism— diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index 204d934..451b2d0 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -17,11 +17,12 @@ UUT— _ Beyond the Binary _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress _ The Feeling Is Mutual -_ Captions +_ I, Too, Dislike It (Captions) _ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title) _ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces _ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels _ Answers on Great Divides: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/questions-for-great-divides.html +_ Challenges of Mounting an Ideological Crusade LW/aAL— _ Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle (LW) @@ -38,6 +39,10 @@ it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictur Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time + +if pro-reality trans people are allied with more numerous anti-reality trans people, that incentivizes me to join an anti-trans coalition, when what I actually (should) want is to cherry-pick the pro-reality people + + Vocabulary as Capital Investment B.F. being smart-but-dense -- 2.17.1 From a1580df12b6f5cddead6ff05a5be194c4e8e8861 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:08:07 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 14/16] Human Diversity review gapless rough draft!! --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 28 ++++--------------- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 22 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index ecc3a77..fe85e12 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -132,16 +132,7 @@ It's important not to overinterpret the IQ-scores-by-race results; there are a b 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. - -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] - - -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, - -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). @@ -183,23 +174,16 @@ The other place where I think Murray is hiding the ball (even from himself) is i 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). - -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. - - - -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. -- 2.17.1 From 6dab1189746a5e3eb795ad434add386c175db137 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:59:24 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 15/16] Human Diversity review editing MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit I didn't make a full pass (Firefox Reader View says this is a 61–78 minute read!), but maybe I can send this out to potential pre-readers even as the later 7/10ths are still rough. --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 10 +++++----- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index fe85e12..9844564 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Category: commentary 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[n]", which feel clunky to read, but are _so much better_ than the all-too-common alternative of authors _not_ "showing their work". @@ -18,15 +18,15 @@ _Human Diversity_ is divided into three parts corresponding to the topics in the 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 (single nucleotide polymorphisms, 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". @@ -168,7 +168,7 @@ Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about de 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. -- 2.17.1 From 817596deb6edadf4d1b0ff691547321e51113c05 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2020 23:05:04 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 16/16] link the classic complaint against PHP --- content/2020/dont-read-the-comments.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/content/2020/dont-read-the-comments.md b/content/2020/dont-read-the-comments.md index 0c8b229..e578b34 100644 --- a/content/2020/dont-read-the-comments.md +++ b/content/2020/dont-read-the-comments.md @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ Tags: meta, Python Historically, _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ has not provided a comment section. There were two reasons for this. -First, technical limitations, downstream of technical æsthetics. There are standard out-of-the-box blogging hosts—your [WordPress](https://wordpress.com/), your [Medium](https://medium.com/), _&c._—that are easy for anyone to use, at the cost of taking control away from the user, locking access to _your soul_ away on someone else's server, or, at best, obfuscated in some database behind opaque gobs of PHP. My real-name blog (started in December 2011, when I was much less technically adept) is still running WordPress, and I'm sad about it. In contrast, this blog is produced using the [Pelican](https://blog.getpelican.com/) static site generator from Markdown text files, [versioned in Git](http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git)—simple tools I _understand_, producing flat HTML files that Nginx can serve. When I don't like something about my theme or my plugins, I'm not at the mercy of the developers; I can just fix it myself. The lack of a database meant forgoing a comment section, but that seemed like a small loss, because— +First, technical limitations, downstream of technical æsthetics. There are standard out-of-the-box blogging hosts—your [WordPress](https://wordpress.com/), your [Medium](https://medium.com/), _&c._—that are easy for anyone to use, at the cost of taking control away from the user, locking access to _your soul_ away on someone else's server, or, at best, obfuscated in some database behind opaque gobs of [PHP](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/). My real-name blog (started in December 2011, when I was much less technically adept) is still running WordPress, and I'm sad about it. In contrast, this blog is produced using the [Pelican](https://blog.getpelican.com/) static site generator from Markdown text files, [versioned in Git](http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git)—simple tools I _understand_, producing flat HTML files that Nginx can serve. When I don't like something about my theme or my plugins, I'm not at the mercy of the developers; I can just fix it myself. The lack of a database meant forgoing a comment section, but that seemed like a small loss, because— Second, internet comment sections are _garbage_ and I don't want to be bothered to moderate one. I thought, people who are actually interested in replying to my writing can write a longform response on their own blog (please?—I'll link back), or on Reddit when I share to [/r/TheMotte](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/); and people who want to talk to me can find [my email address](mailto:ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com) (checked less often than my real-name email; I regret any delays) on [the About page](/about/). -- 2.17.1