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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / book-review-facing-reality.md
1 Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America</em>
2 Date: 2021-06-30 05:00
3 Category: commentary
4 Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
5 Status: draft
6
7 Well, this is awkward.
8
9 I _liked_ [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/). That book did a _little_ bit of political positioning in opposition to the blank slate orthodoxy, but for the _most_ part it was just a fun, clean Science book for Science nerds. Effect sizes! GWAS! Selection on standing variation! Additive genetic variance! No one can get (or stay) angry about these technical minutiæ. "[E]veryone should calm down," Murray wrote, and as your eyes glaze over the two-page table of "Differences in Target Allele Frequencies for Traits Related to Cognitive Repertoires", you can almost start to believe that they should.
10
11 This book ... well. This is the Charles Murray book that's _actually_ about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about. You really have to feel sorry for the man.
12
13 (Bell Curve had two chapters about race, Coming Apart is specifically about White America, human diversity slow-played the race section)
14
15 -----
16
17 ... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write.
18
19 [What I actually care about: the intelligence explosion; the alignment problem might be solvable by von Neumann clones; a civilization at our tech level with a more functional state religion that wasn't afraid of genetics would be able to produce them faster than we will; this is really bad guys]
20
21 [shut down tribalist thinking: it's not like white people (or even Jews) are the pinnicle of creation; imagine the space of possible minds and consider psychic unity and know how puny we all are]
22
23 [amplifying ancestry differences
24 https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/super-gaels/]
25
26 group diff studies
27 https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/01/what-you-cant-say-genetic-group-difference-edition/
28
29 [the nutritional mismatch hypothesis]
30
31 [Cognitive Creationism, Dodging Darwin, &c.]
32
33 [the Georgetown law professor thing: "I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks."—this is actually a very straightforward consequence of affirmative action (even if you don't believe in a genetic gap); it should be possible to reason about
34 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/12/georgetown-terminates-law-professor-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students
35 ]
36
37
38 Paul Christiano abstract story about what kind of agents steer the future
39 https://rationalaltruist.com/2013/02/27/why-will-they-be-happy/
40
41 https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education
42
43 https://www.unz.com/isteve/nature-tackling-systemic-racism-requires-the-system-of-science-to-change/
44
45 https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-not-so-great-reset-rolls-on/
46
47 I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007
48
49 The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
51
52 "Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good?" (No!)
53 https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf
54
55 https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2017/3/13/21111588/it-s-official-new-york-s-prospective-teachers-will-no-longer-have-to-pass-controversial-literacy-exa
56
57 For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-taboo-in-biology.html
58
59 From my notebook circa November 2007—
60 I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm male all the way down, no matter what I say or do or even feel. This is hard to deal with because my <<policies are based on the fact that>> I'm special or the Difference is trivial. <<Whereas all the testing says not really.>> (But I've _always_ been <<inherently gloomy>>)
61
62 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
63
64 https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
65
66 "No causal associations between childhood family income and subsequent psychiatric disorders, substance misuse and violent crime arrests"
67 https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab099/6288123
68
69 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak
70
71 https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/sperm-counts-decline-fertility-science-white-nationalism.html
72
73 https://dynomight.net/are-tests-irrelevant/
74
75 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
76
77 It's going to be the future soon; things aren't always going to be like this