1 Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America</em>
4 Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
9 I _liked_ [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/). That book did a _little_ bit of defensive political positioning, 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"](/images/target_allele_frequencies_table.jpg), you can almost start to believe that they should.
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.
13 You really have to feel sorry for the man. In previous works such as 1994's _The Bell Curve_ (with Richard J. Hernstein) and 2012's _Coming Apart_, Murray argues that American Society in the 20th and early 21st centuries has developed an increasingly stratified class structure based on cognitive ability. All else being equal, smarter individuals attain higher-paying professions, perform better within a given profession, form stabler families, and commit fewer crimes. But sorting by cognitive ability has a dark side in the dissolution of social capital and undermining of the American way of life, as the richest and most educated increasingly live in their own bubbles with no connection to how their fellow Americans live.
15 This social-science thesis has _nothing to do with race_. Imagine an alternate history in which humans never [migrated across the Bering land bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas) to become Native Americans, and in which the [Atlantic slave trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade) never happened, such that, in this alternate world, European explorers found a continent empty of humans and founded a civilization that was monoracial from the start, unable to oppress and exploit blacks and Native Americans who simply weren't present.
17 In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential [confounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding) by racial issues. (For the same reason, _Coming Apart_ takes as its subject matter and is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_—not that this does anything to endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the anti-confounding rationale for studying "white America" (!) and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.)
19 I mean, okay, there are those two chapters in _The Bell Curve_ about ethnic differences in IQ, and two chapters on affirmative action—I can see why people are pissed about _that_—but there's so much more to the man's work than that! Even 2020's _Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class_ (that subtitle!!) was much more muted than what a racialist ideologue would have written: the race section mostly just covers the Science of SNP frequencies while punting with "More research is needed" about what population differences in SNP frequencies _mean_. There are just two pages on the interpretation of ethnic differences in IQ, and their visibility is much reduced by discreetly tucking them away into endnote 4 of the "class" section.
21 In contrast, this little book (125 pages, plus notes) is more—focused. (The power of consensus frame control is so strong that I almost wrote "more direct", but that would be wrong, because I actually believe my case that most of Murray's thought isn't about the racial stuff that inevitably sucks all the air out of the room.) In the wake of [the events of summer 2020](/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/) and the rise of identity politics on the left, Murray perceives a threat to the American creed that individuals should be treated equally as individuals, rather than as representatives of an ethnic or religious faction. Murray's response to the threat: this book about the "two truths" of the subtitle ... that American Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks have different means and distributions of intelligence and of violent crime (!!).
23 Murray acknowledges the irony: if the _goal_ is colorblind individualism, why write about group differences!? The problem is strategic: if we can't _talk_ about group differences, but group differences actually exist and are actually pretty stable, then well-meaning people who are distressed by group differences in socioeconomic outcomes end up conducting an increasingly paranoid witchhunt for systemic racism, eventually casting aside the American creed. Murray quotes [Daniel Patrick Moynihan](/2020/Nov/nixon-on-forbidden-hypotheses/): "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts."
25 Unfortunately, I fear Murray's project in _Facing Reality_ is _too_ focused—too _unambitious_—for the purposes he asks of it. (To be fair, social science is hard enough that it makes sense to ask unambitious questions if you want to get the right answer—even if that means the right answer can't help much.) The book argues that intelligence and crime differences [_exist_](https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/1409839168281272324) as not-trivially-mutable facts of our world, while remaining agnostic about any particular theory of the _causes_ of the differences. The claim is that different groups _actually do_ commit different amounts of violent crime, and _actually do_ have different distributions of cognitive ability, such that, when the groups end up differently represented in prision or higher education, you can't say that this could only be because cops and teachers are racist towards individuals.
27 It's important to notice that, contrary to Murray's self-presentation of being only concerned with facts and not causality, this _is_ implicitly making causal claims: it's just that it's specifically making claims about the "crime → imprisonment" and "intelligence → success" links in the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), while remaining silent about the equations underlying the "genes → intelligence ← environment" and "genes → intelligence ← environment" v-structures. But this is a technicality. (If someone with the requisite power and influence were trying to found a discipline of Actual Social Science in our world, one of the obvious first steps would be to hire [Judea Pearl](http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/) as a technical reviewer for Murray.) Murray's point is just that even if the trait differences were solely caused by environmental factors like poverty or the cultural legacy of slavery, the differences would still be real and still show up in statistics produced by procedurally fair and non-racist institutions; the strawman of "And the differences are 100% genetic" is expressly not implied. (Not that "And this looks likely to be somewhere between 40–80% genetic" would be more than 40–80% less unpalatable.)
29 The problem is that this causality-blindness—or not-quite-coherently _attempted_ causality-blindness—is profoundly unsatisfying. The [difference between a causal model and a statistical model](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/45/6/1895/2999350) is _about_ how the system would respond to interventions; [this isn't something you can dodge](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) if you care about policy and possibilities, rather than just summarizing static facts about a static world. Compiling the stats and arguing that the stats aren't just lies is an important service, and educational to those who aren't already familiar with the stats, but no sophisticated advocate of structural-racism theories is going to have their worldview substantially altered by this book: it's very easy to concede that the trait differences Murray documents are real (not simply made up by lying teacher and cops), but that they would vanish in a sufficiently anti-racist Society, and Murray is _explicilty_ (and reasonably, given how difficult it is) declaring that question out-of-scope. Overall, my impression of _Facing Reality_ is favorable but restrained: I keep finding myself agreeing with Murray "as far as it goes", but thinking that it just doesn't go as far as Murray seems to suggest.
31 After this overview, let me summarize the content of this pretty-short-for-a-book in the form of a pretty-long-for-a-blog-post. After introducing our topic, Chapter 2 covers the stats on American demographics. At present, the country is about 60% white, 18% Latino, 13% black, and 6% Asian, but the, um, black-and-white framing of American racial discourse makes more sense in this historical context that there were a lot fewer Latinos and Asians before a [1965 immigration reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965): in 1960, the figures were 87% white, 11% black. Big cities have become much more multiracial, whereas smaller cities and towns remain either monoracially white or biracial (the two races being white/black in the South, or white/Latino in the southwest and southern California).
33 Here and through the remaining chapters up until the conclusion, Murray elects to switch to the nomenclature "European"/"African"/"Latin" rather than white/black/Latino (respectively, with "Asian" remaining unaltered), on the grounds that using less familiar terms for these groups will drag along less cultural and political baggage without resorting to outright obfuscation ("populations A, B, C, and D"). It doesn't feel that effective to my ear, and I kind expect it to backfire for a lot of readers, to whom the continental African/European/Asian terms probably sound _more_ racially essentialist than I think Murray wants to come off as!
35 The next four chapters follow a formula: "Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", "Race Differences in Violent Crime", "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", and "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Violent Crime." (Those chapter titles felt awful just to type!! Am I really doing this?) Much of the value of these chapters is in the graphs and tables documenting statistics that many readers will be unfamiliar with. The scatterplots of nationally-representative test scores are interesting. The black–white gap _did_ shrink between '70s when it was about 1.3 standard deviations, until about the 1990s, but has been stubbornly stable since then at about 0.85 standard deviations (a.k.a. [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)). Murray estimates the current white–Latino difference at 0.62 standard deviations, and the current white–Asian difference at 0.3 standard deviations (favoring Asians).
37 Murray briefly addresses two popular (but mutually in tension) classes of objection: that the gaps will vanish with better (more equitable) education policy, and that the tests are biased. The response to the we-can-fix-it objection is basically, "We tried that and it didn't work": a lot of money and effort has been poured into attempts to narrow the racial achievement gap over the past thirty years of its stability, but we just don't know of any interventions that lastingly increase cognitive ability for _anyone_. The response to the tests-are-biased objection is basically, "We checked for that and it doesn't work": psychometricians have all sorts of technical measures to check that their tests are doing what they think, but beyond that, if the tests were biased, you would expect them to underpredict school and workplace performance, and that's not what we see: for example, black people get worse college grades than their SAT and ACT scores would predict, not better.
39 Perhaps you could argue both that the tests are racist and that teachers are _even more_ racist?—but you'd want to be specific about what alternative metric of "merit" you think they're being racist _with respect to_. A vast space of "objective" procedures can come up with a number, without giving anyone a reason to care about that particular number; if you care about group rank orderings, you _could_ come up with a measurement that gets the the group rank ordering you want. (Black people have more melanin than white people, on average! People with more letters in their name take longer to say their name out loud, on average! Cats do better than humans on a test of scratching, on average! "Hispanic" comes before "White" in alphabetical order!) The problem is that it looks like the "cognitive ability" thing that psychometricians try to measure is actually pretty robust abstraction that captures variation _in individuals_ that people care about (like the ability to master a profession); if it were just a tool of racial oppression, it's hard to see why it would work so well _within_ groups.
41 In the chapter on violent crime, Murray presents a table of black/white and Latino/white ratios of arrests for violent crimes in thirteen cities for which data was available. The median black/white ratio was 9.0 (that is, 9 black people per 1 white person) and the median Latino/white ratio was 2.4.
43 To argue that these ratios are driven by real differences in behavior rather than biased police, Murray attempts to "triangulate" the true crime rate with other data. For example, arrests for murder specifically are going to be less biased by selective enforcement or fraud: even evil and corrupt cops who don't consider themselves above, say, planting evidence of drugs, seem less likely to fake a human corpse. So if racial differences in murder charges match differences in violent-crime arrests more generally, that's probabilistic evidence that arrests are tracking a real difference in criminal behavior.
45 Interestingly, Murray argues that this is true even if you don't think police are generally getting the right suspect (!!), as long as the suspect who is arrested is of the same race as the actual perpetrator, which will usually be the case given how many murders are crimes of passion where the victim and perpetrator knew each other (in highly segregated communities), or tied to gang activity (where gangs are almost always monoracial). The scenario most prone to racist police getting the wrong guy—non-gang-related murders where the alleged perp is black and didn't know the victim—only accounted for 4% of all homocides. Meanwhile, the group ratios for murder arrests are more stark than for violent crimes more generally: a median black/white ratio of 18.1, and a median Latino/white ratio of 4.7, which is not the pattern we would expect to see if cops were using their discretionary powers to falsely imprison blacks and Latinos on lesser charges. Another source of data for triangulation is in reports of crimes _to_ the police: if crime _victims_ aren't racist in the same way the police themselves might be, then that would show up in the numbers—and it turns out that even black and Latino _victims_ also report more black and Latino perpretrators, even in neighborhoods where they are a minority.
47 As an argument about patterns of behavior in our own world, I find this quite convincing, but again, Murray's agnosticism about the causes of behavior limits its applicability; I expect the sophisticated advocate of structural-racism theories to be entirely unmoved. Even if the police sometimes getting the wrong man can't change the conclusion about which races do how many murders, a world in which the police sometimes get the wrong man of the same race is _exactly_ the kind of factor that would contribute to structural racism—if the System is going to treat you interchangeably anyway, that changes your incentives to commit crime. (Is this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy plausible? I honestly don't know! I haven't done the math!) We don't know what other equilibria might be possible for a civilization with a discipline of Actual Social Science, even if there's no obvious way to jump out of our own equilibrium with the crude "policy" levers available to actualy-existing governments.
49 At times, Murray's inability in his commentary to consider flaws in the _status quo_ seems like a blindness bordering on complicity. Of the criminal justice system, he writes:
51 > The social scientist's view of who commits crimes is a set of snapshots—the report of a crime, an arrest, the decision to prosecute, the charge on which the suspect is tried, the outcome of the prosecution, and the sentence for a guilty plea or verdict. At each step, the authorities are usually trying to get it right, but "getting it right" means different things. Decisions to prosecute depend on many factors besides the likelihood that the arrested person committed the crime (e.g., whether these is evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt if it goes to trial). The decision about the charges that will be filed is a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation.
53 This is all very "reasonable" by the methods and epistemology of Murray's world, and I'm afraid—not a figure of speech, really afraid—that there's nothing I could say, no words I could possibly type to explain the cruel capriciousness of that world's "reasonableness" to those who haven't personally been on the other side, who have never been abused by a total institution like the "justice" system. Two three-day stints in the psych ward are [what did it to me](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/). Going to school might not be bad enough if you went to a good school.
55 _The authorities are usually trying to get it right._ I mean, yes—_by the Authority's own corrupt standards_.
58 [by the authority's own corrupt standards!! TODO: ...
59 http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/
60 https://archive.is/HUkzY public defender
64 [TODO: summarize chapter on first-order effects of IQ]
66 [TODO: summarize chapter on first-order effects of crime]
68 Murray wraps up with a chapter on "If We Don't Face Reality." The facts of IQ and crime differences don't imply any particular policy, but Murray wants researchers to at least be able to control IQ as an independent variable, and for the targets of our ongoing Cultural Revolution to offer a little more resistance. Moreover, Murray contends, identity politics is an existential threat to the American system: it was one thing when just minorities thought of themselves as collective interest groups, but if the white working class picks up the same playbook, then the ideal of individualism will be truly lost within the tides of ethnic conflict. Murray identifies eliminating government-sponsored affirmative action as politically impossible, "not within our grasp", but that a partial solution would be for those on the center-left and center-right to reaffirm the American creed and the goal of equality before the law.
70 To me, this seems ... pretty naïve? I _also_ feel a lot of affection and loyalty to the previous ideological regime, but what made equality before the law such an effective marketing promise was the unstated premise that it would lead to, you know, _actual_ equality. If that's _empirically not true_, and people _aren't_ actually colorblind—if people notice ethnicity as a cluster in high-dimensional configuration space and tend to care more about people "like us"—then the classic ideal of individualist egalitarianism
72 That bell can't be unrung.
76 ... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_.
80 [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]
82 [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]
84 [amplifying ancestry differences
85 https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/super-gaels/]
89 https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/01/what-you-cant-say-genetic-group-difference-edition/
91 [the nutritional mismatch hypothesis]
93 [Cognitive Creationism, Dodging Darwin, &c.]
95 [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
96 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/12/georgetown-terminates-law-professor-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students
99 "rotation" of the class axis, as people sort by cognitive ability directly rather than race??
101 Paul Christiano abstract story about what kind of agents steer the future
102 https://rationalaltruist.com/2013/02/27/why-will-they-be-happy/
104 https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education
106 https://www.unz.com/isteve/nature-tackling-systemic-racism-requires-the-system-of-science-to-change/
108 https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-not-so-great-reset-rolls-on/
110 I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007
112 The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
113 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
115 "Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good?" (No!)
116 https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf
118 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
120 For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-taboo-in-biology.html
122 From my notebook circa November 2007—
123 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>>)
125 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
127 https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
129 "No causal associations between childhood family income and subsequent psychiatric disorders, substance misuse and violent crime arrests"
130 https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab099/6288123
132 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak
134 https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/sperm-counts-decline-fertility-science-white-nationalism.html
136 https://dynomight.net/are-tests-irrelevant/
138 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
140 It's going to be the future soon; things aren't always going to be like this
142 https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689
143 > For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.
145 > While a limited form of selection in humans is acceptable—for example, preventing a couple who are carriers of a recessive genetic defect or disease from producing an offspring with that condition—the kind of wholesale and directed selective breeding of humans suggested by the word "eugenics" is immoral, and I don't favor it at all.
146 https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/discovery-institute-makes-hay-of-dawkins-tweet-and-a-geneticist-mistakenly-says-that-artificial-selection-wont-work-in-humans/
148 > I hold eugenics to be completely immoral and we should not attempt to implement it.
149 https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1229890352275955713
151 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838/
152 https://biohackinfo.com/news-china-gene-editing-criminal-law-article-336-march-2021/
153 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
155 https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/even-during-a-reckoning-mind-reading
157 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/left-targets-testing-gifted-programs/619315/
159 > I don't want to hear about black thugs raping white women, but I'm going to hear it soon if you don't stop talking about white cops killing black kids
160 Glenn Loury on Tucker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuPdPKHG18k
162 https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his
164 Coleman Hughes: it's possible to push back against Kendism without
165 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE5QcD_12fQ
167 printing IQ in the NYT in 1969!!!
168 https://www.unz.com/isteve/news-that-used-to-be-fit-to-print/
170 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X9Rk4rXSMnKfYLq5r/a-brief-review-of-current-and-near-future-methods-of-genetic
172 http://web.archive.org/web/20201101001637/https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-murder-offender-ratio-for-blacks-nonblacks-ratio-for-males-females/
174 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-capture-the-full-extent-of-the-systemic-bias-in-policing/
176 https://quillette.com/2021/07/29/charles-murrays-facing-reality-a-review/
178 "Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images"
179 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10356
180 https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/ai-has-the-worst-superpower-medical-racism/
181 https://www.wired.com/story/these-algorithms-look-x-rays-detect-your-race/
183 https://www.unz.com/isteve/military-discovers-that-stripping-photos-from-promotion-evaluations-hurts-blacks/
185 "Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification"
186 > mean heritable propensity for violence thus shifted 0.08 SD leftward with each passing generation
187 > the most violent 1 to 2% should form a right-hand “tail” that begins 2.33–2.05
188 SD to the right of the mean propensity for homicide. If we eliminate this right-hand tail and leave only the other 98-99% to survive and reproduce, we have a selection differential of 0.027 to 0.049 SD per generation.
190 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rhg27MqkxJsnZwoYg/the-codex-skeptic-faq
192 https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-the-conventional-wisdom-on-educational
194 https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/tetlock-and-the-taliban
196 Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse
197 https://archive.is/aVTpr
199 https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/observations-on-smarter-african-americans/
201 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354010004_Genetic_Ancestry_and_General_Cognitive_Ability_in_a_Sample_of_American_Youths
203 "Human capital mediates natural selection in contemporary humans"
204 https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/ueaeco/UEA-ECO-21-02_Updated.pdf
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob