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 > A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities betweeen things which seem different.
   8 >
   9 > —Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
  10
  11 Well, this is awkward.
  12
  13 I liked [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/).
  14
  15 You've got to feel sorry for Charles Murray.
  16
  17
  18 this book is about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about (Bell Curve had two chapters about race, Coming Apart is specifically about White America, human diversity slow-played the race section)
  19
  20 -----
  21
  22
  23 [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]
  24
  25 [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]
  26
  27 [amplifying ancestry differences
  28 https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/super-gaels/]
  29
  30 group diff studies
  31 https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/01/what-you-cant-say-genetic-group-difference-edition/
  32
  33 [the nutritional mismatch hypothesis]
  34
  35 [Cognitive Creationism, Dodging Darwin, &c.]
  36
  37 [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
  38 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/12/georgetown-terminates-law-professor-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students
  39 ]
  40
  41
  42 Paul Christiano abstract story about what kind of agents steer the future
  43 https://rationalaltruist.com/2013/02/27/why-will-they-be-happy/
  44
  45 https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education
  46
  47 https://www.unz.com/isteve/nature-tackling-systemic-racism-requires-the-system-of-science-to-change/
  48
  49 https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-not-so-great-reset-rolls-on/
  50
  51 I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007
  52
  53 The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
  54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
  55
  56 "Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good?" (No!)
  57 https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf
  58
  59 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
  60
  61 For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-taboo-in-biology.html
  62
  63 From my notebook circa November 2007—
  64 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>>)
  65
  66 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
  67
  68 https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
  69
  70 "No causal associations between childhood family income and subsequent psychiatric disorders, substance misuse and violent crime arrests"
  71 https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab099/6288123
  72
  73 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak
  74
  75 https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/sperm-counts-decline-fertility-science-white-nationalism.html
  76
  77 https://dynomight.net/are-tests-irrelevant/
  78
  79 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
  80
  81 It's going to be the future soon; things aren't always going to be like this