Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America Date: 2021-06-30 05:00 Category: commentary Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics Status: draft Well, this is awkward. 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. 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. In previous works such as 1994's _The Bell Curve_ (with Richard J. Hernstein) and 2012's _Coming Apart_, Murray argues that American Society 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 community and undermining of the American way of life, as the richest and most educated increasingly live in their own bubbles and [...] None of that has _anything to do with race_. [alternate universe no natives no slaves, you could write the same book] [Bell Curve had two chapters about race (oh, and a couple more about affirmative action), Coming Apart is specifically about White America, human diversity slow-played the race section] [push bad memes onto their lessers] ----- ... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. [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] [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] [amplifying ancestry differences https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/super-gaels/] group diff studies https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/01/what-you-cant-say-genetic-group-difference-edition/ [the nutritional mismatch hypothesis] [Cognitive Creationism, Dodging Darwin, &c.] [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 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/12/georgetown-terminates-law-professor-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students ] "rotation" of the class axis, as people sort by cognitive ability directly rather than race?? Paul Christiano abstract story about what kind of agents steer the future https://rationalaltruist.com/2013/02/27/why-will-they-be-happy/ https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education https://www.unz.com/isteve/nature-tackling-systemic-racism-requires-the-system-of-science-to-change/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-not-so-great-reset-rolls-on/ I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007 The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI "Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good?" (No!) https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf 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 For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-taboo-in-biology.html From my notebook circa November 2007— 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 <> I'm special or the Difference is trivial. <> (But I've _always_ been <>) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights "No causal associations between childhood family income and subsequent psychiatric disorders, substance misuse and violent crime arrests" https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab099/6288123 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/sperm-counts-decline-fertility-science-white-nationalism.html https://dynomight.net/are-tests-irrelevant/ https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white It's going to be the future soon; things aren't always going to be like this https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689 > 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. > 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. 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/ > I hold eugenics to be completely immoral and we should not attempt to implement it. https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1229890352275955713 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838/ https://biohackinfo.com/news-china-gene-editing-criminal-law-article-336-march-2021/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/even-during-a-reckoning-mind-reading