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/). You've got to feel sorry for Charles Murray. 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) ----- [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 ] 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