TODO— 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "egalitarian", "hereditarian", "renormalized", "human _bio_-diversity" ----- 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/twitter-piles-on-richard-dawkins-over-eugenics-tweet/13333 Murray "Yes": https://archive.is/uaFFF 5. stages of HBD 6. I have an excuse; telling the truth is a Schelling point (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point)—and finish ---- 10. Jensen sources of variation 11. colorism ------ * it's actually a _selective_ blank slate (Winegard: https://quillette.com/2019/03/09/progressivism-and-the-west/ ) * women and courage * Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 398 (Okay, I was brainwashed by progressivism pretty hard, but ideologies need to appeal to something in human nature; ) —and the people who claim not to have an agenda are lying. (The most I can credibly claim for myself is that I try to keep my agenda reasonably _minimalist_—and the reader must judge for herself to what extent I succeed.) I think this is sympathetic but [ultimately ineffective](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/). Clueless [presentist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) conservatism of the form, "Old-timey patriarchy and white supremacy were Really Bad, but that's over and everything is Fine Now" is unlikely to satisfy readers who _don't_ think everything is Fine Now, and suspect Murray of standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" rather than aspiring to Actual Social Science. > To say that groups of people differ genetically in ways that bear on cognitive repetoires (as this book does) guarantees accusations that I am misuding science in the service of bigotry and oppression. Let me therefore state explicitly that I reject claims that groups of people, be they sexes or races or classes, can be ranked from superior to inferior. I reject claims that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity. It gets worse. Intuitively, "The moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group" seems self-evident—one cries out at the _monstrous injustice_ of the individual being oppressed on the basis of mere stereotypes of what other people who _look_ like them might statistically be like. I fear my training does not permit me to take the moral principle _literally_ as stated. The problem is _technical_ in nature: something that comes up when you try to understand people on a cognitive-scientific level, the way an AI researcher would understand her creations. (Even while "treat individuals as inviduals" might be a very good _English sentence_ to tell someone if you wanted them to behave ethically and didn't expect them to understand the technical problem I'm explaining.) When you "treat individuals as individuals", you do so on the basis of evidence about that individual's traits. If you see someone wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, you'll assume they probably use Emacs, and probably make and make use of all sorts of other implicit probabilistic predictions about them, in the sense that you [anticipate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) or dis-anticipate different behaviors from them than you would of someone who was _not_ wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, and those anticipations guide your decisions. [conditional probability "Emacs shirt" vs. "is female", no principled distinction] is dedicated to casting aspersions on _The Bell Curve_. effect size: standardized units may be practically useless (if of 1 yr of education reliably led to $1 of income) ["Being Steven Pinker is a lot more fun than being Charles Murray"](https://archive.is/bNo2q)—and Pinker knows it. Similarly, being Charles Murray is a lot more fun than being J. Philippe Rushton—and Murray knows it. http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/ [TODO: farmer/forager?? increased sexual dimorphism] New Republic review: https://newrepublic.com/article/156330/charles-murray-never-going-away Cowen: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/charles-murrays-human-diversity.html > The real lesson of “twins studies plus anthropology” is that you have to control almost all of a person’s environment to have a major impact, but a major impact indeed can be had. I behave very differently than my Irish potato famine ancestors, and not because I am genetically 1/8 from the Madeira Islands. That said, within the narrower range of environmental variation measured in twins studies…well those studies seem to be fairly accurate. UK/US rank order > But you can't use the same techniques to study racial differences, because all these techniques are based on a comparison of relatives — twins, identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings, parents and children. https://www.amren.com/news/2012/10/arthur-jensen-has-died/ https://nationalpolicy.institute/2020/02/14/bravery-signaling/ Eugenics Footnote 4 to the introduction of Part III recaps the argument. If the black/white IQ gap in the U.S. were caused by racism, you'd predict that blacks would have higher IQs in countries where they're the ruling majority, like in Haiti or most of sub-Saharan Africa, but they don't. You might think racism affects IQ by means of its affect on socioeconomic status (SES), but adjusting for parental SES only diminishes the gap by a third. Flynn effect, measurement invariance You might think that the tests are culturally biased, but if that were true, you'd expect the distortion (And on the hereditarian model, parental SES could be caused by parental cognitive abilities.) [vertical pleiotropy: LDL affects heart attack; vs. horizontal] ["tag" SNP] https://www.unz.com/article/a-troublesome-intelligence/ https://thegfactor155.wordpress.com/2018/12/30/did-chanda-chisala-disprove-hereditarianism-not-so-fast-part-one/ https://thegfactor155.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/did-chanda-chisala-disprove-hereditarianism-not-so-fast-part-two/ https://www.unz.com/author/chanda-chisala/ [parental SES also tracks parental genes] Cognitive Enhancement and Network Effects: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11406-020-00189-3 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php afraid of seeming too flippant to readers who haven't decoverted yet; my own deconversion event is too far in my past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points https://quillette.com/2020/03/06/ive-been-fired-if-you-value-academic-freedom-that-should-worry-you/ [where I agree with the moral _sentiment_, but that platitude doesn't solve all the problems (notably, that's not how Bayesian reasoning works)] [my thought: but you need causality to know the effects of interventions! Maybe that's _why_ we don't have any useful outside interventions!] [polygenic scores are useful in the context of society's structure] > Women in combat? It's not an issue of female courage. But from early childhood into adulthood, males are far more attracted than females to physical contests, including ones involving violence, and are more physically aggressive and risk-taking than women. [...] "it is a matter of ethical principle" https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/21/eric-turkheimer/race-iq https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production Moldbug's denying the moral worth of IQ: https://archive.is/9Ezk3 defending eugenics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29804244 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/ And, again, socio-psychological facts like character assessments are precisely those for which we have the _most_ reason to distrust each other's judgement: if I like Mary, I might say favorable but false things about her even if I would never tell a lie about homotopy groups. In the absence of a objectively calibrated compassion-o-meter, psychological scientists who want to study individual differences in compassion are mostly limited to doing statistics on people's verbal self-reports and other-reports—but if you don't trust what people _say_, it's at least not _obvious_ whether or how much more you should trust statistical analyses of what people say, in accordance with the ancient dictum: ["garbage in, garbage out."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out) Probably the neuroscientists are working on the compassion-o-meter, but they too face the problem of ensuring that their interpretations of their brain scans actually mean what they say they mean. Jensen— > the test must measure, in addition to the construct it purports to measure, some other characteristic or factor that is completely uncorrelated with the construct and on which the major group, on the average, exceeds the minor group A typical example is the case in which the major and minor groups differ in their native language. A person’s native language is presumably not correlated with the construct of intelligence. If the test involves the native language of the major group exclusively and the minor group has a different language, the test will most likely be positively biased in favor of the major group. In other words, the test is measuring something (in this case a specific language) in addition to the construct that it purports to measure, which condition favors the major group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity Draw-a-Horse Pueblo > That is, the order of item difficulties should be expected to differ between racial groups. > the items that discriminate most between whites and blacks are the same items that discriminate most between older and younger children within each racial group. > In general, for children and adults alike, it is found that those test items that best discriminate individual differences in general mental ability among whites are the same items that best discriminate differences in general ability among blacks, and they are also the same items that discriminate the most between whites and blacks. > Gordon and Rudert (1979) > The effect of black dialect as compared with standard English on the IQs of black lower-class children was investigated in three studies by Quay (1971, 1972, 1974), who had the Stanford-Binet translated into black ghetto dialect by a linguistics specialist in black dialect. No significant difference (the difference actually amounts to less than 1 IQ point) was found between the nonstandard dialect and standard English forms of the Stanford-Binet when administered by two black Es to one hundred black children in a Head Start program in Philadelphia (Quay, 1971). > For example, in the United States only about 9 percent of physicians and dentists are women, whereas in the Soviet Union the figure is close to 50 percent. Thermometer and statistical discrimination in machine learning Anacholic's critique: https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1245997689113907200 ------ This was the linkpost description text I initially drafted, before deciding that the "Straussian coyness" I [occasionally]() [succumb]() to is ultimately unbecoming. ## A Book Review Someone wrote a blog post reviewing a book by some sociologist named Murray. Never heard of him. Anyway, I couldn't get through the whole thing because the reviewer has this _really obnoxious_ writing style that uses way too many italics and exclamation points (as well as occasional weirdly out-of-place cuss words?!), but I did notice that he (?) links to _Less Wrong_ a few times, which is something I don't see "in the wild" very often these days, so I "thought it couldn't hurt" to share the link here in case one of you happens to find it interesting?? ------ New on my secret ("secret") blog: a review of the new Charles Murray book about the science of sex and race differences, including a discussion of some philosophical, psychological, and game-theoretic reasons this stuff is so hard to talk about!