That's why we're not smart enough to want a discipline of Actual Social Science. The benefits of having a collective understanding of human behavior—a _shared_ map that reflects the territory that we are—could be enormous, but beliefs about our own qualities, and those of socially-salient groups to which we belong (_e.g._, sex, race, and class) are _exactly_ those for which we face the largest incentive to deceive and self-deceive. Counterintuitively, I might not _want_ you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my friendship (or the disutility of my animosity), for the same reason that I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my used car. That makes it a lot harder not just to _get the right answer for the reasons_, but also to _trust_ that your fellow so-called "scholars" are trying to get the right answer, rather than trying to sneak self-aggrandizing lies into the shared map in order to fuck you over. You can't _just_ write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds about "things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other", because almost no one is that oblivious. To write and be understood, you have to do some sort of _positioning_ of how your work fits in to [the war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the shared map.
-Murray positions _Human Diversity_ as a corrective to a "blank slate" orthodoxy that refuses to entertain any possibility of biological influences on psychological group differences. The three parts of the book are pitched not simply as "stuff we know about biologically-mediated group differences" (the oblivious-science-nerd approach that I would prefer), but as a rebuttal to "Gender Is a Social Construct", "Race Is a Social Construct", and "Class Is a Function of Privilege." At the same time, however, Murray is careful to position his work as _nonthreatening_: "there are no monsters in the closet," he writes, "no dread doors that we must fear opening." He likewise "state[s] explicitly that [he] reject[s] claims that groups of people, be they sexes or races or classes, can be ranked from superior to inferior [or] that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity."
+<a id="blank-slate"></a>Murray positions _Human Diversity_ as a corrective to a "blank slate" orthodoxy that refuses to entertain any possibility of biological influences on psychological group differences. The three parts of the book are pitched not simply as "stuff we know about biologically-mediated group differences" (the oblivious-science-nerd approach that I would prefer), but as a rebuttal to "Gender Is a Social Construct", "Race Is a Social Construct", and "Class Is a Function of Privilege." At the same time, however, Murray is careful to position his work as _nonthreatening_: "there are no monsters in the closet," he writes, "no dread doors that we must fear opening." He likewise "state[s] explicitly that [he] reject[s] claims that groups of people, be they sexes or races or classes, can be ranked from superior to inferior [or] that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity."
I think this strategy is sympathetic but [ultimately ineffective](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/). Murray is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while denying the possibility of any [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) of the orthodoxy being false. It's like ... [theistic evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution): satisfactory as long as you _don't think about it too hard_, but among those with a high [need for cognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition), who know what it's like to truly believe (as I once believed), it's not going to convince anyone who hasn't _already_ broken from the orthodoxy.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff