Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas [men are better at visuospatial skills](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/alpha-gamma-phi/). The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that general intelligence ["masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"](/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf): people's overall skill in using tools from the metaphorical mental toolbox leads to underestimates of differences in toolkits (that is, nonmetaphorically, the effect sizes of sex differences in specific mental abilities), which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is _super gratifying_ to me personally, because [I independently had a very similar idea a few months back](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)—it's _super validating_ as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track!
-The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".
+<a id="ancestries"></a>The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".
Ask the computer to assume that an individual's ancestry came from _K_ fictive ancestral populations where _K_ := 2, and it'll infer that sub-Saharan Africans are descended entirely from one, East Asians and some native Americans are descended entirely from the other, and everyone else is an admixture. But if you set _K_ := 3, populations from Europe and the near East (which were construed as admixtures in the _K_ := 2 model) split off as a new inferred population cluster. And so on.
<a id="ace-model"></a>The third part of the book is about genetic influences on class structure! Untangling the true causes of human variation is a really hard technical philosophy problem, but behavioral geneticists have at least gotten started with their simple _ACE_ model. It works like this: first, assume (that is, "pretend") that the genetic variation for a trait is _additive_ (if you have the appropriate SNP, you get more of the trait), rather than exhibiting _epistasis_ (where the effects of different loci interfere with each other) or Mendelian _dominance_ (where the presence of just one copy of an allele (of two) determines the phenotype, and it doesn't matter whether you heterozygously have a different allele as your second version of that gene). Then we pretend that we can partition the variance in phenotypes as the sum of the "additive" genetic variance _A_, plus the environmental variance "common" within a family _C_, plus "everything else" (including measurement "error" and the not-shared-within-families "environment") _E_. Briefly (albeit at the risk of being _cliché_): nature, nurture, and _noise_.
-Then we can estimate the sizes of the _A_, _C_, and _E_ components by studying fraternal and identical twins. (If you hear people talking about "twin studies", this is what they mean—_not_ case studies of identical twins raised apart, which _are_ really cool but don't happen very often.) Both kinds of twins have the same family environment _C_ at the same time (parents, socioeconomic status, schools, _&c._), but identical twins are twice as genetically related to each other as fraternal twins, so the extent to which the identical twins are more similar is going to pretty much be because of their genes. "Pretty much" in the sense that while there are ways in which the assumptions of the model aren't quite true (assortative mating makes fraternal twins more similar in the ways their parents were _already_ similar before mating, identical twins might get treated more similarly by "the environment" on account of their appearance), Murray assures us that the experts assure us that the _quantitative_ effect of these deviations are probably pretty small!
+<a id="twin-studies"></a>Then we can estimate the sizes of the _A_, _C_, and _E_ components by studying fraternal and identical twins. (If you hear people talking about "twin studies", this is what they mean—_not_ case studies of identical twins raised apart, which _are_ really cool but don't happen very often.) Both kinds of twins have the same family environment _C_ at the same time (parents, socioeconomic status, schools, _&c._), but identical twins are twice as genetically related to each other as fraternal twins, so the extent to which the identical twins are more similar is going to pretty much be because of their genes. "Pretty much" in the sense that while there are ways in which the assumptions of the model aren't quite true (assortative mating makes fraternal twins more similar in the ways their parents were _already_ similar before mating, identical twins might get treated more similarly by "the environment" on account of their appearance), Murray assures us that the experts assure us that the _quantitative_ effect of these deviations are probably pretty small!
Anyway, it turns out that the effect of the shared environment _C_ for most outcomes is smaller than most people intuitively expect—actually close to zero for personality and adult intelligence specifically! Sometimes sloppy popularizers summarize this as "parenting doesn't matter" in full generality, but it depends on the trait or outcome you're measuring: for example, the shared environment component gets up to 25% for years-of-schooling ("educational attainment") and 36% for "basic interpersonal interactions." _Culture_ obviously exists, but for underlying psychological traits, the part of the environment that matters is mostly not shared by siblings in the same family—not the part of the environment we know how to control. Thus, a lot of economic and class stratification actually ends up being along genetic lines: the nepotism of family wealth can buy opportunities and second chances, but it doesn't actually live your life for you.
If the blank slate doctrine isn't _scientifically_ compelling—it's not something you would invent while trying to build shared maps that reflect the territory—then its appeal must have something to do with some function it plays in _conflicts_ over the shared map, where no one trusts each other to be doing Actual Social Science rather than lying to fuck everyone else over.
-<a id="schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts"></a>And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely _shines_—it's the [Schelling point](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point) for preventing group conflicts! (A [_Schelling point_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) is a choice that's salient as [a focus for mutual expectations](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/): what I think that you think that I think ... _&c._ we'll choose.) If you admit that there could differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitudes, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by [establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) as some "inevitable" natural order.
+<a id="schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts"></a>And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely _shines_—it's the [Schelling point](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point) for preventing group conflicts! (A [_Schelling point_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) is a choice that's salient as [a focus for mutual expectations](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/): what I think that you think that I think ... _&c._ we'll choose.) If you admit that there could be differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitudes, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by [establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) as some "inevitable" natural order.
If you're afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to _make the question un-askable_. Can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist!_ Denying the existence of sex is harder—which doesn't stop people from occasionally trying. "I realize I am writing in an LGBT era when some argue that 63 distinct genders have been identified," Murray notes at the beginning of Appendix 2. But this oblique acerbity fails to pass the [Ideological Turing Test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html). The language of _has been identified_ suggests an attempt at scientific taxonomy—a project, which I share with Murray, of fitting categories to describe a preexisting objective reality. But I don't think the people making 63-item typeahead select "Gender" fields for websites are thinking in such terms to begin with. The specific number 63 [is ridiculous and can't exist](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/); it might as well be, and often is, a fill-in-the-blank free text field. Despite being insanely evil (where I mean the adjective literally rather than as a generic intensifier—evil in a way that is of or related to insanity), I must acknowledge this is at least good game theory. If you don't trust taxonomists to be acting in good faith—if you think we're trying to bulldoze the territory to fit a preconceived map—then [destroying the language](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction) that would be used to be build oppressive maps is a smart move.
Notice how the "not allowing sex and race differences in psychological traits to appear on shared maps is the Schelling point for resistance to sex- and race-based oppression" actually gives us an _explanation_ for _why_ one might reasonably have a sense that there are dread doors that we must not open. Undermining the "everyone is Actually Equal" Schelling point could [catalyze a preference cascade](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8q8p6n/culture_war_roundup_for_june_11/e0mxwe9/)—a [slide down the slippery slope to the the next Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes), which might be a lot worse than the _status quo_ on the "amount of rape and genocide" metric, even if it does slightly better on "estimating heritability coefficients." The orthodoxy isn't just being dumb for no reason. In analogy, Galileo and Darwin weren't _trying_ to undermine Christianity—they had much more interesting things to think about—but religious authorities were _right_ to fear heliocentrism and evolution: if the prevailing coordination equilibrium depends on lies, then telling the truth _is_ a threat and it _is_ disloyal. And if the prevailing coordination equilibrium is basically _good_, then you can see why purported truth-tellers striking at the heart of the faith might be believed to be evil.
-Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgments of the injustice of historical patriarchy ("When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start [...] women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total legal subservience to men") and racial oppression ("slavery experienced by Africans in the New World went far beyond legal constraints [...] The freedom granted by emancipation in America was only marginally better in practice and the situation improved only slowly through the first half of the twentieth century"). It feels ... defensive? (To his credit, Murray is generally pretty forthcoming about how the need to write "defensively" shaped the book, as in a sidebar in the introduction that says that he's prefer to say a lot more about evopsych, but he chose to just focus on empirical findings in order to avoid the charge of telling [just-so stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story).)
+Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgments of the injustice of historical patriarchy ("When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start [...] women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total legal subservience to men") and racial oppression ("slavery experienced by Africans in the New World went far beyond legal constraints [...] The freedom granted by emancipation in America was only marginally better in practice and the situation improved only slowly through the first half of the twentieth century"). It feels ... defensive? (To his credit, Murray is generally pretty forthcoming about how the need to write "defensively" shaped the book, as in a sidebar in the introduction that says that he'd prefer to say a lot more about evopsych, but he chose to just focus on empirical findings in order to avoid the charge of telling [just-so stories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story).)
But this kind of defensive half-measure satisfies no one. From the oblivious-science-nerd perspective—the view that agrees with Murray that "everyone should calm down"—you shouldn't _need_ to genuflect to the memory of some historical injustice before you're allowed to talk about Science. But from the perspective that cares about Justice and not just Truth, an _insincere_ gesture or a strategic concession is all the more dangerous insofar as it could function as camouflage for a nefarious hidden agenda. If your work is explicitly aimed at _destroying the anti-oppression Schelling-point belief_, a few hand-wringing historical interludes and bromides about human equality having no testable implications (!!) aren't going to clear you of the suspicion that you're _doing it on purpose_—trying to destroy the anti-oppression Schelling point in order to oppress, and not because anything that can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how Society is becoming increasingly stratified by cognitive abilities, as school credentials become the ticket to the new upper class.
-This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](http://web.archive.org/web/20200620184942/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
+<a id="the-reason-everyone-and-her-dog-is-still-mad"></a>This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](http://web.archive.org/web/20200620184942/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to "play up" group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn't be [relevant](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling). As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cognitive abilities decline with _age_, and yet we don't see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed by the white majority as an "us"—our mothers and fathers—rather than an outgroup. _Individual_ differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because "smart people" as a group aren't construed as a natural political coalition—although Murray's work on cognitive class stratification would seem to suggest this intuition is mistaken.
And no one can do it! [("Well for us, if even we, even for a moment, can get free our heart, and have our lips unchained—for that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!")](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43585/the-buried-life) Individual scientists can get results in their respective narrow disciplines; Charles Murray can just _barely_ summarize the science to a semi-popular audience without coming off as _too_ overtly evil to modern egalitarian moral sensibilities. (At least, the smarter egalitarians? Or, maybe I'm just old.) But at least a couple aspects of reality are even _worse_ (with respect to naïve, non-renormalized egalitarian moral sensibilities) than the ball-hiders like Murray can admit, having already blown their entire [Overton budget](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) explaining the relevant empirical findings.
-Murray approvingly quotes Steven Pinker (a fellow ball-hider, though [Pinker is better at it](https://archive.is/bNo2q)): "Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."
+<a id="individuals-should-not-be-judged-by-the-average"></a>Murray approvingly quotes Steven Pinker (a fellow ball-hider, though [Pinker is better at it](https://archive.is/bNo2q)): "Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."
A fine sentiment. I _emphatically_ agree with the _underlying moral intuition_ that makes "Individuals should not be judged by group membership" _sound like_ a correct moral principle—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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff