Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America</em>
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
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, genetics
Status: draft
Well, this is awkward.
[TODO: I have paperwork from being in psych prison—yes, I know, they call it a "hospital"—that says I self-presented due to thoughts of sucide. That isn't true.]
+[TODO: https://archive.is/HUkzY public defender
+
+The racist magazine _American Renaissance_ once published [an article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY) complaining about the behavior of his black clients.
+
+The lawyer
+
+> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
+
+I feel a lot of sympathy for the defendant
+
+]
+
Notice how casually Murray mentions the decision of what charges are to be filed as "a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation"! As a description of the system as it actually exists, this is perfectly accurate, but it seems important to notice that the entire concept of plea bargaining is a perversion of justice. One would have hoped for a system that proportionately punishes people for the specific crimes that they _actually did_, in order to disincentivize crime. Instead, we have the Orwellian nightmare of a system that says, "We think you're guilty of something, but it'll be easier for you if you confess to being guilty of something less bad, [and swear under oath that no one threatened you to confess](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) (!!)."
In calling the current system an Orwellian nightmare, I'm _not_ saying I personally know how to do better. (If abolishing the police would just result in anarchy and mob justice, that would just be a different kind of nightmare.) I'm trying to highlight how the statistics output by the actually-existing "justice" and "education" systems need to be understood as data about what's happening _within_ the current power structure managed by these systems, and shouldn't be naïvely seen as solely reflecting an independently existing reality of "education" and "crime." If there were no schools, people would still learn things (people still _do_ learn things outside of school); if there were no law enforcement, people would still take advantage of each other (people still _do_ take advantage of each other, outside the reaches of the law).
I don't know.
-----
-
... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_. Let me explain.
When scholars like Murray write about "intelligence", they're talking about a summary of the differences _between_ humans: we can measure how well different humans perform at various verbal or spatial or mathematical thinking-tasks, and it turns out that, on average, people who are good at one thinking-task also tend to be good at others. Graph all the test scores on an appropriately high-dimensional plot, and [the longest axis of the hyperellipsoid](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid) represents "general intelligence"—the dimension of human variation that we recognize as "smart" _vs._ "dumb."
> The American Medical Association has just released "Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts," a strange document that calls for doctors to insert progressive politics into even plain statements of fact.
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1454468272011743239
https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/ama-aamc-equity-guide.pdf
+
+https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-18/uc-slams-door-on-sat-and-all-standardized-admissions-tests
+
+https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/11/overstepping-auntie-relationship-parenting-advice.html
+
+> AMY WAX: I'm not sure that Murray and Taylor are that far apart in what they percieve to be the outcomes from the American creed. So why is Murray condemning him?
+https://youtu.be/h1vQFMxPk54?t=4138
+
+small town police department very blatantly makes shit up in order to collect fines; on the one hand, a clue about police stats reliability; on the other hand, imagine how much worse this could get with AI
+https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html
+
+Prof under investigation after making comments about race and IQ in class
+https://archive.ph/d5Hks
+
+https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/inconvenient-truths/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
+
+https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/10292/predicting-polygenic-selection-for-iq/
+
+https://www.unz.com/isteve/justice-sotomayor-intelligent-well-informed-reasonable-minded-people-must-be-banned-from-capital-case-juries/
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