[TODO: really need to address "But choice!" or "But not for psychology!" objections]
-Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be unhappy about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on. Nelson _et al._ also found that when the people in the photographs were pictured sitting down, then judgements of height depended much more on sex than when the photo-subjects were standing. This also makes Bayesian sense:
+Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be unhappy about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on. Nelson _et al._ also found that when the people in the photographs were pictured sitting down, then judgements of height depended much more on sex than when the photo-subjects were standing. This also makes Bayesian sense: if it's harder to tell how tall someone is sitting down, you rely more on your prior. In order to reduce injustice to people who are an outlier for their group, one could argue that there's [a moral imperative to seek out interventions](/2017/Nov/interlude-x/) to get more fine-grained information about individuals, so that we don't need to rely on the coarse, vague information embodied in demographic stereotypes. The _moral spirit_ of egalitarian–individualism survives—we would prefer to judge an individual's skills by testing those specific skills in that specific individual—but the _rationale_ is different.
-["more likelihood ratios is a _different_ moral than "don't descriminate"]
+[TODO: the analogue of standing up]
[the other thing the ball-hiders can't get right: actually, IQ is morally valuable]
+
+> I think at the root is the new upper class's conflaction of intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth. Few admit it, of course. But the evolving zeitgeist of the new upper class has led to a misbegotten hierarchy whereby being a surgeon is _better_ in some sense of human worth than being an insurance salesman, being an executive in a high-tech firm is _better_ than being a housewife, and a neighborhood of people with advanced degrees is _better_ than a neighborhood of high-school graduates. To put it so baldly makes it obvious how senseless it is. There shouldn't be any relationship between these things and human worth.
+
+I take strong issue with Murray's specific examples here—I care [not at all](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) for formal school degrees, and as [Harold Lee points out](https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production), the domestic- and community-focused life of a housewife actually has a lot of desirable properties that those stuck in the technology rat race aspire to escape to—
+
+> The conflcation of intellectual ability with human worth helps to explain the new upper class's insistence that inequalities of intellectual ability must be the product of environmental disadvantage. Many people with high IQs really do feel sorry for people with low IQs. If the environment is to blame, then those unfortunates can be helped, and that makes people who want to help them feel good. If genes are to blame, it makes people who want to help them feel bad. People prefer feeling good to feeling bad, so they engage in confirmation bias when it comes to the evidence about the causes of human differences.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff