Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class</em>
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), race, sex differences, Emacs, topology
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), race, sex differences, Emacs, politics, probability, topology
Status: draft
[This is a pretty good book](https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/) about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other! In [my last book review](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), I mentioned that I had been thinking about broadening the topic scope of this blog, and this book review seems like an okay place to start!
Murray's penultimate chapter summarizes the state of a debate between a "Robert Plomin school" and an "Eric Turkheimer school" on the impact and import of polygenic scores, where we tally up all the SNPs someone has that are associated with a trait of interest.
-The starry-eyed view epitomized by Plomin says that polygenic scores are _super great_ and everyone _and her dog_ should be excited about them: they're causal in only one direction (the trait can't cause the score) and they let us assess risks in individuals before they happen. Clinical psychology will enter a new era of "positive genomics", where we understand how to work with the underlying dimensions along which people vary (including positively), rather than focusing on treated "diagnoses" that people allegedly "have".
+The starry-eyed view epitomized by Plomin says that polygenic scores are _super great_ and everyone _and [her](/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/) dog_ should be excited about them: they're causal in only one direction (the trait can't cause the score) and they let us assess risks in individuals before they happen. Clinical psychology will enter a new era of "positive genomics", where we understand how to work with the underlying dimensions along which people vary (including positively), rather than focusing on treated "diagnoses" that people allegedly "have".
The curmudgeonly view epitomized by Turkheimer says that Science is about understanding the _causal structure_ of phenomena, and that polygenic scores don't fucking tell us anything. [Marital status is heritable _in the same way_ that intelligence is heritable](http://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/the-ubiquity-problem-for-group-differences-in-behavior/), not because there are "divorce genes" in any meaningful biological sense, but because of a "universal, nonspecific genetic pull on everything": on average, people with more similar genes will make more similar proteins from those similar genes, and therefore end up with more similar phenotypes that interact with the environment in a more similar way, and _eventually_ (the causality flowing "upwards" through many hierarchical levels of organization) this shows up in the divorce statistics of a particular Society in a particular place and time. But this is completely opaque; the real work of Science is in figuring out what all the particular gene variations actually _do_.
It's important not to overinterpret the IQ-scores-by-race results; there are a bunch of standard caveats that go here that everyone's treatment of the topic needs to include. Again, just because variance in a trait is statistically associated with variance in genes _within_ a population, does _not_ mean that differences in that trait _between_ populations are _caused_ by genes: [remember the illustrations about](#heritability-caveats) sun-deprived plants and internet-deprived red-haired children. Group differences in observed tested IQs are entirely compatible with a world in which those differences are entirely due to the environment imposed by an overtly or structurally racist society. Maybe the tests are culturally biased. Maybe people with higher socioeconomic status get more opportunities to develop their intellect, and racism impedes socio-economic mobility. And so on.
-The problem is, a lot of the blank-slatey environmentally-caused-differences-only hypotheses for group IQ differences become less compelling when you look into the details. "Maybe the tests are biased", for example, isn't an insurmountable defeater to the entire endeavor of IQ testing—it is _itself_ a falsifiable hypothesis, or can become one if you specify what you mean by "bias" in detail. One idea of what it would mean for a test to be _biased_ is if it's partially measuring something other than what it purports to be measuring: if your test measures a _combination_ of "intelligence" and "submission to the hegemonic cultural dictates of the test-maker", then individuals and groups that submit less to your cultural hegemony are going to score worse, and if you _market_ your test as unbiasedly measuring intelligence, then people who believe your marketing copy will be misled into thinking that those who don't submit are dumber than they really are. But if so, and if not all of your individual test questions are _equally_ loaded on intelligence and cultural-hegemony, then the cultural bias should _show up in the statistics_. If some questions are more "fair" and others are relatively more culture-biased, then you would expect the _order of item difficulties_ to differ by culture: the ["item characteristic curve"](/papers/baker-kim-the_item_characteristic_curve.pdf) plotting the probability of getting the biased question "right" as a function of _overall_ test score should differ by culture, with the hegemonic group finding it "easier" and others (answering honestly) finding it "harder". Conversely, if the questions that discriminate most between differently-scoring cultural/ethnic/"racial" groups were the same as the questions that discriminate between (say) younger and older children _within_ each group, that would be the kind of statistical clue you would expect to see if the test was unbiased and the group difference was real. Hypotheses that accept IQ test results as unbiased, but attribute group differences to the environment, also make statistical predictions. Controlling for parental socioeconomic status only cuts the black–white gap by a third.
+The problem is, a lot of the blank-slatey environmentally-caused-differences-only hypotheses for group IQ differences become less compelling when you look into the details. "Maybe the tests are biased", for example, isn't an insurmountable defeater to the entire endeavor of IQ testing—it is _itself_ a falsifiable hypothesis, or can become one if you specify what you mean by "bias" in detail. One idea of what it would mean for a test to be _biased_ is if it's partially measuring something other than what it purports to be measuring: if your test measures a _combination_ of "intelligence" and "submission to the hegemonic cultural dictates of the test-maker", then individuals and groups that submit less to your cultural hegemony are going to score worse, and if you _market_ your test as unbiasedly measuring intelligence, then people who believe your marketing copy will be misled into thinking that those who don't submit are dumber than they really are. But if so, and if not all of your individual test questions are _equally_ loaded on intelligence and cultural-hegemony, then the cultural bias should _show up in the statistics_. If some questions are more "fair" and others are relatively more culture-biased, then you would expect the _order of item difficulties_ to differ by culture: the ["item characteristic curve"](/papers/baker-kim-the_item_characteristic_curve.pdf) plotting the probability of getting the biased question "right" as a function of _overall_ test score should differ by culture, with the hegemonic group finding it "easier" and others finding it "harder". Conversely, if the questions that discriminate most between differently-scoring cultural/ethnic/"racial" groups were the same as the questions that discriminate between (say) younger and older children _within_ each group, that would be the kind of statistical clue you would expect to see if the test was unbiased and the group difference was real. Hypotheses that accept IQ test results as unbiased, but attribute group differences to the environment, also make statistical predictions. Controlling for parental socioeconomic status only cuts the black–white gap by a third.
[TODO: sentence about sources of variation within/between groups based on Jensen]
And so on.
-In mentioning these arguments in passing, I'm _not_ trying to provide a comprehensive lit review on the causality of group IQ differences. (That's [someone else's blog](https://humanvarieties.org/2019/12/22/the-persistence-of-cognitive-inequality-reflections-on-arthur-jensens-not-unreasonable-hypothesis-after-fifty-years/).) I'm not (that) interested in this particular topic. I am ... doing some context-setting for the problem I am interested in, of fixing public discourse. The reason we can't have an intellectually-honest public discussion about human biodiversity is because good people want to respect the anti-oppression Schelling point and are afraid of giving ammunition to racists and sexists in the war over the shared map. "Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, on average" is the kind of sentence that pretty much only racists would feel _good_ about saying out loud, independently of its actual truth value. In a world where most speech is about manipulating shared maps for political advantage rather than _getting the right answer for the right reasons_, it is _rational_ to infer that anyone who entertains such hypotheses is either motivated by racial malice, or is at least complicit with it—and that rational expectation isn't easily cancelled with a _pro forma_ "But civil discourse" or "But the true meaning of Equality is unfalsifiable" disclaimer.
+In mentioning these arguments in passing, I'm _not_ trying to provide a comprehensive lit review on the causality of group IQ differences. (That's [someone else's blog](https://humanvarieties.org/2019/12/22/the-persistence-of-cognitive-inequality-reflections-on-arthur-jensens-not-unreasonable-hypothesis-after-fifty-years/).) I'm not (that) interested in this particular topic. I am ... doing some context-setting for the problem I am interested in, of fixing public discourse. The reason we can't have an intellectually-honest public discussion about human biodiversity is because good people want to respect the anti-oppression Schelling point and are afraid of giving ammunition to racists and sexists in the war over the shared map. "Black people are, on average, genetically less intelligent than white people" is the kind of sentence that pretty much only racists would feel _good_ about saying out loud, independently of its actual truth value. In a world where most speech is about manipulating shared maps for political advantage rather than _getting the right answer for the right reasons_, it is _rational_ to infer that anyone who entertains such hypotheses is either motivated by racial malice, or is at least complicit with it—and that rational expectation isn't easily cancelled with a _pro forma_ "But civil discourse" or "But the true meaning of Equality is unfalsifiable" disclaimer.
+
+[TODO: my opinion is worthless: https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#mu ]
To speak to those who aren't _already_ oblivious science nerds—or are committed to emulating such, as it is scientifically dubious whether anyone is really that oblivious—you need to put _more effort_ into your excuse for why you're interested in these topics. Here's mine, and it's from the heart, though it's up to the reader to judge for herself how credible I am when I say this—
I don't want to be complicit with hatred or oppression. I want to stay loyal to the underlying egalitarian–individualist axiology that makes the blank slate doctrine _sound like a good idea_. But I also want to understand reality, to make sense of things. I want a world that's not lying to me. Having to believe false things—or even just not being able _say_ certain true things when they would otherwise be relevant—extracts a _dire_ cost on our ability to make sense of the world, because you can't just censor a few forbidden hypotheses—[you have to censor everything that _implies_ them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), and everything that implies _them_: the more adept you are at making logical connections, [the more of your mind you need to excise to stay in compliance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
-We can't talk about group differences, for fear that belief in differences will be abused to shore up oppression. But ... structural oppression and actual group differences can _both exist at the same time_. They're not contradicting each other! Like, the fact that men are physically stronger than women (on average, but the effect size is really big, like _d_ ≈ [TODO: size] for [TODO: operationalization]) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! That doesn't mean patriarchy is good! [(You can't derive an _ought_ from an _is_.)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io) This is pretty obvious, really?
+We can't talk about group differences, for fear that anyone arguing that differences exist is just trying to shore up oppression. But ... structural oppression and actual group differences can _both exist at the same time_. They're not contradicting each other! Like, the fact that men are physically stronger than women (on average, but the effect size is enormous, like _d_ ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is _not unrelated_ to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to _credibly threaten_ to physically overpower someone, [gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/#threatpoints-and-bargaining), even if the threat is typically unrealized.) That doesn't mean patriarchy is good; to think so would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy of [attempting to derive an _ought_ from an _is_](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io). No one would say that famine and plague are good just because they, too, are subject to scientific explanation. This is pretty obvious, really? But similarly, genetically-mediated differences in cognitive repertoires between ancestral populations are probably going to be _part_ of the explanation for _why_ we see the particular forms of inequality and oppression that we do, just as a brute fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and went smoother for the invaders than the colonization of Africa had to do with the disease burden going the other way (Native Americans were particularly vulnerable to smallpox, but Europeans were particularly vulnerable to malaria).
+
+Again—obviously—_is_ does not imply _ought_. [TODO: explain that you should imagine yourself in the inferior group]
+
+I don't know how to build a better world, but it seems like there are quite _general_ grounds on which we should expect that it would be helpful to be able to _talk_ about social problems in the language of cause and effect, with the austere objectivity of an engineering discipline. If you want to build a bridge (that will actually stay up), you need to study the ["the careful textbooks \[that\] measure \[...\] the load, the shock, the pressure \[that\] material can bear."](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm) If you want to build a just Society (that will actually stay up), you need a discipline of Actual Social Science that can publish textbooks, and to get _that_, you need the ability to _talk_ about basic facts about human existence and make simple logical inferences between them.
+
+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 things are even _worse_ (with respect to naïve, non-renormalized egalitarian moral sensibilities) than the ball-hiders like Murray can admit!
+
+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.
+
+But can I take this _literally_ as the _exact_ statement of a moral principle? _Technically?_—no! That's actually not how epistemology works! The proposed principle derives its moral force from the case of complete information: if you _know for a fact_ that I have moral property P, then it would be monstrously unjust to treat me differently just because other people who look like me mostly don't have moral property P. But in the real world, we often—usually—don't _have_ complete information about people, [or even about ourselves](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
+
+Bayes's theorem (just [a few inferential steps away from the definition of conditional probability itself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Derivation), barely worthy of being called a "theorem") states that for hypothesis H and evidence E, P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E). This is [the fundamental equation](https://www.readthesequences.com/An-Intuitive-Explanation-Of-Bayess-Theorem) [that governs](https://www.readthesequences.com/A-Technical-Explanation-Of-Technical-Explanation) [all thought](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure). When you think you see a tree, that's really just your brain computing a high value for the probability of your sensory experiences given the hypothesis that there is a tree multiplied by the prior probability that there is a tree, as a fraction of all the possible worlds that could be generating your sensory experiences.
+
+What goes for seeing trees, goes the same for "treating individuals as individuals": the _process_ of getting to know someone as an individual, involves exploiting the statistical relationships between what you observe, and what you're trying to learn about. If you see someone wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, you're going to assume that they _probably_ use Emacs, and asking them about their [dot-emacs file](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Init-File.html) is going to seem like a better casual conversation-starter compared to the base rate of people wearing non-Emacs shirts. Not _with certainty_—maybe they just found the shirt in a thrift store and thought it looked cool—but the shirt _shifts the probabilities_ implied by your decisionmaking.
+
+The problem that Bayesian reasoning poses for naïve egalitarian moral intuitions, is that there's no _philosophically principled_ reason for "probabilistic update about someone's psychology on the evidence that they're wearing an Emacs shirt" to be treated _fundamentally_ differently from "probabilistic update about someone's psychology on the evidence that she's female".
+
+These are of course different questions, but to a Bayesian reasoner (an inhuman mathematical abstraction for _getting the right answer_ and nothing else), they're the same _kind_ of question: the "correct" update to make is an _empirical_ matter that depends on the actual distribution of psychological traits among Emacs-shirt-wearers and among women. (In the possible world where _most_ people wear tee-shirts from the thrift store that looked cool without knowing what they mean, the "Emacs shirt → Emacs user" inference would usually be wrong.) But to a naïve egalitarian, judging someone on their expressed affinity for Emacs is good, but judging someone on their sex is _bad and wrong_.
+
+I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I'll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of _making generalizations_ about _people_ just—doesn't make sense. Not that it _shouldn't_ be practiced (it's not that my heart wasn't in the right place), but that it _can't_ be practiced—that the people who think they're practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work.
+
+Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average (I've seen _d_ ≈ 1.4–1.7 depending on the source), so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) because of [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means).
+
+But this all happens subconsciously—and people _can't turn it off_. In the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context.
+
+The point is, once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look much less compelling. Maybe a Bayesian superintelligence could redesign the human brain to _not_ use Bayesian reasoning when contemporary egalitarians would find that ideologically disagreeable? But a world populated by such people, constitutionally incapable of reacting to statistical regularities that we, in our world, automatically take into account (without necessarily noticing that we do), would likely come off as creepy or uncanny.
+
+[TODO: elaborate on a specific uncanniness]
+
+[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: 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.
+
+[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