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), intelligence, race, sex differences, Emacs, politics, probability, topology
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), intelligence, race, sex differences, Emacs, politics, probability, topology, COVID-19
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!
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.
-Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood." I [_strongly_ agree with](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
+Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood." I _strongly_ agree with the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
And yet I have been ... [trained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/teaxCFgtmCQ3E9fy8/the-martial-art-of-rationality). Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism [to even that which is most sacred](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points). Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—[to the _process_ underlying my _current best guess_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) as to that which is most sacred. If that which was believed to be most sacred turns out to not be entirely coherent ... then we might have some philosophical work to do, to [_reformulate_ the sacred moral ideal in a way that's actually coherent](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility).
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.
-And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely _shines_—it's the [Schelling point](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-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 magnitude, 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.
+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 magnitude, 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. But the taboo mostly only applies to _psychological_ trait differences, because those are more [politically sensitive](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/)—and easier to motivatedly _see what you want to see_: whereas things like height or skin tone can be directly seen and uncontroversially measured with well-understood physical instruments (like a meterstick or digital photo pixel values), psychological assessments are _much_ more complicated and therefore hard to detach from the eye of the beholder. (If I describe Mary as "warm, compassionate, and agreeable", the words mean _something_ in the sense that they change what experiences you anticipate—if you believed my report, you would be _surprised_ if Mary were to kick your dog and make fun of your nose job—but the things that they mean are a high-level statistical signal in behavior for which we [don't have a simple measurement device](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) like a meterstick to appeal to if you and I don't trust each other's character assessments of Mary.)
I take strong issue with Murray's specific examples here—as an [incredibly bitter](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) autodidact, I care not at all for formal school degrees, and as my fellow nobody pseudonymous blogger [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 many of those stuck in the technology rat race aspire to escape into. But after quibbling with the specific illustrations, I think I'm just going to bite the bullet here?
-_Yes_, intellectual ability _is_ a component of human worth, and that's putting it baldly, but I think the _alternative_ is obviously senseless. The fact that I have the ability and motivation to (for example, among many other things I do) write this cool science-philosophy blog about my delusional paraphilia where I do things like summarize and critique the new Charles Murray book, is a big part of _what makes my life valuable_—both to me, and to the people who interact with me. If I were to catch COVID-19 next month and lose 40 IQ points due to oxygen-deprivation-related brain damage and not be able to write long sentences like this anymore, that would be an _extremely terrible thing_.
+_Yes_, intellectual ability _is_ a component of human worth! Maybe that's putting it baldly, but I think the _alternative_ is obviously senseless. The fact that I have the ability and motivation to (for example, among many other things I do) write this cool science–philosophy blog about my delusional paraphilia where I do things like summarize and critique the new Charles Murray book, is a big part of _what makes my life valuable_—both to me, and to the people who interact with me. If I were to catch COVID-19 next month and lose 40 IQ points due to oxygen-deprivation-induced brain damage and not be able to write blog posts like this one anymore, that would be _extremely terrible_ for me—it would make my life less-worth-living. And my friends who love me, love me not as an irreplaceably-unique-but-otherwise-featureless atom of person-ness, but _because_ my specific array of cognitive repetoires makes me a specific person who provides a specific kind of company. There can't be such a thing as _literally_ unconditional love, because to love _someone in particular_, implicitly imposes a condition: you're only committed to love those configurations of matter that constitute an implementation of your beloved, rather than someone or something else.
+Murray continues—
-I mean, maybe it depends on what you mean by "worth"?
+> The conflation 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.
+I agree with Murray that this kind of psychology explains a lot of the resistance to hereditarian explanations. But as long as we're accusing people of motivated reasoning, I think Murray's solution is engaging in a similar kind of denial, but just putting it in a different place. The idea that people are unequal in ways that matter is [legitimately too horrifying to contemplate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok), so liberals [deny the inequality](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/), and conservatives deny [that it matters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter).
-> The conflation 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.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
+
+Each of us in her own way.
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