Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class</em>
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: review (book), race, sex differences, Emacs, topology
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), race, sex differences, Emacs, 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](TODO: linky "... and 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": _all other things being equal_, 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_.
+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_.
Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores _don't_ explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for [_still_](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods) not having put in the hours to get much farther into [_Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)) was that you _need_ to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects: variance in rain may be statistically "explained by" variance in mud puddles, but you can't make it rain by turning the hose on. Maybe our feeble state of knowledge is _why_ we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions.
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 acknowledgements 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 leagl 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? Coerced? It probably _is_ coerced. (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.")
+Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgements 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? Coerced? It probably _is_ coerced. (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.")
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 camoflage 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, not because anything that can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
-And sufficient suspicion makes communication nearly impossible. (If you _know_ someone is lying, their words mean nothing, [not even as the opposite of the truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence).) As far as many of Murray's detractors are concerned, it almost doesn't matter what the text of _Human Diversity_ says, how meticulously researched of a psychology/neuroscience/genetics lit review it is. From their perspective, Murray is "hiding the ball": they're not mad about _this_ book; they're mad about specifically chapters 13 and 14 of a book Murray coauthored twenty-five years ago. (I don't think I'm claiming to be a mind-reader here; the first 20% of [the _New York Times_'s review of _Human Diversity_](https://archive.is/b4xKB) is pretty explicit and representative.)
+And sufficient suspicion makes communication nearly impossible. (If you _know_ someone is lying, their words mean nothing, [not even as the opposite of the truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence).) As far as many of Murray's detractors are concerned, it almost doesn't matter what the text of _Human Diversity_ says, how meticulously researched of a psychology/neuroscience/genetics lit review it is. From their perspective, Murray is "hiding the ball": they're not mad about _this_ book; they're mad about specifically chapters 13 and 14 of a book Murray coauthored twenty-five years ago. (I don't think I'm claiming to be a mind-reader here; the first 20% of [_The New York Times_'s review of _Human Diversity_](https://archive.is/b4xKB) is pretty explicit and representative.)
In 1994's _The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life_, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein argued that a lot of variation in life outcomes is explained by variation in intelligence. Some people think that folk concepts of "intelligence" or being "smart" are ill-defined and therefore not a proper object of scientific study. But that hasn't stopped some psychologists from trying to construct tests purporting to measure an "intelligence quotient" (or _IQ_ for short). It turns out that if you give people a bunch of different mental tests, the results all positively correlate with each other: people who are good at one mental task, like listening to a list of numbers and repeating them backwards ("reverse digit span"), are also good at others, like knowing what words mean ("vocabulary"). There's a lot of fancy linear algebra involved, but basically, you can visualize people's test results as a hyperellipsoid in some high-dimensional space where the dimensions are the different tests. (I rely on this ["configuration space"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) visual metaphor _so much_ for _so many_ things that when I started [my secret ("secret") gender blog](/), it felt right to put it under a dot-space [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain).) The longest axis of the hyperellipsoid corresponds to the "_g_ factor" of "general" intelligence—the choice of axis that cuts through the most variance in mental abilities.
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 free inquiry" 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 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.
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! The fact that men are physically stronger than women 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 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?
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