-> 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.
+Recently, Richard Dawkins [spurred a lot of criticism on social media for pointing out that](https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/twitter-piles-on-richard-dawkins-over-eugenics-tweet/13333) selective breeding would work on humans (that is, succeed at increasing the value of the traits selected for in subsequent generations), for the same reasons it works on domesticated nonhuman animals—while stressing, of course, that he deplores the idea: it's just that our moral commitments can't constrain the facts. Intellectuals with the reading-comprehension skill, [including Murray](https://archive.is/uaFFF), leapt to defend Dawkins and [concur on both points](https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/16/dawkins-makes-a-tweet/)—that eugenics would work, and that it would obviously be terribly immoral. And yet no one seems to bother explaining or arguing _why_ it would be immoral. Yes, obviously _murdering and sterilizing_ people is bad. But if the human race is to continue and people are going to have children _anyway_, those children are going to be born with _some_ distribution of genotypes. There are probably going to be human decisions that do _not_ involve _murdering and sterilizing people_ that would affect that distribution—[perhaps involving](http://intelligence.org/files/EmbryoSelection.pdf) [selection of _in vitro_ fertilized embryos](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection). If the distribution of genotypes were to change in a way that made the next generation grow up happier, and healthier, and smarter, [that would be good](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism) for those children, and it wouldn't hurt anyone else! Life is not a zero-sum game! This is pretty obvious, really? But if no one except nobody pseudonymous bloggers can even say it, how are we to start the work?
+
+The author of the _Xenosystems_ blog mischievously posits [five stages of knowledge of human biodiversity](http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/) (in analogy to the famous, albeit [reportedly lacking in empirical support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model), five-stage Kübler-Ross model of grief), culminating in Stage 4: Depression ("Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?") and Stage 5: Acceptance ("Blank slate liberalism really has been a mountain of dishonest garbage, hasn't it? Guess it's time for it to die ...").
+
+I think I got stuck halfway between Stage 4 and 5? It can _simultaneously_ be the case that reality is evil, _and_ that blank slate liberalism _contains_ a mountain of dishonest garbage. That doesn't mean the whole thing is garbage. You _can't_ brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something _good_ in them. I would still be with the program, except that the current coordination equilibrium is [really not working out for me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). So it is with respect for the good works enabled by the anti-oppression Schelling point belief, that I set my sights on reorganizing at the [other Schelling point of _just tell the goddamned truth_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point)—not in spite of the consequences, but because of the consequences of what good people can do when we're fully informed. Each of us in her own way.