- * structural oppression and actual differences can both exist at the same time! They're not contradicting each other!
- * I don't know how to build a better world, but my first step is to go a little meta and talk about why we can't talk, and take seriously the possible harms from talking, rather than just asserting that free speech and civil discourse is Actually Good the way the likes of Cofnas/Winegard/Murray do (being a nobody blogger probably helps; I have an excuse)
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+ ✓ structural oppression and actual differences can both exist at the same time! They're not contradicting each other!
+ - I don't know how to build a better world, but my first step is to go a little meta and talk about why we can't talk, and take seriously the possible harms from talking, rather than just asserting that free speech and civil discourse is Actually Good the way
+ * the likes of Cofnas/Winegard/Murray do (being a nobody blogger probably helps; I have an excuse)
* women and courage
- * A few things are actually _worse_ than the ball-hiders make it seem ("treat ppl as individuals" doesn't work; "IQ isn't morally valuable" doesn't work)
+ ✓ A few things are actually _worse_ than the ball-hiders make it seem ("treat ppl as individuals" doesn't work; "IQ isn't morally valuable" doesn't work)
* Embryo selection looks _really important_; I don't want to give amunition to racists, but I need to talk about that—and the recent Dawkins brouhaha says we can't even talk about that; and the ways I'm worried about eugenics being misused aren't even on the radar
* Murray says polygenic scores are like GDP ... I bet Ben and Michael would have something to say about that analogy!
* "genders have been identified"
* Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 388
* need to talk about individual differences being non-threatening
* need to define "cognitive repetioires" earlier because I mention it later
+* work what I mean by "renormalize" earlier because I use it later
* work in "Can Race Be Erased" result
The language of _has been identified_
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+/2017/Nov/interlude-x/
—and the people who claim not to have an agenda are lying. (The most I can credibly claim for myself is that I try to keep my agenda reasonably _minimalist_—and the reader must judge for herself to what extent I succeed.)
> To say that groups of people differ genetically in ways that bear on cognitive repetoires (as this book does) guarantees accusations that I am misuding science in the service of bigotry and oppression. Let me therefore state explicitly that I reject claims that groups of people, be they sexes or races or classes, can be ranked from superior to inferior. I reject claims that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity.
-quotes Steven Pinker: "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."
+
It gets worse. Intuitively, "The moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group" seems self-evident—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.
This was the linkpost description text I initially drafted, before deciding that the "Straussian coyness" I [occasionally]() [succumb]() to is ultimately unbecoming.
+
A Book Review
-Someone wrote a blog post reviewing a book by some sociologist named Murray. Never heard of him. Anyway, I couldn't get through the whole thing because the reviewer has this _really obnoxious_ writing style that uses way too many italics and exclamation points (as well as occasional weirdly out-of-place cuss words?!), but I did notice that he (?) links to _Less Wrong_ a few times (!), which is something I don't see "in the wild" very often these days, so I thought it couldn't hurt to share the link here in case one of you happens to find it interesting??
+Someone wrote a blog post reviewing a book by some sociologist named Murray. Never heard of him. Anyway, I couldn't get through the whole thing because the reviewer has this _really obnoxious_ writing style that uses way too many italics and exclamation points (as well as occasional weirdly out-of-place cuss words?!), but I did notice that he (?) links to _Less Wrong_ a few (or twenty) times, which is something I don't see "in the wild" very often these days, so I "thought it couldn't hurt" to share the link here in case one of you happens to find it interesting??
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-Book Review—Charles Murray's Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
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New on my secret ("secret") blog: a review of the new Charles Murray book about the science of sex and race differences, including a discussion of some philosophical, psychological, and game-theoretic reasons this stuff is so hard to talk about!
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff