* 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
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Instead of just getting _the right answer for the right reasons_ (which can conclude _conditional_ answers: if what humans are like depends on _choices_ about what we teach our children, then there will still be a fact of the matter as to what choices lead to what outcomes), everyone and her dog has some fucking _agenda_.
—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.)
+The start of the introductions to the sex and race parts of the book do the obligatory historical context-setting of emphasizing that old-timey patriarchy and chattel slavery were Actually Really Bad.
+Needless to say (it _should_ be needless to say), I agree that old-timey patriarchy and chattel slavery were Actually Really Bad. However,
-You can't _just_ write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds about "things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other"—to write and be understood, you have to do some sort of _positioning_ of how your work fits in to [the war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/).
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-Murray positions his work as a corrective to a "blank slate" orthodoxy that refuses to entertain any possibility of biological influences on group differences. The three parts of the book are pitched not simply as "stuff we know about biologically-mediated group differences" (the oblivious-science-nerd approach I prefer), but as a rebuttal to "Gender Is a Social Construct", "Race Is a Social Construct", and "Class Is a Function of Privilege." At the same time, however, Murray is careful to position his work as _nonthreatening_: "there are no monsters in the closet," he writes, "no dread doors that we must fear opening." The start of the introductions to the sex and race parts of the book do the obligatory historical context-setting of emphasizing that old-timey patriarchy and chattel slavery were Actually Really Bad.
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-Needless to say (it _should_ be needless to say), I agree that old-timey patriarchy and chattel slavery were Actually Really Bad. However, I feel like Murray's overall positioning strategy is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while downplaying the possibility of any [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) of the orthodoxy being false. I think this is sympathetic but [ultimately ineffective](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/). Clueless [presentist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) conservatism of the form, "Old-timey patriarchy and white supremacy were Really Bad, but that's over and everything is Fine Now" is unlikely to satisfy readers who _don't_ think everything is Fine Now, and suspect Murray of standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" rather than aspiring to Actual Social Science.
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-I think we can do better by going meta and analyzing the _functions_ being served by the constraints on our discourse and seeking out clever self-aware strategies for satisfying those functions _without_ [lying about everything](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/). We mustn't fear opening the dread meta-door in front of whether there actually _are_ dread doors that we must fear opening.
+I feel like Murray's overall positioning strategy is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while downplaying the possibility of any [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) of the orthodoxy being false.
-Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood," and 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."
+I think this is sympathetic but [ultimately ineffective](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/). Clueless [presentist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) conservatism of the form, "Old-timey patriarchy and white supremacy were Really Bad, but that's over and everything is Fine Now" is unlikely to satisfy readers who _don't_ think everything is Fine Now, and suspect Murray of standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" rather than aspiring to Actual Social Science.
-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.
+> 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.
-And yet I have been ... trained. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism to even that which is most sacred. 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).
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-"Nothing we learn will threaten _X_ _properly understood_." When you elide the specific assignment _X_ := "human equality", the _form_ of this statement is kind of suspicious, right? Why "properly understood"? It would be weird to say, "Nothing we learn will threaten the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere _properly understood_."
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-This kind of [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) seems like the kind of thing you would only invent if you _were_ subconsciously worried about _X_ being threatened by new discoveries, and wanted to protect your ability to backtrack and re-gerrymander your definition of _X_ to protect your existing beliefs.
+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.
[conditional probability "Emacs shirt" vs. "is female", no principled distinction]
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-People who are
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The first 20% of the _New York Times_'s review of _Human Diversity_](https://archive.is/b4xKB) is dedicated to casting aspersions on _The Bell Curve_.
> 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.
+"it is a matter of ethical principle"
+https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/21/eric-turkheimer/race-iq
+
https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production
Moldbug's denying the moral worth of IQ: https://archive.is/9Ezk3
https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
+ And, again, socio-psychological facts like character assessments are precisely those for which we have the _most_ reason to distrust each other's judgement: if I like Mary, I might say favorable but false things about her even if I would never tell a lie about homotopy groups. In the absence of a objectively calibrated compassion-o-meter, psychological scientists who want to study individual differences in compassion are mostly limited to doing statistics on people's verbal self-reports and other-reports—but if you don't trust what people _say_, it's at least not _obvious_ whether or how much more you should trust statistical analyses of what people say, in accordance with the ancient dictum: ["garbage in, garbage out."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out) Probably the neuroscientists are working on the compassion-o-meter, but they too face the problem of ensuring that their interpretations of their brain scans actually mean what they say they mean.
+
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+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??
+
+------
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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