> 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
+
+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