-OUTLINE of hazardous part—
- * I would prefer to write a science book review for science nerds
- * But we don't have a discipline of Acutal Social Science
- * The _reason_ we don't have a discipline of Actual Social Science is because people are afraid that, e.g., talking about race and IQ will be used to justify oppression: can't oppress people on the basis of race if you mindfuck everyone into believing that race _doesn't exist_; structural oppression and actual differences can both exist at the same time! They're not contradicting each other!
- * Murray tries to spin himself as nonthreating, but it's not convincing
- * People who are mad at Murray about this book aren't really bad about the SNP scatterplots; they're still mad about Ch. 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_, and they think Murray is "hiding the ball"
- * 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)
- * 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
+TODO—
+ 1. need to clearly define before casually using later: "egalitarian", "hereditarian", "renormalized", "human _bio_-diversity"
+
+-----
+ 4. * Embryo selection looks _really important_—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
+
+https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/twitter-piles-on-richard-dawkins-over-eugenics-tweet/13333
+Murray "Yes": https://archive.is/uaFFF
+
+ 5. stages of HBD
+
+
+ 6. I have an excuse; telling the truth is a Schelling point (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point)—and finish
+
+----
+
+ 10. Jensen sources of variation
+
+ 11. colorism
+
+------
+
+
+* it's actually a _selective_ blank slate (Winegard: https://quillette.com/2019/03/09/progressivism-and-the-west/ )
+ * women and courage
+* Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 398
+
+
+(Okay, I was brainwashed by progressivism pretty hard, but ideologies need to appeal to something in human nature; )
-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.)
+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.
+
+> 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.
+
+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.
-People who are
+I fear my training does not permit me to take the moral principle _literally_ as stated. The problem is _technical_ in nature: something that comes up when you try to understand people on a cognitive-scientific level, the way an AI researcher would understand her creations. (Even while "treat individuals as inviduals" might be a very good _English sentence_ to tell someone if you wanted them to behave ethically and didn't expect them to understand the technical problem I'm explaining.)
+When you "treat individuals as individuals", you do so on the basis of evidence about that individual's traits. If you see someone wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, you'll assume they probably use Emacs, and probably make and make use of all sorts of other implicit probabilistic predictions about them, in the sense that you [anticipate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) or dis-anticipate different behaviors from them than you would of someone who was _not_ wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, and those anticipations guide your decisions.
-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_.
+[conditional probability "Emacs shirt" vs. "is female", no principled distinction]
+is dedicated to casting aspersions on _The Bell Curve_.
effect size: standardized units may be practically useless (if of 1 yr of education reliably led to $1 of income)
Similarly, being Charles Murray is a lot more fun than being J. Philippe Rushton—and Murray knows it.
-Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 388
+
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/
[parental SES also tracks parental genes]
-Murray says polygenic scores are like GDP ... I bet Ben and Michael would have something to say about that analogy!
+
Cognitive Enhancement and Network Effects: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11406-020-00189-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology
https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
[claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable)
[...]
-> I think at the root is the new upper class's conflaction of intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth. Few admit it, of course. BUt the evolving zeitgeist of the new upper class has led to a misbegotten hierarchy whereby being a surgeon is _better_ in some sense of human worth than being an insurance salesman, being an executive in a high-tech firm is _better_ than being a housewife, and a neighborhood of people with advanced degrees is _better_ than a neighborhood of high-school graduates. To put it so baldly makes it obvious how senseless it is. There shouldn't be any relationship between these things and human worth. And yet, among too many in the new upper class, there is.
-
-As [Harold Lee points out](https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production),
-> 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
defending eugenics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29804244
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting
+
+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.
+
+
+Jensen—
+> the test must measure, in addition to the construct it purports to measure,
+some other characteristic or factor that is completely uncorrelated with the construct and on which the major group, on the average, exceeds the minor group A typical example is the case in which the major and minor groups differ in their native language. A person’s native language is presumably not correlated with the construct of intelligence. If the test involves the native language of the major group exclusively and the minor group has a different language, the test will most likely be positively biased in favor of the major group. In other words, the test is measuring something (in this case a specific language) in addition to the construct that it purports to measure, which condition favors the major group
+
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity
+
+Draw-a-Horse Pueblo
+
+> That is, the order of item difficulties should be expected to differ between racial groups.
+
+> the items that discriminate most between whites and blacks are the same items that discriminate most between older and younger children within each racial group.
+
+> In general, for children and adults alike, it is found that those test items that best discriminate individual differences in general mental ability among whites are the same items that best discriminate differences in general ability among blacks, and they are also the same items that discriminate the most between whites and blacks.
+
+> Gordon and Rudert (1979)
+
+> The effect of black dialect as compared with standard English on the IQs of black lower-class children was investigated in three studies by Quay (1971, 1972, 1974), who had the Stanford-Binet translated into black ghetto dialect by a linguistics specialist in black dialect. No significant difference (the difference actually amounts to less than 1 IQ point) was found between the nonstandard dialect and standard English forms of the Stanford-Binet when administered by two black Es to one hundred black children in a Head Start program in Philadelphia (Quay, 1971).
+
+> For example, in the United States only about 9 percent of physicians and dentists are women, whereas in the Soviet Union the figure is close to 50 percent.
+
+
+Thermometer and statistical discrimination in machine learning
+Anacholic's critique: https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1245997689113907200
+
+
------
-A Book Review
+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?? (April 2020, ~11,200 words)
+
+------
-Someone wrote a blog post reviewing a book by some sociologist named Charles 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, 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??
+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