* 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
-
-
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,
+
+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.
+> 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."
-People who are
+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.
+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.
+
+[conditional probability "Emacs shirt" vs. "is female", no principled distinction]
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_.
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/
+
------
A Book Review
-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??
+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??
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff