-["Being Steven Pinker is a lot more fun than being Charles Murray"](https://archive.is/bNo2q)—and Pinker knows it. Similarly, being Charles Murray is a lot more fun than being J. Philippe Rushton—and Murray knows it.
+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
+
+
+
+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.)
+
+
+
+
+People who are
+
+
+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_.
+
+
+
+effect size: standardized units may be practically useless (if of 1 yr of education reliably led to $1 of income)
+
+["Being Steven Pinker is a lot more fun than being Charles Murray"](https://archive.is/bNo2q)—and Pinker knows it.
+
+Similarly, being Charles Murray is a lot more fun than being J. Philippe Rushton—and Murray knows it.
Hyde/Fine binary notes: p. 388
New Republic review: https://newrepublic.com/article/156330/charles-murray-never-going-away
-NYT review: https://archive.is/b4xKB
+
Cowen: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/charles-murrays-human-diversity.html
> The real lesson of “twins studies plus anthropology” is that you have to control almost all of a person’s environment to have a major impact, but a major impact indeed can be had. I behave very differently than my Irish potato famine ancestors, and not because I am genetically 1/8 from the Madeira Islands. That said, within the narrower range of environmental variation measured in twins studies…well those studies seem to be fairly accurate.
Footnote 4 to the introduction of Part III recaps the argument. If the black/white IQ gap in the U.S. were caused by racism, you'd predict that blacks would have higher IQs in countries where they're the ruling majority, like in Haiti or most of sub-Saharan Africa, but they don't. You might think racism affects IQ by means of its affect on socioeconomic status (SES), but adjusting for parental SES only diminishes the gap by a third.
+Flynn effect, measurement invariance
+
You might think that the tests are culturally biased, but if that were true, you'd expect the distortion
(And on the hereditarian model, parental SES could be caused by parental cognitive abilities.)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away
-
https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
-
-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 those who _don't_ think everything is Fine Now,
+afraid of seeming too flippant to readers who haven't decoverted yet; my own deconversion event is too far in my past
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies
[claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable)
-> Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points
-Murray quotes Stephen 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."
+https://quillette.com/2020/03/06/ive-been-fired-if-you-value-academic-freedom-that-should-worry-you/
[where I agree with the moral _sentiment_, but that platitude doesn't solve all the problems (notably, that's not how Bayesian reasoning works)]
https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production
Moldbug's denying the moral worth of IQ: https://archive.is/9Ezk3
+
+defending eugenics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29804244
+
+------
+
+A Book Review
+
+_(Content advisory: [politics](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer))_
+
+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??
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff