Human Diversity pre-dayjob Tuesday review drafting: positioning

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@@ -74,12 +74,19 @@ There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced
 
 But that's not why you're reading this. That's not why Murray wrote the book. That's not even why _I'm_ writing this. We should hope—emphasis on the _should_—for a discipline of Actual Social Science, whose practitioners strive to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with the same passionately dispassionate objectivity they might bring to the study of beetles, or algebraic topology—or that an alien superintelligence might bring to the study of humans.
 
 
 But that's not why you're reading this. That's not why Murray wrote the book. That's not even why _I'm_ writing this. We should hope—emphasis on the _should_—for a discipline of Actual Social Science, whose practitioners strive to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with the same passionately dispassionate objectivity they might bring to the study of beetles, or algebraic topology—or that an alien superintelligence might bring to the study of humans.
 

-We do not have a discipline of Actual Social Science. Possibly because we're not smart enough to do it, but perhaps more so because we're not smart enough to _want_ to do it. No one has an incentive to lie about the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere. (The <em>k</em><sup>th</sup> group is trivial for _k_ < _n_, and isomorphic to the integers thereafter. _You're welcome._) If you're asking questions about homotopy groups _at all_, you almost certainly care about getting _the right answer for the right reasons_. At most, you might be biased towards believing your own conjectures in the optimistic hope of achieving eternal algebraic-topology fame and glory, like Ruth Lawrence, but nothing about algebraic topology is going to be _morally threatening_ in a way that will leave you sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil, or fearing that your ideological enemies have taken control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head.
+We do not have a discipline of Actual Social Science. Possibly because we're not smart enough to do it, but perhaps more so because we're not smart enough to _want_ to do it. No one has an incentive to lie about the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere. (The <em>k</em><sup>th</sup> group is trivial for _k_ < _n_, and isomorphic to the integers thereafter. _You're welcome._) If you're asking questions about homotopy groups _at all_, you almost certainly care about getting _the right answer for the right reasons_. At most, you might be biased towards believing your own conjectures in the optimistic hope of achieving eternal algebraic-topology fame and glory, like Ruth Lawrence, but nothing about algebraic topology is going to be _morally threatening_ in a way that will leave you sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil, or fearing that your ideological enemies have siezed control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head.

 
 

-Okay, maybe this was a bad example; topology in general really is kind of a mindfuck. (Remind me to tell you about the long line, which is kind of like the line of real numbers, except much longer.) Anyway, as soon as we start to ask questions _about humans_—and far more so _identifiable groups_ of humans—we enter the domain of _politics_. 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.) You can't _just_ write a book 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_.
+Okay, maybe this was a bad example; topology in general really is kind of a mindfuck. (Remind me to tell you about the long line, which is like the line of real numbers, except much longer.)

 
 

+Anyway, as soon as we start to ask questions _about humans_—and far more so _identifiable groups_ of humans—we enter the domain of _politics_. 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.) You can't _just_ write a friendly science book 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/).

 
 

+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 biological influences on sex, race, and class difference" (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, no dread doors that we must fear opening." The introductions of 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.

 
 

+I'm sympathetic, but I feel like Murray is kind of trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy without analyzing the _functions_ served by the orthodoxy, that taboos exist for _reasons_. We mustn't fear opening the dread meta-door in front of whether there actually _are_ dread doors that we must fear opening.
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+[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.
 
 
 > Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood.