Tags: review (book), race, sex differences
Status: draft
-[This is a pretty good book](https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/) about things we know about some ways in which people are taxonically different from each other! Honestly, I feel like I already knew most of this stuff?—sex differences in particular are kind of _my bag_—but many of the details were new to me, and it's nice to have it all bundled together in a paper book with lots of citations that I can chase down later when I'm skeptical or want more details about a specific thing! The main text is littered with pleonastic constructions like "The first author was Jane Thisand-Such" (when discussing the results of a multi-author paper) or "Details are given in the note<sup>[n]</sup>", which feel clunky to read, but are _so much better_ than the all-too-common alternative of authors _not_ "showing their work".
+[This is a pretty good book](https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/) about things we know about some ways in which people are taxonically different from each other! In my last book review, I mentioned that I had been thinking about broadening the topic scope of this blog, and this book review seems like an okay place to start!
+
+Honestly, I feel like I already knew most of this stuff?—sex differences in particular are kind of _my bag_—but many of the details were new to me, and it's nice to have it all bundled together in a paper book with lots of citations that I can chase down later when I'm skeptical or want more details about a specific thing! The main text is littered with pleonastic constructions like "The first author was Jane Thisand-Such" (when discussing the results of a multi-author paper) or "Details are given in the note<sup>[n]</sup>", which feel clunky to read, but are _so much better_ than the all-too-common alternative of authors _not_ "showing their work".
In the first part of this blog post, I'm going to summarize what I learned from (or was reminded of by) _Human Diversity_, but it would be kind of unhealthy for you to rely too much on tertiary blog-post summaries of secondary semi-grown-up-book literature summaries, so if these topics happen to strike your scientific curiosity, maybe you should skip this post and [go buy the source material](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y82KNS1/)—or maybe even a grown-up textbook!
[p. 212-4: A + C + E model and comparing identical and fraternal twins (different from twins raised apart)]
[ACE model assumes no assortative mating, which leads to an underestimate of A: because it makes fraternal twins resemble each other for non-environmental reasons]
+[equal environments assumption could be violated]
+
+[shared environment is zero for personality]
+
+[standard examples:red haired children, plants with sunshine]
+
+[parental SES also tracks parental genes]
+
+[not determinism for individuals, but shapes class structure]
+
+[useful outside interventions are hard]
+
+[last section looks ahead]
+[geneticists used to think that they would find small number of "genes for" something, but it turns out that lots of SNPs (omnigenetic) affect lots of things (pleiotropy)]
+[vertical pleiotropy: LDL affects heart attack; vs. horizontal]
+
+["tag" SNP: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#limits-to-iterated-selection-the-paradox-of-polygenicity ]
+
+[Plomin school vs. Turkheimer school debate on the usefulness of polygenic scores]
+
+[Plomin says, causal in one direction (trait can't cause score), predict from brith, predict individuals. Can assess risk before it happens, clinical psychology will move towards dimensions rather than diagnoses, "positive genomics"—looking at the right tail in contrast to clinical psychology's focus on disorders]
+
+[Eric Turkheimer: polygenic scores don't tell you anything about causality, and science is about causes: heritability without mechanism. Divorce is heritable _in the same way_ that IQ is. http://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/the-ubiquity-problem-for-group-differences-in-behavior/ a "universal, nonspecific genetic pull on everything"]
+
+[Murray says social science is about explaining variance, not causality]
+
+There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from one of Murray's earlier books) explains some basic statistic concepts. I'm _really excited_ about Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") and Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance")!
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-... and that's the review that I
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+... and that's the review that I
+
+
+> Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood.
+
+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."
+
+[where I agree with the moral _sentiment_, but that platitude doesn't solve all the problems (notably, that's not how Bayesian reasoning works)]
+
+[my thought: but you need causality to know the effects of interventions! Maybe that's _why_ we don't have any useful outside interventions!]
+
+[polygenic scores are useful in the context of society's structure]
+
+> Women in combat? It's not an issue of female courage. But from early childhood into adulthood, males are far more attracted than females to physical contests, including ones involving violence, and are more physically aggressive and risk-taking than women.
+
+[...]
+
+> 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.
+>
+> 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.
+
+
+https://thefutureprimaeval.tumblr.com/post/149802628603/seizing-the-means-of-home-production
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
+
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/
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