Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores _don't_ explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for [_still_](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods) not having put in the hours to get farther into [_Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models)) was that you need to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects—maybe our feeble state of knowledge is _why_ we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions.
-There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from one of Murray's, um, earlier books) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the [topic scope of this blog](/tag/two-type-taxonomy/)—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically _correct_, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least _mentioned_ alternative views ([Serano](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model)? [Veale](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf)?), if only to explain _why_ they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.) Then Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance") has tables of brain-size data, and an explanation of the greater-male-variance hypothesis. Cool!
+There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from, um, one of Murray's earlier books with a coauthor) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the [topic scope of this blog](/tag/two-type-taxonomy/)—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically _correct_, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least _mentioned_ alternative views ([Serano](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model)? [Veale](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf)?), if only to explain _why_ they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.) Then Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance") has tables of brain-size data, and an explanation of the greater-male-variance hypothesis. Cool!
-----
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 siezed 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 like the line of real numbers, except much longer.)
Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood," and 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."
-I [_strongly_ agree with](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
+I [_strongly_ agree with](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
-And yet I have been ... trained. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism to even that which is most sacred. Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—to the process underlying my _current best guess_ as to that which is most sacred. If that which was believed to be most sacred turns out to not be entirely coherent ... then we might have some philosophical work to do, to [_reformulate_ the sacred moral ideal in a way that's actually coherent](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility).
+And yet I have been ... trained. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism to even that which is most sacred. Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—[to the process underlying my _current best guess_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) as to that which is most sacred. If that which was believed to be most sacred turns out to not be entirely coherent ... then we might have some philosophical work to do, to [_reformulate_ the sacred moral ideal in a way that's actually coherent](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility).
"Nothing we learn will threaten _X_ _properly understood_." When you elide the specific assignment _X_ := "human equality", the _form_ of this statement is kind of suspicious, right? Why "properly understood"? It would be weird to say, "Nothing we learn will threaten the homotopy groups of an _n_-sphere _properly understood_."
-["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
+
+
+NYT review: https://archive.is/b4xKB
+
+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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff