From 3a391c5b2dc8e8b1fd28f285b0b52e70516b56be Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2020 09:09:42 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] drafting Human Diversity review (Sunday) --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 20 +++++++++++++++---- notes/human-diversity-notes.md | 15 +++++++++++++- 2 files changed, 30 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index 4c6b489..929c47c 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -70,15 +70,27 @@ There are also some appendicies at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced ----- -... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A science review of a science book, for science nerds: the kind of thing that would have no reason to draw your attention if you're not _genuinely interested_ in Mahanalobis _D_ effect sizes or adaptive introgression or Falconer's formula, for their own sake, or (better) for the sake of [compressing the length of the message needed to encode your observations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_message_length). +... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A science review of a science book, for science nerds: the kind of thing that would have no reason to draw your attention if you're not _genuinely interested_ in Mahanalobis _D_ effect sizes or adaptive introgression or Falconer's formulas, for their own sake, or (better) for the sake of [compressing the length of the message needed to encode your observations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_message_length). 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 kth 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 kth group is trivial for _k_ < _n_, and isomorphic to ℤ 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 fearing that your ideological enemies have siezed control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head, or sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil. -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.) +Okay, maybe that 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.) -In any case, 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 for oblivious science nerds 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/). +In any case, as soon as we start to ask questions _about humans_—and far more so _identifiable groups_ of humans—we end up entering the domain of _politics_. + +We really _shouldn't_. Everyone _should_ perceive a common interest in true beliefs—maps that reflect the territory, [simple theories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor) that [predict our observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences)—because beliefs that make accurate predictions are _useful_ for making good decisions. That's what "beliefs" are _for_, evolutionarily speaking: my analogues in humanity's environment of evolutionary adaptedness were better off believing that (say) there were good hunting grounds to the north _if and only if_ there were _actually_ good hunting grounds to the north. + +(Okay, this story is actually somewhat complicated by the fact that [evolution didn't "figure out" how to build brains](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gTNB9CQd5hnbkMxAG/protein-reinforcement-and-dna-consequentialism) that [keep track of probability and utility separately](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/decision-theory/): my analogues in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness might also have been better off assuming that a rustling in the bush was a tiger, even if it usually wasn't a tiger, because failing to detect actual tigers was so much more costly than erroneously "detecting" an imaginary tiger. But let this pass.) + + +https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/ + +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting + + +You can't _just_ write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds 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 biologically-mediated group differences" (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," he writes, "no dread doors that we must fear opening." 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. diff --git a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md index b44cc94..dfb0f86 100644 --- a/notes/human-diversity-notes.md +++ b/notes/human-diversity-notes.md @@ -9,7 +9,20 @@ OUTLINE of hazardous part— * 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 + +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) -- 2.17.1