pre-poke at "Facing Reality" review

The book hasn't come out yet (and the publisher never responded to my
email asking for a review copy), but I can get started on the things I
want to say that don't intimately depend on the actual book
performance.

diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
index 9fd50d7..47ad550 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
+++ b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
@@ -4,21 +4,17 @@ Category: commentary
 Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
 Status: draft
 
-> A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities betweeen things which seem different.
->
-> —Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
-
 Well, this is awkward.
 
-I liked [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/).
-
-You've got to feel sorry for Charles Murray.
+I _liked_ [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/). That book did a _little_ bit of political positioning in opposition to the blank slate orthodoxy, but for the _most_ part it was just a fun, clean Science book for Science nerds. Effect sizes! GWAS! Selection on standing variation! Additive genetic variance! No one can get (or stay) angry about these technical minutiæ. "[E]veryone should calm down," Murray wrote, and as your eyes glaze over the two-page table of "Differences in Target Allele Frequencies for Traits Related to Cognitive Repertoires", you can almost start to believe that they should.
 
+This book ... well. This is the Charles Murray book that's _actually_ about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about. You really have to feel sorry for the man.
 
-this book is about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about (Bell Curve had two chapters about race, Coming Apart is specifically about White America, human diversity slow-played the race section)
+(Bell Curve had two chapters about race, Coming Apart is specifically about White America, human diversity slow-played the race section)
 
 -----
 
+... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write.
 
 [What I actually care about: the intelligence explosion; the alignment problem might be solvable by von Neumann clones; a civilization at our tech level with a more functional state religion that wasn't afraid of genetics would be able to produce them faster than we will; this is really bad guys]
 

diff --git a/notes/epigraph_quotes.md b/notes/epigraph_quotes.md
index 98f0399..8d9b341 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/epigraph_quotes.md
+++ b/notes/epigraph_quotes.md
@@ -328,6 +328,9 @@ https://xkcd.com/1942/
 >
 > Robin I. M. Dunbar, Primate Social Systems, Ch. 7, "Evolution of Grouping Patterns"
 
+> A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities between things which seem different.
+>
+> —Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
 
 > STEVEN: Test? What do you mean, test?
 > PEARL: Eugh, well, it wasn't really a "test", per se. Not in the traditional sense. We just wanted to see if you were ready to go on missions.