Gabriel Krell

Blog: Recent Readings

November 14, 2023

I've been laid up with a cold, unable to do much thinking work. Finished my current brace of books:

• The Mismeasure of Man. A good read. This one is rather dated for a pop sci book, but it will remain relevant until arguments for hereditarian/ immutable/ racial/ hierararchical intelligence rankings evolve. Most people (at least I would hope) already reject crude biological determinism, but it sure seems suspicious that pretty much all tests are correlated. The core of Gould's book is (a) pointing out that PCA axes cannot be assumed to be "real" in the same way that correlation cannot be assumed to be causation (b) reminding us that rotation (varimax or otherwise) of PCA axes might better describe weakly-correlated "multiple intelligences" (c) pointing out that the same arguments against arbitrary rotation also apply to PCA. It was surprising to learn that some of the techniques I learned in data mining class were originally developed to defend conservative social positions of the time.

  I've read some interesting neuroscience things recently about specific physical phenomena in the brain, e.g. Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience. I'm open to the possibility that biologists and neuroscientists may one day discover a physical mechanism that resembles the hoary concept of innate "intelligence", permitting us to finally identify a correlation axis with a biological basis (if any even exist) in the test data. But it seems unlikely that such a discovery will permit the testing of any individual's nature/nurture balance, at least in the absence of new leaps in understanding of DNA. We can barely fold individual proteins, let alone simulate how genetic material results in a hand or brain. Without being able to discriminate in this way, even such a discovery would still not justify the theories of conservatives who seek to stabilize social inequality on the basis of innate biological differences.

• Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Feel-good reading but not very complex, since a lot of the material is speeches. Two things I found noteworthy:

  • Feinberg was writing/speaking at a time before our conception of sex and gender had crystallized into two separate concepts. For instance, there's a conference of "heterosexual cross-dressers" and their wives. Some of the attendees seem to be what we would now identify as closeted lesbian trans women. Some are ordinary straight men who like to cross-dress. Others are bi-gender, or maybe, lacking a specific word, crudely bucketed into genderqueer or nonbinary. I think Feinberg, and the culture at the time, identified gender both by how you acted and what you thought about yourself: you could have men who cross-dressed but were still men, and ze specifically recognizes some gay subcultures (e.g. leather) for queer inclusion even though they're not gender identities or sexual orientations as we'd see them today. I can't tell from the outside - so empirically speaking the answer is probably "no" - but it occurs to me that the drawing of these various boundaries could impede broader queer solidarity. I do at least think that the new level of detail with which we're accustomed to talking about queerness has reduced our ability to leave some things unspecified. But I probably need to read more Feinberg. This book (at least the speeches) is largely aimed at lay queer audiences of previous generations, and so it is both a little confusing and a little insubstantial to me.
  • Feinberg argues against "biological determinism" by non-trans people who accuse trans women of being obnoxious:

    It's one thing for transwomen to discuss issues of socialization as an internal discussion in transsexual space. But it's a prejudiced and dangerous formulation for non-transsexuals to make. It's a fast and slippery slide from the rigidity of biological determinism to an equally narrow position of social determinism.

    And it too closely parallels transphobic attacks that charge: "Once a man, always a man; once a woman, always a woman." This line of reasoning flies in the face of the fact that consciousness is determined by being. When a man or a woman comes out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, they become part of those communities. No one says "once a heterosexual, always a heterosexual." The consciousness of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people changes and develops while living through the oppression, and working with others to fight back. That is true for transwomen, as well.

    Thought it was touching. Similar salvation is available to obnoxious cishets, who might also become less obnoxious through struggle.

• Moonwalking With Einstein: I will confess I had low hopes for this at first, but I actually might implement some of the techniques. Memory palace requires zero mental effort whatsoever to directly memorize objects with (last week's grocery list is indelibly burnt into my mind), but you do unfortunately have to rote memorize some associations in order to place abstract concepts (principally numbers) in a memory palace. It was funny reading the occasional pop-culture references to "the smartest man alive", IQ, etc. at the same time as a strong rebuttal of those ideas.