Interesting podcast conversation between Sam Harris and Charles Murray (of "Bell Curve" fame)

[iiandyiiii]

@QuickSilver

Wait…what?

I’d like to hear more about this little gem.

SlakerInc, care to expound?

Here’s one of his posts (from another thread):

@SlackerInc

I’m German, French, Irish, Welsh, English, and Swedish (plus 1/8 Native American). I have pale skin, blue eyes, and pride in my Northern European heritage.

Here’s one from this thread (snipped all but the relevant portion):

@SlackerInc

Yes, and I’ve repeatedly acknowledged that. It is my view that they should be seen as the default group of humans, where most of the variety in the genome lies, and groups like East Asians and Northern Europeans should be seen as the much less diverse, more homogenous subgroups whose individual characteristics include higher IQ. It’s not hard to imagine that a group intrepid enough to push that far away from home would be self-selected for intelligence, nor that they would face greater environmental pressures once they were far into the hinterlands.

Another from this thread (also snipped):

@SlackerInc

If we are required to use only lay terminology, then you may be right that we are stuck. But something you may not have been aware of when you wrote this post is that the only reason I’m interested in digging up this discomfiting ground is that I’m beyond sick and tired of seeing hardworking, conscientious educators slammed as “failing” their students because the kids’ test scores lag behind national averages. And if I’m right about pale-skinned, light-eyed Northern European people being something like a legitimate race (or whatever you want to call it: “population”, whatever), and one with a leg up* in terms of IQ, then they are going to skew that national average significantly, by dint of their far outnumbering African Americans.

[snip]

*Something else I think is important is that I do believe the aptitude tests used in schools are tilted toward rewarding the kind of intelligence that is strongest in that Northern European population. I absolutely believe in the validity of Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” paradigm (or something very much like it). He posited the following varieties of human intelligence: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. If aptitude tests included musical-rhythmic and bodily-kinesthetic sections, I’m sure black kids would come much closer to achieving the same scores as white kids, or maybe even higher depending on how the tests were weighted. And I believe that would be far more fair, and completely legitimate, even if the usual FOX News suspects would roll their eyes all the way back into their heads.