Belief in make-believe things aren’t harmful? So If I believe…bananas cures cancer (something’s that’s clearly flat-out WRONG), it cannot cause harm?!? What a crock of shit.
Christ. Racists can both be WRONG and virulent.
Sigh. I can’t help myself. “Someone is *wrong *on the internet!”
https://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/my-editorial-policy
They *did *extensively discuss those things. But they were not what Sam took issue with. Jesus, just listen, for chrissakes!
Then “whiteness” and “white privilege” cannot be real.
Sam Harris is just plain incorrect on race being “primarily a biological concept”. The Pinker quote doesn’t dispute anything I said. I never said “races don’t exist” – I said they were mainly a sociological concept (especially races as commonly discussed – black, white, etc.), not a biological or genetic one.
Sam Harris = willfully-uninformed moron CONFIRMED.
Those are also sociological/historical, not biological phenomena.
If I had a podcast or show, I probably wouldn’t choose to interview advocates of the inherent intellectual inferiority of black people explanation for various achievement and test score gaps (also known as the “blacks are dumber” hypothesis, or the “the slavers were right” hypothesis, etc.). But if I did interview Charles Murray, I’d ask him the following questions:
Why didn’t you submit The Bell Curve for peer review?
Why didn’t you include discussion of studies and research with is directly contrary to this hypothesis?
Do you think it’s coincidence that the worst-performing groups for test scores and various achievement statistics in the US are the two groups that have been treated by far the most abominably in American history (black people and Native Americans), or does that centuries of abominable treatment have something to do with these statistics and gaps?
Are you really willing to accept a conclusion that matches those reached by pseudo-scientific slavery-justifiers of past centuries about inherent intellectual ability, with absolutely zero information about what genes and gene sets are responsible for high and low intelligence, and how prevalent those genes and gene sets are in various population groups? If so, why?
If Sam Harris asked these questions to Charles Murray, I will gladly listen to the podcast at my first opportunity. If he didn’t, then that reflects very poorly on Mr. Harris. I think Harris is brilliant in many ways, but he’s also blind in many ways – probably not coincidentally, a lot of those ways are quite common for very successful straight white males.
Sam is the most impressive polymath of the modern world (Pinker is up there too). You’re a dude on a message board who didn’t even believe me when I told him his view differed with Sam’s. I know who I’m going to take more seriously–sorry, bud.
Then how about this Pinker quote, from his Pulitzer-nominated (and awesome) book The Blank Slate?
For good measure, let’s throw in some Richard Dawkins, from his book The Ancestors’ Tale:
Where did I say I didn’t believe you? Is asking a question disbelief? I just wanted to know. Thanks for answering.
I’m sure Harris would love you to believe that he’s “the most impressive polymath of the modern world”. I’m not so inclined to buy into that, especially if he says something as dumb as race is “primarily a biological concept”. Doesn’t make him stupid, but I think he’s probably not as smart as he thinks he is (a very common flaw in very successful people – especially very successful straight white males).
Pinker’s also a brilliant guy who nonetheless gets things wrong sometimes (and I liked the Blank Slate a lot). And this quote doesn’t really disagree with anything I said. Race is primarily sociological, and not primarily biological. Skin color has some genetic basis, and race has some correlation with skin color. But there are many groups with dark skin who are not closely related, but nonetheless have been lumped together in the same racial groups (and other such inconsistencies based on the whims and convenience of racists). In that sense, and in a way that is wholly consistent with this Pinker quote, race is primarily a sociological and not a biological concept.
Another smart guy and a good book, and a guy who gets things wrong sometimes (notoriously stuff that has to do with women and rape culture). And another quote that doesn’t disagree with the fact that race is primarily based on things other than biology and genetics.
This part of Dawkins’ quote is the most important: “It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them.” (bolding mine)
That’s what I’m saying, and that’s what Harris gets wrong.
So which is it? Is Harris correct, or Dawkins? Those quotes are in direct contradiction with each other.
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Hah.
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Ooooh, that’s a good one! You really made my day, thanks. Got any more?
The thing about Dawkins and Pinker is that they think that they’re so smart that they’ve got everything in every other discipline that’s not their area of expertise worked out. Which is, of course, incredibly fucking stupid.
Sam Harris…well, Sam Harris is just an all-around moron.
This is silly hyperbole. A very smart guy who nonetheless has some big blind spots, worthy of criticism.
Heh. Think I’ll mosey on over to ATMB and suggest we open a forum expressly for OPs that demand participants watch a video, or read a document, without benefit of the Original Poster’s thesis statement.
(Probably be the only forum where 100% of the threads were moved there by a mod.)
Nah. You’ll notice that he earned his Ph.D. before he decided to abandon intellectual coherency in favor of pandering to idiots for Youtube views.
Fair enough, and you’re welcome.
Sure, who wouldn’t love that? But for my money, he walks the walk (although for a polymath, it’s mostly about *how *he talks the talk). Who would you nominate?
You and I have some sharp disagreements, but you are at least a reasonable interlocutor, unlike most everyone else ITT. I sure wish you would listen to the podcast, and then we could pick at some of the points specifically raised in it.
Very fair point. There is, as I understand it, much more genetic variation among sub-Saharan Africans than you’ll find among humans elsewhere in the world. So the easiest target to pick at is the characterization of sub-Saharan Africans as a single race (or, even more absurdly, if South Asians are called “black”–but I don’t see that happening too often). But it’s a lot harder to dispute that light-skinned, blue-eyed people are a race in a genetic sense (an inbred, extended family). Same goes for East Asians.
So there are two places you could go with that information while preserving race as a biological concept. One is to say that there has been insufficient attention paid to the existence of a number of different races within Sub-Saharan Africa, that are wrongly lumped together based on very superficial similarities (I was born in East Africa, for instance, and I can clearly see the difference between the phenotypic features of people there compared to the West African types that are more typically found in the U.S.).
The other is simply to say that there is a central and diverse human gene pool originating from Africa, which is in fact too diverse to be called a single race. But at the same time, there are groups who evolved from small, intrepid bands of explorers which are in fact biologically valid races. And the assertion then would not be “blacks are genetically inferior in IQ”, but “Caucasians and East Asians are races which developed a much less diverse gene pool than the main African originating gene pool, and in these less diverse pools there is a higher proclivity for high IQs.” IOW, sub-Saharan Africans have “normal” or “average” IQs, and Caucasians (especially Ashkenazi Jews) and East Asians have abnormally high IQs as a group. Do you buy that at all?
I don’t think they are. What if Sam had said “eye color is primarily a biological phenomenon”? Is that in conflict with the fact that two people can have different eye colors yet have tons of other genetic characteristics in common, or conversely have the same eye color yet have a fair amount be different otherwise genetically? Sam’s saying race is primarily biological does not mean he’s saying that people of different races are as different as toads and whales (who nonetheless do have much of their genome in common).
Dawkins says specifically that race has taxonomic validity, bottom line.
BTW, it’s a bit of a tangent, but I am familiar with the Dawkins “rape culture” controversy, and while I think he’s somewhat in the wrong, he’s at least a little closer to being in the right than are his most vocal critics on that topic. I doubt for instance he’d disagree with me much about the controversy we are kicking around on another thread regarding a comic book store employee wearing a t-shirt featuring Rosie the Riveter being attacked by a facehugger from the *Alien *movies.
Such threads are different *how, *exactly, from “[movie name]–seen it” threads? Other than it being much easier to click a link and listen to a podcast than it is to go see a movie in the theatre? :dubious:
The fact that you’ve bought into Ben Stiller’s pseudo-intellectual scam reflects just as poorly on you as it does on him.
It looks like there’s already a forum dedicated to discussing the actual content of that and other podcasts. Here, we like to discuss the contents of OPs. If those discussions evolve into discussions of particular podcasts, well, that’s fine. But we really need to start with discussing the content of your OP.
Be really cool if you could provide some.
I wouldn’t bother trying.
It’s just too damn long, and I don’t have opportunities (I don’t drive regularly, I don’t like headphones, etc.) to listen at the moment. If there’s a transcript I could take a look.
But there’s no race of “light-skinned, blue eyed people”. No one (or virtually no one) talks about such a race. Perhaps, hypothetically, someone could come up with a set of superficial characteristics that actually do mostly match biological and genetic ancestry and call it a race. But no one does that. That’s not “race” as it is discussed on this board and in this world. Race in this world is almost always black, white, and a few other categories (depending on how it’s grouped – sometimes a big generic “Asian”, sometimes East and South Asian, occasionally Australasian, Melanesian, and Pacific Islander, or others). And none of these groupings are primarily based on biology or genetics. Not a single one that’s commonly used in any way. Maybe some of those later and lesser used categorizations have a bit more biological/genetic validity than the others, but they’re still mostly based on superficial characterizations and historical happenstance. White and black are even worse – much, much worse.
I don’t buy any of that without actual genetic evidence – the genes for high and low intelligence, and how prevalent they actually are in various groups. I just find it beyond credibility that it just so happens that the two groups in the US that perform the worst statistically are the two groups treated the worst by far through our history.
There’s nothing special about outcomes now. Average African American IQs at various very recent points roughly match average IQ test scores in Ireland from the early/mid-20th century or so. Ireland has since greatly improved. Are we supposed to believe that Irish genetics for intelligence have improved greatly, and current African American genetics for intelligence are the same as past Irish genetics, but not present Irish? Or are these statistics based on far, far more than genes? Considering all the complexities of human history, in which nearly every group was at one point “on top” or “on bottom” of a social hierarchy in various regions at various times, it seems far more likely that these results are due to the myriad of social, political, and even geographical circumstances of that time and place. No racial group is truly isolated – if there really were significant advantages for intellect in one group, wouldn’t these have rapidly spread to others? Did the sub-Saharan “black” Kushites/Nubians conquer and rule Egypt for a century because of superior genetics, or the happenstance of having better military and organizational technology at the time?
It’s just false, for all of the above reasons (and the reasons Dawkins mentioned), to say “primarily biological” for race. They’re based on the whims and convenience of racists. Some very small amount of those justifications (primarily skin color) have some genetic component, but the vast majority do not, especially for the most commonly used racial groupings. “White” and “black” are close to zero in terms of biological validity as categorizations.
He specifically says “very small fraction” in terms of between-race vs within-race, for genetic commonality. That’s directly contradictory to “primarily biological”. Dawkins is saying, quite clearly, that race is primarily not biological, even if there is some “very small fraction” of biological validity.
You don’t have to give the extra-special benefit of the doubt to Harris. He doesn’t need your help. He can be wrong, and he is wrong, in this specific instance.
Great, please link me.
BTW, I note that you apparently have no answer for how it differs from starting a thread about a movie. I also note the absurdity of kaysplaining the board to someone who has been here more than 14 years and 6,000 posts (which doesn’t include my days on the AOL SDMB, or at AFCA, starting in the 1990s). :rolleyes: