I think all students in public schools should be educated to the highest level we can reasonably achieve. And I think we are a lot closer to that already than the “reformers” acknowledge or understand.
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And therefore we don’t need to concern ourselves about schools where students grossly under-achieve. Is that correct? There is nothing we can reasonably do about that?
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t buy your premise. I don’t think they are “grossly underachieving”.
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Because most of the parents of the students are happy?
Employers will.
Regards,
Shodan
That, and they are achieving something pretty close to their maximum potential. Do you know how much is spent on special education, remedial reading help, etc.? Far more than on gifted programs!
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I mean, Negroes, right? Whatcha gonna do?
Except for the lead, right? And the culture and parenting?
Jesus. Your white supremacism isn’t even consistent. It’s just wherever you feel like at the moment.
It’s consistent. You just like to pounce when I don’t spell everything out and expect certain things to go unsaid.
–Once a brain is damaged by lead, there’s no unringing that bell. So from the school’s perspective (or indeed, the rest of society), whether the IQ came about via genetics or lead is irrelevant.
–Family culture and parenting are not under the control of the schools.
So when I say “they are achieving something pretty close to their maximum potential”, I should more precisely say (knowing you or someone else will jump on me–but that can get exhausting, honestly) “the schools are getting pretty close to the maximum test scores they can get out of these kids, assuming they don’t become boarding schools”. During the roughly 1400 hours per year they have kids, I believe they are achieving most of what is realistically achievable with those kids. Further, they are conscientious and always looking at new pedagogical research and seeking to make their teaching practices in line with the latest and best research-based interventions.
Educators (and teachers unions) are getting a bum rap, is what I’m saying.
“Those kids.”
.
Harris comes off poorly, it’s true. Ezra is trying to make peace, and Sam’s having none of it. I follow Sam quite a bit and I’ve never seen him so angry, not even at critics who deserved it a lot more then Klein. Sam’s gotten a lot of blowback like yours already, even from his own fans, and he’s already added an edit to the e-mail exchange you linked to. The gist is he’s still angry, he still thinks he has a right to be angry, but he’s going to drop it. Smart move.
My opinion is that he does have a right to be annoyed, at least, but he would have come off a lot less petulant if he had just aired his case and then grasped at one of the several olive branches Ezra offered.
As for the substance of the debate, I don’t think Sam is being treated in good faith. He is no expert on the subject and is far more more interested in discussing whether Murray’s dismissal as a pseudo-scientist is justified, rather than dive into the actual science. Of course he can’t make that case without engaging with the actual science at least to some degree, but his arguments on those lines have been mostly to point out that the consensus claimed by the Left doesn’t exist. Both Sam and Murray claim that the primary scientific points made in The Bell Curve are uncontroversial among qualified researchers. This is an important point, obviously, as it would counter the claims of pseudo-science and “racialism” made in the Vox article.
Sam has mentioned several times that he has been contacted often by experts in the field who agree more or less with Murray’s basic precepts, though not necessarily with his conclusions. Here a distinction must be made that there is a big difference between disagreeing with his conclusions and dismissing the whole book as agenda-driven pseudo-science.
(I want to make an aside here and say on my own behalf that while I haven’t read The Bell Curve, Murray does seem agenda-driven and the few quotes I’ve seen from the policy side of the book are garbage.)
More concrete evidence has been linked to by Sam and others indicating that both the Vox article and other work by primary author Richard Nisbett has been harshly reviewed in public by at least some colleagues. Perhaps most tellingly, the Vox article itself states the following:
We believe there is a fairly wide consensus among behavioral scientists in favor of our views, but there is undeniably a range of opinions in the scientific community. Some well-informed scientists hold views closer to Murray’s than to ours.
Sam and Murray disagree with the claim about consensus, but even if they didn’t, is it really fair to characterize Murray as a pseudo–scientist given this statement?
My hot take from skimming articles here and there is that the science is so muddy that there really isn’t any defensible consensus that either side can claim. I might fault Sam and Murray equally with Ezra and Nisbett on that count. I think the Vox article tries to make the case that the genetic contribution is zero, which seems preposterous, but the actual genetic contribution may turn out to be so lost in the environmental noise and inter-population variation that we’ll never really know. Which is fine by me.
I’m not saying that everything Murray has ever said or done is “pseudo-science”, but I don’t believe someone who has tried to statistically measure great art, and just so happened to discount everything produced by black people as insignificant (except for Duke Ellington – the single one that gets mentioned), including all genres of music produced by black people:
should be treated as a serious scientist looking for truth. He has a pretty clear white supremacist agenda.
That last update by Sam is really pathetic, IMO. His ego is so overwhelming that he’s unable to even consider the possibility that he may be wrong or misunderstanding the facts, and that Ezra Klein may be sincerely trying to engage him on the facts.
Murray strikes me as kind of an asshat, and I don’t agree with his politics. But James Watson seems even more of a jerk: does that mean he didn’t deserve his Nobel? You have to evaluate scientists on their science, not their politics.
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Agreed, and Murray’s science is shit, as has been pointed out with many supporting links in this thread.
As nachtmusik pointed out, even Vox acknowledged “some well-informed scientists hold views closer to Murray’s than to ours”. Boom.
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So what? That doesn’t mean that all or most or even a significant amount of Murray’s views on the issue of race and intelligence are based on good science. They’re not. Maybe some other scientists did some good science and reached a few conclusions closer to Murray than Nisbett, but that doesn’t excuse or exculpate Murray for his shit science, like dismissing/ignoring the Flynn effect and the Scarr study.
Amusing twitter thread:
Shows a lot of fans of Harris telling him that he’s being a narcissistic ass who can’t take criticism re: Klein.
Again, I think Harris is a smart guy, but his ego has gotten to the point that he’s unable to rationally process and respond to criticism.
Browsed reddit.com/r/SamHarris – the Sam Harris fan subreddit – and was surprised to see that many or maybe even most of the upvoted threads and comments on the topic were critical of Harris’s response to Klein, with the same sort of ego/narcissism focus as my criticism.
It would be easy to come to that conclusion if you read only the correspondence and not the Vox content. In combination, Klein looks disingenuous—and that is what has gotten Sam’s dander up. That, and irritation over understandably not wanting to get reeled into a no-win podcast debate where he has to play the villain.
BTW, Sam lost a lot of fans—including my cousin—with his most recent live podcast “White Power”. Even some of the members of the crowd who lined up to ask questions were audibly angry. I think it was probably good to clear away some of the racist deadwood among his audience, although OTOH it’s unfortunate for people like my cousin to lose that moderating influence and go back to Breitbart and racist YouTube.
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