I started on the Vox content. I didn’t see any disingenuousness at all. I don’t see it on Harris’s side either, just incredible narcissism that renders him unable to rationally process and respond to this criticism. In his “addendum” to the email post, he even blames his fans who have turned on him. No, it’s not that Klein was polite, it’s that the criticism against Murray and Harris has been largely reasonable and based on solid science, and Harris was unable to process that any of the criticism might possibly be reasonable.
Harris seems constitutionally unable to admit he might possibly be wrong in how he sees things, at least in this instance. That’s very sad for such a bright guy.
If your career is talking about a wide variety of ideas, and you have that many racist fans, you’re doing something wrong. Good ideas = very few racist fans, and if your business is ideas, and you have lots of racist fans, then a lot of your ideas are bad.
I think that Harris in this case looks a lot to me like the few scientists that fell for guys like Uri Geller.
Sure that they also impressed the fans of Geller, but as James Randi showed, it was really sad to see seemingly smart guys to fall for flim flam. I remember that Randi approached those smart guys with evidence of how his trickery replicated the “powers” from Geller and others; only to have those smart guys to declare that Randi had powers and he just denied them. :rolleyes:
It is clear to me that Sam, like the few scientists that fell for the paranormal, just continue to ignore important details.
And of course some well informed scientists use their smarts and still fall for the paranormal or for climate change denial or scientific racism, etc. In this very same message board I ran into two posters that pushed those last two tripes, and sometimes in the same thread! Really, once conspiracy theories or denialism take hold, their proponents bet that you can’t eat just one!
In all seriousness, I hope all this criticism from his own fans might teach Harris some humility, so he’ll learn that he’s actually capable of being wrong on things like this (particularly his belief that Klein’s motives are impure and “gaslighting”, and that Murray’s science is solid and widely accepted).
So he should go by his fans’ take now? What about all the ones who are mad about the White Power pod, or the ones who complain about his Trump bashing? You, sir, are not consistent.
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And why wouldn’t you assume his fans are gunning for this debate out of a pugnacious desire to have Sam take down Klein and promote white intellectual superiority? You’re all over the map.
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No, he should go by good science and reasonable discourse. That, based on r/SamHarris and many/most of his twitter responses, his fans seem to be in favor of this in this specific instance, is good, and hopefully will help motivate him to do so.
The subreddit shows that a good portion of his fans, if not most, think that Klein was pretty reasonable, and Harris’s response was not. They might be wrong on other things, but I’m hopeful that this might help him learn that he really is capable of being wrong about this kind of thing.
Neither of these posts appear to address the actual words in my post.
What if that portion of Murray’s science that Sam endorses in the podcast is solid and widely accepted? Or what if Murray’s science is at least a subject of dispute within the community of cognitive researchers? In that case the Vox article would be agenda-driven, Ezra would be guilty of being disingenuous, and Sam would have every right to be pissed by the implications towards him that are made in the article.
After reading the response to the Vox article by Richard Haier, and after seeing a couple of academic surveys of the opinions of researchers in the field, I’m persuaded that the science discussed in Sam’s podcast with Murray is in fact mainstream.
I still don’t think that justifies Sam’s treatment of Ezra, but then again maybe I shouldn’t presume to judge Sam on how he should feel after he’s been unjustifiably dismissed as a sap and a bigot for daring to speak with a person who has been declared off-limits by the left.
There’s a straw man argument that Klein (and liberals in general) don’t accept that genetics is involved in intelligence. If that’s the “mainstream” you’re referring to, then I don’t dispute it, and neither does Klein.
What Klein (and I) dispute is that we can reasonably conclude with any certainty that genetics are involved in average test score differences between racial groups. That’s categorically not mainstream in the least. There are numerous reasons for that – that racial groups are not a valid biological grouping; that there’s no way that test scores could tell us anything about gene differences between groups when those groups are treated so overwhelmingly different by society; that there is specific experimental evidence that greater amounts of African ancestry does not correlate to lower test scores; that we know of factual and widely accepted group test-score differentials that are categorically not based on genetics (the Flynn effect); and more.
What you are doing amounts to a type of Gish Gallup. And if the characteristic in question were susceptibility to high blood pressure and what type of drugs work better in whites versus in blacks, you would presumably not throw this flurry of objections at anyone who mentioned these racial characteristics. It’s because of an ideological desire that this particular connection not be real or at least not be discussed openly (an understandable desire to be sure), that you get so panicky and insistent on discrediting anyone who raises this point.
ETA: I predict that within 10 to 20 years, the genetics of intelligence will be so clear that even if people try to avoid directly discussing the racial implications (and I would endorse that avoidance as long as we stop with the “failing schools” accusations) there will be no real disputing it. But if we are both still on this board, you will fall back to a position of saying that you didn’t want to jump to this conclusion without it being 100% proven, that the people who were touting this idea had malicious motives, and that it is still unseemly for people to gloat about it. And you will mostly be right! But I will still point to my motives as being purer than most.
Claims about blood pressure weren’t/aren’t used to justify some of the worst atrocities in human history. If someone is going to say the Nazis and Confederates were right about black people, they better have damn good evidence. They don’t, and I’m going to continue to point that out for as long as their/your evidence is crap.
Pointing out how shitty/nonexistent the evidence is (and how much the good data contradicts the conclusion) that black people are inherently intellectually inferior due to genetics is not a Gish Gallup.
I welcome scientific progress. I welcome learning all about genetics, no matter what it tells us. I find it unlikely that we’re going to find out that the groups in America that are at the bottom of so many statistical indicators, black people and Native American people, who are about as far from each other as two ethnic groups can be, are at the bottom because the slavers and colonizers were right, and not because they’re also the two groups who have been treated by far the most abominably of any in American history. Especially when the actual studies that have been done so far, like the Scarr study, contradict the slavers’ conclusions, and the supporting evidence for their conclusion is crap.
And if the evidence tells us something different, I’ll happily accept it. What about you? How will it feel if, after all this time, you learned that your belief that black people were inherently genetically intellectually inferior was based on crap evidence?
I’m hearing it in a Mid-Atlantic newsreel voice: “Within two decades it will be clear to all that the Negro species is the intellectual inferior of the White man.”
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I never said inferior. And I wouldn’t even say that about intelligence if we brouden out to multiple intelligences in the Gardner vein.
I don’t know why you would happily accept being wrong. Were I convinced of your position, I would not be happy to be convinced otherwise. Conversely, if I am proved wrong, I will be happy about it. And I very much pride myself on bucking the tendency that the vast majority of people have, to be unwilling to change their position even based on good evidence.
I will give you a good example of where I have done just that. If you talked to me 10 or 20 years ago, I was convinced that free trade and globalism was leading a “race to the bottom” that would ultimately lead to all workers everywhere being pulled down to the basement level wages of the poorest people in the Third World.
Instead, the past few decades have seen the greatest reduction in hunger and extreme poverty the world has ever seen, along with remarkable improvements in literacy, freedom of the press, and human rights in general. So I no longer agree with those on the left (and right wing populists like Trump) who oppose free trade.
(For that matter, 20 years ago I also believed largely the same things you currently do about race and IQ.)
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A conclusion with no evidence. Seriously – black people as naturally better at music or rhythm? It’s hard to believe that someone could think that’s anything close to a scientific conclusion. That’s a laughable belief. Do you believe that Jews are naturally gifted with genetic tendencies towards dealing with money? Blacks are genetically attracted to watermelon and fried chicken? Come on!
I’m always happy to learn something new. I’d be sad if I thought it would lead to something bad, which maybe it would.
But there’s no evidence for it (the genetic conclusion), and lots of evidence against it (Scarr study, Flynn effect, etc.), so I feel fine with where we’re at. And I feel fine criticizing Murray for his unscientific conclusions, and fans of Murray like Harris for failing to challenge those unscientific conclusions. And you for that, as well as the genes-for-music-and-rhythm silliness.
I am not an actual expert on human genetics so take this with a very large mountain of salt( but then I don’t believe you are either ), but I really rather doubt your time frame. Intelligence and what influences the human brain( and indeed how the brain even works)is such a hugely complicated affair, I wouldn’t be shocked if this is still being plausibly argued in the next century.