Yglesias makes a very clear case (IMO) that Murray’s policy recommendations are almost uniformly counterfactual. Further, he argues that, rather than being marginalized/silenced/stymied, Murray has been extremely successful and influential, and his preferred policies are central to the national conversation about public social policy.
…whose name I can’t recall…
Oops.
I agree with almost all of that, with two major caveats:
(1) Murray’s success only works on the right. Sam Harris is fortunate to have so many Patreon supporters, because no right or left wing think tank, or major university, would hire him.
(2) He and his faculty chaperone (who was permanently injured) were viciously attacked. That is frightening, and morally abhorrent, no matter how much professional success he has. Then there’s the social penalty that is hard to quantify.
But I do absolutely oppose most of Murray’s policy agenda.
I also agree with Haier that it is legitimate to question how much of the racial disparity is genetic. What is not legitimate is to treat one side of the scientific spectrum on this question as equivalent to phrenology or Holocaust denialism.
So let’s quote a little more from your Haier link, and I will ask you to comment on whether you agree with these parts as well:
:dubious:
Again, if it was not Murray and the scientific racists, you may had a point. As it is, Murray would had been elevated to a better status if he had been working in Germany in the 1930’s.
In my educated opinion, Murray is like Velikowsky, trying to pretend until the end of his days that he would be vindicated by the evidence of catastrophes in the past. Far from it. In Velikosky’s case, many scientists that do agree that disasters also shaped the earth in the past do not give Velikowsky much credit as his exaggerations and attempt at shoehorning biblical tales to disasters of the past actually slowed down the progress in their field.
Likewise, guys like Murray (that already demonstrated to still be wrong about the Hispanics) with his racist solutions think that they will be vindicated by eventually finding genetic evidence of differences among “races”. Like with Velikowsky and his cosmic disasters, the ones that look for the genetic differences have very good reasons to not support what Murray and their ilk are doing.
And this is because as the ones that are looking for differences report, Murray is not needed. Just like Velikowsky was not needed by the ones finding about the comet that helped remove the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. In that case gradualism was not eliminated as an explanation of the earth’s past; so it is with the environmental component of intelligence, there is still a lot of environmental issues that can not be ignored of that were found in recent years. Genes are important, but not the definitive part of our intelligence or our destinies. Hence the warnings and the repeated lines that racists should not be looking to make hay of the genetic differences of intelligence that may be there.
No. But if advocates are constantly misrepresenting that side as much more strongly supported by evidence than it actually is, or using specious “well it just stands to reason!” rhetoric to insinuate (or openly assert!) that skeptics pointing out the current inadequacy of the evidence are just being “politically correct”…
…then it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the historic similarities between their obstinately unscientific arguments and similar obstinately unscientific arguments advanced in service to unsavory causes in the past.
Fair enough. And I agree with someone who said, on Sam Harris’s Facebook page, something to the effect of “Murray didn’t just stumble upon this data while engaging in pure scientific curiosity.” Klein is right that Murray is kind of shady, and that there are sadly few people who take the line of “we are all limited in some way or another, and we should be kind to each other regardless” (looking, as Sam suggested, at Rawls’s “original position” perspective for inspiration). But I do! And I would like more people to do it.
The hard data are going to come in pretty soon, as Haier said. And those who are now insisting those data are not going to show genetically based racial differences are laying down a huge bet. If they are wrong, who is going to listen to them when they try to make arguments about how people should respond to the findings?
Actually, I think I can pretty confidently predict what is going to happen. DNA-based differences will appear, but they will only explain some percentage of the racial gap. If it is a very small percentage, the crowd that is currently denialist will be able to have fairly solid ground to stand on to say they were basically right that it is mostly about racism (and/or maybe lead, cultural issues around parenting, etc.) and that one or two points’ difference in average IQ attributable to genetics is not really significant.
But if it is a large percentage (and I would call even a minority of say 30 percent or more “large”), they will still try to obfuscate by pointing to the non-genetic portion. This is what they do already with adoption, as we’ve seen right here in this thread. Look! they insist: babies from low-IQ, less educated biological parents adopted by high IQ, highly educated adoptive parents show a significant jump in IQ compared to their biological siblings who stayed behind with their biological parents. They always conveniently forget to point out that their adoptive siblings who are biological offspring of those high-IQ parents are also significantly higher in IQ than they are (all of this is on average, of course). Thus showing genes and family environment to be roughly equal in influence, and even more crucially showing that the genes you get from your parents can limit your IQ potential no matter what environment you are raised in, no matter how many advantages you get from an affluent family, top-notch schools, etc.
If by “confidently predict” you mean “hopefully speculate despite the current lack of scientific evidence”, then yes, I agree you can.
Once again, you seem to be mixing up the concept of individual heritability of IQ with the concept of hypothesized racial-group genetic differences in IQ.
Who in this thread is arguing that individual differences in innate IQ don’t exist? Or that changes in nurture/environment can reliably cancel out all the effects of such individual differences? Can you please point to a specific post that you think is making such claims?
That’s big of you, but there are already plenty of demonstrably real sorts of human limitations that we can be kind to one another about. We don’t have to prematurely jump to conclusions about anybody else’s hypothesized but currently unproven racially-based cognitive inferiority in order to exercise our capacity for kindness towards them.
The fact that you keep being so unquenchably eager to try to talk other people into being accepting and kind and humble and broadminded about black folks’ genetically-determined IQ deficit, even while there is still no actual scientific evidence that any such genetic deficit really exists, is not doing wonders for your hopes of coming across as non-racist.
I’ve already copped to paternalistic racism. It’s the hostile, hateful kind of racism that I don’t understand, and abhor.
Well that’s OK then.
You understand that “racist” isn’t just a pejorative; it’s also a specific kind of reasoning error (unfairly generalizing on the basis of race)? You’re fine with claiming to be making that error?
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What’s amusing is that this fuckstick seems to think owning up to “paternalistic racism” somehow makes him better than the Nazis and Klansmen of the world, instead of just more cowardly.
I’ve read The Bell Curve (most of it at least). I listened to both of the podcasts. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, and Hillary in the general. Hopefully that gives me liberal “street cred” to say the following:
I support Sam Harris and SlackerInc in this discussion.
It’s a huge book, and it by no means focuses primarily on race (it’s only a small portion of the book). It’s a shame the race chapter was so radioactive, because there’s a very important discussion about the role that IQ plays in our society. If you are born with a high IQ, you are very likely to succeed in life (regardless of your race). And if you have a low IQ your prospects are not so great (regardless of your race). From my point of view that’s an argument to greatly strengthen the social safety net, not slash it.
I support a universal basic income, but I don’t think it should replace all government safety net programs (we’d need universal healthcare as well, and services for the disabled).
This is a brief post, but as far as I can tell, none of the points you seem concerned about are actually in dispute.
Err, no? Why would voting for boringly mainstream party politicians give you any ‘liberal “street cred”’ cred, as if such a thing existed in the first place? And why would it matter? The racist asshole OP is himself supposedly a Democrat or something.
So, you mention that the race part of Bell Curve is toxic, but you fail to mention what you think of it, in particular, yourself.
As soon as “liberal” lost its sting from the right as an accusation of quasi or outright Communism, it was picked up by the left as an accusation of being a moderate Democrat, so I don’t see how being racist would prevent one from being that kind of strawman liberal if every other policy and outlook lined up.
Is a paternalistic racist like a shitty dad?
If the discussion was only on the bell curve itself then you’re broadly right: it doesn’t actually contain that much about race (although I’d still say what it includes is sloppy).
However Murray has published other, more contentious works. Like that book about how only whites have contributed anything culturally significant in the arts. And his public comments are often more skewed in that direction than towards the uncontentious parts of the bell curve.
Harris also. Harris says some uncomfortable but valid things, then sprinkles in some bigoted statements. So whenever someone disagrees with him he (or one of his supporters) can just retreat back to the uncontroversial stuff, and paint his opponents as being overly PC.
I don’t really recall any use of it in that sense. I mean, I’m strongly LEftist, myself, but I’m not really encountering its pejorative use by “the left”.
IME, party politics and racism are only somewhat correlated. Plenty of racists to be found on both sides of the American political aisle, as elsewhere.
It goes against my instincts to sign on to that. I certainly don’t want it to be true that there are racial differences in IQ, but I’m not completely closed off to that possibility. I guess I’m agnostic on that issue. I wish The Bell Curve excluded the race chapter, and I wish someone other than Murray (who wants to slash the social safety net) wrote it, because the cognitive stratification of society is certainly an important topic.
Yes, but remember the title and the intention of the thread, it is to claim that Sam and Murray are onto something, when in reality serious researchers do not want their “help”. It is something alright; but as the discussions has showed, Sam is beginning to willfully ignore how racist and wrong Murray is about Hispanics and other groups, and it was made worse when one notices that SlackeInc himself pointed at evidence that he thought helped his point but in reality blows a big hole to Murray and Sam’s arguments.
So, willful ignorance, “paternalistic” racism, propensity to tell us that they (Murray, Sam and the Slacker) ***interpret ***better what experts like Flinn are actually telling us. Continuing to ignore new evidence… Supporting that is not really wise.
To be clear, “The Bell Curve” was thoroughly debunked even before the rise of the commercial internet.
It follows the same trope that other forms of pseudoscientific bigotry, by stacking datasets to fit the argument even if the numbers are wrong.
It was written a decade before we even successfully sequenced the human genome, and evidence that is more recent does not fit it’s claims, and favors the null.
Here is just one example that will demonstrate “simple” problems that should be in the “grasp” of someone like Harris if he actually did have a superior Cognitive ability
Assumptions that the book makes that are wrong and easy to explain to someone as cognitively challenged as Harris. (blame his parents)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160315230510/http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.062