#122 — Extreme Housekeeping Edition
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
150.38182
Summary
In this episode, I explain why I invited Charles Murray on the podcast, and why I felt it was a moral obligation to defend him. I also talk about the problem of a spreading moral panic on college campuses, and the role of the free exchange of ideas, which is the whole point of the institution of the college campus, in creating a climate of fear that delegitimizes free speech and delegitimize conservative speakers who dare to speak on campus. And I talk about why I think it's a good idea to have a conversation with someone who's been accused of racism, and who has been deplatformed, in order to defend them against the charge that they are part of a "morally panic" that's spreading across the country. We don't run ads, and therefore, therefore, our podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you're not a subscriber, you are not currently on our subscriber-only feed, you'll need to subscribe to our premium tier, where you'll get immediate access to our full-length episodes of the podcast. You'll also get access to all our premium features, including ad-free versions of the Making Sense Podcast, as well as access to the podcast's most popular sub-series, "Making Sense: The Making Sense" wherever you get your epsiode. Please consider becoming a supporter of our podcast by becoming a MMS Member! Subscribe, become a supporter, and you'll be helping to make sense of what we're doing here! We're making sense. of it all! Sam Harris explains what it means to him, what he's doing here, and what he thinks it means, and how he's going to you, too. What does he thinks of it? What he thinks about it, what does it mean to him? and why it matters to him and what it's doing it better than you can do it better? And what does he think it matters? What would he think of it, anyway? All of that and why he thinks that it matters more than you should be listening to it, not just that it's making sense, and not just making sense? How does it make him feel about it? What does it matter what it makes him think it does it better, not better, to him feel better, right? He thinks it's better than it matters, not only better, better, more?
Transcript
00:00:10.880
Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
00:00:14.680
feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.420
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
00:00:24.060
There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
00:00:30.240
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:35.880
So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:53.400
This is the first vacation I've taken in quite some time with my family.
00:01:01.060
But anyway, I was on vacation and attempting to be a good father and good husband, not paying
00:01:09.880
But I did happen to catch at one point that Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and Ezra Klein
00:01:17.880
had all attacked me in the span of an hour on Twitter.
00:01:21.880
And genius that I am, I felt that I needed to respond right then and there.
00:01:28.540
I think the lesson of this whole episode is don't rush to make things worse.
00:01:33.600
That is a lesson I will try to fully absorb going forward.
00:01:37.940
And frankly, I think I need to rethink my relationship to social media.
00:01:41.460
There are so many problems that need not be created that are pure confections of having
00:01:49.480
said something or noticed what somebody said on social media.
00:01:54.280
So I'll be rethinking my relationship to all that.
00:01:57.840
To bring you all up to date, I know that many of you have noticed what happened to me in
00:02:04.040
But I just want to give you my picture of it and then tell you what's happening going
00:02:09.400
Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast.
00:02:14.620
And Murray, as most of you know, is the author of the notorious book, The Bell Curve, which
00:02:20.240
while it was not focused on differences between races in any significant sense, there was a
00:02:30.420
But the book was devoted to just the cognitive stratification of society having nothing to
00:02:37.120
Anyway, that chapter on race and the negative response it received fully engulfed Murray's
00:02:47.480
And Murray is still someone who gets protested when he goes to a college campus to give a
00:02:53.460
talk about something that is totally unrelated to that book.
00:02:57.280
And while I have very little interest in IQ and zero interest in racial differences in IQ,
00:03:04.260
I invited Murray on my podcast because I am deeply interested in free speech and in not
00:03:13.880
And what had happened is Murray had been invited to give a talk at Middlebury College, and he
00:03:20.200
was deplatformed in a fairly spectacular way by an angry mob of students.
00:03:25.480
And as he and his host were leaving the auditorium, they were physically assaulted.
00:03:30.600
And ironically, his host was a very liberal professor who was planning to debate him, essentially.
00:03:34.760
She had a list of hard questions she wanted to ask Murray.
00:03:38.580
Anyway, she received a concussion and a neck injury, and I believe she still suffers from
00:03:46.280
And it appeared to be the worst example of this spreading moral panic on college campuses,
00:03:52.880
where conservative speakers, or even those who are just imagined to be conservative, are
00:03:59.140
And the fact that this is happening at colleges, where the free exchange of ideas is the whole
00:04:05.100
point of the institution, that is something that many of us are quite worried about and
00:04:13.000
Now, there are people who consider all of these examples of moral panic on college campuses,
00:04:19.200
Middlebury and Yale and Portland and Berkeley and Evergreen.
00:04:24.040
Many people consider these outliers that signify absolutely nothing.
00:04:27.220
And there are some poll results that suggest that attitudes toward free speech haven't
00:04:35.800
So whether there really is a moral panic on college campuses can be disputed, I think.
00:04:40.900
I know Jonathan Haidt, who's been on this podcast, thinks the panic is real, and he's writing
00:04:44.940
a response to a recent Vox article that suggests that it wasn't.
00:04:48.600
But in any case, people can debate the state of the panic.
00:04:52.120
All I can say is that there certainly seemed to be one at the time I invited Murray on the
00:04:59.200
And the thing that made me most committed to speaking with him was the realization that
00:05:05.920
As I say in that podcast, I had avoided him and even avoided his book for decades because
00:05:12.680
I believe that where there was that much smoke, there must be fire.
00:05:23.080
And of necessity, in order to defend him against the charge of racism, and in order to show how
00:05:29.700
unfairly he had been treated for decades, our conversation had to present some of the scientific
00:05:37.760
So we spoke about the current picture of IQ data, we talked about the way genes and environment
00:05:43.800
likely contribute to intelligence and any other human trait.
00:05:48.640
We got into the weeds somewhat, but again, this is driven not by my interest in IQ, much
00:05:58.300
It was born of my trying to right a very clear intellectual and moral wrong.
00:06:07.360
And then in the aftermath of that podcast, Ezra Klein, who was the editor-in-chief of Vox,
00:06:13.120
he was at the time, now he's editor-at-large, he published a paper that was highly critical
00:06:20.340
The article was written by Eric Turkheimer, Catherine Hardin, and Richard Nisbet, who are all real
00:06:25.940
scientists, and because Nisbet is the most famous of them, and because he's been grinding
00:06:30.520
this axe over IQ for several decades now, I've tended to refer to this as the Nisbet paper.
00:06:36.940
But Turkheimer appears to be the first author on it.
00:06:40.480
So Klein published this piece, and I'm assuming he published it because he thought it was a
00:06:45.240
fair and accurate and important critique of the conversation I had with Murray.
00:06:53.840
This first probably happened on Twitter, but then we moved email.
00:06:57.560
And I expressed how unfair and inaccurate I thought the piece was.
00:07:04.340
And there was some talk of us doing a podcast together to hash this out, but then I got so
00:07:09.480
exasperated in this email exchange with him that I pulled the plug on that idea.
00:07:15.500
I decided there was no way I could talk to this guy.
00:07:17.960
There was just so much evidence of bad faith on his side.
00:07:22.980
As my friend Brett Weinstein says, bad faith changes everything.
00:07:28.060
Either someone is going to reason honestly about the plain meaning of words and about facts as
00:07:36.480
we know them, or they will try to smear you with anything they can use, however dishonest.
00:07:48.700
And so I pulled the plug on the podcast idea because I thought it would be an excruciating
00:07:53.600
Be like the podcast that I have ironically titled The Best Podcast Ever with Omer Aziz.
00:07:59.080
So, let me just be clear about what I think happened here.
00:08:04.320
The Nisbet article was truly dishonest and actually slanderous.
00:08:11.020
It put the onus on Murray and me to prove that we're not Nazis.
00:08:15.840
And if you don't think it did that, you're not reading closely enough.
00:08:19.280
It contained highly charged and highly moralistic accusations.
00:08:24.460
It accused us of the most egregious intellectual misconduct.
00:08:29.080
On Nisbet's account, we were guilty of purveying racialist pseudoscience.
00:08:38.920
And if they were trying to split the difference there, their true intentions were revealed
00:08:46.480
We were part of this horrific legacy of bigotry.
00:08:53.860
Klein called my podcast with Murray disastrous on Twitter.
00:09:03.040
It's America's most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.
00:09:16.140
This is not good faith criticism that I was complaining about.
00:09:21.520
These are the kinds of blows that, if they land, can and should destroy a person's reputation.
00:09:28.940
They're intended to destroy a person's reputation.
00:09:32.340
The reality of the situation is there's the scientific data on IQ and race and genetics and environment and all the related issues.
00:09:43.440
And there can be a good faith debate about these data.
00:09:47.620
And there can be a good faith debate about the social policies that one would want to enact to respond to whatever the facts are.
00:10:04.700
But the criticism of me and Murray was not an example of honest debate.
00:10:09.480
It presented a very skewed and ideological view of the science.
00:10:15.320
And it branded Murray's account of the science as junk science and racialist pseudoscience.
00:10:21.900
Whereas his account of the science is actually mainstream.
00:10:27.920
I'm not talking about his views on affirmative action or what should be done in the world.
00:10:34.680
You can debate both sides of the affirmative action question being fully committed to equality and without a racist bone in your body.
00:10:44.160
But now I'm just talking about the scientific picture.
00:10:47.760
And I should note that just yesterday, the first author on this paper, Eric Turkheimer, apologized for calling me and Murray peddlers of junk science.
00:11:02.120
This is a disagreement about how to interpret data.
00:11:06.020
And it could have been a good faith disagreement.
00:11:09.300
But the truth is, and this is my honest take on the scientific field at the moment,
00:11:15.900
the truth is that if there is a fringe here, Nisbet and Turkheimer and Hardin are on it.
00:11:26.500
Now, of course, it is understandable that they are worried about racism.
00:11:35.300
We should all be committed to political and economic equality.
00:11:39.960
We want everyone to have as much opportunity as they can have.
00:11:45.580
But distorting and cherry-picking the science and slandering anyone who won't succumb to your level of confirmation bias as a racist is totally unethical.
00:12:02.980
This is one side of a scientific debate smearing the other side with the most toxic moral and intellectual aspersions possible.
00:12:16.500
So, when I wrote Klein, and I found him to be totally evasive, I got fairly pissed.
00:12:24.840
One especially unethical thing he did, after sliming us with this piece,
00:12:30.600
Klein refused to publish a far more mainstream and balanced defense of us
00:12:34.760
that was submitted by Richard Hare, who's the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence,
00:12:39.580
and is the author of a recent book, The Neurobiology of Intelligence.
00:12:43.180
Hare came to our defense totally unbidden by me, or Murray, and with a far more mainstream opinion.
00:12:49.400
And Klein refused to publish it, and he has continued to publish attacks on Murray and me in Vox.
00:12:57.380
So, when our email exchange unraveled, I told him that if he continued to slander me,
00:13:03.240
and, in particular, if he misrepresented the reasons why I declined to do a podcast with him,
00:13:09.160
I would publish that exchange, because I thought the world should know how he operates as a journalist and an editor.
00:13:16.800
The world should know how dishonest he was being,
00:13:21.680
and how he wasn't even slightly committed to offering a fair representation of both sides of this debate.
00:13:28.720
Then, I think, basically a year passed, certainly without me noticing anything from Klein on this topic.
00:13:34.820
Whether or not he actually made any noise on it, I don't know.
00:13:38.100
But, then there was a New York Times op-ed by the Harvard geneticist David Reich,
00:13:42.680
which made some statements similar to the ones that had gotten Murray and me into hot water.
00:13:49.240
And, Murray retweeted it, and then I retweeted it with a jab at Klein.
00:13:55.100
Okay, I said, you know, I sure hope Ezra Klein's on the case.
00:14:00.180
It was a totally snide comment, of course, but totally fair, given what he has done.
00:14:06.700
It is just obvious that David Reich is not a racist.
00:14:11.060
And, the points he was making could be easily spun the way mine and Murray's have been spun.
00:14:17.580
And, he was definitely saying some of the same things about genetics and population differences.
00:14:24.280
And, then Klein responded with yet another article attacking me and Murray.
00:14:28.980
And, crucially, he discussed the email exchange I had with him and my refusal to do a podcast with him
00:14:36.380
in ways that I found to be totally self-serving and misleading.
00:14:41.100
So, this prompted me to publish our email exchange.
00:14:53.320
Because, if you just read the emails, apparently, I looked terrible.
00:15:01.480
I assumed bad intent on Klein's part for reasons that were not clear to readers.
00:15:07.180
Klein seemed friendly and open to dialogue, and I just seemed pissed.
00:15:11.700
And, the fact that I published a private correspondence seemed unethical.
00:15:16.280
But, if you had listened to my podcast with Murray,
00:15:18.820
and you read the Vox article, to which my emails were a reaction,
00:15:24.860
then most people understood my anger and saw Klein's evasiveness for what it was.
00:15:31.120
And, when you saw that he had mischaracterized the contents of our email exchange,
00:15:35.420
you thought that my publishing those emails was fair game.
00:15:42.360
But, let me be the first to admit, it was a colossal mistake,
00:15:47.920
given that I was asking way too much of readers.
00:15:53.240
The problem was, it took a lot more work to be in the second camp,
00:15:57.660
and understand what was actually going on here.
00:16:01.120
I was relying on people to have listened to a two-hour podcast,
00:16:08.520
Of course, many people didn't do either of those things.
00:16:10.560
In particular, it seems that my declining to do a podcast with Klein
00:16:15.040
was widely interpreted as my avoiding a hard conversation,
00:16:19.720
and just failing outright to deal with serious criticism.
00:16:24.360
Needless to say, I didn't see it that way, and I don't see it that way.
00:16:31.020
I became very uncomfortable with that perception.
00:17:02.140
And, I don't know whether this will be a productive conversation or not.
00:17:11.100
I detected an extraordinary amount of bad faith
00:17:20.020
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,