Making Sense - Sam Harris - #123 — Identity & Honesty

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.700 My conversation with Ezra Klein of Vox Media.

00:00:50.900 I think I'm going to resist the temptation to add any editorial comments here.

00:00:55.640 My previous episode, the Extreme Housekeeping Edition, had my full reaction to all of the

00:01:01.900 controversy that preceded this podcast.

00:01:04.860 At the beginning here, I go through a timeline of events with Ezra.

00:01:10.220 Everyone will be up to speed.

00:01:12.680 I think the conversation speaks for itself, and if you listen to the whole thing, you will

00:01:17.300 definitely know what I think about it by the end.

00:01:20.680 I think it probably does have educational value.

00:01:25.840 I certainly hope it does.

00:01:27.440 As to what lessons can be drawn from it, I will let you decide.

00:01:32.000 All I can say is that I actually did my best here.

00:01:37.960 This was a sincere effort to communicate, and you can judge the effect.

00:01:43.460 And now I bring you Ezra Klein.

00:01:53.620 Okay, so for better or worse, we're finally doing a podcast together.

00:01:56.880 We're finally doing it.

00:01:58.120 So here's what I would suggest, and I wanted to see if this was amenable to you.

00:02:02.080 So I heard the housekeeping episode this week.

00:02:05.140 I thought it would make sense for me to just give a couple minutes, you know, short kind

00:02:10.560 of like opening thing at the beginning, try to sort of frame where I am on this.

00:02:13.520 I think I maybe have a way to frame it a little productively.

00:02:16.760 And then I'm happy to, in return for that, give you the last word on the podcast, if that

00:02:21.100 feels right to you.

00:02:22.920 Actually, I had a couple of ideas, and so let me just put those out there.

00:02:25.980 And so first, I think we should make the ground rules explicit so that our listeners understand

00:02:31.940 what's happening here.

00:02:32.560 So my understanding is that we'll both present the audio unedited, and it's fine to cut mouth

00:02:38.940 noises and other glitches, but, you know, if we take a bathroom break, we'll cut that

00:02:43.320 stuff.

00:02:44.060 And we can have sidebar conversations that we both agree are off the record, but basically

00:02:47.960 no meaningful words will be cut from the exchange.

00:02:51.520 So we agree with that.

00:02:52.660 Yep.

00:02:52.780 And I had thought, I'm happy to do this after you start, or it makes some sense, I think,

00:03:00.360 to do it before you add what you just suggested.

00:03:03.220 I thought I should summarize how we got here and just kind of go through the chronology

00:03:07.620 so that people who are just hearing this for the first time understand about the email

00:03:12.600 chain and who Charles Murray is and all that.

00:03:15.360 I assume, I mean, look, we can do this in different ways, but my assumption with you, you tend to have,

00:03:20.720 as I understand it, you know, intros where you do stuff like that.

00:03:24.540 I probably will, too.

00:03:27.360 Yeah, but I think it would be good to avoid the perception that our account of how we got here is

00:03:34.200 totally divergent.

00:03:35.720 I think maybe I should give an account which you then can say, okay, yeah, that's the sequence of

00:03:41.040 events as I understand it, too.

00:03:42.980 Sure.

00:03:43.800 Here's my only hesitation on this, and I don't have a huge problem with it.

00:03:47.240 If you feel strongly about it, we can do it.

00:03:48.720 But I would worry about us ending up burning a lot of our time going back and forth on

00:03:55.100 like how an email is described or something.

00:03:57.000 So if we just want to do a very neutral account of it, that's fine with me, but I wouldn't

00:04:00.120 want to end up with like a long chronology argument.

00:04:04.460 Yeah.

00:04:04.640 So I'll do that, and then you'll jump in at the end of that and give me your current take.

00:04:10.180 And obviously, I'll be describing this account from this chronology from my point of view,

00:04:15.080 but I'll flag the places where I think we have a different interpretation of what happened.

00:04:19.340 But I think the sequence of events is totally objective here.

00:04:23.620 So I just have a list of the order of things.

00:04:27.060 Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast.

00:04:30.700 And Murray, as many of our listeners will know, is the author of the notorious book,

00:04:34.880 The Bell Curve, and it has a chapter on race and IQ and differences between racial measures

00:04:42.080 of IQ that was extremely controversial.

00:04:45.220 So Murray's a person who still gets protested on college campuses more than 20 years later.

00:04:50.840 And while I have very little interest in IQ and actually zero interest in racial differences

00:04:57.560 in IQ, I invited Murray on my podcast because he had recently been deplatformed at Middlebury

00:05:03.160 College, and he and his host were actually assaulted as they left the auditorium.

00:05:08.860 And in my view, this seemed yet another instance of a kind of moral panic that we were seeing

00:05:14.500 on college campuses.

00:05:15.860 And it caused me to take an interest in Murray that I hadn't previously had. 0.98

00:05:20.100 So I had never read The Bell Curve, because I thought it must be just racist trash, because 0.95

00:05:26.700 I assumed that where there was, you know, all that smoke, there must be fire. 0.96

00:05:30.200 And I hadn't paid attention to Murray.

00:05:32.340 And so when I did read the book and did some more research on him, I came to think that he

00:05:38.980 was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime.

00:05:44.500 It doesn't really run the risk of being much of an exaggeration there.

00:05:47.860 And the most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect

00:05:56.740 to the science at this point.

00:05:58.100 They were mainstream at the time he wrote them, and they're even more mainstream today.

00:06:02.760 So I perceived a real problem here of free speech and a man's shunning. 0.93

00:06:10.680 And I was very worried.

00:06:12.920 I felt culpable because I had participated in that shunning somewhat.

00:06:17.620 I had ignored him.

00:06:19.300 As I said, I hadn't read his book.

00:06:21.100 I had declined at least one occasion where I could have joined a project that he was associated

00:06:26.260 with.

00:06:26.820 And I declined because he was associated with it, because I perceived him to be radioactive.

00:06:32.760 So I felt a moral obligation to have him on my podcast.

00:06:37.560 And in the process of defending him against the charge of racism, and in order to show that

00:06:44.580 he had been mistreated for decades, we had to talk about the science of IQ and the way

00:06:50.700 genes and environment almost certainly contribute to it.

00:06:53.320 And again, IQ is not one of my concerns, and racial differences in IQ is absolutely not one of my

00:07:02.660 concerns.

00:07:03.420 But a person having his reputation destroyed for honestly discussing data, that deeply concerns me.

00:07:09.960 So I did that podcast, again, exactly a year ago, and Vox then published an article that was highly

00:07:18.300 critical of that podcast.

00:07:20.380 And it was written by Eric Turkheimer and Catherine Harden and Richard Nisbet.

00:07:24.380 And this article, in my view, got more or less everything wrong.

00:07:30.160 OK, it read to me like a piece of political propaganda.

00:07:34.420 Hey, Sam.

00:07:34.760 Again.

00:07:35.660 Yeah.

00:07:36.280 So hearing this, I'm totally happy to have you do this on yours.

00:07:42.880 I think this is a long kind of, and I totally get like from your perspective thing on it.

00:07:48.140 But just imagine what it will be like for people coming to this podcast not knowing why we're

00:07:52.920 having this conversation.

00:07:53.500 I think that's fine.

00:07:54.020 And I just think that if we want to do it that way, let's just do a shorter version of this.

00:07:58.320 You know, just like, you know, like I would suggest something more, you know, not and expand

00:08:02.840 on it how you want.

00:08:03.660 But like, look, you had Murray on your podcast a year ago.

00:08:06.220 You wanted, you know, he had been deplatformed at Middlebury.

00:08:08.580 You wanted to defend him.

00:08:10.580 We published an article that was highly critical of you.

00:08:13.680 You know, I guess you can call it propaganda if you want.

00:08:16.220 But obviously, the more you lean on this, the more this is going to become what we talk about.

00:08:21.980 It'll just take a long time.

00:08:23.400 So it's like we've had a back and forth, published emails.

00:08:25.780 Like, I'm totally happy to have you summarize it.

00:08:27.840 But I don't want to suspend like, I don't want to feel like I'm sitting here for 10 minutes.

00:08:32.060 And then I have to go and do a point by point.

00:08:33.920 I think that's not going to be productive.

00:08:35.340 No, no.

00:08:35.680 I think in my mind, I'm setting you up to say what you said you wanted to say,

00:08:40.240 which is what your current take is on the situation.

00:08:42.800 So, yeah, I will be brief.

00:08:44.720 So I reached out to you by email.

00:08:46.340 I felt this article was totally unfair.

00:08:48.860 It accused us of peddling junk science and pseudoscience and pseudoscientific racialist

00:08:55.100 speculation and trafficking in dangerous ideas.

00:08:58.480 And I mean, Murray got the worst of it. 0.98

00:08:59.900 But at minimum, I'm painted as a total ignoramus. 0.97

00:09:02.540 Right.

00:09:03.300 It was one line which said, you know, if you know, while I have a Ph.D.

00:09:06.020 In neuroscience, I appear to be totally ignorant of facts that are well known to everyone in

00:09:10.420 the field of intelligence studies.

00:09:11.900 And I think that you should quote the line if you want to quote a line.

00:09:15.040 OK, so the quote.

00:09:15.840 I don't think that's what the line said.

00:09:17.380 The quote is this is the exact quote.

00:09:19.580 Sam Harris appeared to be ignorant of facts that were well known to everyone in the field

00:09:23.000 of intelligence studies.

00:09:24.040 Right.

00:09:24.220 Now, that's since been quietly removed from the article, but it was there and it's archived.

00:09:29.640 So that's what I was reacting to.

00:09:31.120 And I sent you an email where I was pretty pissed because, again, I felt I was treated

00:09:39.300 totally unfairly and as was Murray.

00:09:41.960 And I was especially pissed that you declined to publish an article that came to us unbidden,

00:09:49.220 that came to you unbidden.

00:09:50.340 It was unbidden by me or Murray from Richard Hare, who's the editor in chief of the journal

00:09:54.620 Intelligence and a far more mainstream voice on this issue than Nisbet or Turkheimer or

00:10:01.120 Harden.

00:10:01.940 And he came to our defense and he, you know, that would have done a lot to correct the

00:10:06.340 record, but you declined to publish that.

00:10:09.180 And so we went round and round by email.

00:10:11.440 And I got increasingly exasperated over just how I perceived you in the email exchange.

00:10:18.980 And there was some talk of us doing this podcast together, but then I pulled the plug on that

00:10:23.000 because I felt it would be totally unproductive.

00:10:25.020 And at the end of the email exchange, I said, if you continue to slander me, I will publish

00:10:31.260 this email exchange because I felt that people should understand the actual backstory here

00:10:36.120 and how this happened and why I'm not doing a podcast with you.

00:10:39.800 And you did actually publish one more article from Turkheimer that took a shot at us.

00:10:44.500 But basically, we went radio silence for a year about, as far as I know.

00:10:49.480 And then what happened is there was an article published in The New York Times by David Reich,

00:10:55.160 a geneticist at Harvard, which made some of the same noises that Murray and I had made.

00:10:59.980 And Murray retweeted it saying, wow, this sounds familiar.

00:11:02.780 And then I retweeted it taking a snide dig at you saying something like, well, I hope Ezra

00:11:08.600 Klein's on the case.

00:11:09.740 Racialist pseudoscience never sleeps. 0.91

00:11:11.260 And then you responded writing yet another article about me and Murray.

00:11:16.940 And I felt this article was just as unfair as anything that had preceded it.

00:11:22.280 In particular, I felt that you had summarized our email exchange in a way that was self-serving

00:11:27.900 and that I didn't agree with.

00:11:29.740 And so that prompted me to publish the emails.

00:11:33.520 And I will be the first to admit, and I think you will agree with this, that that backfired

00:11:38.100 on me, the public perception of my publishing those emails was that it was not a good look

00:11:43.220 for me at all.

00:11:44.440 And most people who came to those emails cold thought I was inexplicably angry and that you

00:11:51.020 seemed very open to dialogue.

00:11:53.160 And it just, you know, people had to do a lot of work to understand why I was pissed.

00:11:57.640 And most people didn't do that work.

00:11:59.660 I'm not saying that everyone who did the work, who listened to the podcast and read all the

00:12:03.560 articles would take my side of it, but anyone who didn't do the work thought that I was somehow

00:12:09.360 the aggressor there.

00:12:10.620 In particular, the fact that I was declining to do a podcast with you was held very much

00:12:15.420 against me.

00:12:16.200 And that caused me to change my mind about this whole thing because I realized, okay,

00:12:20.120 this is not, I can't be perceived as someone who won't take on legitimate criticism of his

00:12:25.480 views.

00:12:26.060 And so I went out on social media just to see if in fact people really wanted us to attempt

00:12:30.900 this and after 40 or 50,000 people got back and it was, I think it was 76% said yes.

00:12:37.280 I decided that I was up for a podcast with you and you had already said you were up for

00:12:42.000 a podcast with me.

00:12:43.100 And so here we are.

00:12:44.900 And again, much of that's described from my point of view, but I think the timeline is

00:12:50.160 accurate.

00:12:51.040 This is not my ideal, but I'm actually, I'd prefer we get into it.

00:12:53.340 The only thing I would say here that you should just change a little bit in there so I don't

00:12:57.100 do it on your behalf is that you didn't email me.

00:13:00.940 What happened is that this piece published out, I tweeted it out.

00:13:05.320 You tweeted a public challenge to me to come on your show.

00:13:08.700 That's true.

00:13:09.280 Your producer emailed, emailed me to come on your show.

00:13:12.480 I emailed your producer and said, hey, like, can you connect me to Sam?

00:13:15.080 We should talk about this.

00:13:15.940 And then our email exchange began.

00:13:17.140 That's true.

00:13:17.480 The first contact was on Twitter.

00:13:18.820 Yeah.

00:13:19.000 Which is not a big deal.

00:13:20.120 I just want to, I just want to note that.

00:13:22.520 Totally true.

00:13:23.100 But here's what I'd ask.

00:13:24.920 Let's jump into it.

00:13:26.320 I mean, let's just start with you.

00:13:28.060 I mean, why, what don't I get?

00:13:30.860 You know, why is your criticism of me and Murray valid?

00:13:33.720 I mean, just give me your take on all of this.

00:13:36.360 All right.

00:13:36.620 Well, I appreciate that summary.

00:13:38.580 Obviously, and I'm sure we'll get into this stuff.

00:13:41.400 I have disagreements with which articles are fair and which aren't.

00:13:45.880 But I don't think that that is where I want to begin this.

00:13:48.780 I'm sure we'll go through that.

00:13:49.900 I want to try to frame what I want to do here today, because I think people can go through,

00:13:55.140 they can read the original Vox articles, all be linked in my show notes.

00:13:58.020 I assume, Sam, they'll be linked in yours.

00:13:59.500 They can read our emails to each other.

00:14:01.320 They can read my article.

00:14:02.800 They can listen to the original podcast.

00:14:04.480 If you would like to be a Sam Harris and Ezra Klein completist, the option is very much there.

00:14:10.420 So I listened to your housekeeping episode the other day.

00:14:14.100 So I think I have some sense, Sam, of where you are coming into this.

00:14:17.440 And I want to give you a sense of where I am in the hopes that it'll be productive.

00:14:23.560 So something you've said over and over and over again to me at this point is that to you

00:14:30.080 from the beginning, I've been here in bad faith.

00:14:32.460 The problem is that I've come to this, coming to slander you, to destroy your reputation,

00:14:37.860 to silence you.

00:14:38.680 And I really, I take that as a signal failure on my part.

00:14:42.580 I have not been able to persuade you, and maybe I will be today, that I really disagree

00:14:47.800 with you strongly.

00:14:49.460 I think some of the things you're trafficking in are not just wrong, but they're harmful.

00:14:54.020 But I do so in good faith.

00:14:55.520 And I'm here because I want to persuade you.

00:14:58.140 In your podcast with Murray, the way I see what's going on here from my perspective, and

00:15:04.840 one of the tricky things here is that I was not that involved in the original Vox article.

00:15:09.020 I was editor-in-chief at the time, but I didn't assign or edit that.

00:15:11.680 I stand by it.

00:15:12.420 Things you publish when you're editor-in-chief ultimately are on you, and I actually think

00:15:16.000 it's a good piece.

00:15:16.780 But there are times when I can only speak from my perspective, not from the perspective of

00:15:21.300 other people who wrote other things.

00:15:23.400 But the way I read the conversation you had with Murray, and I think you gesture at this

00:15:27.940 in your opening here, you begin that conversation by really framing it around your shared experience

00:15:34.660 responding to politically correct criticism.

00:15:37.260 You say, and I'm quoting you here, in the intervening years, so the intervening years

00:15:41.480 since Murray published The Bell Curve, that you ventured into, I ventured into my own controversial

00:15:46.480 areas as a speaker and writer.

00:15:48.560 I experienced many hysterical attacks against me in my work.

00:15:51.640 I started thinking about your case, your case being Murray's case, a little, again, without

00:15:56.240 ever having read you, and I began to suspect that you were one of the canaries in the coal

00:16:00.060 mine that I never recognized as such.

00:16:03.020 So you say explicitly in the opening to that podcast that in the treatment of Murray, you

00:16:08.320 saw the seeds of later treatment of you.

00:16:10.660 And I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because something that I've been trying

00:16:14.600 to do here is see this from your perspective.

00:16:16.100 Here is my view.

00:16:18.920 I think you have, you clearly have, a deep empathy for Charles Murray's side of this conversation

00:16:24.480 because you see yourself in it.

00:16:26.560 I don't think you have as deep an empathy for the other side of this conversation, for

00:16:30.980 the people being told, once again, that they are genetically and environmentally and at any

00:16:36.220 rate, immutably less intelligent, and that our social policy should reflect that.

00:16:41.320 And I think part of the absence of that empathy is it doesn't threaten you.

00:16:45.100 I don't think you see a threat to you in that in the way you see a threat to you in what's

00:16:48.960 happened to Murray.

00:16:49.960 In some cases, I'm not even quite sure you heard what Murray was saying on social policy,

00:16:54.300 either in the bell curve and a lot of his later work or on the podcast.

00:16:57.660 And I think that led to a blind spot.

00:16:59.580 And this is worth discussing.

00:17:01.780 I like your podcast.

00:17:03.460 I think you have a big platform and a big audience.

00:17:06.220 And I think it's bad for the world if Murray's take on this gets recast here as political

00:17:10.940 bravery or impartial or non-controversial.

00:17:14.760 So what I want to do here, it's not really convince you that I'm right.

00:17:18.040 I don't think I'm going to do that.

00:17:19.020 And it's not to convince you to like me.

00:17:20.700 I don't think I'm going to do that either.

00:17:21.900 I get that.

00:17:23.100 What I want to convince you of is that there is a side of this you should become more curious

00:17:27.860 about.

00:17:28.380 You should be doing shows with people like Ibram Kendi, who's author of Stamp from the

00:17:32.180 Beginning, which is a book on racist ideas in America, which won the National Book

00:17:36.620 Award a couple of years back.

00:17:37.560 People who really study how race and these ideas interact with American life and policy.

00:17:42.740 I think the fact that we are two white guys talking about how growing up non-white in America

00:17:46.760 affects your life and cognitive development is a problem here, just as it was a problem

00:17:52.040 in the Murray conversation.

00:17:53.640 And I want to persuade you that some of the things that the so-called social justice warriors

00:17:57.700 are worried about are worth worrying about, and that the excesses of activists, while

00:18:02.340 very real and problematic, they're not as big a deal as the things they're really trying

00:18:08.000 to fight and to draw attention to.

00:18:10.600 So maybe I'll take a breath there and let you in.

00:18:13.540 Yeah.

00:18:13.760 OK, that's a great start.

00:18:15.880 So I guess there's a lot to respond to there.

00:18:18.940 I guess the first thing I want to say is that there are two things I regret here, both in

00:18:24.400 our exchange and in my podcast with Murray.

00:18:27.320 And so I should just put those out first, I think.

00:18:30.680 The first is that I was, as you said, very quick to attribute malice and bad faith to you

00:18:36.840 in the email exchange.

00:18:38.500 And it's quite possible I did this when it wasn't warranted.

00:18:43.240 The reality is, the background here, which you alluded to, is that I am so battle-scarred

00:18:47.780 at this point.

00:18:48.420 And I've dealt with so many people who are willing to consciously lie about my views and

00:18:53.880 who will just play the evasion game endlessly.

00:18:57.160 I've got people who edit the contents of my podcast to make it sound like I've said the

00:19:02.480 opposite of what I've said.

00:19:04.320 And then people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan forward these videos consciously knowing

00:19:10.500 they're misrepresenting me.

00:19:11.640 There's been so much pushback about this, there's been so much correction, that at this

00:19:15.620 point, the possibility that it's not conscious, the chance of that is zero, right?

00:19:19.940 So I'm dealing with people on a daily basis who are just happy to smear me dishonestly

00:19:27.960 simply to see what will stick.

00:19:30.360 And in fact, when I published our emails, the tipping point for me was to see that Glenn

00:19:34.780 Greenwald, Reza Aslan, and you in a single hour on Twitter had all hit me with stuff that

00:19:40.080 I perceived to be totally dishonest.

00:19:42.260 So my fuse is pretty short.

00:19:44.300 I am the first to admit that.

00:19:46.280 And if I treated you unfairly, attributing bad faith when you were just led by sincere

00:19:52.340 conviction that I had made an error or that you were arguing for something that was so

00:19:57.460 important and that I wasn't seeing it, that's, you know, that is on me.

00:20:01.920 Now, that said, I think your argument is where even where it pretends to be factual, wherever

00:20:10.760 you think it is factual, it is highly biased by political considerations.

00:20:16.780 And these are political considerations that I share.

00:20:19.760 The fact that you think I don't have empathy for people who suffer just the starkest inequalities

00:20:28.300 of wealth and politics and luck, it's telling and it's untrue.

00:20:33.460 I think it's even untrue of Murray.

00:20:35.660 And the fact that you're conflating the social policies he endorses, like the fact that he's

00:20:40.620 against affirmative action and he's for universal basic income.

00:20:45.020 And I know you don't happen to agree with those policies.

00:20:46.980 You think that would be disastrous.

00:20:48.640 There's a good faith argument to be had on both sides of that conversation.

00:20:52.600 That conversation is quite distinct from the science.

00:20:55.220 And even that conversation about social policy can be had without any allegation that a person

00:21:03.080 is racist or that a person lacks empathy for people who are at the bottom of society.

00:21:08.940 So that's one distinction I want to make.

00:21:11.420 And the other thing that I regret, which I think is, this is the thing you're taking me

00:21:16.420 to task for, and I understand it.

00:21:19.280 But I do regret that in the preface to my podcast with Murray, I didn't add some full

00:21:26.560 discussion of racism in America.

00:21:29.180 And the reason why I didn't, or certainly at least one reason why I didn't, is that I had

00:21:34.620 maybe two months before that done a podcast with Glenn Lowry, the economist at Brown, who

00:21:40.760 happens to be Black.

00:21:41.540 And Glenn is fantastic.

00:21:43.760 He's got his own podcast, The Glenn Show, which everyone should watch.

00:21:47.240 But so Glenn was on my podcast, and we were talking about race and violence in America.

00:21:51.840 And I prefaced the conversation with a fairly long statement about the reality of white privilege

00:21:58.140 and the past horrors of racism.

00:22:00.600 And when I got to the end of it, Glenn pretty much chastised me for thinking that it was

00:22:05.660 necessary for me to say something like that just because I'm white, right?

00:22:09.220 The fact that any conversation about race and violence, especially coming from a white 0.91

00:22:13.900 guy like me, has to be bracketed with some elaborate virtue signaling on that point.

00:22:19.500 So he basically said, I mean, these aren't his words, but this was his attitude, basically 0.98

00:22:24.280 said, you know, obviously, since you're not a racist asshole, it can go without saying that 0.99

00:22:29.860 you understand that slavery was bad and that Jim Crow was bad and that you totally support 1.00

00:22:34.700 civil rights.

00:22:35.960 And so his take on my saying that, it was not a total surprise given who Glenn is, but

00:22:42.540 the fact that he viewed it as fairly pathetic, that I felt the need to do that, and that it

00:22:48.140 couldn't just go without saying, I remembered that.

00:22:51.180 And I mean, obviously, your point is well taken.

00:22:53.980 I mean, two white guys talking about differences in IQ across races or across populations.

00:23:00.360 I mean, if ever there's a time to signal that you understand that racism is still a problem

00:23:04.600 in the world, that's it, right?

00:23:06.920 And while we did say some things that I think should still have been fully exculpatory, I

00:23:12.900 mean, for anyone paying attention, I think it should be obvious with a modicum of charity

00:23:18.260 extended to us that Murray and I are not racist and that what we were saying was not coming

00:23:24.100 from a place of racial animus.

00:23:25.640 But I mean, that is the backstory for why I didn't have some kind of elaborate framing

00:23:31.720 of the conversation.

00:23:33.320 So I want to I want to be this is good because I think this gets much closer to the meat of

00:23:37.480 where we actually disagree.

00:23:38.920 And something I want to be clear about is what I think was wrong in that podcast is not that

00:23:44.400 you didn't virtue signal.

00:23:46.040 It's not that you didn't come out and say, hey, listen, just before I start this up, I

00:23:50.280 want everybody to know I'm not a racist.

00:23:51.680 And by the way, I'm not here to say you're a racist.

00:23:54.040 I don't think you are.

00:23:54.720 We have not called you one.

00:23:56.500 I actually think that's a different set of things.

00:23:58.200 And we should talk later.

00:23:59.520 I think this would actually be a good conversation for us to have about literally just what racism

00:24:04.580 is, how we use that word in this conversation.

00:24:07.240 But my criticism of your podcast and by the way, my criticism also of Murray, and this

00:24:12.720 is useful because I can work backwards through your answer here, is not that you didn't excuse

00:24:17.980 yourself.

00:24:18.560 It's that in a conversation about an outcome of American life, right?

00:24:25.280 How do African-Americans and whites score on IQ tests in America today?

00:24:30.120 What happens when somebody sits down and takes a test today?

00:24:32.820 That is an outcome of the American experiment, an experiment we've been running this country 0.82

00:24:36.760 for hundreds of years.

00:24:37.840 You did not discuss actually how race and racism act upon that outcome.

00:24:46.280 You did not discuss.

00:24:47.080 I mean, amazingly to me, you all didn't talk about slavery or segregation once.

00:24:52.300 And what I'm saying here is not that you lack empathy, although I am saying in a different

00:24:58.000 space, I don't I think you have a like an a sense of what Murray's going through that

00:25:04.700 is different from your sense of what other people who are hurt in this conversation go

00:25:10.100 through.

00:25:10.300 I do believe that.

00:25:11.640 But as it comes to the way you actually conducted the conversation, I'm arguing that you lacked

00:25:16.400 a sense of history, that you didn't deal in a serious way with the history of this

00:25:21.760 conversation, a conversation that has been going on literally since the dawn of the country,

00:25:26.120 a conversation that has been wrong in virtually every version in every iteration we've had

00:25:31.040 in America before.

00:25:32.440 The other thing I want to say about this, and this gets very importantly to Charles Murray's

00:25:36.100 work, you're a neuroscientist.

00:25:38.940 And so I get that you look at Murray and you look at the bell curve and what you see are

00:25:44.520 the tables and the appendices and the kind of scientific version of Charles Murray.

00:25:49.500 I'm a policy journalist.

00:25:51.000 My background is I live in Washington, D.C.

00:25:53.500 I cover politics.

00:25:55.560 Charles Murray, not just to me, what he literally is, is what we call a policy entrepreneur.

00:26:00.940 He's somebody who his entire career has been spent at Washington think tanks.

00:26:04.980 He's at the American Enterprise Institute, where I have a lot of friends and I respect that

00:26:08.460 organization quite a bit.

00:26:09.940 And he argues in different ways and throughout his, again, his entire body of work for policy

00:26:17.020 outcomes.

00:26:17.620 His book before The Bell Curve is called Losing Ground.

00:26:21.240 It's a book about why we should dissolve the great society programs.

00:26:24.420 By the way, when he was selling that book, he said, a lot of whites think they're racist,

00:26:28.300 and this is a book that tells them they aren't.

00:26:30.480 Then he came out with The Bell Curve.

00:26:31.780 And we'll go through this, and I'll quote this back to you.

00:26:33.960 But The Bell Curve's final chapter, he says, why did I do any of this?

00:26:37.760 Why did I talk about any of this?

00:26:39.240 Tim and Richard Hernstein, obviously, the co-author of that book, do.

00:26:42.620 And he says, the reason I did it is because we in America need to re-embrace a politics

00:26:48.040 of difference.

00:26:49.320 We need to understand that we are cognitively different from each other, not just by race,

00:26:55.520 but other folks too, but by race as well.

00:26:58.480 And that understanding that changes what we should do in social policy.

00:27:02.800 He literally says, and again, I can quote this to you if you'd like.

00:27:05.620 He says, for one thing, we have all these low cognitive capacity women giving birth. 1.00

00:27:11.800 And by having the social supports for poor children in this country, we are subsidizing

00:27:16.500 them to give birth.

00:27:17.480 And what we need to do is take those subsidies away.

00:27:20.800 So these women who, according to his book, are disproportionately African-American, their 1.00

00:27:25.200 poor children do not get as much federal support when they are born.

00:27:29.860 And so they are disincentivized to have as many children.

00:27:32.160 He also says that we have all these folks who are Hispanic coming up over the border,

00:27:36.060 that our immigration policy is letting in too many low IQ people. 0.99

00:27:39.560 And while he's not quite as prescriptive in that part, he's pretty clear that he wants

00:27:43.120 us to change our immigration policy in order to resist dysgenic pressure.

00:27:47.620 So I'm just going to finish this up.

00:27:49.040 The other thing you brought up is UBI work.

00:27:51.920 And this is why the reason I bring this up is that the reason I think Charles Murray's work

00:27:55.600 is problematic is that he uses these arguments about IQ and a lot of other arguments he makes

00:28:00.240 about other things to push these points into the public debate, where he is very, very,

00:28:05.560 very influential.

00:28:06.520 He's not by any means a silenced actor in Washington.

00:28:09.140 He gives congressional testimony.

00:28:11.160 He won the Bradley Prize in 2016 and got a $250,000 check for it.

00:28:15.800 His book on UBI, it is completely of a piece with this.

00:28:19.920 I reviewed that book when it came out.

00:28:21.360 It's an interesting book.

00:28:22.200 People should read it.

00:28:23.360 But it is a way of cutting social spending.

00:28:25.300 According to Murray's own numbers, he says it would cut social spending by a trillion

00:28:30.460 dollars in 2020.

00:28:31.720 To give you a sense of scale, Obamacare costs $2 trillion over 10 years.

00:28:36.720 So this is another book in a different way that is a huge argument for cutting social spending,

00:28:42.080 which in part he justifies by saying we are trying to redress racial inequality based on

00:28:46.480 an idea that is a product of American history when in fact it is some combination of innate

00:28:51.960 and environmental, but at any rate, it is not something we're going to be able to change.

00:28:56.540 And so we should stop trying or at least stop trying in the way we have been.

00:29:00.720 Okay, Ezra, again, you can't conflate his views on social policy with an honest discussion

00:29:08.300 of empirical science.

00:29:09.780 Those are two separate conversations.

00:29:11.160 You can agree about the data or disagree in a good faith way about the data and have a

00:29:16.880 separate conversation about what to do in response to the data and then disagree in

00:29:20.600 a good faith way about that.

00:29:21.720 Now, I'm not defending Murray's view of what the social policy should be.

00:29:27.020 I'm open-minded about universal basic income.

00:29:29.740 I think there can be a good faith debate about many of these topics.

00:29:34.080 It's a completely separate conversation.

00:29:36.160 And I totally share your concern about racism and inequality.

00:29:40.420 And again, I have no interest in using science to establish differences between races.

00:29:45.540 But the problem is, and I have publicly criticized people who do have an interest in using science

00:29:51.360 that way.

00:29:51.660 And one of my critical questions of Murray was, why pay attention to any of this stuff?

00:29:56.480 And I've said publicly that I didn't think his answer was great on that.

00:30:00.720 And I'm not interested in paying attention to this stuff.

00:30:03.460 And yet I have to in order to have conversations like this.

00:30:07.380 But the problem is that the data on population differences will continue to emerge whether we're

00:30:13.760 looking for it or not.

00:30:15.380 And the idea that one should lie about these data or pretend to be convinced by bad arguments

00:30:22.960 that are politically correct or worse, that it's OK to malign people or even destroy their

00:30:28.660 reputations if they won't pretend to be convinced by bad arguments.

00:30:33.620 That's a disaster.

00:30:35.220 Morally and politically and intellectually, that is a disaster.

00:30:40.160 And that's where we are.

00:30:41.460 That's my criticism of what you have done at Vox and what Turkheimer and Nisbet and Hardin

00:30:47.780 have done.

00:30:48.180 And the truth is, for whatever reason, OK, however noble it is in your head, you've been

00:30:55.940 extraordinarily unfair to me and Murray, especially to Murray.

00:31:01.280 I just want to give you a couple of examples here.

00:31:03.020 I think we have to go into this issue of, you know, you just claimed you didn't call us

00:31:06.860 racist, right?

00:31:08.200 You didn't use the word racist.

00:31:10.080 I'll grant you that.

00:31:11.280 You use the word racialist, right?

00:31:13.140 Which you know most people will read as racist.

00:31:15.240 But even if you even if that is an adequate way to split the difference, everything else

00:31:20.200 you said imputed, if not an utter racial bias and a commitment to some kind of white

00:31:28.760 superiority, you say again and again that here's a quote from your article is actually the

00:31:34.920 subtitle of the article.

00:31:36.460 And when I you know, I called the podcast with Murray forbidden knowledge.

00:31:39.380 You said it isn't forbidden knowledge.

00:31:41.600 It's America's most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality, right?

00:31:47.000 We're shilling for bigotry and racial inequality. 0.80

00:31:49.940 And then you convict Murray.

00:31:52.240 Again, this is a quote of being engaged in a decades long focus on the intellectual inferiority

00:31:58.760 of African-Americans.

00:32:00.560 Now, honestly, that is a smear.

00:32:04.240 I mean, Murray has not been focused on African-Americans.

00:32:07.660 He's been waging a decades long battle to survive being scapegoated by people who insinuate that

00:32:14.940 he's a racist. 0.75

00:32:15.500 And the nature of that battle is to continually try to you have to keep touching this issue 0.98

00:32:21.420 to get the slime off of you.

00:32:23.540 But as you know, the bell curve was not focused on race.

00:32:27.060 There's just one chapter on race.

00:32:28.960 And the truth is that, and you almost alluded to this in what you just said, the truth is

00:32:34.720 that Murray is just as worried about unearned privilege as you are.

00:32:40.620 He's just worried about a different kind of privilege.

00:32:43.080 You could call it IQ privilege, right?

00:32:45.440 And the bell curve is an 800-page lament on this type of privilege.

00:32:50.960 And again, it has nothing in principle to do with race.

00:32:54.020 Murray is just as worried about the white people on the left side of the IQ distribution 0.54

00:32:58.460 as black people or Latinos or anyone else.

00:33:01.760 And you could have said it would be just as true to describe him as having been involved

00:33:08.460 in a decades-long focus on the superiority of Asians over white people, OK?

00:33:14.660 Because that's also part of the story.

00:33:16.940 And, you know, you might ask yourself why you didn't do that.

00:33:19.680 But I want to read a quote from Murray on my podcast because this is, again, I'm not

00:33:27.140 at all arguing for his social policies.

00:33:30.640 I just want us to be fair to the man.

00:33:34.180 And so this is a quote.

00:33:36.380 If there's one thing that right in the bell curve did, it sensitized me to the extent to

00:33:40.420 which high IQ is pure luck, that none of us earn our IQ, whether it's by nature or

00:33:46.440 nurture.

00:33:47.220 We aren't the ones who did the nurturance.

00:33:49.680 Hard work and perseverance and all those other qualities are great, but we can't take

00:33:54.620 credit for our IQ.

00:33:56.320 We live in a society that is tailor-made for people with high IQs.

00:34:01.180 The people who got the short end of the stick in that lottery deserve our admiration and

00:34:05.480 our support if they're doing everything right.

00:34:08.640 And that's the end of the quote.

00:34:10.620 He is worried about a world where success is determined by a narrow range of abilities.

00:34:16.740 And these abilities, whether they come from nature or nurture, are distributed unequally.

00:34:22.680 That's guaranteed to be true.

00:34:25.100 We just know that they can't possibly be equal, both among individuals and across groups.

00:34:30.800 And when you're talking about the averages in groups.

00:34:32.560 And he's totally committed, as I am, again, I don't know how many times you have to reiterate

00:34:37.600 this in a podcast to make it stick, but the punchline here is that everyone has to be treated

00:34:42.300 as an individual.

00:34:43.900 But we have to get past thinking about groups.

00:34:46.940 I mean, there's more variance within a group than between groups.

00:34:50.260 And everyone has to be encountered on their own merits.

00:34:53.320 And he's totally clear about that.

00:34:55.060 So to paint him as callous and as racist and as essentially a white supremacist, you're 0.97

00:35:01.620 talking he's fixated on the inferiority of blacks on your account. 0.98

00:35:06.000 It is irresponsible and unethical.

00:35:08.120 And that that's the kind of wrong that I was trying to address by giving him a platform

00:35:13.120 on my podcast.

00:35:14.260 And that is what produced so much outrage in me in our email exchange.

00:35:18.980 When I hear this, I actually really wonder how much I want to be careful here.

00:35:25.640 I know Charles Murray.

00:35:27.200 When I wrote my very first piece as a journalist in Washington, it was a piece about poverty.

00:35:31.860 I interviewed him for it.

00:35:33.800 I've reviewed his books.

00:35:35.280 I've talked with him.

00:35:36.500 My wife is writing a book about UBI, actually.

00:35:38.820 He's quoted in the book.

00:35:41.140 I do not want Charles Murray silenced.

00:35:43.540 And he's a lovely guy interpersonally.

00:35:45.800 There's no doubt about that.

00:35:46.700 And the quote you read from him about luck, I want to put a pin in that because there's

00:35:50.920 a whole conversation I want to have with you about that quote.

00:35:53.820 If Charles Murray followed what that quote implies, I think things would look very different

00:35:58.520 with him and with my view of his career.

00:36:00.880 But I do think I need to go through some of what you said here.

00:36:03.580 So first, I don't know how much you understand Charles Murray's career.

00:36:07.920 As I said, his first book is Losing Ground.

00:36:10.520 It's a book about the great society.

00:36:12.140 In the interest of time and basic human sanity here, Ezra, I'm worried.

00:36:16.580 That what you're going to do is actually is all the stuff you're going to cover is actually

00:36:20.300 irrelevant because one.

00:36:21.640 Hey, Sam, I've let you I've let you had your say.

00:36:24.080 I'm going to I'm just going to I'm just going to keep going.

00:36:26.420 OK, that's fine.

00:36:27.200 But I just want to prevent your and listener frustration here, because if you go on for

00:36:31.520 10 minutes for me to only say, well, again, his social policies are not social policies

00:36:36.800 I'm advocating.

00:36:38.060 We're going to don't worry.

00:36:38.960 We're going to go we're going to go through all this.

00:36:40.460 And I I don't mean this to be sharp, but you don't give short answers yourself.

00:36:45.020 So, you know, we're just going to have to indulge the other one here.

00:36:47.860 Sure.

00:36:48.300 So, OK, so this first book is Losing Ground.

00:36:50.420 It's about dissolving the welfare state. 0.53

00:36:53.280 And again, he says about that book, a lot of whites think they're racist.

00:36:57.680 I'm going to show them they're not.

00:36:58.680 Next book is The Bell Curve.

00:37:00.320 The way Murray often defends The Bell Curve is by saying, hey, look, it only had this one

00:37:03.940 chapter on race and IQ.

00:37:05.000 And he's completely or actually a couple of chapters.

00:37:06.460 But he's completely right about that.

00:37:07.840 The chapters where that is mentioned, they are not the bulk of the book.

00:37:10.880 But I'm actually a publisher of pieces and I work with a lot of authors on book excerpts.

00:37:16.420 The furor around The Bell Curve is not around the book, which it's a long book.

00:37:20.520 Most people haven't read it.

00:37:21.980 It's that the part of the book that he had excerpted on The New Republic, on the cover

00:37:28.620 of The New Republic under Andrew Sullivan, the cover of The New Republic, it just says in

00:37:33.660 big letters, race and IQ.

00:37:35.380 The reason that is the part people focus on is that they pulled the most controversial

00:37:39.740 part of the book and made it a huge deal.

00:37:42.560 I know that authors, when they don't want their most controversial part to define the

00:37:46.940 work, they don't let you excerpt that.

00:37:48.840 So one, I don't think Murray's Blame is there.

00:37:50.600 His next book is honestly weirder.

00:37:52.420 I don't know if you've ever read or even are that familiar with Human Achievement.

00:37:56.300 Just to be on the record here, I've read The Bell Curve and I've read Coming Apart.

00:38:00.400 And that's all.

00:38:01.760 Coming Apart's an interesting book, too.

00:38:03.380 And Coming Apart just spells out his concern about the cognitive stratification of society.

00:38:08.620 So Human Achievement is a book where Murray, and this comes right after The Bell Curve.

00:38:12.720 And when I describe this book, I almost feel like people are not going to believe me.

00:38:15.960 But go look it up.

00:38:17.260 Murray wants to quantify the human achievements of different races.

00:38:21.100 And the way he does that is he looks in a bunch of encyclopedias and he literally counts up the

00:38:26.660 amount of space given to the accomplishments of artists and philosophers and scientists

00:38:31.940 from different places.

00:38:33.740 And he uses that to say, European Americans, Europeans, white Europeans have done the most

00:38:40.280 to push forward human achievement.

00:38:41.880 One criticism that I and other people have of Murray is that he often looks at indicators

00:38:47.480 that reflect inequality and uses them to justify inequality.

00:38:53.680 That book is like one of the most massive correlation causation errors I can possibly imagine.

00:38:58.960 So now the next thing you say is that in doing this, that I am conflating two things.

00:39:03.860 I am conflating just a calm discussion you two had about the science with a social policy

00:39:09.660 agenda.

00:39:10.660 I want to read you actually what was said in your discussion with Murray about this, because

00:39:16.280 this is actually why I am interested in it.

00:39:19.200 When you were talking with Murray, one thing I think to your credit is you repeatedly asked

00:39:23.380 him, hey, why do this at all?

00:39:25.640 Why have this whole discussion about race and IQ?

00:39:28.060 What are we doing here?

00:39:30.080 So you say, why seek data on racial differences at all?

00:39:33.340 What is the purpose of doing this?

00:39:34.880 And Murray responds, and again, I'm quoting, because we now have social policy embedded in

00:39:39.880 employment policy, in academic policy, which is based on the premise that everybody's equal

00:39:44.060 above the neck, whether it is men or women or whether it is ethnicity.

00:39:48.060 And when you have that embedded into law, you have a variety of bad things happen.

00:39:51.580 And then you ask it again.

00:39:53.240 You say, needless to say, I'm sure we can find hate supremacist organizations who love the

00:39:57.920 fact that the Bell Crow was published and admonish their members to read it at the first

00:40:01.420 opportunity.

00:40:01.940 Why look at this?

00:40:03.540 How does this help society give more information about racial difference?

00:40:07.000 And Murray, again, I'm not going to read the whole thing because I think that would be

00:40:09.420 dull, gives a long answer about affirmative action and why it is bad.

00:40:13.400 So I am not the one conflating this, number one.

00:40:16.360 I am listening to the conversation you had.

00:40:18.780 I'm listening.

00:40:19.420 I'm a close reader of Murray's work.

00:40:21.380 And the reason I care about this stuff is because I care about what the actual social policy

00:40:25.960 outcomes are.

00:40:26.540 Ezra, then you don't know what I mean by conflate.

00:40:28.640 Let me just, I got to clarify this.

00:40:30.040 Sam, you can respond to everything when I'm done.

00:40:32.780 I promise I will shut up and let you talk.

00:40:34.920 The final thing that you did in your answer to me here was you said again and again, people

00:40:40.220 pretending to believe politically correct ideas, people pretending to believe bad evidence.

00:40:45.500 A couple of things on that.

00:40:46.440 I don't doubt your sincerity in this, but I can assure you that Nisbed and Paige Hardin

00:40:51.980 and Eric Terkheimer and me, we actually believe what we believe.

00:40:57.340 And one of the things that has honestly been frustrating to me in dealing with you is you

00:41:01.640 have a kind of a very sensitive ear to where you feel that somebody has insulted you, but

00:41:07.900 not a sensitive ear to yourself.

00:41:09.620 During this discussion, you have called me and not through implication, not through something 0.62

00:41:14.120 where you're reading in between the lines, you've called me a slanderer, a liar, intellectually 0.83

00:41:18.120 dishonest, a bad faith actor, cynically motivated by profit, defamatory, libelous. 0.91

00:41:23.020 You've called Terkheimer and Nisbed and Paige Hardin, you've called them fringe. 0.77

00:41:28.400 You've said just here that they're part of a politically correct moral panic.

00:41:32.080 I do think that you need to do a little bit more here to credit the idea that there just

00:41:37.220 is a disagreement here.

00:41:38.760 And it's a disagreement in part because people are looking at different parts of this with

00:41:41.980 different emphasis, but also disagreement because people look at this issue and see

00:41:45.980 different things.

00:41:47.100 I often hear you on your podcast talk about how it's important to try to to try to extend

00:41:52.680 the idea of sincerity.

00:41:54.740 And one thing that is annoying is that, you know, among the one thing that one thing that

00:41:59.000 I have not done is assume that you don't believe what you believe.

00:42:02.080 Everybody here is trying to have an argument about something that is important, that in

00:42:05.080 Murray's words is about how we end up that should feed into how we order society, what

00:42:11.280 we do to redress racial difference.

00:42:13.160 And that's not just a high stakes conversation.

00:42:15.220 It's also one where people just disagree.

00:42:17.820 Okay.

00:42:18.700 So untangling a bit of confusion here.

00:42:21.740 I guess there's two topics here that I should address.

00:42:24.440 I think we have to talk about what it means to insinuate that someone's racist.

00:42:27.920 But the conflation issue.

00:42:29.920 I get that you hate his social policies.

00:42:32.920 I get that you see that he thinks his social policies are justified by what he thinks is

00:42:38.960 empirically true in the world of data and facts and human difference.

00:42:43.540 So there's a connection there.

00:42:45.540 Right.

00:42:45.780 And you're worried that if one takes the data seriously in the way that he takes it

00:42:51.440 seriously, if one endorses his interpretation of the data from psychology or psychometrics or

00:42:58.520 behavioral genetics, that that will lead to social policies that you find abhorrent or that

00:43:04.960 you think will produce a massive amount of inequality or suffering or something wrong.

00:43:10.040 And I get that.

00:43:11.960 But the conflation is, is that talking about data is one thing.

00:43:18.160 Talking about what should be done in light of the facts that you acknowledge to be true

00:43:22.940 or are likely to be true is another.

00:43:25.940 And there can be good faith disagreements in both of those conversations.

00:43:30.060 Those conversations are not inextricably linked.

00:43:33.380 And what I am noticing here is, and what I've called a moral panic, is that there are people

00:43:39.340 who think that if we don't make certain ideas, certain facts taboo to discuss, if we don't

00:43:47.140 impose a massive reputational cost in discussing these things, then terrible things will happen

00:43:54.040 at the level of social policy.

00:43:55.500 That the only way to protect our politics is to be, again, this is a loaded term, but

00:44:02.120 this is what is happening from my view scientifically, is to be intellectually dishonest, to be led

00:44:08.500 by confirmation bias.

00:44:10.580 Confirmation bias is a real thing.

00:44:12.700 And this is the situation I think we're in.

00:44:15.400 And everything you've said about the politics and the historical wrongs of racism, which

00:44:20.220 you wrote about a lot in your last piece, I totally agree with, okay?

00:44:24.360 And I'm probably more aligned with you politically than I am with Murray, which is to say that

00:44:30.100 I share your biases.

00:44:32.180 I share the bias that is leading you to frame the matter the way you're framing it.

00:44:36.640 Again, I probably should have spelled this out in the beginning of my podcast with Murray,

00:44:41.020 and I didn't for reasons I described.

00:44:42.940 I don't think it would have made a bit of difference, but I still should have done it.

00:44:46.940 And I think it would have been called anodyne the way that Nisbet et al called, are talking

00:44:51.960 about individual differences, anodyne.

00:44:54.040 But I think everything you say about the history of racism is true.

00:44:57.600 I think you could well be on the right side of a good debate about social policy, and your

00:45:04.660 concerns here are totally understandable.

00:45:07.000 I get all of that.

00:45:07.860 So this goes to the charge of bad faith against you, which in this conversation I admitted might

00:45:15.140 have been unfair, right?

00:45:16.380 You might not be the Glenn Greenwald character I read you to be at a certain point in that

00:45:22.420 email exchange.

00:45:23.080 So let's just assume, as you say, that you feel intellectually scrupulous and ethically

00:45:29.300 righteous, okay?

00:45:30.600 I know what it's like to feel that.

00:45:32.680 And you feel this way because you are concerned about racism, you're horrified by the history

00:45:37.200 of racism, and you feel that the kinds of social policies that Murray favors would be disastrous.

00:45:43.320 And again, I'm not arguing for those social policies, but your bias here, your connection

00:45:50.700 to the political outcomes when you're talking about the empirical science is causing you

00:45:57.220 to make journalistic errors, is causing Nisbet and Turkheimer to make errors of scientific

00:46:01.680 reasoning, and these are obvious errors.

00:46:03.940 I mean, in your last piece, you have this whole section on the Flynn effect and how the Flynn

00:46:07.660 effect should be read as accounting for the black-white differences in purely environmental

00:46:12.580 terms.

00:46:13.440 Well, even Flynn rejects that interpretation of the Flynn effect.

00:46:16.980 I mean, he had originally hoped, he publicly hoped that his effect would account for that,

00:46:21.820 but now he has acknowledged that the data don't suggest that.

00:46:25.560 And there are many other errors of this kind that you and Nisbet and Turkheimer are making 0.99

00:46:30.880 when you criticize me and Murray, and you criticize Murray for errors that he didn't make.

00:46:37.300 And in order for you to imagine that I'm equally biased, right?

00:46:41.700 Because you must imagine bias on my side.

00:46:43.560 Why am I getting it so wrong, right?

00:46:45.800 Why am I looking at the same facts that Nisbet and Turkheimer and Hardin are looking at, and

00:46:50.580 I am getting it absolutely wrong?

00:46:53.120 You have to imagine that I have an equal and opposite passion, that I feel equally righteous,

00:47:00.060 but it's pointing in the opposite direction.

00:47:02.660 I would have to be a grand dragon of the KKK to feel an equal and opposite bias on these data.

00:47:11.300 And you've already said you don't think I'm a racist, but that's what would have to be true of me,

00:47:16.720 to be as biased as you are, again, understandably, given the history of racism on these data.

00:47:22.900 And it's just not the case.

00:47:26.120 What you have in me is someone who shares most of your political concerns and yet is unwilling to,

00:47:36.680 again, a loaded word, lie about what is and is not a good reading of empirical data and what is and

00:47:44.800 is not a good argument about genetics and environment and what is reasonable to presume based on what we

00:47:52.100 already know.

00:47:52.680 And again, the problem is, is that even if we never look for these things again, even if we follow this

00:47:59.620 taboo and decide that it's just, there's no ethical reason to ever look at population differences,

00:48:06.020 we will be continually ambushed by these data.

00:48:09.080 They're just going to spring out of our study of intelligence generically or human genetics generically.

00:48:17.160 It's happened on other topics already and people try to keep quiet about it because, again,

00:48:23.300 the environment journalistically and politically is so charged.

00:48:27.140 And my criticism of you has been from day one that you are contributing to that political charge.

00:48:34.580 And it's totally unnecessary because the political answer is so clear.

00:48:39.760 The political answer is we have to be committed to racial equality and everyone getting all the

00:48:46.640 opportunities in life for happiness and self-actualization that they can use.

00:48:51.680 And we're nowhere near achieving that kind of society.

00:48:55.220 And the real racists are the people who are not committed to those goals.

00:49:01.420 There's so much there.

00:49:02.340 I actually really appreciate that answer because I think it helps open this up.

00:49:09.040 So let me say a couple of things here.

00:49:10.800 One is it, one of my macro, one of the things I've come to think about you that I actually

00:49:16.040 did not come into this believing is you're very quick to see a lot of psychological tendencies,

00:49:25.800 cognitive fallacies, et cetera, in others that you don't see applying to yourself or people

00:49:31.760 you've sort of written into your tribe.

00:49:33.800 So you say words in there like confirmation bias, et cetera, to me about Murray, about how

00:49:39.400 we're looking at Murray.

00:49:40.580 And my whole the whole thing I just told you is that Charles Murray is a guy who works at

00:49:45.220 conservative think tanks whose first book was about how to get why we should get rid of the 1.00

00:49:48.500 welfare state, who is his whole life's work is about breaking down social policy.

00:49:54.420 So to the extent that I have any biases that flow backwards from political commitments,

00:50:00.020 so does he.

00:50:00.740 We're all what's my bias.

00:50:02.360 So I'm going to go through that.

00:50:03.640 Don't worry.

00:50:04.040 I promise you I will get to your bias very quickly.

00:50:06.580 I do want to know you mentioned James Flynn here to prepare for this conversation.

00:50:10.700 I called Flynn the other day.

00:50:12.420 I spoke to him on Monday.

00:50:14.200 His read of the evidence right now, and this is me quoting him, he says, I think it is

00:50:19.320 more probable than not that the IQ difference between black and white Americans is environmental.

00:50:24.880 As a social scientist, I cannot be sure if they have a genetic advantage or disadvantage.

00:50:30.640 So I'm just that is what James Flynn thinks as of Monday.

00:50:34.020 So then you ask me, and I think this is a great this is a good question, because I think

00:50:38.100 this gets to to the core of this and it gets to where I tried to open us up into.

00:50:42.000 You your view of this debate is that to say that you have a bias in it is to say in your

00:50:48.700 terms that you're you're like the grand dragon of the KKK, that the only version of a bias

00:50:53.220 that could be influencing what you see here is a core form of racism.

00:50:57.540 That's actually not my view of you, but I do think you I do think you have a bias.

00:51:01.360 I think you have a huge sensitivity.

00:51:06.560 Let's put it that way.

00:51:08.340 And you have a lot of difficulty extending an assumption of good faith.

00:51:12.000 To anyone who disagrees with you on an issue that you code as identity politics.

00:51:17.780 And there's a place, actually, where I think you got into this in a pretty interesting way.

00:51:21.720 I went back and I read your discussion with Glenn Lowry at the beginning when you're talking

00:51:26.120 about why you chose to have Glenn on the show.

00:51:28.480 You say my goal was to find an African-American intellectual who could really get into the

00:51:33.780 details of me, but whom I also trusted to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn't

00:51:39.040 be contaminated by identity politics.

00:51:42.020 To you, engaging in identity politics discredits your ability to participate in a rational conversation.

00:51:48.600 And it's something, as far as I can tell, that you do not see yourself as doing.

00:51:53.720 So here's my question for you on that specific quote.

00:51:56.520 What does it mean to you, particularly when you're talking about something like race?

00:52:01.360 To have your ideas contaminated by identity...

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 09, 2018

#123 — Identity & Honesty

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