TRIGGERnometry - Noah Carl on Race, IQ and Academic Freedom

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:08.240 I'm Constantine Kissinger.

00:00:09.500 And this is the show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

00:00:16.300 Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:20.600 Our brilliant guest this week is a controversial sociologist who's suing his Cambridge College for dismissing him after a controversy.

00:00:30.000 So, Noah Karl, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:32.680 Good to be here.

00:00:33.400 I've made that really sound really exciting.

00:00:35.360 I don't know how exciting it is, but welcome to the show.

00:00:38.440 For anyone who doesn't know you, just tell everybody who you are, how are you, where you are,

00:00:42.500 a little bit about the story that I just mentioned.

00:00:46.020 So, I'm a sociologist who graduated from a PhD at Oxford a couple of years ago,

00:00:54.660 and I am interested in a variety of different subjects, Brexit, European Union,

00:01:00.000 political attitudes, psychometrics, personality, evolution. And I came to prominence, at least to

00:01:09.540 a small extent, following a controversy after my appointment at St. Edmunds College, Cambridge,

00:01:16.360 which occurred in the autumn of 2018. Basically, some students and academics made a series of

00:01:25.180 complaints to the college about me. These complaints were not trivial. They alleged that

00:01:31.380 I was a racist pseudoscientist and they called for an investigation into my appointment at the

00:01:38.440 college. An investigation was undertaken and five months later I was dismissed from my role

00:01:46.040 at the college and made unemployed. So here I am today and I've decided to try to take some kind

00:01:54.600 of legal action against the college i like the fact you said so here i am today like this is my

00:01:59.560 rock bottom this is what happens when you get unemployed you end up on trigonometry

00:02:04.360 well welcome we can't talk about the details of the case for legal reasons

00:02:09.380 but just in broad brushstrokes i mean some of the accusations that were made was that you're

00:02:14.520 a pseudoscientist that you were doing research into these super controversial race and iq stuff

00:02:20.620 and one of the interesting things as well that I wanted to get you to touch on is that the vast

00:02:27.080 majority of the people who supported the motion to have you dismissed were scientists or scholars

00:02:33.700 in areas that have nothing to do with what you actually researched. So there are people like

00:02:38.180 English literature professors making assertions as to the validity of your research. So just give

00:02:43.660 us an overview of the whole situation. Yeah, so there was this open letter sent to the newspapers

00:02:49.360 in early December which was initially signed by a couple of hundred academics and subsequently

00:02:55.420 over the next few days signed by 586 in total and the headline of the open letter was no to

00:03:03.060 racist pseudoscience at Cambridge University where I'd been employed and the charges in the

00:03:10.980 open letter were that I had been involved in work that would be that could be considered

00:03:18.560 pseudoscientific and that I'd attended a certain conference in London called the London Conference

00:03:23.340 on Intelligence, and that my work had been or was liable to be misused by certain bad actors with

00:03:32.520 the purpose of harming vulnerable populations around the world. And as you correctly pointed

00:03:40.020 out, the open letter was signed by a large number of people, many of whom one would suspect probably

00:03:45.520 didn't have that much expertise in the relevant areas. Actually, a research assistant and I went

00:03:51.900 through the entire list of signatories and identified the subject for each one. And we

00:03:59.040 found that only a relatively small number were in subjects like biology or psychology. I think

00:04:05.800 less than 10% in those disciplines which could be considered relevant to the subject matter

00:04:11.040 at hand. A great deal were in subjects like gender studies and critical race theory.

00:04:18.620 That's what Constance got his master's in. 0.99

00:04:22.920 I'm an expert.

00:04:24.060 Yeah, okay, well, maybe we can talk more about that later.

00:04:26.840 I can confirm everybody's racist.

00:04:30.000 And sort of qualitative sociology, history, and English literature, as you said. I'm hesitant

00:04:37.860 to completely dismiss someone's opinion

00:04:39.620 just because they're not in the same field as me.

00:04:42.800 But in this case, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable

00:04:45.780 to presume many of them just sort of saw a notice

00:04:49.520 for an open letter about someone

00:04:50.760 who'd been accused of racism and thought,

00:04:52.480 well, I better sign that because I'm against racism.

00:04:55.480 And then, you know, days or weeks later,

00:04:59.500 it all broke out in the press.

00:05:01.740 It should be said, Francis,

00:05:02.600 just before you ask your question,

00:05:04.140 that there was also a letter that later was signed

00:05:07.280 by many people who are actually experts in the field

00:05:09.980 in your support, in your defense, right?

00:05:12.060 Yeah, so Quillette magazine kindly organized an open letter

00:05:16.840 in support of me, or at least in support of my academic freedom,

00:05:20.740 once I had been fired from the college right at the end of April.

00:05:24.560 And that was a sort of short statement just saying

00:05:27.240 that we support Noah Karl and we oppose the injustice visited upon him.

00:05:32.500 and that was signed by over 600 academics and scholars from around the world,

00:05:38.280 including many in areas like intelligence research and human evolution

00:05:43.380 and human behavioural sciences.

00:05:46.760 I thought you were going to say, when you interrupted me,

00:05:49.300 it just needs to be said that I'm not racist.

00:05:53.480 Everybody who watches the show knows that that is not true,

00:05:56.200 so there is no way I could say that.

00:05:57.780 I know, absolutely.

00:05:59.540 No, and I realise you can't get into the specificities of your case,

00:06:03.720 but again, broad brushstrokes.

00:06:05.240 Why did these accusations come about?

00:06:08.360 So I think it's reasonable to sort of lay out

00:06:12.640 what the main charges against me were in slightly more detail.

00:06:16.860 So they objected, as I mentioned,

00:06:18.800 to the fact that I'd attended this conference in London

00:06:20.900 called the London Conference on Intelligence,

00:06:22.700 which I can say a bit more about in a second.

00:06:25.020 They also objected to the fact that I'd published

00:06:26.940 and reviewed papers in a journal called Open Psych, founded by a colleague of mine,

00:06:32.580 which again, I can talk a little bit more about if you'd like. And then thirdly, they objected,

00:06:36.600 although they didn't mention it explicitly in the open letter, to a paper of mine published

00:06:41.640 in an evolutionary psychology journal, which was entitled, How Stifling Debate About Race,

00:06:47.660 Genes and IQ Can Do Harm. So quite a provocative title, but which made some, I think, quite

00:06:53.980 important and serious arguments about the ethics of discussing these topics which are considered

00:07:00.660 very controversial. And what was the thrust of that paper? Right, so that paper made three main

00:07:08.820 arguments in support of the proposition that stifling debate around race genes and IQ can

00:07:15.160 actually do harm as opposed to good. The first argument was that by equating, as many people do,

00:07:20.680 research on race, genes, and IQ with racism by equating a proposition like part of the gap

00:07:28.700 in average IQ between one group and another may be attributable to genetics with the claim

00:07:34.180 one group is genetically superior to the other group, you're holding our morals hostage to the 1.00

00:07:41.220 facts. You're saying that if the science ever did suggest that genes made a contribution to

00:07:46.160 the gap in average IQ between two different groups, then that group that scored higher

00:07:51.520 would be somehow entitled to oppress or exploit or consider itself metaphysically superior to the

00:07:56.940 other group, which seems like a rather irresponsible and dangerous position to take.

00:08:01.780 We don't want our morals to be determined by what the next paper published in Nature or Science

00:08:07.960 finds. We want our morals to be couched in robust ethical principles that can withstand the onslaught

00:08:15.820 of science. That was the first main argument. The second argument was based in large part

00:08:23.180 on arguments that had been made by Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate. He points

00:08:28.160 out that while certain political parties, most notably the Nazis, obviously egregiously

00:08:37.320 misused science surrounding human population differences for appalling ends, other political

00:08:45.800 political ideologies or political systems have misused the reverse position, i.e. the point of

00:08:51.680 view that we're all blank slates and that biology plays no role in the differences between us or in

00:08:56.120 the differences between groups. This rings a bell. I did grow up in the Soviet Union, so I have an

00:09:00.580 idea what you might be referring to. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Soviet Union being the

00:09:06.100 most obvious example of this. In Pinker's book, he identifies quotes from prominent communist

00:09:13.380 intellectuals in which they use the metaphor of the blank slate to describe how humans are

00:09:20.860 plastic and could be manipulated for political purposes and to make them into sort of better

00:09:26.840 you know individuals more well disposed to life in a communist utopia. I think there's a quote

00:09:39.340 from Mao,

00:09:40.400 Se-Tung in China,

00:09:41.440 which is something like,

00:09:44.640 oh, I've forgotten

00:09:45.540 what the quote is.

00:09:46.680 That's right.

00:09:47.460 But,

00:09:49.620 only the newborn child

00:09:51.880 is spotless,

00:09:52.460 I think is a quote

00:09:53.100 from the Khmer Rouge

00:09:54.220 in Cambodia.

00:09:55.360 Great people.

00:09:57.220 Yeah.

00:09:58.260 Mao, great guy.

00:09:58.940 He only killed

00:10:00.020 80 million people, man.

00:10:01.020 I know,

00:10:01.380 we're overpopulating.

00:10:02.480 He's doing his bit.

00:10:03.960 So yeah,

00:10:04.400 you can find quotes

00:10:05.700 in Mao,

00:10:06.240 you can find quotes

00:10:06.980 in the Khmer Rouge,

00:10:07.900 you can find quotes

00:10:08.720 in some Soviet intellectuals.

00:10:10.940 And the idea is that any belief we may have

00:10:18.280 about the nature of human psychology or human nature itself

00:10:23.300 can be manipulated for political purposes.

00:10:26.940 There's nothing inherently dangerous about the biology plays a role,

00:10:32.020 end of the spectrum, as opposed to the biology plays no role,

00:10:35.360 end of the spectrum.

00:10:36.060 And hence, again, we should try to build an ethically robust system which is logically independent of scientific facts, but which may be informed by them to some extent.

00:10:51.940 And then the third argument of the paper was basically just that there have been clear empirical examples of where stifling debate around these topics has done harm.

00:11:02.000 One of the examples I gave in that section was of research relating to the election of Donald Trump.

00:11:12.380 Whether you support or you oppose Donald Trump, it's clear that very many people strongly oppose him and consider his...

00:11:19.620 That is the biggest understatement in the history of trigonometry.

00:11:23.500 He has engendered a certain amount of criticism, it could be said.

00:11:28.580 Mate, go into politics.

00:11:29.680 And I think Sir Roger Scruton had a wonderful quote,

00:11:33.060 which is that he appears to have some flaws of character.

00:11:39.240 In any case, suppose you're strongly against his presidency,

00:11:43.560 as many people are,

00:11:44.800 and it's obviously not unreasonable to be strongly opposed to it.

00:11:50.040 You have to recognize that the atmosphere of political correctness

00:11:55.560 that has bubbled up in the United States

00:12:01.500 and in the West more generally did contribute to his election.

00:12:06.580 There's an analysis written up in Quillette

00:12:11.440 by a gentleman named Zach Goldberg

00:12:14.040 where he showed in a series of statistical models

00:12:16.540 that even after controlling for measures of anti-immigration sentiment

00:12:21.240 and ethnic prejudice, opposition to political correctness was still a strong predictor of

00:12:27.300 voting for Trump as opposed to Hillary Clinton. And there's some anecdotal quotations in various

00:12:33.200 news sources from the 2016 campaign of people saying, well, you know, I've never voted Republican

00:12:38.340 before. And, you know, I don't particularly like Trump's policies, but we just have to do something

00:12:42.000 about political correctness. And of course, not all opposition to IQ research or research into

00:12:48.700 population differences is a sort of juvenile manifestation of political correctness. Some of

00:12:55.820 it's based on a serious judgment about the harm that could be done by this research. But I think

00:13:01.960 a lot of it, or at least a certain amount of it, is just a manifestation of political correctness.

00:13:06.560 And the people who take that position should recognize that imposing political correctness

00:13:13.300 on others can often lead to a backlash, as it has done in the case of Donald Trump.

00:13:17.420 but no when you started this research was there not a small part of your brain that just thought 0.93

00:13:22.720 i'm going to get into shit for this well uh one thing i should point out as i've pointed out in 0.84

00:13:28.520 in a blog post responding to some of the criticisms of my work is that i've not actually 0.95

00:13:33.160 done any original research on population differences in intelligence or iq although i

00:13:38.460 obviously have shown an interest in it and i am still interested in it uh to this day uh but

00:13:44.300 certainly, it crossed my mind that publishing certain works or attending certain conferences

00:13:51.680 might get me into trouble. It was certainly a risk I was willing to take given that I got into

00:13:57.720 academia because I'm interested in finding out the truth about things and also interested in

00:14:03.980 exploring controversial topics as opposed to just making incremental progress on things that are

00:14:09.420 already very well understood indeed i would argue it's sort of our role as scholars to push the

00:14:15.680 boundaries of of truth and of science uh and so i felt at the time that while i might get into a

00:14:23.220 little bit of trouble it's probably not going to be too bad that judgment seems on reflection

00:14:27.860 to have been somewhat mistaken because we laugh about it but fundamentally we were chatting just

00:14:33.440 before we started the interview essentially no matter what the outcome of the legal case is your

00:14:38.260 career is over now? Quite possibly, yes. I mean, as I mentioned to you in the pre-interview

00:14:43.800 discussion, I'd watched an interview with Brett Weinstein, who, along with his wife, Heather

00:14:51.240 Haying, was dismissed from Evergreen College following a scandal in 2017, somewhat different

00:14:57.900 from mine, but received much more media attention. And Professor Weinstein and his wife have many

00:15:05.440 years of uh teaching experience uh and clearly uh very well-established educators and he was

00:15:14.380 saying in the interview that i watched that after having been dismissed from evergreen he's he still

00:15:19.820 hasn't received any job offers from universities which is mind-boggling yeah we've we've both met

00:15:24.440 brett and heather they're lovely people they're very balanced yeah they are on the left yeah and

00:15:29.580 And, I mean, as I said to you jokingly, you know, you are an interesting and promising scholar.

00:15:37.000 But they are people who have a 20-odd year career of teaching and giving value to the institution that they represented.

00:15:43.660 So the fact that no one wants to hire them says quite a lot about what you said is cowardice, basically, on behalf of many institutions.

00:15:52.620 I mean, yeah, they would seem to be just a total asset for any university.

00:15:57.640 They've got all that teaching experience. They've developed a public persona of respectable and engaging scholars and clearly are, as you say, affable, nice people who simply want to understand the world and promote knowledge and learning.

00:16:17.120 And yet they haven't received a single offer or at least haven't done so up until that point.

00:16:21.120 So let's come back to the paper that you got criticized for. The particular point number one, which is the ethics of researching race and IQ and all these things. I personally can totally see why people would have a concern about looking into whether different groups, ethnic groups, in a society that's highly polarized right now, in a society where there's constant conversation about structural oppression.

00:16:48.420 and people's worries about doing research into whether Jews are more intelligent than black people

00:16:55.900 or white people are more intelligent than Latinos or all this stuff

00:16:59.120 and the kind of things that could be used for, the kind of things that might come out of that.

00:17:03.900 So what is the moral argument in favor of that kind of research?

00:17:08.480 Well, as I said, one argument is that the alternative point of view has also been misused

00:17:15.720 and could also be misused again.

00:17:18.420 And there are numerous examples from recent history, as again, Pinker and others have pointed out, of a group that was considered highly successful being targeted for discrimination or indeed much more serious sanctions, genocide, because its success was taken as evidence of its wickedness.

00:17:43.580 The Jews in Europe and the Middle East are the most obvious example of this.

00:17:47.600 Well, this is why I always say I'm massively in favor of IQ research because it always shows Jews being on top. 1.00

00:17:53.480 So I'm very happy with that. But keep going. Sorry.

00:17:57.740 That's OK. So one has to be aware of that other possibility,

00:18:06.840 namely that if every difference in outcome is attributed to the environment

00:18:11.540 and one group ends up doing a lot better socioeconomically than some other groups,

00:18:18.220 members of those other groups may feel they have been unfairly dealt with by society

00:18:26.040 and may target that more successful group, as was the case in Germany.

00:18:33.660 And indeed, if we go to the Nazis, there's at least some evidence that prominent Nazi scholars

00:18:40.480 were opposed to the concept of psychometric intelligence or IQ as it's often known

00:18:46.060 precisely because it showed Ashkenazi Jews living in Germany to score higher

00:18:50.580 than non-Jewish Germans at the time.

00:18:53.660 And it was described in one source as sort of an instrument of Jewry,

00:18:58.720 psychometric intelligence that is.

00:19:02.300 Whereas one could imagine at the time someone saying,

00:19:05.700 well, no, the reason that Jews own more large businesses 1.00

00:19:10.940 or are over-represented in high-income professions

00:19:13.740 maybe that they have higher average cognitive ability.

00:19:17.500 Superior.

00:19:18.480 I wouldn't like to use that highly noted term.

00:19:20.820 I'm just messing with you, man.

00:19:23.000 I like to get some validation for my IQ.

00:19:26.800 Okay, but do you not understand people's concerns

00:19:29.960 about looking at those things, though?

00:19:32.200 So I do understand their concerns.

00:19:33.620 And the reason I wrote that paper was precisely to address some of their concerns, to show that I didn't just sort of recklessly wander into this controversial area without having taken a moment to reflect on the ethics at all, which is more than can be said, I think, for many of my critics.

00:19:53.180 but as I said the first argument in the paper

00:19:57.140 which I think is the most important one

00:19:58.560 and that's the argument that

00:19:59.600 if we characterize the area as controversial

00:20:04.100 if we say it would be terrible

00:20:05.940 if the science turned out one way rather than another

00:20:09.920 what we're doing is saying

00:20:11.320 that there is some relationship

00:20:13.740 between what science finds

00:20:15.480 and what our policies ultimately will be

00:20:20.340 whereas my point of view is that we should say now

00:20:25.880 it doesn't matter what the science comes up with

00:20:28.860 because certain ethical principles will still prevail.

00:20:33.120 The ethical principles like it's wrong for members of one group

00:20:39.640 to exploit or oppress members of another group

00:20:41.760 regardless of the mean trait values

00:20:44.200 for certain socially salient traits within those two groups.

00:20:47.820 and hence it can actually be harmful to say that it's controversial we should just say it's not

00:20:54.640 controversial it's just science some of the hypotheses that have been advanced may turn

00:20:58.580 out to be wrong others may turn out to be right and let's treat them critically but dispassionately

00:21:04.820 like we would do with uh in any other area of science isn't it almost impossible though to

00:21:10.620 treat this subject dispassionately when you've had you know black people have had the history of

00:21:15.060 racism and part of the racism that they have faced is essentially that they're a lower form

00:21:19.680 of human being you see a lot of the time comparing them to apes and monkeys so when someone comes

00:21:24.620 along and goes well we're going to do this study you can understand you know the sense of anger

00:21:30.200 it's just well this is just going to legitimize racism against me that has been exposed to my

00:21:35.760 people for hundreds of years yeah i mean that's a fair point and of course some some of the claims

00:21:41.580 are, you know, simply wrong,

00:21:43.600 like that they're somehow sort of lower form of humans

00:21:45.940 or more related to apes than other races.

00:21:50.640 I mean, we're all...

00:21:50.980 To clear that up.

00:21:52.480 Obviously, we're, you know,

00:21:53.880 there's one species of Homo sapiens

00:21:57.220 divided into different populations,

00:21:59.720 which some people believe it's valid to refer to as races

00:22:03.540 and other people would prefer to use other terms for.

00:22:06.740 But to address your point itself,

00:22:10.080 the best argument against someone saying

00:22:14.440 this group has a lower average IQ

00:22:17.240 therefore we should exploit it

00:22:18.400 is not to say

00:22:19.500 well let's not ever try to find out

00:22:22.780 whether that's true

00:22:23.300 it's to say

00:22:23.800 well it doesn't follow

00:22:24.760 that just because the mean value

00:22:26.800 for some trait in that group is lower

00:22:28.060 that you are entitled to exploit them

00:22:29.540 or that you're entitled to abuse

00:22:31.960 any particular individual

00:22:32.880 because he or she happens to be from that group

00:22:35.160 i.e. better to argue against someone's

00:22:38.400 defective moral reasoning than against their scientific reasoning. Again, as I said, because

00:22:43.580 in the future, we may have very good evidence that gaps that we now observe in traits like

00:22:51.940 cognitive ability between groups are to some extent genetic. I'm not saying that is true or

00:22:56.820 will be shown to be true, but it could be. And if the research doesn't get done in Western countries

00:23:02.280 like the UK or the US, it may get done elsewhere in countries where researchers don't feel so

00:23:08.160 restricted so i think it's it's a losing battle in the in the long run to imagine that we won't

00:23:15.000 find out the answers to these questions of course the answer may turn out that genes don't make any

00:23:19.220 contribution i think that's somewhat unlikely but it's it's certainly a possibility so basically

00:23:24.760 what you're saying is the chinese are going to do it next year i mean the chinese may well

00:23:29.160 undertake research in this area that would be um considered controversial or or or beyond the pale

00:23:36.900 in the West.

00:23:38.260 Okay.

00:23:38.760 Well, that's very, very interesting.

00:23:39.740 Not very ethnically diverse China, though.

00:23:41.740 So where are they going to get

00:23:42.880 all these study subjects?

00:23:44.260 No, absolutely.

00:23:45.360 That's the question.

00:23:48.840 But beyond maybe protecting

00:23:50.760 the high IQ groups from persecution,

00:23:53.780 as you were talking about

00:23:54.640 in Nazi Germany.

00:23:55.980 Yes, Francis.

00:23:56.400 I always bring it back to the Jews, mate.

00:23:57.540 It's always about the Jews, mate. 1.00

00:23:58.740 It's all about the Jews. 1.00

00:24:00.200 This isn't the Labour Party conference.

00:24:03.940 What other benefits are there

00:24:05.320 to doing this research?

00:24:06.900 Well, I think one benefit that people often dismiss or forget to talk about at all is just it's inherently interesting to know the truth about things.

00:24:18.680 As a scientist or a scholar, I like to know whether certain things are true or false.

00:24:25.440 I don't like to put particular hypotheses away in a box and put a padlock on it and lock it so that we never find out whether it's true or not.

00:24:34.560 many philosophers, at least in the Western canon, probably elsewhere as well, have throughout

00:24:40.880 history distinguished between three fundamental desiderata, beauty, morality, or the good,

00:24:50.500 and truth. I think truth can to some extent be considered something that's valuable in and of

00:24:55.980 itself. So that's pretty important as far as I'm concerned. But also we have in social science

00:25:02.540 large numbers of people looking at questions like why are there gaps between self-identified

00:25:11.180 racial groups and traits like education, income, home ownership, things like that. And presumably

00:25:20.780 we want to know the actual answers to those questions rather than to just assume certain

00:25:25.100 answers and then ignore evidence to the contrary. Now, again, this isn't to say that

00:25:29.100 the more controversial answer namely that genes make some contributions definitely correct but

00:25:35.140 it's just some it's something that has to be considered if we want to look at those questions

00:25:38.520 seriously. And do you think that's why there's been such a backlash to you in this instance

00:25:44.380 because essentially some of the things that you're talking about challenge the mainstream narrative

00:25:49.700 which is everybody's equal and if anyone out anyone's outcome differs from what other groups

00:25:56.700 are getting, that is purely because of discrimination. Do you think that is the reason?

00:26:00.260 Yeah, I mean, that's clearly one of the reasons. And I'm certainly not the first person to have

00:26:05.860 fallen afoul of that tendency. Of course, one other thing that we should remember here,

00:26:13.220 which is a point that I made in my paper that we've been discussing, is that we already know

00:26:18.300 beyond a reasonable doubt that differences between individuals in traits like IQ and other

00:26:24.680 personality attributes are to some extent genetic in origin. There are various different kinds of

00:26:30.880 studies which have shown this. Adoption studies show that if children are taken at birth and

00:26:39.380 adopted by different families, they will often turn out as or more similar to their original

00:26:45.620 biological parents than to their adoptive parents, which suggests that it's genes they inherited from

00:26:50.740 their original biological parents that caused them to turn out the way they did rather than the

00:26:57.000 parenting that they received from their adoptive parents, at least in large part. Then there are

00:27:02.160 twin studies, which you may have heard of, where non-identical and identical twins are compared

00:27:09.260 for similarity on a particular trait, such as cognitive ability. And what is typically found

00:27:15.120 is that identical twins who share not only the intrauterine environment, but also all of their

00:27:21.120 genes, except post-conception somatic mutations in genes, they tend to be much more similar on

00:27:29.860 traits like cognitive ability than do dizygotic twins, which share the intrauterine environment,

00:27:36.600 but only share half of their genes on average, like fraternal siblings do. And so that's the

00:27:43.620 sort of useful natural experiment, which tells us that the greater genetic similarity of identical

00:27:47.680 twins contributes to the greater phenotypic similarity of identical twins.

00:27:52.680 In the last couple of decades, even more sophisticated methods have been developed

00:27:56.560 for looking at the contribution of genetics to individual differences in traits,

00:28:03.200 things like genome-wide association studies, which allows to pinpoint

00:28:07.600 individual loci in the genome which may represent the genes that cause specific differences between

00:28:17.900 individuals in these traits. So all that evidence suggests that or indicates very strongly that some

00:28:25.640 people have a higher average IQ than other people because they possess certain genes which those

00:28:29.940 other people don't possess. Does that mean that the people with the higher IQ and the higher number

00:28:35.580 of iq increasing genes are superior yes to the other individual definitely yes i don't not very

00:28:41.140 many people of course not very many people if anyone takes that proposition seriously we say

00:28:47.740 no your your moral worth you know either we all have equal moral worth or your moral worth is

00:28:54.540 determined by you know whether you do good deeds and whether you um act in a moral way in your

00:29:00.940 everyday life it's not determined by whether you score higher or lower on a on a battery of

00:29:06.260 cognitive tests and so i i would simply apply that same logic to differences between groups

00:29:11.180 and in other words it's about saying that all human beings have equal value irrespective of

00:29:15.880 which traits they have genetically or otherwise yeah it's about pointing out that we we already

00:29:19.740 know again beyond a reasonable doubt that some individuals are genetically smarter than other

00:29:25.060 individuals. That hasn't caused the collapse of civilization. It hasn't caused the individuals

00:29:30.820 with the higher genetic propensity for cognitive ability to say, you know, all the others must

00:29:40.200 genuflect before us and treat us as demigods on earth because we're slightly smarter on average.

00:29:47.140 It's just the recognition of the fact that there are individual differences in the population.

00:29:50.460 and there may also be average group differences in the population.

00:29:54.360 We don't yet know for sure, but it's something that could be the case.

00:29:57.940 And what are the benefits of conducting this type of research?

00:30:01.200 If you think 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years ahead, how could that benefit the human race?

00:30:07.440 Well, as I've already argued, I don't think one has to cite a specific material benefit

00:30:13.320 in order to justify doing the research.

00:30:14.960 I think as scholars we should want to find out the truth about things,

00:30:18.200 even if at the present time it doesn't seem to be a material benefit.

00:30:21.040 However, I would argue that there is likely to be a material benefit.

00:30:24.340 Not only that tail risk that I discussed earlier

00:30:29.420 of avoiding persecution of more successful groups

00:30:34.380 like the Ashkenazi Jews, 1.00

00:30:36.940 but also just in understanding why certain groups

00:30:41.440 are different from one another

00:30:42.240 and what kind of policies are likely to therefore be effective

00:30:48.640 and what kind of policies are likely to be unaffected.

00:30:51.340 For example, if you propose a policy based on the assumption

00:30:54.320 that genes play absolutely no role in a particular group difference

00:30:58.920 and it turns out they do play a role,

00:31:00.740 that policy may be a total waste of money

00:31:03.480 and it might be better to spend that money in a different way,

00:31:06.060 for example, in just redistributing income from one group to another.

00:31:08.980 I mean, as I argued in that paper in the Evolutionary Psychology Journal, there's a prominent philosophy on the left, luck egalitarianism, which basically says that we can distinguish between the choices people make during the course of their lives and the initial endowments they received when they were born.

00:31:30.780 That includes not only endowments like growing up in a large house or with very wealthy parents, but also genetic endowments like having a high genetic propensity for intelligence or hard work, whatever it may be.

00:31:47.460 And according to Lucky Galitarianism, it's reasonable to hold people to account for the choices they make during the course of their lives.

00:31:53.600 So if someone commits a crime, it's reasonable to send him to jail and punish him.

00:31:58.560 But if someone is born with a low IQ, it's not reasonable to hold him to account for that because he or she didn't do anything to deserve that low IQ.

00:32:08.240 And hence, it's reasonable for the society to get together and say that individual didn't have the same advantages as everyone else.

00:32:15.500 So it's fair to redistribute some money to him or her or to provide additional early childhood education or training.

00:32:23.640 Again, I'm not saying that you have to adopt this point of view,

00:32:25.980 but it's one that can be reasonably argued for

00:32:29.300 and that doesn't commit us to any sort of extreme political philosophy

00:32:36.660 of social Darwinism or something like that.

00:32:39.400 And how much does IQ make a difference in someone's life, having a high IQ?

00:32:43.700 Does it make a huge difference?

00:32:45.900 It can make quite a big difference.

00:32:48.180 It depends, of course, on the domain.

00:32:49.520 And it's not the only factor that makes a difference.

00:32:51.600 Other personality traits make a difference.

00:32:54.640 Which country you were born in makes a huge difference.

00:32:58.480 Whether you had parents with connections or not makes a difference.

00:33:03.380 But to go to IQ in particular, it has moderate correlations with life outcomes observed around age 30 or 40 if it's measured, say, at age 11 or age 16.

00:33:18.580 in some domains it can have incremental predictive validity even within the top one percent so you

00:33:26.040 might say well after a certain point iq is no longer predictive after say an iq of 120

00:33:33.620 more iq doesn't really benefit you well in some domains it actually still can benefit you

00:33:39.660 there was a famous study of a group of people called them the sorry the study was called the

00:33:46.020 mathematically precocious youth, and these were individuals who scored very high on a mathematics

00:33:51.140 test, which isn't identical to IQ, but it's very similar. And they were followed up by researchers

00:33:56.780 into their 30s and 40s, and it was found that these individuals who represented the top, I think,

00:34:05.520 1% of scorers in the relevant population had achieved lots of impressive things, including

00:34:17.120 filing patents and publishing academic papers and winning various kinds of awards. And they found

00:34:22.120 that those who scored in the top quarter of the top 1% had done more of those impressive things

00:34:27.620 than those who scored in the bottom quarter of the top 1%. So it can be incredibly predictive.

00:34:33.640 Of course, when it comes to a variable like lifetime income, it's somewhat less predictive.

00:34:39.880 Of course, it has a correlation with lifetime income, but it's not as strong as it is with outcomes like educational attainment,

00:34:50.440 where there's a more obvious connection from cognitive ability to performance in universities.

00:34:57.860 you say and because uh being a former teacher you know that we were very much drummed into us that

00:35:04.120 there was different types of uh intelligence you know there's academic but there's also spatial

00:35:09.620 and all the rest of it do you adhere to that do you believe that that is a thing that somebody can

00:35:13.360 be you know at school for whatever reason not academic but they get into the world of business

00:35:17.820 for example like alan sugar and yeah so i think um the first thing to say is that uh when it comes

00:35:24.400 to intelligence itself, psychometric intelligence, the generally accepted position among researchers

00:35:29.820 is that there aren't different types of intelligence, although there are different

00:35:37.640 subdomains, if that makes sense. What you typically find when you give a sample of people

00:35:43.740 a battery of cognitive tests, say a memory test and a verbal reasoning test and a spatial

00:35:48.520 reasoning test, mathematical reasoning test, is that scores on each of the tests are positively

00:35:55.280 correlated, meaning that the people who do better on spatial reasoning also tend to do

00:35:58.400 better on verbal reasoning, and they also tend to have slightly better memories. And

00:36:01.820 that means that a so-called general factor of cognitive ability can be extracted using

00:36:08.560 some statistical methods, which accounts for a large part of the differences in scores

00:36:14.260 between different individuals on those tests.

00:36:16.780 And that contradicts the point of view

00:36:20.000 that was once somewhat fashionable

00:36:21.520 in the educational literature,

00:36:25.080 that there were distinct types of intelligence.

00:36:27.020 So you were either sort of a visuospatial learner

00:36:29.940 or a verbal learner.

00:36:32.540 But once you extract this general factor

00:36:37.100 from the cognitive test,

00:36:38.420 you do find that there are also distinct subdomains

00:36:41.400 which people may excel to a greater or lesser degree.

00:36:45.240 So some people may have so-called verbal tilt.

00:36:47.960 They might be slightly better at the verbal tests in the IQ battery

00:36:51.960 than on the mathematical tests,

00:36:53.340 and those people might tend to go into fields like law or...

00:36:57.280 Back to the Jews. 1.00

00:37:00.060 They may also go into politics, for example,

00:37:02.900 whereas people who have a sort of mathematical, visuospatial tilt

00:37:06.640 might be more likely to go into engineering or into scientific research.

00:37:11.580 and so the answer to your question is it's it's mostly incorrect but there is a grain of truth

00:37:17.400 to it in the sense that although the tests are all positively correlated there are distinct

00:37:23.080 subdomains like verbal intelligence and numerical intelligence just coming back to your case now

00:37:28.760 more broadly as you know we believe in free speech and that means believing in freedom for

00:37:35.640 people that you may not agree with to speak their mind right is this your case is it first and

00:37:42.360 foremost about the principle of freedom and academic research where the idea being that you

00:37:47.040 and i can grill you for you francis and i can grill you for 40 minutes uh about what's the

00:37:53.220 benefits of this research but fundamentally it doesn't matter because an academic should have

00:37:57.840 the freedom to research whatever the hell they want i mean that's very much my position is that

00:38:02.600 you can consider all this research to be either completely erroneous or sort of somewhat

00:38:12.420 irresponsible, but you should still uphold the principle that individuals, in this case

00:38:17.900 academics, should be free to pursue lines of inquiry that they regard as fruitful and

00:38:23.280 that you have every right to criticize them in blogs and in journal articles or newspaper

00:38:28.080 articles or in the form of verbal conversation, even tweets. I mean, one would hope you would

00:38:35.740 do it reasonably respectfully and not resort to ad hominem attacks or attempts to impugn

00:38:41.100 the character of the researchers concerned. So my view is very much that academic freedom

00:38:46.240 is extremely important and is under threat and should be protected.

00:38:50.800 And do you think it's got worse? I mean, there's not only your case, there's also the case

00:38:54.620 dr jordan peterson who was fired from cambridge university i think for was it appearing next to

00:38:59.480 somebody in a photograph a fan of his who had a particular slogan on a t-shirt yeah so he'd been

00:39:05.200 invited uh to uh take up a visiting fellowship uh in the divinity faculty for a term i think

00:39:13.160 to give a series of lectures that he'd compiled uh on some aspect of the bible and its psychological

00:39:18.800 interpretation and and he announced this on his youtube channel and some of his critics found out

00:39:27.800 about this announcement and we don't exactly know what happened after that but they presumably

00:39:32.780 petitioned the divinity faculty and or the wider university administration to have his fellowship

00:39:38.980 rescinded and a couple of days later there was an announcement on again on twitter not necessarily

00:39:44.440 the most formal avenue for making such announcements that said his application for a fellowship

00:39:54.560 had been rescinded following further review.

00:39:58.400 And it transpired later that the student union had sent out a similar tweet even earlier

00:40:05.820 than the Faculty of Divinity itself,

00:40:10.120 which implies but does not prove

00:40:14.660 that they were involved in the campaign

00:40:17.620 to have his fellowship rescinded.

00:40:20.260 Well, they were certainly privy to it before.

00:40:21.980 One presumes that's almost certainly the case.

00:40:26.420 That is the most beautifully diplomatic answer we've ever had.

00:40:29.760 Well, just comparing freedom of academic research

00:40:33.040 and freedom of speech,

00:40:33.780 I feel like I can make a pretty strong case

00:40:35.900 for why freedom of speech is important and necessary.

00:40:38.960 Why is academic freedom of research important and necessary?

00:40:43.360 So I think some of the reasons are similar to ones

00:40:46.300 that would be given in defense of freedom of speech more generally.

00:40:51.600 For example, that we humans are often quite bad

00:40:59.260 at objectively appraising risk.

00:41:01.980 So for example...

00:41:03.100 Yeah, I know that, mate.

00:41:05.840 That's how this show happened.

00:41:08.100 Yeah, so evolutionary psychologists will point out

00:41:10.720 that we tend to have a much stronger emotional response

00:41:13.920 to a spider or to the dark or to...

00:41:19.400 Snakes.

00:41:20.620 Or to a snake, for example, than we do to a loaded gun

00:41:23.280 or a faulty electrical wire or, say, driving without a seatbelt,

00:41:26.960 even though, at least in countries like the UK,

00:41:29.520 where we don't have poisonous spiders or snakes for the most part, I think.

00:41:33.100 the loaded gun or the faulty electrical wire

00:41:36.220 would be much more objectively dangerous.

00:41:37.800 But we just don't have that same emotional response

00:41:39.340 because we evolved in an environment

00:41:41.040 where there weren't any faulty electrical wires,

00:41:43.000 but where there were poisonous snakes and spiders

00:41:45.220 that might kill us if they got too close.

00:41:49.740 And I think this sort of cognitive bias

00:41:53.860 applies more generally and leads us to catastrophize

00:41:57.440 about the possible effects of certain kinds of research

00:42:00.440 to a greater extent than is justified by a more objective assessment.

00:42:06.740 And that's obviously an argument that could be made in defense of free speech in general.

00:42:11.060 Secondly, there's the Streisand effect.

00:42:13.880 There's the tendency for censorship to backfire.

00:42:18.360 If you try to prohibit all discussion of something,

00:42:23.020 whether in general in society or in academia in particular,

00:42:26.260 it's likely to get even more attention than it would have done otherwise i mean i think that

00:42:32.420 almost certainly applies in my case almost no one had heard of me before this huge controversy

00:42:38.300 erupted uh it's it's it's unlikely you know i have to be honest that my research or my

00:42:48.300 writings in general would have gotten very much

00:42:52.500 readership were it not for the huge

00:42:56.300 spotlight on them that was generated by the open letter.

00:43:00.260 For example, that paper that we were discussing earlier in the interview, I think had around

00:43:04.220 3,000 downloads before the

00:43:08.280 open letter against me was published. It now has about 23,000. So that's an additional

00:43:12.260 20,000 downloads that could perhaps

00:43:16.180 or in large part be attributed to the controversy.

00:43:20.980 So there's that strides end effect.

00:43:23.100 If you consider this research to be as dangerous as you say you do,

00:43:29.540 trying to censor it may actually lead to more people hearing about it

00:43:32.400 and wanting to find out about it.

00:43:35.020 And then thirdly, there's just obviously the fact

00:43:38.800 that we do want to find out the truth about things

00:43:41.800 And our role as academics, I think, should be to pursue fruitful lines of inquiry and scientific data, wherever they may lead, not to act as arbiters of what should or shouldn't be allowed to be discussed in society.

00:44:01.920 Jonathan Haidt, the American psychologist and free speech campaigner, has an excellent lecture up on YouTube called Two Incompatible Sacred Values at American Universities.

00:44:13.940 And he talks about this conflict that has emerged in the last decade or so between free speech and academic freedom and truth on the one side and the movement to stifle certain discussion of certain topics and to impose a sort of framework of language that doesn't seem very natural to us on some topics.

00:44:42.460 and he argues that universities are going to face a choice going forward

00:44:47.640 between retaining telos or truth as their ultimate purpose

00:44:52.880 or whether they are going to adopt a sort of dual purpose of truth

00:44:58.220 and also social justice.

00:45:00.040 He shows in his lecture that if we consider the shields of universities

00:45:06.100 like Harvard and Yale, they have the word veritas on them,

00:45:10.020 which means truth, indicating that the founders of these universities saw truth as one of the

00:45:19.300 probably the ultimate goal of these education institutions. Whereas now, if you read some of

00:45:23.600 the mission statements of universities, particularly in the US, they will say things like

00:45:29.560 promoting diversity, inclusion and equity, and academic freedom. And of course, that's all very

00:45:36.180 well and good until you recognize that these things can come into conflict with one another.

00:45:40.020 I would argue that truth should prevail when it comes into conflict with other values, which are valid for people to hold.

00:45:49.560 And I don't think universities should function as centres for teaching, learning and the promotion of a particular political point of view.

00:45:57.980 I think they should just focus on the first two.

00:46:01.160 And from what we've seen now with academics losing their jobs, do you think this is a trend that is going to get worse now?

00:46:10.020 Um, very hard to say. I mean, it's, it's, it's notoriously unwise to make predictions. I don't see any obvious sign of it getting better. Um, I mean, it seems to be part of this more general phenomenon that has been called the great awokening, something that's happened since about 2012.

00:46:29.320 in the UK, US, and some other Western countries,

00:46:36.240 suddenly we see dramatic shifts in political attitudes

00:46:41.440 on certain subjects, particularly on the left.

00:46:45.140 In America, we see increases in the volume of Google searches

00:46:50.180 for terms that once seemed very strange,

00:46:53.340 like intersectionality and white privilege and cultural appropriation.

00:46:59.320 We've seen, following some excellent analyses by a guy called David Rosado and a guy I mentioned earlier, Zach Goldberg, that the frequency of usage of those sort of woke terms in the newspaper of record in America, the New York Times, has increased precipitously just in the last decade or so.

00:47:17.940 So there seems to be some kind of general phenomenon worthy of study which is affecting not only the wider culture but also the freedom of academics to pursue lines of inquiry that the promoters of this phenomenon consider to be objectionable.

00:47:39.620 And the last time we saw each other was at a slightly secret academic conference which was on this very subject.

00:47:45.540 I thought you were going to say slightly seedy.

00:47:47.940 i don't feel it was seedy but speak for yourself mate all the people who were there watching this

00:47:54.000 and now they know how you feel about it i know that's what i thought you were going to do slightly

00:47:57.180 see it was slightly secretive but it wasn't seedy no it wasn't yeah disappointingly so anyway well

00:48:02.640 done for sidetracking me for a whole 20 seconds for no purpose whatsoever thanks mate but what i

00:48:08.760 noticed at that conference was a very strong feeling certainly from the people who were there

00:48:13.100 and some of them were very distinguished people, was that there is a culture of fear in academia,

00:48:19.060 which is exactly what we see in comedy in many different fields of the arts.

00:48:23.800 There's a culture of there's certain things which must not be talked about,

00:48:27.720 and if you talk about them or if you do them or if you publicly discuss some of these concepts

00:48:32.840 that you talk about in The Great Awakening, you will be punished.

00:48:36.840 Do you think there is that culture in academia now where people stay away from certain subjects

00:48:42.600 and, in fact, in many cases feel like they have to come out

00:48:45.260 and criticize someone like you

00:48:46.540 without even knowing anything about your case because of that.

00:48:50.400 Absolutely.

00:48:51.360 I mean, it's hard to collect systematic data,

00:48:54.820 which is something I would always like to see

00:48:56.320 before making a strong problem.

00:48:58.460 You can tell he's a scholar, can't he?

00:49:01.020 But there are certainly huge numbers of anecdotal reports

00:49:04.340 of people self-censoring

00:49:07.920 or, indeed, of signing petitions,

00:49:10.860 denouncing someone or denouncing an area of research

00:49:14.180 even when they themselves disagree

00:49:16.820 with the statement of the petition.

00:49:19.980 I mean, I've certainly heard individual cases myself

00:49:23.040 and I've also heard other people report

00:49:24.620 that they know of such cases.

00:49:28.400 So you're absolutely right.

00:49:31.840 I mean, one ray of hope is that, at least in surveys,

00:49:38.100 Most academics do still say that they believe in academic freedom and an environment of open debate on campus as opposed to one characterized by restrictions on what you can and can't say in certain areas.

00:49:51.380 There was a survey done in 2017, I believe, by a guy called Sam Abrahams, which found that about 80 percent, if I remember the figure correctly, of academics in America prefer the atmosphere of open inquiry and debate to the one that's restricted in the interests of protecting certain groups who are allegedly at risk of harm.

00:50:16.760 So that would suggest to me, if the result is correct,

00:50:19.580 that there's a sort of 20% on the fringe

00:50:23.960 that are accounting for a disproportionate share

00:50:27.400 of all the mobbing attempts and all the censure.

00:50:33.780 It's an 80-20 rule.

00:50:35.840 You know, this idea going back to the late 19th century,

00:50:42.020 early part of the 20th century,

00:50:43.000 20% of Italian landowners owned 80% of the land in Italy.

00:50:47.980 Often we find that a small group can exert disproportionate effect on some larger phenomenon.

00:50:54.820 And so if this is indeed true, one way to counteract the growing censorship on campus might be to tell members of the 80%,

00:51:05.920 you know you're in the 80%, i.e. the emperor is actually naked.

00:51:12.500 and he's not wearing any clothes, and we all recognize this,

00:51:15.320 i.e. let's sort of speak up in unison and say we don't have to agree with someone

00:51:19.900 to defend their right to freedom of expression,

00:51:22.100 and let's have a civilized discourse in which we focus on criticizing arguments

00:51:26.860 and data and methodology rather than people's character or motives.

00:51:31.380 You say that, but it just seems...

00:51:33.640 For instance, before I started this show, I was never aware of the problems on campus.

00:51:38.360 We had Lionel Shriver a few weeks ago, not months ago,

00:51:42.140 talking about a professor in Harvard who went to defend Harvey Weinstein.

00:51:48.260 Not defend his actions, but defend him legally.

00:51:50.620 Yeah, and defend him in court.

00:51:52.120 Ron Sullivan, yeah.

00:51:52.980 And, you know, he was fired as a result.

00:51:56.600 And so you think, well, if that's where we are,

00:51:59.340 where somebody who's legitimately doing a job

00:52:01.620 and everybody has a right to a legal defence

00:52:03.460 loses their livelihood as a result,

00:52:07.540 Where are we?

00:52:08.700 Well, I know.

00:52:09.060 I mean, that case was, again, extraordinary in my opinion

00:52:11.040 because, as you said, he wasn't defending the actions of Harvey Weinstein.

00:52:15.740 If he had done so, which he, of course, should have the right to do,

00:52:19.980 that I think could reasonably argue would compromise his role as dean.

00:52:25.120 But he wasn't defending the actions.

00:52:26.480 He was just defending the man in court as any person who's taken to court

00:52:34.120 is entitled

00:52:36.460 to be

00:52:38.600 what almost certainly happened in that case

00:52:45.020 is that the administration

00:52:47.040 of his college or of Harvard

00:52:48.940 in general were petitioned

00:52:51.360 and

00:52:52.000 were sort of

00:52:56.860 bombarded with complaints from students

00:52:58.900 and their defenders within the

00:53:00.580 faculty saying

00:53:02.780 you know this this person is making it hard for me to study this person is um causing me to feel

00:53:09.160 unsafe i can't i can no longer go to this person and divulge all the stresses and anxieties that

00:53:15.640 i'm feeling can you please make this go away and although there were high-minded op-eds written

00:53:22.460 in probably the new york times places like that defending the principles it was just easier for

00:53:26.580 the college to say, well, look, all this opprobrium and all these complaints are going

00:53:34.620 to disappear if we just take a quick decision now. It was sort of taking the path of least

00:53:39.480 resistance. Even if the administrators themselves agreed with the principal, they just found

00:53:44.960 it simpler and easier to give in to calls for his dismissal, or at least dismissal from

00:53:52.060 that role. You talk about the ray of light. I actually, as an outsider, the idea that 20%

00:53:57.440 of academics don't believe in freedom of academic research. To me, that sounds sky high. And isn't

00:54:03.060 one of the reasons for that, as Jonathan Haidt has written about, that over the last 40 or 50 years,

00:54:09.560 the academy has become increasingly left-wing statistically? Yeah, I mean, that's a fair point. 0.98

00:54:16.020 In an ideal world, it should be, in my opinion, 0% of academics

00:54:19.520 who aren't in favor of an atmosphere of open debate and free inquiry.

00:54:26.720 But 20% is a lot better than 80%.

00:54:28.940 And if one were to assume that almost all academics

00:54:36.380 who hold, say, left-wing opinions

00:54:40.900 were in favor of the sort of social justice politics

00:54:44.580 that manifests itself in opposition to free speech,

00:54:47.440 then one would assume the figure were far greater than 20%.

00:54:50.640 But according to that survey anyway, it's just 20%.

00:54:54.160 So to your point about the composition of the academy,

00:55:00.860 you're absolutely right that according to the data collected by Haidt

00:55:04.500 and some other data collected by the gentleman mentioned earlier, Sam Abrahams,

00:55:08.940 over the last few decades going back to say the 1970s or even earlier there's been a

00:55:18.000 increase in the proportion of faculty who identify as left-wing or liberal and a corresponding

00:55:24.740 decrease in the proportion who identify as conservative now there's if we take the 20th

00:55:31.300 century as a whole there's obviously no strong connection between um left versus right and

00:55:39.060 preference for censorship then maybe there's a tendency for sort of centrist regimes to be

00:55:44.360 less censorious than the more extreme ones but we've seen censorship on the right obviously in

00:55:49.260 the form of nazis but also in the form of you know mccarthyism in the united states in which

00:55:54.940 there were certain sort of witch hunts

00:55:58.000 against academics with communist views

00:56:01.820 or allegedly communist views.

00:56:03.820 Nowadays, censorship seems to be largely

00:56:07.640 on the political left, at least in the universities.

00:56:11.300 There are still attacks that should be mentioned

00:56:13.140 on academics from conservative factions

00:56:16.040 operating outside the university.

00:56:19.660 Occasionally, academics infringe on the sacred values

00:56:24.160 of certain religious groups and find themselves under attack,

00:56:27.200 but they usually get the defense of their institutions in those cases.

00:56:32.080 In the cases in which a left-wing sacred value is threatened,

00:56:38.700 it's often true that the individual in question,

00:56:42.120 the individual who's threatening that sacred value,

00:56:44.540 doesn't receive any protection from everyone's institution

00:56:47.620 or is indeed dismissed by them, as I was,

00:56:50.120 or as Jordan Peterson was at Cambridge University as well.

00:56:54.780 And why is it that these universities don't seem to have the backbone or moral spine to go,

00:57:03.120 no, this person is conducting research.

00:57:06.380 You may deem this person to be controversial, but that is simply your opinion, which you're allowed to express.

00:57:11.880 But you do not have the right to demand that someone be fired.

00:57:15.600 Well, one reason I think is a reason that I've already touched on,

00:57:19.340 which is that there's a number of true believers in the university faculty and the university administration.

00:57:26.840 So Sam Abrahams has shown in yet another survey that university administrators in the U.S.

00:57:32.760 are even more skewed to the left liberal end of the spectrum than our academics themselves.

00:57:38.300 And they are the people who are often deciding whether a certain person should be sanctioned or dismissed or defended.

00:57:45.640 Many of those people I'm sure would be principled defenders of free speech

00:57:50.140 But if there are true believers among them

00:57:51.980 Then the principle doesn't matter

00:57:54.280 They're not going to implement it

00:57:55.460 Another interesting reason which has been widely discussed

00:57:59.400 Is the increase in university tuition fees

00:58:02.080 Both in the UK and across the pond

00:58:05.080 Which have led to students being treated like consumers

00:58:13.480 Rather than like scholars

00:58:15.060 they pay a huge relatively large upfront cost to go to university and when they get there they don't

00:58:20.640 want to confront ideas that they consider hurtful or damaging psychologically they want to get their

00:58:31.140 degree and not have to not have to be challenged and since they're paying such a large number of

00:58:36.100 money they don't see why they should be so there's a there's a conflict there which isn't easily

00:58:41.500 resolved because if enough students prefer to not be challenged or offended, then universities

00:58:54.100 will lose enrollment if they uphold academic freedom for controversial points of view because

00:59:02.900 fewer students will apply there. However, my sense is from the few individual cases that

00:59:08.860 there have been in which one might test these arguments is that it's actually the opposite,

00:59:14.840 i.e. there are more students that care about academic freedom and free speech than there

00:59:19.220 are students who adhere to the sort of social justice view of the world, i.e. there's this

00:59:28.200 sort of silent majority, as one might describe it, comprising people who may not hold controversial

00:59:35.880 opinions or points of view themselves, but recognize the importance of airing these opinions

00:59:40.800 and discussing them openly. So, for example, if my memory serves, at Evergreen College in the U.S.,

00:59:48.960 the college from which Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying were dismissed, there was a drop in

00:59:53.820 enrollment in the year after their dismissal, which suggests but does not prove that students

01:00:00.180 were turned away by the controversy there

01:00:02.200 and were not enamored of the manner

01:00:08.880 in which those two scholars were fired from their positions.

01:00:13.460 I think there was a similar drop in enrollment

01:00:14.980 at Middlebury College following the controversy

01:00:17.740 surrounding a talk given by Charles Murray.

01:00:21.300 I don't know how many other cases there have been,

01:00:23.220 but it would be worth systematically analyzing them

01:00:25.240 to see if the net effect of dismissing someone

01:00:28.120 is to reduce rather than increase your enrollment.

01:00:32.760 And perhaps if colleges and universities could be persuaded of that,

01:00:37.380 they would be less willing to buckle under pressure.

01:00:39.620 Well, let's hope that's what happens in your case.

01:00:41.760 I hope so.

01:00:42.260 Spoil students, bring back corporal punishment.

01:00:44.720 Anyway, Noah, thank you very much for coming on the show.

01:00:47.760 We've got time for one last question, which always is,

01:00:50.200 what is the one thing no one's talking about that we should be talking about?

01:00:53.860 Okay, so for me, this is something that a few people are talking about,

01:00:57.500 But in my opinion, one that not nearly enough people are talking about, which is the fact that our cities are growing increasingly ugly, i.e. that for every beautiful new building that is constructed, 19 or 20 ugly buildings are constructed.

01:01:15.440 and indeed one of the few people

01:01:19.820 who has been making the case for beautiful architecture,

01:01:23.120 Sir Roger Scruton, was recently fired from his role

01:01:27.240 as a government advisor on this matter

01:01:29.300 following a sort of hit job in the New Statesman.

01:01:33.440 And so I think many, many more people

01:01:34.880 need to be talking about the fact

01:01:36.960 that we need physical beauty in our lives

01:01:41.100 and that much of it has been taken away from us

01:01:45.100 at least in the UK, over the last few decades.

01:01:52.340 And that it's a public good.

01:01:54.040 It's the most important public good in society

01:01:56.400 that no one or only people like Sir Roger Scruton

01:02:01.040 and a few others want to talk about.

01:02:03.200 We obviously recognize, or many people believe,

01:02:06.180 that the health service is a really valuable public good in society.

01:02:11.320 Many people believe that education

01:02:13.380 and the natural environment are important public goods,

01:02:17.100 but no one seems to, or very few people seem to mention,

01:02:20.820 that the beauty of the streets we walk down going to work

01:02:24.480 or on our way to the shops are also a public good

01:02:26.520 and we should fight to defend that public good

01:02:30.720 against encroachments of increasing ugliness.

01:02:35.640 I'm woke, so I don't see beauty.

01:02:37.600 Anyway, on that note, thank you so much for coming, Noah.

01:02:41.420 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:02:42.620 If people want to follow you online, on your Twitter, what is your Twitter handle?

01:02:48.660 NoahKarl90.

01:02:49.860 NoahKarl90, fantastic stuff.

01:02:52.220 And if people want to donate to you because of your legal proceedings, how can they do that?

01:02:59.580 So the website is support NoahKarl.

01:03:02.860 And, yeah, you can make a donation there of any size that appeals to you and we'd be really grateful.

01:03:10.860 Fantastic.

01:03:11.220 Well, you've raised, I think, over $80,000 already.

01:03:14.680 That's right.

01:03:15.460 And obviously your legal case will take some.

01:03:18.280 We wish you all the best with that.

01:03:20.160 As always, follow us at TriggerPod on all the social media.

01:03:23.620 Subscribe to the YouTube channel.

01:03:25.040 Click the bell button next to the subscribe button.

01:03:27.220 And we will be back in a week's time.

01:03:28.820 Absolutely.

01:03:29.480 And please leave us a nice review on iTunes,

01:03:31.200 particularly if you're from the United States or abroad,

01:03:33.520 because that means our podcast gets seen globally.

01:03:36.820 If you enjoy it, if you like it, share it, tell a friend, all the rest of it.

01:03:40.520 and we will see you soon.

01:03:41.800 Thanks a lot, guys.

01:03:42.560 See you next week.

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TRIGGERnometry - July 28, 2019

Noah Carl on Race, IQ and Academic Freedom

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