Tag: Sam Harris

Jonathan Rash points out that Sam Harris doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.

A recent episode of Sam Harris’ podcast Making Sense features Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and, most recently, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. According to Harris’ website, he and Diamond discuss

the rise and fall of civilizations,…political polarization, disparities in civilizational progress, the prospect that there may be biological differences between populations, the precariousness of democracy in the U.S., the lack of a strong political center, immigration policy, and other topics.

Most of these categories have little to do with Diamond’s work. Rather, they concern Harris and his well-worn personal grievances with “The Left.” These grievances cover everything from “PC culture” and feminism to psychological research methods and immigration policy. What holds them all together is the following unifying idea: Progressive opinion-makers are dishonest hacks willing to destroy the livelihoods and reputations of those who deign to question the elite liberal consensus on hot-button issues concerning race, gender, culture, and politics, and their political correctness is destroying the country and rendering reasoned debate impossible.

Like most episodes of Making Sense, this one consists mostly of Harris rehashing the myriad ways he feels he has been mistreated or misunderstood by progressives. As any consistent Harris listener can attest, the man sustains an immense amount of self-righteous anger over this. The problem is the measure of anger outpaces his understanding of the topics he’s angry about.

The problem is also the vanity and egotism. I find Harris unreadable (and god knows unlistenable and unwatchable) because of it.

Like his late friend Christopher Hitchens, Harris is a gifted rhetorician who possesses the preternatural ability to speak not only in complete sentences but complete paragraphs. This talent can be mesmerizing, but it masks something The Hitch never had to hide and of which the Diamond episode is a prime example: a general hollowness of mind reinforced by a stunning lack of intellectual rigor and curiosity.

See that’s why I don’t find the talent mesmerizing, and never have. He may be good at talking in complete paragraphs but the paragraphs are not interesting, and neither is he. Hitchens was interesting in himself and he said interesting things in his paragraphs. Harris just drones.

Harris’ association with the Intellectual Dark Web, his constant focus on “identity politics” and “liberal delusion,” and his obsession with his own “bad-faith” critics, just to name a few examples, have made him the bête noire of the left.

Along with his smug sexism, his contempt for almost everyone else, his lack of affect, his unearned air of superiority.

Well over a million people follow Harris on Twitter and listen to each of his podcasts. But as his platform has grown, he has ventured into areas far outside his core competencies, which are limited to mindfulness/meditation and perhaps (though this is debatable) certain subdisciplines of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. As a result, Harris often finds himself in avoidable confrontations with experts on controversial topics about which he knows very little.

This means that much of the criticism of Harris currently out there is misplaced. In recent years he’s been repeatedly assailed as a bigot and racist. He is neither. The trouble with Harris is more prosaic: he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The Diamond episode is just one example of how Harris’ issues are mostly the result of his own ignorance. The problem isn’t that he’s not an expert at everything—obviously no one is. The problem is that Harris is deeply assertive, outlandishly so, in precisely the areas that are thorniest for non-experts to meaningfully wade into.

The episode begins with Harris asking Diamond about his career and a couple of his books, but within the first half hour the conversation turns abruptly to “race and IQ,” a perennial favorite. Harris asserts, as he has many times before, that it simply must be the case that there is significant genetic variation in intelligence across “populations” (by this he means “race,” crudely defined), and that to deny this is to ignore clear science in favor of one’s ideological precommitments.

Diamond’s response is typical of anyone who’s spent time studying the issue:

Theoretically that’s a possibility. The problem is that despite a lot of effort by a lot of people to establish differences in, say, cognitive skills, differences at a population level have not been established. Instead there is an obvious mass of cultural effects on cognitive skills.

So Harris changes the subject.

Rash covers his embarrassing dispute with Chomsky, and one where he tried to set a security expert straight via his personal intuitions, which went as well as you’d expect. Then there are his reading habits…

When asked in an earlier AMA what kind of “art, music, and fiction” he likes, Harris all but acknowledges that he’s not really into all that. “I love music but I almost never listen to it.” He has no time, you see. “I’m afraid fiction falls by the way for the same reason.” But don’t worry, he used to read. “Fiction is really my roots,” he claims. “Back in the day, I was very into Kafka and Nabokov and Joseph Conrad. … Back in the day, I was a big fan of The Lord of the Rings, and I also watch things in that genre. I watch Game of Thrones. … I’ve also read a few plays recently.”

Thud. Of course he was; of course he does.

Harris is a specialist, and like all other specialists he knows a great deal about one or two things and essentially nothing about anything else. This is not per se objectionable; there is nothing wrong with narrow expertise. One objects only when the specialist pretends to a more eclectic intellectualism than he has done the hard work to develop, when he demands a degree of deference and respect wholly incommensurate with his level of learning. It’s exactly this type of hubris that causes Harris to believe that he invalidated David Hume’s foundational is/ought distinction by simply observing that we can’t act on our values without knowing the facts.

Exactly. I despise The Moral Landscape and that sums up why.

Harris hides a vast ignorance with a vast vocabulary and silky turns of phrase. He is dangerous because millions of us listen to him, even when there’s no reason to. Acknowledging this fact is the first step toward achieving the productive “experiments in conversation” that Harris champions but rarely delivers.

Which is to say, pay no attention to Sam Harris, he is of no interest.

Updating to add: I forgot to point out that the tweet is from last October.

Sam Harris is unbearable.

https://twitter.com/_Saeen_/status/924043987127857152

I recommend listening to that one-minute clip, to get the full sense of how his flat cold affectless voice combines with his smugly confident words on a subject he knows NOTHING about to create a monster of I’m Not a Racistism.

Virtually everything that’s said, in the identity politics space, about what’s happening, is at best slanted. There are Trumpian levels of dishonesty on the left around these topics, and it’s harmful. And BLM is part of that problem, and if you’re going to argue that in the aftermath of having a two-term black president, that nothing has changed with respect to race – if you’re going to be like Ta-Nehisi Coates, and endlessly beat the drum of black identity politics, as though we’re living in the first years of Reconstruction, and not acknowledge any gains that we’ve made against racism in our society…you’re delusional, and insofar as people believe what you’re saying, what you’re saying is harmful. And BLM has some of that in it, so I just think we have to get out of the identity politics game.

Says the prosperous white man.

From March 2016: Omer Aziz had an experience with Sam Harris.

In December 2015 he had published an essay in Salon on the book by Harris and Maajid Nawaz on reforming Islam.

I argued that the book was a simplistic and unoriginal take on a complex topic, more of a friendly conversation than any kind of serious analysis. The piece concluded by lamenting the erosion of public debate, as intellectuals of previous eras have been replaced by profiteers more interested in advancing narrow agendas than in exploring difficult questions.

The piece got Harris’s attention, and he publicly reached out to me on Twitter to invite me on his podcast to “discuss these issues.”

Daniel Bastian on the Harris-Klein conversation:

What’s clear from the outset is that Harris’s ego is still perhaps the central problem blinding him to many of his own strong biases. This is literally how he frames the conversation from the get-go:

“I’m not saying that everyone who did the work, who listened to the podcast and read all the articles would take my side of it, but anyone who didn’t do the work thought that I was somehow the aggressor there and somehow, in particular, the fact that I was declining to do a podcast with you was held very much against me. That caused me to change my mind about this whole thing, because I realized this is not, I can’t be perceived as someone who won’t take on legitimate criticism of his views.”

Heaven forbid there is someone out there who thinks Harris backed down from a challenge. For someone so ostensibly committed to defending a person who subscribes to the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, Harris seems positively paranoid about any affront to his own intellectual standing.

And he also unabashedly puts his own precious reputation front and center, and apparently expects us to put his concern for his reputation ahead of our concern about the harm this blather about race and IQ scores does. On the one hand, millions of people; on the other hand, Sam Harris. Hmm, tough choice.

The reason this conversation never really made it off the ground is that their emphases were both in different places and, where they overlapped, were out of register with one another. Harris thinks Klein is underestimating the reputational hazards that attend participation in questions about the science of race and other precarious topics. Klein thinks Harris underappreciates the intricate social and historical context waiting around every corner of a conversation like the one he and Murray had. Harris, moreover, thinks these conversations run independently of one another; Klein thinks they’re more or less indissociable. And round and round they go.

Klein says something detailed and persuasive, Harris responds like a brick wall. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s funny how Harris is desperately concerned about his own reputation but can’t figure out how not to sound so obtuse.

I think we do in this conversation get a better sense of Harris’s understanding of ‘identity politics’. For him, IP is something that other people engage in to lend unjustified credence to their arguments and positions. While he describes the phenomenon as using one’s skin color or gender to gain undue leverage in debate, in practice he often uses the term as simple code for tribalism, or to describe people whose motives for engagement are suspect and unfounded.

At the same time, he sees himself as somehow immune to these impulses. He honestly sees himself as sitting above the fray, reasoning from a purely Rational™ standpoint. His position is borne of sound principles, the other side’s of ideology. His views are dispassionate, unbiased and uncorrupted, while the opposition — which must include the many well respected scientists who’ve responded to Murray’s work over the years — is contaminated by identity politics and political agenda.

When Klein offers that confirmation bias and motivated reasoning might just be at work in Harris’s own approach to these conversations and, indeed, might explain why he is so quick to ascribe bad faith and malice to his detractors, including Klein, Harris demurs and doubles down, insisting that he’s “not thinking tribally”. Rather, the default explanation is that he and Murray have been unfairly maligned by dishonest parties who happen to share all the same concerns about the social implications that he does.

He does it over and over and over again, while we all squirm in embarrassment.

The fact is that anti-social justice (what Klein refers to as “anti- anti-racism”) is its own tribe, with its own tendencies toward cognitive fallacies and moral panics and all the rest. And Harris has always seemed more concerned with defending this particular tribe (read: his tribe) than using his intellectual capital and zeal to speak truth to the injustices and abuses of power that actualize social change movements. As Klein suggests more than once, this might be because Harris sees a part of himself in folks like Murray. He feels threatened by the march of social justice, anxious that he’ll be the next Murray-esque casualty in the crusade against destructive speech.

I.e. because he’s a vain, prickly, self-absorbed man with all the affect of a lawnmower.

Let’s do the Klein-Harris again.

Ezra Klein

I think you’ve had two African Americans as guests. I think you need to explore the experience of race in American more and not just see that as identity politics. See that as information that is important to talking about some of things you want to talk about, but also to hearing from some of the people who you’ve now written out of the conversation to hear.

Sam Harris

So this is the kind of thing that I would be tempted to score as bad faith —

Ezra Klein

I’m shocked!

Sam Harris

In someone else, but actually, I think this is a point of confusion, but it is, nonetheless, confusion here.

Your accusation that I’m reasoning on the basis of my tribe here is just false. I mean, I spend, this is the whole game I play, this is my main focus in just constructing my worldview and having conversations with other people. When I’m thinking about things, that are true that stand a chance of being universal, that stand a chance of scaling, these are the kinds of things that are not subordinate to a person’s identity. They’re not the things that will be true by accident of birth, because you happen to have been born in India and are Hindu, right? I mean, this is the problem I have with religious sectarianism. This is the problem I have with nationalism or any other kind of tribalism that can’t possibly scale to a global civilization that’s truly cosmopolitan, where when you’re reasoning among strangers, you have to converge on solutions to problems that work independent of who you happen to be.

Point so utterly missed. Seeing “I think you need to explore the experience of race in American more and not just see that as identity politics” as an “accusation that I’m reasoning on the basis of my tribe” is just so dense, so clueless, so…well, dumb, frankly. It’s just dumb to think that one’s experience doesn’t shape how one thinks and especially what one knows.

Then he says he defends Ayaan Hirsi Ali all the time so obviously he’s no racist god damn it. Oddly enough he doesn’t mention the time he had Maryam Namazie on his podcast and spent two hours trying to bully her into agreeing with him instead of listening to her and having a conversation with her.

Sam Harris

There are so many layers of confusion here. I mean, this is just a, again it’s not just yours, it’s everybody’s. It’s got to be a majority of both our audiences. I want to say something about this notion of what’s at stake here, because in your recent piece you talk about Murray’s focus on the inferiority of blacks.

Ezra Klein

Intellectual inferiority.

Sam Harris

But you also use just inferiority of blacks are inferior as well. Go back and look at the piece.

But this notion of inferiority, I mean, no one talks about inferiority who’s actually having a dispassionate argument on this topic of IQ testing. It absolutely does not map on, I can only, I’m not going to pretend to be a mind reader, but it certainly doesn’t map on to my view of this situation.

I mean, for instance, I would bet my life that my IQ is lower than John von Neumann’s was.

Oh god oh god oh god how does one even try to reason with someone who claims that insisting that black people have “lower IQs” on average is not at all calling them inferior?

Ezra Klein

Two things here. One, when I talk about what Murray says specifically I do use intellectual inferiority. I got the piece out in front of me.

I do think, 100 percent, without doubt, that when we have, in American life, over and over and over again, said that African Americans are intellectually less capable than whites, that has been — yes, that is a way of saying that they are inferior and it has been a way of treating them as if they are inferior. It has been a way of justifying social outcomes that are unbelievably unequal and unfair that have been going on until, I mean, they’re going on in the present day.

Of course it has, just as it has with women.

There’s a lot more after that but I think I’ve had enough.

All this conversation did is further convince me that Sam Harris is a blight on the intellectual landscape.

Ezra Klein did the podcast with Sam Harris, and there’s a transcript. It is, naturally, an interesting read. One sample:

Ezra Klein

One of the things I’ve come to think about you that I actually did not come into this believing is, you’re very quick to see a lot of psychological tendencies, cognitive fallacies, etc. in others that you don’t see applying to yourself, or people you’ve written into your tribe. You say words in there like confirmation bias, etc., to me about how we’re looking at Murray. The whole thing I just told you is that Charles Murray is a guy who works at conservative think tanks, whose first book was about why we should get rid of the welfare state, who is, his whole life’s work is about breaking down social policy.

To the extent that I have any biases that flow backwards from political commitments, so does he. We’re all —

Sam Harris

Okay. But what’s my bias?

Ezra Klein

Hold on Sam. I’m going to go through this.

Sam Harris

But what’s my bias?

Ezra Klein

I promise you I will get to your bias very quickly.

[one para omitted]

Then you asked me — and I think this is a good question, because I think this gets to the core of this and it gets to where I tried to open us up into — your view of this debate is that to say that you have a bias in it is to say, in your terms, that you’re like the grand dragon of the KKK. That the only version of a bias that can be influencing what you see here is a core form of racism. That’s actually not my view of you, but I do think you have a bias.

I think you have a huge sensitivity, let’s put it that way, and you have a lot of difficulty extending an assumption of good faith to anyone who disagrees with you on an issue that you code as identity politics. There’s a place actually where I think you got into this in a pretty interesting way. I went back and I read your discussion with Glenn Loury.

At the beginning, when you’re talking about why you chose to have Glenn on the show, you say, “My goal was to find an African American intellectual, who could really get into the details with me, but whom I also trusted to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn’t be contaminated by identity politics.” To you, engaging in identity politics discredits your ability to participate in a rational conversation, and it’s something, as far as I can tell, that you do not see yourself as doing.

I don’t know what they say next because I paused there.

That’s one of the things that just drives me nuts about Harris and guys like Harris – their blindness (their smug blindness, frankly) to how easy it is for people with the Approved Forms of identity to see “contamination” in the “identity politics” of people who don’t. It’s almost comical that Sam Harris thinks he has truly rational conversations that are not contaminated by identity politics. It’s less close to comical that he doesn’t even realize that his hostility to “identity politics” is “identity politics.”

So, yeah, that’s his bias, or one of them.

Sam Harris has added an update to his attack on Ezra Klein / email dump, to explain how sad it is that everyone did such a crap job of reading his attack / email dump, it’s enough to make a person lose faith in the power of shy-racist thought-making.

NOTE (3/28/18)

Judging from the response to this post on social media, my decision to publish these emails appears to have backfired. I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting (e.g. his denial of misrepresentations and slurs that are in the very article he published). Many people seem to have judged from his politeness that Ezra was the one behaving honestly and ethically. This is frustrating, to say the least.

That’s some impressive self-knowledge right there. (Isn’t it funny how narcissists are always thinking about themselves and yet know less about the subject than anyone who talks to them for ten minutes?) He was relying on readers to see it the way he sees it instead of drawing their own conclusions – the nerve of some people! How can they not “follow the plot” and notice what Sam Harris thinks is obvious? How can they think that the polite person of two people is the one being polite? It’s so frustrating.

Many readers seem mystified by the anger I expressed in this email exchange. Why care so much about “criticism” or even “insults”? But this has nothing to do with criticism and insults. What has been accomplished in Murray’s case, and is being attempted in mine, is nothing less the total destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of honestly discussing scientific data.

What total destruction? Again: Murray has a very comfortable berth at the AEI. I’m pretty sure they pay their house intellectuals fairly lavishly, by way of demonstrating that right-wing think tanks are much better for intellectual types than cash-strapped universities. Harris has those best-seller royalties. Furthermore the reputations can’t be totally destroyed no matter what, because if everyone who backs away from WHITES ARE BEST AND SMARTEST scholars then their opposites rush in to fill the gap. But also, again, Sam Harris’s reputation is actually not as important as the normalization of the WHITES SMARTEST bullshit.

Klein published fringe, ideologically-driven, and cherry-picked science as though it were the consensus of experts in the field and declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion in my and Murray’s defense—all to the purpose of tarring us as racists and enablers of racists. This comes at immense personal and social cost. It is also dishonest.

Oh yes? Mainstream science is all on Murray’s side? Really? That’s not the impression I get, but I’m not a scientist so I don’t know. At any rate, again, he’s worrying about the “immense personal and social cost” to him while not worrying a bit about the social, political, psychological, economic, vocational and related costs to all the people branded “dumber” by Murray’s “science.” In fact, what he is is “offended” – and aren’t we supposed to laugh and jeer at people who complain about being “offended”? Harris is worried about his fee-fees; cue all the anti-SJWs and mockers of the Control Left telling Harris to toughen up or get off Twitter or both.

Many readers also fail to see how asymmetrical any debate on this topic is.

Uhhhhhh…what? Asymmetrical? To the disadvantage of Harris? He’s the underdog here? Not the people he’s helping Murray stamp with the “Dumber” brand?

Whatever I say at this point, no matter how scientifically careful, appears to convey an interest in establishing the truth of racial differences (which I do not have and have criticized in others). Does it matter that Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man was debunked long ago, or that James Flynn now acknowledges that his eponymous effect cannot account for the race-IQ data? No, it doesn’t. This is a moral panic and a no-win situation (and Klein and my other “critics” know that). I did not have Charles Murray on my podcast because I was interested in intelligence differences across races. I had him on in an attempt to correct what I perceived to be a terrible injustice done to an honest scholar. Having attempted that, for better or worse, I will now move on to other topics.—SH

Stick the flounce, please.

So, as you’ve probably seen already via comments, Sam Harris retorted to Ezra Klein’s Vox piece yesterday. He retorted in his usual prickly, self-righteous, mind-blind, egomaniacal way.

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/978766308643778560

Most of the (nearly 900 so far) replies to that tweet point out that he doesn’t come across as well in that piece as he clearly thinks he does. Did I mention mind-blind? Yes I did. He reminds me of Trump in his helpless inability to perceive his own presentation of self from the point of view of not-SamHarris.

https://twitter.com/jtjoelson/status/978777659307151363

Exactly so. He’s always done that though – this isn’t some new thing. Remember that time he tried to make Chomsky do a dialogue with him? And posted their email exchange as if it would show what a putz Chomsky had been and it simply showed what a putz he, Harris, had been? This is like that.

So, on to his response:

In April of 2017, I published a podcast with Charles Murray, coauthor of the controversial (and endlessly misrepresented) book The Bell Curve. These are the most provocative claims in the book:

1. Human “general intelligence” is a scientifically valid concept.
2. IQ tests do a pretty good job of measuring it.
3. A person’s IQ is highly predictive of his/her success in life.
4. Mean IQ differs across populations (blacks < whites < Asians).
5. It isn’t known to what degree differences in IQ are genetically determined, but it seems safe to say that genes play a role (and also safe to say that environment does too).

At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial—though taken together, they proved devastating to his reputation among nonscientists.

That would leave most readers with the impression that Murray is a scientist, presumably one who specializes in whatever fields those are that agree with the claim “human ‘general intelligence’ is a scientifically valid concept.” But he’s not. His PhD is in political science. Ok so he’s a social scientist but that’s not how Harris is using “scientifically” in that passage. Harris is implying that Murray is a neuroscientist or intelligence scientist or cognition scientist of some kind, a white coat scientist, a lab scientist, a hard scientist – not a political scientist. In particular “they proved devastating to his reputation among nonscientists” implies that Murray is hot shit to real scientists, the ones who know everything there is to know about brains.

At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial—though taken together, they proved devastating to his reputation among nonscientists. That remains the case today. When I spoke with Murray last year, he had just been de-platformed at Middlebury College, a quarter century after his book was first published, and his host had been physically assaulted while leaving the hall. So I decided to invite him on my podcast to discuss the episode, along with the mischaracterizations of his research that gave rise to it.

That “so” doesn’t do the work he wants it to. There is no “so” there. De-platforming is not automatically a reason to invite people onto one’s podcast. It depends. It could be the case that the ruckus at Middlebury was outrageous and that there’s no particular reason to boost Murray’s fame. Murray has a niche at the American Enterprise Institute, so he’s ok. The naughty lefties haven’t pushed him out into the snow to die while clutching his little box of matches.

Needless to say, I knew that having a friendly conversation with Murray might draw some fire my way. But that was, in part, the point. Given the viciousness with which he continues to be scapegoated—and, indeed, my own careful avoidance of him up to that moment—I felt a moral imperative to provide him some cover.

But that’s what doesn’t follow. Viciousness is, broadly speaking, wrong, but it doesn’t follow that everyone who meets vicious opposition is deserving of “some cover.”

In the aftermath of our conversation, many people have sought to paint me as a racist—but few have tried quite so hard as Ezra Klein, editor in chief of Vox. In response to my podcast, Klein published a disingenuous hit piece that pretended to represent the scientific consensus on human intelligence while vilifying me as, at best, Murray’s dupe. More likely, readers unfamiliar with my work came away believing that I’m a racist pseudoscientist in my own right.

How interesting that Harris puts that in such a misleading way – that he makes it look as if Ezra Klein wrote a hit piece on him. “Published” can be just another way of saying “posted” or “wrote” or “issued” in the world of online writing and publishing. Funny how Harris forgot to remind us that Klein is an editor at Vox, and to mention the actual authors of the “hit piece” – Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett, actual researchers in the field.

What do they say?

In an episode that runs nearly two and a half hours, Harris, who is best known as the author of The End of Faith, presents Murray as a victim of “a politically correct moral panic” — and goes so far as to say that Murray has no intellectually honest academic critics. Murray’s work on The Bell Curve, Harris insists, merely summarizes the consensus of experts on the subject of intelligence.

The consensus, he says, is that IQ exists; that it is extraordinarily important to life outcomes of all sorts; that it is largely heritable; and that we don’t know of any interventions that can improve the part that is not heritable. The consensus also includes the observation that the IQs of black Americans are lower, on average, than that of whites, and — most contentiously — that this and other differences among racial groups is based at least in part in genetics.

Harris is not a neutral presence in the interview. “For better or worse, these are all facts,” he tells his listeners. “In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence than for these claims.” Harris belies his self-presentation as a tough-minded skeptic by failing to ask Murray a single challenging question. Instead, during their lengthy conversation, he passively follows Murray to the dangerous and unwarranted conclusion that black and Hispanic people in the US are almost certainly genetically disposed to have lower IQ scores on average than whites or Asians — and that the IQ difference also explains differences in life outcomes between different ethnic and racial groups.

In Harris’s view, all of this is simply beyond dispute. Murray’s claims about race and intelligence, however, do not stand up to serious critical or empirical examination. But the main point of this brief piece is not merely to rebut Murray’s conclusions per se — although we will do some of that — but rather to consider the faulty path by which he casually proceeds from a few basic premises to the inflammatory conclusion that IQ differences between groups are likely to be at least partly based on inborn genetic differences. These conclusions, Harris and Murray insist, are disputed only by head-in-the-sand elitists afraid of the policy implications.

But that’s not true, and they explain why, showing their work as they do. It’s not really about Harris, in fact, it’s about Murray’s claims and what is wrong with them. Yet to Harris it’s a “hit piece” about him, and Klein published it at Vox (did he?) for the clicks:

After Klein published that article, and amplified its effects on social media, I reached out to him in the hope of appealing to his editorial conscience. I found none. The ethic that governs Klein’s brand of journalism appears to be: Accuse a person with a large platform of something terrible, and then monetize the resulting controversy. If he complains, invite him to respond in your magazine so that he will drive his audience your way and you can further profit from his doomed effort to undo the damage you’ve done to his reputation.

It’s all about Harris’s reputation. It’s not at all about the harm that can be done by peddling bad false wrong claims about race and intelligence, it’s simply about Harris’s reputation.

So he published their email exchange without permission.

Ezra Klein on Sam Harris and “we brave awesome white guys are going to talk Forbidden Truth about race now, so suck it up, cowards.”

It starts with a typically smug taunt by brave awesome Sam himself.

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/977889565238153222

Klein explains:

The background to Harris’s shot at me is that last year, Harris had Charles Murray on his podcast. Murray is a popular conservative intellectual best known for co-writing The Bell Curve, which posited, in a controversial section, a genetic basis for the observed difference between black and white IQs.

Harris’s invitation came in the aftermath of Murray being shouted down, and his academic chaperone assaulted, as he tried to give an invited address on an unrelated topic at Middlebury College. The aftermath of the incident had made Murray a martyr for free speech, and Harris brought him on the show in part as a statement of disgust with the illiberalism that had greeted Murray on campus.

Harris’s conversation with Murray was titled, tantalizingly, “Forbidden Knowledge,” and in it, Harris sought to rehabilitate the conversation over race and IQ as well as open a larger debate about what can and cannot be said in today’s America. Here is Harris framing the discussion:

People don’t want to hear that a person’s intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence even in childhood. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don’t want to hear this. And they certainly don’t want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

But Brave Sir Sam is here to do what those cowardly people who Don’t Want To Hear It refuse to do – he’s here to assure us that yes white people really are smarter than everyone else, and that’s Science.

Harris returns repeatedly to the idea that the controversy over Murray’s race and IQ work is driven by “dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice” — not a genuine disagreement over the underlying science or its interpretation. As he puts it, “there is virtually no scientific controversy” around Murray’s argument.

But even if he’s right that there’s no scientific controversy (Klein says in fact there’s plenty), it doesn’t follow that not wanting to go around shouting WHITE PEOPLE ARE SMARTEST OF ALL is necessarily dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice. I can think of several other things it could be. It strikes me as quite typical of Sam Harris to think dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice are the only explanation.

Subsequently, Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett — three academic psychologists who specialize in studying intelligence — wrote a piece for Vox arguing that Murray was peddling pseudoscience and Harris had been irresponsible in representing it as the scientific consensus. (You can read their piece here, a criticism of their piece here, and their response to their critics here.)

Harris responded furiously to their article and publicly challenged me, as Vox’s editor-in-chief at the time, to come on his show and debate the issue. Over email, after failing to persuade Harris to have Turkheimer, Harden, or Nisbett on instead, I accepted Harris’s invitation. Unfortunately, our exchange seemed to only make him angrier. He ultimately refused to have me on his podcast on the grounds that a conversation between the two of us would be “unproductive,” pivoting to a demand that I instead publish an op-ed supporting his views (you can read that piece here) or suggesting instead he simply publishes all our emails to each other (I rejected that because my emails were attempting to set up a podcast between Harris and Vox’s authors, not arguing my position on this issue).

The linked op-ed supporting his views is at Quillette. Of course it is.

Here is my view: Research shows measurable consequences on IQ and a host of other outcomes from the kind of violence and discrimination America inflicted for centuries against African Americans. In a vicious cycle, the consequences of that violence have pushed forward the underlying attitudes that allow discriminatory policies to flourish and justify the racially unequal world we’ve built.

Generations of poverty will do that to people. It’s pretty gruesome to see privileged (yes, privileged, in just about every sense you can think of) guys like Sam Harris falling over themselves to push the “whites just are smarter, it’s Science” line.

The conversation between Murray and Harris, one not unique to them, is particularly important right now because it shows how longstanding, deeply harmful tropes are being rehabilitated across the right as a brave stand against political correctness, and as a justification for cutting social programs and giving up on efforts to foster racial equality.

So he explains where Harris goes wrong.

H/t Screechy Monkey

Sam Harris just keeps getting more tiresome. (Not more smug. He started out at maximum smug so he can’t get any more so.) (Unless he performs a miracle.)

Ooh edgy.

I’m reading comments on this post about the reasons Lawrence Krauss got semi-banned from Case Western Reserve, and I’m brought up short by this comment – by, specifically, a bit where it quotes Sam Harris.

It’s an elephant that looms large for female atheists, but is invisible for male atheists: Ed Drayton noticed the gender disparity, didn’t know why, so he asked and got knowledgeable answers: Sam Harris also noticed it, didn’t know why, but didn’t let ignorance get in the way of instant expertise when, off the cuff at a book signing, he supplied an answer from his own imagination:

“I think it may have to do with my person[al] slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people… People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”

I’ve seen it before, of course; I did a furious post about it at the time, of course (I’m nothing if not predictable), and yet…I hadn’t seen it in awhile and I’d forgotten details. The “estrogen vibe” bit has been much quoted and I fell into the habit of citing it that way when occasion arose to cite it, with the result that I neglected the rest of it. The estrogen vibe part is not the worst part. No.

I’ll tell you what is.

There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said.

“There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said.

What’s he saying there? He’s saying that the ability to take a step back from the given, the normal, the accepted, the mainstream, the conventional, the everybody knows, the unquestioned, the unquestionable – to take a step back from it and think about it, analyze it, question it, doubt it, be critical of it, is

INTRINSICALLY MALE.

It’s a truly astounding thing to say.

After all what can be more basic? How can we ever improve anything if we don’t have that habit of questioning the obvious? If we accept that it’s intrinsically male then women are useless for any kind of real thinking. It frames men as the innovators and rebels and reformers, and women as the bovine accepters.

But apparently that really is how most of them do see us, and that’s why they’re customers for endless iterations of An Evening With

• Sam Harris
• Richard Dawkins
• Michael Shermer
• Lawrence Krauss
• Bill Maher

There’s one coming up in just two days – Harris and Shermer.

Pangburn Philosophy presents an Evening with Sam Harris & Michael Shermer, Monday, March 5 in Dell Hall.

Join authors Sam Harris & Michael Shermer for a night of skepticism, science & reason.

Sit at the feet of the manly Thinkers who are intrinsically inclined to be “very critical of bad ideas” – except their own, of course.

Harris “explained” at the time that it was just a spontaneous reply to a question, not a carefully reasoned claim in a piece of writing. Yes; granted. He probably wouldn’t put it that starkly in a piece of writing. But the fact that it is what popped into his head when he was asked is striking and profoundly depressing. That’s how they see us. That’s what they think of us. We’re too sweet and loving to take a critical posture…so that’s why it’s absolutely necessary to leave us out of all the intellectual work and just keep hogging the microphone forever and ever and ever and ever…………..