Some Schmo wrote:Klein accused Harris of engaging in a discussion to promote a racist agenda, and that's ridiculous.
Where? He explicitly says that he isn't saying this on several occasions while explaining that Harris's promotion of someone who advocates dubious race science is incidental to his desire to push-back against leftwing attacks on free speech on college campuses. Klein actually bends over backwards to be polite on this point.
In their podcast exchange Klein says,
"This is good, because I think this gets much closer to the meat of where we actually disagree. Something I want to be clear about is what I think was wrong in that podcast is not that you didn’t virtue signal. It’s not that you didn’t come out and say, “Hey, listen, just before I start this up, I want everybody to know I’m not a racist.”
And by the way I’m not here to say you’re racist, I don’t think you are. We have not called you one. I actually think we should talk later about literally just what racism is, how we use that word in this conversation.
But my criticism of your podcast and, by the way my criticism also of Murray, and this is useful, because I can work backwards through your answer here, is not that you didn’t excuse yourself. It’s that in a conversation about an outcome of American life — How do African Americans and whites score on IQ tests in America today? What happens when somebody sits down and takes the test today? — that is an outcome of the American experiment, an experiment we’ve been running in this country for hundreds of years. You did not discuss how race and racism act upon that outcome. You did not discuss it.
I mean, amazingly to me, you all didn’t talk about slavery or segregation once. What I’m saying here is not that you lack empathy — although in a different space, I think you have a sense of what Murray is going through that is different from your sense of what other people who are hurt in this conversation go through, I do believe that — but as it comes to the way you actually conducted the conversation, I’m arguing that you lacked a sense of history, that you didn’t deal in a serious way with the history of this conversation, a conversation that has been going on literally since the dawn of the country. A conversation that has been wrong in virtually every version, in every iteration, we’ve had in America before.
In this piece Klein writes a great deal about specifically how Sam Harris ends up promoting Murray's writing on race while simultaneously arguing he isn't trying to promote a racist agenda. He thinks he's doing it incidentally because of a blindspot:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... bell-curveHarris repeatedly accuses Klein of trying to paint him as a racist for his promotion of Murray. In their email exchange, Klein is clear what what he thinks and doesn't think:
https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/I’m perplexed by the criticism, which I’ve seen some make and I think you’re implying, that there actually isn’t much daylight between the case you and Murray present and the one the authors present, and what disagreement exists is a matter of dishonest framing. In your response to me, it’s clear you thought I couldn’t possibly have heard the original discussion to think that this piece was fair, which means I’m either a terrible listener, or the discussion landed differently on some listeners than you think it did, or both.
The overwhelming thrust of your discussion features Murray arguing that racial IQ differences are real, persistent, significant, driven by genetic racial differences (he has a long discourse on how strong that signal must be to make it through the noise of racial mixing), and immune to virtually every intervention we’ve thought of. Yes, there are caveats sprinkled throughout, but there’s also a clear and consistent argument being made, or so it seemed to me. That was, as I understood it, the Forbidden Knowledge referred to in the title: you can’t just wish away the black-white IQ gap as a matter of environment and history and disadvantage.
And these authors are saying, no — racial IQ differences can be seen on tests, but they are mutable, their relationship with genetics is much more complex than Murray lets on (his argument that this would all be genetically understood shortly seems really wrong, given what I’ve seen in this area, and just given how hard we generally find it to untangle genetic relationships in spaces far less complex than intelligence), that we’ve seen both interventions and time create massive differences, that heritable qualities exhibit massive changes all the time, etc.
Another way of putting it is I think the takeaway that one would fairly have from your conversation — certainly the takeaway I had — is that the racial IQ gap cannot plausibly be closed, and instead needs to be managed. That’s definitely the Bell Curve takeaway. The central conclusion of this piece, it seems to me, is that we are far, far, far away from being able to conclude that, and the progress made on IQ (and other heritable qualities) in recent generations should make us optimistic, not pessimistic, and deserves much more emphasis than Murray gives it.
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We do disagree on the underlying text here. Without belaboring the points, the authors didn’t call you a white supremacist, or imply you were one, as you suggested in your podcast. They didn’t call you a racialist, much less a racist. To the extent any motivating lens was suggested for your discussion, it is “a reflexive defense of free academic inquiry,” and a post-Middlebury concern over “liberal intolerance” — hardly the most malign intentions.
I won’t waste your time by re-summarizing the substance of the dispute from my perspective. Suffice to say, if you share my view of the substance, then of course it’s a problem if endorsing Murrayism becomes a way for people to signal intellectual courage. This is, I think, a view you would recognize easily in another context: You’ve often criticized liberals — and I think you now believe this about me — for holding incorrect opinions about various matters for reasons of virtue signaling, and you’ve often outlined the dangers inherent in that.