• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Legendary Comedy Duo: Harris and Murray

TraneWreck said:
I fully accept that IQ and intelligence in an individual and in groups is partly determined by a range of heritable factors and environmental conditions. That ruins Murray's arguments, not mine.
Click to expand...

Eh? Why does that ruin his argument when he also says this?
 
TraneWreck said:
You are flatly wrong. Murray has been one of the most influential racists of the last couple decades. His shoddy science has given an intellectual foundation to a wide range of malicious beliefs.

You can stubbornly refuse to see the truth in front of you, but, again, the man generates bunk science for the express reason of attempting to prove that black people are genetically inferior to white people.

Hey, that's *********** racist.



Again, you are just wrong. You just listened to a podcast where he presented very bad science to justify his position that black people are inferior to white people. That is a proud, public display of racism.

That you, like Harris, have chosen to ignore the actual science making it difficult to see where the malicious, flawed reasoning takes place is not a compelling argument against Murray's racism.




See, this is just sad. It isn't because he had a conversation. It's because he gave a teary defense of the man, validated his incorrect statements as being "just facts," and completely failed to criticize views that have been demolished for two decades. Harris endorsed those views, both explicitly and implicitly.

THAT is the reason for the criticism.
Click to expand...

I think you are merely reasserting the same thing. I and Harris are not convinced that what we have seen and heard in front of us is racist. You insist it is. You accept that a study showing mean average IQs of East Asians as being more intelligent than other groups due to environmental and genetic factors would not be racist yet you asset that similar conclusions when put forward by Murray are. How does that work?
 
And seriously, I listened to the podcast - you did not - and he does not proudly and publicly claim that blacks are inferior to whites. This is why I am having trouble taking your word for anything. It seems you are making things up.
 
angrysoba said:
Eh? Why does that ruin his argument when he also says this?
Click to expand...

Because he says it, then still draws conclusions that are not justified by the evidence.

This was the very careful analysis contained in the article I linked that you complained about "knitpicking." This is why they were so careful. Literally no one has provided an argument or defense of Murray that was not already dealt with in the article in the OP.
 
angrysoba said:
And seriously, I listened to the podcast - you did not - and he does not proudly and publicly claim that blacks are inferior to whites. This is why I am having trouble taking your word for anything. It seems you are making things up.
Click to expand...

I listened long enough to hear him do it.

This isn't complicated stuff. Murray's entire game is to cloak obvious, gross racism behind a "scienc-y" facade. If you are unaware of the science or don't care to learn, it can be convincing. That's why he's particularly malicious and dangerous.

Murray also plays this coy little game of trying to distance himself from the Bell Curve and minimize the claims therein, but as you see in the Harris interview, he will always go back to defending it as "Science."

The man argues for race realism and provable genetic differences between those races in a way that is not supported by the evidence.

If you can't see how the assertion that black people are one standard deviation below white people in terms of intelligence, and environmental factors cannot explain it, is racist, I don't know what to tell you. It would be one thing if the science supported that claim, but it does not.
 
angrysoba said:
I think you are merely reasserting the same thing.
Click to expand...

As are you. You just say over and over you don't think he's racist. That's something you can keep saying over and over.

I and Harris are not convinced that what we have seen and heard in front of us is racist. You insist it is. You accept that a study showing mean average IQs of East Asians as being more intelligent than other groups due to environmental and genetic factors would not be racist yet you asset that similar conclusions when put forward by Murray are. How does that work?
Click to expand...

Did you miss the part where Murray argues that environmental conditions are insufficient to explain achievement differences between groups?

This is the fundamental problem with your repetitive, unconvincing defense of Murray: you ignore his actual conclusions.

Everyone agrees there is some combination of genetics and environmental conditions. Only one guy is saying that environmental conditions are inadequate to explain why white people are smarter than black people.
 
Here is a good article that runs down the notorious racists who were used as sources for the Bell Curve:

For all the shock value of its assertion that blacks are intractably, and probably biologically, inferior in intelligence to whites and Asians, The Bell Curve is not quite an original piece of research. It is, in spite of all the controversy that is attending its publication, only a review of the literature—an elaborate interpretation of data culled from the work of other social scientists. For this reason, the credibility of its authors, Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, rests significantly on the credibility of their sources.

[...]

Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828).2 But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.
Click to expand...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve/
 
TraneWreck said:
As are you. You just say over and over you don't think he's racist. That's something you can keep saying over and over.



Did you miss the part where Murray argues that environmental conditions are insufficient to explain achievement differences between groups?

This is the fundamental problem with your repetitive, unconvincing defense of Murray: you ignore his actual conclusions.

Everyone agrees there is some combination of genetics and environmental conditions. Only one guy is saying that environmental conditions are inadequate to explain why white people are smarter than black people.
Click to expand...

What? I have not asserted that Murray is not a racist. I have said he may be but I haven't seen evidence to support that. And if YOU think that environmental and genetic factors combine to cause difference in intelligence among groups then you DO think environmental factors alone are inadequate to explain them.
 
angrysoba said:
What? I have not asserted that Murray is not a racist. I have said he may be but I haven't seen evidence to support that. And if YOU think that environmental and genetic factors combine to cause difference in intelligence among groups then you DO think environmental factors alone are inadequate to explain them.
Click to expand...

No, that's just a bad conclusion. Environmental factors may be completely sufficient to determine the difference in IQ and intelligence BETWEEN "RACES," while still acknowledging that there is a genetic component.

That's the point of the Flynn effect: the difference between white people and black people today is 1/2 the difference between white people today and white people in 1948. The genetics are the same, the environment changed, that is more than sufficient to explain the difference.
 
TraneWreck said:
No, that's just a bad conclusion. Environmental factors may be completely sufficient to determine the difference in IQ and intelligence BETWEEN "RACES," while still acknowledging that there is a genetic component.

That's the point of the Flynn effect: the difference between white people and black people today is 1/2 the difference between white people today and white people in 1948. The genetics are the same, the environment changed, that is more than sufficient to explain the difference.
Click to expand...

Alright, well I will read up more on the issue, starting with the paper that the Vox authors wrote as an update to Knowns and Unknowns, and the NYRB article. Hopefully that will give me a more informed idea about Murray's work. If I think it demonstrates he is a racist then I'll say so, but I'm not going to make such a claim without being having strong evidence.
 
angrysoba said:
Alright, well I will read up more on the issue, starting with the paper that the Vox authors wrote as an update to Knowns and Unknowns, and the NYRB article. Hopefully that will give me a more informed idea about Murray's work. If I think it demonstrates he is a racist then I'll say so, but I'm not going to make such a claim without being having strong evidence.
Click to expand...

All I can ask is that you read more, though I would be curious if you could provide a list of non-racist academics who uncritically quote from journals edited by ex-Nazis:

Undaunted, Mankind Quarterly published work by some of those who had taken part in research under Hitler’s regime in Germany. Ottmar von Verschuer, a leading race scientist in Nazi Germany and an academic mentor of Josef Mengele, even served on the Mankind Quarterly editorial board.
Click to expand...
 
it is telling that despite repeated requests, tranewreck is singularly unable to provide a quote from this awful gross racist that we can read (or hear, a timestamp from the podcast would do fine) and go 'oh yeah, that is pretty racist, maybe you are right instead of appearing to engage in somewhat hysterical attacks that basically completely validate what is said in the intro to the podcast...'
 
Demanding a single discrete quote to focus on while ignoring his sources and conclusions seems like a red herring to me.
 
TraneWreck said:
All I can ask is that you read more, though I would be curious if you could provide a list of non-racist academics who uncritically quote from journals edited by ex-Nazis:
Click to expand...

Quote:
Undaunted, Mankind Quarterly published work by some of those who had taken part in research under Hitler’s regime in Germany. Ottmar von Verschuer, a leading race scientist in Nazi Germany and an academic mentor of Josef Mengele, even served on the Mankind Quarterly editorial board.
Click to expand...

And I bet just as much bias is shown by the people Tranewreck quotes. Reparations supporters for instance. So I give little credence to the Godwin ploy.

Race is one of several subjects on which it is nearly impossible to find unbiased research. Others are pornography, Marijuana, and homosexulity- nature or nurture.

And about now, there may be enough data acquired to come to a conclusion. But 'Africa' is too broad, it would need to be separated into the ummm 7 different ethnicities of Africa.

Ooops, double the number of groups, each of those 7 diluted with Euros. Maybe African-Americans ARE dumber, because of Euro genes? Hahahahaha. :D

And the culmination of all this research will have to point out exactly which group is the stupidest. Serbians? Pacific Islanders? Amazon pygmies? There has to be ONE. Would liberals accept that?

And of course, that avg would not meant that every member is shtoopid either. I bet there is a genius Pygmy Serbian out there too.
 
Hmm, I can't remember- did 23&Me ask about my IQ? They asked a lot of sciency stuff. I didn't do Ancestry, did they?

But those sites also each have a bias. 23+ wanted to gather new data, to sell to Big Pharma. Which they did, to the tune of $75M. Ancestry is an LDS group, they want to baptize ancestors of Mormons in absentia.

But you can get all 50M exomes sequenced for about $500 now. 50x more than either of those two. I'll go search...

https://www.genosresearch.com

But Ooops, they have been merged. I'm not sure they will do direct to public stuff any more. " As a result of the acquisition, we are temporarily holding off on accepting new orders. "
 
Last edited:
Sam Harris had an email exchange with Ezra Klein of Vox regarding the piece attacking him and Murray. He has now published the email exchange.

I am still reading it, but here is a main point:

The thrust of the Vox piece is to distort Murray’s clearly stated thesis: He doesn’t know how much of interracial IQ difference is genetic and how much is environmental, and he suspects that both are involved. His strongest claim is that given the data, it’s very hard to believe that it’s 100 percent environmental. This could be said about almost any human trait. Would you want to bet that anything significant about you is 100 percent environmental? I would take the other side of that bet any day, as would any other honest scientist. (The truth is, it’s not even clear what it means to say that something is 100 percent environmental. All the environment can interact with is our genes and their products.)
Click to expand...

https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/
 
There's a difference between some particular trait being 100% environmental (whatever, as Harris himself says, that means) and the differences between two populations in that trait being 100% environmental.

I think the latter is a much more straightforward idea and I don't think "any other honest scientist" would find it particularly unlikely a priori.
 
Roboramma said:
There's a difference between some particular trait being 100% environmental (whatever, as Harris himself says, that means) and the differences between two populations in that trait being 100% environmental.

I think the latter is a much more straightforward idea and I don't think "any other honest scientist" would find it particularly unlikely a priori.
Click to expand...

...neither I nor Murray denied that environment contributes to the differences we see across groups and between individuals. In fact, we used the same analogy to height that the authors used. Height is highly heritable, but you can surely stunt a person’s (or a whole population’s) growth through malnutrition. So, merely seeing a group of short people, one can’t be sure to what degree environment determined their height. And yet it remains a fact that if a person doesn’t have the genes to be 7 feet tall, he won’t be. It is also utterly uncontroversial to say that while there are many ways to prevent a person from reaching his full intellectual height, if he doesn’t have the genes to be the next Alan Turing, he won’t be that either.
Click to expand...

* Unless we are talking about some kind of technological enhancements, I suppose.
 
Harris was pissed off at the way he and Murray were represented by the writers of the "great article" TraneWreck posted in the OP, and the role Ezra Klein performed as the editor, as well as his refusal to publish a counter-argument from a scientist called Richard Haier:

Here are two things that you seem to deny, which I think are not debatable (at all):

1. You published an article (and tweets) that directly attacked my intellectual integrity. At a minimum, you claimed that I was taken in by Murray, because I didn’t know enough of the relevant science. Consequently, we peddled “junk science” or “pseudoscience” on my podcast.
2. You published an article (and tweets) that directly attacked my moral integrity. Murray is “dangerous,” and my treating him as a free speech case is “disastrous.” We are “racialists” (this is scarcely a euphemism for “racist”). There is no way to read that article (or your tweets) without concluding that Murray and I are unconscionably reckless (if not actually bad) people.
In your email, you seem to deny both these points—but they are not deniable. What’s more, you have declined to publish a truly expert opinion (from Richard Haier) that rebuts both of them—as though Vox has suddenly run out of pixels. I don’t know how we will have a productive conversation if you are going to stonewall me on these points.

The article you published will stay online until the end of time, damaging my and Murray’s reputations. I have seen it circulated by otherwise intelligent people as though it were the definitive takedown of us—where it is a dishonest, ideological, and sanctimonious cherry picking of the available evidence.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom