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Legendary Comedy Duo: Harris and Murray

d4m10n said:
Intelligence, height, athleticism, and health are all important attributes in the game of life (some more than others) but Murray only writes books about the increasing value and centrality of one of them. If we take out the controversial chapters about racial subgroups from The Bell Curve and Coming Apart, what we have left are books about how IQ is by far the most important determinant of life outcomes in modern society.
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It's racist to research IQ without simultaneously researching height, athleticism, and health?
 
angrysoba said:
That's a separate issue. It may well be that g is not a very rigorous metric. It's one of those examples I gave where I said the claim is a "target rich environment". If we can cast enough doubt on the findings we don't have to think about it anymore and that would be satisfying enough.

However, what if it is a robust metric after all?

Then we presumably have to find another hiding place, right?
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In a hypothetical world where the g factor or some other metric had withstood the highest degree of scrutiny to the point that denial or ignorance would have to be responsible for rejecting it, then we'd have to figure out how to internally frame that so as to not translate it into racist thoughts and words.

I'd have to carefully look at all possible data points to know the specifics of how I'd think of it. It seems more likely than not that differences between groups would be in aspects similar to (but far smaller than) than differences between genders/sexes, where something like the neurodiversity model of understanding cognitive differences is useful.
 
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Wildy said:
As an aside, the discussion between Harris and Klein has been released. (Or if you'd prefer listening to Klein's show.)

It is 2 hours long, so clear some time.
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Listened to it over lunch today (at 2x speed) and I'm going to say Sam Harris pretty much **** the bed on this one. He made everything personal, whined endlessly about meta-topical minutiae, and generally failed to focus on the scientific or sociological claims which Murray makes.

Bias check: I'm on the relatively short list of people who were already subscribed to both Ezra and Sam's podcasts, but I usually enjoy Sam's show a bit more.
 
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d4m10n said:
Listened to it over lunch today (at 2x speed) and I'm going to say Sam Harris pretty much **** the bed on this one. He made everything personal, whined endlessly about meta-topical minutiae, and generally failed to focus on the scientific or sociological claims which Murray makes.

Bias check: I'm on the relatively short list of people who were already subscribed to both Ezra and Sam's podcasts, but I usually enjoy Sam's show a bit more.
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I pretty much thought the same. Ezra made some good points the first hour and really kind of owned Harris but the second hour Harris definitely made the better arguments and Ezra had no reply to many of Harris' hypotheticals like his Neanderthal thought experiment.

But overall Harris did come across kind of whiney and really impugned the intellectual honesty of pretty much everyone who criticized him while complaining of the same being done to him and Murray.
 
d4m10n said:
Listened to it over lunch today (at 2x speed) and I'm going to say Sam Harris pretty much **** the bed on this one. He made everything personal, whined endlessly about meta-topical minutiae, and generally failed to focus on the scientific or sociological claims which Murray makes.

Bias check: I'm on the relatively short list of people who were already subscribed to both Ezra and Sam's podcasts, but I usually enjoy Sam's show a bit more.
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I have an extreme aversion to the podcast format when it comes to highly technical discussions of scientific matters which, by virtue of their very nature, need to be evidence-heavy. So, thanks for listening and giving us the scoop.

Like I've mentioned elsewhere, Harris is one of my favorite thinkers out there. It sounds like if he wants to say Murray isn't full of crap, he needs to buck up and publish a scientific(ish, at least) paper on the topic (no peer review necessary as far as I'm concerned - the entire skeptical community will be more than happy to go over it with a fine tooth comb) but just something where we can at least see what he's thinking other than "the g factor correlates with success and is heritable!"
 
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kellyb said:
Can I get the cliff notes on that?
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Basically Europeans and some other groups have traces of Neanderthal ancestry, whereas people with exclusively African ancestry do not. Harris claims (based on a thorough investigation into the counterfactual social simulation module in his own mind) that we are only allowed to discuss this phenomenon in polite company because it turned out that way, rather than the other way around.
 
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kellyb said:
Can I get the cliff notes on that?
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Well he says that if Africans had the Neanderthal dna and the rest of humanity did not, discussing that fact would get you vilified the way he and Murray did discussing I.q. because of the historical association of Neanderthals with being backwards and brutish.
 
d4m10n said:
Basically Europeans and some other groups have traces of Neanderthal ancestry, whereas people with exclusively African ancestry do not. Harris claims (based on a thorough investigation into the counterfactual society simulation module in his own mind) that we are only allowed to discuss this phenomenon in polite company because it turned out that way, rather than the other way around.
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What???

LOL

I've had two people I encountered online accuse me of not even being human because of that finding. It was very impolite and dare I say it, racist, the way they went about it.

The discovery channel and PBS have had specials on it. It's hardly some huge secret only the white intellectual elite talk about.
 
kellyb said:
The discovery channel and PBS have had specials on it. It's hardly some huge secret only the white intellectual elite talk about.
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Sam was saying it would be kept secret (or at least rather taboo) if we all lived in the possible world where Neanderthals arose and persisted in Africa instead of Europe.
 
nelsondogg said:
Well he says that if Africans had the Neanderthal dna and the rest of humanity did not, discussing that fact would get you vilified the way he and Murray did discussing I.q. because of the historical association of Neanderthals with being backwards and brutish.
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My understanding is that if neanderthals and humans hooked up and had fertile babies, it means (by nature of current taxonomy) neanderthals were human.

Am I wrong?
 
d4m10n said:
Sam was saying it would be kept secret (or at least rather taboo) if we all lived in the possible world where Neanderthals arose and persisted in Africa instead of Europe.
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That's basically an extraordinary claim, in my opinion.
 
kellyb said:
My understanding is that if neanderthals and humans hooked up and had fertile babies, it means (by nature of current taxonomy) neanderthals were human.

Am I wrong?
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Yes but there is a general public idea that Neanderthals were dumb or inferior to homo sapiens. So if only Africans had those genes Harris posits that pointing out such a fact would cause uproar and vilification the same way pointing out blacks score lower on iq tests does. But he says both would be "facts" that people should be able to talk about.
 
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