Should-Read: I must say I never understand why people invite Charles Murray to speak.
If you cannot find a better advocate for a particular set of ideas than a one-time KKK-wannabe cross-burner, doesn't that tell you something about the quality of the ideas that will then be set forth? If somebody's response to his Bell Curve regressions' failure to produce a large enough Black-white differential to please him is to go p-hacking by suppressing education variables, does not that tell you about the degree of his open-minded commitment to academic values?
The purpose of a university is to set forth ideas that are potentially great and then to evaluate and assess them according to liberal Enlightenment norms of logic and evidence. Does this guy fit that?
And the purpose of a think-tank ought to be largely the same as a university...
Nathan Robinson: Current Affairs: "Charles Murray... in the 1950s... staged a cross burning on top of a hill...
...Murray claims he was stunned when the residents of his Iowa town instantly thought the flaming cross was somehow racist. “It never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance,” he insisted. Forty years later, with the publication of The Bell Curve, Murray would once again profess himself surprised that people could view him as a racist. “I’m befuddled by it… I don’t know what to make of it,” Murray said when even old acquaintances began calling his book dishonest and bigoted. Murray wondered why he was being “punished” for producing perfectly valid social science research on a matter of public import. One thing that has always fascinated me about Charles Murray is just how incapable he is of understanding why people do not like him. He seems to believe that if someone thinks him a racist, it must be because that person has not actually read Murray’s work...
