Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Sam Harris convinces me that he is not part of what Charles Murray calls the "cognitive elite": Vox: The Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate - Vox: "Sam Harris: [In] your last piece, you have this whole section on the 'Flynn effect' and how the Flynn effect should be read as accounting for the black-white differences in purely environmental terms. Well, even Flynn rejects that interpretation...
...There are many errors of this kind that you and Nisbett and Turkheimer are making when you criticize me and Murray. You criticize Murray for errors that he didn’t make.... You must imagine bias on my side. Why am I getting it so wrong? Why am I looking at the same facts that Nisbett and Turkheimer and Harden are looking at and I am getting it absolutely wrong? You have to imagine that I have an equal and opposite passion, that I feel equally righteous, but it’s pointing in the opposite direction. I would have to be a grand dragon of the KKK to feel an equal and opposite bias on these data.... Even if we... decide that it’s just, there is no ethical reason to ever look at population differences, we will be continually ambushed by these data....
Ezra Klein: There is so much there. I actually really appreciate that answer, because I think it helps open this up. So let me say a couple things here. 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.... 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.... You mentioned James Flynn.... I called Flynn... on Monday..... He says:
I think it is more probably than not that the IQ difference between black and white Americans is environmental. As a social scientist, I cannot be sure if they have a genetic advantage or disadvantage.
That is what James Flynn thinks of Monday....
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... lot of difficulty extending an assumption of good faith to anyone who disagrees with you on an issue that you code as identity politics.... One of the things that I hear in you is that, whenever something gets near the questions of political correctness—the canary and the coal mine for the way you yourself have been treated—you get very, very, very strident. They’re in bad faith. They’re not being able to speak rationally. They’re not being able to have a conversation that is actually going forward on a sound evidentiary basis....
I think you’re missing a lot, because you are very radically increasing the salience of things that threaten your identity, your tribe... without admitting, or maybe even without realizing, that’s what you’re doing.... There are a lot of white commentators, of which I am also one, who look at what’s happening on some campuses, or look at what happens on Twitter mobs, or whatever, and they see a threat to them. The concern about political correctness goes way, way, way, way up. Then the ability to hear what the folks who are making the arguments actually say dissolves. The ability to hear what the so-called social justice warriors are actually worried about dissolves. I think that’s a really big blind spot here. I think it’s making it hard for you to see when people have a good faith disagreement with you, and I also think it’s making harder for you to see how to weight some of the different concerns that are operating in this conversation.... I mean, in your whole show, Sam, you’ve had 120-some episodes, and... you’ve had two...
Sam Harris: It’s amazing you would think this is relevant, but yes, you can give me the numbers...
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!...
