Willful Ignorance
April 12, 2018 12:32 PM   Subscribe

The podcast debate between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris finally happened. For context, check out the background on all this, previously.

Wordy version: This podcast is a good, long deconstruction in the court of public opinion of the resurgent theory of anti-anti-racism, the notion that whatever progress the US has or hasn't made in the arena of equal rights, and however science has been historically misused in that regard, we can set all that aside and should not use it to criticize supposedly "objective" science on race today. And white dudes are entitled to be super angry when people disagree about that.

Short version: While you clean your apartment, enjoy listening to a guy pretend that all of US history doesn't matter because he stands alone astride it, coldly analyzing facts that the rest of us are too emotional to grapple with. (If you listen closely enough, you may be able to hear soft slapping sounds which I presume are when Ezra Klein face-palms.)
posted by wibari (107 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 


You shouldn't play chess with a rooster. It'll knock over all the pieces, crap on the board, declare victory, and fly away crowing.

Which is exactly what happened to Klein. Harris looked like a total buffoon, demonstrated his utter thoughtlessness and ignorance of most topics, failed to acknowledge that racists are racist, defended his defense of Murray, declared victory, and went away crowing about how awesome he was.

To think I once bought two of his books. You screwed up past sotonohito.
posted by sotonohito at 12:58 PM on April 12, 2018 [54 favorites]


Throughout his discussion with Klein, Harris presents himself as a defender of pure science. He wants to have a discussion of race and IQ, in isolation from normative/political/policy questions.

However, at the same time, Harris is defending Charles Murray. Murray is certainly not engaged in pure science - he is a policy guy, promoting political goals.

I don't think Harris can have it both ways. He can defend pure science, or he can defend Charles Murray. But to attempt to do both at once doesn't make sense.
posted by HoraceH at 1:00 PM on April 12, 2018 [16 favorites]


I listened to this the other day. It's pretty obvious pretty early on that Sam Harris is out of his depth, and Ezra Klein really shines light on how weak Harris' positions are.

Harris spends much of his first few speaking turns whining about how mean people are to him on Twitter. No, really. Then it then goes a lot like this:

Harris: I don't agree with the attacks on Murray. He's not a racist.
Klein: Yes, he is, and here's exhibit A, B, C.
Harris: Hey you're a policy guy, I'm a scientist. I just look at Murray's data. I don't care about Murray's politics, just the data. But he's also not a racist. How dare you.

Klein sums up really well at the end and calls out Harris' complaints about "identity politics." "But you are also guilty of identity politics! You identify with Murray, you said so yourself!" But Harris just couldn't see that, going back to arguments about just being an "empiricist." Harris embarrassed himself a few years ago trying to take on Noam Chomsky--he should quit while he's behind.
posted by zardoz at 1:02 PM on April 12, 2018 [15 favorites]


Sam Harris previously publicly humiliating himself next to competent people: Noam Chomsky, Bruce Schneier
posted by indubitable at 1:03 PM on April 12, 2018 [22 favorites]


I listened to this (two people talking past each other for far too long) the other night, and one thing that I found really problematic was the issue of "immutability". I'll accept that my IQ isn't gonna change much, but I can imagine, oh, generations later my offspring may improve on this, unless they're kept down every generation of course.
posted by parki at 1:06 PM on April 12, 2018


Sam Harris is one of those people who automatically assumes he is right because he is 100% rational and scientific in his way of thinking, while being completely blind to his (and everyone else's) innate biases, which means he's precisely 0% rational and scientific in his way of thinking.
posted by SansPoint at 1:16 PM on April 12, 2018 [59 favorites]


Mr. Harris describes himself out loud without tongue in cheek as "a public intellectual."

This is hard not to read without gagging a little. Even if it were broadly held to be an apt description, self-application would surely be the mark of an ass.
posted by Construction Concern at 1:16 PM on April 12, 2018 [15 favorites]


Do they ever talk about the fact that IQ is a pretty meaningless indicator of anything other than how good you are at IQ tests? I'd be happy to never hear IQ referenced as a serious benchmark of "intelligence" ever again.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:16 PM on April 12, 2018 [33 favorites]


Klein sums up really well at the end and calls out Harris' complaints about "identity politics." "But you are also guilty of identity politics! You identify with Murray, you said so yourself!" But Harris just couldn't see that, going back to arguments about just being an "empiricist."

I've noticed that white people who use "identity politics" in a pejorative fashion never want to engage with the fact that their own politics are white identity politics. They want white identity politics to be the water we all swim in. I'm glad Klein called him on it (altho I was not able to listen to the whole thing, because ohmigod Sam Harris is annoying).
posted by protocoach at 1:18 PM on April 12, 2018 [72 favorites]


They discuss whether IQ is a valid measure - the take is that no matter what benchmark is used, you will see these differences across groups (that's how bell curves work). You can replace with IQ with anything and have the same debate. There are an infinite number of rulers to divide people.
posted by parki at 1:22 PM on April 12, 2018 [6 favorites]


For even more shadenfreude, and if you have time to jump down a Reddit rabbit hole, over on /r/samharris (yes, he has a fanbase) there are a number of apparent Sam Harris fans taking him to task over this.
posted by zardoz at 1:25 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


A friend of mine attended Sam Harris's public defense for his Ph.D. dissertation. She said it was embarrassingly bad, and she got the strong sense that his committee passed him just to get rid of him. Hopefully they've learned from that poor decision.
posted by biogeo at 1:26 PM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]


I'm so sick of verbal debate being held up as the ultimate intellectual challenge or whatever. It's inefficient, it's imprecise, and it's subject to countless hacks and cheats.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:27 PM on April 12, 2018 [66 favorites]


To think I once bought two of his books. You screwed up past sotonohito.

Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins were all touted and played up as bold, fearless, 'new atheist' public intellectuals about ten or fifteen years ago. At some point back then I decided to give The God Delusion a try. I gave up at the exact point in the book where Dawkins sneeringly derides Catholic veneration of saints as, and I quote, "tasteless kitsch."

Stephen Jay Gould is one of my 'public intellectual' heroes, and I get a kick out of the fact that not only did he have a decades-long academic beef with Dawkins over the mechanisms of natural selection, he also repudiated Sam Harris almost forty years in advance. The Mismeasure of Man, published in 1981, is a definitive refutation of biological determinism and the bigoted psuedoscience that has sought to prop it up in various forms for centuries. In a later edition of the book, Gould specifically devoted an entire new chapter to a takedown of The Bell Curve.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 1:30 PM on April 12, 2018 [76 favorites]


I like Sam Harris. He occasionally makes great points and I learn something from listening to his podcast once in a while. Here he shows how everyone is human and how a pinch/heap of salt should always be handy even when listening to people one respects.
posted by savitarka at 1:33 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam: w/r/t Dawkins, by all accounts his actual _science_ books are ok. I've only read The Blind Watchmaker, which was overwritten (I got the point about 2/3rds through), but a solid explanation of the gene-based theory of evolution.

Everything he's written that's out of his field of Evolutionary Biology is crap, and he really needs to STFU.
posted by SansPoint at 1:34 PM on April 12, 2018 [6 favorites]


Mr. Harris describes himself out loud without tongue in cheek as "a public intellectual."

I occasionally pretend, aloud, that I am an Investigator in Lovecraft's 1920's Arkham, looking for proof that there are evil cultists and Great Old Ones waiting to breech the wall into this dimension, and that I and my fellow investigators are the only thing standing between that enslavement and madness.

You may draw your own conclusions from both these statements.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 1:35 PM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]


I conclude that a Friday evening hanging out with you is probably more fun than one with Sam Harris.
posted by biogeo at 1:37 PM on April 12, 2018 [30 favorites]


> Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam:
"Stephen Jay Gould is one of my 'public intellectual' heroes"

A short 1995 video of Gould talking about IQ
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 1:37 PM on April 12, 2018 [7 favorites]


I listened to this (two people talking past each other for far too long) the other night, and one thing that I found really problematic was the issue of "immutability". I'll accept that my IQ isn't gonna change much, but I can imagine, oh, generations later my offspring may improve on this, unless they're kept down every generation of course.

The immutability argument is such policy bullshit even if you choose to accept the garbage science.

Eyesight almost never improves. Vision deterioration is pretty much biologically immutable. Yet we can fix it. We have surgical and technical interventions ( corrective lenses) that cure almost all the common forms of deterioration so effectively that we no longer even think of age related vision loss or near or far sightedness as a handicap except under rare circumstances.

We do not throw up our hands and say "You're fucked" and walk away because of some graphs of distributions.
posted by srboisvert at 1:40 PM on April 12, 2018 [16 favorites]


going back to arguments about just being an "empiricist."

jesuswept. When was "The Myth Of The Given" published? 50 years ago?
posted by thelonius at 1:43 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]


A short 1995 video of Gould talking about IQ

youtube's suggested 'up next' list for that video is definitely a land of contrasts
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 1:52 PM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]


Bar a few Harris/Murray apologists bussing in from out of state, there's some good comment in this Crooked Timber thread on Harris' self-serving definition of reason and Murray's pernicious bullshit.
posted by Iridic at 2:02 PM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]


It's impossible for humans to test for innate capabilities because all we can measure is socialized performance.

I saw some dude crowing about how the fact that rich people generally do better on IQ tests proves that poor people are poor because they're stupid. But literally anybody who has ever taken a test knows that they do better when they are not hungry, tired, or stressed, especially not chronically. The easier your life is, the better you're going to do on a freaking test.

Also, we know that self belief matters -- girls who are told they're bad at math perform worse on tests than girls who are told they're good at math. But we all get messages about ourselves and what we're good at from the moment we are born (though apparently in Iceland girls get fewer of those messages because they outperform boys in math). And on top of that, the people analyzing these results have gotten all those messages too, and bring their own biases into designing the studies and interpreting results.

All of which boils down to: when we look at variances in performance by different groups, we can see that they exist, and we can prove that socialization influences them, but we can't prove that biology does.
posted by mrmurbles at 2:05 PM on April 12, 2018 [30 favorites]


I just read his exchange with Schneier. Bruce clearly explains problems with profiling and discusses better strategies... To sum up Harris' arguments, I'll let Bruce talk: "the only argument you have made for this profiling system is that it’s common sense."

His animosity towards Islam is consistent through the entire article, but he wants to make it clear he is only operating on 'logic', while Bruce makes it clear that he is only operating through 'intuition'.

I feel like there was a similar approach in the build up to this podcast (which I read altogether too much of): Harris didn't want an examination of the science in question, instead he wanted to talk about how hurt he was that people thought he was racist for giving a platform to someone that used questionable science (that he doesn't want examined) that ended up having a seemingly racist endpoint. Instead he wanted to discuss how everyone wants to be 'PC' and how he is personally attacked for his viewpoints.

The thing is, when you continually spout stuff that just *happens* to coincide with racist and bigots, and then refuse to allow area experts refute your 'logical' and 'scientific' position, then you are going to look like a racist and bigot. I don't know what's in his heart, but he certainly seems pretty shitty at the thing he purports at doing: being a 'public intellectual'.

A problem with his exchange with Bruce is that it seemed like his position was that he was going to have a debate with Bruce, that he'd hopefully win. If he had any intellectual integrity, he would have ended the exchange half-way through thanked Bruce for giving him a better understanding of how to approach specific security problems.

Despite his advanced vocabulary, and gift for rhetoric, I don't really consider Sam intelligent: intelligence involves incorporating new information and then changing your perspective based on the new insights you've been given.

I'm glad I read that exchange, as Bruce can be a pleasure to read, but my life won't be lacking if I never read another word that Sam Harris writes again.
posted by el io at 2:08 PM on April 12, 2018 [26 favorites]


I wish Matt Yglesias had his own podcast in this format, I would have enjoyed listening to him take this jackass apart on air.
posted by cj_ at 2:19 PM on April 12, 2018


There was some drama leading up to the debate, with Sam Harris behaving like a righteous jackass, a blatant intellectual bully. Sam Harris published his emails with Klein smugly sure this would be the kill shot. The updates are tasty:
NOTE (3/28/18)
Judging from the response to this post on social media, my decision to publish these emails appears to have backfired. I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting (e.g. his denial of misrepresentations and slurs that are in the very article he published). Many people seem to have judged from his politeness that Ezra was the one behaving honestly and ethically. This is frustrating, to say the least.
NOTE #2 (3/30/18)
It seems that my declining to do a podcast with Klein has been widely interpreted as my failing to answer serious criticism of my views. Needless to say, I don’t see it that way. But I’m very uncomfortable leaving any significant percentage of my audience with the impression that I’ve dodged a hard conversation, or otherwise shirked an important responsibility.
NOTE #3 (4/10/18)
I’ve now done two more podcasts on this topic, in the hopes of finally putting it behind me.
What a champion of rationality and debate.
posted by fleacircus at 2:22 PM on April 12, 2018 [13 favorites]


Do they ever talk about the fact that IQ is a pretty meaningless indicator of anything other than how good you are at IQ tests? I'd be happy to never hear IQ referenced as a serious benchmark of "intelligence" ever again.

I'm not sure the premise that IQ tests are literally meaningless is the one you want to stand on. They're pretty widely used for, say, diagnosing cognitive disabilities, assessing harm from parasites or environmental contamination, and so on. The much more questionable question is what exactly do they mean - what human differences do different scores really represent, and what are the factors that underly those differences?

It's not that it's a totally invalid concept, but it's one that's easily abused, especially because the ways scores are commonly presented gives a false sense of precision and authority. And there are a lot of dishonest people trying to borrow a piece of that authority.
posted by atoxyl at 2:29 PM on April 12, 2018 [21 favorites]


Cosma Shalizi's criticism of the way the stats are commonly interpreted is another classic.
posted by atoxyl at 2:31 PM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]


I can't listen to the podcast since I'm at work, but if Sam Harris thinks he's Mr. Rational, what happens when somebody puts all the evidence in front of him and says "you're wrong"? Does he just clam up, or what? I'm heavily biased against him and a lot of the "New Atheists", and I just want to watch them all fall apart.
posted by gucci mane at 2:32 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


Pope Guilty: I'm so sick of verbal debate being held up as the ultimate intellectual challenge or whatever. It's inefficient, it's imprecise, and it's subject to countless hacks and cheats.

Not to mention that the seemingly unalterable goal of debate seems to be "win the argument" rather than "arrive at the truth." I enjoy listening to debate so I can hear viewpoints in opposition to mine—or both viewpoints in areas where I am not well versed—but I find it frustrating how the goal is to leave with foregone conclusions completely intact, despite having used them as a blunt instrument.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 2:35 PM on April 12, 2018 [13 favorites]


These ideas are not new. They are the same worn-out crutches that have been used to justify the same unjust systems for a long, long time. They are perversions of the scientific method. As Gould noted in the introduction to Mismeasure of Man way back in 1981:
"I have said little about the current resurgence of biological determinism because its individual claims are usually so ephemeral that their refutation belongs in a magazine article or newspaper story. Who even remembers the hot topics: Shockley's proposal for reimbursing voluntarily sterilized individuals according to their number of IQ points below 100; the great XYY debate; or the attempt to explain urban riots by diseased neurology of rioters. I thought that it would be more valuable and interesting to examine the original sources of the arguments that still surround us."
That passage in particular stopped me in my tracks, because all these decades later we are still wading through what amounts to the same old horseshit -- and yet I had never heard of any of the ideas that Gould mentions here. These particular ideas had their moment and then were forgotten, but I am sure they served their true purpose nonetheless: justifying an unjust system. And today we find that the same cruel and unfounded ideas keep coming back in mutated forms.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:41 PM on April 12, 2018 [19 favorites]


Judging from the response to this post on social media, my decision to publish these emails appears to have backfired. I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting (e.g. his denial of misrepresentations and slurs that are in the very article he published). Many people seem to have judged from his politeness that Ezra was the one behaving honestly and ethically. This is frustrating, to say the least.

Hahahahaha oh my gosh, I didn't see the updates. This is hilarious. "I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting" is amazing. He sure hates that gaslighting.

In all seriousness, I feel intense secondhand embarrassment on behalf of this guy's fan club (which seems to skew young, straight, white and male). It's like an entire generation of men decided they needed extra practice at mansplaining, and are studying under the most confidently self-deluded guy they can find.
posted by grandiloquiet at 2:45 PM on April 12, 2018 [20 favorites]


yeah but it turns out that racism is really really fucking popular in the US so I'm pretty sure Sammy'll do OK in the end
posted by PMdixon at 2:46 PM on April 12, 2018 [9 favorites]


That shalizi post, and everything else he writes, is just brilliant. Harrria’ bought PhD couldn’t hold a candle to shalizi and I would love to see him try and engage with shalizi’s criticisms.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:49 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


okay now ezra klein debate matt christman
posted by entropicamericana at 2:52 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]


Rambunctious title aside, I enjoyed Michael Brooks's thoughts on the debate.
posted by Drexen at 2:55 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


To me it came across like Klein was a calm and patient parent talking very gently to an extremely angry, irrational, and self-impressed teenager.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:00 PM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]


The "science" here is so dumb it doesn't even deserve the word.

Murray would look at a street where vandals had systematically bashed in the windshields of every green car on the block and say "Glass in green cars is just intrinsically more fragile".

And Harris would be there defending him, like "We're not saying green cars are bad, just that we have to acknowledge that for whatever reason, their windshields break more frequently. That's science, not identity politics".
posted by 0xFCAF at 3:02 PM on April 12, 2018 [47 favorites]


I'm not sure the premise that IQ tests are literally meaningless is the one you want to stand on.

The reason I make a point of this is that I think that in the abstract the discussion too often plays out like

quantitatively-oriented but naive person (imagine a first-year engineering student who posts on reddit): "so what's this about race and IQ?"

well-meaning metafilter type: "IQ? everybody knows IQ doesn't mean anything"

charles murray: [40 different studies about things IQ correlates with]

engineering student who posts on reddit: "wow, chuck, you have a lot of data!"

charles murray: "wanna hear the funny story about the time I burned a cross but didn't mean anything bad by it?"

which is to say I think it's best to come prepared to engage a little more rigorously than that. At least enough so to be able to catch total pseudoscientific shitshows like this sort of thing.
posted by atoxyl at 3:02 PM on April 12, 2018 [30 favorites]


I read the email exchange between Harris and Klein, and I was moderately surprised at how bad it makes Harris look, and how incapable he seems to be of realizing that.

I can't listen to the podcast since I'm at work, but if Sam Harris thinks he's Mr. Rational, what happens when somebody puts all the evidence in front of him and says "you're wrong"? Does he just clam up, or what?

The email exchange actually seems to be a good example of this. Klein, quite patiently, works to identify what Harris's grievance is exactly, and then once he's done so, points directly to the original sources that Harris is responding to to explain that the article published in Vox doesn't say what Harris believes it says. Harris's response is to angrily assert that they don't even agree on what they're disagreeing about -- despite Klein having just agreed with what he's saying is the point of disagreement. The email exchange makes it abundantly clear that Harris's reading comprehension skills are not good, and that his response to good-faith attempts to correct his misunderstandings is to double down.

Sam Harris is an intellectual lightweight who believes that refusing to engage in prior scholarship and instead relying on his own uninformed opinions is a better pathway to knowledge than study and academic engagement. (See, for example, his writings on ethics.) While many academics suffer from the problem of saying foolish things outside their own area of expertise while thinking their irrelevant domain-specialist knowledge should protect them from criticism (e.g., Richard Dawkins on Twitter), Harris suffers from the somewhat more remarkable problem of saying foolish things that his own training should have given him the tools to think about critically. Although anyone trained in the analysis of neuroimaging data needs to be well trained in statistics and probability theory, his past arguments in favor of racial profiling at airport security revealed a lack of basic understanding in this area; in particular, he seems to believe that P(x|y) = P(y|x), which is an elementary mistake. (In his case, x is "looking like a Muslim", and y is "being a terrorist".) When his errors are pointed out to him, he seems to adopt a strategy of either changing the subject, moving the goalposts, or simply asserting without evidence that his position is correct. All of this is on clear display in his email exchange with Klein.
posted by biogeo at 3:14 PM on April 12, 2018 [27 favorites]


(CNTRL F) "Jordan Peterson"
No matches found

Oh thank goodness.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 3:28 PM on April 12, 2018 [13 favorites]


I tried to listen, but they kept uncritically conflating IQ with intelligence, which I thought/hoped had gone out of fashion in 1940s.

Yes, being smart will help you score well on any test. It doesn't follow that the test is testing for being smart (maybe you studied, maybe you are good at IQ test kinds of tasks, maybe skill at those tasks are favored by your background and culture, maybe you are just good at tests, maybe you have test anxiety, maybe you are sandbagging the IQ test on purpose for reasons of your own.) IMO intelligence is broad enough that I doubt a general intelligence test is a real thing that could ever exist.
posted by surlyben at 3:31 PM on April 12, 2018 [4 favorites]


Man, reading just little bits of the transcript of that "debate" made me feel awful. I hadn't exposed myself to Sam Harris much, and oof, I have no plans to again. Over and over he calls context "confusion," presumably because he knows on some level that history has proven him wrong again and again and again. Ezra Klein gave him just an unimaginable amount of patience and got so little in return. Fuck the fact that Harris has an audience that buys all this bullshit.
posted by Rinku at 3:36 PM on April 12, 2018 [6 favorites]


Good links, good comments and I pretty much agree with the consensus, love me some Steven Jay Gould and actually plan to listen to the podcast while cleaning my apartment. But the Short Version is some pretty heavy duty editorializing in the post.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 3:49 PM on April 12, 2018


"No matches found"

Yeah, but now there is.
posted by el io at 4:12 PM on April 12, 2018 [8 favorites]


I've found Sam Harris annoying and offensive for a very long time, but I found myself being incredibly annoyed with Klein (with whom I essentially agreed on everything he said). It sounded like he was trying to craft the world's longest sentence by stuffing in as many subordinate clauses as he could. He might have succeeded, I don't know, I kind of drifted off into a trance.

But IQ tests... no. There are so many irrelevant things that they test for (the most fundamental of which, I'd have thought, is how seriously an individual takes IQ tests, or bullshit tests in general) that obscure anything useful they might achieve. And since in any useful application they might serve they've been employed time and again to provide a specious veneer of respectability to the systematic exclusion of people (especially children) on the grounds of race, class or gender that that might as well be what they were specifically designed to do.
posted by Grangousier at 4:30 PM on April 12, 2018 [2 favorites]


IQ tests measure something and that something correlates with a lot of things when taken on a population level.

Any individual IQ measurement is not be particularly meaningful, but no one says childhood lead exposure is A-OK because it only leads to population-level decreases in IQ test measurements which is just nothing to worry about.

Correlational measurements can be useful and valid if used correctly. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater if there's not a good replacement baby on deck.
posted by 0xFCAF at 4:35 PM on April 12, 2018 [9 favorites]


Sam Harris is the "public intellectual" version of Paul Ryan, the bro who thinks he deserves a passing score just for speaking in that smug monotone regular-guy voice, who retreats into his "aw shucks, who me?" demeanor whenever anyone calls him on his shit. I have heard him win a few debates...when he was arguing with utter morons or thoroughly deluded ideologues, whoopdedoo.

Sorry dude, you're an apologist for racists and your ideas are like nectar to the pseudo-scientific racist crowd. Like sotonohito I too wish I could go back in time and un-buy your lightweight, unoriginal books.
posted by xigxag at 4:51 PM on April 12, 2018 [11 favorites]


I tried to listen, but they kept uncritically conflating IQ with intelligence, which I thought/hoped had gone out of fashion in 1940s. ... IMO intelligence is broad enough that I doubt a general intelligence test is a real thing that could ever exist.

Eh, virtually all intelligence tests are correlated, and correlated with generally 'good' outcomes. If there's a dimensionality to intelligence, we haven't found it. It is also entangled with race in the US, and socioeconomic status.

To this discussion, the importance is how such tests are used. Testing can be used to identify who needs extra resources to thrive, or policies like lead-reduction in urban settings. Or it can be used to justify discriminatory policy heuristics like denying black kids college educations. It's on society to recognize that IQ is as much a policy outcome as it is a predictor, and use that data responsibly.
posted by pwnguin at 4:53 PM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]



Any individual IQ measurement is not be particularly meaningful, but no one says childhood lead exposure is A-OK because it only leads to population-level decreases in IQ test measurements which is just nothing to worry about.


I wonder if other standardized tests might not show the same thing. One problem with IQ testing specifically is the claim to measure "intelligence" so if you have a low score, there is a stigma that you don't have if you get low marks on, say, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.
posted by surlyben at 4:55 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


The idea that IQ is immutable isn't actually accurate, either. There was a study I heard of, referred to as the "intellectual bloomers study", where they randomly selected a classroom of kids, moved them to a special class, and told their teachers and school that scientists had determined these kids were 'intellectual bloomers', with very specific language. The kids all improved their school performance at the end of the year, and their IQs had raised.

The only thing that had actually changed was that scientists told everyone around them that they were going to become smarter.
posted by Merus at 5:16 PM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]


Might I direct people to the link to Shalizi's analysis Atoxyl posted earlier?

I mean it's a little dense but it's basically a statistics professor saying, "OK, so what would it look like if we were testing a bunch of randomly correlated factors rather than the "intelligence" that we are looking for?" and the result seems to be that you see high correlations that are statistical artifacts, but are similar to those in tests that purport to find a general intelligence.
posted by Zalzidrax at 5:19 PM on April 12, 2018 [6 favorites]


If there's a dimensionality to intelligence, we haven't found it.

There are certainly multiple dimensions distinguished and tested. The part of the "general intelligence" concept that seems to hold up is the observation that performance across these subtests is correlated, but what's not actually implied is that there must be a single, real thing that underlies this observation.
posted by atoxyl at 5:29 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


To this day, I have considered myself a living demonstration of the failure of IQ as a measurement of anything practical (and more and more considering it an artificial construct devised by white racists).

As for Sam Harris, I still associate that name with the singer on Star Search in the early '80s, and consider the singer intellectually superior to anyone else using that name since...
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:36 PM on April 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


the Short Version is some pretty heavy duty editorializing in the post.

Sorry, I was trying to be funny, but also, it's not THAT far a stretch from Harris's own words.
posted by wibari at 6:56 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]




There was a study I heard of, referred to as the "intellectual bloomers study" ...

IQ might not be immutable -- I have no idea -- but there's good reason to doubt that the Pygmalion Effect is a real thing.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 8:09 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sam Harris is one of those people who automatically assumes he is right because he is 100% rational and scientific in his way of thinking

I think this is actually a developmental stage some of us -- especially young men -- go through. Eventually we realize that brains are fallible, that senses unreliable and that feelings are first-class citizens of the mind. You can reason all you like, but at some point you have to grapple with the fact that you're reasoning about the story your brain is telling you. It is not a reliable narrator.

Some of us, though, are stunted for some reason and believe into adulthood that a human being is capable of perfect rationality. Which would be adorable if it wasn't so fucking destructive. See: Objectivists in Congress.
posted by klanawa at 8:30 PM on April 12, 2018 [17 favorites]


The last article published by Matthew Eglesius says that the science in The Bell Curve is pretty humdrum and unobjectionable, though it doesn't at all lead to Charles Murray's policy conclusions. This is a pretty far cry from the original Vox article that claimed Sam Harris was peddling pseudo-science and "racialism". I get why Sam Harris is pissed. As he's said, charges like these, right or wrong, can lead to a professor being fired or professionally ostracized. The whole point of Sam Harris' podcast with Charles Murray was to protest that this unobjectionable (Vox's description) science was being attacked because people didn't like Murray's really bad policy conclusions. In a nutshell, let's have an honest conversation about the science separate from politics.

My issues with the podcasts would be (1) If anything, the conclusion to draw from the data is IQ across sub-groups of human beings is remarkably close. There is no race "smarter" than another race. (2) Noting that intelligence is rooted in biology is like discovering that water is wet. (3) Given 1 and 2, the scientific data is hardly worth discussing. (3) Yeah, Charles Murray's policy proposals matter and needed to be highlighted. However, I do get (and agree with) Sam Harris's point that we shouldn't be attacking science simply because it doesn't line up with our policy preferences. The obvious analogy here is climate change denial.

Bottom line: Both Vox and Sam Harris screwed this dialogue up. Sam Harris wanted to have a conversation about keeping politics and science separate, but somehow ended up instead having a whole discussion on relatively uncontroversial science while inadvertently rehabilitating and promoting someone who proposes truly awful things. On the other hand, Vox first attacked the science and Harris personally, rather than arguing from the get go that the science didn't support the policies. Worst of all, both groups ended up conflating IQ with intelligence and generally did a poor job presenting the science.
posted by xammerboy at 8:45 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


Noting that intelligence is rooted in biology is like discovering that water is wet.

I... disagree? I don't think it's anywhere near as indisputable as that. As, you know, this entire debate proves.
posted by perplexion at 8:55 PM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]


Aspects of running can be either genetically or environmentally determined, but the fact that humans can run at all is due to our biology, that we are born with legs rather than wings. That's all I mean to suggest.
posted by xammerboy at 9:01 PM on April 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sam Harris's point that we shouldn't be attacking science simply because it doesn't line up with our policy preferences.

The irony being that that's what Sam Harris is doing. (You see this sort of thing in climate science all the time.) And Harris' policy preferences are well-known. He's essentially a white supremacist: he wants IQ to be a cause rather than an effect.
posted by klanawa at 9:22 PM on April 12, 2018 [12 favorites]


The last article published by Matthew Eglesius says that the science in The Bell Curve is pretty humdrum and unobjectionable

If you are referring to this one, you may want to take note of what Yglesias actually writes:
What makes a controversial book controversial is that some of its content and its major conclusions are controversial, and that is true — and then some — for Murray.... The actual conclusion of The Bell Curve is that America should stop trying to improve poor kids’ material living standards because doing so encourages poor, low-IQ women to have more children — you read that correctly. It also concludes that the United States should substantially curtail immigration from Latin America and Africa. These are controversial policy recommendations, not banal observations about psychometrics.
posted by No Robots at 9:36 PM on April 12, 2018 [20 favorites]


The Bell Curve isn't a work of science. Murray's not a biologist or a psychologist or an economist, running R scripts and conducting experiments and pushing out the boundaries of knowledge bit by bit. He's a political scientist by credentials, but in his working life he's an ad man. The charts in The Bell Curve serve the same purpose as the colorful representation of the spinal cord in a pharmaceutical commercial, with the red pulsing circle around the Problem Area, while Murray is the calm voice urging you to ask your doctor if Celebrex is Right for You. The only difference is the law does not compel Murray to admit that his prescription for poverty might have side effects, including poverty, depression, and death.

(I'm of the opinion that all science, like all modern life, partakes somewhat of politics, but what we have here is politics partaking of science in order to co-opt its air of its impartial authority, which is quite a different matter.)
posted by Iridic at 10:00 PM on April 12, 2018 [29 favorites]


I don't think you can keep the science and politics separate, especially in a topic like this one. A bit ironic for an area where everyone is so busy arguing about variances... but this sort of "view from nowhere" arguing as if this is a consequence free parlor game is itself a political position! "I want to discuss the science and not any policy implications" - well, maybe *you* don't want to discuss them, but unless you plan to keep your discussion sealed in an airtight lightless tomb for decades other people, maybe more nefarious/dishonest than you, are going to try.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 10:15 PM on April 12, 2018 [9 favorites]


One of the things that really bugs me about the Sam Harris types is that they claim to be outcome agnostic, as if data and morality exist in a vacuum, and this debate was infuriating to listen to because Klein never puts his foot down about it.

Harris's whole "I'm not a racist I just look at data" is so easy to circumvent by saying, "ok, fine, even if Murray is right, don't you realize we have to do something with that information? Certain types of data enable advocates of toxic outcomes, therefore, such data is politically radioactive, and needs to be handled with really thick gloves. Even if Murray was right, he was an straight-up advocate for metaphorically dropping uranium cakes in the city well. Nuclear power is zero carbon emissions, so why don't we build new plants? Why is the permitting process so arduous? Why do we guard the fuel so heavily? Racist outcomes kill far more people than radioactive waste, so why shouldn't we be angry when someone strolls around in public like some plutonium racist Johnny Appleseed?"

And yeah, from here you get into free speech, but we do regulate free speech, right down to incitement to violence, precisely because it is a threat to democracy, equality, and honest debate...which are things we have because all the other things produce crappy outcomes!

Outcomes matter. Why didn't Klein go there? Why not force this point?
posted by saysthis at 11:20 PM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]


Sam Harris wanted to have a conversation about keeping politics and science separate,

Then he wanted to have a dialogue about unicorns and other impossible things. Everything is political.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:28 PM on April 12, 2018 [10 favorites]


Derail about IQ- it infuriates me that you can have two kids- both struggling with mainstream education. However, if you apply for funding for them, there is an arbitrary cut off point. Below 70 gets funding and support. 71 gets nothing.
posted by freethefeet at 11:47 PM on April 12, 2018 [5 favorites]


Sam Harris wanted to have a conversation about keeping politics and science separate,

Then he wanted to have a dialogue about unicorns and other impossible things. Everything is political.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:28 PM on April 13 [1 favorite +] [!]


And yeah. I'm totally double-posting right now, making the same point twice, but it's a point that in this debate we have to make again and again and again and again (THE F**KING FRUSTRATION) and so lemme dry run another rephrasing (for the record, I know I'm not arguing with you, NoxAeternum I'm just seizing on your last comment as yet another restatement of the reason we know Sam Harris Is Wrong About This).

To ask that people accept objective facts without bias is not even a controversial axiom. Everyone agrees that is good. To deny that we start from an objective reality impacted by people's subjective bias and fail to take that into account, or the effect those biases will have in the future given different policies, is to deny reality itself. To see an angry mob and insist they are "simply angry" is to deny causality. To hear accusations over a scientist who wrote a book and call the accusers irrational and persecutors and on a witch hunt is to ignore the casus belli of science itself.

That is a huge fucking blind spot, is magical thinking, and the practice of magic is the thing that makes someone a witch. BURN THE WITCH is how I feel right now and I mean just ARGH.
posted by saysthis at 12:04 AM on April 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


and if you have time to jump down a Reddit rabbit hole

If you have time to go down a very short Wikipedia rabbit hole, you will learn that Sam Harris’ mother Susan Harris created “The Golden Girls.”

So today I learned two things, if we count “my single Sam Harris book makes past ricochet biscuit possibly only half as dumb as past sotonohito.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:44 AM on April 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


I couldn't figure Sam Harris out for the longest time. I listened to his podcast when I could stomach his blindspots because I was fascinated by his ongoing problem with Islam. Like why was he so fixated? Why bring it up so much? He seemed to bend over backwards to be dense about it.

He's like an argument against the effectiveness of mindfulness training... Or his current lack of reflection is an improvement over an even more dense past version...

Then I listened to his interview with Russell Brand and he talked about how badly 9/11 effected him. Russell didn't pick up on it but that was the opportunity to explore his trauma.

He doesn't get that all the work he's done since has in some way been a white guy's attempt to cope with trauma and fear, imo.

(Also his stance made him rich so it's his livelihood now...)

Anyway. There're fewer people who are less rational and scientific. If he was he'd be out warning people about the danger of backyard swimming pools like the freakonomics guys... Not Islamic extremism.
posted by ServSci at 4:47 AM on April 13, 2018 [7 favorites]


I cannot believe there are people on MetaFilter defending The Bell Curve. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to point out its speciousness and racism.
posted by defenestration at 5:16 AM on April 13, 2018 [18 favorites]


The Bell Curve isn't a work of science. Murray's not a biologist or a psychologist or an economist, running R scripts and conducting experiments and pushing out the boundaries of knowledge bit by bit. He's a political scientist by credentials, but in his working life he's an ad man.

Murray is an evil dinosaur but this statement could be misinterpreted. Nowadays most political science training and research consists of running R scripts, and a huge portion consists of running experiments.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:25 AM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Also it seems to me that the simplest and most cutting scientific objection is to do what all grad student seminars do in the socia sciences: loudly should “YOUR MODEL IS WRONG”. Wrong models (this includes modeling the data generating process) produce wrong conclusions. Why can’t Murray and Harris be more scientific? Why can’t they apply Box’s loop and criticize and revise the mode more? Model criticism is an integral part of all social scientce research, why are they so steadfastly defending a particularly bad model???
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:32 AM on April 13, 2018 [11 favorites]


^Because the model here is ostensibly biology, a hard science that, according to some, does not "model," but describes reality in all its irrefutable and undeniable glory.
posted by No Robots at 6:50 AM on April 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'll accept that my IQ isn't gonna change much, but I can imagine, oh, generations later my offspring may improve on this, unless they're kept down every generation of course.

as far as I know, IQ changes with stress, how much sleep you've had, whether you're hungry. Stress, lack of sleep, hunger: I'm pretty sure those are correlated (even caused by) poverty.

also stress has permanent effects on children's brains.
posted by jb at 7:30 AM on April 13, 2018 [8 favorites]


he talked about how badly 9/11 effected him.

He's a lot like Steve Bannon, really. Both were clever, wealthy, and looking for direction when 9/11 happened and revealed (to them) the true nature of the world as a clash between the noble traditions of the West and the debased, superstitious East. It's only "rational," then, to defend the beleaguered seat of the Enlightenment from the foreign hordes at any price. Harris conceals his convictions under a layer of Galileo cosplay, but I don't think it's a naive accident that he keeps hailing white supremacists and eugenicists as brothers in inquiry and sweet reason.
posted by Iridic at 9:16 AM on April 13, 2018 [13 favorites]


Iridic: And the fact that so much of the Enlightenment came from knowledge picked up from Muslim thinkers, of course, does not enter into their thinking at all.
posted by SansPoint at 9:20 AM on April 13, 2018 [10 favorites]


Because the model here is ostensibly biology, a hard science that, according to some, does not "model," but describes reality in all its irrefutable and undeniable glory.

I'm a biologist. Biology is nothing but box and arrow diagrams. Some people spend their whole lives exploring one box or measuring the rate of one arrow. But we know that there is an entire world of simplification in every single diagram. Anyone who doesn't is a bad biologist (who in this case used his parents' money to make his own 501c3 to fund his research rather than just admitting he purchased a PhD like rich people can).
posted by hydropsyche at 9:29 AM on April 13, 2018 [11 favorites]


the fact that so much of the Enlightenment came from knowledge picked up from Muslim thinkers, of course, does not enter into their thinking at all.

It's but a pea under the mattress. The axiom is that Muslims are inherently murderous savages opposed to reason. If this proposition conflicts with demonstrated achievements in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, optics, medicine, and philosophy, then those achievements never happened. Or were actually achieved exclusively by free-thinking agnostics. Or were stolen from India and Greece. Or were vastly overblown by regressive leftist propagandists. Or were an historical aberration that was corrected when the true nature of Islam reasserted itself. Whatever will make the cognitive dissonance go away.

(Not that there aren't serious and complex discussions to be had about the nature of the Islamic Golden Age, but Harris doesn't actually give a shit about the history, no more than Murray actually gives a shit about the nature and quantifiability of intelligence.)
posted by Iridic at 9:53 AM on April 13, 2018 [10 favorites]


Yes, you can have a separate conversation about science from politics. The fact that the earth travels around the sun can be discussed without discussing religion. Also, it's ultimately self-defeating for religion to deny or disparage the fact, because facts have a tendency to out. As Galileo muttered under his breath while being found guilty, "It's still true". Once out, all the effort put into the denials weaken your general case. Even if facts are inconvenient, it's ultimately better for everyone to frame your counter argument around them than deny them.

Ultimately, Vox gets this right. You can agree on science and still disagree on what it means:

The Bell Curve is a long book that says a lot of things, many of which, as Murray’s partisans like to point out, are not especially controversial in academic psychology. By the same token, Karl Marx’s work is full of observations that are well within the consensus of the economics profession — that high levels of unemployment reduce wages for the employed, that firms seek to maximize profits, that market economies are prone to sporadic crises, etc.

Science will always be subject to politics, but we shouldn't be denying or distorting basic science to further our arguments. I am part Neanderthal and it would be counter-productive to invest a lot of time into arguments regarding my self-worth denying it.
posted by xammerboy at 11:11 AM on April 13, 2018


Btw, I don't think that's what most people on this thread are doing. But there are some posts that seem to be saying you cannot have a conversation on science separate from politics period. I would not have expected this to be a controversial point, but there you are.
posted by xammerboy at 11:13 AM on April 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


There was a long read in The Guardian last month about the revival of "race science" that I though was really excellent. It touches on Murray's appearance on Sam Harris's podcast, among other things.
posted by ceejaytee at 11:31 AM on April 13, 2018 [5 favorites]


FFS. There was a time when I though Harris was shaping up to be an interesting thinker, but at this point he's become a harmful buffoon.
posted by homunculus at 11:38 AM on April 13, 2018


The fact that the earth travels around the sun can be discussed without discussing religion

Only if everyone involved in the discussion agrees that it's unnecessary to discuss religion. Which is a basically political agreement. What constitutes relevancy is itself a political question.
posted by PMdixon at 12:00 PM on April 13, 2018 [9 favorites]


Yes, you can have a separate conversation about science from politics.

The very fact that there's disagreement on this point disproves it.
posted by klanawa at 12:47 PM on April 13, 2018 [6 favorites]


You know, you can probably debate the evolutionary divergence of nematodes and nematomorphs, or the status of modified Newtonian dynamics, without immediately bringing in values and judgment and politics.

Thing is, Murray is talking about people, not nematodes. He's talking about heritable intellectual variations across populations. He's talking about race science. And race science was used, in living memory, to justify the murder of six million Jews and millions of other minorities. It's not parochial or narrow-minded to hold such research to extremely high standards of evidence, to parse its results meticulously, and to be very aware of its social and political implications, lest it again be used to dehumanize, confine, and annihilate vast swathes of people.

Again, Murray is not a disinterested researcher presenting us with the bare data and letting us draw our own conclusions. He demands, instead, that we dehumanize vast swathes of people and deny them their claim on our compassion, and he only selects and interprets those facts that will justify his intent. He is operating entirely in a political mode; the lab coat is a ploy to secure himself from criticism. If you believe that science should be something more than a slave to politics, then Charles Murray is your enemy.
posted by Iridic at 1:06 PM on April 13, 2018 [23 favorites]


People like Sam Harris, and I've known several, are constitutionally incapable of admitting they're wrong. Which is too bad, because otherwise they're bright enough that they'd probably be able to learn and improve, and make a significant intellectual contribution. Their arrogant belief in their own intellectual superiority over anyone who disagrees with them is what makes them stupid, and dooms them to forever peddle the same pedestrian, error-filled ideas to an audience that uses them as a tool to validate their own preconceptions, and will turn on them the moment they are no longer useful.
posted by biogeo at 2:23 PM on April 13, 2018 [5 favorites]


Biology is nothing but box and arrow diagrams.

I guess what matters is which box(car) you're put in, and where the arrows are pointing.
posted by No Robots at 2:24 PM on April 13, 2018


I quite enjoy the collection of "smart people demonstrate why Harris is wrong".

>> Yes, you can have a separate conversation about science from politics.

If you're scientifically measuring IQ, and you acknowledge the differences break down to genetics and environmental factors, that should be front and center. If you can't speak to or truly quantify the effects of those environmental factors then it's quite possible that your genetic conclusions are bunk. You need to be able to see, and be willing to discuss that the environmental factors are caused by politically motivated actions, which have had, and continue to have deleterious effects on groups in your study. Ezra doesn't just disagree with the bad political views that come from the study, he disagrees with the very science of it.

He more then once asks Sam to discuss why this science is concrete and why in years we won't look back on it in the same way we now look back on now widely regarded as racially biased studies done in the past. Sam doesn't, because Sam's only refrain is this science is correct.

To try an analogy-- If I did a scientific study of cancer rates on different cow breeds on a farm, then after I collected the data, I reported that the Jersey cows are genetically better at protecting again cancers. If someone then mentioned "Ehh.. Hey Static-- did you address the fact that the field with the Jersey cows has all the trees to hide under during the midday sun?". I would be pretty darn stupid to say "Well, yes, there are likely some environmental factors but look at the data, clearly the Jersey cows are genetically less likely to get cancer".

You need to address the bias in your dataset, that's good science. In the conversation Erza mentions that the if IQ:A = 100 and IQ:B = 92 but environmental factors account for -10 points again B, the normalized data might be A=100, B=102 and your conclusion is inverted.
posted by Static Vagabond at 2:51 PM on April 13, 2018 [20 favorites]


Evolution was used to justify all kinds of non-sense, but the solution was not to argue that evolution is wrong. By all means lets "hold such research to extremely high standards of evidence, parse its results meticulously, and be very aware of its social and political implications." But, let's not cross the line we shouldn't and say things that are true are not. Let's not join the conservatives that argue the earth is not warming, that evolution is a scam, etc. This is what Vox did when it published an article saying Sam Harris is peddling pseudo-science. That they started from this position and then walked those statements back over the course of several articles to the point where the science is no longer being discussed at all tells its own story. And yeah, that they started from there makes all of the rest of their explanations for why Murray is wrong appear weaker.
posted by xammerboy at 2:58 PM on April 13, 2018


No one's saying it isn't possible that environmental factors account for the differences. They're just saying it's unlikely. Just as climate change scientists admit all their data could be wrong for several reasons, but that it's not likely.

Intelligence is a varied thing. So much so that scientists don't have a definition for it. Scientists don't even knows what exactly I.Q. measures, just that it seems to correlate with other things, and is therefore likely measuring something.

To Sam Harris' point, in the very near future you'll very likely be able to go to your doctor's office, take a shot, and in a few hours change your eye color to whatever color you want by changing your genes. The science is here. The only part of that that's fiction is the product hasn't been physically developed.

It won't be much longer before someone comes up with a shot to raise your I.Q. It will be easier to argue against that being a good idea if I don't have a history of denying that I.Q. exists or that there can be any genetic basis for it.
posted by xammerboy at 3:25 PM on April 13, 2018


My other be gripe with Harris is that he is a dogmatic frequentist. Any non racist Bayesian would put a prior on any independent-well measured— effect of IQ mattering at or near zero. He doesn’t. Why is his prior that he effect is positive?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:49 PM on April 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


I suspect most white people have absolutely no idea how bad the schools are in majority-black neighborhoods in the US. That one factor on its own probably explains the majority of the difference in measured IQ.
posted by miyabo at 8:03 PM on April 13, 2018 [6 favorites]


xammerboy: By all means lets "hold such research [research into "race"] to extremely high standards of evidence, parse its results meticulously, and be very aware of its social and political implications." But, let's not cross the line we shouldn't and say things that are true are not.

What are Sam Harris & Charles Murray saying that is "true" that people here are saying is not?
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:56 AM on April 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


What are Sam Harris & Charles Murray saying that is "true" that people here are saying is not?

First, that genes likely have something to do with the structure of our brains. It's possible they don't. It's possible that unlike every other organ and attribute throughout the animal kingdom the human brain alone and aspects of the intelligence it manifests are uniquely independent of change through heritable characteristics. It's possible we are all born with the same brain, and then environment alone completely shapes our personalities and cognitive capabilities. Perhaps the human brain alone is completely independent of the natural changes that occur through evolution to every other animal and their myriad traits. Does this sound remotely likely? Is it surprising science suggests aspects of intelligence are heritable?

Second, that racial characteristics can be genetically defined. Is race purely a social construct? Race certainly is a social construct in many, many ways, but if you were asked to walk down a street and identify people that are asian, could you confidently do that within a reasonable margin of error? Is it really reasonable to say that differences between races do not genetically exist when we can see many of these differences and easily differentiate between them with our own eyes?

Now, you could point out that intelligence is hugely multi-variate and complex, and that we have little understanding of what intelligence even is, much less how to measure it. You could point out that measurable differences of I.Q. (whatever that is) are truly small between racial groups. You could point out the fact that with every generation IQ is rising in a way that cannot have anything to do with genes, which indicates something funny is going on. You could similarly say that genetic differences between races is incredibly small, involves a very small number of genes, and appears to largely affect surface-level characteristics. But, instead, people want to argue that race is purely a social construct and intelligence is in no way heritable.

There will soon be a shot you can take to change your mental characteristics. It's coming. It worries me. In many cases, when we've genetically engineered food to be hardier and more resistant to disease we've also changed its taste. We changed what it fundamentally is in a way we did not intend nor want. I would prefer that scientists be able to investigate the relationship between genes and intelligence than not, and preferably be able to do some research before the technology to start changing our genes is available. I fear that once available, the demand will be so outrageously high, given the lengths people now go to modify themselves, that it will be too late to start informing ourselves how to use it responsibly.

And this research is very hard to do without using racial groupings as a basis. It's a little like asking Charles Darwin if he could not use different islands as a basis for his observations on evolution, because he may inadvertently imply that one island is better than another island. Genetic differences develop and cluster around physical locales for obvious reasons.
posted by xammerboy at 1:44 PM on April 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


No, sorry, your argument is highly disingenuous. Are there genetic factors that impact intelligence? Sure, of course there are, you could argue no aspect of human life is free of influence from genetic factors. However, we barely know what "intelligence" is, so how could we possibly decide how much of our intelligence is owed to genetics? Modern humans are genetically identical to humans that existed 200,000 years ago, so why is it we've only started making digital watches in the last 50 years? Did something change in our genes? Or perhaps this is strong evidence that genetics aren't a huge factor in what makes a person "smart"?

I get where you're coming from, I would never argue that genetics aren't a factor in determining intelligence, or that racial differences are purely social, but you're stressing the importance of genes to an illogical extreme. I also find distasteful the implication that because some aspects of race are genetic the political aspects of race are justified. Just because I can map the genetic differences between a European person and an African person doesn't imply their social differences are also genetic, don't be absurd.

I find it unlikely that there will be a medical treatment for stupidity any time soon, unless you want to include treatments for genetic disorders that result in mental retardation. There are far too many other aspects of life that affect intelligence that we already have the technology to influence, like nutrition and education, for us to worry about the threat of future potential genetic engineering.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:20 PM on April 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


Sigh. Okay, I'll bite.

> What are Sam Harris & Charles Murray saying that is "true" that people here are saying is not?

First, that genes likely have something to do with the structure of our brains.


I just scanned the thread again and I can't find a single example of anyone claiming that genes likely do not have anything to do with the structure of our brains. The closest thing I can see that could be interpreted that way is this comment, which is about intelligence, not about the structure of our brains. While intelligence and neurobiology are obviously linked, they are not identical. There are many individuals with normal intelligence who have major neurological abnormalities (e.g., many cases of hydrocephalus), and conversely there are many individuals with highly impaired intelligence whose brains are, as far as current science can detect, essentially normal. The facile conflation of "brains" and "intelligence" muddies this discussion badly, and needs to be avoided.

It's possible they don't. It's possible that unlike every other organ and attribute throughout the animal kingdom the human brain alone and aspects of the intelligence it manifests are uniquely independent of change through heritable characteristics.

You're arguing against a straw man here. No one serious thinks this. It's actually not possible that genes don't influence the structure and function of the brain. But this question is quite orthogonal to what Harris and Murray are claiming. Their argument is that at the population level [1], differences in IQ scores can only be explained (or are much more likely to be explained) by differences in population genetics. This entails a whole host of unexamined assumptions. Perhaps the most egregious of these relates to how such differences could arise in the first place.

Consider the selective forces at play. Suppose that high intelligence provides a fitness advantage. In this case, any genetic variants that promote high intelligence will be under strong positive selection. Natural selection is a process that removes genetic variability, and as a consequence we would expect to see that intelligence is actually not highly heritable. This somewhat counterintuitive result is because heritability can only be measured with respect to the genetic variation in the population in question, and is well understood in population genetics. One might argue that this would stabilize the genetic variability underlying intelligence within a population, but not necessarily between populations, leading to the kind of effects Harris and Murray claim. But this doesn't really hold up either, because it doesn't match what we already know about the gene flow within the broader human population structure. The fact is, human populations are actually quite porous on the whole, and historically there has always been quite a bit of gene flow (on the timescale of centuries to millennia) between populations. Within Eurasia and Africa, at least, there has always been considerable travel, trade, and interbreeding, even into fairly deep prehistory. This is well demonstrated by the genetic evidence as well as archaeology. Novel gene variants under strong positive selection rapidly (on evolutionary timescales) spread even to relatively isolated populations and become fixed within them as well. I suppose it is possible that Australia and the Americas may historically have been sufficiently isolated to prevent this, but that Murray's claim is that people of Asian, European, and African descent have systematically different, genetically-caused levels of intelligence. This is simply incoherent within our modern understanding of human population genetics.

Suppose instead that high intelligence doesn't confer much of a fitness advantage. In this case, genes for intelligence would be only under weak selection, which would mean many variants would persist in the population, and we might see a high relationship between genetics and intelligence. Now the problem becomes, how do Murray and Harris see population-level differences in intelligence arising? Is it purely due to founder effects [2]? This is an important mechanistic question to address, and the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate it before the rest of the argument can be taken seriously.

A third possibility is that, for some reason, different human populations were selected for different levels of intelligence during evolutionary history. This of course is an even more extraordinary claim, and one that Murray and Harris must address. A fourth and related possibility is that the genes related to intelligence are pleiotropic [3], and are under differential selection in different human populations due to their non-intelligence-related effects. Of all the options, this is the one that would have the most prima facia merit, but again still requires a mechanistic explanation more detailed than just "it's different for different groups".

In sum, the idea that the human brain is subject to genetic influences is utterly noncontroversial, but there is a huge, and unsubstantiated, leap of argumentation to then claim that there are population-level differences in the gene-intelligence relationship.

[1] Note that unlike Harris's term "group" or, as The World Famous points out, its euphemistic referent "race", "population" is a term with a defined, though somewhat fuzzy, meaning in biology. A population is characterized by relatively restricted gene flow, such that rates of interbreeding within a population are much higher than rates of outbreeding. What counts as a population can be highly dependent on the timescale in question, and for the purposes of an individual gene, is going to depend strongly on its rate of evolution.

[2] "Founder effect" is the name given to population-level genetic differences caused by the random selection of genes that a small, founder population happens to possess.

[3] Pleiotropy is when a single gene has multiple effects on various traits. This is true of most of our genes.

Is race purely a social construct? [...] Is it really reasonable to say that differences between races do not genetically exist when we can see many of these differences and easily differentiate between them with our own eyes?

Yes. Race is a social, not a biological, concept. Rather than lay out what is a pretty basic argument that is generally accepted by all biologists, I will direct you to this article on the topic.

There will soon be a shot you can take to change your mental characteristics.

This is the second time you've made this claim, which suggests a few misconceptions about genetics, neuroscience, and the potential of gene therapy. I've already gone on quite long enough so I won't spend too much time this claim. Suffice to say that this is probably not true, or at least not in a way that is qualitatively different that existing drugs that can provide cognitive enhancement for people with certain impairments (e.g., ADHD medication). The relationship between genes and cognitive traits is not nearly as direct as you seem to believe it is. For the majority of genetic traits that are known to influence cognition, the nature of the effect is developmentally- and environmentally-mediated. E.g., certain genes have been found to provide increased resilience to early-life stress. Two individuals with different variants of such a gene, if both exposed to a stable early life experience, will develop similar cognitive phenotypes. But if both are exposed to considerable early-life stress (e.g., loss of a parent), one will develop essentially normally, and the other will develop certain cognitive impairments [4]. An adult gene-therapy intervention is essentially "too late" to change this outcome; the structural changes to the individuals neurobiology have already occurred, and the relevant genes are never going to be reactivated in the same way. Science fiction often depicts DNA as some sort of magical "essence", which if changed, produce immediate and dramatic changes in the individual's phenotype. (E.g., the sci-fi trope of "de-evolution" occurring to an individual whose genes have mutated.) Reality simply doesn't work that way.

[4] These "impairments" are actually often adaptations to a high-stress environment, but that's a whole separate issue.
posted by biogeo at 3:14 PM on April 14, 2018 [32 favorites]


biogeo: Flagged as fantastic.
posted by SansPoint at 3:17 PM on April 14, 2018 [1 favorite]


There's almost a comedic angle to The Bell Curve. Its grand thesis is that conservative policies make sense if you believe that it's true and important that poor people and black people are genetically inferior.

(UBI is thrown in their as something to fool doofuses like Sam Harris; a Trojan horse, like the flat tax.)
posted by fleacircus at 4:34 PM on April 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


I agree with biogeo--there is no chance that you will ever be able to go to the doctor and get a shot to raise your IQ. Your "IQ", whatever it is, was not determined by one or a few genes operating in simple mendelian fashion at the moment of fertilization. Nor at the moment of your birth, when you had completed your initial development in the uterine environment with all the effects that environment had on you. Development is a process, hugely affected by environment at every moment, and there is not now nor will there ever be a way to instantaneously alter the effects of a lifetime of that process and environment with an injection or any other way. That flies in the face of everything we know about biology.

I agree with everything else biogeo said, too, but I think that is a particularly important point upon which non-biologists may just have been deceived by science fiction writers.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:53 PM on April 14, 2018 [4 favorites]


I really enjoyed this podcast. This kind of talking past each other / failure to communicate and reach an agreement feels so common to me, as does the misunderstanding of racism, or racist motivations, and also the desire to believe that you're the clear-eyed one in the room.

I like the notion that in a discussion, both parties must be willing to make a change. In that sense, even though this was a debate, it comes across as a discussion doomed to failure: Harris needs Klein to change his position (or acknowledge his hypocrisy); Klein doesn't expect Harris to change his views but would like it if he did. Both are wrangling with something sincere, and there's a certain pain underneath that, expressed in a staid, drawing room manner.

It's good audio that I will listen to again.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:17 AM on April 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


[S]he got the strong sense that his committee passed him just to get rid of him. Hopefully they've learned from that poor decision.

O my sweet summer child
posted by Going To Maine at 11:20 AM on April 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Is it really reasonable to say that differences between races do not genetically exist when we can see many of these differences and easily differentiate between them with our own eyes?

Wow, that's the worst argument for anything ever.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:18 AM on April 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


Wow, that's the worst argument for anything ever.

"Things that look different are probably different" seems like a pretty good metric for distinguishing phenomena and identifying correlates in many areas. Indeed, that gut appeal seems like the core of the problem.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:55 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


« Older If Dinosaur Train was a documentary, would we know...   |   6000 for 6000 Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments