Making Sense with Sam Harris - #122 — Extreme Housekeeping Edition

Episode Date: April 3, 2018

Sam Harris responds to the ongoing controversy over his interview with Charles Murray and discusses his upcoming conversation with Ezra Klein. He also announces a change he will be making to the format of the podcast. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Okay, it has been an intense week. I was on vacation this last week. This is the first vacation I've taken in quite some time with my family. It's been at least a year. I can't recall the last one, I think. But anyway, I was on vacation and attempting to be a good father and good husband, not paying too much attention to social media. But I did happen to catch at one point that Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and Ezra Klein had all attacked me in the span of an hour on Twitter. And genius that I am, I felt that I needed to respond

right then and there. I think the lesson of this whole episode is don't rush to make things worse. That is a lesson I will try to fully absorb going forward. And frankly, I think I need to rethink my relationship to social media. There are so many problems that need not be created that are pure confections of having said something or noticed what somebody said on social media. So I'll be rethinking my relationship to all that. To bring you all up to date, I know that many of you have noticed what happened to me in the last week, but I just want to give you my picture of it and then tell you what's happening going forward. Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast.

And Murray, as most of you know, is the author of the notorious book, The Bell Curve, which, while it was not focused on differences between races in any significant sense, there was a chapter on race and IQ in that book. But the book was devoted to just the cognitive stratification of society having nothing to do with race. Anyway, that chapter on race and the negative response it received fully engulfed Murray's life. This is in the mid-90s. And Murray is still someone who gets protested when he goes to a college campus to give a talk about something that is totally unrelated to that book. And while I have very little interest in IQ and zero interest in racial differences in IQ, I invited Murray on my podcast because I am

deeply interested in free speech and in not letting moral panics get out of hand. And what had happened is Murray had been invited to give a talk at Middlebury College, and he was deplatformed in a fairly spectacular way by an angry mob of students. And he was deplatformed in a fairly spectacular way by an angry mob of students. And as he and his host were leaving the auditorium, they were physically assaulted. And ironically, his host was a very liberal professor who was planning to debate him, essentially. She had a list of hard questions she wanted to ask Murray.

Anyway, she received a concussion and a neck injury, and I believe she still suffers from the results of that. So this was a big deal. And it appeared to be the worst example of this spreading moral panic on college campuses, where conservative speakers, or even those who are just imagined to be conservative, are getting deplatformed. And the fact that this is happening at colleges, where the free exchange of ideas is the whole point of the institution, that is something that many of us are quite worried about and are appropriately focused on.

Now, there are people who consider all of these examples of moral panic on college campuses, Middlebury and Yale and Portland and Berkeley and Evergreen. Many people consider these outliers that signify absolutely nothing. And there's some poll results that suggest that attitudes toward free speech haven't changed the way many fear. So whether there really is a moral panic on college campuses can be disputed, I think. I know Jonathan Haidt, who's been on this podcast, thinks the panic is real and he's writing a response to a recent Vox article that suggests that it wasn't. But in any case, people can debate the state of the panic. All I can say is that there certainly seemed to be one at the time I

invited Murray on the podcast. And the thing that made me most committed to speaking with him was the realization that I had been part of his shunning. As I say in that podcast, I had avoided him and even avoided his book for decades because I believe that where there was that much smoke, there must be fire. Right? So I felt morally culpable for this. So I had this podcast conversation with him. and of necessity, in order to defend him against the charge of racism, and in order to show how unfairly he had been treated for decades, our conversation had to present some of the scientific justification for his claims. So we spoke about the current picture of IQ data. We talked about the way genes and environment likely contribute to intelligence and any other human trait. We got into the weeds somewhat, but again, this is driven not by my interest in IQ, much less racial differences in IQ. It was born of my

trying to right a very clear intellectual and moral wrong? And then in the aftermath of that podcast, Ezra Klein, who was the editor-in-chief of Vox, he was at the time, now he's editor-at-large, he published a paper that was highly critical of both Murray and me. The article was written by Eric Turkheimer, Catherine Hardin, and Richard Nisbet, who are all real scientists, and because Nisbet, who are all real scientists.

And because Nisbet is the most famous of them and because he's been grinding this axe over IQ for several decades now, I've tended to refer to this as the Nisbet paper. But Turkheimer appears to be the first author on it. So Klein published this piece, and I'm assuming he published it because he thought it was a fair and accurate and important critique of the conversation I had with Murray. But it wasn't. So I contacted Klein by email. This first probably happened on Twitter, but then we moved email. And I expressed how unfair and inaccurate I thought the piece was. And there was some talk of us doing a podcast together to hash this out, but then I got so exasperated in this email exchange with him that I pulled the plug on that idea. I decided there was no way I could talk to this guy. There was just so much evidence of bad faith on his side. As my friend Brett Weinstein says, bad faith changes everything.

And it really does. Either someone is going to reason honestly about the plain meaning of words and about facts as we know them, or they will try to smear you with anything they can use, however dishonest, right? And that's what I feel Klein was up to. And so I pulled the plug on the podcast idea because I thought it would be an excruciating waste of time. Be like the podcast that I have ironically titled the best podcast ever with Omar Aziz. So let me just be clear about what I think happened here. The Nisbet article was truly dishonest and actually slanderous. It put the onus on Murray and me to prove that we're not Nazis. And if you don't think it did that, you're not reading closely enough.

It contained highly charged and highly moralistic accusations. It accused us of the most egregious intellectual misconduct. On Nisbet's account, we were guilty of purveying racialist pseudoscience. And that's, everyone reads racialist as racist. And if they were trying to split the difference there, their true intentions were revealed in many of the other things they said. Okay, we were part of this horrific legacy of bigotry, and everything we said justified bigotry. Klein called my podcast with Murray disastrous on Twitter. I had titled it Forbidden Knowledge, right? And he said, it's not forbidden knowledge. It's America's most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality. This is what he said in his most recent piece. So these are serious accusations, and they're actually false. This is not good faith criticism

that I was complaining about. These are the kinds of blows that, if they land, can and should destroy a person's reputation. They're intended to destroy a person's reputation. The reality of the situation is there's the scientific data on IQ and race and genetics and environment and all the related issues, and there can be a good-faith debate about these issues. And there can be a good faith debate about these data. And there can be a good faith debate about the social policies that one would want to enact to respond to whatever the facts are. So as to most help everyone, right? How can we do good in the world? Honest debates to be had on those questions. But the criticism of me and Murray was not an example of honest debate. It presented a very skewed and ideological view of the science,

and it branded Murray's account of the science as junk science and racialist pseudoscience, whereas his account of the science is actually mainstream. I'm talking about his account of the data. I'm not talking about his views on affirmative action or what should be done in the world. All of that can be debated too. You can debate both sides of the affirmative action question being fully committed to equality and without a racist bone in your body, but now I'm just talking about the scientific picture. And I should note that just yesterday, the first author on this paper, Eric Turkheimer, apologized for calling me and Murray peddlers of junk science. He admitted

that was an empty insult. It turns out it's just science, right? This is a disagreement about how to interpret data, and it could have been a good faith disagreement. But the truth is, and this is my honest take on the scientific field at the moment, the truth is, is that if there is a fringe here, Nisbet and Turkheimer and Hardin are on it for patently ideological reasons. Now, of course, it is understandable that they are worried about racism. We all should be worried about racism. We should all be committed to political and economic equality. We want everyone to have as much opportunity as they can have. That is all understandable.

But distorting and cherry-picking the science and slandering anyone who won't succumb to your level of confirmation bias as a racist is totally unethical. That's not good faith criticism. This is one side of a scientific debate smearing the other side with the most toxic moral and intellectual aspersions possible. These are reputation-destroying slanders. So when I wrote Klein and I found him to be totally evasive,

I got fairly pissed. One especially unethical thing he did, after sliming us with this piece, Klein refused to publish a far more mainstream and balanced defense of us that was submitted by Richard Hare, who's the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence, and is the author of a recent book, The Neurobiology of Intelligence. Hare came to our defense totally unbidden by me, or Murray, and with a far more mainstream opinion. And Klein refused to publish

it. And he has continued to publish attacks on Murray and me in Vox. So, when our email exchange unraveled, I told him that if he continued to slander me, and in particular if he misrepresented the reasons why I declined to do a podcast with him, I would publish that exchange. Because I thought the world should know how he operates as a journalist and an editor. The world should know how dishonest he was being, and how he wasn't even slightly committed to offering a fair representation of both sides of this debate. Then I think basically a year passed, certainly without me noticing anything from Klein on this topic. Whether or not he actually made any noise on it, I don't know. But then there was a New York Times op-ed by the Harvard geneticist David Reich, which made some statements similar to the ones that

had gotten Murray and me into hot water. And Murray retweeted it, and then I retweeted it with a jab at Klein. I said, you know, I sure hope Ezra Klein's on the case. Racialist pseudoscience never sleeps. It was a totally snide comment, of course, but totally fair given what he has done. It is just obvious that David Reich is not a racist. And the points he was making could be easily spun the way mine and Murray's have been spun. And he was definitely saying some of the same things about genetics and population differences that could have gotten him slimed. And then Klein responded with yet another article attacking me and Murray.

And crucially, he discussed the email exchange I had with him and my refusal to do a podcast with him in ways that I found to be totally self-serving and misleading. So this prompted me to publish our email exchange. Now, as it turns out, that was a mistake. That was a serious miscalculation on my part. Because if you just read the emails, apparently I looked terrible. I seemed inexplicably angry. I assumed bad intent on Klein's part for reasons that were not clear to readers. Klein seemed friendly and open to dialogue, and I just seemed pissed.

And the fact that I published a private correspondence seemed unethical. But if you had listened to my podcast with Murray, and you read the Vox article, to which my emails were a reaction, then most people understood my anger and saw Klein's evasiveness for what it was. And when you saw that he had mischaracterized the contents of our email exchange, you thought that my publishing those emails was fair game. Now, that's obviously the view I took, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. obviously the view I took, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. But let me be the first to admit it was a colossal mistake given that I was asking way too much of readers. The problem was it took a lot more work to be in the second camp and understand what was actually going on here. I was relying on people to have listened to a two-hour podcast and to have read the original

Vox article. Of course, many people didn't do either of those things. In particular, it seems that my declining to do a podcast with Klein was widely interpreted as my avoiding a hard conversation and just failing outright to deal with serious criticism. Needless to say, I didn't see it that way, and I don't see it that way. But in the aftermath of all this, I became very uncomfortable with that perception. So I put it to a vote on social media, Twitter and Facebook, and 76% of people on both platforms claim to want to hear a podcast with the two of us. So I've changed my mind. And I'm now going to do a podcast with Klein. And we will record that in a few days. And we will release it jointly on our podcast. I won't insist upon any ground rules apart from it

being unedited. And I don't know whether this will be a productive conversation or not. There's certainly a danger that it could be my next best podcast ever, because again, I detected an extraordinary amount of bad faith on Klein's side. Some of you think I'm hallucinating this, but I really don't. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.