Making Sense with Sam Harris - #123 — Identity & Honesty

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Ezra Klein, Editor-at-Large for Vox Media, about racism, identity politics, intellectual honesty, and the controversy over his podcast with Charles Murray (Making Sense #73).  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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My conversation with Ezra Klein of Vox Media. I think I'm going to resist the temptation to add any editorial comments here. My previous episode, the Extreme Housekeeping Edition, had my full reaction to all of the controversy that preceded this podcast. At the beginning here, I go through a timeline of events with Ezra. Everyone will be up to speed. I think the conversation speaks for itself, and if you listen to the whole thing, you will definitely know what I think about it by the end. I think it probably does have educational value. I certainly hope it does. As to what lessons can be drawn from it, I will let you decide. All I can say is that I actually did my best here. This was a sincere effort to communicate, and you can judge the effect.

And now I bring you ezra klein okay so for better or worse we're finally doing a podcast together we're finally doing it so here's what i would suggest and i want to see if this is amenable to you. So I heard the housekeeping episode this week. I thought it would make sense for me to just give a couple minutes, you know, short kind of like opening thing at the beginning, try to sort of frame where I am on this. I think I maybe have a way to frame it a little productively. And then I'm happy to, in return for that, give you the last word on the podcast if that feels right to you.

Actually, I had a couple of ideas. And so let me just put those out there. And so first, I think we should make the ground rules explicit so that our listeners understand what's happening here. So my understanding is that we'll both present the audio unedited, and it's fine to cut mouth noises and other glitches, but if we take a bathroom break, we'll cut that stuff. And we can have sidebar conversations that we both agree are off the record, but basically no meaningful words will be cut from the exchange. So we agree with that. And I had thought I'm happy to do this after you start, or it makes some sense, I think, to do it before you add what you just suggested.

I thought I should summarize how we got here and just kind of go through the chronology so that people who are just hearing this for the first time understand about the email chain and who Charles Murray is and all that. I assume, I mean, look, we can do this in different ways, but my assumption was you tend to have, as I understand it, you know, intros where you do stuff like that. I probably will, too. Yeah, but I think it would be good to avoid the perception that our account of how we got here is totally divergent. I think maybe I should give an account which you then can say, OK, yeah, that's the sequence of events as I understand it, too. And sure. Here's my only hesitation on this.

And I don't have a huge problem with it. If you feel strongly about it, we can do it. I, I would worry about us ending up burning a lot of our time going back and forth on like how an email is described or something. So if you want, if we just want to do a very neutral account of it, that's fine with me, but I wouldn't want to, um, end up with like a long chronology argument. Yeah. So I'll do that. And then you'll jump in at the end of that and give me your current take. And obviously I'll be describing this account from this chronology from my point of view, but I'll flag the places where I think we have a different interpretation of what happened.

And, but I think the sequence of events is totally objective here. So I just have a list of the order of things. Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast. And Murray, as many of our listeners will know, is the author of the notorious book, The Bell Curve. And it has a chapter on race and IQ and differences between racial measures of IQ that was extremely controversial. So Murray's a person who still gets protested on college campuses more than 20 years later. And while I have very little interest in IQ and actually zero interest in racial differences in IQ, I invited Murray on my podcast because he had recently been deplatformed at Middlebury College. And he and his hosts were

actually assaulted as they left the auditorium. And in my view, this seemed yet another instance of a kind of moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses. And it caused me to take an interest in Murray that I hadn't previously had. So I had never read The Bell Curve because I thought it must be just racist trash because I assumed that where there was all that smoke, there must be fire. And I hadn't paid attention to Murray. And so when I did read the book and did some more research on him, I came to think that he was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime. the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime. It doesn't really run the risk of being much of an exaggeration there. And the most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science at this point. They were mainstream at the time he wrote them, and they're even more mainstream today. So I perceived a real problem here of free speech and a man's shunning. And I was very worried. I felt culpable because I had participated in that

shunning somewhat. I had ignored him. As I said, I hadn't read his book. I had declined at least one occasion where I could have joined a project that he was associated with. And I declined because he was associated with it, because I perceived him to be radioactive. So I felt a moral obligation to have him on my podcast. And in the process of defending him against the charge of racism, and in order to show that he had been mistreated for decades, we had to talk about the science of IQ and the way genes and environment almost certainly contribute to it. And again, IQ is not one of my concerns, and racial differences in IQ is absolutely not one of my concerns. But a person having his reputation destroyed for

honestly discussing data, that deeply concerns me. So I did that podcast, again, exactly a year ago, and Vox then published an article that was highly critical of that podcast. And it was written by Eric Turkheimer and Catherine Harden and Richard Nisbet. And this article, in my view, got more or less everything wrong. OK, it read to me like a piece of political propaganda. Hey, Sam. Again. Yeah. So hearing this, I'm totally happy to have you do this on yours.

I think this is a long kind of and I totally get like from your perspective thing on it. But just imagine what it will be like for people coming to this podcast, not knowing why we're having this conversation. I think that's fine. I just think that if we want to do it that way, let's just do a shorter version of this. You know, just like, you know, like I would suggest something more, you know, not and expand on it how you want. But like, look, you had Murray in your podcast a year ago. year ago you wanted you know he had been deplatformed at middlebury you wanted to defend you wanted to defend him we published a article that was highly critical of you you know i guess you can call it propaganda if you want but obviously the the more you lean on this the more this is going to become what we talk about um i it'll just take a long time so it's like

we've had a back and forth published emails. Like I'm totally happy to have you summarize it, but I don't want to suspend like, I don't want to feel like I'm sitting here for 10 minutes and then I have to go and do a point by point. I think that's not going to be productive. No, no. I mean, I think in my mind, I'm setting you up to say what you said you wanted to say, which is what your current take is on the situation. So yeah, I will be brief. So I reached out to you by email. I felt this article was totally unfair. It accused us of peddling junk science and pseudoscience and pseudoscientific racialist speculation and trafficking in dangerous

ideas. And I mean, Murray got the worst of it, but at minimum, I'm painted as a total ignoramus, right? It was one line which said, you know, said, you know, while I have a PhD in neuroscience, I appear to be totally ignorant of facts that are well known to everyone in the field of intelligence studies. And I think that you should quote the line if you want to quote a line. OK, so the quote is. I don't think that's what the line said. The quote is, this is the exact quote. Sam Harris appeared to be ignorant of facts that were well known to everyone in the field of intelligence studies.

Right. Now, that's since been quietly removed from the article, but it was there and it's archived. So that's what I was reacting to. And I sent you an email where I was pretty pissed because, again, I felt I was treated totally unfairly and as was Murray. And I was especially pissed that you declined to publish an article that came to us unbidden, that came to you unbidden. It was unbidden by me or Murray from Richard Hare, who's the editor-in-chief of the Journal Intelligence, and a far more mainstream voice on this issue than Nisbet or Turkheimer or Hardin. And he came to our defense and he, you know, that would have done

a lot to correct the record, but you declined to publish that. And so we went round and round by email and I got increasingly exasperated over just how I perceived you in the email exchange. And there was some talk of us doing this podcast together, but then I pulled the plug on that because I felt it would be totally unproductive. And at the end of the email exchange, I said, if you continue to slander me, I will publish this email exchange because I felt that people should understand the actual backstory here and how this happened and why I'm not doing a podcast with you. And you did actually publish one more article from Turkheimer that took a shot at us. But basically, we went radio silence for a year about as far as I know. And then what happened is there was an article published in The New York Times by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, which made some of the same noises that Murray and I had made.

And Murray retweeted it saying, wow, this sounds familiar. And Murray retweeted it saying, wow, this sounds familiar. And then I retweeted it taking a snide dig at you saying something like, well, I hope Ezra Klein's on the case. Racialist pseudoscience never sleeps. And then you responded writing yet another article about me and Murray. And I felt this article was just as unfair as anything that had preceded it. In particular, I felt that you had summarized our email exchange in a way that was self-serving and that I didn't agree with. And so that prompted me to publish

the emails. And I will be the first to admit, and I think you will agree with this, that that backfired on me. The public perception of my publishing those emails was that it was not a good look for me at all. And most people who came to those emails cold thought I was inexplicably angry and that you seemed very open to dialogue. And it just, you know, people had to do a lot of work to understand why I was pissed. And most people didn't do that work. I'm not saying that everyone who did the work, who listened to the podcast and read all the articles would take my side of it. But anyone who didn't do the work thought that I was somehow the aggressor there.

In particular, the fact that I was declining to do a podcast with you was held very much against me. And that caused me to change my mind about this whole thing because I realized, OK, this is not I can't be perceived as someone who won't take on legitimate criticism of his views. And so I went out on social media just to see if, in fact, people really wanted us to attempt this. And after 40 or 50,000 people got back, and it was, I think it was 76% said yes, I decided that I was up for a podcast with you, and you had already said you were up for a podcast with me. And so here we are. And again, much of that is described from my point of view, but I think the timeline is accurate.

This is not my ideal, but I'm actually, I'd prefer we get into it. The only thing I would say here that you should just change a little bit in there so I don't do it on your behalf is that you didn't email me. What happened is that this piece published out. I tweeted it out. You tweeted a

public challenge to me to come on your show. That's true. Your producer emailed me to come on your show. I emailed your producer and said, hey, like, can you connect me to Sam? We should talk about this. And then our email exchange began. That's true. The first contact was on Twitter, which is not a big deal. I just want to I just want to note that. Totally true. But here's what I'd ask. Let's jump into it. I mean, let's just start with you. I mean, why what don't I get? You know, why is your criticism of me and Murray valid?

I mean, just give me your take on all of this. All right. Well, I appreciate that summary. Obviously, I'm sure we'll get into this stuff. I have disagreements with which articles are fair and which aren't. But I don't think that that is where I want to begin this. I'm sure we'll go into this stuff. I have disagreements with which articles are fair and which aren't, but I don't think that that is where I want to begin this. I'm sure we'll go through that. I want to try to frame what I want to do here today, because I think people can go through, they can read the original Vox articles, all be linked in my show notes. I assume, Sam,

they'll be linked in yours. They can read our emails to each other. They can read my article. They can listen to the original podcast. If you would like to be a Sam Harris and Ezra Klein completist, the option is very much there. So I listened to your housekeeping episode the other day. So I think I have some sense, Sam, of where you are coming into this. And I want to give you a sense of where I am in the hopes that it'll be productive. So something you've said over and over and over again to me at this point is it to you from the beginning, I've been here in bad faith. The problem is that I've come to this, coming to slander you, to destroy your reputation, to silence you.

And I really, I take that as a signal failure on my part. I have not been able to persuade you, and maybe I will be today, that I really disagree with you strongly. I think some of the things you're trafficking in are not just wrong, but they're harmful. But I do so in good faith, and I'm here because I want to persuade you. In your podcast with Murray, the way I see what's going on here from my perspective, and one of the tricky things here is that I was not that involved in the original Vox article. I was editor-in-chief at the time, but I didn't assign or edit that. I stand by it.

Things you publish when you're editor-in-chief ultimately are on you, and I actually think it's a good piece. But there are times when I can only speak from my perspective, not from the perspective of other people who wrote other things. But the way I read the conversation you had with Murray, and I think you gesture at this in your opening here, you begin that conversation by really framing it around your shared experience responding to politically correct criticism. You say, and I'm quoting you here, in the intervening years, so the intervening years since Murray published The Bell Curve,

that you ventured into, I ventured into my own controversial areas as a speaker and writer. I experienced many hysterical attacks against me in my work. I started thinking about your case, your case being Murray's case, a little, again, without ever having read you. And I began to suspect that you were one of the canaries in the coal mine that I never recognized as such. So you say explicitly in the opening to that podcast that in the treatment of Murray, you saw the seeds of later treatment of you. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because something that I've been trying to do here is see this from your perspective. Here is my view. I think you have, you clearly have, a deep empathy for Charles

Murray's side of this conversation because you see yourself in it. I don't think you have a deep empathy for Charles Murray's side of this conversation because you see yourself in it. I don't think you have as deep an empathy for the other side of this conversation, for the people being told once again that they are genetically and environmentally and at any rate immutably less intelligent and that our social policy should reflect that. And I think part of the absence of that empathy is it doesn't threaten you. I don't think you see a threat to you in that in the way you see a threat to you in what's happened to Murray. In some cases, I'm not even quite sure you heard what Murray was saying on social policy, either in the bell curve and a lot of his later work or on the podcast. And I think that led to a blind spot. And this is worth discussing.

I like your podcast. I think you have a big platform and a big audience, and I think it's bad for the world if Murray's take on this gets recast here as political bravery or impartial or non-controversial. So what I want to do here, it's not really convince you that I'm right. I don't think I'm going to do that. And it's not to convince you to like me. I don't think I'm going to do that either. I get that. What I want to convince you of is that there is a side of this you should become more curious about. You should be doing shows with people like Ibram Kendi, who's author of Stamped from the Beginning, which is a book on racist ideas in America, which won the National Book Award a couple of years back. People who really

study how race and these ideas interact with American life and policy. I think the fact that we are two white guys talking about how growing up non-white in America affects your life and cognitive development is a problem here, just as it was a problem in the Murray conversation. And I want to persuade you that some of the things that the so-called social justice warriors are worried about are worth worrying about, and that the excesses of activists, while very real and problematic, about and that the excesses of activists, while very real and problematic, they're not as big a deal as the things they're really trying to fight and to draw attention to. So maybe I'll take a breath there and let you in. Yeah. Okay. That's a great start. So I guess there's a lot to respond to there. I guess the first thing I want to say is that there are two things I regret here, both in our exchange and in my podcast with Murray.

And so I should just put those out first, I think. The first is that I was, as you said, very quick to attribute malice and bad faith to you in the email exchange. And it's quite possible I did this when it wasn't warranted. The reality is the background here, which you alluded to, is that I am so battle scarred at this point. And I've dealt with so many people who are willing to consciously lie about my views and who will just play the evasion game endlessly. And I've got people who edit the contents of my podcast to make it sound like I've said the opposite of what I've said. And then people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan forward these videos consciously knowing they're misrepresenting me. There's been so much pushback about this. There's been so much correction that at this point,

the possibility that it's not conscious, the chance of that is zero, right? So I'm dealing with people on a daily basis who are just happy to smear me dishonestly simply to see what will stick. And in fact, when I published our emails, the tipping point for me was to see that Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan, and you in a single hour on Twitter had all hit me with stuff that I perceived to be totally dishonest. So my fuse is pretty short. I am the first to admit that.

And if I treated you unfairly, attributing bad faith when you were just led by sincere conviction that I had made an error or that you were arguing for something that was so important and that I wasn't seeing it, that's, you know, that is on me. Now, that said, I think your argument is where even where it pretends to be factual, wherever you think it is factual, it is highly biased by political considerations. And these are political considerations that I share. The fact that you think I don't have empathy for people who suffer just the starkest inequalities of wealth and politics and luck, it's telling and it's untrue. I think it's even untrue of Murray. And the fact that you're conflating the social policies he endorses, like the fact that he's against affirmative action and he's for universal basic income.

And I know you don't happen to agree with those policies. You think that would be disastrous. There's a good faith argument to be had on both sides of that conversation. That conversation is quite distinct from the science. And even that conversation about social policy can be had without any allegation that a person is racist or that a person lacks empathy for people who are at the bottom of society. So that's one distinction I want to make. And the other thing that I regret, which I think is, this is the thing you're taking me to task for, and I understand it, but I do regret that in the preface to my podcast with Murray, I didn't add some full discussion

of racism in America. And the reason why I didn't, or certainly at least one reason why I didn't, is that I had maybe two months before that done a podcast with Glenn Lowry, the economist at Brown, who happens to be Black. And Glenn is fantastic. He's got his own podcast, The Glenn Show, which everyone should watch. But so Glenn was on my podcast and we were talking about race and violence in America. And I prefaced the conversation with a fairly long statement about the reality of white privilege and the past horrors of racism. And when I got to the end of it, Glenn pretty much chastised me for thinking that it was necessary for me to say something like that just because I'm white. Right. The fact that any conversation about race and violence, especially coming from a white guy like me, but this was his attitude, basically said, you know, obviously, since you're not a racist asshole, it can go without saying that you understand that slavery was bad and that Jim Crow was bad and that you totally support civil rights.

a total surprise given who Glenn is, but the fact that he viewed it as fairly pathetic, that I felt the need to do that, and that it couldn't just go without saying, I remembered that. And I mean, obviously your point is well taken. I mean, two white guys talking about differences in IQ across races or across populations. I mean, if ever there's a time to signal that you understand that racism is still a problem in the world, that's it. Right. And while we did say some things that I think should still have been fully exculpatory, I mean, for anyone paying attention, I think it should be obvious with a modicum of charity extended to us that Murray and I are not racist and that what we were saying was not coming from a place of racial animus. But I mean, that is the backstory for why I didn't have some kind of elaborate framing of the conversation. So I want to I want to be this is good because I think this gets much closer to the meat of where we actually disagree. And something I want to be clear about is what I think was wrong in that podcast is not that you didn't virtue signal.

It's not that you didn't come out and say, hey, listen, just before I start this up, I want everybody to know I'm not a racist. And by the way, I'm not here to say you're a racist. I don't think you are. We have not called you one. I actually think that's a different set of things. And we should talk later. I think this would actually be a good conversation for us to have about literally just what racism is, how we use that word in this conversation. But my criticism of your podcast, and by the way, my criticism also of Murray, and this is useful because I can work backwards through your answer here, is not that you didn't excuse yourself. It's that in a conversation about an outcome of American life, right? How do African-Americans and whites score on IQ tests in America today? What happens when somebody sits down and takes a test today? That

is an outcome of the American experiment, an experiment we've been running this country for hundreds of years. You did not discuss actually how race and racism act upon that outcome. You did not discuss, I mean, amazingly to me, you all didn't talk about slavery or segregation once. And what I'm saying here is not that you lack empathy, although I am saying in a different space, I don't, I think you have a, like a sense of what Murray's going through that is different from your sense of what other people who are hurt in this conversation go through. I do believe that. But as it comes to the way you actually conducted the conversation, I'm arguing that you

lacked a sense of history, that you didn't deal in a serious way with the history of this conversation, a conversation that has been going on literally since the dawn of the country, a conversation that has been wrong in virtually every version in every iteration we've had in America before. The other thing I want to say about this, and this gets very importantly to Charles Murray's work, you're a neuroscientist. And so I get that you look at Murray and you look at the bell curve and what you see are the tables and the appendices and the kind of scientific version of Charles Murray. I'm a policy journalist. My background is I live in Washington, D.C. I cover politics.

Charles Murray, not just to me, what he literally is, is what we call a policy entrepreneur. He's somebody who his entire career has been spent at Washington think tanks. He's at the American Enterprise Institute where I have have a lot of friends, and I respect that organization quite a bit. And he argues in different ways and throughout his, again, his entire body of work for policy outcomes. His book before The Bell Curve is called Losing Ground. It's a book about why we should dissolve the Great Society programs. By the way, when he was selling that book, he said, a lot of whites think they're racist, and this is a book that tells them they aren't. Then he came out with The Bell Curve, and we'll go through this, and I'll quote this back to you. But The Bell Curve's final chapter, he says,

why did I do any of this? Why did I talk about any of this? Him and Richard Herrnstein, obviously the co-author of that book, do. And he says, the reason I did it is because we in America need to re-embrace a politics of difference. We need to understand that we are cognitively different from each other, not just by race, but other folks too, but by race as well. And that understanding that changes what we should do in social policy. He literally says, and again, I can quote this to you if you'd like. He says, for one thing, we have all these low cognitive capacity women giving birth. And by having the social supports for poor children in this country, we are subsidizing them

to give birth. And what we need to do is take those subsidies away. So these women who, according to his book, are disproportionately African-American, their poor children do not get as much federal support when they are born. And so they are disincentivized to have as many children. He also says that we have all these folks who are Hispanic coming up over the border, that our immigration policy is letting in too many low IQ people. And while he's not quite as prescriptive in that part, he's pretty clear that he wants us to change our immigration policy in order to resist dysgenic pressure. So I'm just going to finish this up. The other thing, you brought up his UBI work. And this is why the reason I bring this up is that the reason I think Charles Murray's work is problematic is that he uses these arguments about IQ and a lot of other

arguments he makes about other things to push these points into the public debate, where he is very, very, very influential. He's not by any means a silenced actor in Washington. He gives congressional testimony. He won the Bradley Prize in 2016 and got a $250,000 check for it. His book on UBI, it is completely of a piece with this. I reviewed that book when it came out. It's an interesting book.

People should read it. But it is a way of cutting social spending, according to Murray's own numbers. He says it would cut social spending by a trillion dollars in 2020. To give you a sense of scale, Obamacare costs $2 trillion over 10 years. So this is another book in a different way that is a huge argument for cutting social spending, which in part he justifies by saying, argument for cutting social spending, which in part he justifies by saying we are trying to redress racial inequality based on an idea that is a product of American history, when in fact it is some combination of innate and environmental. But at any rate, it is not something we're going to be able to change. And so we should stop trying or at least stop trying in the way we have been.

OK, Ezra, again, you can't conflate his views on social policy with an honest discussion of empirical science. Those are two separate conversations. You can agree about the data or disagree in a good faith way about the data and have a separate conversation about what to do in response to the data and then disagree in a good faith way about that. Now, I'm not defending Murray's view of what the social policy should be. I'm open-minded about universal basic income. I think there can be a good faith debate about many of these topics. It's a completely separate conversation. And I totally share your concern about racism and inequality. And again, I have no interest in using science

to establish differences between races. But the problem is, and I have publicly criticized people who do have an interest in using science that way. And one of my critical questions of Murray was why pay attention to any of this stuff? And I've said publicly that I didn't think his answer was great on that. And I'm not interested in paying attention to this stuff. And yet I have to in order to have conversations like this. But the problem is that the data on population differences will continue to emerge whether we're looking for it or not. And the idea that one should lie about these data or pretend to be convinced by bad arguments that are politically correct, or worse, that it's okay to malign people or even destroy their reputations if they won't pretend to be convinced by bad arguments. That's a disaster. Morally and politically and intellectually, that is a disaster. And that's where we are, right?

That's my criticism of what you have done at Vox and what Turkheimer and Nisbet and Hardin have done. And the truth is, for whatever reason, however noble it is in your head, you've been extraordinarily unfair to me and Murray, especially to Murray. especially to Murray. I just want to give you a couple of examples here. I think we have to go into this issue of, you know, you just claimed you didn't call us racist, right? You didn't use the word racist. I'll grant you that. You used the word racialist, right, which you know most people will read as racist. But even if that is an adequate way to split the difference, everything else you said imputed, if not an utter racial bias and a commitment to some kind of white superiority, you say again and again that, I mean, here's a quote from your article. This is actually the subtitle of the article. And when I, you know, I called the podcast with Murray forbidden knowledge. You said it isn't forbidden knowledge. It's America's most ancient

justification for bigotry and racial inequality, right?'s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality, right? We're shilling for bigotry and racial inequality. And then you convict Murray, again, this is a quote, of being engaged in a decades-long focus on the intellectual inferiority of African Americans. Now, honestly, that is a smear. I mean, Murray has not been focused on African-Americans. He's been waging a decades-long battle to survive being scapegoated by people who insinuate that he's a racist. And the nature of that battle is to continually try to, you have to keep touching this issue to get the slime off of you. You have to keep touching this issue to get the slime off of you. But as you know, the bell curve was not focused on race. There's just one chapter on race. And the truth is that, and you almost alluded to this in what you just said, the truth is that Murray is just as worried about unearned privilege as you are.

He's just worried about a different kind of privilege. You could call it IQ privilege, right? And the bell curve is an 800-page lament on this type of privilege. And again, it has nothing in principle to do with race. Murray is just as worried about the white people on the left side of the IQ distribution as black people or Latinos or anyone else. And you could have said it would be just as true to describe him as having been involved in a decades-long focus on the superiority of Asians over white people, okay? Because that's also part of the story. And, you know, you might ask yourself why you didn't do that. But I want to read a quote from Murray on my podcast because this is, again, I'm not at all arguing for his social policies. I just want us to be fair to the man.

And so this is a quote. If there's one thing that writing The Bell Curve did, it sensitized me to the extent to which high IQ is pure luck. None of us earn our IQ, whether it's by nature or nurture. We aren't the ones who did the nurturing. Hard work and perseverance and all those other qualities are great, but we can't take credit for our IQ. We live in a society that is tailor-made for people with high IQs. The people who got the short end of the stick in that lottery deserve our admiration and our support if they're doing everything right. And that's the end of the quote. He is worried about a world where success is determined by a narrow range of abilities. And these abilities, whether they come from nature or nurture, are distributed unequally. That's

guaranteed to be true. We just know that they can't possibly be equal, both among individuals and across groups, and when you're talking about the averages in groups. And he's totally committed, as I am. Again, I don't know how many times you have to reiterate this in a podcast to make it stick, but the punchline here is that everyone has to be treated as an individual. We have to get past thinking about groups. I mean, there's more variance within a group than between groups, and everyone has to be encountered on their own merits. And he's totally clear about that. So to paint him as callous and as racist, and as essentially a white supremacist, you're talking, he's fixated on the

inferiority of blacks on your account. It is irresponsible and unethical. And that's the kind of wrong that I was trying to address by giving him a platform on my podcast. And that is what produced so much outrage in me in our email exchange. When I hear this, I actually really wonder how much, I want to be careful here. hear this, I actually really wonder how much I want to be careful here. I know Charles Murray. When I wrote my very first piece as a journalist in Washington, it was a piece about poverty. I interviewed him for it. I've reviewed his books. I've talked with him. My wife is writing a book about UBI, actually. He's quoted in the book. I do not want Charles Murray silenced. And he's a lovely guy interpersonally.

There's no doubt about that. And the quote you read from him about luck, I want to put a pin in that because there's a whole conversation I want to have with you about that quote. If Charles Murray followed what that quote implies, I think things would look very different with him and with my view of his career. But I do think I need to go through some of what you said here. So first, I don't know how much you understand Charles Murray's career. But I do think I need to go through some of what you said here. So first, I don't know how much you understand Charles Murray's career. As I said, his first book is Losing Ground. It's

a book about the Great Society. In the interest of time and basic human sanity here, Ezra, I'm worried that what you're going to do is all the stuff you're going to cover is actually irrelevant because one... Hey, Sam, I've let you, I've let you had your say. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna keep going. Okay, that's fine. But I just want to prevent your and listener frustration here, because if you go on for 10 minutes for me to only say, well, again, his social policies are not social policies I'm advocating. We're going to, don't worry, we're going to go, we're going to go through all this. And I, I don't mean this to be sharp, but you don't give short answers yourself. So, you know, we're just going to have to indulge the other one here.

Sure. So, OK, so this first book is Losing Ground. It's about dissolving the welfare state. And again, he says about that book, a lot of whites think they're racist. I'm going to show them they're not. Next book is The Bell Curve. The way Murray often defends The Bell Curve is by saying, hey, look, it only had this one chapter on race and IQ. And he's completely or actually a couple of chapters, but he's completely right about that. The chapters where that is mentioned, they are not the bulk of the book. But I'm actually a publisher of pieces and I work with a lot of authors on book excerpts.

The furor around the bell curve is not around the book, which it's a long book. Most people haven't read it. It's that the part of the book that he had excerpted on the New Republic, on the cover of the New Republic under Andrew Sullivan, the cover of the New Republic, it just says in big letters, race and IQ. The reason that is the part people focus on is that they pulled the most controversial part of the book and made it a huge deal. I know that authors, when they don't want their most controversial part to define the work, they don't let you excerpt that. So one, I don't think Murray's Blame is there. His next book is honestly weirder. I don't know if you've ever read or even are that familiar with Human Achievement. Just to be on the record here, I've read The Bell Curve and I've

read Coming Apart. And that's all. Coming Apart's an interesting book, too. And Coming Apart is just spells out his concern about the cognitive stratification of society. So Human Achievement is a book where Murray and this is comes right after the bell curve. And when I describe this book, I almost feel like people people are not going to believe me. But but go look it up. Murray wants to quantify the human achievements of different races. And the way he does that is he looks in a bunch of encyclopedias and he literally counts up the amount of space given to the accomplishments of artists and philosophers and scientists from different places. And he uses that to say, Europeans, white Europeans,

have done the most to push forward human achievement. One criticism that I and other people have of Murray is that he often looks at indicators that reflect inequality and uses them to justify inequality. That book is like one of the most massive correlation causation errors I can possibly imagine. So now the next thing you say is that in doing this, that I am conflating two things. I'm conflating just a calm discussion you two had about the science with a social policy agenda. I want to read you actually what was said in your discussion with Murray about this, because this is actually why I am interested in it. When you were talking with Murray, one thing I think to your credit is you repeatedly asked him, hey,

why do this at all? Why have this whole discussion about race and IQ? What are we doing here? So you say, why seek data on racial differences at all? What is the purpose of doing this? And Murray responds, and again, I'm quoting, because we now have social policy embedded in employment policy, in academic policy, which is based on the premise that everybody's equal above the neck, whether it is men or women or whether it is ethnicity. And when you have that embedded into law, you have a variety of bad things happen. And then you ask it again. You say, needless to say, I'm sure we can find hate supremacist organizations who love the fact that the bell curve was published and admonish their members to read it at the first opportunity. Why look at this? How does this help society give more information about racial difference? And Murray, again, I'm not going to read the whole thing because I think that would be dull, gives a long answer about affirmative action and why it is bad. So I am not the one conflating this, number one. I am listening to the conversation you had. I'm listening. I'm a close reader of Murray's work. And the reason I care about this

stuff is because I care about what the actual social policy outcomes are. Ezra, then you don't know what I mean by conflate. Let me just, I got to clarify this. This is confusion. You can respond to everything when I'm done. I promise I will shut up and let you talk. The final thing that you did in your answer to me here was you said again and again, people pretending to believe politically correct ideas, people pretending to believe bad evidence. A couple of things on that. I don't doubt your sincerity in this, but I can assure you that Nisbet and Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer and me, we actually believe what we believe. And one of the things that has honestly been frustrating to me in dealing with you is you have a kind of a very sensitive ear to where you feel that somebody has

insulted you, but not a sensitive ear to yourself. During this discussion, you have called me, and not through implication, not through something where you're reading in between the lines, you've called me a slanderer, a liar, intellectually dishonest, a bad faith actor, cynically motivated by profit, defamatory, libelous. You've called Turkheimer and Nisbet and Page Harding, you've called them fringe. You've said just here that they're part of a politically correct moral panic. I do think that you need to do a little bit more here to credit the idea that there just is a disagreement here. And it's a disagreement in part because people are looking at different parts of this with different emphasis, but also disagreement because people

look at this issue and see different things. I often hear you on your podcast talk about how it's important to try to to try to extend the idea of sincerity. And one thing that is annoying is that, you know, the one thing that one thing that I have not done is assume that you don't believe what you believe. Everybody here is trying to have an argument about something that is important, that in Murray's words is about how we end up, that should feed into how we order society, what we do to redress racial difference. And that's not just a high stakes conversation.

It's also one where people just disagree. Okay, so untangling a bit of confusion here. I guess there's two topics here that I should address. I think we have to talk about what it means to insinuate that someone's racist, but the conflation issue. I get that you hate his social policies. I get that you see that he thinks his social policies are justified by what he thinks is empirically true in the world of data and facts and human difference. So there's a connection there, right? And you're worried that if one takes the data seriously

in the way that he takes it seriously, if one endorses his interpretation of the data from psychology or psychometrics or behavioral genetics, that that will lead to social policies that you find abhorrent or that you think will produce a massive amount of inequality or suffering or something wrong. And I get that. But the conflation is, is that talking about data is one thing.

Talking about what should be done in light of the facts that you acknowledge to be true, or are likely to be true, is another. And there can be good faith disagreements in both of the facts that you acknowledge to be true or are likely to be true is another. And there can be good faith disagreements in both of those conversations. Those conversations are not inextricably linked. And what I am noticing here is, and what I've called a moral panic, is that there are people who think that if we don't make certain ideas, certain facts taboo to discuss, if we don't impose a massive reputational cost in discussing these things, then terrible things will happen at the level of social policy. The only way to protect our politics is to be, again, this is a loaded term, but this is what is happening from my view scientifically,

is to be intellectually dishonest, to be led by confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a real thing. And this is the situation I think we're in. Everything you've said about the politics and the historical wrongs of racism, which you wrote about a lot in your last piece, I totally agree with. And I'm probably more aligned with last piece, I totally agree with. Okay. And I'm probably more aligned with you politically than I am with Murray, which is to say that I share your biases. I share the bias that is leading you to frame the matter the way you're framing it. Again,

I probably should have spelled this out in the beginning of my podcast with Murray, and I didn't for reasons I described. I don't think it would have made a bit of difference, but I still should have done it. And I think it would have been called anodyne the way that Nisbet et al. are talking about individual differences, anodyne. But I think everything you say about the history of racism is true. I think you could well be on the right side of a good debate about social policy, and your concerns here are totally understandable. I get all of that. So this goes to the charge of bad faith against you, which in this conversation, I admitted, might have been unfair, right? You might not be the Glenn Greenwald character I read you to be at a certain point in that email exchange.

So let's just assume, as you say, that you feel intellectually scrupulous and ethically righteous, okay? I know what it's like to feel that. And you feel this way because you are concerned about racism, you're horrified by the history of racism, and you feel that the kinds of social policies that Murray favors would be disastrous. And again, I'm not arguing for those social policies. But your bias here, your connection to the political outcomes when you're talking about the empirical science is causing you to make journalistic errors. It's causing Nisbet and Turkheimer to make errors of scientific reasoning. And these are obvious errors. I mean, in your last piece, you have this whole section on the Flynn effect and how the Flynn effect should be read as

accounting for the black-white differences in purely environmental terms. Well, even Flynn rejects that interpretation of the Flynn effect. I mean, he had originally hoped, he publicly hoped that his effect would account for that, but now he has acknowledged that the data don't suggest that. And there are many other errors of this kind that you and Nisbet and Turkheimer are making when you criticize me and Murray. And you criticize Murray for errors that he didn't make. And in order for you to imagine that I'm equally biased, right, because you must imagine bias on my side. Why am I getting it so wrong? Right. that I'm equally biased, right? Because you must imagine bias on my side. Why am I getting it so wrong, right? Why am I looking at the same facts that Nisbet and Turkheimer and Hardin are looking at, and I am getting it absolutely wrong? You have to imagine that I have an equal and opposite

passion, that I feel equally righteous, but it's pointing in the opposite direction. but it's pointing in the opposite direction. I would have to be a grand dragon of the KKK to feel an equal and opposite bias on these data. And you've already said you don't think I'm a racist, but that's what it would have to be true of me, to be as biased as you are, again, understandably given the history of racism on these data. And it's just not the case. What you have in me is someone who shares most of your political concerns and yet is unwilling to, again, a loaded word, lie about what is and is not a good reading of empirical data and what is and is not a good reading of empirical data, and what is and is not a good argument about genetics and environment and what is reasonable to presume based on what we already know. And again, the problem is, is that even if we never look for these things again, even if we

follow this taboo and decide that it's just, there's no ethical reason to ever look at population differences, we will be continually ambushed by these data. They're just going to spring out of our study of intelligence generically or human genetics generically. It's happened on other topics already, and people try to keep quiet about it because, again, the environment journalistically and politically is so charged. And my criticism of you has been from day one that you are contributing to that political charge. And it's totally unnecessary because the political answer is we have to be committed to racial equality and everyone getting all the opportunities in life for happiness and self-actualization that they can use. And we're nowhere near achieving that kind of society. And the real racists are the people who are not committed to those goals.

There's so much there. I actually really appreciate that answer because I think it helps open this up. So let me say a couple things here. quick to see a lot of psychological tendencies, cognitive fallacies, et cetera, in others that you don't see applying to yourself or people you've sort of written into your tribe. So you say words in there like confirmation bias, et cetera, to me about Murray, about how we're looking at Murray. And my whole the whole thing I just told you is that Charles Murray is a guy who works at conservative think tanks, whose first book was about how to get why we should get rid of the welfare state, who is his whole life's work is about breaking down social policy. So to the extent that I have any biases that flow backwards from political commitments, so does he. We're all

what's my bias. So I'm going to go through that. Don't worry. I promise you I will get to your bias very quickly. I do want to know you mentioned James Flynn here to prepare for this conversation. I called Flynn the other day. I spoke to him on Monday. His read of the evidence right now, and this is me quoting him. He says, I think it is more probable than not that the IQ difference between black and white Americans is environmental. As a social scientist, I cannot be sure if they have a genetic advantage or disadvantage. So I'm just, that is what James Flynn thinks as of Monday. So then you ask me, and I think this is a great, this is a good question, because I think this gets to the core of this, and it gets to where I tried to

open us up into. Your view of this debate is that to say that you have a bias in it is to say in your terms that you're like the grand dragon of the KKK, that the only version of a bias that could be influencing what you see here is a core form of racism. That's actually not my view of you, but I do think you have a bias. I think you have a huge sensitivity, let's put it that way. And you have a lot of difficulty extending an assumption of good faith to anyone who disagrees with you on an issue that you code as identity politics. And there's a place actually where I think you got

into this in a pretty interesting way. I went back and I read your discussion with Glenn Lowry. At the beginning, when you're talking about why you chose to have Glenn on the show, you say, my goal was to find an African-American intellectual who could really get into the details with me, but whom I also trusted to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn't be contaminated by identity politics. To you, engaging in identity politics discredits your ability to participate in a rational conversation and is something, as far as I can tell,

that you do not see yourself as doing. So here's my question for you. On that specific quote, what does it mean to you, particularly when you're talking about something like race, to have your ideas contaminated by identity being.

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