Making Sense with Sam Harris - #212 — A Conversation with Kathryn Paige Harden

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Kathryn Paige Harden about public controversy over group differences in traits like intelligence and ongoing research in behavioral genetics. They discuss Harden’s criticism of the Making Sense episode featuring Charles Murray, the mingling of scientific thinking with politics and social activism, cancel culture, environmental and genetic contributions to individual and group differences, intellectual honesty, and other topics. 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher along with other subscriber-only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason

why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. I am here with Paige Harden. Paige, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me, Sam. So just a few notes to our listeners.

We're kind of jumping on this podcast because we had a bit of a Twitter collision, and then a very friendly person reached out to both of us to see if he or she could midwife a better conversation. So there's at least one thing that's relevant there is that, you know, I haven't sent you the gear. I usually send guests to get as close to perfect audio as we can get. So we're doing this over Skype and apologies for any Skype-like glitches in your sound. Before we jump in, can you summarize your academic background and just what you've been focusing on as a scientist? Yeah. So I am a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where I've been since graduate school. And I run a research lab there that is focused on genetic

influences and how they shape child and adolescent development. So one part of that is on cognition and academic achievement. And then the other part of that is on mental health with a particular focus on antisocial behavior problems, delinquency and crime. focus on antisocial behavior problems, delinquency and crime. So I do twin studies and then a variety of measured DNA studies with using polygenic scores, which maybe we might dive into later. And then in the past two years, I've been writing a book. I'm about to be finished with it. Although there's still a long road. I'm realizing until a book is a physical object in the universe between finishing the manuscript and it being published, which is called the genetic lottery. So it's on the role of genes in shaping social inequalities and is really trying to reshape that conversation away from thinking of genetics as an enemy of equality or equality hinging on genetic sameness to really

think about given our current landscape, particularly in the US, how could we use genetic information and what we've learned from genetic studies to think about what it means when we say equality. So that's been my passion project for the last couple of years. And I'm, you know, I'm excited to talk about that in relation to, I think, the many issues that I think we could touch base on today. Oh, that's great. If memory serves, you'll have exactly 11 months to wait once you finish your book and to see it born. An increasingly ridiculous 11 months given the nature of media these days. Yeah, yeah. It's such yeah. It feels very antiquated in

relation to the immediacy of everything else that's happening right now. Well, lucky for you, inequality is still going to be a problem after 11 months, so you will not be less relevant, I'm sure. So there's something I'd like to ask at the outset here, because I'm pretty confident that you and I are coming to this conversation from very different places, just with very different frames around what it means to have this conversation. I think our glitch on Twitter was born of that difference. At the outset, I'd love to get your impression of why we're speaking now and just what's happened between us. Because, you know,

we've never met as far as I know. I don't think we've ever bumped into each other at a conference or anything. And yet we're entangled in some way now. So from your point of view, how did we get here? And what is your motive in having this conversation? Yeah. So, I mean, entangled is a good word for it. Spooky action at a distance. The origin of this is, you had a podcast with Charles Murray, I think going on two years ago now. And I wrote an article with my former PhD advisor, Eric Turkheimer, and social psychologist Dick Nisbet in Vox that was critical of Murray's portrayal of the state of the science is how I viewed that article. And then there was reactions to that article and then our response to those reactions. There was yet another piece on the same topic by Ezra Klein. There was multiple conversations between you and Klein about whether our Vox piece, the substance of it, and whether soliciting it and publishing it was in good faith.

And honestly, the aftermath of that publishing of the Vox piece never sat well with me. I think in many ways, the parts of it I wrote in my head as I was writing it was very much me as a scientist responding to what I thought Murray was portraying inaccurately. And then I think as the article got published and sort of reverberated through social media, and as you know, as well as I do, that has this weird funhouse mirror distortionate effect on conversations. It seemed that you felt criticized in a way that, to be quite honest, surprised me, kind of the intensity of it.

Something was being lost in my intention and how it was being received. And so, you know, I kind of left that whole thing with a, that didn't go how I would have wanted it to go. And I, I don't feel like I communicated the messages that I was intending to with the precision that I wanted to. And then fast forward to, you know, the most recent week you had Robert Plowman on your podcast to talk about his new book, Blueprint. And, you know, I had what I think is a very kind of social media moment in which I am responding to someone else's comment on, you know, what, what are we all going to do as parents around school

closures? And someone responded with, oh, well, you need to listen to Sam Harris's new podcast because then you'll realize that going to school doesn't matter. And it was such an alarming tweet and with some backstory that, you know, I've known Robert Plum for quite a long time. but the role of whether or not schools and parents make a difference is a topic about which we've had multiple conversations with public and private and about which we disagree. So there really was just kind of like full circle moment in which I felt like, oh, are we back here talking about someone was on Sam Harrison's podcast and how that information is being received by your audience and how I'm responding to it. And then I have to be really honest. I was really surprised when you responded on Twitter. I think I had this idea in my head that your platform is

so enormous and there are so many people responding to you at any one time that the extent to which what I was saying about not even in that moment, I wasn't even, as you know, responding to the podcast, but so much to this, you know, anonymous person who was saying, oh, you should listen to it because then you will realize that schools don't matter. it was really upsetting to me in that moment. And it really kind of kicked off our, I think, sense, at least I have the sense of sort of having unresolved, unresolved, to go back to your original word, unresolved entanglement, that we're both interested in these issues, that the conversation really was not between you and me the last time around the Vox article. And I think maybe something was lost in that, in how that played out. So I'm hoping that by having this conversation, we, you know, we will each get something out of it months, inequality is still going to be a problem. And I'd like to move forward, feeling like there's a mutually respectful relationship. And that wasn't what was playing out on Twitter. So that's kind of where I'm really hoping this conversation goes today. Nice, nice. Well, we Yeah, we definitely share the goal there. And another thing we share, I'm sure, given everything you've just said, is

a concern about social inequality and social cohesion and just the suffering of other people. I'm sure we both want other people to thrive, both because we care about other people, but also just for purely selfish reasons. I'm sure we both would much prefer to live in a society that is filled with happy, self-actualized people. And I trust you don't like to see the sidewalks filled with homeless people any more than I do. And I mean, again, both for the sake of the people themselves and for our own quality of life, right? So I think everyone has an interest in these issues. And so, you know, everyone, whether they're thinking about it or not, has an interest in things like wealth inequality

and the crazy disparities in crime and access to health care in our society and failing schools and, you know, insofar as racism remains a problem and the cause of other problems, I think you and I are both concerned about racism. I think it's safe to say, but I think I should say a couple of things about how I'm coming to these issues that will explain what was otherwise surprising about my reaction to

your Vox piece. One, my reaction and my non-reaction. I mean, one, I didn't actually answer. I didn't respond to your Vox piece. One, my reaction and my non-reaction. I mean, one, I didn't actually answer. I didn't respond to your Vox piece. And many people thought I should have, because many people saw it as a serious scientific criticism of a conversation I had on my podcast. And, you know, I must say, I didn't view it that way. And that's why I didn't respond, among other things. And so, you know, so let me see if I can just launch into an account of what has happened here for me, and explain just what, you know, what would otherwise seem like bizarre behavior. First,

I think we should distinguish two topics here. I mean, there's the scientific topic of human intelligence and, you know, differences in human abilities generally, whether we explain these differences environmentally or genetically or both. All of that is interesting and consequential and important to talk about, honestly, and there's that topic. But then there's this sociological and political fact that it's difficult to talk about these things, right? And so those are two very different things. And I'm really brought to this topic mostly because of my focus on the second topic. I mean, that's certainly why I had Murray on my

podcast. So again, just to be clear, we need to distinguish certain scientific topics from the fact that talking about the science, right, is rightly perceived, I think, to be professionally dangerous and personally toxic. That is, unless one is committed to maintaining a certain kind of political correctness, more or less at all costs here. correctness, more or less at all costs here. So if I can just jump in there really quickly, is I roughly agree with that division. But I think, and we can come we can circle back to this, I think failures in either make the other more difficult in the sense that like, if we can't speak, you know, openly and honestly about the science that makes doing the science harder but i think also people you know our responsibility to talk about the science as clearly as possible as part of what i think of the scientists contribution to sort of keeping cancel culture at bay like so i think i agree with the division that you can sort of think of those two issues

but i think they do affect each other in the real world in kind of this continuous basis. Yeah, except I think you and I will draw that boundary a little differently. And I can argue about why I draw the boundary as I do, because I think it's important. I think any principle other than intellectual honesty that would cause us to make certain scientific claims is very nature going to be unstable and prove to be a bad bulwark against the kind of social outcomes that I think you and I get into that. But I mean, just again, for context, I think I said this at the top, you and I were brought together by a moderator who wants to remain anonymous and inaudible in this conversation. We have someone on the line with us who hasn't yet chimed in, but may yet chime in, and we will edit out those intrusions. This person wants to remain anonymous because they—and I'm using they to conceal gender, not to say that they are transgender—they perceive this whole topic to be so fraught that they are concerned that this might blow back on them or institutions with which they're

associated. That's just a sign of the times, right? You and I just may calibrate our, we obviously calibrate our sense of the risk differently, but that's the nature of the context in which we're having this conversation. I don't, I just want to say I don't disagree with our anonymous third participant. You know, I, I've been in the field of behavior genetics essentially my whole adult life you know i went to i applied for graduate school when i was 20 years old and so i that sense of this thinking about how genetics relates to inequalities between people and what implications that has for our policies, for our nation, our sort of our intuitions about justice and fairness is really strikes at the heart of so many issues that people feel passionately about. And by virtue of being an

exclusive topic requires communicating about it with great care. And I think if you're going to do it, you have to do it well and to say, well, I'm willing to be interested in this issue, but I'm not going to drag a whole bunch of other people, you know, by virtue of my association with them into that, into that morass. I mean, I, I agree that there are potential implications, even just in terms of time, for anyone being sort of associated with this conversation. Yeah, yeah. All of that is ultimately unnecessary, not surprising, but unnecessary. And I think whatever political daylight we eventually land in that is stable will be born of our having discovered that this is really not a problem to talk about, right? And that's where I'm hoping to get to.

But the strategies I see other people using, I think, are bound to be ineffective, and they have the additional problem of creating a lot of casualties of another sort along the way. And so just to give you some color to my experience here, first, I'm interested in intelligence, both human and artificial, but I've never been interested in IQ per se, and I'm certainly not interested in racial differences in IQ, but I've grown extremely concerned about the way our capacity for moral panic has made it difficult to have honest conversations in general about just all kinds of topics having nothing to do with behavioral genetics or intelligence or just across the board. And I mean, talking about religion, for instance, or differences among religions. And I really don't like scapegoating and mob justice. And this is the

kind of thing one encounters on this topic. So as you said, you know, two years ago, I brought Charles Murray on my podcast for reasons around these free speech concerns, right? I mean, this was in response to his being physically attacked at Middlebury, you know, a full quarter century after he wrote his controversial book, The Bell Curve. And I can say that having that conversation with him has had a profoundly negative effect on my life, right? And it's not because anything Charles said or did, and it's entirely because of what other people said and did in response to that conversation. And, you know, some of that was foreseeable, you know, certainly should have been foreseeable. And, you know, to some degree,

I consciously took this on as something that, you know, I just, I felt a moral obligation to respond to what I perceived to be both an injustice in his case and a creeping dysfunction in our intellectual life, and the fact that you have professors being assaulted on college campuses for highly distorted ideas about what they wrote 25 years ago. And you were one of the principal people who contributed to this backlash by publishing that article in Vox, right, along with, as you said, Richard Nisbet and Eric Turkheimer. And now you may not think it was a smear, but in my world, it absolutely was, right? I mean, and it gave Ezra Klein the scientific cover or the seeming scientific cover to publish other smears of me and Murray in Vox. And it's one thing to differ about, you know, specific interpretations of data, say.

But the reality is, is that that article accused me and Murray. I mean, I think you thought your emphasis was mostly on Murray, and it was. me and Murray. I mean, I think you thought your emphasis was mostly on Murray, and it was, but I mean, virtually every sentence, you know, I was wrapped up there as part of the problem. You accused us of peddling junk science, right? And the best interpretation of how I came out in that article was as Murray's dupe, right? Like I just, you know, I was just, I didn't understand the science and he put one over on me. But the more reasonable interpretation of the article was that I was more of a willing accomplice in the spread of dangerous and discredited ideas. And whatever you thought your take on my podcast with Murray was, and whatever top spin you thought you were giving

with a part of the article you wrote or not, and however much daylight there might be between you and Nisbet and Turkheimer, the net result of that article was to land me on the hate watch page at the Southern Poverty Law Center in the company of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan lunatics, right? Yeah. Whether or not you thought it was a smear, in the current environment, it absolutely functioned as a smear, right? And it is, when I, you know, pinged you on Twitter the other day, what I was really responding to was, I mean, I was responding to two things.

Your seeming outrage that that I would quote platform Robert Plowman, right? Which using the phrase platform in response to my putting a person who's inarguably one of the leading people in the field on my podcast seemed bizarre to me and seemed of a piece with the article you had written about me and Murray. But you resurfaced your Vox article, right? Which again, in my world, functions as, for people who don't get into it, people who can't take the time to listen to a two-hour podcast and don't have enough understanding of the topic to see as I think I do the mismatch between your article and what I and Murray actually said in that podcast, that article functions as scientific proof,

That article functions as scientific proof, essentially, that I'm a racist asshole, or at least dangerously irresponsible in my platforming a racist asshole on my podcast. And that's just an objective statement about how this thing functions in my life. And so to see you retweet it and then take a shot at me for having, quote, platformed Robert Plowman, you got a somewhat snide response from me on Twitter. Like, really, Paige? And you did this all without listening to the podcast with Robert Plowman? Man, that's amazing, right? So some people think I'm just being thin-skinned and I can't take criticism of my views. That's not what's happening. I mean, unless you see what's coming back at me on a daily basis and see the effect

in my life and in the lives of others, I mean, the truth is I have taken immense pains to be uncancellable, right? And I effectively am uncancellable. So I'm an incredibly lucky person, right? I just, you know, I have very few complaints about my life. But this is definitely one. I mean, I recognize that because of what happened there, and in large measure because of the article you wrote, and then what Ezra Klein did with it, it may well be the case that 30, 40 years from now, when I die at the end of a long and happy life, my daughters will read that I was persistently dogged by accusations of racism or something

completely insane, given what I actually feel about race and racism and what it would mean to live in a just society. And the causality of that is absolutely apparent to me, given the social forces and the social incentives and the biases I see around this conversation. So that's who you were meeting on Twitter the other day. Yeah. Okay. So I have a couple responses to that. And the first is just, you know, that helps me understand more about kind of the tenor of your response. Because thinking about it in terms of how my article, but particularly how that article was picked up and reverberated and interpreted to ultimately lead to you being, you know, clustered with neo-Nazis, you know, obviously I can see how that would be, you know, I obviously, I can see how that would

be deeply upsetting. When I, what I feel like this brings up for me is there's, there's a kind of ironic parallel here in the sense that you're saying, you know, you wrote this thing and you didn't intend for it to, you know, lead to other people casting aspersions on me as a, you know, as a racist or as a Nazi, but it had that effect given the social environment that we live in and the way that journalism works, you know, so don't you bear some responsibility for how that criticism was used? Well, let me just clarify one thing. It's not as inadvertent as all that because, I mean, Let me just clarify one thing. It's not as inadvertent as all that, because honestly, the only... I should just give you a little more color for what I think about the article. The only way to interpret the article is that Murray and I... Again, it's more Murray. I'm sort of

showcasing his views, but I was also signing off on many of the things he was claiming, and you made that clear in the article. But the frame you gave it is that these are dangerous, well-known-to-be-discredited views. I mean, it wasn't totally coherent, because in one paragraph you guys say, you know, the truth is there are many scientists whose views are much closer to Murray's than to ours, and we don't even have the same views, right? So you did sort of pay lip service to the idea that there is a continuum of views about, now we don't even have the same views, right? So you did sort of pay lip service to the idea that there is a continuum of views about, now we're talking about the heritability of intelligence and group differences in intelligence here. That's the most toxic topic. So you paid a

little lip service to it, but basically the general thrust of the article was, and this is junk science, and it's dangerous, it's irresponsible, and it is of a piece with a long history of awful justifications for racists, you know, pseudoscientific justifications for racism and bigotry and slavery and all the rest. And we're now part of that. And so there's no way to say, I mean, I hear where you're going. You think that I'm trying to hold you responsible for the completely inadvertent interpretations that some people have made of your article. But most of it is there in the article. And there is no commitment to racism and no cover for white supremacy given in my framing of Murray, or

honestly, even, I mean, this is what we'll get into this, but even in what I understand to be Murray's views. So, I mean, I think this is, yeah. So, I mean, just for our listeners who have not read the article or listened to the podcast, you know, I think, and also just to give a little bit of backstory is I think many times people who respond to Charles Murray's basic thesis, which is that one IQ tests have predicted validity for things we care about, that individual differences in intelligence are substantially heritable, and that group differences between racial, ethnic groups and IQ are likely genetic in origin. And then four, that because of that, things will be, you know, that kind of, we have some pessimism about the possibilities of social policy.

Go back to three for one second, because this is a crucial distortion in your article that was just unnecessary. And I mean, it's there for anyone who wants to go back and read your article and listen to the two hour podcast. And at the time, I assumed most people would do that and they'd be able to do that. But of course, that's a ridiculous assumption. And most people just either read the article and didn't take the time to listen to the podcast or, you know, having listened to the podcast, they read the article and they couldn't remember what was in the podcast. And most important, people are so desperate to believe that Charles Murray is a racist monster and that this whole topic of racial

differences in IQ is radioactive for very good reason, that they're overwhelmingly biased just to accept the claims you made in that article at face value. But the claim you just made that Murray puts, I think it was your point number three, you just enumerated, that Murray thinks this explanation for racial differences in IQ is very likely to be mostly genetic. That is just untrue, right? It's untrue in the bell curve. It's untrue in the podcast. Several places in that podcast, we spelled out why even if intelligence is 80% heritable, say,

you could not say that the differences between groups was due to genetics. In fact, it could be 100 percent environmental. I think in the podcast, I use the analogy to height. You know, you could have an island of people who have the genes to be as tall as the Dutch, but if they were malnourished, you know, and you found them to be shorter than the Inuit, it would be 100 percent due to environment. And so we made those caveats. And when I made that particular caveat, Charles Murray, his first sentence was, that's a crucial point, right? I mean, the irony is that there's a tiny substantive difference between you, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but in my understanding of your view, and again, I don't know what

distinguishes you from Nisbet and Turkheimer on this point, if anything, but the only difference between what you're arguing for and what Murray is arguing for is what we might call a default hypothesis with respect to the role that genes play in group difference, right? And it's actually something that Richard Hare brought out so Richard Hare who I don't know I've only spoken to him once and and I you know I've never met him and and he unsolicited responded to your Vox piece right here Richard Hare is the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence and he's the author of the book The Neurobiology of Intelligence right so he's a person who's in this field and he came out of the woodwork in response to your Vox piece. And Ezra Klein, I mean, just so people understand how the sausage of, in my view, defamation gets made, Ezra Klein refused to publish that response

from Hare, you know, as though he had run out of pixels on the Vox website. And then Richard Hare wrote a follow-up response to your second piece in Vox, which also Vox refused to publish. But the point he made is that for people in the field, in the field of intelligence, and you clearly have a different view of this, but this was his view, again, unsolicited, is that the default hypothesis is that for a highly heritable trait, is that for a highly heritable trait, individually, like intelligence, it's a safe default assumption that genes will play some role, some, not the majority role, just some involvement in group differences. And this was Murray's point in the podcast. Otherwise, to have a different default assumption, to say that we're going to default to it's

100% environment and genes play absolutely no role whatsoever, right? You just, it seems like it's an assumption you need to argue for. I mean, this is a minuscule difference in terms of what someone's finding plausible. I don't think it's a minuscule difference. Do you not think it's a minuscule difference because of your judgment of scientific plausibility or because of your concern for the social effects of one assumption versus the other? Because of the science,

I would say because of the depth of evidence for it as a scientific hypothesis. So this is, I mean, this is a really, I think this is a really, really unintuitive point. You know, we can, we can talk about how if within a group, differences between people are caused by genes, and differences between groups could still be due to the environment. But I think lurking behind there, there's still this intuition that, well, but how plausible is that? And if there were genetic differences, you know, they would obviously work in the same direction that we see, you know, in the, in the case of phenotypic differences, right? So I think it sounds, it sounds so, so plausible to call it a default to say, well, we know that genes cause intelligence differences within white people.

We know that there's phenotypic differences on average in IQ between racial groups. Shouldn't our kind of running null hypothesis, our prior, given the absence of any good evidence either way, shouldn't our prior be that the genes are also involved in the group differences? And I think that that idea of what our prior should be is really based on a very basic statistical misunderstanding. I mean, according to Richard Hare, this is the default hypothesis among intelligence researchers. I mean, it's actually named that. I'd like to give a concrete example that I think illustrates this. So, you know, recently there was a paper in BioArchive by a team of people that do ancient DNA studies, which was finding that one of the early genetic loci associated with having a particularly bad response to COVID

is something that we seem to have gotten from our Neanderthal ancestors. So, you know, everything in COVID genetics is very preliminary right now. Like the paper, I think is still in archive. It hasn't been published yet. But if you look at the paper, you see, okay, well, here's a genetic variant that makes people more likely to develop bad complications from COVID and to die from COVID. And then if you look at the worldwide distribution of that gene, you'll see that it's absent in Africans because they do not have a significant proportion of Neanderthal genetic ancestry. So you have an example of within people of European ancestry, we can look and we can say, here's a gene that's associated with this response. that's associated with this response. And then if you looked at the phenotypic differences in, you know, bad outcomes from COVID across groups of people, you might, using Heyer's default

hypothesis logic, say, well, genes cause, you know, this gene causes bad COVID response in white people. There's so much worse medical outcomes in black people. It must be that part of this difference between them is genetically caused. And what's more, it's because they have more of this genetic risk that we're seeing, but in fact, they have none of it, right? It's like it is it the genetic differences that we're's not specific to discussion of intelligence. That's not specific to a discussion of IQ. It's a really, really, really basic statistical point, which is that if you know the direction of an association within a group, you don't know anything about whether that plays out between groups, not even in the sign of that direction, right? So it could be that, you know, let's say, actually, Africans are at a genetic advantage

for cognitive ability that's been swamped by, you know, environmental risks and adversity. And I think once you realize that that's not just, that's not just about IQ, that's about, you know, that was labeled as the ecological fallacy. That's like a basic statistical point. what is the relationship between differences in genetic ancestry and the causes of these cognition differences that we see on average between groups. And in the absence of any data, any really good data, the only priors we have are informed by what, right? And so that's why I think the prior that there is a genetic difference and what's more, it works in this particular direction is not informed by the science. And that's the part that I really, I don't think that's a minor disagreement. So I think if we look at the evidence for how much does IQ statistically predict life outcomes in people, there is a huge mound of evidence there. And people might not like to

hear it, but we can talk objectively about what that means. When we're talking about what is a reasonable prior in terms of our explanations for group differences in performance and standardized IQ tests? I don't think, I don't agree with the framing that the, what has been called the default hypothesis is actually a reasonable prior, because I think that's based on a really basic misunderstanding of what knowledge within groups tells us about, about causes between groups. So I, you know So I think that's tricky to describe because default hypothesis sounds like such a reasonable norm, but I don't think it's agnostic enough about what we know. Okay. So now I'm going to, I mean, all of that's interesting and useful. And for me, again, it falls into the

bin of being what I think is a very minor difference in scientific intuition, which we can continue to drill down on. I think it's interesting. It's actually, it's contained in the analogy I just gave to height. You know, if we find an island of short people, they may in fact have the genes that point in the opposite direction entirely. They may have the Dutch super tall genes. They could just be malnourished. Environment completely swamps their genetic advantage for height. Obviously, we could be in that circumstance with respect to the differences between black and white IQ scores in the US or any other invidious group difference we seem to have found through psychometrics.

That's totally true. And I really think Charles Murray would admit that if put that way. But in terms of it being a different intuition scientifically about, you know, how, what the default should be, it seems to me a fairly minor point. And it's a point, most importantly, it's a point about which totally well-intentioned people can disagree, right? And, you know, often Murray just leaves it as he's agnostic, right? And it just seems a safer assumption that genes are involved. And again, you're right. He's assuming the valence there, that the genes are making the contribution in the direction

of a disadvantage. So I think, I mean, this is probably, I think, where we, maybe where the, you know kernel of our core disagreement lies which is that murray is saying i'm agnostic and he's sort of saying i'm agnostic about a range of possibilities which often when he talks doesn't include the possibility that there is a genetic advantage quote unquote to people of african ancestry'm saying, you know, there's just really no good science about this. And so I think where the more major disagreement is, is what are then, what is the risk to benefit ratio of spending time, you know, pontificating about that possibility in the absence of any real scientific data.

So I think if you have one set of values, I think it's, well, we should just be able to talk openly and honestly about any possibility that exists. And this is one possibility of the world. And we don't have any good data to suggest that it's true, but let's speculate. And it's really kind of our ability to talk about any possibility that might exist in the world is kind of prioritized. I think where other people might also have not a different value, but weight a different value, is what are the harms potentially done by that speculation? And I think for a lot of people, they think about, well, that is a speculation that, you know, even if it doesn't necessarily feed into, is it at least consistent with some really ugly racist views about the inferiority of Black people in particular?

And so I think, you know, I think some people push back on this. Well, why should we talk about something about which we are scientifically agnostic that just so happens to reinforce a really ugly stereotype. I think for me personally, I am frustrated by the amount of attention that this topic eats up when we have so much good genetic data and so many exciting methodological developments that are on much better scientific ground that we could be talking about how do we use those to improve people's lives. But instead, you know, everyone gets kind of sucked into this black hole of like speculating about racial differences when we don't really have ready data or methods to solve that problem. And so I just think there's a real opportunity cost, given how, in your own words, fraught and explosive this topic is, to paying so much attention to something that we can't and haven't solved well with data at the expense of talking about all the things we could, you know, solve with data that we do have good scientific information on. So I think, you know, my risk

benefit calculus on what good versus what harm is done by letting people, wildly in the absence of scientific data on the sources of black-white IQ differences, I think I'd come down on a different risk-benefit calculus than you do about that. Okay, well, so there's a lot contained in the phrase, letting people speculate. Yes, yeah, yeah. As soon as I said it, I thought that's kind of like a strange, you know, it's like. Yeah, that is strange, Mr. Orwell. You and I totally agree about the opportunity costs here, but I view them as coming from a different quarter because I have no interest in IQ and I have, I really have no interest in IQ differences among groups, right? So it's not for an intrinsic interest in this topic that I have suffered massive opportunity costs in getting sucked into this black hole,

right? What I am concerned about is the quality of our public conversation about everything and the defenestrations of good people for bad reasons, and the voxification of science and journalism that leads to witch hunts and blasphemy tests and scapegoating and all the rest. And what I think I'm seeing here is a failure to distinguish scientific disagreement from the pressures of politics and social activism. And I'm seeing most people, even most journalists and scientists, pin their hopes for political equality and social cohesion and good outcomes, good outcomes, the hope for a good society, on our ability to either avoid certain topics until the end of the world, or pretend that certain plausible assumptions are in fact not plausible, but rather just so outrageously unlikely and socially damaging that a person could only entertain them based on a desire to live in a

society that isn't good, right, that is racist. So the assumption that people come away with, you know, whether you consciously felt this about me and Murray or not, I would be happy to know, but the moralizing topspin of the article you and your co-authors wrote, and certainly the effect in the world, is that it suggests that only someone who's committed to maintaining social inequality, right, only someone who is selfishly committed to maintaining the unfair advantages of their group based on racism. Again, this is something that the onus is on white people here. Strangely, it's not on Asians, right, who compare favorably to everybody on this particular metric. Only someone who's just morally deranged by our modern lights could be tempted to take

what Charles Murray says about race and IQ seriously, or could have a default hypothesis that suggests that, well, we don't know what genes are doing here, but they're probably playing a role, and they're probably playing a role in the observed direction of disparity. And I think that's one deeply unfair, but worse, I think it's dishonest with respect to the actual nature of the scientific differences. I think it will be bowled over by coming developments in genetics and in other sciences. So I think it's unstable. I think it's not actually a safe space to occupy, given the coming advances in science. And this is my big picture concern. I think we will, this is my default hypothesis that applies to everything across the board, not just intelligence. If you could list the top 100

things that we care about in human beings, you know, intelligence would be one. I don't know where it would be on the list, but somewhere in the top half, certainly. But list everything we care about, you know, the big five personality traits and susceptibility to violence and shyness and compassion and everything, sense of humor, right? I think virtually all of these things on the list will be dictated to some significant degree by genetics, in the case of individuals, and to some significant degree by environment. But the thing that will pose a political concern for people is that if we had ways of testing, ways of measuring all of these traits, and in many cases we do, and we decided to exhaustively

test differences between groups, we would find differences. It would be an absolute miracle if the mean value for the hundred things we most cared about were the same for every conceivable group of human beings. And again, it wouldn't even matter how you pick these groups. These groups could be self-identified. They could be Yankee fans versus Red Sox fans. They could be the Norwegians. They could be people who think they're Sox fans. They could be the Norwegians. They could be people who think they're Norwegian but are wrong about it. We could chop up humanity in every conceivable way and test these groups and we're going to find mean differences. So my view politically is we need to be able to absorb that fact and realize that it doesn't fucking matter, right?

It really doesn't matter. So there's so much to respond to in that. So I think the first is, you know, you surely have noticed in the second book, we didn't go over it. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast

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