Review of Waking Up #73: FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

Official podcast notes :
"In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Charles Murray about the controversy over his book The Bell Curve, the validity and significance of IQ as a measure of intelligence, the problem of social stratification, the rise of Trump, universal basic income, and other topics."

As of this writing (4/16/2018), the podcast may be found here:

I'm starting with episode number 73 because it is probably Sam Harris' most controversial one to date.

His guest, Charles Murray, a fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, favors the dismantling of affirmative action-type programs. He is most famous, however, for having co-authored a book some decades ago called The Bell Curve, in which he argues that intelligence tests are valid and measure a real thing, general intelligence. GI has been proven to have at least some genetic basis, and that different populations (i.e. "races") have different average scores.

This leads to all sorts of ad hominem attacks on him, most famously in March 2017 at Middlebury College, a tiny private university where Murray was invited to speak, until something Sam calls "moral panic" kicked in and the students rioted.

Sam, no stranger to moral panic himself, steers the conversation to the verifiable scientific data that is presented in The Bell Curve. He wants to ignore Murray's political motivations, or even willfully disregard them, in order to prove his commitment to The Truth. (He'll pay a price for this down the road.) But in this episode there are important ideas discussed, some of which flew in the face of my admittedly uninformed beliefs.

It's guaranteed to stimulate, whether or not you find yourself persuaded by the ideas they discuss.