Sam then claims a central error she made was to say that Murray says MOST of the difference in IQ testing between whites and blacks is due to genetics.
He’s confused. The article never said that. (Here it is: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/harden/files/2018/10/Charles-Murray-is-once-again-peddling-junk-science-about-race-and-IQ-Vox.pdf)
But why does he even split that hair? He and Murray both said that it is inevitable that SOME of the IQ testing difference must be due to genetics. So by definition, he has committed himself to a racist conclusion. After all, it is the very definition of racism to say that some races are more intelligent than others. I'm not sure how he thinks he has dodged that bullet.
Here is my understanding of the “default hypothesis” that Sam and Charles had framed:
A. Intelligence is a thing and IQ tests measure some aspect of it
B. Genes play a role in intelligence
C. Some of the IQ differences between groups is due to genetics
I was surprised that Kathryn pushed back even on this hypothesis. And she asks the same question that Sam asked Charles, “why would anybody want to discuss the possibilty that a genetic test may someday prove that one group is inferior to another?” and she pushes back a little harder on that, too: it’s insulting, it shows your prior prejudices, and in the infinite space of possibilities, it speaks poorly of you to choose to focus on that.
Sam makes a very strange point which I think he doesn’t realize works against him when he says that any lover of pure statistics could divide the population up into any random group and then measure their differences. He gives a silly example: people who love the Yankees versus people who love the White Sox. Test for average genetic differences between those two groups, he says, and you will assuredly find differences. But, he concludes, “it fucking doesn’t matter.“
So why do it? And why come to the defense of someone who did, if he chose to do it in an insulting way that perpetuates a racist narrative? Unless you had some kind of underlying socio-political motivation, which Charles frankly admits that he does. He wants to cut affirmative action and welfare. He thinks the former cheapens the achievement of "black people at Harvard" and may even harm the ones who find themselves in over their heads. And he thinks the latter is creating a class of less-gifted dependants who are flooding the country with their lower-G babies (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/).
So this is my biggest problem with Charles, and my reason this is one of the rare times I don't agree with Sam. He doesn't recognize that, regardless of the validity of the science Charles refers to, it is being marshaled for a political end that the science alone doesn't support. It doesn’t help Charles is funded by right wing money which shares his aim to cut social services, but for less noble reasons. To say nothing of the succor Charles is lending to white supremacists.
Sam admits he asked Murray “why study differences in populations at all for which I don’t think he had a great answer.” He and Kaitlyn come close to addressing the question of Murray’s motivations when they discuss the factors that influence educational attainment, including socioeconomic and family history luck, as well as genetic luck if genes are in there. Kaitlyn acknowledges the luck also, but she says her fundamental difference is whether this luck can be influenced by social policy. Charles was clear that he thought it could not.
Charles claimed in that earlier conversation that his only motivation to even ask the question in the first place is to “defang the political serpent that the reality of human difference is dangerous territory.” But when your motivation is political, you are sharpening the teeth, you aren't defanging.
The last thing to note is that Sam seems to reject firmly any responsibility that the scientist has to consider the social implications of any discovery he makes.
Addendum: #73 REDUX
I went back and replayed that episode with Charles Murray, and noticed that even in the preamble Sam gives before the conversation, he makes the claim that the criticism of Charles had nothing to do with his motivations in publishing this work, which is exactly the opposite of what I understand--the criticisms are 100% about his motivations.
By about 39 minutes into the conversation, into the podcast, Sam and Charles come up to the question of the usefulness of education, since it has in the long term very little effect on an individual’s intelligence. This has something to do with Kathryn’s concerns that this conversation in #211 also imply that school is a waste of time.
58 minutes into the podcast, they talk about variations in IQ across populations, and so far I do not hear any of Sam‘s purported backpedaling of potential bad data or inconclusive factors or anything acknowledging that the question might not be perfectly unassailable.
At 1.05 hours, they broach the question of the Flynn effect and whether it is safe to assume that IQ is a stable metric, and they disregard callously the problem that this effect might completely overwhelm any observed differences by race. THis is an important point that the Vox article gets and that even to this day, Sam still doesn't. I have to say this is one of the sloppiest sections of the conversation.
At 1:13 Sam repeats the question of why to seek out differences between groups and get this answer: “because...social policy... is raising the cost of hiring (minority) applicants." Which, as far as I can observe as a businessman, is fatuous to the point of disingenuous. As well as completely deaf to the overwhelming data that racism in hiring is still a thing.
If only Charles and his co-author had left out that whole question! They raise so many other critically important ones, which have been completely overlooked. Such as this: since the 1950s, high cognition was valued at a premium and began to stratify society. This kind of separation of the classes is increasingly worrisome. The upper classes disdain the lower classes. The lower classes notice this and are now voting for complete douchebags for president, just to get back at them.
He makes a compelling point that in the 1950s, they were very few ostentatious mansions in the country, and the oligarchs who lived in them were still cheek by jowl with the middle class. Nowadays there are neighborhoods of mansions all over the country, and they are all highly segregated by rings of decreasingly affluent ZIP Codes before they even come in touch with a single working class person. And we are becoming a kind of technocratic feudal system. Fewer than 100,000 people make up the nobles in what Charles calls the “narrow elite” who are the ones who move the needle on what society believes and what they hear about. This includes journalists, CEOs, politicians, and producers in the entertainment industry. The rest of us get to be the serfs. Yes, we divide up into various castes... but we're the serfs.
