Sam HarrisVerified account

Sam, you really don’t come across well in these emails. The assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is being unfair or operating in bad faith is extremely unbecoming, and seems at odds with your nominal commitment to engaging intellectually with those that disagree.

Ezra has amply demonstrated the ability to get along with and have productive conversations with all sorts of people of widely varying viewpoints. That you couldn’t have a productive exchange with him is totally on you.

That you so frequently reach these types of impasses with such a varied array of people is telling. You’re the common denominator here.

You’re being disingenuous. Ezra pretended to ignorance about why Sam was upset, while everyone can clearly see that Vox and it’s readers were and are gleefully suggesting that he is a racist obsessed with racial differences.

I didn’t get that suggestion from the piece. The piece simply disagreed with him, vehemently. Sam has a hard time accepting that smart people sometimes have good faith disagreements with him.

Why is that not a legitimate opinion?

It is not unfair to Sam for Vox to argue that The Bell Curve is junk science, nor to argue that Sam giving it a wide audience on his podcast was bad.

However personal these attacks have been, the theory at the basis of @charlesmurray's work has fed destructive alt-right thinking for years and years. As much as you care to distance yourself from the alt-right, your support for Murray is deserving of scrutiny and critique.

What's odd is that this statement doesn't address the question of whether or not @charlesmurray's work is accurate or not.

What? This article doesn't address whether his work is accurate, either. It just alleges that Murray is a secret racist, like every other 'the real problem with the Bell Curve' article.

No. The author seems pretty focused on the data. Do you agree that "Latino and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence"?

The author is 100% worried about Murray's secret racist motivations. The subtitle is: "The 1994 book...[isn't] being honest about the authors' motives" “The Bell Curve” endorses prejudice...nowhere does the book address why it investigates racial differences in IQ"

2/As to that line, it's of course statistically valid and true. Black and Latino immigrants score lower, on average, than other Americans (of all colors) on IQ tests. This means the average score is lower. Those are just numbers. What happens after education is different.

A fairly grievous tactical error here. Klein is nothing but gracious in his writing. His behavior is reprehensible, but this will only serve to mask that. As long as one is genial, most will see nothing wrong with implying that one's opponent is secretly a horrible racist.

Agreed. It only becomes clear at at the end when @ezraklein dodges direct complaints of unfairness in the sensationalist title, etc. But the new article on Vox that Ezra penned himself is so sad to see. Much respect lost for Ezra - I didn’t think he’d write such a hit piece.

Just curious - Any specific lines/quotes that you think are so abhorrent that his entire article qualifies as a 'hit piece'? I'm genuinely curious.

Thanks for asking, I just re-listened to the podcast and re-read the Vox articles. It's the framing of Sam's discussion by Ezra that I find most disturbing. He has a section headline describing Sam's work as "ancient prejudice" and paints Sam as a racist 1/

Another misleading Ezra quote: "two white men to spend a few hours discussing why black Americans are, as a group, less intelligent than whites" -- The pod is mostly about IQ, test design, heritability, twin studies, etc. 2/

The strongest claim about IQ differences in the pod is that it's probably a mix of genes and environment. Is that really so controversial? Ezra's then goes on to tar Sam and Murray by associating them with a history of explicit racists from Thomas Jefferson, to Voltare. 3/

Ezra then takes swipes at Murray (I'm sure to the cheers of SJW's): "Murray is arguing that his decades-long focus on the intellectual inferiority of African Americans"... really? The Bell Curve only has one chapter on race. 4/

Ezra says paints Murray again as a racist: "[Murray] speaks with affection of an era when there were fewer African-American students at Harvard" 5/