Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought

[Jim__]

25. I listened to the entire podcast. I didn't think it needed to be mentioned.

From Post #23:

Klein by his own admission didn't write or even edit the original Vox article and right away he distances himself from the comments made.

Yes, Klein said he didn't write the article, but he also said he stands by his decision to publish the article and he considers it a good piece. Not exactly distancing himself, just acknowledging the obvious - he didn't write it.

From Post #23:

Harris point out correctly that some of what was in the original article that he complained about was retracted with an apology.

Where was that? At about 35 seconds into the podcast, Harris claims a sentence was quietly pulled. On the podcast, he doesn't say anything about an apology. But lets look at what Harris claimed was an exact quote from the article, the sentence he said was pulled:

Sam Harris appeared to be ignorant of facts that were well known to everyone in the field of intelligence studies.

But, here is what Klein pointed to - as noted by Klein, this was added to the transcript, it was not in the podcast - as the exact quote from the original article as far as he was able to tell:

Here, too briefly, are some facts to ponder — facts that Murray was not challenged to consider by Harris, who holds a PhD in neuroscience, although they are known to most experts in the field of intelligence.

So, there is quite a bit of difference between those quotes, and especially from Harris's original claim that this sentence was an example of his being painted as a total ignoramus.

I did not find any place in the transcript where Harris claims that something from the original article was retracted and apologized for. He did claim Turkheimer apologized, but nothing about a retraction, and Klein did not agree about the apology. From the transcript:

Ezra Klein

The scientists, Nisbett and Paige Harden and Turkheimer, said that they believe Murray’s interpretation of this, ultimately, is pseudoscience and is way, way, way out in front of the data.

Sam Harris

But you know Turkheimer has apologized for that. What do you with the fact that he’s apologized for that?

Ezra Klein

I spoke with him yesterday. He holds all the same views on this, but that he feels that that wasn’t helpful to the debate, which is nice of him. He may be, you know, it’s good to keep the debate’s temperature down, but that doesn’t change his view.

So, if you are referring to something different in the transcript, please point it out.

From Post #23:

Klein criticizes Murray and Harris distances himself from Murray's conclusions and both either agreed or didn't disagree that there were no errors in the data Murray presented.

I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about here. Could you give a specific example?

One of the big problems with Murray's book is that he didn't actually present detail data. Most of the data he used to arrive at his conclusions are publicly available from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). I don't think anyone claims there is a problem with the NLSY data. There really wouldn't be anything to disagree with about that.

From Post #23:

So right away you don't have much in the way of contradiction and they agreed with each other on pretty much all pertinent points.

No, they did not agree with each other on pretty much all pertinent points. They disagreed with each other on pretty much all the pertinent points. Here's Murray near the beginning of the discussion:

...

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. 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 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. 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. I think that led to a blind spot, and this is worth discussing.

...

And an excerpt from Harris's response to this comment:

...

Now that said, I think your argument is, even where it pretends to be factual, or wherever you think it is factual, it is highly biased by political considerations. 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 is just, it’s telling and it’s untrue. I think it’s even untrue of Murray. 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, I know you don’t happen 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. That’s one distinction I want to make.

...

It's a long podcast and I can only excerpt so much. But this is an example of pertinent points they disagreed on.

From Post #23:

So it was far more of a discussion than a debate, so I'm just curious as to how one decides who "won" the debate other than picking out which one you like better than the other.

I have absolutely no concern about whether someone labels this as a debate or a discussion.

The debate format here is not unusual. Judging the debate is not really that difficult. If you judge debates based on which one you like better than the other that's your prerogative. I base my judgement on who is making the more accurate and more pertinent points. In this case, I thought that was clearly Klein.