Rest assured that in repeatedly ascribing to Klein and to me things we didn't say, Sebby is following in Harris's shoes. Here is an exchange from early in the transcript:
Sam Harris
... So, I felt a moral obligation to have [Murray] on my podcast. In the process of defending him against the charge of racism and in order to show that he had been mistreated for decades, we had to talk about the science of IQ and the way genes and environment almost certainly contribute to it. Again, IQ is not one of my concerns and racial differences in IQ is absolutely not one of my concerns, but a person having his reputation destroyed for honestly discussing data — that deeply concerns me.
I did that podcast, again exactly a year ago. Vox then published an article that was highly critical of that podcast. It was written by Eric Turkheimer and Kathryn Harden and Richard Nisbett. This article, in my view, got more or less everything wrong. It read to me like a piece of political propaganda.
I reached out to you by email. I felt this article was totally unfair. It accused us of peddling junk science and pseudoscience and pseudo scientific racialist speculation and trafficking in dangerous ideas. Murray got the worse of it, but at minimum, I’m painted as a total ignoramus, right? One line said while I have a PhD in neuroscience I appear to be totally ignorant of facts that are well known to everyone in the field of intelligence studies.
Ezra Klein
I think you should quote the line. I don’t think that’s what the line said.
Sam Harris
The quote is, this is the exact quote: “Sam Harris appeared to be ignorant of facts that were well known to everyone in the field of intelligence studies.” Now that’s since been quietly removed from the article, but it was there and it’s archived.
[I went back and looked into this and, as far as I can tell, the original quote that Harris is referring to is this one: “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.” Here is the first
archived version of the piece if you want to compare it with the
final. — Ezra]
