We are all Slave now.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Here's the transcript:

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/1721024...script-podcast

Where does Harris corner Klein on being pro-censorship?

You didn't mention that much of what they're discussing is whether Charles Murray's work should be taken seriously. Do you think Charles Murray should be taken seriously? Do you think that declining to invite Charles Murray to speak at a college is the same thing as censorship? Do you think that Charles Murray has been censored?

Klein is incredibly slippery:
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Ezra Klein

I think there is what you would call confusion here. I do think it’s just important to say this. I have not criticized you, and I continue to not, for having the conversation. I’ve criticized you for having the conversation without dealing with and separating it out and thinking through the context and the weight of American history on it.

Sam Harris

The weight of American history is completely irrelevant to—

Ezra Klein

It can’t possibly be irrelevant on something that even you admit is environmental!

Sam Harris

No, the only thing that is relevant. Yes, but that part of the conversation has been had. You don’t have to talk about slavery. You don’t have to talk about the specific injustices in the past to have a conversation about the environmental factors that very likely keep people back. I completely agree with you that it is right to worry that the environment for blacks, or for any other group that seems not to be thriving by one metric or another, that the environment almost certainly plays a role. And the environment, we just know that the environment plays a role across the board in behavioral genetics. There’s no one who’s arguing that any of these traits — forget about intelligence, anything we care about — is 100 percent heritable. It’s just that nothing that complex is 100 percent heritable.

And again, I have zero interest in establishing differences among races, and my reading of Murray and, again, he said this on my podcast several times, his focus is not on groups, his focus is on individuals. It’s just a fact that individuals find themselves with whatever cognitive toolkit they have, however they got it, based on genes and environment, and we have a society that is massively rewarding specific tools.

No one on Murray’s side of this debate is saying that all social self-worth is indexed by IQ scores. No one is saying that, and this is the point I was trying to make when I said, “Look I am inferior to John von Neumann?” I don’t think so and I don’t think you think so.

What’s at stake here is not a person’s intrinsic worth, right? And using words like inferior completely loads the dice here. It’s a highly charged, moralistic assertion, which just does not map onto any sane person’s thinking about this. Yes it mapped on to Thomas Jefferson’s thinking about this, but to summarize what I’m doing with the slaveholders of our distant past and talk about these things as though it’s a single set of ideas, it’s completely unfair journalistically, and it has the consequence that I’ve described.

. . .

Ezra Klein

Look, you talked about the stakes of this conversation, and there are stakes to it. Some of them are policy stakes. Those are the ones Charles Murray is fundamentally interested in, ones that when you asked him why you should have this conversation he kept bringing up. There are stakes in how we treat each other and what kind of groups we see in each other. I think using these conversations to become more precise, as opposed to less precise — using these conversations to begin to question social categories that we build for political purposes in this country, as opposed to validate them in strange ways that don’t have consistency across them — I think we could be doing a better job on that.

In all this, what I would say, and I’ll let this be my final point, and I appreciate the time you’ve given to this conversation today, is I think that to have this conversation well, to be ready for what may or may not come down the pike, to be able to talk about this, as you say, like adults, I think that you would be doing your audience a service to let go of some of the feelings you have about what you call identity politics and what you see in others with identity politics and have more conversations about race in America and the way it is built and they way it is seen and the way it acts on people’s life chances.

I think that there is room to have conversations about genetic findings, but because we are mapping those conversations onto social-political realities, having more conversations where you deliver more nuance and more understanding, where you yourself get more understanding of the social-political realities — I feel uncomfortable being the person on the other side of the chair here. I don’t think — I’m not an expert on race and IQ — but I’m also not someone who I think is the right spokesperson for the experience of other races in this country. And I don’t think that is me falling into a trap of identity politics. I think that is me being honest about what are the limits of my own perception. There’s a lot I can learn, but, you know, I’m a political journalist and I’ve only learned so much.

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Klein can't come right out and say he believes Murray should be shunned. Instead, he takes a roundabout, arguing over and over about how Murray is interested in policy. In doing this, he's trying to remove Murray from the scientific realm and put him in the policy realm. This affords him a stronger argument that Murray's policy prescriptions are odious. It entirely avoids the debate over whether Murray's science is lacking, which I think it very much is, as his generalized groupings are cultural, and cultural studies is a soft-headed and hardly rigorous field. (Harris is dead wrong is asserting that Murray focuses on individuals. I see none of that in Murray, and all of the contrary.)

Harris, OTOH, says let Murray's "science" be put to the test as science.

I favor letting a person like Murray have his day on the proofs and fail on those proofs. What on earth could be the objection to that?