Among the leftist posters in P, you are by far the most obnoxious and patronizing poster here. The only thing you used to separate your obnoxious posts from my supposed obnoxious posting is skin color. It's ironic that people like you criticize Murray for being divisive when your (and others similar to you) use of identity politics as a weapon to separate people into tribes based on physical attributes is more far more destructive.

Anyway, I listened to the podcast. While Charles appeared to represent himself well on the show, I do not really hold him in high esteem. I also don't think Sam pushed him hard enough on the biased sources he used in The Bell Curve or criticisms academics have made regarding possible methodological errors. Seems to me that Sam himself was biased in favor of Charles and used his platform to champion Charles as a oppressed intellectual rather than objectively question him on the valid criticisms of his book. It is true that some of the criticisms of Charles have been unfair or based on cherry-picked information but that doesn't justify ignoring legitimate arguments against his work.

I also don't really respect Charles's response on why he studied this subject in the first place. The benefits society gains from this type of data are marginal while the potential negative consequences are obvious. Charles sounds very naive when talking about how his work has been construed by white supremacist groups to fit their political agenda. It's as though he expected everybody to interpret the work exactly the way he did. It makes me wonder how somebody so smart can also be so foolish.

But then again, we have Sklansky as a shining example of that.

What? You didn't know who Charles Murray is! I know what I'm talking about when I'm smug. You didn't let the fact that you were entirely ignorant about what was clearly a salient fact stop you from being smug. You inexplicably assumed that the podcast wouldn't be racist when you were entirely unaware of who the guest was, when pvn clearly WAS aware of who the guest was. When someone knows more than me, I don't contradict them out of reflex.

OK this is literally AM talk radio bull**** where the problem with racism is people complaining about it. Also that's not what irony is. Also separating people into tribes based on physical attribute is literally the point of the ****ing Bell Curve. The left wing view is that race is a social construct.

Charles Murray literally burned a cross as a teenager, Bob.

Point taken. My comment was a mistake and I should have listened to the podcast before commenting rather than making the assumptions you have stated.

People should try to avoid being smug as it often make others dismiss your arguments without thought. It's why I generally don't respond to Trump trolls.

There's bull**** on both sides. A small percentage of liberals scream racism at the top of their lungs about less destructive racism like wedding cakes and that diminishes the urgency of calls to action against racism that harms not just its victims, but society as a whole such as police brutality and the entirety of our criminal justice system. I know that these people are almost always acting in good faith but I do not think people who do this realize that they are indirectly harming their worthwhile cause.

Of course I perceive right-wing bull**** to be in much greater supply than left-wing bull**** but just because one side of the spectrum has more than the other doesn't mean I should let bull**** on the left slide by unnoticed.

Yes, The Bell Curve is divisive. I don't recall where I said that it wasn't. But I would argue that one book written by a person the vast majority of people have never heard of is less harmful than the worldwide spread of identity politics.

Source: Daring Research or Social Science Pornography

We have all done stupid things as teenagers. If I can forgive somebody for committing a violent crime as a teenager, I can forgive somebody for committing a property crime as a teenager so long as they have shown remorse for their actions.

Our ideology also changes as we get older. We are often influenced by the views of family members we respect when we are children only to discover our own views as we mature into young adults.

Charles Murray isn't practicing identity politics?

It depends on what you think his intent was in writing The Bell Curve. Was he a political scientist acting in good faith or was he using it as a cover to write a book advocating scientific racism?

Based on listening to the podcast, I don't think Murray wrote the book with a personal political agenda in mind. It's not as though this was his first book. He contributed to plenty of books and academic papers prior to TBC without controversy. I don't think he would risk his reputation as an academic if he didn't think this venture was worthwhile.

The intent of the book appeared to take the information he researched and use it to make public policy recommendations that benefit everybody in a more accurate fashion. Unfortunately, Murray didn't have the foresight to recognize the negative influence that the book could have if construed by hatemongers and used to harm others.

So a man who burned a cross as a teenager wrote a book about how black people are genetically inferior as an adult and both times he was naive but well intentioned about the racial aspect of his actions? How many passes does he get before we can speculate about his motives?

Murray is the white supremacist that wrote the bell curve? Baaahahah

Also, isn't bill maher doing a whole season devoted to white supremacists, like having milo and tomi lahren on?

If a person honestly believes that Murray carried out a Machiavellian plan to spend 20 years building a respectable reputation in academia just so he could use it as a cover to slip a book about racial science into circulation, then it's best to change the topic as quickly as possible. It's completely absurd to believe that a reasonable person would willingly destroy their own reputation for one book.

Doesn't have to be Machiavellian. You don't think a respected academic can't also be a racist? I'm sure there are nobel prize winners who are racist as **** and if they wrote a book about the genetic differences between the races it'd be just as moronic and racist.

I would think a smart well respected academic would have the wherewithal to understand that writing about black people's natural genetic deficiencies might be a bit controversial. Especially if they had been through something similar when their innocent naive teenage cross burning got taken out of context as a racially charged act.

http://www.vox.com/2017/4/24/1536945...tered-campaign

Guess a tell-all book about the Clinton campaign came out. A gem: they didn't want to campaign in Michigan after Bernie embarrassed her there because it would just solidify to the unions how her economic message wasn't a fit for them.

Murray might have been naive how hard-core white supremacists would take his book, mostly because he was writing it in the service of Republicans to cut social programs for minorities and the poor. Which you know, half dozen of one half dozen of another.

This is a good article tracing Murray's and Dinesh D’Souza's books in the 90's as a resurfacing of scientific and cultural racism that we today on the right.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.vox.c...-culture-trump

I don't think my previous post was direct enough:

Do you sincerely believe that Murray chose to throw away the reputation he built in academia over the course of 20 years to write a book about racial science?

It's either this or Murray was acting in good faith but misjudged the negative consequences of his book.

It's not that simple though.

Your line of thinking risks blacklisting an entire line of research and creates a precedent for future self-censorship. Advances in academia have often been at odds with orthodoxy at the time. For example, Galileo's heliocentrism was so heavily opposed by the church that he was put under house arrest.

To not research the answer to a question because of the fear of finding unsettling information or being worried about the consequences of its revelation is allowing ignorance to prevail over the pursuit of knowledge. It is in part what the March for Science was opposing: the suppression of academic studies in order to keep the masses stupid.

There's plenty that's up for debate such as how the material was presented, the methodology used to gather the statistics and whether some of the more inflammatory remarks should have been altered to be less offensive or removed entirely. But one thing I definitely disagree with is indirectly advocating ignorance by choosing not to pursue lines of thinking because it may uncover information that upsets people.

I think he figured it was a risk worth taking yes. He doesn't seem to have done too badly out of it, didn't he work for "think tanks" for like 20 years afterwards?

I don't think anyone should have prevented him from researching, writing, and publishing his book, just that it's ok to call him a racist for doing so and that it's kind of strange to give him the benefit of the doubt regarding naivety considering the circumstances.

This thread got all chezzy

Dude spent the decade leading up to The Bell Curve at a conservative think tank writing about welfare reform. He's not some social scientist who spent years in some lab doing IQ research. He found one dude who was an outlier in the field and who had already been picked apart by scientists broadly and wrote it up as a trashy pop-sci book. But it made white people feel good about themselves, so everyone collectively pretends that he's a serious thinker on one said of a real debate.

We'll just have to agree to disagree here.

I definitely lost some respect for Sam because of this podcast. Granted, I never agreed with everything he said but this is one of the worst podcasts he has ever done. He should have pursued the valid criticisms made by academics against Murray more aggressively. He might have had a more balanced view if he read the books written that refuted his claims prior to the interview. Unfortunately, he poisoned the well for listeners by heavily praising Murray in the introduction which biased the feedback his fans have given on Reddit.

Anyway, my AirBnB host sucks at singing but insists on warming up her vocal cords like she's Mariah Carey or some **** like that. My noise-cancelling headphones are dead and the nearest convenience store is 20 minutes away. What's my play?

Fair enough. I like being on the 'not having to defend Charles Murray' side of our disagreement.

You know, you could always spend like 20 minutes or so reading about the basics of genetics and heredity, then you wouldn't feel the need to post garbage takes like this that result in lots of people laughing at you.

Idle speculation and pseudo-science about racial differences has always led to so many shining paths in history. Definitely worth pursuing.

Obama's speaking.

Murray has made quite a career out of it. He's way better off than if he had continued his phd work on tithing in Thailand, which is part of why this whole 'he risked his reputation' **** is so weird.

Now he's hosting a discussion group, but Trump held some conference at the same time to interrupt and detract from Obama because, well, he just can't help himself. Needless to say, Fox immediately switched to Trump while MSNBC is still covering Obama.

Oh, that totally happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley

Charles Murray has never worked in academia, Bob. Literally never.

This is from the CV posted on AEI:
You seemed to get that talking with authority about a man who you apparently had never heard of was a mistake, but here we are, with you ****ing retconning a new origin story for this dip****.

Think about why your emotional instincts were to side with Murray here. And before you go "oh but look at him volunteering for the Peace Corps", think real carefully on how it appears that everyone else in this discussion knew who he was before yesterday.

And then think about how it is that you learned he was respected. From Sam Harris. Think about what that says about Harris, that he'd mislead his listeners into thinking Murray was a respected academic instead of a long-time right wing opinion columnist.