Literally after I mocked him for dodging it with that weird "hey I don't like to share my PERSONAL rankings of the races because it's impolite" **** that Harris also tried.

It's so weird how these guys, wits honed razor sharp by hundreds of open minded podcasts exposing them to the entire spectrum of political views,

1) All legitimately appear to believe the academic consensus is that black people are inferior, they don't even appear to have considered any other options, and they are somehow processing criticism of that belief as if it was a request by the left to censor the truth.

2) Cannot hide that belief at all. Just no rhetorical skill at all, they just flail around crying about their feelings being hurt by being called racist then accidentally admitting that yeah, they're super racist

I wonder how Nigerian princes fit into the equation.

every right wing mouthpiece is a nigerian prince on some level

wow thats profound on some level

Academic consenus abour blacks being inferior? I think you are confusing me with someone else.

Also i dont see why its weird to think race ranking is nasty, where is the weirdness.

That said my view on Harris is that i struggle to see malign or evil intent in him. He doesnt strike me as a hater that wants to undermine people out of nothing. Im open to it but i will decide for myself. What i suspect has happened with this whole Murray thing is that Harris has gotten high on himself because of his intellectual success and now he wants to push boundaries. He feels invincible or something and cant keep his feet on the ground. I dont know if thats accurate, just my guess at this point in time. In practice he is cozying up to a character that is very shady, most people would not do that.

Lastly, im not one of those people that are deeply involved into all this, like the other ppl you debate. So i think you mistake me for those people. I dont listen to tons of podcasts like all these other ppl. Im mostly gaming and other stuff, occatinally watching some interviews on youtube or whatever. Also im not emotionally attached to any one public intellectual, like e.g Harris, i dont care about them, unlike many others that will adopt all their positions and view them as their leader etc. I think they are interresting to listen to but im generally emotionally detached.

It's weird to think race ranking can be done.

They should shy away from it because it's junk science that can't be done. There's no set of calipers accurate enough.

Once you realize race is a social construct all this measuring differences becomes silly.

It’s like asking are Catholics smarter than Protestants.

this is exactly why you don't get it

Actually, I think it's very natural to think that race ranking can be done, as exemplified by the fact that it's creeped up regularly in various forms at least since the 1600s. It takes some knowledge of genetics, history, psychology, experimental methodology to understand why it's a fool's errand, to say nothing of the philosophical fact that it should have no practical implications even if it could be done.

But it's like alchemy--the fact that one cannot turn lead into gold by any standard chemical method did not mean that it was not a primary goal of "chemistry" for hundreds of years. It's "natural" to think it can be done given all the other possible chemical transformations that can be, and there's a an obvious and significant motivation to do it, just as there's an obvious and significant motivation, based on a common inclination to tribalism and desire to rank ourselves above others, to denigrate certain subsets of humans and elevate others. There's nothing more naturally human than thinking, "those people are not like me, and they are poorer, do worse jobs, have a less impressive history, and are therefore inherently less intelligent". If one believes that the world is rationally ordered in some fairly strong sense (and people love to believe in a rationally ordered world), it's a very natural conclusion.

This is why I think that claims of racial superiority should be pushed back on regularly with real arguments and real science and not just ignored or derided as "unacceptable", because they are influential with much of the public. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's a majority view, in one form or another, among conservative intellectuals and is quite obviously believed by Trump and many members of Congress. The idea should not be ignored, it should be shot, drowned, and then burned at the stake, with serious arguments and data, because it's more influential and more harmful than people realize.

Explain to me how race is not a social construct? You think it is biological?

Like so much biological classification we have drawn arbitrary lines we call race. You can line up every human on earth from most to least of whatever “racial characteristic” you want and you won’t find an obvious place to split them into races.

Of course before the psychopaths like fly swoop in to claim I’m saying racism doesn’t exist; I’m not. The very fact that race is a social construct is what makes racism so pernicious. It’s also why social constructs like affirmative action are the solution.

Murray is obviously intelligent, and this guy likely is as well.


https://twitter.com/emmaroller/statu...51146534539266

Most practicing biologists or scientists don't want to spend their career debunking race-science or historical problems with race/IQ/and psychology, but it's actually a pretty good topic for historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science.

I guess we’re circling back to the question of what “intelligent” means if we’re claiming that a Ph.D student who embraces Naziism is “intelligent.” Maybe clowns like Murray and this guy can do a few stupid human tricks, they’re still morons in my book and the best you can say is that they are competent in a very narrow set of activities.

Obviously someone can be very intellegent in one scientific field and a moron in others. This is a very common pattern. In Archaeology, for example, we are faced with an endless barrage of retired chemists or physicists telling us how we have misinterpreted every built structure on earth because it’s actually some elaborate star map.

Really smart people over estimate their ability to transfer thier knowledge to other fields.

Yeah. This doesn’t make any sense. Intelligence is a social construct as well. Catholics could have been smarter than Protestants. But we know they aren’t because of data.

How is intelligence a social construct?

The analogy is race is to biological traits, like skin colour, as IQ categories, like dullness, are to intelligence.

Claiming a racial difference is like saying people born on even numbered minutes are smarter than people born on odd numbered minutes. You don't need data. It makes no sense. Studying the difference would be worse actually because you can define and measure time.

Exactly.

Scientifically I don't think this view is even controversial. Like with google-memo guy, people said, 'oh he works at google, he must be smart,' when the reality was him writing the memo was him failing the intelligence test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

You can't base intelligence on testing the thing the person studied their entire life, but you can base it on if that same person thinks citing Kyle Smith from the op-ed of the NY Post in a serious paper is a good idea.

The dude really did make a little footnote with a link to Kyle Smith. It was incredible.

Help me out with this, because I don't see it. Obviously there wouldn't be any correlation between birth minute and intelligence, but I assume there is some correlation between parent intelligence and child intelligence (i.e. some element of intelligence is genetic). Why couldn't that be correlated with other human attributes (height, hair color, skin color)? It doesn't seem as obvious to me that it couldn't exist (leaving aside the other obvious points like it isn't a causative relationship, the effect of nurture vs nature, etc)

I guess what I'm saying is, to make a comparison like the one you just did, you would have to assume that there is zero genetic impact to an individuals intelligence?

Intelligence may well be genetically hereditable, but race isn't.

People in search of "public" intellectuals should remember that most people who aspire to be public intellectuals are huge *******s.

There are a few exceptions, of course, but not many.

Yeah, something can be scientifically objectively true and completely meaningless. That's why 'I'm just talking facts why are you trying to silence facts' is a disingenuous argument. If I say left handed one eyed sailors with red hair are on average less intelligent than 5ft 10 blue eyed welders with birthmarks larger than 1cmsq. That may well be supported by rigorous scientific analysis but there is an implied "therefore..." that makes the whole thing suspect.

Correct. The big problem is simply that the science of The Bell Curve is bunk from start to finish. Bad assumptions, bad methodology, no alternative hypotheses. It could in theory be possible that one race is smarter than another, but the data simply do not show that when actual scientists examine the studies.

Really, the whole history of IQ testing is full of crackpots and junk science. It’s worth reading about the history of it, if only so that you can lol at people like Skalansky who obsess over intelligence testing.