found online by Raymond
From PZ Myers:
There is also the part where Harris declares that he has black friends, therefore you can’t accuse him of casual racism. The part where he reveals that he knows nothing about Charles Murray’s work outside of The Bell Curve and can’t comprehend how anyone can think he has racist motivations. But mainly, Harris is all about how others have dared to criticize Sam Harris.
I think it’s damning enough that Harris thinks so highly of himself that he would walk unarmed into a duel with Ezra Klein, and get fairly and politely slaughtered on all points.
Of course, Harris probably emerged thinking that Klein never even touched him.
When identity politics becomes tribalism, it becomes a problem. It often does. Therefore, it is often a problem.
Whatever Harris’s flaws, he continues to argue that we should try to transcend all of that. He still believes in the concept and goals of thought experiments like Rawls’s veil of ignorance and he still believes that we should be willing to accept unpleasant scientific conclusions and other “taboo” ideas and be able to address them calmly and reasonably when we disagree, so of course he rejects the sorts of ideologies that insist that everything is just a struggle among different identities. I support him wholeheartedly on that front.
Reading through the debate (if you can call it that), that’s pretty much all he says, apart from expressing unhappiness at how he and others have been misinterpreted or mistreated and suggesting that Klein is guilty of expecting data to match his conclusions. Klein wants to argue about The Bell Curve; Harris doesn’t really care either way. Klein accuses Harris of ignoring his own identity politics and biases, but never really explains what they are, how they manifest, or how they lead to demonstrably false conclusions, which is a pretty important step to leave out in a criticism. And then Klein says this:
“You say that it is unfair, journalistically, to put your conversation within the lineage of the conversation going all the way back in American history and all the way, as you say, the pre-American history — in fact, in my piece, I quote Voltaire and Hume and others — that at each point European-descended white men of scientific mind looked around them, looked at the society they saw, looked at the outcomes people had in the society they saw, looked at the science pulled from those outcomes, right? And it was called science back then too. And said, “You know what? What we are seeing here is a result of innate differences between the races.”
Klein wants to accuse and jump to conclusions about Harris’s reasoning, motivations, and desires because he is somewhat associated with an idea with repugnant historical variants. For me, this stands out as the segment that captures and explains Klein’s thinking on the matter. There’s no need to consider the idea on its own merits when you can simply condemn it by association or by virtue of how someone might misuse it. Harris doesn’t even seem to have a strong attachment to the position in question and certainly doesn’t go on to prescribe all manner of racist social policies, so it makes Klein’s reaction seem all the more like the sort of moral panic (and tribalism) that Harris describes and condemns.
The debate boils down to this:
Harris: Many people react to scientific conclusions according to how they feel about them or according to the worst case scenarios to which they imagine the conclusions will lead. We should instead react according to the validity of those conclusions.
Klein: People with morally repugnant views held and hold position X. It has also been used to justify bad things. Therefore, it is bad — and I wonder if you, being willing to accept that position under certain circumstances, may also hold morally repugnant views and want to do bad things because of it.
As usual, I can’t stand the Myers horde.