It’s the asymmetry stupid
Sam Harris has added an update to his attack on Ezra Klein / email dump, to explain how sad it is that everyone did such a crap job of reading his attack / email dump, it’s enough to make a person lose faith in the power of shy-racist thought-making.
NOTE (3/28/18)
Judging from the response to this post on social media, my decision to publish these emails appears to have backfired. I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting (e.g. his denial of misrepresentations and slurs that are in the very article he published). Many people seem to have judged from his politeness that Ezra was the one behaving honestly and ethically. This is frustrating, to say the least.
That’s some impressive self-knowledge right there. (Isn’t it funny how narcissists are always thinking about themselves and yet know less about the subject than anyone who talks to them for ten minutes?) He was relying on readers to see it the way he sees it instead of drawing their own conclusions – the nerve of some people! How can they not “follow the plot” and notice what Sam Harris thinks is obvious? How can they think that the polite person of two people is the one being polite? It’s so frustrating.
Many readers seem mystified by the anger I expressed in this email exchange. Why care so much about “criticism” or even “insults”? But this has nothing to do with criticism and insults. What has been accomplished in Murray’s case, and is being attempted in mine, is nothing less the total destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of honestly discussing scientific data.
What total destruction? Again: Murray has a very comfortable berth at the AEI. I’m pretty sure they pay their house intellectuals fairly lavishly, by way of demonstrating that right-wing think tanks are much better for intellectual types than cash-strapped universities. Harris has those best-seller royalties. Furthermore the reputations can’t be totally destroyed no matter what, because if everyone who backs away from WHITES ARE BEST AND SMARTEST scholars then their opposites rush in to fill the gap. But also, again, Sam Harris’s reputation is actually not as important as the normalization of the WHITES SMARTEST bullshit.
Klein published fringe, ideologically-driven, and cherry-picked science as though it were the consensus of experts in the field and declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion in my and Murray’s defense—all to the purpose of tarring us as racists and enablers of racists. This comes at immense personal and social cost. It is also dishonest.
Oh yes? Mainstream science is all on Murray’s side? Really? That’s not the impression I get, but I’m not a scientist so I don’t know. At any rate, again, he’s worrying about the “immense personal and social cost” to him while not worrying a bit about the social, political, psychological, economic, vocational and related costs to all the people branded “dumber” by Murray’s “science.” In fact, what he is is “offended” – and aren’t we supposed to laugh and jeer at people who complain about being “offended”? Harris is worried about his fee-fees; cue all the anti-SJWs and mockers of the Control Left telling Harris to toughen up or get off Twitter or both.
Many readers also fail to see how asymmetrical any debate on this topic is.
Uhhhhhh…what? Asymmetrical? To the disadvantage of Harris? He’s the underdog here? Not the people he’s helping Murray stamp with the “Dumber” brand?
Whatever I say at this point, no matter how scientifically careful, appears to convey an interest in establishing the truth of racial differences (which I do not have and have criticized in others). Does it matter that Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man was debunked long ago, or that James Flynn now acknowledges that his eponymous effect cannot account for the race-IQ data? No, it doesn’t. This is a moral panic and a no-win situation (and Klein and my other “critics” know that). I did not have Charles Murray on my podcast because I was interested in intelligence differences across races. I had him on in an attempt to correct what I perceived to be a terrible injustice done to an honest scholar. Having attempted that, for better or worse, I will now move on to other topics.—SH
Stick the flounce, please.
Bravely bold Sam Harris,
Rode forth on his podcast.
He was not afraid of debate, O brave Sam Harris!
He was not in the least bit scared to be politely contradicted,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sam Harris.
—
He was not in the least bit scared to be twisted up in knots,
Or to have his premises debunked
or his assumptions questioned
To have his logic shattered
and his arguments shred away
and his conclusions mocked and ruined,
Brave Sam Harris!
—
His lies rebuked
and his insults parried
and preening exposed
and his ego bruised
and his tweets ratioed
and his emails laughed at
and his manhood…
That’s enough debate of forbidden subjects for now, lads. Time to move on to other topics.
—
Brave Sam Harris ran away
No!”
Bravely ran away away
You’re being politically correct!
When Ezra Klein begged to disagree
Sam Harris turned his tail to flee
I was misinterpreted!
Yes Brave Sam Harris turned about
And the lamest Horseman chickened out
Pausing only to briefly tweet,
he quickly beat a brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sam Harris!
There is a contradiction, or at the very least a willful logical fallacy, in insisting that an uncritical (in every sense of the word) presentation of a so-called “honest scholar” is *not* an endorsement of that scholar’s work. In order to see an injustice in what has been done to Murray’s scientific reputation, you need on some level to agree that the reputation wasn’t sabotaged by the scientist in the first place, and that cannot come without some tinge of endorsement unless you are very careful. (Hint: having them on your podcast and “uh-huhhn”-ing and “no-doubt”-ing your way through an hours-long exegesis without critically examining, or even mildly challenging, any of their claims or premises is about as far from being careful as you can get.)
The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging you have one. National Geographic is looking at and admiting its racist past as a way to do better now and in the future.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/
Maybe Sam Harris should do the same.
#1: [standing ovation]
It strikes me that Harris wields the word ‘science’ in much the same way that tyrants use ‘democracy’.
Joining Grahan in a standing ovation for Screechy Monkey.
Screechy Monkey, make that three cheers for the standing ovation.
I forced my way last night through yet another email dump by Harris from 2012. He was arguing with security expert Bruce Schneier.
Harris’ point was that racial profiling works as security in airports. He began with an absolutely ridiculous straw scenario that could easily have been a ‘plot’ from 24. I’m frankly surprised he didn’t include a random mountain lion.
Almost all of Bruce’s emails were about trying to get the topic back to the narrow definition that Harris began with, but Harris was having none of it. His bait was switched so much that it was splattered all over the walls. He didn’t just change the subject in pretty much every email, he repeatedly castigated Bruce for not answering questions that neither of them had even asked.
Bruce’s point was consistent: any competent security analysis will show that racial profiling at airports is a bad idea (he’s right) and that’s *before* considering the horror show of racial profiling as a matter of policy in, you know, society.
Harris’ thinking was all over the place. He switched arguments at the drop of a hat when it was obvious he was losing, only to bring his points back up as subtext to a completely different argument and thereby claim some kind of vicarious victory. Throughout all this hokum, Bruce stuck to his point, which is that racial profiling doesn’t and can’t work in airports (including Harris’ ludicrous b movie scenario) and even if it could would you really want to do it?
Yet again, Harris thinks he came out of this discussion the winner.
It was exactly as frustrating as the arguments with creationists we’re all so used to. Harris used exactly the same tactics. Bait and switch,Gish Gallop, an impressive display of fallacies…Quite often, Harris – not a security expert – just plain told Schneier – very much a security expert – that his analysis was wrong because it didn’t fit with his – Harris’ – preconceptions. Quite often he misrepresented what Schneier said. It’s kind of ironic that he kept accusing Bruce of invoking randomness where he wasn’t. I mean, that is so straight fucking out of the creationist playbook, right?
Harris didn’t only lose, he might as well not have turned up. And this was an email exchange edited by Harris. His insistence throughout that there’s a statistical argument for racial profiling was horribly, hilariously misunderstood and his refutation of the rebuttal was pretty much “I’m rubber, you’re glue”.
This guy is allowed to actually teach? Fuck.
There was also an awful lot – as Ophelia reminded me – of horribly sexist bullshit by Harris. There was so much of the thinky-stuff-not-for-ladies about it. Ugh.
latsot, I remember that racial profiling controversy. He later turned up explaining that, as he read it, this would lead to profiling him, because he wasn’t arguing for profiling by race (no, of course not) but by risk group, which would be younger males. Uh huh. Sure.
The thing is, I do think there is a lot wrong with our airport security. They miss a lot. Looking at everyone’s baggage is boring…a steady diet of various clothes, shoes, belts, ties, etc going by all day with something occasionally interesting (I’ve noticed my bag always gets selected for a random check when I pack my plant press; I’m sure there is no good way to be sure what that is on x-ray unless you are intimately familiar with plant presses, though I am sure there are few, if any, bombs that look similar). I think the sheer mundane tedium of it all probably leads to missing things, most of which are just thing customers threw in their luggage either because they wanted them where they were going or because they wanted to see if they could get them past airport security and play tough guy about it later.
I think these flaws are inherent when we treat every customer coming through as though they are a potential criminal; but profiling isn’t the way to fix that. There are many more Muslims that are not terrorists than that are. There are many more African American males who are not criminal than are. I’ll go way out on a limb here and state something that probably is indisputable, at least to people like Harris, that there are even many more white men that are neither terrorists nor criminals than that are. And his argument about youth? Same thing.
The thing that strikes me about the whole thing is how many of the terrorists that have been apprehended either before or after a terrorist act are already known to the FBI or CIA (not all by a long shot, but a goodly number). Perhaps that would be the answer…though there are also many people followed by the FBI/CIA that are neither terrorist nor criminal, so we’d still sweep innocents into the snare of having to prove they are not criminals.
But racial profiling has done nothing to stop crime or terrorism, and is unlikely to do so, as the security expert recognized. The fact is, interacting with other humans will always run the risk that we will interact with some who do not have our best interests in mind, and there is no way to get a guarantee otherwise. We will always try to protect ourselves from those elements of society that would do us harm. I have learned to distrust Sam Harris, and suspect that, for many of us, he falls in that category of individuals that would do us harm – us being non-white, non-male, non-scientist, non-Sam Harris or his trusted circle, or any combination of the above.
Picking people to search in airports entirely at random is better security than racial profiling for about eight or nine thousand reasons.
I’ve been doing this for about 20 years. Bruce has been doing it for close to 50. Harris believes he knows better than all of us practitioners put together.
Pick a subject and Harris will think he’s king.
@4, 5, 6,: Stealing from Monty Python is a cheap way to get applause, but I’m not above it.
I don’t know of an easier way to post these excerpts, so I’ll just link to Matt Yglesias’ tweet with screenshots from Charles Murray’s totally-not-racist-at-all-how-could-you-think-that book, in which Murray implies that the government is wasting too much time and money on feeding and educating the genetically inferior.
But hey, Harris is just all about the facts, man. Facts don’t care about your feelings, snowflake, and HOW DARE YOU CALL ME A RACIST WHY I’LL PUBLISH YOUR EMAILS AND EVERYONE WILL SEE! THEY’LL SEE! [sputtering rage]
Bravo Screechy Monkey!
latsot, thanks for bringing up Harris’s discussion with Bruce Schneier. I remember that one pretty well. I find it a much better example of Harris’s poor reasoning skills than his bout with Noam Chomsky (I thought both men came out badly in that one.)
iknklast, airi, Harris actually argued that he should be profiled because he looks Semitic.
Latsot – Oh yes, I had remembered the Chomsky one but totally forgotten about Schneier. Thanks for the reminder.
Lady Mondegreen – I actually thought that the exchange with Chomsky was the worst Harris looked out of the three, just in terms of basic inability to understand even only what the other person is arguing, but I guess that partly lies in the eyes of the beholder.
Iknklast – So you are a fellow botanist? Hi!
OK, Lady M, it might be the semitic look; the one I saw he seemed to be suggesting it was age, but I could be remembering that incorrectly.
Hi, Alex SL! Yes, Botany rules!!!!
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What happened to Freeze Peach..
But no, Harris just added this to his post:
I wish Harris would talk with the Vox authors instead.
What an outsider like myself notices at once about Murray is what appears to be his strong adherence to the dogma (common in Anglo-Saxondom – Mrs T’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’) and particularly among the American right, that only individuals exist, uninfluenced by anything around them, and therefore such things as the oppression of minorities or classes does not exist, since minorities and classes don’t exist, and therefore it is ridiculous to attempt to create policies that are designed to mitigate the plight of such fictions or to create a fairer society, and counter-productive and unfair to those only actually existing things, individuals, to have such policies and to put them into practice. I notice, incidentally, that Andrew Sullivan, who famously made much of Murray’s ‘theories’ when they first came out, is now asserting — http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/denying-genetics-isnt-shutting-down-racism-its-fueling-it.html
— that he is ‘ proud of having published well over a dozen reasoned, eloquent rebuttals to Charles Murray’s core (The Bell Curve) argument on race and IQ in The New Republic’ back whenever it was. Oh, dear…. What is the word for this? ‘Disingenuous’ seems far too mild.
I know he’s not the most popular guy around here, but Christopher Hitchens had Charles Murray and his fan club nailed back in 1994. From a Nation column (sorry, but the best link I can find is this image posted on Reddit.:
But notwithstanding that penultimate sentence, Hitch went on to discuss the state of the science for a few paragraphs, and then concluded with this:
Too slowly is understating it.
Oh hey now – I don’t put Hitchens anywhere near the Sam Harris category. He had his faults certainly, especially the women not funny thing, but…he was a demon writer and thinker and talker and wit.
I didn’t mean you specifically so much as the community in general. It seems like every time Hitchens’ name comes up on any blog I read, no matter what the context or topic, it turns into a discussion of Iraq War, sexism, etc. — which is unfortunate, because as you say he was a hell of a writer and is worth referencing on many topics. So I was being a little overly defensive.
Ah; yeah. It would be nice if people could discriminate better than that. Sam Harris is a droning affectless bore, and Hitchens…was not.
Hitch in memoriam: I’m staying at a Franciscan nunnery B&B outside Sorrento, and right by the wifi router is a pamphlet featuring the Saint hateful Sadist of Calcutta. And I was’nt even connected yet. >:-/ (He was Pope-selected as Devil’s Advocate in the rapid process of her canonization, and did great work to no avail.)