If Mort Divine ruled the world

[rms]

dude said it wasn't a good weapon for protection because it shot 22's what is going on with that dude?

and why you wasting time backing people's arguments centered around "but i'm a good citizen, why should my rights be infringed?"

 

[Dak]

Because regardless of "rights", attacks on gun ownership inherently strip the law abiding, and no one ever blames the perpetrator. Like...ever. It's "white supremacy" or "gun culture" or "racism" or anything but the shooter, and no laws are suggested which actually consider contingent chains beyond "can't have guns shooting without guns". Fuckin cro-magnon rationale at work. Politicians and activists are philistines.

 

[rms]

http://wakingup.libsyn.com/123-identity-and-reality

Jeez @ Ezra

 

[Dak]

http://wakingup.libsyn.com/123-identity-and-reality

Jeez @ Ezra

Is there a particular time point to cut to?

 

[rms]

I think the beginning is quite clear but the whole thing is embarrassing him for, from my perspective. It's really just a shitshow more than anything of value, so if you're anti-Ezra before there's no need to listen

 

[Dak]

I think the beginning is quite clear but the whole thing is embarrassing him for, from my perspective. It's really just a shitshow more than anything of value, so if you're anti-Ezra before there's no need to listen

The posted the transcript so reading it now. Harris highlighted the same quote I did for Ein in pointing out Klein's piece:

I think we have to go in to this issue of, you just claimed you didn’t call us racist, right? You didn’t use the word racist, I’ll grant you that. You used the racialist, which you know most people will read as racist. But even if that is an adequate way to split the difference, everything else you said imputed, if not an utter racial bias and a commitment to some kind of white superiority, you say again and again that, here’s a quote from your article. This is actually the subtitle of the article. I called the podcast with Murray “Forbidden Knowledge.” You said, “it isn’t forbidden knowledge, it’s American’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.” This is what, we’re shilling for bigotry and racial inequality.

I think the thing that irritates me most about Klein (besides many other things), is that he strikes me as the sort of person who will refer to himself as "a white guy" (like in this podcast)...and then pull the antisemitism card as soon as it suits him. I haven't looked to see if he has done it before but it wouldn't surprise me if it has or does happen.

Probably the only thing Klein had right from the whole piece was that Harris is quick to take offense and not quick to recognize when he is giving it. Which, incidentally, has nothing to do with Klein's actual position. Klein repeatedly used Murray's opposition to the welfare state as evidence of racism. This is piss-poor logic. He also threw out random "inequality" factoids with no qualifiers or further exposition.

What it continuously boils down to for Klein is the welfare state and this fantasy that whites as a group have it amazing (but that at the same time we can't judge groups on group characterics!):

What is interesting about the move Murray makes, and this is the thing that I call out in my piece and have talked about a bit, is that what Murray is intent on showing is that genetic or environmental, it can’t be changed, it’s immutable.

He says, “There is this notion” — this was in your podcast — “there is this notion that if traits were genetically determined that’s bad and if they’re environmentally determined that’s good, because we can do something about them if they’re environmental. If there’s one lesson that we’ve learned from the last 70 years of social policy, it is that changing environments in ways that produce measurable results is really, really hard. We actually don’t know how to do it, no matter how much money we spend.”

If you go read both the original and the second Vox pieces, they are primarily about this claim. They are primarily about the claim that we cannot change these outcomes. They are primarily about the claim that if you move people into adoption into high-income families, they have a 12 to 18 point IQ change. There is tons and tons of evidence — now we’re getting into my world again — in the realm of social policy, of not just effects from social policy on one generation, but multi-generational effects from things like Medicaid and so on.

One place where I think this is important is that, a lot of the debate here and the reason people care about it, is that if you’re saying things are immutable, often people say they’re immutable because they’re genetic. Murray actually says they’re immutable really no matter what.

If you say they’re immutable, that’s actually a way — and this is what Murray does, again explicitly and repeatedly both on your show and in other places — is say that because they’re immutable, that really means that this is not on us. This is not on us, white America, or America broadly, and we don’t have to kind feel so bad. We can embrace the politics of difference. We can begin removing some of these social supports. Don’t need to have as much affirmative action. Don’t need this employment nondiscrimination stuff. We can cut the size of the social welfare state.

I'd love to know what evidence he has. It seems like all we have is evidence that the inequalities persist (which is ironically the evidence Klein et al will use to demand more spending and villify those advocating different policies!). The broad poverty rate hasn't appreciably fallen since "The Great Society" policies were instituted (ironically my link somehow claims that 1-3% in ~50 years is progress! But won't show the graph showing massive, shorter improvements prior), black homeownership, unemployment, and incarceration hasn't budged, and the number of black single mother homes exploded.

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/poverty-h...s-but-official-poverty-measure-masks-progress
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-no-progress-african-americans-20180226-story.html
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html

The biggest lie Klein told the whole time was the following:

I think a conversation that included more African-American voices and more people who have specialization in the history of race in America, in the history of these ideas in America, in the history of how these ideas and social policy in America interact, would lead to a better, more fruitful, more, as you put it, adult, and also a more constructive, debate.

He most certainly doesn't mean a Sowell or Walter Williams. He means [insert generic critical theory/marxist sociologist].

Harris brings up, not a new point, but uses his Semitism to good effect here, and Klein completely shits the bed in response:

You have the fact that — this is actually in Reich’s recent book, of which that op-ed was a crib — the finalist in the 100-meter dash in the Olympics, the male finalist, every single finalist since 1980 has been of West African descent, right? That does not appear to be an accident, and it doesn’t matter what country they came from. It does not appear to be best explained by environment. There’s a very similar story that it can be told about East Africans with respect to the marathon. There’s this shocking disparity in this particular type of athletic ability that is segregated in this way based on population ancestry. It happens to be a great ability, and it’s all good for those sprinters.

But imagine if you and I as Jews decided to worry that maybe there was some underlying anti-Semitism that kept Jews out of the finals of the 100-meter dash in the Olympics. Do you think there is a Jew on earth who thinks that? I would doubt it, but it’s certainly possible to think.
.............................
If you go looking for bigotry as your explanation for every difference you see — you can read about this in Reich’s book — if you have populations that have their means slightly different genetically, 80 percent of a standard deviation difference, you’re going to see massive difference in the tail ends of the distribution, where you could have 100-fold difference in the numbers of individuals who excel at the 99.99 percent level. This is just something you will see by virtue of statistics.

What does Klein respond with?

I do think this is a good place to close, because I do think this is our bedrock disagreement. I think you look at me, you look at the folks who you see as engaging in identity politics, which is something other people do, but not you, and you see tribalism.

You see on my part a social justice warrior tribalism of some sort or another, someone who is looking for evidence of racism and bigotry. I look at our society, and I see society that, even now, on every study we run, shows huge, huge, huge racial bias. I mean I look at a study done just a couple of years ago, showing that if you send employers a resume and everything is equal except for the name, one name is African American-coded and another name is European-coded, you get 50 percent fewer call backs the African-Americans.

I look at evidence of it, when African-Americans go into the hospital, they do not get treatment for pain at the same rates as white Americans, because doctors do not believe them. They think they’re trying to scam the drugs or something.

I see us a society that is not 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years away from a long, long, long legacy of not just racism, but violence and oppression of the worst kind, a society where we did things that even now to just go through them, it chills you. But that was 50 years ago. Some of it still goes on today.

Violence and oppression of the worst kind 50 years ago. Is Klein a Holocaust denier? But look at what he does here. Does he respond? Nope, no argument to counter, so he dips out with an red herring and a couple more factoids. This is why he's a journalist. Just a better than average wordsmith with no other talents.

 

[rms]

I'd love to know what evidence he has.

this claim was backed by one study, I think he claimed was Flynn's, that showed adopted minority families saw an increase of 12-18 IQ points

What does Klein respond with?

that's the whole podcast and what I sensed in the emails. Klein never really answers anythings and just tries to call Harris an amateur psychologist. It's so strange that Harris never just went all out on him (gave up around an hour and a half)

 

[Einherjar86]

Klein is doing Harris and Murray a courtesy by saying "racialist" instead of "racist." He knows that "racist" carries connotations of intentionality and bigotry (e.g. "I don't like black people"). "Racialist," by contrast, signals the unintentional and entirely historical dimensions of Harris's and Murray's comments.

Also, I'm sure Klein would love to have a conversation that featured Sowell. He would also probably prefer that it featured Henry Louis Gates, John McWhorter, and Cornell West. In fact, a conversation comprised mostly of black intellectuals is probably the ideal.

Harris's comment about anti-semitism is confusing. Sheer physical performance necessitates a very different kind of endurance test than intellectual performance. A test of mental performance, or intelligence, cannot limit itself to the parameters of a particular task; intelligence can be assessed by the questioning of cognitive tasks, since questioning is itself a cognitive task.

The same can't be said for physical tasks; questioning the parameters of the hundred-meter dash doesn't qualify as a test of physical endurance.

I actually think Harris's anti-semitism comment is pretty damn condescending, when you really consider what he's saying.

 

[rms]

Harris's comment about anti-semitism is confusing. Sheer physical performance necessitates a very different kind of endurance test than intellectual performance.

I think you're being too specific with the general claim here. Some people are born better sprinters than long distance running. Some people are born better doing mathematics than writing poetry.

Haven't wasted my time with an IQ test since i was middle school or something but last I remember it was more general 'questions' or 'tasks' which would seem to remove (or aims to remove) contextual learning.

did you listen to Harris' podcast that is mentioned in this one with the Harvard economics prof?

 

[Einherjar86]

I think you're being too specific with the general claim here. Some people are born better sprinters than long distance running. Some people are born better doing mathematics than writing poetry.

I understand that's what he's suggesting. I'm saying that the premise of appealing to test results in order to make this distinction (between those better at math as opposed to those better at poetry) is faulty. Additionally, I firmly believe there's no genetic predisposition for being good at poetry.

Haven't wasted my time with an IQ test since i was middle school or something but last I remember it was more general 'questions' or 'tasks' which would seem to remove (or aims to remove) contextual learning.

There's no such thing as de-contextualized learning.

did you listen to Harris' podcast that is mentioned in this one with the Harvard economics prof?

No, I was responding to Dak's post.

 

[Dak]

Klein is doing Harris and Murray a courtesy by saying "racialist" instead of "racist." He knows that "racist" carries connotations of intentionality and bigotry (e.g. "I don't like black people"). "Racialist," by contrast, signals the unintentional and entirely historical dimensions of Harris's and Murray's comments.

Also, I'm sure Klein would love to have a conversation that featured Sowell. He would also probably prefer that it featured Henry Louis Gates, John McWhorter, and Cornell West. In fact, a conversation comprised mostly of black intellectuals is probably the ideal.

Unfortunately Sowell is ~15-30 years older than the other 3 (probably would be exhausted by a contentious forum), but is the only one who has been educated in and studied the actual material nature/science of disparities, and the only one to actually spend time growing up poor in the Jim Crow era South. I would that he were somehow 30 years younger, Walter Williams as well, although his experience is of the northern and Californian like West and McWhorter. McWhorter is too young and grew up in the North, West was privileged and grew up in the West, and Gates is just a literary critic from the North. Funny how those who grew up facing more adversity but studied actual economics disagree about the economics with those with no economic training. Dem Uncle Toms (which isn't racist to say!).

Harris's comment about anti-semitism is confusing. Sheer physical performance necessitates a very different kind of endurance test than intellectual performance. A test of mental performance, or intelligence, cannot limit itself to the parameters of a particular task; intelligence can be assessed by the questioning of cognitive tasks, since questioning is itself a cognitive task.

The same can't be said for physical tasks; questioning the parameters of the hundred-meter dash doesn't qualify as a test of physical endurance.

I actually think Harris's anti-semitism comment is pretty damn condescending, when you really consider what he's saying.

Well if Harris has a fault besides his focus on religion as the worst thing ever, he can be extremely condescending (which would be less of a problem if he didn't take so much affront to it). But if anyone deserves it it is Klein.

You are wrong about "sheer physical performance", as rms roughly pointed out. There are all sorts of measures of physical performance, which insofar as we can measure appear to have less in common than mental performance. Sprint vs short vs long vs marathon vs ultra marathon. Latarel vs straight line agility. Jump height. Bench Press. Squat. Deadlift. Clean&Press. Etc Etc. For all weight lifts max vs reps. On and On. Physically, specialization involves far more tradeoffs than mental, as far as we can currently tell. For instance, great sprinters make poor marathoners and deadlifts. great deadlifters make poor runners period. Great marathoners make poor lifters (all these things being competitively measured). HOWEVER: If we test any of these athletes against the population mean, almost all will be better than the mean at anything except maybe the 99.9999%tile.

Differentially, g contributes regardless of intellectual pursuit, where the divide between "creativity" and "systems" sort of specialties has more to do with right vs left hemisphere dominance rather than total g. Which is currently most aptly tested via "IQ tests". It is not g that would inhibit the 99.9999%ile in creativity vs systems against the mean, but rather this divide.

 

[rms]

You believe people are genetically different in mathematics but not poetry?

 

[Einherjar86]

Unfortunately Sowell is ~15-30 years older than the other 3 (probably would be exhausted by a contentious forum), but is the only one who has been educated in and studied the actual material nature/science of disparities, and the only one to actually spend time growing up poor in the Jim Crow era South.

The former (i.e. "material nature/science of disparities") is untrue and the latter is largely inconsequential.

But if anyone deserves it it is Klein.

That sentiment is part of the problem, in my opinion.

You are wrong about "sheer physical performance"

No, I'm not--as I specified in response to his comment.

Harris is making a judgment on physical versus mental performance based on the results of physical and mental exams. There's nothing to be gained from contemplating the parameters of a physical endurance test (whether running, lifting, cycling, etc.). There is something to be gained from contemplating the parameters of an intelligence test. Harris assumes the transparency of results, but they're not transparent.

I do acknowledge the biological prerequisites for being good at physical tasks. I'm saying the basis for measuring physical ability ends at the fulfillment of the specified task. By contrast, the basis for measuring intellectual/cognitive ability does not end at the fulfillment (or lack thereof) of the specified task.

You believe people are genetically different in mathematics but not poetry?

I believe that the propensity for analytical thought/practice is largely positivist. In other words, mathematics is creative only insofar as one adheres to particular axioms.

Poetic thought/practice is totally different, and can't be predicted genetically. In fact, there are a lot of poets who are mathematically (or scientifically) inclined. Poetry is something that anyone, even the most non-intellectual individual, can practice, because it has quite little to do with conceptual complexity of any kind (mathematical or philosophical). It has to do with an unorthodox and inventive approach to language. Of course, that's not to say that poets can't be intellectual.

Now, do I think there might be a genetic predisposition between those who practice mathematics and those who practice literary criticism? Sure, I'm open to that suggestion. But literary criticism isn't poetry. In fact, literary critics usually write pretty bad poetry.

 

[Dak]

The former (i.e. "material nature/science of disparities") is untrue and the latter is largely inconsequential.

That sentiment is part of the problem, in my opinion.

So we may as well take the uneducated white, modern, opinion as equally valid amirite? Your illogical sentiments show.

No, I'm not--as I specified in response to his comment.

Harris is making a judgment on physical versus mental performance based on the results of physical and mental exams. There's nothing to be gained from contemplating the parameters of a physical endurance test (whether running, lifting, cycling, etc.). There is something to be gained from contemplating the parameters of an intelligence test. Harris assumes the transparency of results, but they're not transparent.

I do acknowledge the biological prerequisites for being good at physical tasks. I'm saying the basis for measuring physical ability ends at the fulfillment of the specified task. By contrast, the basis for measuring intellectual/cognitive ability does not end at the fulfillment (or lack thereof) of the specified task.

I can't even quite claim you contradict yourself here directly because you make multiple claims. Results aren't transparent, but measurement ends at fulfillment, but only for physical tasks, and you never address my information about left/right differences vs g. You aren't even wrong, simply all over the place.

 

[-CC-]

I'm not sure if you're still talking about Jordan Peterson, but I can't stop laughing at this video of some interviewer trying to corner Peterson on Pepe the Frog and the "OK" hand emoji

 

[Einherjar86]

So we may as well take the uneducated white, modern, opinion as equally valid amirite? Your illogical sentiments show.

I don't see much logic to this statement either, if I'm being honest. Why does including educated black scholars justify the inclusion of uneducated whites...? I'm saying you're wrong that Gates and West are unfamiliar with the "actual material nature/science of disparities."

I can't even quite claim you contradict yourself here directly because you make multiple claims. Results aren't transparent, but measurement ends at fulfillment, but only for physical tasks, and you never address my information about left/right differences vs g. You aren't even wrong, simply all over the place.

I'm actually just making one point, but it may not have been relevant. All I'm saying is that the correlation between body type and physical performance yields a higher degree of predictability than does the correlation between SAT scores and grades in college. The analogy assumes a pretty symmetrical relationship between physical performance and cognitive performance. I didn't comment on your left/right brain comment because I don't disagree with it.

Klein isn't incorrect to accuse Murray's position as being part of a "racialist" pattern that goes back centuries. He's also not wrong in pointing out that modern scientific interpretations of statistical variation re. intelligence differ widely, and the majority of geneticists disagree, or at least have major problems with, Murray's work. In the sciences, "intelligence" isn't a one-dimensional phenomenon, which is how Murray treats it. He also reduces its correlation to real-world application so that "intelligence = success," but this also isn't necessarily true.

The biggest problem with Murray and Herrnstein's book isn't its scientific findings, which aren't all that controversial; it's that the book serves not only as a scientific investigation, but as a blanket apology for the disparate treatment of racial difference despite high performance. For example, Murray and Herrnstein associate intelligence with wage earnings but fail to note that in scenarios where a black worker and white worker perform the same job and exhibit comparable intelligence, the black worker more often makes less. Their book is an effort to sweep racism under the rug by declaring the modern marketplace a meritocracy, and that's simply not the case.

It wouldn't be so bad if they just stuck with the data and suggested that there appears to be some link between intelligence and heritability, but that's not what The Bell Curve does, and it's not the extent of Murray's position.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I'm actually just making one point, but it may not have been relevant. All I'm saying is that the correlation between body type and physical performance yields a higher degree of predictability than does the correlation between SAT scores and grades in college. The analogy assumes a pretty symmetrical relationship between physical performance and cognitive performance. I didn't comment on your left/right brain comment because I don't disagree with it.

Body type isn't genetic for the most part. A naturally gifted Kenyan can immigrate to America and choose to eat doughnuts and watch television all day, and he will be a lardass. People with slow metabolisms or asthma can still exercise, stay in good shape, and be athletically competitive on some level (though they will never become Usain Bolt). Body type is more the exercise analog of knowledge or intellectual talent, which can be easier or harder to gain based on one's biological potential. Obviously a muscular body, the product of work towards attaining physical strength, will correlate better than IQ will to college grades, when IQ measures potential.

 

[Einherjar86]

Then I used the wrong term. I'm just referring to whatever Harris means when he suggests that there are more "naturally gifted" Africans than Jews in the hundred-meter dash (for example). So not body type, but whatever genetic trait predisposes someone to physical endurance training. He's making the provocative point that if black people can claim socioeconomic injustices as an explanation for lower IQ, then it makes sense that Jews could claim anti-semitism as an explanation for why they don't perform as well (on average) in the Olympics. There are multiple problems with this analogy, of course.

 

[rms]

He's making the provocative point that if black people can claim socioeconomic injustices as an explanation for lower IQ, then it makes sense that Jews could claim anti-semitism as an explanation for why they don't perform as well (on average) in the Olympics.

but his analogy was merely to counter Klein at a basic level. Representation does not necessarily equal discrimination. This tangent was to highlight that both him and Klein, two jews as he repeats often at the end there, do not/would not see any evidence of anti-semitism. he asks Klein there why does a lack of representation for blacks automatically call into question racial discrimination for blacks but not jews.

 

[Einherjar86]

Completely fair, and I would agree that representation does not necessarily equal discrimination, as in the case of Jews in athletics, for instance. But in the case of African Americans and intelligence, there's overwhelming evidence for the influence of discrimination on representation. Harris is ignoring a bunch of other evidence and making the logical claim that representation =/= discrimination. This is true, but in this particular context it's not the case.

Also, accounting for the histories of both blacks and Jews in the West (even including the Holocaust), it's a misleading comparison. Even during the Middle Ages, anti-semitism wasn't reflected in widespread disenfranchisement of Jews; they still owned businesses and could earn money. In fact, they arguably were better off than Christian (economically speaking) since they could provide financial services from which Christians were religiously prohibited (namely, money-lending). Although the Christian stigma against Jews persisted, Jews were permitted into systems of education and financial literacy. Over centuries, they built a strong base for themselves socially and economically (and of course, the stigmas persisted, hence jokes today about Jews and money), including here in America.

By contrast, Africans in America were overwhelmingly prohibited until the nineteenth century from earning money and getting an education. Many slaves taught themselves to read by studying the Bible (since good Christian slaveowners couldn't deprive their property of the word of god). I often encounter an argument that the slaves, who were "liberated" in the mid-nineteenth century, haven't managed to build themselves up to the status of modern Jews, who suffered the Holocaust in the mid-twentieth century. The problems with this comparison are manifold, but perhaps the most egregious has to do with the fact that the relatively good quality of life for Jews in America today stems primarily from their ancestors' participation in American society prior to Holocaust, which was also largely unaffected by the Holocaust. Meanwhile, African Americans were permitted little to no productive roles in society until after the Civil Rights Movement.

That anti-semitism has been violently disruptive for some Jews is absolutely true. But overall, anti-semitism hasn't had the same effects that slavery and Jim Crow had for blacks; and in some ways, anti-semitism actually contributed to the economic and intellectual foundation of Jews in the Western world.

So Harris's point is really just pointless, in my opinion. Yes, it's true that representation (or lack thereof) doesn't necessarily equal discrimination--the key word being necessarily.