Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Sam Harris Lights Career On Fire In Ezra Klein Debate" video.

  1. TheEvolver311 The theory of evolution is a good example of how a theory can reveal something true about the world and yet be to a degree directed by ideology. I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that Darwin's formulation of evolution is tinged with a certain Victorian capitalist framing of the world in terms of competition.and struggle with and mastery over nature. He was less likely to emphasize instances of mutual aid and symbiosis. To be clear, I absolutely accept the theory of evolution, but I also think it's a mistake to believe that scientists have this magical power of abstracting their politics from their scientific practices. A theory can both be right insofar as it reveals something about the world and be articulated by one's prior political understanding of the world. It isn't an easy relationship to understand; you can't use it like a hammer to bludgeon every sentence in the Origin of Species; but when it's staring you right in face, as with Murray, it behooves you to look back. The problem for me with trying to abstract fact from worldview is that facts don't come to us from Heaven etched in a stone tablet. They aren't prior to the world. They aren't even prior to society. The kind of society you live in is going to have some—some—influence on the kind of scientific knowledge produced. The way to transcend bias, if only somewhat, is not to ignore sources of bias but to try to be more aware of them. One other thing to note is that heritability does not tell you whether or not the expression of the trait can change. Murray, however, believes that low IQ scores among (disadvantaged) groups is a sign that they can't be changed by any social policy, therefore UBI. Again, the heritability, as far as I understand it, doesn't tell you about the mutability of the trait. As you point out, height is heritable, yet height has increased over time due to changes in environmental conditions. It is a trait that is both highly heritable AND changeable. Ramiian IQ tests don't test general intelligence. They test certain traits that are valued by our society, verbal skills, spatial reasoning, analogy. As noted in the Atlantic during the Richwine controversy in 2013, "This, then, shows the limits to IQ tests: Though the tests are good measures of skills relevant to success in American society, the scores are only a good indicator of relative intellectual ability for people who have been exposed to equivalent opportunities for developing those skills - and who actually have the motivation to try hard on the test." As the author of the book Measure of Failure argues in context of standardized assessments in schools, the socially significant work of these sorts of tests lies beyond their measure of any sort of ability and in the degree to which they measure how willing you are to take this sort of thing seriously. Are you the kind of person who takes SATs seriously and studies and takes prep tests? Are you the kind of person who takes IQ tests seriously? If you aren't, if you don't value the test, the society it reproduces, or the abilities it purports to measure, then of course you won't perform well by its metric. The Atlantic continues, "To grasp how culturally contingent our current conception of intelligence is, just imagine how well you might do on an IQ test devised by Amazonian hunter-gatherers or medieval European peasants."
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  2. 14:00 This is why it's so important for people to understand: facts can be true, but they can never be the truth.
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  3. Facts are not the truth. This should be painfully obvious to someone who claims to be a scientist. The truth is how you organize facts into a picture of reality. What facts you choose, how you interpret them, weigh them, and understand their relation to other facts dramatically changes what "real" looks like, it doesn't matter how true any individual fact is.
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  4. M C The book I mentioned at the end of my previous post, Measure of Failure, talks about Binet. While Binet did not conceive of the test as a measure of general intelligence, he also didn't create it with the totally innocent purpose of helping struggling students. I don't have the book in front of me, but perhaps I can quote from it later. The basic line of argument iirc is that in order to reform education Binet's test had to assume that their was failure and then assign a metric and standard for it, which predictable had more to do with reproducing social ideals of education than it did with innate cognitive ability. I'll replace that summary with a quote when I get a chance.
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