After watching the debate, I was still sided more with Sam Harris.
I was glad to listen to a relatively respectful conversation though. After reading the articles on Vox, the Tweets, and the e-mails, I was concerned that they wouldn't be able to have a real conversation. They interrupted each other a few times - called one another biased, but things never escalated from that.
I attribute the degree of civility to Sam Harris' not being even vaguely on the right. I kept thinking that while I was listening, "what if Sam Harris were a right wing conservative, saying exactly the same things as Sam Harris, how differently would this conversation play out."
It's not like Ezra Klein is a radical leftist or anything. His speech more than his writing, is careful, considerate, and uncertain. His writing is where he becomes uber-tribal. And that's his talent. That's the craft he's mastered over years and years in journalism. It's hard to tell him he shouldn't do it when there's an army of leftists thirsty for condemnation of the right.
But first and foremost I think Ezra Klein is a liberal. He is as intellectual and open-minded as he can be until it runs into the sacred values of liberalism. I think for Sam Harris, intellectual honesty is his sacred value. And he can be as liberal as he can be until it runs into conflict with the truth. For people like that, intellectual dishonesty is disgusting.
That's a point I didn't think either of them notice when talking about why someone would be interested in racial differences. It's an area where the low-hanging fruits of wisdom can be plucked, because nobody else will go near it. You don't have to be a super-genius to discover something new on the subject, you just have to be socially insensitive. It's like the forbidden fruit sitting there at arm's reach when the entire orchard of knowledge have been plucked dry.
I should probably flesh that idea out a little bit and do a 2 1/2 hour Jordan Peterson-type lecture on how that's the true meaning of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis.
They kept saying that it doesn't matter how race and genes and intelligence correlate, because no matter what people should be treated like equals. Okay, but it matters when we measure differences in race outcomes and use it to infer unequal opportunities, and use that to justify social policy. And even if adjusting for genes doesn't eliminate racial disparities - if minorities still get an unfair shake, the magnitude of the problem goes down. It's less urgent, and we should be willing to spend fewer dollars correcting it. Because it's a smaller problem than we thought.
If the science turns out that way. If it turns out that say, blacks and latinos have genes that give them a higher proclivity for intelligence than whites and Asians, then the problem is bigger than we thought.
Ezra talked a lot about how race differences has been used as a justification for racism and bigotry. While it seems like Ezra and Sam both agree that race differences wouldn't imply that, Ezra seems much more worried about it than Sam.
For me, it seems like justification is the wrong word. Instead I would use, excuse. It doesn't seem plausible to me that racism or bigotry would have been any weaker in time's past if only they hadn't believed in race differences. And I don't think this information would unleash a new wave of racism onto American society. To me it seems like racism is a prejudice, not a conclusion. And if it is a prejudice, then eliminating one rationale for it will only be replaced by another.
I hope Ezra Klein and Sam Harris do another podcast together. I listen to both of their podcasts and they're both of high quality. I just hope that this time, they do it on a topic that is completely different.
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