Former Sam Harris Fan Can't Believe He Fell For His Bullsh*t
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As a Muslim, I never liked Sam Harris especially when he said that it's a good Idea to make a preemptive N_ke strike on Muslims. 
I knew he was a bullshytter because he keeps advocating for the apartheid state in the Middle East.
What made him a certified bullshytter is that he now believes in IQ differences.
No black person should listen to this racist, g_nocidal creep.
I knew he was a bullshytter because he keeps advocating for the apartheid state in the Middle East.
What made him a certified bullshytter is that he now believes in IQ differences.
No black person should listen to this racist, g_nocidal creep.
I used to be heavy into the "new atheists" til I realized I ain't really agree with their politics, probably around the time I started peeping Christopher Hitchen's Iraq war advocacy later in his life. shyt happens when you first discover some kernel of truth and you engulf yourself in it.
Also yea fukk Dave Rubin lol.
Alot of those youtube atheists from 2007 turned out to be right wing a$$holes and women haters. Amazing Atheist and Thunderfoot come to mind.
As an atheist, I saw it happen in real time. It was weird especially being black.
If Hitchens was alive, he'd laugh at all these dweebs.
Easily about 80% of them ended up on some alt-right/lite bullshyt talking about race and IQ and right win crap
A decent holdout is still the Atheist Experience Podcast/Youtube show
I used to be heavy into the "new atheists" til I realized I ain't really agree with their politics, probably around the time I started peeping Christopher Hitchen's Iraq war advocacy later in his life. shyt happens when you first discover some kernel of truth and you engulf yourself in it.
Also yea fukk Dave Rubin lol.
some of them embracing white nationalism
storyteller
Veteran
Sam Harris might finally be realizing the folly his old ways
. We've come a long way from this clip below which I think covers Seder's referencing above.
Sam Harris might finally be realizing the folly his old ways
To be fair, Harris has distanced himself from certain "IDF" members long ago... probably a year and a half ago, when the likes of people like Rubin and Weinstein began to publicly prop up conspiracies about covid & its vaccine.
Also, Seder comparing Charles Murray and Alex Jones is completely laughable. Saying genetics likely influences intelligence (at least partially) and the government is turning frogs gay, or 9/11 was an inside job ain't even in the same realm of aligning with reality.
Again.. and as I said years ago, you may disagree with him and he can, at times, state things that on their face seem needlessly inflammatory. But you can't say he's a right-wing grifter in the same vein of a Dave Rubin.. at least not honestly.
storyteller
Veteran
Saying genetics likely influences intelligence sounds reasonable, except how do we define and then measure intelligence? Because IQ is highly flawed way to do so (revisit when Sam Harris got absolutely bodied by Ezra Klein if you need to brush up on why).
Murray also doesn't simply say genetics influences intelligence. He takes it a step further, using that flawed measure of IQ to paint certain races as less intelligent than others. Maybe it's not a one-for-one Alex Jones comparison, but it's pseudo science for dumb people nonetheless.
It ain't even in the same ball park to compare the two because although we (scientists) may be limited in our ability to assess an individual or population's (term scientists use, since 'race' is largely ill defined) intellectual ability, that doesn't change the fact that attempts to evaluate this, in any standardized way, demonstrates a disparity between groups that loosely correlates to what most would identify as as race. No one I'm aware of is saying that this disparity proves that certain populations are inherently more or less intelligent than others. But there is demonstrable evidence that these gaps in average ability between groups do exist.
Now flip that to a 9/11 Truther, or Alex Jones who claims that the Bush administration orchestrated maybe the biggest American tragedy of all time... a claim which has absolutely ZERO evidence and further, contradicts existing evidence regarding who was actually responsible.
This is what I mean when I say I think people are being dishonest. The claim sounds reasonable because it is reasonable. Literally every attribute about a person is influenced in some way by their DNA... by their genetics. Again, to my understanding, neither Murray nor Harris claims that intelligence is 100% genetic... in fact I believe both would say we don't know the percentage... but to say it's on the same level of delusion as a 9/11 conspiracy is so insanely uncharitable that it strikes me as a total bad faith comparison.
storyteller
Veteran
To the bold: The problem isn't that standardized tests produce a variance in disparate groups. The challenge comes from finding the actual causes of that variance (simplest terms, correlation does not equal causation). Then we take that a step further by actually examining what causes Murray applies, and then his prescriptions based on those conclusions (he's a political scientist after all). He uses IQ specifically, now how is he applying IQ to behavior and how much weight is he giving genetics to IQ.
When people argue against Murray, they point out flaws in HIS conclusions and the way HE did the science. When Seder compares Murray to Alex Jones, you might say he's using hyperbole. I wouldn't really argue with that although it's subjective. Sam's drawing a comparison between two grifters that push rightwing policy behind misleading use of information.
This seems to be a pretty common sticking point though. Murray's attempt at science being taken in good faith or as bad faith.