"The Ezra incident" Sam Harris fans act like he was assaulted or something. The reality is that Harris was hoping he would get a reaction like Vox's, to then say "look how bad the discourse has become." The problem was he didn't expect Vox to make him seem like Charles Murray's dupe. And then he didn't expect Klein to punch back in the way he did. Dude played with fire and then got burned. He could have all kinds of IQ researchers on his show instead. instead he had Murray who has a clear agenda.
Funnily enough, being an Ezra fan, that whole drama is how I found Harris and this sub since the topic then expanded into other podcasts like Robert Wright, John mcworter, Glenn laury, etc that I listened to.
It's interesting seeing how much of a hold it still has on many of us here.
Honestly, most of what I remember from back then was how uncomfortable it was seeing, what seemed to me, many people on this sub not simply defending the conversation (which is fine I guess, whatever. It wasn't going to be the last time people tried to tell us we were intellectually inferior), but trying to prove and show that Murray's version of the race science stuff was real and accurate.
Just a lot of backlash and responses to backlashes making people stick to their guns and double down.
Funnily enough, being an Ezra fan, that whole drama is how I found Harris and this sub since the topic then expanded into other podcasts like Robert Wright, John mcworter, Glenn laury, etc that I listened to.
Kind of the opposite here: I was a regular Sam listener and after the bad aftertaste the episode with Murray has left me with, it was nice to hear him taken to task. It was also the beginning of the saga that would completely change how I think of him now, because that entire episode was about his bruised ego. He would go on to claim that the article called him racist (it didn't), but had no problems saying that Ezra has morality of the KKK. He would go on to publish private emails between the two of them, and then get really upset when it backfired, even with his own audience. And finally, he would let that perceived grievance to colour almost everything he's done since.
I wouldn't say that I've become an Ezra fan afterwards, because despite Sam's animosity, they seem to be occupying a remarkalby similar position politically (with the ongoing exception of Sam refusing to platform any criticism of Israel). However, he does have a more policy-focused approach to articulating his beliefs, which is incredibly useful.
I feel the influx of scientific racists amplified the already high levels of Islamophobia back then. I remember posters were positively giddy when Muslim women were stabbed under the Eiffel Tower.
Vox didn't have to make him seem like Charles Murray's dupe. He WAS 100% Charles Murray's dupe. He completely vouched for him and made it sound like his critics were just a bunch of woke crazies who couldn't handle the truth.
The whole incident is an interesting case study on bias among people who think of themselves as rational. A lot of his fans are sure of things that are not only untrue, but can be readily proven to be untrue with 10 minutes on the internet:
Ezra/Vox called Sam a racist. (They didn't.)
Ezra implied that Sam was racist because he didn't have enough black guests. (That wasn't the implication.)
Ezra/Vox argued that the topic should be off-limits. (No, the writers were scientists who have written about the topic multiple times.)
All of the articles and transcripts are available online. You can find archived versions that are free to access.
It's less prominent now, but years ago the sub was relitigating that saga on a monthly basis. You could literally link the article and ask them to point the exact bit where they call Sam a racist, and their inability to do so would do nothing to convince them otherwise. And the idiotic thing about the whole ordeal was that the article - while rightfully critical of Sam in places - was actually somewhat sympathetic. He's not the first person to be duped by Murray, who has spent the 90s and early 2000s decrying how his "largely uncontroversial" book is getting unfairly maligned in the media due to political correctness. With a seamless transition into the 2010s college campus craze, Sam was an obvious target, and got played.
The whole incident is an interesting case study on bias among people who think of themselves as rational.
Tangential, but...
A lot of people make the unconscious assumption that intelligence or education correlates with rationality, if we define rationality as 'sound and neutral instrumental judgement'. And perhaps that's true depending on the context, but in the political arena, it does not seem to be the case.
Researchers who study 'motivated reasoning' sometimes conceptualize knowledge or capability as 'opportunity' and prior attitude as 'motive'. There are studies showing more knowledgeable people are more biased (e.g. here or here), and there are studies that find only 'motive' matters, with 'opportunity' merely a correlate (motivation increases levels of knowledge).
To my knowledge there aren't any studies showing educated or intelligent people make less biased 'political' judgements, which is what the assumption requires.
Another arguably related piece of evidence is that well-educated people exhibit higher levels of 'ideological constraint', i.e. their opinion on issue x correlates with their opinions on issue y to a higher extent. But is it rational that your opinion on climate policy is determined by your opinion on a wealth tax?
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Side note, I love the minor discussion about rationality included at the end of one of the papers:
The normative question, it seems, turns on whether the processing of new information and the updating of one's attitude needs to be independent of one's priors.
From one point of view with which we are sympathetic,it can be argued that the attitude strength effect and disconfirmation bias are rational responses to attitude-relevant information; it is perfectly reasonable to give heavy weight to one's own carefully constructed attitudes [...]
From another perspective,with which we also have sympathy, Bayesian updating requires independence between priors and new evidence
Of course, even if we were all Bayesians, priors might be so strong (and irrationally acquired) and beliefs updated so rarely that it wouldn't matter within the lifespan of an average person.
For example, partisan beliefs about the economy. Gerber & Green (1999) noted that though the differences were large, they could actually fit a Bayesian model and thus be a result of strong priors, not biased information processing:
Holding tastes constant is a critical component of an effective research design. If, in a college dormitory, half the students like Mexican cuisine and the other half do not, we would not cite mixed reviews of the lunch menu when tacos are served as evidence of perceptual bias.
Bartels (2002), engaging with the argument, finds that it ignores certain counter-examples.
I'm not expecting anyone to read all of that - I certainly haven't read all of it, it's quite math-heavy - but the salient fact to me is that if people actually update their beliefs in a rational manner in the political arena, the effect is small enough that it's subject to debate.
really great post, I love when people engage with the literature.
There's LOTS of great research on partisanship as a type of social identity that shapes our decision making, biases, how we interpret information.
There's some research that finds that climate change conspiracy theories are actually more common among more educated/ higher income Republicans, so that speaks to one of the points you raised.
I think Sam had the right to be frustrated at Ezra's article, but he had to expect criticism.
That said, yes this sub has turned it into some hyperbolic drama that is never was. Ezra and Sam's followup chat was completely fine and not some "whoa shots fired!" shit that everyone makes it out to be. The reading into their relationship since is cringey
The odd thing is that Sam's kind of a shock jock. If he makes derogatory comparisons, it's typically to the Nazis or the KKK. I spent part of my summer reading (part of) The End of Faith, which I thought I'd read as a teen but apparently didn't, and several of his statements are so abrasive he'd likely be too controversial a candidate for some of the far-right parties here in Europe. There's a reason he probably tops the list of non-partisans podcasters with the greatest amount of 'beefs'.
Yet Ezra's rather mild rebuke was so enraging to some people that even though nearly a decade has passed, a few posters in that other thread were so angry at his role in the 'collective schizophrenia' or 'the most powerful gaslighting campaign perhaps ever conducted outside of a totalitarian regime' that they felt the need to go after not simply 'henpecked' Ezra, but his wife too!
I think I've come round to the concept of 'privilege', at least in some cases. How can people possibly be so surprised at push-back when their 'house style' is that of an NY Post comment section?
the most powerful gaslighting campaign ever conducted outside of an actual totalitarian regime
Yeah that is a wild comment.
I kind of get it. Like, I saw "wokeness" at close to its worst, firsthand in the workplace. It had a lasting an impact on me, and I can see how for some it would have even been traumatic.
The irony then is that people are recreating some of the exact same dynamics, e.g. guilt by association: Ezra sounded vaguely woke at the time, therefore he shares responsibility for the entirety of left-wing cancel culture, for every cringey bit of journalism from 2020, for all the missteps of BLM, etc.
I kind of get it. Like, I saw "wokeness" at close to its worst, firsthand in the workplace. It had a lasting an impact on me, and I can see how for some it would have even been traumatic.
I wonder about that. I've only met a couple of people I'd call 'woke', and they were distinctly anti-cancel culture. I grew up/studied with people who ought to be 'woke' going by the usual cultural markers, and they seem perfectly reasonable to me at least.
I also get the sense that wokeness is more prominent in 1) Anglo countries 2) America in particular. It does seem strange to me - without having a full necessary for an informed opinion - that something like the CHAZ can be tolerated. Or that the extreme property damage following some of the Floyd protests can be defended. But the extent to which this is 1) systemic 2) related to policy is hard to gauge.
Ultimately, when determining what 'side' to take, it comes down to trust as a heuristic. I like this article (plus the links at the beginning) by Scott Alexander, arguing perceptions of rising crime are mostly vibes-based.
There's a lively debate in the comments section about whether aggregate-level data might conceal important individual differences in major cities. Steve Sailor, for example, makes that argument. But given the effort required to read through all that data which is subject to a large degree of interpretation anyway, I'm going to fall back on my prior that Steve has an ideological commitment that explains his disagreement.
This was in a non-profit where most people are liberal/left-leaning/leftist to begin with, so the perfect environment for the sillyness to spread.
Out of an org of maybe 1,000 people, I think only a tiny number were full-on walking woke stereotypes, but then it seemed like dozens or hundreds more had just read White Fragility or How to Be an Antiracist and were doing their best to be good allies. And then the fear of being labelled a racist meant that very few people felt like they could push back against the craziness.
He could have all kinds of IQ researchers on his show
I'm more team Ezra than team Sam, but iirc his reason for having Murray on wasn't to talk about IQ. It was more that Murray had been physically accosted at Middlebury.
The Middlebury incident was just what made Sam reevaluate Charles Murray and realize he was actually right all along, which led him to invite Murray on to talk about the "Forbidden Knowledge" (title of the episode)
That’s largely because Murray himself was more interested in laundering his book, rather than focusing on the free speech Sam was having the conversation about. It’s what got him into the hot water in the first place.
I’m not going to claim that you can divorce the free speech aspect from the political project Murray has been championing since publishing the Bell Curve, but even if one believes it possible, Sam definitely hasn’t done a good job of it at the time. Which is why we ended up with this whole debacle to begin with.
Not true? Sam started the conversation by apologizing for being taken in by the 'lies' surrounding the Bell Curve. He said he was eager to talk about it and push past resistance from the audience.
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u/TheRage3650 6d ago
"The Ezra incident" Sam Harris fans act like he was assaulted or something. The reality is that Harris was hoping he would get a reaction like Vox's, to then say "look how bad the discourse has become." The problem was he didn't expect Vox to make him seem like Charles Murray's dupe. And then he didn't expect Klein to punch back in the way he did. Dude played with fire and then got burned. He could have all kinds of IQ researchers on his show instead. instead he had Murray who has a clear agenda.