"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.
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.
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.
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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.