IQ is very real. But, I had nothing to do with it!
harris murray transcript.docx
Waking Up With Sam Harris #73 - Forbidden Knowledge with Charles Murray
Sam Harris: [00:00:19] Welcome to the Waking Up podcast, this is Sam Harris. Okay, strap in. Charles Murray is a political scientist and an author. He is most famous for having co-authored the book The Bell Curve, along with the late Richard Herrnstein. Now, to say that this book was controversial is really beyond an understatement. It is probably fair to say this is the most controversial book in the last 50 years. And the book looks at the growing role that intelligence plays in modern societies. And the authors worry about a kind of cognitive partitioning of our society into separate classes. I mean, there was a time when being a few standard deviations above the mean in intelligence didn't get you very much when you're just plowing the field alongside your neighbors. But now you can start a software company or a hedge fund, and this leads to astonishing levels of wealth inequality and cultural isolation. This is a theme that Murray has returned to in his other work and in a more recent book Coming Apart, which we also discuss.
Now, unfortunately for Murray, what we have here is a set of nested taboos. Human intelligence itself is a taboo topic. People don't want to hear that intelligence is a real thing and that some people have more of it than others. They don't want to hear that IQ tests really measure it. They don't want to hear that differences in IQ matter because they're highly predictive of differential success in life, and not just for things like educational attainment and wealth, but for things like out-of-wedlock birth and mortality. People don't want to hear that a person's intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes. And there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person's intelligence, even in childhood. It's not that the environment doesn't matter, but genes appear to be 50-80% of the story. People don't want to hear this and they certainly don't want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups. Now, for better or worse, these are all facts.
[00:02:40] In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence than these claims. About IQ, about the validity of testing for it, about its importance in the real world, about its heritability, and about it's differential expression in different populations. Again, this is what a dispassionate look at decades of research suggests. Unfortunately, the controversy over The Bell Curve did not result from legitimate good faith criticisms of its major