9 ms·
> And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive
by matthewdgreen 6y ago
> And when you read the linked page[0], what Scott writes concerning Murrary seems perfectly inoffensive. He divides political views into quadrants, Competitive/Collective vs Optimistic/Pessimistic, then says "The only public figure I can think of in the [Collective + Pessimistic quadrant] with me is Charles Murray." This is what is described as aligning himself with Murray.
Well there's some more in that paragraph you quote. He then goes on to say "Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and [Murray] in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture." (Emphasis kept from the original.) Which I think the NYT writer reads as being at least a partial endorsement of Murray's belief that some class differences reduce to heredity. I do too, since this seems roughly in line with what I understand from Scott's writing. It is also true that Murray takes that idea farther and goes in some directions I find to be both scientifically unsupported and inflammatory.
You can agree or disagree with the NYT here, I don't care. But I think you should quote more from that paragraph before you characterize it.
- coldtea 6y agoHe also aligns himself with dozen of other thinkers he agree with and mentions them. Why isolate some particular name, if not to imply "here's a racist"?
- underyx 6y agoBecause if the Proud Boys believe in gravity, evolution, and fascism, only one of these three is newsworthy.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThe source article is pretty explicit about its goal: it's trying to inform readers on how a specific group of people think, which is important because many powerful people are in that group. Describing only the parts of their ideology that are "newsworthy", the parts that are strange or shocking to a typical NYT reader, is going to present a picture so distorted that it ends up being simply false. It would be like a human interest story that studiously refused to mention anything normal about the subject.
- mpweiher 6y agoYes. But that's how reporting (sadly) generally works. “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” - Michael Crichton I was first mentioned at a very young age in a newspaper when Der Spiegel reported on my dad. What it mentioned was that he had two children, my sister and myself. It then stated our ages, and got both of them completely wrong. This is not hard. It's also not important, but if it's not important enough to get right, maybe it's not important enough to simply make up? And later, I discovered the effect Michael mentions: every time they reported on anything I knew even a little about, they got it comically wrong. Except I don't suffer from amnesia. UPDATE: the only news source that I've found the be reasonably reliable over time is The Economist, if you ignore them on executive compensation ("our valued readers and sponsors: everything is fine with your outrageous salaries") and GMOs.
- leesalminen 6y agoI’ve been “quoted” in a couple press releases over the years. I never spoke nor wrote any of the quotes attributed to me. The comms team sends me a draft and says “looks good?” And I respond “yeah, whatever, don’t care”. The first time I was really surprised as I had taken the time to actually write something they could quote, but they didn’t want it.
- mattdotc 6y agoCorporate communications is not journalism, so what's your point?
- civilized 6y agoWhat does "align himself with" even mean? If I publicly agree with Hitler on vegetarianism, while denouncing his beliefs that I disagree with, have I "aligned myself" with Hitler? Obviously this is absurd. But the reporter would not have achieved his desired effect if he had just said "partially agreed with Murray on a specific issue". So he used the tribal language of alignment to fuel his politics of knee-jerk outrage. As the media so often does.
- matthewdgreen 6y agoI don't think this is at all a reasonable analogy. Scott does not just agree with Murray on some unrelated topic like vegetarianism. He appears to agree with Murray that some class differences reduce to heredity. Murray himself takes that set of beliefs and follows it in a direction that quite explicitly replaces "heredity" with "race", and associates a great deal of our nation's class differences to it. It's not really clear to me whether Scott's beliefs lead him in that direction too, or maybe if they do so to a lesser extent. I do know that many people on rationalist-adjacent boards like The Motte (used to be part of the SSC subreddit) have drawn some pretty unpleasant and unjustified opinions on this matter, which is one of the reasons that people asked Scott to remove that discussion group from the subreddit. (He did so, but only under duress and while denouncing the people who asked him to.)
- civilized 6y agoIt is very common for nasty people to have some kernel of reasonable belief that they take to an extreme. Agreeing with that reasonable piece does not "align" you with the extremist. That's just tribalist rhetoric. Find me an honest person who is knowledgeable about IQ and denies that IQ is somewhat heritable, and there is some meaningful (not completely determinative!) causal relationship between intelligence and class indicators such as income. That's all Scott has ever "aligned" himself with from Murray.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago>He appears to agree with Murray that some class differences reduce to heredity. Yes, and the way to attack this is not to insist that there are zero heritable differences in people's talents for various economically renumerable activities. There are lots of heritable differences. There are also lots of environmental effects. The way to attack it is to do the thing the NYT cannot do, and attack meritocracy as the basis of our political economy. For instance, plainly the Trump children got where they are due to heredity! Their whole damn family is coasting off Donald's father, who made the money. But as we all saw, their "very good genes" made them, well, terrifically incompetent, feckless morons.
- tptacek 6y agoBecause Murray is an important and pernicious force in American thought, a policy entrepreneur with wide-ranging influence in American politics. It's not about what Murray says about Alexander, but what Alexander is effectively saying about Murray. Legitimizing Murray, who is sort of a figure of fun among a lot of people who do serious social science work but influential in conservative policy circles, is probably more alarming than legitimizing clowns like Yarvin.
- lliamander 6y agoSee, I've read some of Murray's works, and he is both much closer to the consensus (especially on issues related to IQ) than you claim, and he specifically goes out of his way to counter the more abominable conclusions people tend to attribute to him. I find this sort of callumny appalling.
- tptacek 6y agoI stand by what I wrote. And it's "calumny".
- lliamander 6y agoI accept the spelling correction. But I look forward to a day when people feel the need to be far more cautious in general than they have been with Murray about making accusations of racism and other forms of bigotry.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 6y agoI didn't say Murray was a racist or a bigot. But, in fairness to you: I do believe he is one.
- cltby 6y agoMurray is a lightning rod amongst academic social scientists (henceforth ASSes) because he stands so clearly in opposition on so many axes. A.) he staked out a wildly controversial position; contrast with ASSes who only advance milquetoast leftist points of view. B.) subsequent decades have done scarce little to refute that position; contrast with ASSes who have been humiliated by the replication crisis. C.) the position has proved very influential; contrast with so many ASSes whose papers fail to collect even a single citation. D.) Murray has defended his position with grace; contrast with the histrionics and classlessness of his ASS detractors.
- yesenadam 6y agoOk, thank you, much appreciated.