As good an answer as we'll ever get to what went wrong, that's very fair and balanced to both sides.

This is a conflict between high-decoupling and low-decoupling thought.

It’s a member of a class of disagreements that depend on psychological differences so fundamental that we’re barely even aware they exist.

High-decouplers isolate ideas and ideas from each other and the surrounding context. This is a necessary practice in science which works by isolating variables, teasing out causality and formalizing and operationalizing claims into carefully delineated hypotheses. Cognitive decoupling is what scientists do.

To a high-decoupler, all you need to do to isolate an idea from its context or implications is to say so: “by X I don’t mean Y”. When that magical ritual has been performed you have the right to have your claims evaluated in isolation. This is Rational Style debate.

I picture Harris in my mind, saying something like “I was careful approaching this and said none of it justifies racism, that we must treat people like individuals and that general patterns say nothing about the abilities of any one person. In my mind that makes it as clear as can be that as far as I’m concerned none of what I’m saying implies anything racist. Therefore I’ve earned the right not to be grouped together with or in any way connected to nazis, neo-nazis, Jim Crow laws, white supremacy or anything like that. There is no logically necessary connection between beliefs about intelligence and racist policies, and it should therefore be possible to discuss one while the other remains out of scope.”

But “decoupling as default” can’t be assumed in Public Discourse like it is in science. Studies suggest that decoupling is not natural behavior (non-WEIRD populations often don’t think this way at all, because they have no use for it). We need to be trained to do it, and even then it’s hard; many otherwise intelligent people have traumatic memories of being taught mathematics in school.

While science and engineering disciplines (and analytic philosophy) are populated by people with a knack for decoupling who learn to take this norm for granted, other intellectual disciplines are not. Instead they’re largely composed of what’s opposite the scientist in the gallery of brainy archetypes: the literary or artistic intellectual.

This crowd doesn’t live in a world where decoupling is standard practice. On the contrary, coupling is what makes what they do work. Novelists, poets, artists and other storytellers like journalists, politicians and PR people rely on thick, rich and ambiguous meanings, associations, implications and allusions to evoke feelings, impressions and ideas in their audience. The words “artistic” and “literary” refers to using idea couplings well to subtly and indirectly push the audience’s meaning-buttons.

To a low-decoupler, high-decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a high-decoupler the low-decouplers insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight. This is what Harris means when he says Klein is biased.

For what it's worth, I'm a high-decoupler all the way, to the last meter and into the trenches if that's what it takes. I think that style of discourse should be defended at all costs. But its now clearer than it was before that there is another way of seeing issues that is more than just naked self-aware lying.