Is Sam pandering to the right for money?

If that were the case then African Americans would have similar IQs to people in Africa which is not the case.

The counterargument to that would be is that we don't precisely know where most Black Americans came from. You can't compare apples to apples when modern day black Americans have admixture from different populations from Africa, and of course, from Europeans.

We don't really know how heritable IQ is.

It seems that Murray had a large enough sample that controlled for independent variables and found that IQs measure what they measure with consistency in population groups. He often cities cases of twins raised apart, or adopted minority children etc, in his lectures. That environmental argument, especially on the heritability of IQ, seems to be all but discredited by advances in genetics. It will, most likely, fall by the wayside in the coming years completely. Disclaimer: I'm not anywhere near this research, but I got into the rabit hole when I was trying to figure out the IQ thing after hearing the podcast.

Someone could be way smarter than me but suck on a series of IQ tests because they have ADD and couldn't get their Adderall prescription refilled.

Now, this is a valid critique. I myself suffer from ADD. I haven't taken an IQ test precisely because I fear the implications that you raise. I'm not a die-hard defendant of IQ testing; I have my own personal reservation on it. I just don't like poorly thought out arguments that are based more on raising unprovable assumptions or conclusions that I see other people making on this very divisive and 'radioactive' topic.

Sam's Ph.D. is a shame that he bought with his parent's (and his foundation's) money. He's never actually done any work in neuroscience, and his dissertation was laughable to people who know the field. His reliance on fMRIs is troubling to any neuroscientist because fMRIs are famously unreliable. Sam is not an academic, and academics do not treat him as one.

I've heard this before. The thing about the funding seems like a red herring. However, it does seem like Sam Harris has eschewed a life of academia. But I present the question: just because one doesn't do work/research in their terminal degree any longer -- does that take away from the fact that they earned that doctorate?

I respect Sam as an intellectual because he went to those prestigious institutions. That and his vocabulary is probably 10x as large as mine. UCLA is one of the hottest schools on the West Coast. Something like only 1% or even .05% of a high school class in CA would qualify for admissions there -- I know because it was the dream of many in my classes. And I'm fairly certain that 'public Ivy' like UCLA, isn't as corruptible as a private institution, like U.Penn where Trump's dad was able to buy him admission there.

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