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Justus's avatar

Even though I’m a pretty standard liberal, I like to dip my toes into heterodox waters to challenge my priors....which inevitably leads to Charles Murray. I keep trying to see what they think exonerates him, but I keep coming up underwhelmed. So for better or worse it’s good to hear that you come away with a similar impression.

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Nemo's avatar

I was wondering how I knew the name Charles Murray…

Charles Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, a book which has done much to popularize pseudoscientific race essentialism.

Stephen Jay Gould (an actual evolutionary biologist, unlike Murray) wrote The Mismeasure of Man specifically for the purpose of debunking The Bell Curve.

I’m not really sure why I should trust Murray on anything else, when his most prominent work can be charitably called a misunderstanding of statistics (and uncharitably, a nefarious manipulation of data to reinforce his own preferences for racial hierarchy).

I understand the Know Your Enemy argument you put forth, but why read Charles Murray when there’s plenty of thinkers out there producing correct information to learn about?

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