Sam Harris

I do not pay attention to Sam Harris but hazily thought of him as a relatively-less-terrible exemplar of the Legion Of Famous Bonehead White Guy Intellectuals With Bad Priors. (Understand that I use the term “intellectual” here as descriptive of a position in the social process and a psychological type rather than as validation of his insight. Joe Rogan, f’rinstance, is a true intellectual in the sense that he loves ideas and really does think for himself … while being such an asshole and knucklehead that he is attracted to terrible ideas.) I took Harris as discernibly smarter than someone like Rogan, though hung up on a distinct Stubborn Asshole Atheism which made him a sucker for Islamophobia. But that praise through less-vigorous damnation comes to a close, because I just learned that a few years back, he said this:

As bad luck would have it, but as you’d absolutely predict on the basis of just sheer biology, different populations of people, different racial groups, different ethnicities, different groups of people who have been historically isolated from one another geographically, test differently in terms of their average on this measure of cognitive function. So if you’re gonna give the Japanese and the Ashkenazi Jews, and African Americans, and Hawaiians … you’re gonna take populations who differ genetically — and we know they differed genetically, that’s not debatable — and you give them IQ tests, it would be a miracle if every single population had the same mean IQ. And African Americans come out about a standard deviation lower than white Americans. A standard deviation for IQ is about 15 points. So, if it’s normed to the general population, predominantly white population for an average of 100, the average in the African American community has been around 85.

I recognize that song; it is thoroughly debunked bad faith racist far right The Bell Curve horseshit. Once again I should have recognized that these guys are all swimming in the same Intellectual Dim Web stew of bigotry.