Episode Details

Jon and I go way back to the early days of the marriage movement. In this episode we discuss his important new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, and get into some heated exchanges over Trump, the MSM, and Russiagate — Jon as the optimistic liberal and me as the pessimistic conservative.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here.  For three clips from my conversation with Jon — on what he calls “the weirdest and craziest social idea ever invented”; on the propaganda of Trump and the NYT; and on the best ways to reform Twitter — head over to our YouTube page.

Meanwhile, many readers are responding to my conversation with Charles Murray last week. One quick take:

Great to hear Charles Murray! I’m sure Twitter subsequently lost its mind — good. Screw ‘em. Has anyone been more unfairly maligned than this man?

Twitter was oddly quiet. Another reader enjoyed the long conversation as well:

Oh jeez, Andrew — I can imagine the fun mail you’ll be getting for this one, but it’s the episode I’ve been really looking forward to! I found it both insightful, and emotional. 

But after one day, what sticks out for me is the section about affirmative action. When Murray says that when he went to Harvard in 1961 there were few Blacks and that you KNEW they absolutely deserved to be there on merit and academic acumen, that rang true. But then … there was no acknowledgement by him or you of the obverse: many of the white kids were there because of legacy or rich parents. I mean, isn’t that how Bush43 ended up at Yale? There MUST be a recognition of that when talking about affirmative action.

Absolutely. I don’t want to end affirmative action before ending legacy admissions. They are inextricable acts of unfairness — but the long history of legacy discrimination makes it a higher priority. In the Quotes section of the Dish last week, we cheered the end of legacy preferences in Colorado.

A reader dissents over the Murray episode:

I find all this talk of race and IQ to be rather insulting to folks I dearly love. I would hope you could find a guest similar to Stephen Jay Gould (who’s dead) to provide a useful counterpoint to Charles Murray. Robert Bieder is still alive — he’s 82 and his book Science Encounters the Indian is a wonderful overview of the racist anthropology of the 19th century. If you’re going to give time to Murray, then you owe it to your readers to give time to the scholars who helped us all understand that intelligence has nothing to do with the melanin content of a person’s skin or how they do on a test.

Obviously intelligence has nothing to do with melanin. But it is measurable, and real, and denial of this seems to me to be a denial of science. Another dissent from a reader:

First, I’ll lead with my background, which informs my thoughts on this. Brought up by my Ashkenazi Jewish mother with a Yoruba/Nigerian father by blood, though not culturally, I am in an odd space in the race wars.  

The motivated reasoning on race and intelligence by the white community is something I’ve often observed but rarely have seen commented on. For example