Cross-posted from Putanumonit.com.

John Nerst wrote an excellent analysis of the recent clash between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein on the topic of race, IQ, and all the topics that get dragged in when you talk about race and IQ. The essay weaves together several layers: it dives deep into the details of the disagreement, and it also soars high enough to see the conflict as being not just between two interpretations of IQ science or two political positions, but two general ways that people think: decoupling vs. contextualizing.

As an Ashkenazi Jew, I don't have much to say on the race/IQ debate, but I'm fascinated by the meta-conflict in play. It shows up in many guises: nerds vs. non-nerds, scientists vs. activists, mistake theorists vs. conflict theorists.

I'm a big fan of the bell curve: the bell curve of soccer ability, of attitudes on racism and on feminism, of tennis skill, of worrying about climate change. But none of these deserve to be capitalized.

That honor is apparently reserved for "The Bell Curve" of IQ scores in a population, and the book on said subject by Charles Murray. The book contains 900 pages that not a single person has ever read, and a chapter on the differences in IQ distributions among self-identified races. This chapter ensured that for the next 24 years, interacting with Charles Murray in any capacity, for or against, was a political statement.

Enter Sam Harris. Harris belongs to a group of people who share certain traits, one of these being a strong distaste for the idea that everything has to be a political statement. Sarah Constantin identifies some other commonalities:

Stanovich talks about “cognitive decoupling”, the ability to block out context and experiential knowledge and just follow formal rules, as a main component of both performance on intelligence tests and performance on the cognitive bias tests that correlate with intelligence. Cognitive decoupling is the opposite of holistic thinking. It’s the ability to separate, to view things in the abstract, to play devil’s advocate.

[...]

Speculatively, we might imagine that there is a “cognitive decoupling elite” of smart people who are good at probabilistic reasoning and score high on the cognitive reflection test and the IQ-correlated cognitive bias tests. These people would be more likely to be male, more likely to have at least undergrad-level math educat...

Decoupling vs Contextualizing