Charles Murray
Article
Charles Murray is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 14, 2021 and January 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “aligned himself with Charles Murray”; “The only public figure I can think of in the southeast quadrant with me is Charles Murray”; “a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve”. It most often appears alongside New York Times, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 14, 2021
- Last seen: January 15, 2025
Appears In
- Statement on New York Times Article
- Book Review: The Cult Of Smart
- How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn’s National IQ Estimates
Related Pages
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- New York Times (2 shared issues)
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- Silicon Valley (2 shared issues)
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- The Bell Curve (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- American education (1 shared issues)
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- Aporia (1 shared issues)
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- Appalachian (1 shared issues)
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- Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (1 shared issues)
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- artificial intelligence (1 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten (1 shared issues)
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- Baby Einstein (1 shared issues)
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- Bezoses (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
1. The article tries to connect me to Charles Murray and The Bell Curve, saying:
In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and IQ in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
Inline links: aligned himself with Charles Murray
This is true only insofar as I once expressed agreement with an unrelated position of Charles Murray’s, where he thinks that telling poor people “learn to code” is not a compassionate or sufficient response for dealing with poverty, and that we need to act more decisively by providing poor people with a stable income. You can read the full post involved by following the link, but the paragraph that mentions Murray is:
Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?
If you take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief! This finding on its own doesn’t disprove a genetic component to racial IQ gaps. But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%. Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%), so this doesn’t refute anyone in particular. But it’s consistent with what both sides of the debate say, and a natural prediction of the environmentalist position.