#80 - Wrestling With Our Social Taboos: A Dialogue with Charles Murray

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Charles Murray about statistics, cognitive abilities, and social-political issues. They begin by providing a statistical overview of the bell curve, standard deviations, and the overlap of group mean averages. They discuss meta analyses and factor analyses and why they are important for IQ data. They also mention g and its importance for cognitive abilities. They provide definitions of terms such as race, ethnicity, and populations along with genetic concepts such as SNPs, Alleles, and Polygenetic Index scores. They outline the data on race and IQ and question whether it is important to even study group differences between races. They talk about the current social ideology and contributions to these conversations. They also mention the gene-environment interactions, how some groups use data for nefarious reasons, and many other topics.

Charles Murray is the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He holds a BA in History from Harvard University and a PhD in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been involved with the Peace Corps and United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He is the author of numerous books, including, The Bell Curve, Coming Apart, Human Diversity, and Facing Reality. You can find some of his work at his website.          Twitter: @charlesmurray

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