That time Lex Fridman Promoted Race Science §

…during an interview with Sam Altman §

Lex Fridman is a podcaster who generally covers tech but has been in the news recently for interviewing Donald Trump. During a section about ChatGPT and misinformation about one hour and fifty four minutes into his interview with Sam Altman, Fridman decides to use race science as an example of “truth” that might be best left unsaid.

There could be truths that are harmful in their truth. I don’t know… group differences in IQ. There you go. Scientific work that when spoken, might do more harm. You ask GPT that, would GPT tell you? There’s books written on this that are rigorous, scientifically, but are very uncomfortable and probably not productive in any sense…but maybe are.

Fridman doesn’t mention any books or authors by name, leaving the listener to wonder what exactly he’s referring to. However, a hint can be seen in his 2022 interview with psychologist Richard Haier.

In it, Haier appears to advocate for eugenics in response to a question about The Bell Curve’s chapter on race from a producer for Ted Koppel’s show:

Haier: She said, “What would you say if you were on TV?” And I said, “Well, what I would say is that it’s not at all clear if there’s any genetic component to intelligence, any differences, but if there were a strong genetic component, that would be a good thing.”

And you know, complete silence on the other end of the phone.

And she said, “Well, what do you mean?”

And I said, “Well, the more genetic any difference is the more it’s biological. And if it’s biological, we can figure out how to fix it.”

Fridman: I see, that’s interesting.

Haier: She said, “Would you say that on television?”

Fridman: Yes.

Haier: I said, no. And so that was the end of that.

Haier serves at the editor in chief of the Intelligence, a scientific journal. Intelligence’s whose board includes Gerhard Meisenberg and Richard Lynn, two researchers closely tied to Mankind Quarterly, a fringe pro-eugenics journal funded by the SPLC-designated hate group Pioneer Fund. In response to criticism, Haier claimed that “sunlight and by inclusion” is the best way to deal with race scientists holding white supremacist views.

Haier was also a signatory of Linda Gottfredson’s controversial 1994 editorial Mainstream Science on Intelligence that promoted the view that black people are genetically predisposed to have lower IQs. Despite heavy criticism and its own ties to the Pioneer Fund, several researchers have recently cited Mainstream Intelligence in academic papers about artificial intelligence. I have previously discovered and written about these links between AI and race science and consider Lex Fridman’s embracing of it as yet another piece of evidence that the field has an under-discussed race problem.