YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Murray

lines on the record: 109
first: 2020-10-28
most recent: 2020-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Doesn't mean the melody doesn't exist, it means that they are impaired in trying to hear that. Some people are colorblind. Doesn't mean color doesn't exist. It means they can't see it. I think there are differences in human beings in their ability. sense other ways of knowing besides the hyper rational ways in which I try to know things. and I have become convinced it is not that they're making stuff up. It is that they aren't making it up and the fact I can't see it is because I'm the equivalent of tone deaf or colorblind. And it's not my fault, but it is incumbent on me to do the best I can to understand what the melody is like and understand what the color red is like.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there is a God, we are like my dog trying to figure out what I'm doing when I'm running a regression equation. Okay The dog can look at me and he can try to relate that to something he can understand. He hasn't the slightest idea. And similarly, when people say, well, how can there be a God because if there were a God? That's sort of the level of just a lack of appreciation for the intellectual challenge of trying to get your head around some of these questions. I will also make one other observation, and this comes through my wife and the people I have been exposed to over the years through her. I think that there is in religion something equivalent to being tone deaf Some people cannot hear a melody.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, since I don't know directly what his... Said I can't comment on it. I can describe my own. Just a couple of observations One is that I have a much greater sense of mystery than I used to have about the universe. And I don't think that's made up. I think that contemplating all sorts of things that we see around us and that all at once to say that, ah, Everything that can be known is Be known by the human minds That becomes a little more implausible. Because Let's stipulate that there is a God. It is absolutely impossible for us to avoid anthropomorphizing that God. We have to think in terms of the frame of reference that we have and a God that lives outside of time, outside of history, that permeates everything is not possible for us to understand.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I predict that if you expose yourself to a fair amount of that material, You will have planted A different sensibility Do you good in years to come?”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the thing about this literature is that it's really smart. It's really subtle and thoughtful and smart. And so you ought to expose yourself to that. And then I can't give you a reading list right now, but I think it would be perfect to pick up readings in a variety of traditions that are the sort of the best that has been said and thought in each of those traditions, just so that you can be sure that when you reject religion you are doing it on the basis not of saying, I don't believe Bible stories anymore. Or whatever the equivalent is in Buddhism and Islam and the rest of that, it is, you were saying, no, I have given consideration to the reasons why some very thoughtful smart people do believe this. And with respect, I simply disagree with them. But you've got to give yourself the basis for coming to that conclusion.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose the simple answer is I'm becoming a closeted believer. But apart from that I'd say don't give up on a thoughtful consideration of these issues. You don't have to do it in the Christian framework. You can do it. A variety of frameworks, it would be one of the things I did not realize until I, just a little background here is that my wife is Is the Quaker by convincement? She came to this as an adult as well. She was like me. She was an agnostic in college and so forth. Through her, I've been exposed to a lot of really brilliant writing about a lot of really difficult issues that that doesn't require you to Read chapters about the resurrection or things like that, but they're talking about broader theological issues and sometimes not even in a Christian framework at all”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The resurgence of a more thoughtful way of thinking about religion, whether that takes the form of Christianity as we've known in the past, I don't know. But I think its vitality is out there.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have some friends who teach courses at places like Harvard that raise them, that are talking about religion specifically. They are jammed. Or if there is a public lecture on one of these issues, people are standing at the back of the hall. There is sort of, I think, a real, I don't know about the University of Texas. I suppose you have the University of Texas, you probably have some kids who are straight from the Bible Belt and other kids who are your over-educated intellectuals who think it's all nonsense, probably something in between. But certainly in the elite schools, I think that there is a real sense of here are all these important subjects we haven't been allowed to think about seriously. So I am not, I'm kind of optimistic about”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That these are ultimate issues that human beings really want to grapple with, starting with the ultimate question why is there something rather than nothing? And then going on into other questions about what are the foundations of human morality. Are we making all of this up? Is this all a matter of evolved tendencies that had survival value over the course of hundreds of millions of years of the evolution of species? Or is there something else My sense is that there is a resurgence of interest in those questions.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I call it the adolescence because I think intellectuals in the twentieth century were sort of like adolescents who have decided that their parents have made mistakes, that they didn't realize their parents aren't perfect, and they decide their parents are wrong about everything. And the rejection of religion, I think, was of that order, so it was not the case that in the twentieth century intellectuals carefully considered religion and rejected it. Religion became something that nobody smart complete in that anymore. And that progressed throughout the century. So that by the time I went to Harvard in 1960, 1961, It was just taken for grant givers in the air. If you're smart, you don't believe that stuff anymore. And the fact is”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excuse me, I'm gonna have to cough for a second. First place, don't write off Christianity quite yet and don't write off the other great religions quite yet either. I use the analogy, I think the first time I ever used it was in human accomplishment. The 20th century was kind of the adolescence of mankind. That the Enlightenment had delivered some body blows to some very old ways of looking at the world You had the Enlightenment and the primacy of reason. Then you had Darwin, who dealt a body blow to the understanding of how the biblical description of how the universe and the world were created. You had Relativism in all sorts of forms psychologically. Had the discovery of the subconscious, the unconscious. You had relativity in physics. Which spills over into the way you look about objective truth and all sorts of other things.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The importance of the truth as trumping everything else, the importance of civil discourse and all that, all sorts of things which you have professors who 25 years ago would have said this is the foundation, my moral foundation for the way I conduct my life and my profession, who now have backed away from that big time when it comes to their professional obligations. And I'm saying to myself Doesn't this also spill over into your The firmness, the persistence of your moral principles in other ways. So, I think a secular society It's not just that it's likely to be much less productive than the The West was previously. I think that It has a false sense of security that it can never fall back into the bad old days, a totalitarianism and the Barbarity of all kinds, we can fall back into the bad old days very easily.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the notion that rape is wrong, murder is wrong. They will always be wrong, they are irredeemably wrong, they can never be justified as human. know the Ten Commandments basically what is the basis for that belief If it is the nature of the universe, that's one thing. If you're saying we have breached this through human raceocination, That's a much weaker. A much weaker force to prop it up when times get tough. And I think that in all sorts of ways right now, I hope you don't ask me for a lot of specific examples because I'm not sure I can give them. But you see people backing off of what used to be very firm moral principles because it's increasingly unpopular or inconvenient or unfashionable to believe them. And the examples of backing off the principles of moral and social science of the search for truth and”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've undergone an evolution, by the way, since. The last 20 years, and I was kind of at the beginning of it when I finished human accomplishment in 2004, 2005, where I was not only convinced by that time that Religiosity, who was extremely important to the particularly Christian religiosity, extremely important to Western civilization and what had gone on. I was also beginning to think that secular humanism didn't have the staying power that it needs. And this is my question for the Steve Pinkers of the World. What is your Ground for your moral beliefs. What that's a question that is very hard to answer if you do not think that they are in no way given by God. And by God I don't mean a little old man sitting on the mountaintop within the clouds, I'm talking about a much more. Realistic concept of whatever a God might be.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's wrong to say it, whereas in my case they are saying that Dick Ernst and I said things in a bell curve we never said or subsequent to Dick's death that I've said things that I just simply never said and the idea of white supremacy or that it's okay for certain people to die is just nutty.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this has been happening to so many people for so long. I mean, It was going on when the bell curve came out, and that was 26 years ago that the Bell Current Curve came out. It wasn't at the same level of vitriol. It wasn't at the same level of sort of Completely quilling anybody's standing up for academic freedom. Time bell curve came out. You still had people who said this is a legitimate scientific inquiry. Now it's a I don't even think I'm the most egregious example of being misrepresented. What's even scarier is examples of people Who have made factually accurate statements about something involving race or gender? Nobody is saying that the fact was wrong, but They are saying that it shouldn't be said.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That my generation of social scientists grew up believing were absolutely inviolate, such as I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death you're right to say it, such as that if there is science you don't agree with, the answer to that is to have better science that refutes the bad science. And the idea of safe spaces of getting triggered, of being canceled because you say things which are factually true but are hateful or whatever. That is a sign in the social science of not just evidence, but Pervasive corruption A case of a culture having enormous effects not on the hard sciences but on the soft sciences. Although there are people working in the Google who will tell you that it's having effects in the hard sciences as well.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Culture that produces the English novel of the 19th century requires a fundamentally different sensibility from the cultural milieu in which the writers of today live. So there I think you've got a case that a society that has become decadent in some ways changes the milieu which impedes artistic accomplishment. Not sure I can say the same thing about scientific accomplishment, but I could certainly say it about social science accomplishment. Whereby what we are witnessing now in the social sciences. Is a collapse of the principles.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to some extent, you've gotten the sciences inevitable. In the arts, it's a different thing. There is no Reason why we still couldn't be composing great music in C major. It's not as if Beethoven and Brahms and Haydn and so forth wrote all the great music there was to be written there, but it's not going to happen. And it's not going to happen because the cultural milieu simply is. Not going to produce that kind of accomplishment. And suddenly you are not going to have Certain kinds of great literature written anymore because again of the cultural milieu the kind of”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's The decline in the rate of accomplishment In the sciences partly a function of Of maybe inevitable decline in certain fields. So that anatomy used to be a scientific subfield that had a lot going on with it, lots of lung. There's nothing to learn about human anatomy anymore. Contrast that with genetics where we are in a golden age and there's all sorts of things being discovered all the time. And so you have different fields at different stages of development. In the sciences, there is a number of fields that are extremely well developed. And there is only so many fundamental discoveries that you can make. You know, once you've discovered Newton's laws, yeah, you can then get quantum mechanics, but it's getting harder and harder to have basic new discoveries of things that have already been done.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the case that the example of Ross Method gives is actually going to the moon, which the United States did a long time ago, as opposed to having movies that spend vast sums of money in creating an utterly wonderful simulation of going to the moon. It's a real, the genius of the people who create these special effects is real. The artistry of what they do is real. It's a very different accomplishment from actually taking the Saturn V out on the launch pad and lighting that mother up and sending it to the”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“brushed out at the New York Times columnist wrote a book called, I guess the title is The Decadent Society. He's basically making the point that that's where we are now. And he makes the point as well that you can have a society that is decadent, that is still a very pleasant place to live And Rome in the Antonine period was still, at least if you had money, it was still a very pleasant place to live. And you can even have Certain kinds of accomplishment go on, but they tend to be more derivative. And”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Answer Olson said, well, there is one way. And that's to lose a total world war. And so he contrasts the economic recovery of Japan and Germany with the economic recoveries of England and France after World War II. And he says, what's the difference? Germany and Japan had no choice but to start over from scratch. And the French and the British were not required to do the same thing, and Germany and Japan just cruised right on passed within a few years.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We still have a subsidy for sugar farmers in the United States, which leads Americans into a situation where they're paying twice the world price for sugar This benefits a very small number of sugar farmers. Why can't you get rid of it? Because you can't get the entire nation excited about paying twice the world price for sugar, but the sugar farmers are really, really excited about keeping their sugar subsidy. And so every time Congress ties to repeal it, you have this very effective, powerful lobbying thing go into operation in Washington and they manage to convince enough people to keep it that it never goes away. Okay, take the sugar subsidy, multiply that 500 times a thousand times, and you have institutions that really can't get much done. Does that remind you of any institutions in the United States today, such as the CDC and so forth?”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people who are not familiar with institutional sclerosis, this is the contribution of Mansur Olsen, an economist who wrote a couple of seminal books back in the 1960s and 70s. Which said, Look, what happens with any society is that over time you have Sclerotic institutions because it's like barnacles in a boat that slow it down. In the case of institutions it is that special interests get things worked out to their advantage so they want to keep it that way and then another special interest gets another twist in the law or whatever and over time you get hundreds of these inefficiencies, these barriers that get put up. It's very, very hard to get rid of them. I'll give you the classic example is the sugar subsidy in the United States.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oil paints made a difference. Oil paints made things possible that weren't possible before, but mainly perspective. You know, three dimensional recreation of three dimensional spaces on a two-dimensional canvas was a huge new. On which people could build. And the other thing was a gradual development of the scientific method, which took a long time. But every step in that just opened up a new increment to start building that foundation and that as a foundation got built it became easier to build upon that and you had the outpouring of the Renaissance. The Enlightenment did not rescue Europe from Christianity. I remind you the Enlightenment didn't come along until the 18th century. An awful lot had happened before the 18th century. Things were really at a very high velocity at the time that the Enlightenment occurred.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why did it last so long? Well, the finest didn't come along until what? Now I used to know this. It's around the end of the first millennium, all right? So until then you had a collapse of all sorts of things. Civilized apparatus The Roman Roads, the aqueducts, the functioning cities, a lot of that went away, so you had a life that was Very fragmented, very Not many universities, except a few in Italy. They were very rudimentary, and they didn't come along until. The Middle Ages So there wasn't really any Foundation on which to build. Of the universities started to provide a little place to stand for some kinds of things to get started. You had specific inventions that had a huge effect Why did you get this outpouring of art? Great art in the 14th century”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you have to distinguish between two periods of Christianity. Christianity started out as a very communal, almost communistic religion, people living together in common, sharing things in common. And also it put huge emphasis on the world to come. And for centuries, This is why you had. So popular to have hermits and monasteries and so forth. This life is the preparation for the next And it's unimportant in a way. And that's where Aquinas was so important because he flipped that and said no using this life to accomplish these great things is pleasing to God. That was a huge change. It probably was a major factor in changing the cultural setting for the Renaissance.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The theological leaders sort of looked the other way. But it was never enthusiastically embraced by the theology, and they just allowed a lot of more freedom at some points in history than they did at others. But it's a very different environment for fostering individual accomplishment. Islamic and Taoist and Buddhist outlooks on life versus Christian. And I'm not saying this in As a believer in a religious tradition, I'm talking about its consequences culturally for certain kinds of accomplishments.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have his creations understood so that to explore the universe and the workings of the universe is a way of expressing your love of God and God himself is enthusiastic about this. Contrast that with Islam in its, certainly its earlier forms whereby it is blasphemous to explore. Mysteries of the universe At this point, whenever I start to talk about Islam, then people say yes, but you had the center of scientific development was in Baghdad and in the Middle East for centuries and in Spain when Spain was under Islam. Do discuss that somewhat in. human accomplishment. The short story being that basically”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was a sense of purpose in life. And here I think Christianity's role in the West is just crucial. In a time of secularization, I don't think that the generations today studying history have any idea what a huge cultural force Christianity was in the West and in Europe. And one of the ways in which it It fostered so much accomplishment was Not the Protestant Reformation, which played a role. I mean, the Protestant Reformation emphasized the individualism even more. But it goes back to Thomas Aquinas. And Thomas Aquinas, said very powerfully in his theology, drawing a lot from Aristotle as well as Christianity, that it is pleasing to God.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Society throughout all the invasions of the Manchurians and this and that and the other thing is an incredibly long lived civilization and it functioned at a very high level for a very long time even though at the top in the politics things were unsettled they were extremely stable within the country. One of the costs of that Is that people were more willing to subordinate their own interest to others in the family, especially the family ties were very tight and that The modern West where individualism became very strong and it was okay to walk away from your family and to devote yourself to your passion. When you have that kind of autonomy, You are more. Have better chance of pursuing excellence in the field. You aren't tied down in any way. And the other thing that the West had That East Asia did not have in the same form, but”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of musical structure, theory of harmony that others could feast on for the next hundred years. And that's true both in the sciences and in the arts. You have great novelists in the country. That novelist inspires other novelists. That's an important feature. Read the book more recently than I have. What else do I say is important? Oh, there's the thing about purpose and autonomy, which Haven't gone into, but Here's where it's interesting. And I say East Asia instead of South Asia because I don't know as much about South Asia as I know about East Asia. But I think probably A lot of what applies to East Asia applies to South Asia. You had in China this incredibly stable.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's where you're asking me a question I could have answered a lot better 15 years ago when I was working on the book than I can now Human capital, here's some things that can't be very easily. It can't be human capital because the human capital in Florence fifty years before the Renaissance was basically the same as the human capital in Florence during the Renaissance. Models make a huge difference. So that you get Socrates and but Socrates Piquet's Plato and Plato bequets Aristotle. He's got great models. You have in music Bach and some of the other great composers, the Baroque, and they established this very rich”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly it's an artifact because the world has usually been at war. It's been much more common to have periods of war than periods of peace. Well, I'm in danger here of speculating in a way that I didn't in the book as far as I can remember. It's possible that you have a Relationship between a country that is fighting a certain kind of war. Wars of expansion, wars, which is part of a culture which is very vital and alive and aggressive and confident. Is a way that Toynbee characterizes a society on the rise, a civilization that is in the full flush of growing is also likely to be a not very good neighbor to the countries around it. That goes under the category of speculation that you should not take to the bank. But there's probably some relationship.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That kind of accomplishment translates, it generalizes. That's why I want more people to do it. Also, that's where I learned what I love to do. It turns out I love to play with data. To try to make sense of patterns in numbers. And I didn't know that when I went to Thailand.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had become comfortable in an environment where I had been utterly convinced I could never be comfortable, and an environment in which I eagerly sought to escape, I couldn't, without losing my pride, go home, but I really wanted to. Okay, so what good is that? Subsequently any time I'd been thrown into a really strange environment, I've been able to look back in my own life experience and say, that's okay. You can deal with this. And that's what I mean by having three years later, I was out of state in Thailand, six years altogether, but by three years later, I'd be going down a street in Bangkok. And I was just absolutely cocky at that point. I understood everything that was going on around me. I was completely at home.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spoke the language sort of. They gave pretty good training in peace corps training. But the social cues. The social cues are such that if you walk down the street in the United States, you know what's going on around you. You walk down a street in rural Thailand in your first days there, you have the least idea what's going on and it's very tiring. And I prided myself on loving every kind of cuisine, didn't like typhoon. And it just went on. I was miserable. But I still remember the day I was in the back of a pickup truck. And we were heading out to a village. We were doing building wells and privies was the project. And the sun was rising and the mist was coming up over the paddies. And I said, you know, this isn't so bad. And I had...”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me illustrate it with the early days in Thailand. I was assigned when I first got there to a town called Lampang, which is in the northern part of the country, and I didn't know it at the time I was being assigned to one of the Wonderful assignments out of Get. It's just gorgeous up there. I was the only male furang foreigner in the entire province except for an elderly French priest. and I had culture shocked. Just like the classic case, I was miserable. I would be walking down the street of Lampang, and I would just be exhausted because”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In jerking yourself away from your comfort zone, and the two best ways to do that are to go into the military if you're an undergraduate, or for that matter, to On an airplane with a one way ticket. Off the other end and make a living in that strange country for a couple of years. Don't be a backpacker hanging out with the expats. Get a job teaching English or tending bar or whatever and get to know another Really alien country. You can't go to London and Paris and do this. You can go to Bangladesh. You can go to Thailand the way I did. You can go to Nigeria. You've got to You've got to see what's out there before you can decide how you want to spend your life. Once you start something you want to do, that's the point at which you go into high gear and pursuing that. Thank you for asking for that clarification”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you've caught me in a way, in a contradiction there. I did say pursuing the thing you love and learning what you love. So in your 20s, what you don't want to do. To go directly to law school Above all else from undergraduate. Actually, you don't want to go to graduate school at all because you are 20 years old, 22 years old if you're graduating perhaps. You've proved one thing in life. You're good in the classroom. That's your comfort zone. Not only have you proved already you can deal with that environment, it's quite possible that you have never dealt with any other environment in your life. You've gone to good elementary and secondary schools, you've gone to a good college, all your life. You've been one of the smart people. You haven't the least idea what's out there in terms of the different options in life. And you've got to be proactive.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ele Wilson, the biologist has a striking paragraph in this regard. He says if you want to be a top scientist, not just a good one, but a top scientist, you've got 40 hours a week that you will spend on your teaching and ordinary university duties, and then you will have another 15 hours that you will spend on this. He says, and then you'll have another 15 hours you spend on that. And at the end of the paragraph, he's outlined basically an 80-hour week. And he said, this is just sort of basic. You aren't going to get there from here unless you're willing to do that. And in my experience, that's the answer. The people who rise to the top work their asses off. Hardly anybody”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm thinking about when people are looking for jobs at the American Enterprise Institute or other places and the people who are interviewing them come back and report to me and they say this person's really worried about the vacation days and then are they going to be asked to work late and so forth and part of what I go into in the curmudgeon's guide, which we may be talking about later, is You're 20 years old. What do you want a balanced life for? In your 20s is the time you should be going flat out in pursuit of what you love to do and finding out what you love to do. But you shouldn't be looking to have balance. And if you want to be at the top of your field.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to think of First place, you'd have to give me an example of who did it that way so that I could react to it because anybody that comes to mind Did work really, really, really hard. And I have to say that this is one of the things that I think is way underrated right now, where there is a tendency for people to want to have a balanced life. I'm always struck when I I am talking to people your age. You're what? Your 20s? Are two zero zero.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he also worked fanatically hard. Are there any other common themes in these people? I guess that. Know is I'm thinking about literature and the great writers And you have everything from the very stayed trollop writing his 2,500 words every morning and then stopping and starting a new book the same day finished a previous one and then you have Tolstoy who was as weird as they get in his old age. They're all over the lot. You can't say much as a generalization.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who very stayed looked like a prosperous German middle class person. He was a genius. So you've got all of these ranges of personalities. Hard work is the common theme. There is no such thing as the person who was really great in their field who sort of did it with their left hand while they were or waited for the muse. The thing that ties everybody together, I'm not the first person to observe this. Other historians who've looked at genius have noted the same thing. Incredibly hard work over very long periods of time, their whole lives, six, seven days a week. And that includes, by the way, Mozart. Mozart is one of the people that a lot of He has the reputation of having tossed off these things while writing one piece of music while he was playing another. The story is about Mozart and his incredible facility with music are legendary.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But not very many people are, and he sort of set the standard of the artist genius who has no time for ordinary people and don't get on his way because he has to express himself. In his case, it was justified. Unfortunately, everybody who came after him thought, oh, well, this is the way you're supposed to act. Contrast that with Bach. Number three right after Mozart and Beethoven, and I have lots of people who say that's ridiculous. He should be number one. He created not just spectacularly wonderful music, he created an incredible oeuvre of it. I mean, he was writing a cantata every week for the church in which he played. And he also cited something like 22 children. He was this German family man with one woman with his wife. And he was these classic German burger.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all over the lot in terms of personality. You have lots of stories about the mad genius and you have lots of people who are under the impression that when you get a really super high IQ, for example, you become pretty odd and don't have many interpersonal skills and so forth. That's actually an illusion. You notice the brilliant people who are also oddballs. You don't notice the people who are brilliant but are oddballs. And so in music, You have the contrast between Beethoven and Bach. Beethoven, who was phenomenal, he's tied with Mozart in the music inventory, not surprisingly. But he also acted as if he were God's gift to the world. In his case he was right, he was God's gift.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, if you think about Newton and about Einstein and their miraculous years, the different things they were doing did feed into each other in a lot of ways. So you can see that if you had somebody at the peak of his powers and he was dealing with one important thing which also required him to do another important thing or look at another important thing, you can see that there would just be a burst there. Also, it's mysterious, and that's part of the answer. These things just come out of nowhere in some cases and who knows how.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I'm not comparing to Newton's miraculous year, but in my In my 40s, I was clearly doing my best stuff in terms of sort of a combination of youth and experience. And that fits in with what they have found with age distributions. So age is one thing. It's very unlikely you're going to have a miraculous year in your 70s.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source