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

  1. “Part of it is if you are at a very productive party of your life, it spills over. And that productive part of your life is probably going to be Well, if you're a hard scientist, if you're a mathematician, it may be in your 20s. All right, there are an awful lot of great mathematicians and everything that they did that was important they did by the age of 26. Because if you're operating at the far end of mathematics, you need every single neuron clicking at full force, and you start to lose them. And if you're in a something like the soft sciences or policy like I am, The nice thing is that you actually, first place, you don't need that many brain cells to be a decent social scientist compared to being a mathematician. And also, though, judgment and experience works into it. So whereas judgment and experience is of no help whatsoever to a mathematician, it's of great help if you're dealing with issues of history and public policy and so forth. So you can be in the 40s and 50s, but in my own case,”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Pretty much one chapter at a time. Because one thing would lead to another For example, I've realized that if I'm going to talk about this way of measuring stuff using the historiometric method, that I need to describe to my readers what these distributions of things look like. And then I started to find out about the Latka curve, whereby with great accomplishment it is not a bell curve at all. It is a very, very left skewed curve. Here's the example I ended up using in golf. In golf you will have a lot of people who win one tournament and the number of people who win two tournaments in professional golf just plunges. The number of people who win three, you're getting down towards the bottom. And when you get out to the grades, they are all by themselves at the end. That's true in almost every field of human excellence. Well, all of that was new to me. I didn't know that when I started writing the book.”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Personally, and the analogy that comes to mind is the guy who was a fine sculpture and he asked, how do you do it? How do you make a sculpture of a horse? And he says, you have this block of wood and you cut away everything that isn't a horse. And when I'm doing a book, I have this idea in my head of what it ought to look like, a very vague idea, and I cut away everything that doesn't look like what I hoped it would be.”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “For a while, I have a lot of stuff in my head. So my wife would say as I was finishing human accomplishment, that for a few shining moments there you knew everything. But then, of course, you start to forget it all immediately. As I went back to the book today to remind myself, I found myself in the position of reading a passage and saying, that's really interesting because I completely forgotten that was in there. Anyway, the answer is I go about this stuff very, very...”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The definitive catalog of the important figures in science took me seventeen ten hour days at the Hood College Library, which is about twenty miles away from me to do that one source. So in one sense I had to do an awful lot of research beforehand. But then when I started out I did what I always do, which is I get interested in some particular aspect and I dig into that. And I write, and then I go on to another topic, and there's no particular rhyme or reason to it. It's very idiosyncratic.”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Are going to end up spending a lot more time on Beethoven than you do on Profiev. And the reason you're going to do it is to explain his music, Beethoven's music, takes more time. And he looms larger in the story of music. The same thing goes with science that Einstein gets a lot of space. Same thing goes with the arts. So in order to accumulate inventories, and I have something like 16 or 18 of them, I have one for Western literature. I have one for Indian literature too. And for Indian philosophy and for Chinese art, and you know, I just had a whole bunch of separate inventories. Well, I spent two years basically doing nothing but going through these indexes of books and writing down the data. There was a book called a set of books called the Dictionary. A scientific biography. It's a wonderful resource in that it is supposed to be”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well I don't do it the way a lot of people do. A lot of people pretty much map out the book ahead of time. And they know which chapters are going to follow, which chapters. And so they go ahead and do a lot of their research and then they start to write. Human accomplishment was different from me because, in one sense, I couldn't start writing until I had done a lot of this historiometric research. People who have not read the book should know that I establish inventories of events and inventories of people in the arts and sciences. And I use a technique that's quite well established. It's been around for a long time. whereby you go to the index of a book and you count up the number of pages that a given person is referenced. And the logic behind it is this, that if you are writing a history of music,”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “A lot of times while I was writing it, I wondered that myself. It was an incredibly difficult book to write. The short answer is that back in the 1980s, mid-1980s, I read a book by Daniel Porston called The Discoverers, I think it was. And Borst, you know, when I picked it up, I thought it was going to lay out this panorama of human accomplishment over the centuries. And it was really just a set of many biographies of a lot of major sciences and so forth. And there wasn't anything wrong with that, but it's not what I wanted to read. I wanted to see the whole thing. A panorama. And as has been the case with other books I've written, I had a book I wanted to read and the way to do that was to write it. And so I set off on writing this. And it was a five-year task altogether. Very intense five years.”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I was not only convinced by that time that religiosity was extremely important to the particular 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.”

    2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source