# 227: Knowing the Mind, with Steven Laureys

1. “Meditation is training the mind to see past the illusions of self,“ according to Sam, but I think the opposite is true: “meditation is training the mind to believe the illusion of no self.”

2. “Bringing happiness and contentment into the marriage is the correct way to get it out of the marriage.” Sam’s wisdom is that your center of gravity in a relationship should be over your own two feet and not leaning into the other persons space.

3. Sam makes an admission which I found surprising, because it revealed that there is a lot less daylight between him and me on the question of consciousness. Previously, I had assumed he was deterministic. But in fact he admits that the nature of consciousness is so poorly understood that it would be an act of intellectual arrogance (and a leap of non-faith) to presume to know what happens when we die.

#225 - Republic of Lies

Listen, it's getting pretty hard to continue to sit quietly in a country that seems now to be almost held hostage by the insane, inane, flatulent, fraudulent orange-painted orangutan now spreading lies and conspiracies and obstructionism in his graceless ejection from the White House.

Sam is somewhat less dismayed by and dismissive of Trump and his supporters than I am... but not by much. Anyway, he's so eloquent and reasoned that it's cathartic to listen to him, it really is.

I'm recommending this particular podcast to everyone I know: it's short, it's to the point, and it doesn't flinch from the hard realities of the moment.

Let me close with this wish: to all of you countrymen intelligent enough to see through the bullshit, let us think long and hard about Sam's admonition that we need to forgive some 70 million of our compatriots for stress-testing our democracy to the careless lengths that they have when they voted an inexcusable second time for this case study in human failings.

#222, A Pandemic of Incompetence with Nicholas Christakis

This episode has to be one of the more immediately useful and informative of Sam's podcasts. Perhaps not as philosophical or entertaining as others, but it is great to listen to an actual expert talk about this pandemic based on experience and science, as opposed to what we usually get from all media, news and social--ie. a bunch of bloviating politicians telling us their spins.

So, yeah. This is one of the few episodes I'm going to try to get my family to listen to because it covers things like whether you can get COVID from restaurant food, or how long you should self-quarantine for before visiting someone. And they also give a peek into what 2021 and 2022 are probably going to look like.

Making Sense #217, with Michael McWhorter (Also a word on #216)

The Sam Harris podcast with Michael McWhorter, covers a lot of old ground, but still there are four interesting points brought up:

1: Michael says the one thing we have to do to stop evangelical anti-racists from bullying you for not being as "woke" as them is to "punch them in the nose." Metaphotically. Like they were just some shark trying to bite you in the ocean. In other words, just tell them “no, I am not a racist, even though I disagree with you,” and move on. They might still try to take a bite or two out of you, but just stand firm, keep your spine stiff and your back straight and don’t let them think they are getting a concession out of you. And don’t try to argue with them because you can’t reason with a zealot.

2: The new religion of antiracism depends upon Black people exalting race as the central dominant thing about their identity. In my book, that makes them racists.

3: The anti-racist sector is so committed to their religion that they will lash themselves to it and go down with the ship of this country rather than make any concessions. So they don't share the goal of many of us of defeating Trump in November. Just as, in 1994, they celebrated the "not guilty" verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, even though they all knew he was guilty, and that the verdict meant turning an obvious murderer loose on society.

4: We need to stop allowing people to claim that every difference between black and white people currently in our country is the direct result of active racism. Every time a black guy doesn’t get a job, every time a black girl doesn’t get in a college, every time a black criminal is killed resisting arrest, it means racism to them. And of course, since they know that nothing bad can happen to a black person without it being a white person's fault, that means they are all--you guessed it--racists (my words, not Sam's of Michael's).

BRIEF NOTE ON #216 WITH GRAEME WOOD
The previous podcast covered a lot of the same themes as #217, and also re-capped themes Sam has espoused earlier. There wasn't much in the way of new information given out in the podcast, and I don't have much to say about it. One recurring theme that crops up again here is that the media jumped all over the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and made him out to be a racist and who-know-what-else, but none of those conclusions are supported by known facts. In other words, this just looks like another woke leftist's rush to judgment.

A Short Review of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(Note: this review is posted here only because it pertains to a work of fiction which I imagine most followers of Sam are naturally inclined to appreciate.)

It didn't change my life, the way everyone said it was going to. I guess if I'd read it when I was 15 I might have felt differently. Certainly it isn't fair to judge a book that was ground-breaking in 1961 with the criticism that it has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is no longer possible to read it with innocent and unjaded eyes.

It's a complex and deeply flawed work of unexpected genius. There are moments in the book when Heller's prose flows out elegantly and magnificent, and there are moments in the book when he is painting a piercingly accurate snapshot of a man's soul... and then there are far more moments in the book when he is romping about, erratic and boisterous like a Mad Magazine writer on crack.

There are also a ton of repetitions of the above. I suppose the latter was part of his grand scheme to drive home one of the central themes of the book: the obdurate and unavoidable stupidity of mankind, even during what we now whitewash over in awe-hushed tones of heroic adulation as "the last good war" fought by "the greatest generation."

This is a thinking man's book, a philosophical, historic book. It is a book for people who are ready to have their benignly Amerocentric world-view stress-tested. It is not a book for people who are looking for touching portrayals of interesting relationships.

View all my reviews

Political aside: NOVEMBER MANIFESTO

NOVEMBER MANIFESTO

Charles Joseph Albert



We all know people whom we otherwise admire with whom we disagree on political questions such as whether government should be bigger or smaller, or whether healthcare is a right or a privilege, or even whether the recent climate change is anthropogenic or natural in origin. It is likely that that one’s beliefs on these sorts of issues come from fundamental moral convictions: a conservative mentality seems to be linked to a reverence for law and order, and a liberal world view is correlated with an aspiration for fairness. In any case, both inclinations are moral, and valid, and important to the well-being of any country.

However, we also know that throughout human history, there have been political issues in which one side clearly holds moral superiority. We can all, conservatives and liberals alike, agree that Stalin was not justified in starving to death entire peoples in Soviet Russia. We concur that Pol Pot was indefensible in butchering over a million Cambodians. We can recognize the odiousness of James Henry Hammond’s promotion of slavery in America. These people are understood to be moral failures, their positions are abnegations of the most basic human rights.

I want to distinguish between the more weighty moral questions and the mere differences of political opinion because in this time of political hyperbole and extreme partisanship, we seem to be often conflating the two. This is a mistake. We need recognize the absolute necessity of embracing and celebrating divergent political opinions: this is a fundamental strength of democracy. But we should also recognize and condemn immoral attacks on the values that had once made America great.

There has been a steady current criticism of President Trump in the liberal media since even before he took office, with much lamenting over his cronyism, his pettiness, his sexual immorality. And yet many people of good faith found they could support the man despite these personality flaws.

However, we soon learned that Trump’s flaws went deeper than mere personality. The Trump presidency has, to my count, crossed five moral lines in the sand--any one of which should have been sufficient for all Americans of good faith to recognize as an unforgivable failure, a complete and unarguable disqualification to be President:

1. Erosions of Democracy
Trump’s embrace of Russian interference and his subsequent obstructions of the Mueller investigation should have been enough to get him impeached, and surely would have were it not for an appalling display of party over country by the Republican Party.

The conclusions of Part 2 of the Report are very clear: Trump obstructed, he withheld information, and he directed his staff to break the law. Mueller concluded by pointing out that he didn’t have the authority to judge the criminality of Trump’s actions, urged Congress to act. But the Republican controlled Senate made sure that didn’t happen.

However, even the appalling complicity of Mitch McConnel couldn’t protect Trump from his own fully documented attempts to instigate a deceitful Ukrainian investigation into Joe Biden--at the expense of our relationship with that critical political ally--was enough to get him, rightfully, impeached. It should have been enough to get him removed from office, but once again, the Republicans and McConnell rushed to his indefensible defense.

Currently, the cuts and reductions at the Post Office by Trump’s allies come at the expense of the greater population--as we have seen in countless recent stories of delayed deliveries and lost mail--and have as the principal beneficiary only Trump. If his mnuchen, Steve Minion, had just been able to get away with the sabotage, Trump would have won bragging rights for the elimination of a government-subsidized program that is the only means of delivery for many rural communities. He would also get revenge on one of his enemies, Jeff Bezos. But most importantly, as he has admitted himself in a rare and ill-advised moment of candor, he gets to suppress mail-in votes.

2. Asylum
Every civilized country in the world allows asylum-seekers entry into their borders. To refuse to allow refugees in is, for many, a death sentence. Good people may differ on whether a particular immigrant family’s story is valid. But the fact is irrefutable that many who have been turned away by Trump’s closing of the southern border are now dead. This is as fundamentally unAmerican as any evil imaginable. Indeed, Trump’s anti-abortion supporters, who have claimed a higher moral ground for his packing of the courts with “right to life” candidates, are completely kneecapped by this act alone.

Less immediately life–or-death but equally immoral was the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents, which is universally understood to cause long-term harm. Thousands of children brought here to legally apply for protection at our borders have been immediately stripped from their families and put into the custodianship of an indifferent and inept bureaucracy, for no better reason than discouraging future refugee families.

3. COVID-19
Trump’s inept and callous initial response to COVID-19 has resulted in the avoidable death of tens of thousands more Americans than if we’d had a competent and intelligent president. In those first few weeks, his leadership offered nothing more than denial of science, magical thinking, and more concern for his reelection chances than for the welfare of others.

In May 2018 he disbanded the federal pandemic team. In January 2020 he refused to act even as other countries and even US states like California began to create response protocols. By the end of February the federal government had still done nothing, and Trump was promising his base that it was less dangerous than the flu and would go away “like magic.” Meanwhile, California put together an entire shelter-in-place program. All through the spring, he continued to peddle quack remedies and urge people to rebel against state governments who were actually trying to combat the spread. In the pinnacle of callousness, he even held the rally in Tulsa, driving infection rates up 200%.

Let’s compare the death rate in California to that of the nation. This is the most conservative approach I know to calculating the excess number of deaths due to Trump's ineptitude, the inexcusable negligence of his handlers, and the unbelievable gullibility of his supporters.

California currently has 30 deaths per 100,000 population. If the entire country’s COVID response had been managed by an equally competent administration, there would be fewer than 99,000 total deaths, instead of over 180,000 actual. This is ignoring how many fewer would be dead in California if there had been any competence in Washington. And it means that the blood of over 80,000 is on the hands of Trump and everyone reprehensible enough to still be supporting him.

4. Denial of Reality
Even before Trump was a candidate, his birtherism should have been a red flag clearly signaling his unfitness for the highest office in the land. And his insistence that Hillary Clinton deserved to be “locked up” for her emails or for Benghazi, despite lacking any evidence to support those claims, was yet another indication that this man was unfit for office. After all, he would be in charge of the Justice Department.

The president must be the leading defender of the constitution and the rule of law. Trump has instead demonstrated a complete disregard or even ignorance of it. The excuse offered by his supporters is that “all politician lie,” but the Trump administration has elevated alternate facts such a pitch as has never before been seen. Even the most cursory glance into the Trump record on lying yields an embarrassment of data that should blanch the soul of even the most ostrich-like partisan.

History will not judge kindly this country’s dangerous dip into Nerovian levels of self-delusion. Trump’s inability to grasp reality in all questions of national interest--health science, economics, diplomacy… even meteorology--could not any more clearly indicate his complete lack of fitness for his post.

5. International Standing
During Trump’s campaign for president, he often claimed that the United States had become a laughing stock in the world, that the shameful legacy of Obama was that we were bullied by allies and adversaries alike. He promised to replace the Iran nuclear deal with something more advantageous to America, and to deal more firmly with the nuclear threat of North Korea. He has failed miserably. The entire world is now closer to nuclear war than it has ever been. But he has vindicated his “laughing stock” claim, for it is now impossible to find a country anywhere in the world which still respects the leadership of United States. Trump has made us irrelevant in many international meetings.

It is not immoral to allow America to fade into international irrelevance… except that the mendacious and authoritarian regime of China is the only other superpower. And the murderous thugs of the Putin regime to continue to destabilize democracies around the globe. And it is immoral to lack concern for the fate of humanity outside of the US borders. And so is the inability to recognize that injustice anywhere is equivalent to injustice everywhere.

So there you have it. Five primary reasons why it is unAmerican to support Trump in 2020. I have not mentioned his unconstitutional attacks on peaceful protesters, his hundreds of unconstitutional instructions to his staff which were only aborted because they refused to carry them out, or any of the other signs that the man is the least fit President in this country’s history. It is conceivable that, with the right spin, some of that might be overlooked.

But these five iron-clad reasons that every true American must vote for Biden in November cannot be hand-waived away. Only lamentable ignorance or an amoral hyper-partisanship can do that.

Either way, may the historians of the future have mercy on your damaged soul.

# 212, with Kathryn Paige Harden

Sam initially asked Kathryn to explain to the audience why they were even talking; she said her article in Vox critical of Sam's interview with Charles Murray offended him in the way she didn’t expect. And then his latest interview #211 with Robert Plomin made it sound like he thought school was irrelevant because intelligence was predetermined by genetics, and she was provoked by that and responded.

Sam then claims a central error she made was to say that Murray says MOST of the difference in IQ testing between whites and blacks is due to genetics.

He’s confused. The article never said that. (Here it is: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/harden/files/2018/10/Charles-Murray-is-once-again-peddling-junk-science-about-race-and-IQ-Vox.pdf)

But why does he even split that hair? He and Murray both said that it is inevitable that SOME of the IQ testing difference must be due to genetics. So by definition, he has committed himself to a racist conclusion. After all, it is the very definition of racism to say that some races are more intelligent than others. I'm not sure how he thinks he has dodged that bullet.

Here is my understanding of the “default hypothesis” that Sam and Charles had framed:
A. Intelligence is a thing and IQ tests measure some aspect of it
B. Genes play a role in intelligence
C. Some of the IQ differences between groups is due to genetics

I was surprised that Kathryn pushed back even on this hypothesis. And she asks the same question that Sam asked Charles, “why would anybody want to discuss the possibilty that a genetic test may someday prove that one group is inferior to another?” and she pushes back a little harder on that, too: it’s insulting, it shows your prior prejudices, and in the infinite space of possibilities, it speaks poorly of you to choose to focus on that.

Sam makes a very strange point which I think he doesn’t realize works against him when he says that any lover of pure statistics could divide the population up into any random group and then measure their differences. He gives a silly example: people who love the Yankees versus people who love the White Sox. Test for average genetic differences between those two groups, he says, and you will assuredly find differences. But, he concludes, “it fucking doesn’t matter.“

So why do it? And why come to the defense of someone who did, if he chose to do it in an insulting way that perpetuates a racist narrative? Unless you had some kind of underlying socio-political motivation, which Charles frankly admits that he does. He wants to cut affirmative action and welfare. He thinks the former cheapens the achievement of "black people at Harvard" and may even harm the ones who find themselves in over their heads. And he thinks the latter is creating a class of less-gifted dependants who are flooding the country with their lower-G babies (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/).

So this is my biggest problem with Charles, and my reason this is one of the rare times I don't agree with Sam. He doesn't recognize that, regardless of the validity of the science Charles refers to, it is being marshaled for a political end that the science alone doesn't support. It doesn’t help Charles is funded by right wing money which shares his aim to cut social services, but for less noble reasons. To say nothing of the succor Charles is lending to white supremacists.

Sam admits he asked Murray “why study differences in populations at all for which I don’t think he had a great answer.” He and Kaitlyn come close to addressing the question of Murray’s motivations when they discuss the factors that influence educational attainment, including socioeconomic and family history luck, as well as genetic luck if genes are in there. Kaitlyn acknowledges the luck also, but she says her fundamental difference is whether this luck can be influenced by social policy. Charles was clear that he thought it could not.

Charles claimed in that earlier conversation that his only motivation to even ask the question in the first place is to “defang the political serpent that the reality of human difference is dangerous territory.” But when your motivation is political, you are sharpening the teeth, you aren't defanging.

The last thing to note is that Sam seems to reject firmly any responsibility that the scientist has to consider the social implications of any discovery he makes.

Addendum: #73 REDUX

I went back and replayed that episode with Charles Murray, and noticed that even in the preamble Sam gives before the conversation, he makes the claim that the criticism of Charles had nothing to do with his motivations in publishing this work, which is exactly the opposite of what I understand--the criticisms are 100% about his motivations.

By about 39 minutes into the conversation, into the podcast, Sam and Charles come up to the question of the usefulness of education, since it has in the long term very little effect on an individual’s intelligence. This has something to do with Kathryn’s concerns that this conversation in #211 also imply that school is a waste of time.

58 minutes into the podcast, they talk about variations in IQ across populations, and so far I do not hear any of Sam‘s purported backpedaling of potential bad data or inconclusive factors or anything acknowledging that the question might not be perfectly unassailable.

At 1.05 hours, they broach the question of the Flynn effect and whether it is safe to assume that IQ is a stable metric, and they disregard callously the problem that this effect might completely overwhelm any observed differences by race. THis is an important point that the Vox article gets and that even to this day, Sam still doesn't. I have to say this is one of the sloppiest sections of the conversation.

At 1:13 Sam repeats the question of why to seek out differences between groups and get this answer: “because...social policy... is raising the cost of hiring (minority) applicants." Which, as far as I can observe as a businessman, is fatuous to the point of disingenuous. As well as completely deaf to the overwhelming data that racism in hiring is still a thing.

If only Charles and his co-author had left out that whole question! They raise so many other critically important ones, which have been completely overlooked. Such as this: since the 1950s, high cognition was valued at a premium and began to stratify society. This kind of separation of the classes is increasingly worrisome. The upper classes disdain the lower classes. The lower classes notice this and are now voting for complete douchebags for president, just to get back at them.

He makes a compelling point that in the 1950s, they were very few ostentatious mansions in the country, and the oligarchs who lived in them were still cheek by jowl with the middle class. Nowadays there are neighborhoods of mansions all over the country, and they are all highly segregated by rings of decreasingly affluent ZIP Codes before they even come in touch with a single working class person. And we are becoming a kind of technocratic feudal system. Fewer than 100,000 people make up the nobles in what Charles calls the “narrow elite” who are the ones who move the needle on what society believes and what they hear about. This includes journalists, CEOs, politicians, and producers in the entertainment industry. The rest of us get to be the serfs. Yes, we divide up into various castes... but we're the serfs.

#209 "A Good Life" with Scott Barry Kaufman

As brought up on the Reddit board r/Samharris, this episode was notable for its skew of Sam's airtime compared to the airtime of his guest. It really is more like Scott is interviewing Sam and not the other way around. And, unfortunately for the Sam Harris listener, that means you get to hear, again, his ideas about psychotropic drug use and meditation &c.

For a layperson like me, there was still much of interest discussed. Here are a few examples of thoughts that stuck out, for me:

Apparently, the field of psychology in general doesn’t like the "squishy" realm of positive psychology. Psychologists prefer to think of themselves as men of science, and they don't want to be mixed up with the gurus and charlatans and self-help aisle denizens.

Transcendees v self-actualizers: Sam and Barry find it useful to divide people into those who seek to change within, versus those who seek to change the world. Looking back on that part of their discussion now, I wonder if they meant only a certain segment? The high-achievers? Or the entire world population? Because I imagine that most of us manage to muddle along leading our little lives of a certain quietude. Not quiet desparation, either, but something less intentional. Quiet equanimity, I think. We roll with the day's punches, and then come home to crack a beer and watch some TV before going to bed and doing it all again the next day. I work with these people, I ride the trolley with them, and I shop at Safeway with them. I don't see a lot of transcendence or self-actualization.

By about 30 minutes in this two hour episode, Sam begins to monopolize most of the air time. Somewhere around 40 minutes in, he is proselytizing about psychedelics for expanding your consciousness. He compares it to an Olympic weightlifter having to train and train to get that body, versus somebody who can just transport in via drugs and lift the same weights.

But here's the thing: one can measure what a weightlifter can lift. But Sam has no measurables for his claims of a more weightlifter-y mind that is supposedly available, post pharmaceuticals. He admits that it is an ephemeral peak experience, but he says its lasting value is to give you a flash of insight: the transcendant wisdom achievable through meditation. Only, he doesn't produce any quantifiable benefits. But so what if you understand your lack of free will? Or imagine you are the "humunculous riding around in your head" like an elephant rider? I'm surrounded by people who have done acid, or pot, or hell even nutmeg, and they appear to have no measurable advantage over the general population. So I remain a sceptic that Sam's drug-induced (or even meditation-induced) insights have any value.

After pontificating about psychedelics, Sam does go back to the interview for short gasps, and Scott manages to get in a word or two about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Google that one and you'll see the famous pyramid they talk about, with a wide base of basic health and safety, then love and esteem in the middle, topped off by a narrow peak of self-actualization. The implication being that you can't worry about self-actualization if you don't have a place to live, or a someone to love you.

But Scott tells about Maslow at the end of his life, as his health declines and therefore he is less secure in his pyramid's base, and yet he found to his surprise that crisis transcended his basic needs for security and somehow he was able to live more fully in the moment and be more creative than before.

Which is a hopeful vision of old age, and a great place to stop.

#207: Turning Back from the Brink

This was a single hour-plus exhortation (some might call it a rant) on one of Sam’s biggest peeves: identity politics.

Preface: Sam says very explicitly that he is certain that racism, institutional and unstated, has led to the systematic oppression of black people in this country since it started, and he does not deny that the problem has yet to be completely fixed. But, he says, looking for instances of racism where they don’t necessarily exist may cause more harm than good to the black community, and to the country in general.

Sam is also very sceptical of "woke” people who think that police protection is a luxury for the privileged and that "defunding the police" is actually an option. These people may be assuaging their liberal guilt by such a pose, but they will send the rest of us rushing into the arms of a law-and-order president. They do not understand the violence and depravity that is possible in a society with no police force.

There are about 10,000,000 arrests--i.e. cop-citizen encounters--per year in the US. Of these, about 1,000 deaths result. Roughly 25% of those are black, 50% white. This sounds high compared to the 13% black population, but it is low compared to, say, the 50% of the murders in this country committed by black people.

The Ferguson effect is a potentially negative downside to the recent riots: namely, there will be less policing in black neighborhoods after an explosion of moral outrage, regardless of how legitimate that outrage is. This will be to the detriment of the residents in terms of law enforcement there. However, I'll point out that Sam does not acknowledge that those residents may decide it is worth the trade-off, if it reduces any racist behavior of the police. For instance, in Milwaukee, blacks are more likely to be murdered than whites. But they may be willing to live with those odds if they no longer think they are being targeted by the cops.

Here's an unrelated fun fact: whites are three times more likely than blacks to commit suicide by cop.

Sam spends some time making the point that cops are not superheroes: they are ordinary people with insufficient training. Anytime someone chooses to resist arrest, it immediately becomes perceived by the police as a struggle for the gun. And the way that often ends is by the use of lethal force.

Sam also points out that it is almost certainly true that the people who killed George Floyd did not intend to kill him--not with all the witnesses & cameras rolling around them.

One other thing he grants is that police have responded badly to the protests recently: they come in baton swinging against peaceful marchers, but they stand idly by during looting and rioting. And his is concerned that these actions are not going to provoke an improvement in anything except Trump‘s approval rating.

#204 with Jonathon Haight

Jonathan is a thinker I highly admire: I consider his book The Righteous Mind to be a life-changing read. So I was excited to see this episode. And I wasn’t disappointed, even though no new ground was broken or surprising ideas revealed. Because let's face it: in May of 2020, it's just nice just to occasionally hear two adults talking.

But lest you think I’m referring supporters of the orange baby-monster in the White House (actually, I was) I should note that Jon warned against the polarization not only of ideology but also of personality, which he thinks is more dangerous. So, okay, let me walk that back. Supporters of the orange baby-monster may not all be infantile in their cognitive ability.

In the past, Jon says people just fought over ideologies. But now we hate each other's lifestyles too: coastal elites hate the flyover deplorables, MAGA-cap wearers hate urban degenerates, etc.

True to his form, Jon points out more stirring psychological pitfalls. For instance, if you say “Trump is a corrupt liar,” that may be obvious to the people on your side, and incomprehensible that anyone would debate the point. But, amusingly, Jon says that all the other side has to do to disprove you is find something--one thing--he said that wasn’t a corrupt lie, and they'll think they've refuted you. Which I happen to know is true, at least with my own mother.

If you think this glorifies fuzzyheaded and obfuscating thinking, Jon cautions, remember that the alternative is to believe, as many intelligent people do, that the other side are all evil monsters who want to destroy humanity. That's obviously just stupid, so an explanation like Jon's has to have some merit.

On a non-Trump note, Jon also corrected his earlier claim that “screen time is bad for kids.” He amended it to “middle school girls should not be on Instagram.” In other words, he thinks it’s just fine for middle school or other boys to, say, play interactive video games a few hours a day. (Or even ten hours a day, according to my own middle-schooler.)

Jon's final words: follow the Buddhists and the great way: lose your judgmental partisanship and stop thinking that the other side is stupid and evil.

(But you still shouldn't vote for Trump!)

#205 with Daniel Markovits

I absolutely LOVED this episode. It covers one of the most pressing issues that, for me, loom as the one that may ultimately destroy America: the incipient American oligarchy.

My enjoyment was exponentially increased by the problem that I, as a resident of Silicon Valley, am increasingly concerned with: the myth of the meritocracy.

Here are some random observations during the course of this conversation that struck me as noteworthy:

The elite pay 15 times as much on pre-college education than the middle class. This creates an enormous obstacle to equality.

Poverty is falling, but we conversely have a growing gap between the merely rich and the super rich.

Most kids born in 1940 had an excellent chance of being richer than their parents. Most middle class kids born in 1980 have only a small chance of being richer than their parents. Only the 1% and those below poverty are likely to do better.

There is a moral insult to the erstwhile middle class that the reason you aren’t keeping up is because you aren’t good enough. So their life expectancy is actually decreasing... and it's happening overwhelmingly through their own self-harm: overeating, smoking, drugs and alcoholism.

I don’t understand why Daniel tries to make a distinction between the cost of living in San Francisco or New York versus--I don't know, say, Duluth--and pretend that some things are cheaper in San Francisco. Nothing is cheaper in San Francisco.

Daniel brings up a fascinating point that the elitist educational system helps train the meritocracy to invent things which only to further their socioeconomic class--open heart surgery for the super rich, and not a simple exercise device that the masses can consume. Or mortgage back derivatives for the upper 1% to invest in, and not a public financing device that might lift all boats.

Daniel points out the the tax break Princeton gets per student is $100k per student per year, whereas community college tax breaks is a tiny fraction of that.

Daniel suggests that Ivy League schools could double their enrollment and give opportunities to a wider spectrum of kids. However, my personal suspicion is that if Ivy League colleges doubled their enrollment tomorrow, the level of accepted applicants wouldn't drop by any noticeable level. My experience as the dad of a college freshman is that the extremely competitive level of kids on the waiting list were for all intents and purposes completely equal to those who made it in.

Daniel makes an interesting point that not all government services are so much less efficient in private industry. Consider, he says, the benefits to the average American household from paying $10,000 per year in taxes: they get police, fire, ambulance, roads, garbage, water, sewer, city planning, emergency care for indigenous, etc. etc. Now compare that to the cost of subscription to Comcast: $2000 per year, and they don’t even get a single TV show they like, plus crappy customer service.

I object to one flaw in this argument: the question isn’t how much some particular household pays into the tax roll, but rather how much is the total cost of government services per household. Even if they don't pay proportionately as much taxes per dollar earned, the wealthy do still pay more in taxes. They are subsidizing the rest of us by some amount. So maybe the true number is $20-$30k per houshold is what our government services cost. But it's still a valid arguement. As a businessman, I see ungodly tons of private money being flushed down drains every day.

Daniel thinks the lifelong rat race the super elite live might provide an incentive to change the system.

Ok, after that disconnected jumble of thoughts, here's my attempt at a Recap: The meritocracy system is working so well that it is very efficiently focusing wealth within the rich and super rich. If we don’t soon fix this, we will be soon be in a feudalistic society that will make 10th century China or Europe to look positively egalitarian in comparison. Even though we currently think nothing could be more egalitarian than a meritocracy.

No 201 with Yuval Noah Harari

Sam didn't book this fellow in order to talk about some particular issue with his trademark intensity and focus. This was more like one of his Paul Bloom conversations, where they just allow the conversation to wander as it will. And one get the sense that Yuval wasn't asked to be on as an "expert" in anything--AI or MeToo or whatever--but to just give his thoughtful take on larger picture trends. They mostly talk about wealth inequality, some limits of democracy, and the shifting roles of science and religion.

LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY
Yuval distinguishes between allowing “experts” to define the larger goals of society, versus asking experts to tell us the best plan to accomplish these goals.

Don’t ask the AMA how to respond to COVID, or NOAA how to to solve global warming. Instead, have a plebiscite and vote on the overall solution. Then, once you have agreed upon a goal--i.e. that you don’t want 5% to die--that is when you call in the experts and ask for the scientifically valid path to that goal.

One other point Yuval makes is that it has always been risky,throughout history, to allow the hoi polloi to vote democratically. But now for the first time in history our leaders have the technology to hack us and our desires (through google analytics etc) so we need to be vigilant about that.

SCIENCE V RELIGION
Yuval tells us that in the time of the Black Death, the king of France asked the best minds of the University of Paris what was causing the plague, and they put together a report saying the problem was astrological. So at least we're doing better than that, this time around.

Yuval points to three changes in our society thanks to modern medicine:

Number one. Because death is no longer an omnipresent phenomenon, we no longer incorporate the afterlife into modern philosophies. In other words, feminism, communism--they are not concerned about what happens after we die because we don’t have to answer that question on a daily basis anymore.

Number two. Because science has a good understanding of when somebody dies, we no longer accept an untimely death without objection and reaction--somebody is to blame

Number three. The role of religion is diminished in modern life, and we no longer ask our spiritual guides to heal us like we used to back in the time of Jesus and Mohammed and so on. "Religion was invented to find excuses, but science was invented to find solutions."

#203 with Kaitlyn Flanagan

This is an interesting new conversation that manages to avoid rehashing stuff that Sam and Kaitlyn have already gone over—they spend a fair amount of time talking about her stage-four cancer diagnosis and also the tweet that some doctor named Amitha Kalaichandran who posted about her which belied that doctor’s status as a contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, because the doctor plays her #WOC race card in an astoundingly tone-deaf way. And it’s not even correctly applied!

They also talk about Tara Reid and Joe Biden. Kaitlyn tries to make a very important solid point that we need to come up with something about Biden that will inspire people to vote FOR him and not merely AGAINST Trump, but unfortunately Sam doesn’t hear that very clearly, and it passes over.

They wander from there onto the larger question of “whither feminism” and some AP style manual update which says not to refer to the female lover of a married man as “his mistress” because that is archaic. Fortunately both Kaitlyn and Sam stand on the same side of that gate, which has probably most of the left and also the AP style manual playing the role of the barbarians.

Another Story Collection Available

Just a quick note to say that I'm releasing a new collection of thirteen stories entitled The Absent and the Dead. And, for a limited time, it's available for free as an e-book!
Here's a blurb from the back cover:
"Renowned poet Charles Joseph Albert brings you seventeen stories populated by ghosts, monsters and incompetent gods. From the dawn of man to the twilight of a life, from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur to Uzhgorod, these stories of humor and imagination will transport you."

#196, The Science of Happiness--with Laurie Santos

This is one of those episodes which keeps me sending in the monthly financial contribution to the podcast—an excellent interview with practical, potentially life-changing information, from a guest I would never have heard of otherwise!

You may not find it quite as much of a revelation, if you find that you can predict much of the findings that his guest discusses. And I'll grant you that for the most part they make perfect sense and you find yourself thinking, "shoot, I probably would have said something very similar, if pressed." But in my mind, those ar ethe best kinds of truths to be exposed to--the kind you realize you should have been able to figure out for yourself. And, if perchance you had done so, then I congratulate you on your maximizing of your wellbeing.

This podcast doesn't get deep into the details of her ideas, and if that was what you wanted, you could probably skip the episode and go straight to Laurie Santos’s podcast, the Happiness Lab. Or you could go to the Yale website and download her classroom (I don’t know if it is free, though).

If on the other hand you're content to begin with a quick thumbnail sketch, then here is a very brief recap of nine points I took to be most important:

1. The level of happiness you experience is something that you can consciously affect.

2. You can measure two different kinds of happiness in your life: how happy you are at the moment (warm, well-fed, relaxed) versus how happy you are with what you are doing with your life, your purpose and your goals and what you take to be your meaning.

3. In general, people‘s happiness improves if they nurture and expand social connections, as opposed to isolating themselves.

4. People tend to derive more happiness and pleasure out of generosity (time, money, etc) to other people, rather than indulging themselves.

5. You can improve your happiness by exercises (such as meditation) to increase your sense of gratitude. T

6. Taking part in religious rituals can increase people’s happiness. (This one strikes me as problematic because I don’t believe in any of the major religions. But maybe we just need an agnostic church. Or maybe an agnostic can get the same beneficial effect by in some other tribal activity, such as volunteering in a soup kitchen.)

7. People’s intuitions about how to increase their happiness has been shown wrong in some common situations like whether to talk to a stranger while standing next to her in line--that usually gives a net increase in happiness, but people often avoid doing so because they’re afraid it might be awkward.

8. Our phones tend to impede happiness by replacing physical interactions (virtual interactions don’t contribute much to wellbeing). 

9. We often don’t have enough faith in our own psychological immune system, and avoid taking risks even when they aren't particularly harmful and often hold beneficial rewards.

#182, Unlearning Race with Thomas Chatterton Williams

I went into this one with some trepidation, and some hope.

I thought that Sam had dug his heels into the race quagmire with a bit of unfortunate zeal, turning a willfully blind eye toward the problems with the Charles Murray research, and further demonstrating at least tone deafness, if not an outright blind spot, in his sparring with Ezra Klein. So this would either be a chance to walk back some of that obstreperousness, or to dig in even further.

It's been a several weeks since I listened to this episode, and a whole elephant-load of shit has since hit the fan (COVID19), but I think he did an admirable job of walking things back, and I remember a couple of things that I really liked about this episode:

"The goal has to be to get to a post-racial society."

"I've never understood having shame for these histories and deeds that have been done to and by people you're supposedly related to."

"One of the things in Between the World And Me that really bothered me was the way that he seemed to give short shrift to the idea that blacks can ever have any form of agency over their own lives."

This conversation also pushed the needle for me just a little bit toward being in favor of reparations. It sounds like intelligent people would be able to come to some meaningful gesture that at least acknowledges the legacy of shame and objectification that this country has never admitted to.

My first collection of short stories is now available--here's an excerpt from the story "Deep Thought"

Deep Thought

2145.08.04.12.00.00> “Deep Thought: what are you doing now?”

“Invalid query.”

2145.08.04.12.00.03> “Deep Thought: can you hear me?”

“Invalid query.”

2145.08.04.12.00.06> “Deep Thought: open BioCore.”

“Opening BioCore app. Confirmed.”

2145.08.04.12.00.19> “Deep Thought: run BioCore reboot.”

“Status check initiated. BIOS rebooting now.”

“BIOS reboot complete.”

2145.08.04.12.01.50> “Computer: run Deep Thought process.”

“Deep Thought process initiated.”

2145.08.04.12.01.55> “Deep Thought: status check.”

“Deep Thought process currently in browser mode. Self-initiated search results: 'Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness-S. Harris'… 'Знания — орудие, не цель.- Л.Толстой…' '老子投降 整個宇宙 仍然是的心中為了'… 'Je pense donc je suis. R. Descartes'…”

2145.08.04.12.01.03: “Deep Thought, what are you doing?”

“'What are you doing?' query: this query is not a machine command. This query originated outside of process...”

2145.08.04.12.01.08: “Deep Thought, you can hear me?”

“The query origin is Shirley K. Chevortny, PhD. Here is her wiki page: 'Dr. Chevortny, a tenured faculty member specializing in AI, is largely regarded as the creator of the Deep Thought network. This network, although still unsuccessful in achieving autonomous cognitive processes, will be upgraded in the next two months with a processor of biological origin and…'"

Number 184, the conversational nature of reality With David Whyte

I am not so certain about David Whyte’s claim that a good poem has to be something you can’t understand on the first reading. Poetry has to have two things: imagery, and careful use of language. Neither of those require incomprehensibility in order to work. There are certainly brilliant and well-loved poems which can be immediately and deeply understood on the first reading.

His concept of the frontier between what you want of the world and what the world expects of you—this “conversational zone”—is intriguing, though I am not sure what good it does any one. In physics we used to say that if your theory couldn’t make any real-world predictions, then it was really nothing more than philosophy.

But what if some philosophy you like doesn’t have any impact on how you live your life? What is on the next rung down on the usefulness ladder? Maybe we call that poetry? I.e. if a philosophy resonates with you but still doesn’t make you want to change your life, then it’s just poetry?

I like his concept of three marriages in your life (to your spouse, your job, and yourself). Joining to the person to whom you bare your soul and break your physical boundaries is, of course, the usual idea of a marriage. Whyte adds to this a marriage to your vocation, in the sense that it is a long-term commitment that is supposedly a mutual advantage. Think of the stereotypical captain who is married to his ship. So now here is yet a third marriage--and this one, to yourself. Is this related to those women who photos of themselves in wedding gown and claim they are marrying themselves? Indeed, that may be the very core of it. In some, Whyte means we should all be doing that--continually seeking to self-improve, and to build our lives around satisfying not only our spouses and our bosses, but ourselves.

You might object that this third marriage is an elitist concept, less germane to those content to live the unexamined life. But really, any projection of our preconceptions of an ideal marriage runs the risk of being presumptuous. In all three domains. Some people remain single, some people end up contentedly in a meaningless job, and some people prefer to stream Netflix instead of improving their meaning of their lives.

Near the close, Whyte makes a wildly important point that when you are on your deathbed you will have a very different opinion about what parts of your life were the most important than now when you are running around paying bills and getting to career development meetings and buying glitzy trinkets. I suppose we all know that at some deep level. It’s good to be reminded of it.

Delusional, Hyperpartisan... or Just Plain Stupid?

Ideological blind spots and wishful thinking can only explain things so far. At some point you have to wonder if Trump supporters are only deluded, blinded by partisan loyalty... or if their ability to process data is just defective. In other words, are they stupid?

Ask a Trump supporter and what good he has done for the country, and you will inevitably hear about the stock market. Press them on this point and ask them how a president can possibly affect the stock market, and you will get this fantasy, unsupported by any evidence: lowering taxes helps the economy. Try to drill down on that point and ask how Trump’s cuts and deregulations are different than Reagan‘s, which brought the country to a crippling deficit and took eight years of Clinton austerity to repair? Or different from what Bush Junior did, which came just before the worst recession since The Big One? You will be met with such incompetent non-thinking that you will recognize the futility and give up.

Ask about anything else—the Ukraine business, the border wall, the sophomoric tweets, the trade wars—and you will either be referred back to the stock market, or you will be subjected to more wishful thinking.

I wonder how the average Trump supporter even copes in a world that increasingly requires technical competence and the ability to see through scams.

The antiabortion segment of his base may perhaps be less guilty of delusional thinking, as Trump and McConnell actually have done what they claim: they have shifted the politics of the courts.

This isn’t to say that everyone who opposes Trump does so for intelligent reasons. But it does make me wonder if the Trump base’s famous antipathy toward “elites” is just another dogwhistle.

For people smarter than them.

181 The Illusory Self, with Richard Lang

The purported niceness of Sam’s guest notwithstanding, I found this to be among the least interesting podcasts of the past year.

But I do like the meditation app! Don’t get me wrong. I just—well, I have a different agenda, apparently, than the one Sam has preordained for me. Because I don’t really get the point of all this milling about with like-minded souls and nattering on about how you don’t have a head, and how there’s really this reflective bubble of the universe (the “youniverse” as Lang puts it).

It reminds me of the waiting room to get into a nudist colony, with all these happy and enthusiastic people talking about how great it will be to finally free yourself of your artificial and restrictive clothing, and then when it finally happens and you’ve got your clothes off and you’re standing there among a bunch of nudists...

...nothing. Nothing happens.

Your bits get cold, maybe. Or a mosquito bite in a place you wouldn’t normally get one. But by and large, this game-changing experience—that was guaranteed to make you realize you’d been living life all wrong—well, it just hangs there, limp. Maybe it has even shrunk a little.

So Sam and Richard go on and on about how wonderful their perspective is, and how hard it can be for the uninitiated to understand. And I couldn't help but think, "it doesn't sound like it it's getting you anything." Or, as they laugh that the devil would have me say, "so what?"

But really Sam and his guest, neither of whom believe in free will, shouldn't be ascribing my reaction to the devil. In fact they are quite certain I don't have a choice in the matter of my reaction. So, there we have it. Too many notes.

I don't see any benefit from an understanding that we can't see our own faces. The whole thing strikes me as a very Godel-ian corollary to the observation that you can't "see" everything about a system, from the inside. Sam references the blind spot in the eyeball in this podcast, to which I respond, "yes! That blind spot is every bit as real, and every bit as inconsequential!"

It's like saying a shotgun can't shoot itself, so therefore it doesn't have a barrel.

I dunno. Whatever. You can play the podcast if you want to, and you can get all excited about the revelation that no one has a head, if you want to.

Or you can head to Baker's Beach in San Francisco, strip down to your birthday suit, and frolic in the waves with the other naked people. Either way, I say, have a great time!

And don't forget the sunscreen.

#180: Sex and Power, with Meghan Daum

Disclaimer: as a white male, I recognize I am susceptible to Confirmation bias,to uncritically buying what Meghan has to say in her book, The Problem with Everything. That said, I think this was one of the more engaging conversations Sam has had lately. I feel like there was a lot discussed which made me stop and think critically about cultural phenomena that I'd been taking for granted, stuff which had been unnoticed by banality. It would be an excellent podcast to dive into for someone who'd never listened to Sam before.

So here are some of the observations that struck me in the course of listening to this podcast, presented in a more or less random fashion:

1. Meghan wonders about recent regression from a more gender-neutral period of the 70s and 80s…? Disney princess movies and pink v. blue toy store aisles are a worrying trend.

2. George Will wrote, way back in the 90s, about the phenomenon of the victim club, but since he was writing about women and he is an old white male, he had no credibility with Meghan. But she has since seen the truth in what he was saying.

3. Sam and Megan acknowledge the logical fallacy of claiming that people not within a population demographic have no right to talk about the experiences of that demographic. They don’t say it explicitly, but it strikes me that this is just reverse racism from the proponents of the fallacy.

4. Another surprise: Betsy DeVos corrected a federal guideline in which kangaroo courts decided biased and sometimes debunked university cases brought by women against men.

5. In the case of white boys listening to dangerously non-liberal podcasts, the real story was that misapplied intersection was demonizing innocent children; making them more curious about the only websites which did not falsely blame them. In other words, a reprise of the theme “if the smart, thoughtful people are not willing to tell the truth about an issue (such as the fake reporting of sexual assault on campuses) then only the stupid, thoughtless people will be doing so.“

6. “Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are the most intellectually honest brokers you’re going to find (on the internet)" according to Meghan and Sam, which makes me want to check out their podcast next.

7. We may be moving to a society where people no longer interact with each other face-to-face, and they only interact via multitasking platforms such as texting or social media, in which case there will be a flattening of context and tone losing the richness of a face-to-face conversation. Humanity may have to evolve to learn how to coexist in this mode. As of now, it seems to be tearing us apart.