That's why I'm happiest when Sam Harris is interviewing someone who works in the field of neurology and neuroscience. Like today's episode on how we form beliefs and a sense of identity. This is his metier! It's what he speaks with the most authority on.
That said, I don't think he needed to spend quite so much time telling us how many references that some article he published with Jonas gets. Maybe it just felt good to tell everyone about his chops. Poor guy probably catches a shitstorm of hate with every episode, so maybe he needed this lengthy intro just to re-establish that he isn't some fly-by-night.
It took 17 minutes for Jonas to get to the first piece of actual meat in this whole conversation, which was something a "continued influence effect." That’s a fact refers to people's tendency to cling to information, even if it has been discredited. Merely being given incorrect info first means you're more likely to remember it over any subsequent corrective information. The example Sam chooses for this effect was the McMartin preschool sexual abuse debacle, which was a fascinating story and a gigantic warning flag to the nation, and yet he didn’t mention any of its most interesting facts. For a fuller account on this, I refer you to this article in Wikipedia.
The next phenomenon they discuss is the tendency to lean toward a positive statement rather than the negative one. It is easier to agree that 2+2 = 6 then it is to refute it. They also mention the “repetition effect": merely repeating a falsehood enough times makes it more likely that people think it is true. And then they discuss the hypothetical “backfire effect" which would be telling a person that his prejudice is wrong but thereby reinforcing the prejudice instead of weakening it. Only, they admit that effect and may not be real.
When Sam gets to the “fireplace effect”, however, I began to wonder if he hadn't fallen prey to one of his own delusional effects. How else can anyone say something as boldly incorrect as “fireplace smoke is just as noxious as diesel exhaust.” Hydrocarbon exhaust is laden with much more toxins than wood smoke, which you can confirm for yourself by simply googling "wood smoke toxicity" versus "diesel exhaust toxicity." It is true that both combustions also produce particulate matter, which you don't want to breathe if you can avoid it. But you don't get dangerous levels of PM from a wood fire inside your fireplace.
The most interesting discussion in the podcast is on the difference between emotion and logic, and how our brains cannot distinguish between the two different “modes of thought" and they are not so sure are really different modes of thought. Sam mentions the wishful thinking fallacy as something which scientists constantly have to guard against, whence double blind studies, control groups and all that.
They also discuss the high social cost of changing your beliefs, with examples of a closet atheist who is a church preacher, and a conservative think-tank employee who became a liberal. They discuss the freeing of prejudices that a person can experience by practicing mindfulness techniques. It is easier to reject an inconvenient truth when you learn to recognize the emotional effect it has on you.
I particularly liked Sam’s discussion of how to distinguish between healthy skepticism and being a wacko conspiracist nutjob. The wacko does not build a model of explanation, but merely questions the plausibility of random facts or coincidences. He can't try to explain how his theory could work--say, how the government would have blown up its own world trade center--because any positive statement can be disproved. So instead, he says stuff like, "Isn’t it an unlikely coincidence that the Air Force happen to be mostly offshore doing training exercises that day?" As opposed to a skepticist who, say, questions CIA involvement in South America, and builds a case about how it destabilized some communist government using evidence. In that case, there is a conspiracy, but you aren't a whacko because you built an explanation of what happened, and every step of your theory can be tested with facts.
