#58 - The Putin Question

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Garry Kasparov about the problem of waning American power, the rise of Putin, the coming presidency of Donald Trump, computer chess, the future of artificial intelligence, and other topics.

Coming back to this episode months later, I don't remember anything about Trump, computer chess, AI, or other topics. The only thing I remember can be summed up in my handy-dandy little meme I just generated instead of working:

Review of Making Sense #157: What Does the Mueller Report Really Say? With Benjamin Wittes

Oh, boy! This was a juicy one. Starting with good disclaimers about how Benjamin is not a lawyer but a legal reporter, and also that he despises Trump and wants him out of office. So if you take him at his word, you won't view the rest of the interview as yet another Trump lackey running a screen for him. And really, unless you're blinded by your own political bents, you will find yourself unable to disagree with pretty much everything Benjamin says.

He makes clear that in Volume 1 of the report, Mueller found no criminal activity on Trump’s part prior to the 2016 election:

• Gross incompetence kept him from accomplishing the conspiracy he intended 
• So did a halo of interceding aides 
• Merely applauding and being the beneficiary of Russian hacking does not mean Trump conspired.

So, though there are terrible lapses of judgment recorded, there's nothing criminal there.

Volume 2 is a different story, though. That one is about the Trump response to the investigation. Benjamin notes that Mueller was legally not allowed to say that anything indicted Trump, only whether he is exonerated or not. But he says there are three clearly criminal and impeachable classes of offenses outlined in Volume 2:

• Criminal offense #1: serial abusive attempts to influence the investigation by firings etc.
• Criminal offense #2: serial attempts to abuse his power and launch FBI attacks on Hillary Clinton and other political enemies 
• Criminal offense #3: commanding and encouraging witnesses to not cooperate with the investigation.

Benjamin ends by recognizing the danger of proceeding with impeachment proceedings, which may only energize Trump's base for a 2020 election. And he very rightly counters that with the danger of turning a blind eye to such criminal and reprehensible behavior.

Sam does a good job of staying out of the way and only asking intelligent and appropriate questions. At the end, he asks the question which is on my mind a lot these days: "what do you say to the die-hard partisan Trump supporter who keeps insisting that there is no 'there' there?" 

Benjamin's answer is one we've probably all heard before: "Tell them to substitute 'Biden' or 'Hillary' (or whatever) in the report everywhere you see Trump's name, and see if you can't understand how terrifying this is to people on the other side who are concerned about the fate of our democracy.'

Sound advice. But I bet many committed Trump supporters would be willing to ride a nuke into--well, not Moscow, anymore, but how about San Francisco?--if Trump told them to. So I don't think they'd give a fig about the fate of our country's democracy.

Making Sense #154: What does Sam Harris really want?

#154 What do Jihadists Really Want

This is one of the topics that most appeals to the whacko right-of-center segment of Sam's base. But it's important not to judge the strength of an argument by the whackos it attracts.

My primary objection to the overall content of this particular podcast is that Sam's bias seems to be preventing him from seeing clearly the traps he so nimbly detects in his opponents' views. Anyone who has listened to him learns very quickly that he hates it—HATES IT—when people try to second guess what he says.

And indeed one of the very first things Sam tells us is that we should believe what people say about themselves and stop trying to second-guess their motives. Jihadists want to kill all of us infidels because the Koran tells them to. Choosing not to believe them would be as foolish as choosing not to believe a medical student who tells us that he's studying to be a doctor because he wants to help people.

Oh—except that Sam allows that the medical student may also be in it for the money. Or the prestige. Or scientific curiosity.

But getting back to jihadists—they all want to kill us because their religion is inferior. Sure, he says, there may be some "local" jihadists who are only beheading US Marines because their leaders told them to. But that's beside the point for Sam. And he even says it would be crazy to think that there aren't some Muslims who want to kill us because of the horrors of colonialism. But don't let that distract you.They really want to kill us because they hate our freedoms. George W was right!

If you don't agree with Sam, you are a "Muslim apologist." Or even worse, you are a self-described "woke" liberal, meaning your weak mind has been befuddled by—what? I don't know, too much empathy, perhaps.

Now, I love laughing at foolishness as much as the next self-righteous science nerd. I love skewering the befuddled, mocking the wrong-headed, and kicking the bottom tiles of the Jenga stack that is the average American mind. I love it almost as much as Sam does.

Which is why I'm going to hoist you by your own petard, Sam. Let's take a swipe at your Jenga stack, for you seem to be blind to the fallacies of your own argument:

1    1)      You acknowledge that your own example of medical students may have multiple and complex reasons for choosing their path

2    2)      you acknowledge that it would be absurd to ignore the effects of colonialism, and then do so

3    3)      you acknowledge that the power of cult leadership may also play a role

4    4)      It requires a disturbing level of intellectual hubris to think you're smarter than everyone else and that you're the only one who sees this clearly.

Sam's premise is that jihadists exist mostly because Islam is a religion with "more than its share of bad ideas." But it is entirely possible that he's wrong. That the whackos in the Muslim community who think infidels should be killed may not speak for a significant portion of the "Muslim community." If that is even a thing.  

Were I to (gasp) try to second-guess Sam's motivations, I'd say it's pretty clear that he planted a big, fat, flamboyant flag in the whole end-of-faith, four-horsemen camp, and that's why he is blind to the above problems.

Let me repeat that I mostly agree with Sam. In fact I think he's the closest thing I've ever heard to The Voice Of Reason. Indeed, I don't dispute that Islam has more than its share of bad ideas. Further, I buy into Sam's notion that Episcopalians, Jews, etc. have benefited from several hundred extra years of civilizing effects and are now more likely than Muslims to frown on beheading infidels.

But I also note that Zionists were the first modern terrorists when they were being globally persecuted and in search of a safe place, in the early to mid 1900s. Nobody who has half a brain would now say that proves their religion is uncivilized or murderous. They would instead correctly acknowledge the dramatic and pernicious effect of global persecution on a population.

And I think Sam needs to do the same for Muslims. Even if it alienates the whackos in his base.

Making Sense #152: with Roger McNamee

This episode is about data privacy and the commodification of personal data. 

I'm going to be frank in that, for me, it doesn't carry a lot of interesting information. There were a few quote-worthy remarks to come out of the interview, but I'm not sure I'm 100% behind every one of this guy's worries. 

The best thing about the episode is that Roger doesn't paint himself as an expert and he isn't trying to convince anyone the sky is falling. It's really just a high-octane conversation between two very smart people, which makes it a thousand times more interesting than the next best thing out there right now (in April 2019, that would be Captain Marvel). 

One of the best quotes to come out of the episode is something along the lines of, "we need to ask how is it okay for Google to sell data they collect on minors."

Pretty much sums up all you need to know about the episode.

If you want a few more high points, I'd go with:

-"We’re not the customer and we're not even the product. We’re the fuel.”

-“I don’t believe that Facebook and Twitter will be as profitable than they have to clean up the toxic digital spills that they create.”

-"The Google Maps app is collecting meta data to process and sell. The Apple maps app doesn't do that."

Here are a few disagreements I have with this conversation:

Roger thinks Google is training their artificial Driving programs with our "Captcha" answers about which pictures have stoplights in them. That we're training their computers how to recognize stoplights. But that doesn't make any sense. If Captcha is going to know how or whether our responses are correct, then it already knows which pictures have stoplights in them.

Roger seems to think he doesn’t have any business relationship with Equifax and so they shouldn't have access to his data. But unless I'm mistaken, you sign a release when you accept a credit card. And the fine print on the release is the bank will share your data with their partners.

I'm also not convinced that the free giving away of all of this data is something to worry about. He does cite one conceivably nefarious example where Google figures out that your jerky mouse movements mean you have some disease, and sells that data to your insurance company so they can drop you. Which is pretty far-fetched. And would be rendered obsolete if this country ever gives up its obsession with jingoist yahooism and adopts universal health care.

Not a review--this posting is original content inspired by the Making Sense podcast

Summa Contra Theologica is a 32-page hyperlink text which I have created that in some ways is an answer to the stark atheism espoused by Sam and Making Sense.

I still consider it a work in progress, and any feedback, corrections, contributions or condemnations you care to make will be of great interest to me.

Thanks!

My review of Making Sense #146, Digital Capitalism with Douglas Rushkoff

I'm getting back to write this review a few weeks after listening to the podcast. Twice.

Why did it take so long? Because, although I am very appreciative of Rushkoff's points of view, I just didn't find myself terribly persuaded by him. It's great that he's biased toward humans over machines, and I imagine that there might be one or two people here in Silicon Valley where that opinion is controversial.

But I don't think that Facebook or Google tracking our data and marketing stuff to us is really a problem. The usual rules about false information should and are being enforced, but really, we're only protecting morons and hyper-partisans with those rules. The rest of us are presumably smart enough to know that Sandy Hook really happened, or that there is no child-sex ring being operated out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor, or that Donald Trump is an execrable human being with nothing but flyover-state resentment to keep him from immediate impeachment.

As an aside, I'll point out that Sam's and Rushkoff's comments about how bad the Information Age has become for writers only applies to that tiny minority of writers who were getting published. The rest of us were getting nothing but rejection letters from a closed-loop network of good old boys.

Now things have changed, and I'm free to submit my work to an explosion of free online venues and have finally become published. If not successful. This blog is an amusingly typical example: I have a 100% acceptance rate for new work here (why not--it's MY blog) and yet it has a readership of zero.

But the main reason I haven't published this review until now is that I just didn't find the episode very interesting. There were no conflicts of opinion, no startling revelations, and no real there, there.

#144 Conquering Hate, with Deeyah Khan

This is precisely the kind of conversation that I admire Sam Harris most for undertaking. Not because he's so clever and so right. Actually the opposite. As with podcast #123, with Ezra Klein, Sam is confronted in this podcast with a person eloquently pointing out a shortcoming in his thinking. Unfortunately, as with the Ezra Klein podcast, Sam's blind spot stands out rather obviously, and he seems to be unable to get what she's saying, which I think is this: It's unfortunate that Sam spends so much of his time tearing down the "bad ideas" of Islam that lead to jihadism and being so obstinately and completely in denial that there were any geopolitical motives in someone like Bin Laden or any other privileged Islamist. She urges him not to flatten the narrative down to "Islam bad, secularism good" when she has found from personal meetings with these people that it's never that black and white, that it is always "all about complexity."

But this message can't go over so easily for a man who has made his name with books like "The End of Faith" or "Islam and the Future of Tolerance." Those books focused on the shortcomings of Islam. They not only ignore, but actually disparage, any arguments about Western imperialism. Khan is in square opposition to his simplistic view, but she can't seem to crack through Sam's multi-decades-long veneer of religious approbation.

Another fascinating idea that Khan brings up which Sam is lamentably unable to grok is her observation that these hate movements, be they Jihadist or White Supremist, seem to her to be carried out by foot soldiers culled from the ranks of the most vulnerable, the most impressionable, the most likely to fall under the sway of a charismatic leader willing to invest the time and effort into cultivating them. Showered with attention, magnified by the media and by their cause, these angry young men are brought from anonymity and inconsequentialism to notoriety and preeminence by their movement. Their leaders, their particular "Fight Club," may be motivated by a more pure idea of hatred or dogma, but these suicide bombers and KKK lackeys are lured into a movement on weaker pretexts, and Khan finds she is able to dismantle and penetrate them, not by correcting the false dogma, but by her own countering charisma. But Sam seems to only half-get this.

And frankly, Sam should take a more clear-headed view of his own stance here, as he clearly wants it both ways. He claims that it isn't fair to call him an "islamophobe" because of his Muslim friends, because by taking a stand against jihadists he is defending more vulnerable Muslims who are women, or gay, or even just more secular, than any leftist antifa warrior. And yet he is also on record as an avowed atheist who calls the Koran the worst book imaginable for getting the moral landscape wrong. Or consider this quote pulled off the web in less than thirty seconds by googling Sam Harris and Koran: "The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you." How can someone post that on his website, and then say he isn't an islamophobe!

In the interests of full disclosure, I would acknowledge that I am an islamophobe also. For that matter I'm a christiophobe and a hindophobe and any other brand of bigot you want to call me. Yes, even the word bigot I won't object to, in its original religious-only meaning (derived from the way the French mocked the imperiously pious British with their constant utterances of "by God").

Why admit this? Because I believe anyone--like Sam--who thinks that religions are delusional, misguided, and poisonously pedogogical vestiges of a less evolved mindset, ought to come clean and at least own his bigotry.