#299: Steps in the Right Direction, with Russ Roberts

“There are known knowns, there are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns." – Donald Rumsfeld

This is the sort of podcast that one might listen to, not to get a single new idea or beliefs challenged, but merely for the (considerably less compelling) pleasure of eavesdropping on two intelligent men discussing current events.

You might think from the title of this episode and from the guest’s recent book (Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us) that maybe something--a roadmap? a hierarchy of information?--will be outlined for how to make good decisions. How to live a good life. But au contraire, Russ says that it's foolish to try to use any methodology in making the BIG decisions. He warns that we often have no way to know all of the facts surrounding decisions like whom to marry or whether to have children. So, rather trying to tame the large unquantifiable truths with some kind of spreadsheet tally, the decision-maker will be better off going with what he feels in his bones as his basis for a decision.

The listener probably could have seen that coming, because early on in the interview, Russ observes that although economists claim theirs is the only quantifiable social science, it is unable to quantify any of the things that we really care about: respect, love, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose.

So, basically nothing new in this interview. They veer off on other thoughts (it's a long episode). Russ and Sam don't seem to agree on whether Free Will exists. Or whether society is improving in regards to human rights. Because Russ thinks that recent periods of disturbing back-sliding are the norm and not the outliers: the Holocaust, Soviet oppression, even the anti-free-speech trend right now. But even at that, Russ doesn't go any farther than to observe the veneer of civilization runs thin on the human psyche. Not a new thought for all of us who read “Lord of the Flies" in high school.

One last thought: It occurs to me that Sam is so adamantly opposed to free will, but he has never really made the distinction between that and “having the lights on.” So I wonder if his guest and I and everyone else who disagrees with Sam might be merely conflating free will with consciousness?

#290: What Went Wrong, with Marc Andreessen

I'll tell you what went wrong: asking a billionaire his opinion on anything. After an entire hour of enduring the inanities, the only enlightenment I reached was how wonderful it would be to boil all billionaires into Soylent Green and fed them to the pigs in some farm in Arkansas.

Consider three of his gems:

1. "If the system hasn't been changed yet, that's because it's working the way we want it."
I'm paraphrasing. But the privileged idiodicy of this is obvious to all of us who who aren't billionaires. When is that last time any of us managed to simply change anything we didn't like?

2. "Why don't we have any new cities?"
Actually, you can add to this the equally asinine "It's illegal to build new roads."
We don't build new cities because we're fucking overrun with cities. Where do you think we need a new city? East Bumfuck, Nevada? And where do you want to build a new road? Let's just let pass the fatuous pronouncement that it's "illegal." It's isn't exactly illegal, is it? More like it's unnecessary.

3. "In 1993-1994, nobody besides us thought the Internet was going to be a thing."
This is the kind of self-aggrandizing I have to laugh at. Everybody in my world (science) had been using email since 1983. I knew students in Texas excitedly developing HTML in 1990. I left academia and went into envornmental protection, and I still remember everyone's excitement the first we saw a web browser in 1993. It was electrifying.

So, sorry; this is just wrong. There was enthusiasm for the Internet in lots of places at that point.

*

I can summarize the guest's problem as his apparent belief that picking up a book by some economist means that a guy like him, with no relevant expertise, can leapfrog his way into being smarter than thousands of dedicated professionals on all kinds of non-economic issues (the highway system, the EPA, etc). This, of course, is exactly the problem Sam rails against when he complains about arm-chair climatologists and home-schooled epidemologists.

Here's a striking example: Andreessen thinks the city of Los Angeles was founded by some 1920's newspaper cabal trying to make a buck, because he read it in a book. Doesn't that strike you as, well, absurd? What about all the other factors leading to the population influx into the LA basin? The film industry? What about the port? Did he even *look* at Wikipedia? Because they have a completely different narrative.

You can see his propensity for oversimplification again when he summarizes the entire Nixon administration into two domestic policy plans: the EPA and the Energy Independence project. Somehow, all of Energy Independence becomes equivalent to nuclear power. And somehow, never mind the gigantic leaps forward in the health of the country and its citizens that the EPA brought about; the guest only sees poor over-regulated corporations who can no longer profitably flood the watersheds with DDT and build their nuclear waste dumps. So the result of his cherry-picked, pea-brained interpretation of the world is this: the legacy of the Nixon administration is that we end up with all of the stagnating regulations but none of the limitless free energy benefits.

I call triple bullshit on this. There's more to the EPA than beating up on poor little corporations. And there is more to energy independence than going full nuclear.

Speaking of nuclear, Sam brings up the obvious (well, to anyone except a billionaire with his head up his ass) point that, hey, maybe there were a few, shall we say, "setbacks" in nuclear power since the 1970s? Like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? But our guest dodges that one. He pretends that the bad PR is from the evil managerial government that we have allowed to fester within our capitol. Missing the obvious point that the oil companies would have lost trillions--TRILLIONS--if the US had switched to nuclear. But they're off limits to suspect. Apparently, billionaires can do no wrong; it's the evil regulators who killed Big Nuke.

Oh, wait, I know how he overlooked Big Oil. Because that didn't fit with his libertarian narrative.

Not that his supposedly superior engineering brain performs with any clear advantage over that of a lawyer when Sam asks him about banning people on Twitter who are actively spreading harmful information. Sam asks about the harm to society from the hydroxychlorizone conspiracies or Sandy Hook victim doxing, and this model of probity says it's Orwellian to even talk about suppressing free speech. As if speech has to be completely unfettered or else we're evil. But then he accuses Sam of hypocrisy for only going after a-holes on the right... which all of Sam's audience must get a big laugh at. And, when Sam pushes back on that, Mr. Free Speech suddenly decides that he can't actually give any opinion about Twitter, because he doesn't want to get sued.

My, how quickly this noble right to free speech cedes to intellectual property laws. And the fear of law suits. And I suppose there are other valid exceptions, like if I tried to give you his social security number. Or incite violence against him. Or, for that matter, yell "fire" in a theater.

He spews a ton of other nonsense in this interview, like how there's "chaos and carnage in the streets" because we'd elected too many "pro-crime DAs." Which, sorry for disabusing everyone, but there actually isn't. Isn't chaos and carnage in the streets. And there isn't a single "pro-crime" DA. I know it can seem that way if you are a doomscrolling billionaire in Palo Alto. But Andreessen of all people should know that you can't believe everything you read on the Internet.

As a venture capitalist, his prescription to "save" society is that old libertarian chestnut of "disrupt the institutions." But, considering how myopicly arrogant is the giver of this advice, it's hard to have a lot of confidence in it.

Not to mention hypocritical: how many of these libertarians actually ever choose to move to a country with less regulations--i.e. less rule of law? And, since the answer is "none", why do you think that might be?

#281: Western Culture Criticism and its Incompetents

Sam's guest in this episode, Douglas Murray, has the advantage of the erudite Oxford accent. It makes him sound like he is an oracle of intelligence. But a little pushback on his claims shows that they are actually quite poorly reasoned, and one is left scratching one's head in wonder that such a high-profile author could propose such incompetent fatuosity. Or that Sam didn't drill any deeper.

Consider Murray's most strident claim in this podcast: that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was squelched by partisan corrupt officials who should be fired in disgrace from their positions. He's ignoring several critical problems with that story, and I won't even dwell on the obvious one that Sam raised already: putting Trump back in office would have been disasterous.
1) The Republican operatives who had owned that story for months or probably years had been purposely holding onto it until the last second, as another "October Surprise." If the story were so damning and would hold up to scrutiny, why didn't they release it earlier?
2) Respectable newspapers--I do NOT include the New York Post in this category, and neither would you if you took the time to read a month's worth of their headlines--need more than the "few minutes" that Murray suggests it would have taken to vet the merits of a story. Especially a story broken by political operatives famous for wild and baseless conspiracies.
3) There was virtually no legal way for the sources of this story to get information from Biden's laptop, and so the operation began its very existence under a shroud of illegitimacy. It is laughable that Murray voice outrage about the integrity of careful, unbiased journalists--he isn't one, he is merely an editorial columnist--who refuse to trumpet the news immediately. It doesn't show their corruptness, it shows Murray's appalling lack of concern for journalistic integrity.
4) I predict that any real journalist who did/does vet the story fully has almost certainly found gross exaggerations or even fabrications. I'm going out on a limb here, but all the claims four years earlier about Hillary Clinton's criminal email negligence turned out to be charges that were--and you'll have to pardon this pun, but really, it's too perfect--completely trumped up.

Double-Header on Consciousness and Self-Knowledge: #264 & #268

Both episodes, #264 and #268, do cover some interesting ground about our consciousness and our self-knowledge. Neither felt like they unearthed anything particularly new, however. So I'll cover both in this one entry.

Episode #264 Consciousness and Self
Sam had already broadcast with Anil Seth (as episode #113 in January 2018) and he brought it out again because of a book Anil just released. I didn’t really care for that podcast episode the first time around, but here are a few new comments:

1) Even after a 3-hour podcast, we are no closer to answering the question “what is consciousness?”

2) Anil attacks the plausibility of the philosophical zombie based on the notion that if it is complex enough to appear identical to something that it conscious, then it's probably going to be conscious also. I had hopes that his arguments about brain complexity and the entropy of cognitive states was going to give us a toehold into how to build a conscious information processor, but… no.

3) I'm more sympathetic now to the idea of panconsciousness, starting in atoms and growing in flies and bats and so on to humans. Anil's theory is that consciousness evolves; it consists merely of basic motor responses in simpler beings, and develops in richness with increasingly complex brains. It does seem pretty obvious.

Episode #268: The Limits of Self-Knowledge
Here, the questions are how do we know, and how do we know what we know? As Sam's listeners are aware, he's particularly concerned with how many people in America are running around spouting gibberish which they just have to know at some level are simply lies, and yet they cling to them like barnacles to a sunken ship. Disbelief of climate change, Voter Fraud, Systemic Racism everywhere, the 2020 election... our country, it seems, is filled with idiots. How did that happen? Of course they reference Dunning & Kruger, who came up with the famous work on the inverse correlation with competence and confidence.

Unfortunately, neither are able to propose any kind of antidote for this epidemic of willful ignorance. So ultimately, the whole podcast is not really much more than a bemoaning of our limitations as a species.

I did have one thought while listening to the podcast, which was that the Right brain v. Left brain stuff covered in #234 probably plays a role in how we delude ourselves.

Here's a throwaway thought they covered, worthy of Chuck Palahniuk, which is a good place to stop:
The first rule of Alzheimer's is to not recognize that you have Alzheimer's.

#261, Belief and Identity, with Jonas Kaplan

I don't know about you, but I prefer to get my news from reliable news sources such as Le Monde or The Economist, and I generally choose airlines with experienced pilots, such as United or American Airlines, and I also tend to get health care from a licensed and successful medical practice such as a hospital. I do NOT, however, like it when the journalists try to fly the plane. Or the pilot wants to operate on me. Or the doctor tries to investigate government corruption.

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.

#259 The Reckoning to Come, with Balaji Srinivasan

1) I am recording these observations as I go, since this episide is 4 hours long. I'll do my best to listen to the guest, Balajit Srinivasan, with an open mind. This will be hard, because within the first few minutes he already brags about a $300 million sale of his first company, then injected some patently false modesty before crowing about his current angel investing.

2) Ugh--not the old "the age of numbers that is replacing the age of letters." If every tech guru who repeated that would only bother themselves with the letters, they would learn that this old saw has been buzzing around for the past hundred years or so.

3) In response to Sam's request for his "30,000 foot view of the world," Balaji observes that the 21st-century was the mirror image of the 20th century, because in the 20th century "the West was capitalist and the East was communist," and now in the 21st-century "the East is ethnocentrist and the West is ethnonationalist." In other words, he conflates left/right economics with left/right politics. The inability to distinguish between capitalism and racism does not bode well for one's mental clarity.

4) More intellectual fogginess: Balaji claims that Americans believe “whites are the worst.” It’s hard to imagine what minority of opinion he is using to serve to the characterize the entire country. Especially coming as he does from Silicon Valley, which has to be among the whitest major metropolitan areas in the world.

5) Another dubious claim: "the world was in a centralizing era pre-1950, but the advent of the transistor opened up everything and democratized speech." I had to laugh at that, because I have a 180 degree different take on it: there were tremendously more avenues for broadcasting your ideas before the internet than there are now. Balaji references the three big TV stations, completely ignoring that every major city in the US once had its own independent TV station. And several newspapers! Remember those? Gone! As are the thousands of independent radio stations and viable book publishers that used to exist.

I have an inkling that Balaji believes that any speech of importance can find an audience merely by posting it on Twitter, or a blog, or something. Exactly what I'm trying to do here. And I imagine some of the fifteen of you occasional readers can understand more easily than Balaji, how the fact that he can pontificate on the web and reach hundreds of thousands of eyes proves nothing about the democratization of media, proves if anything the opposite of it, requiring as it does his own rarified position in order to gain an audience of any size.

6) OMG, I can't belive Balaji called FDR a dictator. Man! Talk about devaluing the currency on THAT word. His evidence are some WPA programs which he claims were wrong-headed because they hadn't sufficiently helped recover the world economy, shattered by WWII and the Great Depression, before FDR's death. And--get this--further proof of dictatorship was the Japanese internment during WWII.

Ah, Balaji! If only you had bothered your head with more of those letters you disparage. Perhaps a real history book, rather than your tweets and memes and objectivist circle-jerk claptrap you mention several times in the interview. If you had only managed a little of a liberal arts education!

Seriously, dude, at least look at Wikipedia! The interment of the Japanese was an idea that Roosevelt considered and then rejected based on advice from his cabinet. It only happened because mobs of your beloved objectivist Californians clamored for it. FDR had to be dragged into it unwillingly. This is actually the opposite of how a dictator works.

7) The fact that Balaji so highly recommends The Sovereign Individual is an indication of just how deeply he has drunk of the Silicon-Valley-libertanian Kool-Aid. I guess I should at least give him credit for the uniformity of his convictions. Still, one shudders to think of him in some bar in Palo Alto, toasting his new purchase of a New Zealand safe room with his fellow VC, passing around copies of the book that tells how the Old World is doomed and what you need to do to still be on your feet when the New World is born.

8) Sam does a good job of pushing back on some of Balaji's wild claims, like "you can't make a fuss about illogical TSA screening or you'll miss your flight," or "the problem with the FDA is the power they wield," which in his twisted logic made them obstruct early COVID screening. But one hears from Balaji little interest in the actual facts on the ground at the FDA. And what's with the childish notion that making a stink at the airport is the best way to protest illogical TSA policy?

9) Balani says federal regulation is not about keeping big corporations in check, but about crushing their competition. Which makes it awfully hard to explain why big corporations spend billions on lobbying every year to try to get themselves deregulated. And one has to wonder what mental gymnastics Balaji needs in order to explain why, a few years after the investment banking industry managed to get Bush Jr to reduce regulation, we got the worst financial crisis in living memory. No, wait, I know--he probably thinks bitcoin is the answer ;)

10) I really had to grit my teeth at 1:03 when this nutcase tries to say that price-fixing regulation is only arbitrarily enforced. I mean, what fucking planet did this guy grow up on? How can he possibly argue, as he does very passionately, that laissez-faire capitalism is actually good for consumers?! What does he think about all the people who died from poisoned meat and tainted milk in the 1900's? Or the massacres of coal miners? Or a million other abuses of power?

11) Shit: there are still 3 hours left to this podcast, and I'm getting really sick of listening to this guy. Even though I have the playback speed set at 1.5X. I don't care how rich he is, this Balaji Srinivasan schmuck has his head so far up his ass he can see out through his own nostrils.

I'm going to suck it up and try to last through his explanation of bitcoin and blockchain. But unless something remarkable comes up, I'm quitting here. I'm sorry, I really tried to listen to this loony with an open mind. Why I failed may be an interesting subject to get into some day, but I prefer to keep this particular post focused on the contents of the actual episode.

Edited in: Good god, his inaccurate swipes against legitimate journalists are maddening.

#247 Constructing Minds, with Lisa Feldman Barrett

https://samharris.org/podcasts/247-constructing-minds/

This was one of the best podcasts aired in a few months, because Sam managed to find an expert who actually had stuff to say that was a revelation, not just some political opinion.

"Culture as operating system" isn't a particularly ground-breaking insight (and I'm not even sure how accurate the analogy is) but it lays out more clearly a critical fact: we are not freely independent hardware units, able to crunch any problem and always come up with the best possible solution. We are products of our native culture.

The "myth of the triune brain" which Lisa discusses is also interesting: I learned that the model of three separate evolutionary structures of the brain--the reptilian, or amygdala; the limbic, or emotional center; and the cerebral cortex, or hominid brain--has been discarded as inaccurate. These structures may well be identifiably different, but they aren't stages of evolution. All creatures with brains have these three structures. Ours are just differently proportioned.

Lisa says that the most important role of your brain is the regulation of your body's functions. Humans' brains have simply evolved to do more than that. Our brains all their time also analyzing current inputs (visual, smell, sound) to make a predictive model of what is going to happen next. It helped hominids survive in the Great Rift Valley, and it helps their descendants write blogs.

There's an amusing moment when Sam starts to say that something like "disgust may be a universal state of mind," and Lisa tries diplomatically to contradict that. "We have to be careful saying that," she repeats about 20 times. "Nausea is ontological, but maybe disgust isn't." Or words to that effect.

I wish I could test the concept with something like a Venn diagram of the cognitive states of people from every culture when confronted with a video of this scene which I witnessed 35 years ago as a freshman in college: I was sitting on the steps of the main quad, eating lunch with a couple of friends, and watching the daily parade of people. A large black dog stopped right in front of us and took a huge dump. To make matters worse, the poop was covered with a bright green slime. But the absolute topper--the detail which pegged out our disgust-o-meter--was when the dog turned around and proceeded to eat the entire Log 'O Green Feces right there in front of us. I confess that we expressed our revulsion in the most raucous and unequivocal way you can imagine eighteen-year-old American males would.

But maybe Lisa is right, and in Finland they would merely applaud politely. I don't know.