My take on #314, "The Cancellation of JK Rowling", with Megan Phelps-Roper

This conversation in itself, though more reasoned and thought-provoking than almost anything else I've come across recently, was not really all that remarkable for Sam, certainly not worth highlighting in this blog....

...but for one salient reason. And that is his recommendation to listen to Megan's podcast, "The Witch Trials of JK Rowling".

Once again, Sam has struck gold and then shared it with us. This podcast is remarkably well done: empathetic, intelligent, highly controversial, and very well produced. It was a fantastic find. And there's no way I would have heard of it--or even of Megan--without Sam's introductions to her. We'd met her already in podcast #12, "Leaving the Church" which, if it did nothing else for me, convinced me to seek a better way to communicate with people "outside my tribe."

So, be you muggle or witch, trans-philic or trans-phobic, I'd recommend you check out Megan's podcast--only 7 episodes long, but full of great moments.

Another new book

I just self-published another book. This has next to nothing to do with Sam Harris or Making Sense.

But on the other hand, I did write it. So here it goes: Here's the link: An IQ of 84: A Gaijin Chronicle

#307 The Long Game: with David Waldinger

This was more of a "feel-good" episode than anything eye-opening or world-view challenging. For the first-ever Sam Harris podcast listener, something new might come out. Otherwise, it's really nothing more than comfort food for intellectuals.

But let's be honest: in these times, intellectuals need all the comfort they can get.

To be fair, though, I did learn one thing: the meaning of this Koan:
"If you meet the Buddha on your path, kill him."

David explains that this means the ideal of an post-epiphanal existence where the subject has evolved beyond his imperfections and has become a guru beyond reproach, is not in keeping with Buddhism. There is no Buddhist delusion of anything like a Pope, the embodiment of God's Word, who can implicitly and unquestioningly be trusted with your 12-y.o. daughters (or sons).

Given the horrific records of so many Christian fathers, Islamic fatwaists, and Jewish fascists, one rather wishes this bit of wisdom was more broadly shared among the world's religions.

Another book promo

Disclaimer: This is a promomotion for my latest book, and not a review of a Sam Harris podcast.

My latest collection of short stories is now available at Amazon. These are stories set in eastern Europe, and Sam has had plenty of people on to discuss the problem's with Putin's Russia. Does that count for anything?

And all proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated to United24, the charity set up by president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to support Ukrainian victims of the Russian invasion. Which is one of the most effective charities working for Ukrainians. And Sam has interviewed the effective altruism guy, William MacAskill, a few times. So maybe that's a link?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BKXKCCJB

#300: A Tale of Cancellation, with Meg Smaker

I admit I was starting to waver recently about whether my monthly contribution to Making Sense wouldn't be better put to use buying mosquito nets for children in Africa. Blame it on his promotion of effective altruism, perhaps. And that the last several guests didn't really say anything that struck me as urgent--or even necessary.

However, this interview with cancelled filmmaker Meg Smaker convinced me that supporting Sam Harris is still the right thing to do.

Not just because her cancellation was clearly done by a few bad actors of bad faith for self-aggrandizing and self-enriching reasons. But also because I firmly believe that their core motivation--that only members of any minority group should be allowed to tell stories about that group--is such an idiotic and nefarious idea that it could literally make racism increase in America, and harm virtually every member of the respective minority populations that they belong to.

We need to be able to tell the stories of the Other, period. White writers need to be able to include characters of color in their stories. Female documentarians need to be able to report on male subjects. Muslims need to be able to write about non-muslims.

Anyone who can't understand the self-evident truth of this isn't trying very hard. Or maybe their reason has been coopted by their misguided attempt to force a place for themselves on the page or on the screen... a place that their own talents weren't able to win on their own merits.

#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?