Review of Waking Up #124: IN SEARCH OF REALITY

Official podcast notes: 

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Sean Carroll about our understanding of reality. They discuss consciousness, the many worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics.

Housekeeping:

"I had an argument for most of what I was saying, and Klein did not." Sam maintains his blind spot and does not understand that Klein’s central argument is that the data is too fuzzy and too charged to draw conclusions from. 

Is versus Ought: Sam takes a line reminiscent of the Jordan Peterson position that what is true includes what ought to be true, specifically not maximizing suffering for all humans.

Free will: they reach an understanding that there are two levels from which you can look at human behavior: the microscopic level, where there is no free will, and the macro level, where we believe that we have free will because nobody yet is capable of predicting our responses.

Carroll points out that in 500 years the big tragedy will be that nobody figured out what quantum mechanics means, although he is 100% convinced that quantum mechanics is right. 

Also Carroll seems to think that an infinite number of infinities, the multi-universe theory, is less complicated then something like an extra, undetected, variable. 

Review of Waking Up #123: IDENTITY AND HONESTY

Official Notes:

"In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Ezra Klein, Editor-at-Large for Vox Media, about racism, identity politics, intellectual honesty, and the controversy over his podcast with Charles Murray (Waking Up #73).

Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and founder of Vox. Before that, he was columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg."

As of this writing (4/20/2018), the podcast may be found here:

This conversation between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein stems from Sam's episode number 73, the controversial interview with Charles Murray (reviewed previously). I found this conversation intriguing for several reasons:

1) There are some highly-charged issues discussed here by two men of no small, uh... shall we say, self esteem. Both are quite accomplished at keeping ego to a minimum and eloquently defending their points of view. They manage to get through the entire episode without losing their cool, quite a feat given the stakes: essentially, is one of them a racist or is the other one a simpleton? Would that I were as accomplished in such prickly (or even equanimous!) conversations. It demonstrates one of the reasons why I think Sam is as close to a divinity as we will find on this earth.

2) The episode does a stellar job of highlighting Sam's blind spots, which are few, but which really do seem to be persistent and beyond even his ability to recognize. One such intellectual Achilles heel is that Murray is not merely some objective man of science, committed to the most rigorous possible interpretation of the data, as Sam paints him to be. Murray's background in social policy and his publication record do indicate a certain bias. (I don't mean to say Murray's a racist. He certainly didn't come off as such in the interview. But it does mean he may not be a completely neutral instrument of observation.) This should be a huge red flag for Sam, but he is so caught up in his own guilt about participating in the "moral panic" against Murray that he doesn't seem to care. And so he digs in his heels to defend data that, for all he knows, Klein is correctly calling dubious. 

3) Another of the blind spots which I have noticed in Sam's podcasts is a certain hypocrisy about "mind-reading." Sam often bemoans the fact that his detractors claim to know what he really means to say, when really they should accept on face value what he says. You might think that if this is such a big issue with him, he would be extra careful not to do the same and ascribe motivations to his opponents. Especially if they aren't broadcasting said motivations, and therefore these must be guessed through some magical mind-reading ability on Sam's part. And for the most part Sam doesn't do this. But in this particular conversation, Sam concludes that Klein et al. are out to get him in statements like: "What has been accomplished in Murray’s case, and is being attempted in mine (italics mine), is nothing less than the total destruction of a person’s reputation."

Such a claim demonstrates not only a certain hypocrisy, but also a tinge of paranoia that is probably only making Sam's blind spot worse. Sam, buddy--word of advice: purge yourself of the bad-faith interpretation about what Klein is doing and you might be more open to actually hearing him.


4) Another valuable datum gleaned from this conversation is the fact that Murray is not a scientist but a policy analyst, and not only that, but he comes into this issue with an ax to grind. It was almost comical to hear someone as scientifically illiterate as Klein try to make this point, and unfortunately given Klein's lack of creds in this area I think Sam doesn't pay enough attention to him here (another blind spot?) but essentially the jury is still out on how well linked any of Murray's data is to genetic origins within populations. It is therefore highly unwise to use the data as a basis to draw any conclusions. Though Murray, apparently oblivious to this problem, does draw conclusions and even recommends policy.
The dangers of drawing a conclusions from fuzzy data when you have an ax to grind are spectacularly well known. Even in my narrow little domain of physics, we have seen ludicrous results from this sort of thing, such as the infamous Milliken Oil Drop fiasco.

Review of Waking Up #116.5: THE RUSSELL BRAND INTERVIEW

Program notes:

“This episode of the Waking Up podcast features an interview that Sam did with Russell Brand on the Under the Skin podcast. They speak about religion, terrorism, politics, meditation, psychedelics, and other topics.”

This conversation exhibits an interesting collision between Sam Harris and several typical liberal positions. Interesting, but hardly definitive, because though Russell Brand is eloquent, he is easily diverted. 

If you come at WUWSH as I do, from a liberal place, you may recognize many of Brand's objections to Harris' pronouncements and even some of his thought experiments. But Brand is incapable of digging in deep and really opposing Sam's positions. He’s more interested in a quick, entertaining response, which is often a non sequitor--whence Brand's brilliantly coined “giddy blur” which so dismays poor Sam.

Sam sidesteps Brand's questions of power and oppression with his thin argument that since Palestinian Christians don’t suicide-bomb, the problem is all about Islam. In my mind, this is as specious as saying, for example, that the racist underpinnings of the American ghetto are not the reason a higher incidence of black men in America are convicted felons, because, well, just look at all the black women who aren't felons.

Sam is too quick to disregard Brand's objections because he won't stick to them for long. I suspect that since this is Brand's show, the problem is exacerbated by a desire to keep things light and amusing. But I wish he'd been able to drive home better his key points, such as how the entire Muslim world feels under attack by an exploitative Western military-industrial complex, or that state run violence is morally just a scaled-up version of jihadism. But Brand never stays on point long enough to really land a punch. And that leaves Sam free to wallow in his monomaniacal narrative that Islam=bad. 

You can see the shadows behind Sam's veil here: to say that one religion is the "epicenter of bad ideas" makes you tautologically a bigot. Which then begs the question of whether being a bigot is really a bad thing. I'm not sure it is. Certainly a religion like the Aztec's, which required human sacrifice, would be pretty hard for even the Southern Poverty Law Center to get behind. And agreeing on that point makes us all, by definition, bigots.  So I leave you with this question : is it necessarily bad to be a bigot?

Review of Waking Up #73: FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

Official podcast notes :
"In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Charles Murray about the controversy over his book The Bell Curve, the validity and significance of IQ as a measure of intelligence, the problem of social stratification, the rise of Trump, universal basic income, and other topics."

As of this writing (4/16/2018), the podcast may be found here:

I'm starting with episode number 73 because it is probably Sam Harris' most controversial one to date.

His guest, Charles Murray, a fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, favors the dismantling of affirmative action-type programs. He is most famous, however, for having co-authored a book some decades ago called The Bell Curve, in which he argues that intelligence tests are valid and measure a real thing, general intelligence. GI has been proven to have at least some genetic basis, and that different populations (i.e. "races") have different average scores.

This leads to all sorts of ad hominem attacks on him, most famously in March 2017 at Middlebury College, a tiny private university where Murray was invited to speak, until something Sam calls "moral panic" kicked in and the students rioted.

Sam, no stranger to moral panic himself, steers the conversation to the verifiable scientific data that is presented in The Bell Curve. He wants to ignore Murray's political motivations, or even willfully disregard them, in order to prove his commitment to The Truth. (He'll pay a price for this down the road.) But in this episode there are important ideas discussed, some of which flew in the face of my admittedly uninformed beliefs.

It's guaranteed to stimulate, whether or not you find yourself persuaded by the ideas they discuss.

Who am I and what makes me think anyone will want to read this?

This blog is about Sam Harris, not me. Though I recognize that the reader may want some background on me as the blog author. So here's a brief bio.

I'm a straight white male who has worked in various technical fields since getting a PhD in theoretical physics nearly 30 years ago. I also write poetry and fiction--mostly near-term futurist stuff.

I first discovered Sam Harris about three months ago, listening to a TED Radio Hour broadcast which included Sam discussing his concerns about AI in the near future. His eloquent thoughtfulness captivated me, as it has for millions of other people around the country. Intrigued, I Googled him and made my way to his Waking Up podcast.

For the past months, I've blissfully listened to many really wonderful conversations on Sam's podcast. Some of them have been very eye-opening. Some have been mostly good, though perhaps downplaying some point I perceived to be critical. Others didn't really shake me up much one way or the other. And a few have strayed so far from the norms of good conversation to be hilarious in their incoherence. But, even in those last few, Sam's graciousness and steadfast desire to really try reach an understanding is inspirational. He makes me wish I could even be half as rational and considerate when I talk to people that obstreperous.

Indeed, if you have the time and inclination, I urge you to skip this blog and go play all 120+ podcasts (preferably in chronological order!) and I wish upon you the same bliss of intellectual stimulation that I've felt.

But if you prefer to start by merely dipping a toe in this water to see how it suits you, then please have a look at my subsequent blog entries for the episodes (to date) that I recommend the most highly--and the ones I don't.

And let me know what you think!