#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.

#244 (Food, Climate, Pandemic) & #245 (Scary Ideas)

I'm going to be blunt here. Unless you're a hardcore Sam Harris fan, like I am, I wouldn't say there was anything memorable in either of these podcasts.

In #244, we're reminded that carnivores are responsible for a lot of bad things, and we're tantalized with the possibility of animal-free meat.

In #245, we're reminded that scientists have to kowtow to political pressure, and tantalized with the possibility of a politics-free journal.

Yeah, and while we're at it, I'd like a work-free income and a hangover-free cocktail.

#246 - Police Training & Police Misconduct

I asked my brother, a cop with 20 years experience, to listen to this podcast, and he agreed that it was an excellent take on one of the biggest problems he faces on the force: lack of training in grappling with unwilling criminals.

Which I knew anyway. There are a few videos of my brother struggling with whackos out on the internet. They've gone viral, for precisely the reason Rener Gracie says: my brother is clearly struggling with people that he would have been able to easily master with just a tiny bit of training.

And the people filming these videos that went viral? One was a police-brutality numbskull who was trying to prove that all cops are pigs. It doesn't come off all that convincingly since the drug addict my brother is arresting had been terrorizing the entire street, screaming obscenities and stealing things out of shops, and then fighting with the cops before trying to run away. My brother finally succeeds in pinning him to the sidewalk and pressing the crazy man's head to the ground with his knee in order to get the cuffs on him.

Meanwhile, the best thing the young airhead filming the incident can do is complain about police brutality. And post a deceivingly edited version of it it to the internet in the delusion that he's making his point. Only my brother's department actually posted a more complete recording of the entire incident, which was pretty compelling, and clearly showed the idiocy of the original.

The other video with my brother in it was filmed by some citizen in a building across the street while my brother in an open parking lot tries to subdue a larger man who is clearly off his meds. He had been breaking into cars looking for stuff to pawn. My brother tries to get the cuffs on the guy, but loses control. A fight ensues, and then you can clearly see the man trying to grab the pistol out of my brother's holster. He yanks on it several times while my brother has him in a chokehold. Eventually the guy gives up, (the holster has a trick release for exactly this reason) and then he's cuffed. But let me tell you, that was a scary fight to watch.

Now, my brother is the first to admit that cops are called to plenty of situations that really require a social worker. And that reforming the 911 response for a lot of calls makes sense. But he completely agrees that training to help with the grappling situations would be enormously helpful, for those calls where violence is inevitable.

And here's the tragedy of the situation: although he's exactly the kind of empathetic, level-headed, fair-minded person we need on our police forces, he's sick of getting stuck between felonious addicts and brainless "anti-policing advocates" intent on portraying everything he does as "brutality." So my brother is quitting. Retiring early, at reduced pension.

I suppose that's exactly what the "defund the police" crowd want-- all cops to quit. At least, until the next felonious addict comes raging down their street.