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Difference between revisions of "11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends"
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11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends (view source)
Revision as of 02:21, 9 April 2020
, 02:21, 9 April 2020→Transcript
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'''Eric:''' 02:05:20 I think what you're saying is, is that because of the information quality and the fame quality and the inspirational quality to copycat killers, that communicating the information that somebody wished to communicate, provided they're willing to make a down payment in, in terms of dead bodies taken, you know, lives taken out of this world. I'm not even focused on the manifesto. I'm focused on just naming the person. Okay. You know, you're sympathetic at some level with the concept of strategic silence. Yeah. I would be sympathetic with the concept of strategic silence if I trusted the people who were supposed to manage it. But that's, I'm trying to get to the next layer, which I understand that concern. I am very concerned that the people who are enthusiastic about strategic silence are interested in telling us partial information about all of these things so that we cannot actually tell what the hell just happened. | '''Eric:''' 02:05:20 I think what you're saying is, is that because of the information quality and the fame quality and the inspirational quality to copycat killers, that communicating the information that somebody wished to communicate, provided they're willing to make a down payment in, in terms of dead bodies taken, you know, lives taken out of this world. I'm not even focused on the manifesto. I'm focused on just naming the person. Okay. You know, you're sympathetic at some level with the concept of strategic silence. Yeah. I would be sympathetic with the concept of strategic silence if I trusted the people who were supposed to manage it. But that's, I'm trying to get to the next layer, which I understand that concern. I am very concerned that the people who are enthusiastic about strategic silence are interested in telling us partial information about all of these things so that we cannot actually tell what the hell just happened. | ||
'''Sam:''' 02:06:18 Well, yeah, so you just change the topic to jihadism and we're perfectly in agreement because yes, they will allied the religious identity of perpetrators in various contexts and actually hide information from us. Right. So, they'll, they'll correct, you'll, you'll see it, you'll see something happen. It'll, the media will pretend it's inexplicable, right? Like the end of the Orlando shooting. It's like maybe this guy was just, it was his repressed homosexuality. It was, that was the problem. Right? And yet those who have a little bit of information recognize that this is a clear-cut case of jihadism and indoctrination and a spread and the consequences of certain ideas. And the analogous situation on the other side would be what if we were going to systematically conceal evidence of, you know, you know, white supremacy being the motive for a certain | '''Sam:''' 02:06:18 Well, yeah, so you just change the topic to jihadism and we're perfectly in agreement because yes, they will allied the religious identity of perpetrators in various contexts and actually hide information from us. Right. So, they'll, they'll correct, you'll, you'll see it, you'll see something happen. It'll, the media will pretend it's inexplicable, right? Like the end of the Orlando shooting. It's like maybe this guy was just, it was his repressed homosexuality. It was, that was the problem. Right? And yet those who have a little bit of information recognize that this is a clear-cut case of jihadism and indoctrination and a spread and the consequences of certain ideas. And the analogous situation on the other side would be what if we were going to systematically conceal evidence of, you know, you know, white supremacy being the motive for a certain... | ||
''' | '''Eric:''' But what I'm trying to say is that in all of these killings, like you just pointed out that the Unabomber, you read, re-read the Unabomber's manifesto right now the Unabomber wrote a story called Ship of Fools, which I thought was relatively interesting about people losing their heads in social justice and society getting ... | ||
''' | '''Sam:''' 02:07:31 There's some of that in the manifesto, too. He's very very critical... | ||
'''Eric:''' 02:07:37 He's not a dumb man, that Kaczynski guy. Yeah. However, the point was is that you were able to mine that for information and then you were able to reach some pretty interesting conclusions about where Kaczynski was relative to society in general. You trusted yourself. | |||
''' | '''Sam:''' Right. | ||
'''Eric:''' | '''Eric:''' Okay. My guess is that when it comes to jihadis, you are more interested in communicating the information about what the motivational structure is because it is prescriptive that something might be done. However, it is also actually, there's another reason, it's not just that it's prescriptive that something might be done... | ||
'''Sam:''' | '''Sam:''' 02:08:16 It is also actually, there's another reason, it's not just that it's prescriptive. It may not be, it's just that is it. There are more, there's more contact between... | ||
''' | '''Eric:''' 02:08:17 There're more levers to play with to try to control the situation. | ||
''' | '''Sam:''' And it's a much larger problem. | ||
'''Sam:''' 02:13:32 | '''Eric:''' No kidding. Right. But on the other hand, if I look at the New Zealand shooters and the Squirrel Hill shooters' manifestos, right? It's disgusting and it has content. Yeah. And you know, the way on which I can explain to people how all of the open border type stuff is going to cause future problems is just to say you may not think of a country the way I, I do or somebody else. But imagine that somebody comes to your home as a guest and you give them the key and they say, I hope you don't mind, but I noticed that there were a lot of people on skid row today who didn't have anything to eat, no place to sleep. So, I ran off 2000 copies of, of your key and I hope we can adopt all those people when they come over later tonight. | ||
'''Eric:''' 02:09:13 Because I gave him the address and the security code. Now if, if that starts to rattle around in your brain, you don't feel good about it. You may not conceive of your country as a house with a, with a, a front door and a security code and rules as to who gets in and out. But they do. And some of those people are going to go crazy and they're going to kill people. And I know that to be the case. And it's not that I'm sympathetic with a synagogue shooter or a mosque killer. Fuck those guys. The point is, is that we are not trying to get the information because we have this class of people, this intermediating class that I don't trust as far as I can throw them and that you still have more residual trust in. In other words, my feeling about data and society is, is that I understand all sorts of things that they're trying to do, but they're super dangerous. They are incredibly dangerous in part because they're going to be backed by people like Bill and Melinda Gates or the Ford Foundation or whatever it is. | |||
'''Sam:''' This is the Southern Poverty Law Center problem. | |||
'''Eric:''' Exactly. | |||
'''Sam:''' And other guys. Yeah. So, it's, you know, I think you and I have been talking past each other a little bit here. I totally agree that in this case we can't really trust the gatekeepers. What, that the only thing that I was expressing openness, open-mindedness about or agreement about. | |||
'''Sam:''' 02:10:34 With respect to strategic silence is there is this, you know... | |||
'''Eric:''' How would you trust this strategic silence, Sam. | |||
'''Sam:''' In some ways it's impossible, because you take it out of the atrocity... | |||
'''Eric:''' But you don't know that. | |||
'''Sam:''' Yeah. But like, but there's the atrocity side of it, which has its own thing. But just take a take the, the, the case of famous suicides, right? We know that suicide is contagious. And, you know, this has a name, the, Werther effect, you know, based on Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. So there, there's the fact that a significantly prom... sufficiently prominent person who's got any kind of, especially, and this is true, I think for any suicide, but especially if there's some sort of Byronic, you know, romantic gloss that can be put on it, you know suicides go up and suicides go up in ways that are, you know, hooray, plane crashes go up. | |||
'''Sam:''' 02:11:31 Right? And we believe, you know, I don't know if the data has changed on this, but as of, you know, 20 years ago or whenever this was done, I think this was in it might've been an in Cialdeni's book, Influence (Influence: The psychology of persuasion) plane crashes go up and the interpretation of that is that some number of airline pilots commit suicide with everyone on board. Right? You know the, I mean we know that's happened before. There's, there's one famous case of that but you know, it just added these statistics that seems to be suggested. But so, what do you do when Anthony Bourdain commits suicide? How do you cover that story? There's got, there has to be some style guide around how you cover it and it's not an at one point it could look like an unwillingness to actually get at the truth, but what's your, what, what's your, what's actually motivating you is not an unwillingness to get to the truth. It's just you, you're, you're aware of the potential contagion effect here depending on what the, what the actual story is. | |||
'''Eric:''' 02:12:36 So I can't figure out where our energy differs. I agree with you that in theory, strategic silence, like don't publicize things where the benefit is very slight. Right. And the cost is enormous. I get it. But right now, we're in some different place, which is that a lot of us, I mean, just don't trust any of the gatekeepers. Like there's not one gatekeeper that I want making that decision for me at the moment. And you know, in particular, it's very weird that I like, I get the concept Dana, but I don't trust you because you came out with this alternative influencer network thing, to zero methodology on it. So, you're volunteering | |||
'''Sam:''' And it's all guilt by association and it's... | |||
'''Eric:''' 02:13:32 And you know Noam Chomsky talks to Stefan Molyneux and he's not included. It's total nonsense. And the person who wrote it has been herself as a complete activist rather than a researcher. So, there's a total breakdown on that thing. What I'm confused by is the more of this kind of shielding that we have, the more likely we're going to have four more years of Donald Trump. And I can only imagine what's going to happen after an eight-year Trump presidency. Are we going to move to the next level of really unexpected candidate? We've got to realize that we're making for the most shocking Rose ceremony ever. We, we've got to realize that what we're doing is we're making people crazy because they can see that it's the Truman show. So, if we had a discussion where we like, had you heard strategic silence before? I think I'd do it for me. I know. Yeah. I think I'd heard the phrase but, but the [inaudible] national discussion and coming to a national consensus about this or we're going to use strategic silence when it's Jihadi violence, right? | |||
'''Sam:''' 02:14:28 And we're not going to use it when it's white supremacist violence in a different way or we're going to leak particular information provided it goes this way and not that way. That's what's going to cause an infinite series of trumps. Well, yeah, and more importantly for this topic, I think it's, it's imperative that we understand what is actually going on and what, why people are doing what they're doing and what the, what the, the, the scale of the, the relative risks are and just how big a problem is. I met my, my last podcast, which I haven't released yet, is on this topic, just talking to someone who's written a history of white supremacy and white power in the U S and I'm just trying to get a handle on how big a problem it is. And I, and I came away from that podcast convinced more or less that nobody knows how big a problem it is. | '''Sam:''' 02:14:28 And we're not going to use it when it's white supremacist violence in a different way or we're going to leak particular information provided it goes this way and not that way. That's what's going to cause an infinite series of trumps. Well, yeah, and more importantly for this topic, I think it's, it's imperative that we understand what is actually going on and what, why people are doing what they're doing and what the, what the, the, the scale of the, the relative risks are and just how big a problem is. I met my, my last podcast, which I haven't released yet, is on this topic, just talking to someone who's written a history of white supremacy and white power in the U S and I'm just trying to get a handle on how big a problem it is. And I, and I came away from that podcast convinced more or less that nobody knows how big a problem it is. | ||