Difference between revisions of "11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends"

Eric: Oh, you'll enjoy it. The problem is, is that people are really angry about everything that happens as I'm beginning, I was like, you know, why, why, why is the glass on the edge of the table? And you know, the, the plosives are too loud and you know, there's like a lot of stuff that is there, there is no introductory period because weirdly this thing was discussed and on the Rogan program.

 

'''Eric:'''  Exactly. Which I've never been remotely close to since. And even though the podcast has grown in listenership. So partially what's happening is that we're just trying to find a format and to get comfortable with the idea. But a lot of what it's supposed to do is to go into intellectual territory that isn't based on an interview with a guest to see whether or not we can bring an enormous number of people closer to the most transcendent, solid intellectual achievement that is on offer. Because in general it feels to me like there's this monastery where all the good stuff is kept and almost nobody ever visits or reads any of it.  

'''Sam:'''  But there's just to make sure that I understand what you're saying. You're saying that you're envisioning many podcasts being just you and a whiteboard or something where you're some kind of graphics.

'''Eric:'''    02:26:18      A lot of what happened was that I was able to put things together out of sheer necessity without going through the symbolic channel. And it's my belief that even if people don't see themselves, like let's say learning disabled, that the symbolic channel is where we get stuck. That most people, if you show them a page of equations, they tune out. Right. And it's very difficult to figure out, well, what can you communicate that isn't an analogy. But that actually gets people to an understanding of sort of the, just the majesty of, of, of human intellectual achievement. And so, the hope is going to be that if we can get some, some decent production values and get the ad models to work that we can start experimenting with some sort of hybrid graphical and discussion and solo and be great. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think you should explore, it'd be fascinating for you to explore the, the alternative learn learning paradigm learning disability question.

'''Eric:'''    02:27:26       I mean people would find that incredibly useful and inspiring if you, if you, if you, if there was something there to explore that would be, especially if it would be actionable on the basis of, well, the thing that parents are, or so many of us nature's, you know, like I, I can't tell you how much hopelessness I progressed in my parents because no matter what I tried to do and nothing worked, and I know that that experience of bright, interested kid who just can't buy a base hit in school is duplicated and probably 15 20% of the households in America, it's like an enormous unknown population. What my hope is to show people why the sort of learning disabled or dyslexic mind might have superpowers. Do you actually have a diagnosis of dyslexia? Dyslexia? Dysgraphia is something called kinesthetic reinforcement. You know, people, I haven't, did you get these as a teenager or is this something things were in their infancy back then?

'''Eric:'''     02:28:27      There were batteries of tests that are different. Like, you know, there was this Kurdish word test when they assumed nobody knew Kurdish. I didn't know Kurdish for sure. And they tested to see whether you could remember a bunch of words you'd probably never seen. And in one list you wrote them out and in one list you didn't to aid in the memory. And so, when I got back a test, this was at Harvard I was like very high nineties in lots of different areas. And then one area, my score plummeted to like third percentile, right? I said, what is that does let me say, well, that's kinesthetic reinforcement. And I said, well, what does that mean? They said, well, were you to take notes? You would erase everything that you're learning. And I said, w what did you just say?

'''Eric:'''     02:29:12      And I realized that my notetaking had wiped out my entire education up to that point. Well, now why would you have taken a test like this at Harvard? I was struggling. I was, I was in the most symbolically dependent subject. I mean, at some point I'll get into my history in mathematics. But there was no one remotely like me in my situation as a PhD student at Harvard. And it was the worst possible ostensible miss, you know, mismatch. You could imagine, because math lives in symbols, it isn't symbol, but the symbols are really crucial for understanding what's going on. And that's exactly where I'm blocked. And the hope that I have is if I can get around symbols in large measure for myself, can I do it for people who aren't even necessarily blocked on learning channels?

'''Sam:'''         02:30:08      Because like I have, you know, I consider myself more or less, you know, you know, by comparison innumerate because I, you know, I took math, you know, in high school. It's not that I w I mean I was sort of equivalently good on both sides and both humanities and math. I mean, it was, it was not obvious that I shouldn't be pursuing math, but I never, you know, like after, once I did calculus in high school, I just never got math. Like I never, I never got w it was, it was just work and I never really got it. And then, you know, I mean I've, you know, I've just taken, you know, mathematical logic and statistics, you know, at the college level. But like my, my math education stopped at a point because I hit a wall of, of one just, you know, lack of exposure to the beauty of it. I mean, I'm like a fan of math now, you know, like in, in terms of his broad concepts. But I hit a wall. The, the burden of having to grapple to learn the language of the symbolism was high enough that it just does cripple it. It was, there was no, there's not enough reason to struggle with it. And I just, you know, I just don't need disabilities

'''Eric:'''    02:31:20      If you can overcome them, end up in part as this incredible superpower because, and I, and I talk about this in terms of colorblindness. So, both my brother and I are colorblind in a standard way. But we make the point about contrast blindness because there's a tradeoff between whether you see color better than others or worse or whether you see contrast better. So, to the extent that what you see is learning disabilities is mysterious to you. Like why would this be retained in such a large portion of the population? Right. It's because I think it has the characteristic of being the cost that is paying for another superpower relative to somebody who is not blocked on those channels. And like for example, I don't know whether you noticed the objects that are around here, the Klein bottles. I said I saw that.

'''Eric:'''     02:32:08      Yeah. Oh yeah. I haven't, I haven't. So, for example, that's best Sheba Grossman's art and that's a 24 cell, which is the unique new analog of a platonic solid that is not found. Sorry. The convex polytopes are the analogs of the platonic solids and dimension four. This is pushed back into dimension three and that's the unique convicts, folly tope that has no analog directly in dimension three. So then the other one that you have there is the analog of the Dodo. This is a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional object. So, like, you know, you've seen the Tesseract that is the hyper cube, which is the three-dimensional model that represents a four-dimensional structure, right? This right here is pretty directly the analog of the dodecahedron in four dimensions, projected back into three dimensions. Now when you, and again this is my a typology is, is layman's topology, but the are some projections back into three dimensions far more evocative of, of the four-dimensional object.

'''Eric:'''     02:33:30      Yeah. You want to see a lot of them so that you could see so that you could understand. So how do you have an internal sense of how much you understand or don't understand the higher dimensionality of an object based on the, it's three-dimensional. Well, for example, if we took a regular Klein bottle here and for those of you at home, I guess we should be talking about what we're doing on video. Yeah. Right, right. So, I have a glass, a bottle where the neck has been passed through to what would be called the punt and in three dimensions that appears to intersect the side of the bottle. But if you had an extra dimension represented by the amount of blueness in the bottle and we colored this blue in the bell, clear here, you could see literally in four dimensions. This doesn't intersect itself because this part of the glass would be clear in that part of the glass would be blue.

'''Eric:'''     02:34:26      Hence they're separated by some dimension that we can't represent specialty. So, by mixing spatial dimensions with colored dimensions, I claim you can actually see in four dimensions that this thing doesn't run into itself. The Klein bottle appears to intersect mathematically. There's the same logic as a Mobius strip. Is it two Mobius bands sewn together? Okay. Right now, the point that I was making is that that is an example of an object where you don't realize you can see four dimensions by just adding a color dimension to spatial dimensions, right? So, I can give you lots of intuition pumps too. And this is what I did on the Rogan program with the hop vibration. I called it the most important object in the universe, not because the hop vibration is, but it's the only example of a principle fiber bundle, which is the underpinning of really the most fundamental physics we have.

'''Eric:'''     02:35:25      And my intention is to read one paragraph of ed Witten with my audience. So, you know, Oprah has a book club or had a book club, right? So, I'm going to just try and get through one paragraph, which I think is the most important paragraph ever written in the English language. Not because ed Whitten's prose is so beautiful, not because it's free of error, but because it actually makes an attempt to say what our most deep notions of reality are in a single paragraph with relatively few symbols and unknown words. So maybe to do a paragraph club where other people do a book club. So, the awesome, the hope is to really start off with conversations. But if people are following along at home and they say, where's the portal? We're just getting started. This is the open these are the opening shots.

'''Eric:'''     02:36:13      But I would encourage you as a, even as a side gig to the portal, maybe this is not podcast material, this maybe this is an online course or something, but to find a route in to higher mathematics for the, the symbol blocked Oh, I want to do, I want to do music, I want, I want to do the unity of knowledge. All the stuff that people don't even know is out there to be found because I believe that, you know, I call this transcendence hacking that the feeling of transcendence that often induces religious feelings is really better purposed as a guide to what is it, what is worth paying special notice towards in a world drowning and distraction and that feeling of, Oh my God, like this thing here, I don't know if you've seen this. No, I'm pointing at a crystal cube.

'''Eric:'''     02:37:07      That is a three-dimensional projection of an eight-dimensional root system of the 248 dimensional, exceptionally group, he eight. So, this is sort of the most complicated, exceptional object known this. Your nemesis is a favorite. I've known it. In fact, I was on it before he was, I abandoned his name. Garrett Lisi. Yeah, yeah. But everyone should know that it's there and worry about it. Whether they're a professional mathematician or not. So though the idea I wasn't planning to talk about the objects is to leave Easter eggs includes all over the place so that people start to habituate themselves to the idea that you don't need angels or magic texts in order to commune with something that gives you the feeling that maybe we're not totally alone and that doesn't have to be an animate thing. That one you know, worships, it can be just the wonder of, my God, there's so much more mystery than anyone knew it was, was here even a short time ago. Yeah. Yeah. Well keep going. I'm enjoying the ride. All right, well Sam, thanks

'''Sam:'''         02:38:11      Very much for coming by. You're welcome to come back anytime and thanks for helping launches all those years ago with the first podcast we did over, over at your studio. Nice. Nice. So you've been through the portal with Sam Harris. Please subscribe to us on Apple, iTunes or Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts, and please check us out on YouTube. Make sure to subscribe. Click the bell if you want to be notified for future episodes. Thanks for hanging in there. Be Well.