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

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'''Sam:'''        01:36:46      And I would, I was talking about this and thinking in these terms, but still totally embedded in, in the activity of, of taking Twitter seriously and, and feeling that it was a professional necessity. And on some level, it was just, it was just sticky enough, you know, emotionally like this is, you know, cause I am getting a lot of my news that way. I'm, I'm following smart people. I want to see what articles they're reading and there's an opportunity for conversation and then somebody like Nassim Taleb says something, you know, outrageously stupid that is, you know, directed at me. Right. And it goes, it's going out to hundreds of thousands of people. And so, you know, it's an opportunity for me to tell him to fuck off. And so, I find some way to say that and this thing begins playing out. And to the degree that I've stepped away, which is like 95% now when I come back and I see, you know, some of my friends I see you, you know, embroiled with, you know, you know Clare Lehman or somebody and it does look like I'm now in touch with the ...

'''Eric:'''  He went on Sam Cedar's program.  

'''Eric:'''    01:40:01      I think it's hard to remember like Country Joe and the Fish was ridiculing a bad war in terms that are ridiculous. You've now got a group of people who if a mathematician says, you know that in in different arithmetics you could have an equation like two plus three equals one. And so, then you get somebody saying, "I don't know what they're smoking over there at Princeton, but..." yeah, well that's ridicule but you're ridiculing something that you straw man and didn't understand because the person actually was making sense. And so, what I see is that the left and in particular the Sam Cedar crowd has a  

Eric  Because you can be Sam, I mean, the problem was solved...

Sam  These guys can be. Sam Cedar can be honest on his show and still have a show. Right? Nobody's going to cancel him because he was too honest.  

Eric  No, I, I think that there's like this very weird other, I mean Sam, I don't want to get into the Sam Cedar thing in particular.

Sam  He'll take these quotations.  

Eric  No, but he, he, he has Pechman's ability to reason. I mean, I got this,  

Sam  This is the banality of evil, right? Like there's not that many evil people. There's just a lot of people who are functioning in some normal mode was with, with normal incentives and they become assholes because they're not heroes. Right? But so like it takes some work not to be an asshole when you are incentivized to be one and, and we're all vulnerable to this, but there's some people who have just cashed in. Go for it.

Eric That nonsense on the left makes me crazy because in part it just feels like all of my ideals turned into some piece of crap that's...

Sam  We're of the left.

Eric Not only the left, man. I came from a farther left part than I didn't even, I don't even know where you started, but yeah.

Eric  If I could, if I, if I could move to another party that made sense, I'd do it at this point.

 

Eric  Anyway. I think that what they, I think that what we don't really understand is that there's a homelessness problem that is really significant. If you are the sort of a person who needs to attach to some kind of institutional structure in a time when there is no institution that actually holds your perspective, you're going to start to do very bizarre things. Now the thing about you and and me is, is that to some extent, and I don't think we can do this long-term, we're okay with being homeless, right? You can just sort of first principles, try to think your way out of stuff, but it's very tough for most people and I think that there is, there are these sort of collection points in the adaptive landscape of politics. Would you would disagree with that?

Sam Yeah, well, one thing that seems important is

'''Sam:'''        01:45:27       the connection to science. I mean, we're not spending a lot of time talking about science in this mode, but the, the, the, the dispassion and self-criticism that is the like is the only rubric under which real science can be done, bleeds into our thinking about all these other issues. I mean, I think that's, that's gotta be a relevant variable. It's, it's like it, like you either have a scientific cast of mind or you don't, and when you don't...

Eric I have both.  

Sam Right? But when you, when you don't, you're seeing, you're not seeing the,  

Eric  Well this is like always the issue is with our friend Jordan Peterson, which is that when he gets really far out there in the end of the people that are called mytho-poetic, I don't, I don't know the lingo. You always wonder are you still maintaining a fact-checking ability to, to bring you back to earth. And so as long as those two facilities are present and in dialogue and as long as the fact-checking, you know, what we, what we call the scientific method is in some sense inadequate to me to explain how science has progressed, all the mad thinking and then the spirituality of coming up with breaking new ground, doesn't have the..

Sam Well you gave us Rahma Nugrheni about an hour ago.

Eric  Well there's, there's that, you know, the Kerala School of Astronomy that came up with infinite series before Newton and Leibniz, was doing it in religious poetry, you know, it rhymed I think over there in Kerala. So, there is a, there is a kind of madness that you have to invite to break new ground and there's a kind of sanity that you have to invite to wrestle with the madness. And our friend Dan Barkay came up with this idea that science is a two-front war, but that most people are only been deployed to one front. And I think that that's a real, it's a really nice image. I do worry that in part the activist mindset, particularly on the left has a very clear idea, which is that, yeah it's really a shame the number of people who have to get hurt for justice to be done.

Sam  Yeah. But I mean that that is a, an ethic or a pseudo ethic that we have to just relentlessly criticize because it's so much harm gets done. I mean that, that is the, the thinking that allows good people or otherwise good people to create immense harm. Just like, let's throw, throw them off the rooftops because they you know, the purge is on and it's, sorry, we have to break these many eggs to make this omelet.  

Eric  But partially the question is how do we spend enough time together to get past this problem? Like I, I really think it's quite serious that part of it is, is  

Sam  Well part of the problem is that we're not actually doing much of this face-to-face or like I've never met Nassim I've never met Sam Seder. I've never met...

Eric This is why I had a phone call with him.

Eric Well you saw happen with Clare. Let's talk, let's talk about the Clare situation.

Same Ok, that would have been different had you never hung out with Claire, or it might've been different.

Sam  Well let's flip it around it, it was more of a betrayal, you know, or a seeming betrayal given the fact that you had hung out together. It wasn't just coming over the transom of

Eric The betrayal in part was, was my betrayal of Claire. I just didn't know it.  

Sam Well, whatever. I'm just saying that change if you know each other...

Eric  I'm trying to make a different point. When somebody, you know, behaves in a way that is very most unexpected. Like what I try to do is I try to slow it down and I say, I bet we're watching two different movies and your story and my story are not, the gears are not lining up. And so, if we just push on the gears, the teeth are going to pop off and there'll be the handle of everything.

Sam  Right.  

Eric And that in part IQ has this curse that I've said it's a pretty good measure of intelligence.

Sam Right.  

Eric That problem. You know, it was being teased out and neither of them, the reason I stayed out of is just, I didn't believe in Claire's position as I understood it. And I didn't believe in Nassim's tactics as I understood them. And Claire interpreted that I think, and I don't know this to be true as, wow, you know, you're seeing me getting mauled right and I thought you would be there, you know, or something like that. And so, in part, just backing up everything, slowing it down, trying to listen. You know, Ben and I have gotten sideways a few, few times. To his credit, every time I take something to Ben Shapiro, he'll think better of himself and he'll come...

Sam Yeah, yeah, yeah, no that that's my experience as well.  

Eric  Even though account for a part of his business,  

Sam Yeah, no, that counts for a lot. So, so the, the, the place where we've, we've reached some kind of bad faith singularity is where I think, okay, there's like, we just have to cut our losses. There's no conversation. Like, that's why I would never talk to Sam Seder in a public forum. He's, he's proven himself so committed to the singularity. I mean, he's,

'''Sam:'''        01:52:46      It's like there's a bunch I can, there's maybe 20 people who are just on this part of the landscape where there's no coming back from it. I mean, this coming, you know, obviously there's an appropriate, the, any conversation that would have to happen would have to begin with an actual apology. I'm like, it's just so bad. There's no alternate movie version that's exculpatory. Right. These people know their line, their, their avidly lying. It's all malicious. It's all, it's all, it's all Saul Alinsky. It's all just smears.  

Eric Well, it is Saul Allinsky. But look, the best that can be said for it, again, I don't get along with it right, is I believe that they think that they're in desperate times and they believe that desperate times call for desperate measures. And that's sort of the mindset, which is the ridicule is necessary to stop a greater evil. And that entitlement, as soon as you start experiment  

Sam But ridicule is not the problem.

Eric Can I be honest, can I be honest? I've probably watched 5 minutes of Sam Seder total.

Sam You, that's, that's more than I've watched. But I've watched enough to know that these are people who, when they're trafficking in audio of my podcast that's been edited yet it just show the opposite of what I was saying and they get a thousand blistering comments telling them, right, that they keep the audio up or they, they, they, they don't, they never correct an error.  

Eric I agree. But that's what it's coming out of it.  

Sam  It's psychopathic behavior. You know, it's like, well, whether or not they're psychopaths, they're acting like psychopaths.  

Eric  All right, but then we've got a giant chunk of our world and in part a lot, a lot of the sense-making apparatus that is explicitly amongst itself, psychopathic. It believes that it is under threat and desperate times and desperate times call for desperate measures.

'''Eric:'''        01:54:33      This is it's opportunity and it's going to do things and it's going to be...the thing that I didn't understand about it because I came from the left, is that it just explicitly thinks in, "that's too bad". Right? I'll, I'll, I'll get you a Kleenex next. It's just this dead cold-heartedness that progress requires that good people get hurt. "Boohoo" and, and that thing is so hardcore.

Sam That's gonna make that, that makes the Trump and backlash.  

Eric  Understandable. And that's, and that's really in part what I'm trying to get at, which is, is that when I went to Washington in like 1996 on immigration issues, I went into some staffers, like some room of cubicles and I saw the sign on one of the cubicles that said, "if it's worth fighting for, it's worth fighting dirty for". Right? And I came to understand that if you wanted to survive and thrive and get stuff done in Washington, that that had been absorbed almost universally. Right? And then once I realized that I had to make a decision, did I really want to get good things done or did I want to stay a person I could live with? And that's very painful to actually have to think about.

Eric  We want to create a world in which that's an easy choice. What we've created is a system of selective pressures, which may actually end up selecting for that over and over again. And you don't realize, and this is the, this is the issue, the reason that so many of these things make me angry like the great moderation or the abuse of the immigration system to decrease wages and then you cry xenophobia when somebody points it out or NAFTA and a lot large areas of the country get really hurt and you're saying everybody's going to be made better off. Is that all of these things I can see in real time? Like right now what I can see like those things of the past is, I can see this weird, and this is getting back to the Jeff Epstein thing.

Sam  So you're saying it's fishy that no one's doing that?

Eric  Well, I mean it's beyond fishy. In other words, you have something that everybody's demanding and wants. If it weren't true, you could get paid by showing that it's not true or making the best argument possible or making fun of how thin that the claims are.  

Sam  Well, that may yet happen. I mean, I get, again, I don't know that somebody isn't writing the 5,000-word Atlantic article on Epstein that's going to answer...

'''Eric:'''    01:57:35      Dude, how long has it been? This guy supposedly commits suicide, we don't know whether you know what branch of the decision tree that's on and you can search, go to the New York Times and search on intelligence, the thing I, and Epstein like, it's not being explored. It's not being shut down. It's like anechoic tile in your echolocha, it's not what you're hearing. Go to the search bar and search for things that people are discussing that don't come up. And that's what's telling you that there's something very, I mean, this guy was apparently a serious sexual predator, we're in an era of "Me-Too".  

Sam Right? But there are anomalies like that. I mean, the clear anomaly for me was, and again, and it's one for which I don't have any sinister explanation, I just think it's an anomaly of the news cycle we're in, right? It's sort of what Trump has done to our, our information diet. When the Las Vegas shooting, you know, perpetrated by a man whose name I don't even know. Right? And I'm kind of a student of these things, but I never even took the time to

Eric  Well now that's not true.  

Sam  That's like it was, it had fallen out of the news cycle.

Eric  It was very bizarre.

Sam  And never, never came back.

Eric It vanished very quickly.  

Sam But there you, I don't think there's any reason why it vanished apart from the fact that we just don't have the bandwidth for it anymore. It's like there was no, there was no link that made it a clearly ideological, I mean, nothing's surface. He wasn't a clear white supremacist or he wasn't a jihadist. I mean there was no

Eric Remember the word bump stock.

Sam  Yeah. Yeah. So, the bump stock...  

Eric  Why weren't we talking about bump stuff?  

Same We banned bump stocks as a result of that thing.

Eric  Did you see Dan Bilzerian was that this thing?  

Sam  Oh no, no. I think I,  

Eric  Dan Bilzerian is that wanting out of this thing saying like, we're under fire. I'm going to go get my gun. And you know, he's like, he's doing it in real time.  

Sam  If you told me we're not going to be talking about this a week later. Right. That just wouldn't compute. But that's, that is the situation we're in. I mean, somehow it just didn't survive the Darwinian contest with whatever else was on social media.  

Eric  I don't really think that that's what happens. Listen...

Sam  Why aren't we talking about it?  

Eric  Well, that's, that's, see, look, and you're starting to smile. No, this is the thing that conspiracy theorists get dead wrong, which is you are allowed to notice some very weird anomaly and not have to say what it is you're noticing. Right? So, my claim, like...

Eric  Correct. You're not correct in my opinion. So let me get ...

Sam  Interesting, well, the way I would say it, but whoever's right or wrong, I'm just saying that this belief that I have now have, that we have, we have a different relationship to information now in reasonably  

Eric We can agree that we're cycling through things very quickly. But that was a spectacular, there's a reason we're talking. It was amazing. Yeah. Because it's anomalously weird how fast that story disappeared. Oh yeah. Now one of the things that you, we have to, we have to talk about it in that, in that realm is Dana Boyd and her discussion of strategic silence.

Sam  And where was this articulated?  

Eric  You should check out Data and Society, which is a particularly interesting organization which fingered our friends as the alternative influencer network. And Dana Boyd, who I believe is sort of in our circles in the tech circles starts talking about the need for strategic silence.  

Sam  This is a girl, Dana or a boy, Dana?  

Eric  A female. Okay. Somebody I perceive to be female. I now don't want to touch a human named Dana Boyd. Right. and strategic, silence. And she also talks about data gaps, if I'm not mistaken, I have my terminology right. And so, then you have to look at things like style guide, like the AP style guide or the New York Times style guide, which is the way in which people are directed to report news stories.

Sam  Well, I think, I think there's, some are better than innocent. I think some are benign and we've been slow to adopt them. I think. I think, I think the fact that, I don't know, this guy's name is probably a good thing for the world. And that was, that was part of the style new style guide. And you just don't...

Eric  Did you read the New Zealand shooter's manifesto?  

Sam  No, but I, I part of it, but yeah, I haven't, I haven't read the whole thing.

Eric No one wants to criminalize, I'm just saying that you learn  

Eric I'm talking about something more disturbing.  

Sam  It's appropriate for the, for journalists to worry that merely shining a light or your, push up pointing a camera at this new atrocity is the, the should be that the default setting, right? Like name the guy, let's go, let's go get into his story. Let's find out why he did it and do all of this in public.  

Eric  We're in such a much more dangerous place in my opinion.  

Sam  And I know about, maybe we're, we're talking past each other here.

Eric  Let's just agree that in a better world, we would have a situation by which we would not want to communicate. We're relatively

Sam  These people famous. We don't, there's this famous part of the motive, right? Posthumous fame even is part of the motive. So as if it, even if it's not part of the motive, it's part of what is attractive to the living aspiring a gunman.  

Eric  First of all, let me steel man your position to make sure I'm getting it and then I can take issue with you and you'll, we'll see whether I'm adding or subtracting. Right.

'''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, but what apprentice say is that in all of these killings, like you just pointed out that the Unabomber you read, re-read the Unabomber is 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 some of that in the manifesto.

'''Sam:'''        02:07:31      To me, he's, he's very critical of not a to dump man.