Buckle up for this one. Not my usual content, but I’m just getting on a plane that was delayed for three hours and listening to a talk with one of our most prominent “new atheists.” I’m convinced this chat bears some relevance to the community, if tangentially.
I do love Sam Harris. One part of this I find objectionable is his assertion that capitalism is the best tool we have to solve wealth inequality, but that’s maybe off-topic here and I don’t expect most of this community to share my feelings on that anyway. I’m happy to discuss it in Matrix.
On the other hand, he makes some excellent points on how the left is hungrily eating its own tail and how.
You must log in or register to comment.
I used to listen to a lot of Sam Harris. I used to like him when I was younger. But there were way too many times where his thoughts seemed more passion based and the holes in his logic, as well as the way he presented himself started to annoy me. The whole white supremacy arc he did as a protest to anti-intellectualism (I guess? It was fucking stupid) was the last straw for me.
I like his Ted Talk on AI though.
His insistence on embracing what he considers to be spiritualism (and isn’t it always different depending on who you ask?) turns me off of him. Then there’s this…
His nattering on about the nature of free will and the inevitability of the choices you make or whatever isn’t useful or provable at our stage in science, and the way he always goes on about it always makes me think he’s using a whole bunch of words to say absolutely nothing and trying to pass it off as deep thinking. It isn’t, it’s the ramblings of someone with his head firmly up his own ass.
And yeah, that race theory shit is what I was referring to. Brain rot stupidity.
that an entire article is people saying what other people are saying other people are saying. Also IQ scores are pseudoscience invented by the eugenics movement.
I got about an hour in but didn’t really hear anything new on the topic. The interviewer even brought it back up.
They did mention being invited to dinner parties with the intention of engaging on subjects but they didn’t mention how to realize when you’ve gone too far. I’d say to avoid hot topics at dinner parties but I’m hardly a good example for that.
I did like the point that debates are never intended to change the minds of the participants, simply by our expectation of how a debate functions.
Harris admitted they haven’t debated in many years. I think this shows in how he was talking about how “woke” activists fail to “realize” all the stats he brought up. In my experience, activists do know these statistics. Harris won’t know because he won’t debate them.
Sometimes I wonder if Harris conflates capitalism with labor. And Cops with BJJ instructors.
I’ll listen later and report back, this comment is to find this post again.
