Heh I just listened to the first 30 minutes of it. I have to admit I think Harris is coming off as the better informed one whose thinking on the topic is less rigid. Harris might even be more honest: for example, contrasting "genetic an environmental conditions" with "historical" conditions is unfair of Ezra Klein. It seems pretty obvious that environmental conditions are intended to include things that are connected to historical inequalities that can be traced back to slavery and emancipation. Klein is also going on a tear attacking Murray and portraying him as a bad guy instead of taking this ideas at face value and making a case against them. I mean, advocating for a universal basic income and cutting social services might not be a great idea, but advocating that policy doesn't make you a bad person and shouldn't be an indication that a person is beyond the pale, as Klein suggests at one point with his exasperation.

But the whole thing has been quite tedious, because they're effectively having a discussion about facts and data... without talking about the facts and the data. What do you think?

It's funny to me that everyone who talks about this prefaces it by first mentioning how much of a total waste of time it is. I mean, it is a total waste of time, but...

Of course a UBI should replace social programs. Why would you keep expensive means tested programs when you have a low-overhead alternative that does the same thing? Is Ezra Klein trying to run a jobs program for white middle class people or something?

I don't get why Klein keeps saying that "history" is the cause of inequality. I can't believe he actually thinks that, and Harris' suspicion of arguing in bad faith seems warranted to me. What kind of explanatory power does slavery and desegregation have on their own as a reason for inequality between whites and blacks? Those things only cause inequality by virtue of their effects, not by themselves.

Another example of some pretty dumb reasoning is in the first section of this podcast: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/voxs-the-weeds/e/53870223

The study suggests that a feasible explanation for why black males (but not black females) are significantly more likely to be worse off than their parents is that the criminal justice system incarcerates them at higher rates. Klein disputes that, and says it's probably not that; it's more likely just racism. Never mind that that doesn't square with the fact that black women are better off or just as well off as their parents at a rate that is comparable to whites. It's ridiculous that the guy who made his career as a preeminent policy wonk consistently refuses to believe that policy can be used to solve problems.

I haven't listened to the podcast, but I'm sure that Harris baited Klein into thinking he is dumber than he is by unapologetically juxtaposing liberal assumptions with the possibility of them being simply hopeful simplifications.

You usually lose against Sam Harris if you assume that him "sounding" wrong means you can lecture him on morality and be sloppy and angry.

For a humorous example of this listen to Harris get berated by a drunk and emotional Hannibal Buress for so much as talking about statistics in the context of crime and race.

I mean, if the big long rant toward Harris about race that Klein posted on his blog is any indication....

Maybe the real problem with Harris is that progressives really can't fathom whether or not he is on their side, and this spooks them.

Progressives aren't even on their own side. I'd've assumed this condition is familiar to them.

Heh, spot on. He's pretty good at getting Klein to look unreasonable and overly emotional without doing anything that seems quite like a provocation.

I'm surprised b/c I thought Klein came off as the less emotional of the two on the podcast. Harris got pretty in his feelings about the insinuation that he might harbor prejudices.

well i guess our contrasting interpretations says something about our motivated reasoning and tribal affiliations... :p

That's one reason why I wasn't too interested in listening to the podcast. I've witnessed enough of this kind of intellectual theater.

I know it's been mentioned but Hitchens was far more charming. Sam Harris is sort of like an awkward and humorless version of Hitchins, and he ends up making people with good intentions really angry at him for not much reason.

If I wanted to participate in an protracted and emotional intellectual spat, I'd just come here.

I do think it's funny that Sam Harris has basically turned "being right on the internet" (insert offensive meme about the special olympics) into a flourishing book selling business.

Although it might have something to do with the atheist twist on the old "there's no publicity but good publicity": the more angry I make people in the course of showing them I am "right", the more followers I will accumulate!

I mean, there are only so many ways to piss off Christians, so I guess the atheist movement had to find other people to fight with to sell their books.

I mean, Hitchens would basically turn your words against so that he could declare you a walking joke, which was flipping hilarious. Whereas Sam Harris seems to genuinely care about being right, and is gradually finding out that most other humans actually don't.

On the other hand, when Harris is not arguing with people, I think his style of interviewing is great. Maybe he talks too much, but I like it.

The people who would win against Sam Harris have better things to do then speak to Sam Harris.

The problem with Harris is he doesn't really have anything of value to say

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/951276346529009665

Sam Harris thinks you can derive "ought" statements from "is" statements. As a careful reading of the tweets above suggests, Sam Harris doesn't understand the is-ought distinction.







This entire statement is a big stupid contradiction. He's just presumed the normative statement "we ought not do things which suck". There's no objective reason we ought to do things which don't suck. It's part of our value system. So he didn't say anything at all about the is-ought distinction.

All his argument actually shows is that some values we hold prior to reason, or that we might act out of instinct. This isn't new to philosophy.

This is not even difficult philosophy. This is intro level, basic ****. And he's so incompetent he can't even grapple with some of the most easy to understand, basic ideas in western philosophy. An idea that he wrote an entire book on.

Why anyone listens to him, I don't know. Just go read actual academics. They don't make podcasts, but the ideas are better than a C-grade sophomore essay.

His view is not actually as incoherent as you make it out to be. It's effectively utilitarianism.



So? When did that ever matter in philosophy?

If he was just advocating for utilitarianism, then he'd be advocated a widely held, respectable philosophical view. He also wouldn't be able to sell a book because he has nothing new to say on that. I'm not arguing anything about the claim "we ought to minimize suffering" at all. My only assertion is that it's a kind of assertion, it's an assertion about value.

The entire point of The Moral Landscape was to argue that the is-ought gap is faulty and the cause of much of religion and other bad things, so it's core to his entire argument. And that part that's "new" is completely pointless.



It begets the question of why read Harris when there are plenty of books with better arguments.

Because it's accessible. A lot of philosophy isn't.

Yeah, just as Harris says: it does appear we can derive values from how things are. What he's getting at is this: It's self-evident a posteriori from experience (not a priori) that some things are bad (namely, things that are painful), and therefore we should avoid those things (because pain might well be the perception that something is bad, just as pleasure may be the perception that it is good). It appears that values can be derived from simple facts about our experience of the world, or, if not values, at least prescriptions for action (viz., avoid the painful, pursue the pleasurable), and we ought to use knowledge in the service of that criterion for right action.

The is-ought distinction isn't taken for granted by all philosophers to be true. Many philosophers don't agree with it. Something something sophomores

Accessible =/= good. Accessible + cogent = good.

I agree that philosophers could do more to converse more with the public. However, often when they do try they are ignored. Good philosophical argument is not entertaining, it's challenging, and most people go out seeking to be entertained, not challenged. Good philosophical arguments are also often not sexy. There are plenty of books written at an introductory level on this kind of thing that are cogent, it's that people don't read them because it's not appealing.

This is like arguing that the Beatles are overrated. Beatles fans don't care that you don't like the thing they like, no matter what reasons you give for why it's bad. Boohoo

It's not saying we experience pain is the problem, it's "and therefore we should avoid those things". It's an implicit value claim that we should avoid things which are painful. You're making a logical leap to say that something being painful implies it *should* be avoided.

There's nothing in the logical of stove -> pain that implies it should be done. It's because we judge that "pain sucks", as Harris pointed out, we apply the label which determines pain to be bad. Just because you can point to objective causes of things many people find sucky doesn't mean in itself it should be avoided.

All this means is that moral reasoning is, in its essence, axiomatic. You start from a moral assertion, and facts can tell you how to apply that assertion. But you can't prove the assertion as a result of the facts themselves.

This is a more general way of pointing to the naturalistic fallacy.

Also, remember this is the same book where Sam Harris argues killing people who believe in radical Islam is justified because they believe in it.



Values can certainly make use of objective reality to come to moral claims. That's not the issue, and is irrelevant to the distinction. The argument is that you can't get to a moral claim from purely simple facts about the experience of the world. Before you can use worldly facts to derive moral facts, you must first make a moral claim - e.g. "we ought to avoid pain".



The objections that philosophers raise are far different from Harris's. Theirs are in the vein that shoulds can be derived from is statements in the form of true conditionals: if one desires to avoid pain, then one ought not tough a stove, is a statement about oughts derived from 'is' statements. Pretty much all criticisms I've ever read would be in this vein, I know of nobody who says the gap is meaningless in a vein like Sam Harris', but if you know of any arguments I'd be willing to read them.

Trust me, I don't give a **** if you like Sam Harris.

I should be more clear on the part about cogency: Sam Harris addresses the is-ought gap not by comprehending and presenting an argument against it, but by completely misunderstanding what it says. If he had a cogent argument, it would be a different story. As it stands he literally just doesn't understand what he's talking about. Even Ayn Rand didn't **** up that badly.

It's even worse than I thought:



The thing he's describing here is.. drumroll please.. the is-ought gap. He says in defense of his work that you can't derive morals from solely scientific descriptions of the world, while on another stage criticizing the is-ought gap for dragging otherwise rational scientists down into the pit of moral relativism. This is what I mean by Sam Harris doesn't have a cogent argument. He's inconsistent and incoherent.

Just curious, how much of Sam Harris' views are invalidated because he is a sloppy philosopher? What if the philosophy part is just window dressing, and he just has a well thought out opinion with other reasons for having? Based on his interviews, he seems like a pretty reasonable guy to me.

Doing good philosophy feels smart, so people who make questionable philosophical arguments must be stupid (or at best lazy thinkers), and therefore, we can summarily dismiss their views as being insufficiently clear to merit further attention.

Right?

Wait, is the podcast with Klein about theoretical philosophical arguments? Or are you saying that Sam Harris is incapable of having a rational discussion on any topic because he is bad at philosophy?

Is the podcast with Klein (or almost all his other podcasts) even about philosophy?

Oh, didn't mean to confuse. I didn't open the podcast, as I don't think it's worth my time.

lmao that was beautiful.

Why doesn't anyone just repeatedly explain to him that he is unlikable?

Haha, OK. Well I was hoping for a more potent argument against the case for Harris' rational faculties, but TBF I didn't listen to the podcast either! But only because I knew the two of them would probably spend the entire hour talking past one another and getting indignant.

Well he went to Stanford and was probably surrounded by a bunch of Objectivist dorks, so he probably doesn't even realize it.

you ****ing scumbag why would you capitalize objectivist?

I rationally deduced that the word should in fact be capitalized, from first principles.

[quote=Elon Musk]I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.[/quote]

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/objectivism?page=3

Well either that or I did the exact opposite, and just copied the fact that everybody else capitalizes Objectivism.

In Soviet Germany, Nouns capitalize You!

I think Sam Harris says some nice things at times, it's just to me, does that justify studying his work deeply? If you're going to read a work on utilitarian ethics and science, there are many different books you could read, why pick his above the others?

At his best he's giving an alright defense of pretty good ideas. At worst he's mangling ideas so bad he can't recognize when he's using them, if he even tries to defend them instead of attacking the person making charges, a common occurance with him. And after all of the insistence and anger he causes, to dismiss it by assuming the thing he's argued against is just frustrating. It's like he took the worst flaming on Massassi and made a career out of it.

I like the line from Wikipedia, though:



Also, somewhere I saw a takedoen of his neuroscience PhD research. It was pretty low quality research, using outdated and unreliable MRI methods (the same method where scientists were able to get positive brain scan results on a dead fish), selectively removed people from a small sample size. And guess what? His results concluded that religious people are dumb and atheists are smart. Hmm...

Oh, from what I understand his wealthy family paid for his PhD research. Yeah, as long as you aren't a total moron you can pay your way through a PhD.. and Sam Harris isn't a total moron.

Also, seriously, his comments about Muslims are awful.

His phd wasn't funded? lol