r/samharris

What is wrong with Sam Harris? Was he always this deranged and I just didn't notice it?

A few highlights:

- Falsely claims that COVID lab leak was suppressed

- Appears to buy into weird smears of Anthony Fauci

- Mystifyingly argues that the current American Left is equally objectionable to the current American Right

- Claims that Zohran Mamdani talks about Israel constantly

Neuroscientist, philosopher, and Making Sense podcast host Sam Harris joins Preet Bharara to examine why good-faith political debate has become so difficult, President Trump’s political durability, the influence of the DSA, and whether anyone can inherit the MAGA movement after Trump.

The conversation also turns to law and democratic institutions: demands to prosecute political opponents, the difference between accountability and retribution, the limits of unwritten norms, and what it would take to prevent another president from exploiting the same weaknesses.

Link to YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEiN_Mi5Lk4

Ok so months ago on a More From Sam...the guy that sounds like a pubescent Ted McGinley asked Sam something about movies or something.

Sam's answer as far as I remember ended up reiterating the normal he usually just reads books and doesn't binge entertainment things but then he called out a movie by name and said it was great.

We're not talking about the Chauncey Gardner lol. I think it MAY have been, "Three Billboards Outside Ebing Missouri"??? But I don't know for sure. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about and what the movie was. I believe he said he couldn't stop laughing whatever it was.

In the past, Netanyahu's office and his people - since the days of the protests against Rabin, made sure to use peripheral Mizrahi thugs as their thugs and street people and manipulated them by cultivating feelings of inferiority and opposition to the old establishment and creating a narrative of 'persecuted by the media'. Whether it was against Rabin in the first incarnation, to turn them on against Barak, in the 2015 elections or against the witnesses and judges in Netanyahu's trial. Netanyahu and his office always made sure to incite these people from afar or send people and intellectuals to turn them on (later intellectuals emerged who cultivated the 'second Israel' theory, peripheral Mizrahi and basically anyone who is not leftist, against the predatory 'elite' that supposedly hates 'the people'), to exploit them, etc. But they always made sure to keep their distance from them and let them get dirty for them like mafia thugs. Whether these are typical thugs on the street, Bibi's soldiers in the Knesset, or media mouthpieces.

Now, this people are establishing their own historical narrative, worldview and basically an alternative universe, and an independent populist-authoritarian-anarchist ideology that becomes independent of Netanyahu himself, in a situation where Ben-Gvir is trying to bring his people into the Likud party and Netanyahu fears the power of extremist figures in his party. In ideological terms, Netanyahu is Silvio Berlusconi, while the new Israeli right is Mussolini/Franco. Ben Gvir embodies a Mussolini-style movement in Hebrew in the age of the internet. He distanced himself from the religious-Ashkenazi-Messianic right, and gathered around him street thugs, TikTok rabbis, criminals, peripherals, former ultra-Orthodox who can't find themselves, and influencers and just plain nationalists who are interested in destroying the existing order.

Since October 7th, Sam Harris has celebrated Haviv Rettig Gur as a voice of reason in Israel. Sam has been on Haviv's show, and Haviv has been on Making Sense. Here, he criticizes the right wing of Israel's government. Some people claim that Sam and "his tribe" don't do this.

Ben Shapiro, who has debated Sam Harris about atheism and MAGA, is called out by Alex O'Connor, who Sam has talked to about philosophy and religion. Ben is a decent ally against the Nazi-wing of the conservative movement, but he should still be called out on things he's wrong about.

Given Sam’s podcast has dried up and it’s now incredibly boring and repetitive, I thought I’d share some podcasts I’ve been binging recently and which others might like, specifically if you’re into Sam’s podcasts where he discusses philosophy, consciousness, ethics, and science (rather than geo-politics):

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
Sentientism
The Dissenter
Brain in a Vat
Building a Science of Consciousness
Within Reason

Sam makes a compelling case against free will.

We don't choose our genes. We don't choose our parents. We don't choose the society we're born into. Even our thoughts seem to arise in consciousness before we're aware of them. From that perspective, free will appears to be an illusion.

But I have a friend whose experience has made me question this conclusion.

He grew up in an obese family. His parents are obese. His siblings are obese. By his mid-20s, he was obese as well.

Then he decided to change.

He completely changed his diet, started exercising regularly, and eventually lost roughly 100 pounds.

I've talked to him extensively about the process. He still craves donuts almost every day, but he chooses to eat oatmeal instead. He still doesn't enjoy exercising, but he does it anyway.

The transformation hasn't been entirely positive, either. He's left with a significant amount of loose skin, which he's very self-conscious about. His decision to get healthy has also created tension within his family. They often explain their weight by pointing to genetics, slow metabolisms, or the idea that they're simply "naturally big." So his transformation has completely undermined those arguments and has created friction and frustration between him and his family.

He's overcoming social pressure, family norms, genetic predispositions, cravings, and his own desire to avoid exercise.

From the outside, it looks as though he's making dozens of deliberate choices every day that directly oppose his conditioning.

I understand that a determinist would probably ask, "What caused him to become the family member who changed?"

But that's exactly what I'm struggling with.

If a family shares the same environment, similar genetics, similar access to information, and similar habits, yet one persistently overrides those influences while the others don't, what exactly is the deterministic explanation?

What am I missing?

>Woke Two: Cancellation Boogaloo?!

>What to make of the progressive rethink of Woke One.

>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have conceded to the excesses of what we must all now call Woke One. But the concession, and that characterization of it, raise some obvious questions.

>In this episode, Matt and Brian discuss:

>What was Woke One;

>Which aspects of it do progressive leaders now concede were “crazy”;

>Why did it happen in the first place?

>Then, how relevant is any of this for near-term politics so long as Donald Trump is in power wrecking the economy? The country keeps losing jobs (or putting up extremely week monthly jobs numbers). Congress is about to give Trump more power to impose tariffs. And there’s no clear offramp to the war in Iran. Are Republicans simply fucked? If so, why hasn’t the war been a bigger political disaster for Trump? Could Democratic leaders forge a factional truce around a midterm-campaign promise to end the war next year? Or is it going to be 2007 all over again?

https://www.politix.fm/p/woke-two-cancellation-boogaloo

>
Further reading:

>Matt on how the high cost of living is tearing Republicans apart.

>Brian takes a stab at a Woke One origin story.

>Why are Democrats voting to give Trump more tariff power?

>The doctor advising Republicans on how to lose weight says his miracle diet gives him orgasmic, wipe-free poops.

It is incredibly strange how an ignorant Christian approaches the Bible. It is approached as truth, but also literature, but though it is approached as literature it isn’t approached as a kind of historical or fictional literature. In fact, the way in which the Bible is approached as literature, is idiosyncratic.

A Christian reads the Bible and finds comfort and hope in it. The reading he does is a literary reading of the text (because the actual historical study of the text would destroy the Christian’s reading of the text, if he was honest about the evidence he encountered).

Interestingly enough, I still read the Bible the way these ignorant Christians read it, except I do not share in their willful ignorance, or supernatural presuppositions.

As literature, the Bible is an astounding book, but as a historical document, it’s a compilation of deception and confusion— the ignorant reader assumes all kinds of premises that have nothing to do with its actual context or content. (This is perfectly acceptable if we’re reading it as literary fiction, or philosophically, but it’s not acceptable if we’re trying to comprehend its cultural context and meaning).

I find the topic of the Bible as literature utterly fascinating— because I find the Bible as literature entertaining and thought-provoking (in an idiosyncratic way). Just like one can innovate all kinds of insight through the interpretation of Greek myths, I find the Bible as literature to function exactly the same way.

It’s strange to realize that Christianity is entirely founded on humans reading the Bible as true literature (both of which are biased presuppositions). What this means is that all this exegesis that has exploded on the scene, isn’t actually what captivated the masses, what captivated the masses was and is the Bible as “true literature” (that it has been read as one uniform book with one theology— which is a false assumption on the part of the reader).

[This motions to the immanent destruction of Christianity (from within), something Luther never could have realized when he hyper-focused Christianity on a kind of rational approach to “the Word.” Because, you see, this leads Christians to rationally scrutinizing what they read. You will ask, “how is it rational?” The answer is because they use the law of non-contradiction (within the presuppositions of their theology) to stand as judge over their theological interpretations. They use one scripture to correct another scripture, not realizing they’re practicing reason’s exacting form. And, they believe that because “the Bible is absolutely true,” any scrutiny of it will only further affirm this. Thus they have primed themselves to fall right into the trap of Rational Critical Scholarship, which shatters their folk assumptions about the Bible, they very thing that Christianity as a religion is based on.]

Reading the Bible as literature is a very different experience from studying it historically. Christianity cannot survive the latter, and this new reformation of rational critical scholarship has now entered Christianity’s consciousness. Apologists have starting responding to it, which winds them ever deeper into the destruction of the authority of religious content, and the shattering of its folk form.

I think their only hope is to pivot back to the Bible as literature, and to embrace the epistemological relativism of modern philosophy, which thereby allows them to make their case pragmatically against a world collapsing into nihilistic despair. (Though this approach already surrenders the truth of Christianity from the outset).

But this nihilistic collapse is ideological, it’s not substantive, it’s created by philosophy and sustained by philosophy. Science knows nothing of this nihilistic despair, and shatters it at every turn.

Christianity, above all else, needs men to read the Bible as true literature. If this falters, which is now presently happening due to rational critical scholarship, then Christianity will collapse from within. Men will no longer be able to read the Bible as true literature, holding a set of folk presuppositions, but only as another form of mythology. This is great for the secular world, but it is a death sentence for Christianity.

Human consciousness is now at the last stage of Christianity, where it becomes just another myth in a pile of myths. Those myths represent this same process of sublated consciousness playing out in other civilizations. We are now at this stage in our civilization process— we are transcending the mindlessness of our own myths.

Does this mean new false Gods will be born? I suspect they are already born! But one thing that can save us from repeating this process, at least in the minds of a few, is not just to transcend the myth (content) of Christianity, but to identify and transcend the psychological, authoritarian form on which Christianity and all other myths have been based.

Submission statement: Romer, a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, defends some of the D.S.A.’s controversial positions: “I think people like us being rather bold. . . . People want a fighter.”

https://preview.redd.it/r64x25q8glih1.png?width=1261&format=png&auto=webp&s=d2c20418bc7d8c4d4824eba8444f23678a9a1d09

Sam is on vacation. This is a rebroadcast of the first half of their conversation. Daniel Kahneman was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. He was the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and co-author, with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, of Noise. Kahneman died on March 27, 2024, at the age of 90.

Just saw a trailer for Biden and Tucker. Sam should interview him. He could be the next president and does some amazing interviews.